The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology
February 25, 2020
David Albertson
14 citations
To grasp the legitimacy of cataphatic mystical theology, it is important to move beyond medieval binaries of power, gender, and literacy. Instead, cataphasis and visionary mysticism should be re-examined as practices of active spatial projection, navigation, and annotation. Historical instances from pre-modern Christianity and modern space theories suggest various ways to reconceive mystical...
The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology
February 25, 2020
Cyril O'Regan
3 citations
This chapter examines the epistemology of mystical theology. It begins with the ‘intellectualist’ line of thinking from Pseudo-Dionysius to Meister Eckhart, paying close attention both to the ‘protocols’ which are required to speak of God both as the ground of our language, beyond naming, and as one who can really be experienced. These epistemological protocols can also be identified in...
The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology
February 25, 2020
Rowan Williams
2 citations
The beginnings of a distinctive Christian theology lie in the conviction that human beings had been granted a new level of access to or presence to the God of Israel through the death and rising of Jesus: they were introduced into the heavenly sanctuary and accorded the dignity of priests and the intimacy of access to God as sons and daughters of the Father of Jesus. This prompts both doctrinal...
The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology
February 25, 2020
Maria Clara Lucchetti Bingemer
2 citations
The chapter examines the presence and visibility of spiritual and mystical experience in the secularized and plural contemporary world. Our historical moment puts into question the socio-political and cultural context of contemporary mystical life and thought. This allows us to trace the contours of present-day mystical experience in the southern hemisphere, where the experience of the Spirit...
The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology
February 25, 2020
Bernard Mcginn
1 citation
This chapter follows the evolution of the three main models of Christian understanding of mystical union from the biblical foundations down to the crisis of mysticism at the end of the seventeenth century. Although the technical term ‘mystical union’ was rarely used for most of this period, many Christian thinkers spoke about becoming one with God through grace. Three main models emerged. The...
The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology
February 25, 2020
David Tracy
1 citation
Using the pluriform concept of the infinite to investigate the evolving relationships between theology, metaphysics, and mysticism, the chapter creates a heuristic conversation between crucial representative thinkers, among them: Plato, Plotinus, Gregory of Nyssa, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Descartes, Pascal, Fénelon, and Jeanne Guyon. In doing so, the chapter asserts that the Christian God is both...
The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology
February 25, 2020
Douglas E. Christie
The Christian mystical tradition gives expression to a varied, ambiguous, and shifting understanding of creation. The dialectical tension between kataphatic and apophatic mysticism frames this complex attitude towards creation. On the one hand, mystics regularly affirm the sacramental character of the created world, its capacity to reveal and make present the reality of God. Central to this...
The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology
February 25, 2020
H. Feiss
Mystical experience is a foretaste of heaven and so eschatology and mysticism are related. Five examples of this relationship are Gregory the Great’s account of Benedict’s final vision of the world in the light of God, the twelfth-century Victorines’ explanation of how mystical union leads to configuration with Christ and so to compassionate care for others, Bernard of Clairvaux’s theory that...
The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology
February 25, 2020
Bernard Mcginn
This chapter is designed as a broad road map of the development of Christian mystical theology down to the Quietist Controversy at the end of the seventeenth century and the triumph of the Enlightenment, which took a generally negative attitude toward the mystical element in Christianity. It follows the main genealogies, or historically coherent traditions of mystical theology, from the...
The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology
February 25, 2020
Rob Faesen
The study of mysticism and mystical theology implies the study of texts, and the general principles of scientific literary analysis are applied here. Nevertheless, mystical literature contains a number of elements that are worthy of specific enquiry. The first is that as a linguistic form, these texts have a unique ‘referent’—i.e. that the connection between the signifiant and the signifié is...
The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology
February 25, 2020
Philip Sheldrake
Theological anthropology explores Christian understandings of human identity. In mystical theology, this broadly takes three forms. First, ‘positive’ or kataphatic anthropology focuses on what we may affirm about the various dimensions of human identity. In this chapter, this is illustrated with reference to Julian of Norwich. Second, ‘negative’ or apophatic anthropology emphasizes that the...
The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology
February 25, 2020
Boyd Taylor Coolman
This chapter argues that the overarching Christian conception of the human is that of ‘pilgrim’ or ‘wayfarer’. But this notion has a particular history. Over the first fifteen centuries of Christianity, spiritual or mystical itinerancy emerged at the nexus of certain Judaeo-Christian assumptions about the world and its original, current, and final relationship with God, on one hand, and of...
The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology
February 25, 2020
Rik Van Nieuwenhove, William Crozier
This chapter considers mystical theology as a resource for theology of the Trinity today. It consists of two parts. The first part draws mainly on the Trinitarian theology of St Bonaventure to demonstrate that participation in the life of the Trinity is essential to begin to engage in theology of the Trinity: vision implies participation. The second part provides an example of how the writings...
The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology
February 25, 2020
Peter Tyler
‘Prayer is nothing but an intimate sharing between friends’: so St Teresa of Avila describes the nature of Christian prayer from the perspective of the Western tradition of mystical theology. In this chapter two key aspects of this tradition are explored: the Neoplatonic and the Augustinian. The first, Neoplatonic tradition derives from the Platonic tradition of theosis which although never...
The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology
February 25, 2020
Edward Howells
Human experience is central to mystical theology but it cannot define it, because, according to mystical theology, the experience is not merely human but divine. After an orientation in the current debate on mystical experience, the puzzling quality of the experience, as both fully human and more than anything human, is elaborated through an exposition of three historical examples, Augustine,...
The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology
February 25, 2020
Patricia Zimmerman Beckman
Mystical writers of Lives and Visions employ distinct, explicit strategies to evoke mystical experience in their audiences. Beyond claims of historical meaning and truths, the texts focus on the process of knowing and encounter with the divine. After tracing biblical and early historical resources, three case studies on Hildegard of Bingen, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Annie Dillard elucidate...
The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology
February 25, 2020
Joanne Maguire
Mystics who speak and write for others act as teachers in various ways. Studies of mysticism and religious experience have tended to consider a mystical quest as a highly individual and idiosyncratic venture, but it is apparent that many mystics wrote and spoke to instruct their followers. Teaching implies recipients of that teaching, both as individuals and in aggregate, and it implies...
The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology
February 25, 2020
Charlotte Radler
Christian mystics have used the topographical metaphors of depth, ground, and abyss to illuminate the continuity between God and creation. This chapter first proffers a brief survey of the biblical and early Christian usage of these metaphors. It then moves to a more extensive exploration of them in the writings of medieval, modern, and post-modern Christian thinkers Meister Eckhart...
The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology
February 25, 2020
Jean-Luc Marion
Access to the ‘notion’ of ‘the mystical’ is treated by many as problematic in an age of scepticism. For a tradition that reverences sacred mystery, and for a discipline like theology—that processes both from and toward this mystery—this scepticism issues an epistemological challenge to the credibility, even the possibility of the discipline itself. In a manner not unlike phenomenology, while...
The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology
February 25, 2020
Brandon Gallaher
This chapter seeks to show that mysticism is not about the rarefied experience of certain spiritual athletes but the Holy Spirit’s ordinary or common call to transformation of every Christian into a potentially extraordinary ‘second Christ’. The author contends that in Christian teaching the Spirit hides himself but in this age is made known in the faces of transformed Christians—saints and...
The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology
February 25, 2020
Kevin L. Hughes
This chapter traces the pattern of reading and relating to the scriptural that was intimately woven into the fabric of mystical theology for more than a millennium of Christian practice. While the ‘spiritual interpretation of scripture’ is usually considered as a technical method of biblical exegesis, Henri de Lubac argued that it was less a literary technique than a spiritual itinerary. But...
The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology
February 25, 2020
Andrew Louth
This chapter argues that the heart of the ‘mystical’ in the Christian faith is inalienably liturgical. Despite the fact that modern use of the ‘mystical’, and especially ‘mysticism’, is concerned wholly with the experience of the individual, whether in the context of the sacramental life or outside it, the root meaning of the mystical in Christian understanding is bound up with the sacraments,...
The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology
February 25, 2020
Alexander J. B. Hampton
The development of Christian mysticism is deeply bound to poetics. This examination first considers Platonic poetry, Hebrew creation, and Christian kenosis as sources of poetic mysticism, before turning to an elaboration of the role of rhythm, language, and the poetic imagination. The appraisal then considers the historical development of mystical poetry, beginning with early Christian...
The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology
February 25, 2020
Michael Barnes
This chapter asks what the Church has to learn from, and what it can offer to, the contemplative turn in contemporary culture. It begins with one particular aspect of this phenomenon, namely the interreligious spirituality of persons who find themselves caught up ‘between’ the wisdom of established traditions and their pursuit of an authentic personal practice. Thomas Merton and Swami...
The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology
February 25, 2020
Louise Nelstrop
This chapter explores the place of erotic and nuptial image within Christian mystical texts. It outlines a shift in later mystical texts in which human corporeality, especially in terms of sensation and emotion, is embraced as part of what it means to love God. It is noted that this development is accompanied by an increasingly Christological focus. It is argued that there is much that...