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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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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...