The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism - 1200-1350.

By Bernard McGinn Crossroad Herder, $24.95, 526 pp.

The Flowering of Mysticism is the third volume of Bernard McGinn's monumental history of Christian mysticism. The generic title of McGinn's enterprise is The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism. McGinn's approach, argued at some length in volume 1, is that mysticism is best understood as the experience of the consciousness of God's presence in a deep and immediate way. This approach permits him to bypass the sometimes sterile philosophical debates, which usually only focus on first-person accounts about the character of mystical experience. His decision to stand with this understanding has triggered some critiques in the scholarly community, but none has been so compelling as to cause him to change his position.

The present volume treats what has been called the "new mysticism." Three characteristics are symptomatic of this largely fourteenth-century movement: a new attitude about the relationship of the cloister to the world (with a detectable shift away from the cloister); a new relationship between men and women who are on the path of mystical union; and, finally, new forms of literature, language, and modes of representing mystical consciousness. McGinn calls this the "democratization" of mysticism. The new understanding argued that anyone prompted by grace could reach mystical union without necessarily being supported by the regular life of the cloister. Such a widening of mystical opportunities was thought to reveal itself in the increased use of the vernacular, new experiments in the formation of religious communities (the Beguines), different vocabularies (the language of Minne in which the Dutch word for "love" gets a currency so wide that it become almost the affective equivalent of esse, the Latin word for being), and, inevitably, tensions with those more at home with older forms of religious expression.

McGinn begins his treatment with an extended consideration of Saint Francis of Assisi, the Franciscan tradition, and the men and women who followed that path. Command of the sources permits McGinn to set Francis into historical context. He impressively searches the writings we have from the hand of Francis in order to place them into a broader theological framework. He follows the trajectory of the lives of those men and women who use Francis as a paradigm for following the crucified Christ, including those who mix a love for Francis with the apocalyptic notions derived from Joachim of Flora. His treatment of the Franciscan movement is so thorough (as he told me when he was writing it) that he knew before this volume was complete that it would require another book to do full justice to the more apophatic tradition represented by Meister Eckhart and the Dominican school.

Subsequent chapters treat women who experimented with new forms of religious living (for example, recluses, certain forms of the beguinage, urban solitaries); the three great Beguine mystics (Hadewijch, Mechtild, and Marguerite of Porete); and, finally, the women mystics who belonged to traditional religious orders (such as the great tradition of the monastery of Helfta). Space does not permit even a resume of the careful elaborations McGinn makes of the texts attributed to these women, the men who wrote about them, and the scholarship devoted to them (there are nearly one hundred and fifty pages of notes in this volume). It is worthwhile pointing out the careful distinctions he draws between visionary and mystical literature; the porous border between "low" devotionalism and "high" theology; the reason(s) why there is such an emphasis on suffering in these writings; the interaction between holy women and their male counterpoints; and, finally, the novelty of some of their religious formulations. In the case of Marguerite of Porete, such innovation ended with her on an inquisitor's pyre. Having taught a seminar on trinitarian theology this past term, I was struck by the creative trinitarian motifs found in much of this literature. Those whose primary interests are not historical will still find much to nourish the mind by a careful reading of these pages.

In a postscript, McGinn notes that few of these figures have been conspicuous in the standard accounts of church history. Nonetheless, he observes, the task of historical theology is not only to reread the classics of a Francis of Assisi or a Gertrude of Helfta, but to reclaim and remember those who have been forgotten. Some elements of the lives of the persons treated in this volume may seem odd or bizarre, but even such eccentricities are put into context in a sympathetic study like this one. One can only hope that the author's energies do not flag before he brings his whole work to conclusion. In my estimation, the three extant volumes already constitute a major work of historical theological scholarship.

Over the last few decades, scholarship on mystics and mysticism has expanded beyond the Western world, and a number of studies of the writings of religious women in Latin America in the period after the Reformation have also been published. The Mexican polymath, Sor Juana de la Cruz, has been the subject of a number of studies, including a brilliant work by the late Octavio Paz. Judging from the bibliography in McKnight's work, there is a whole range of such literature to be studied. The recovery of this corpus, of course, is due in part to the burgeoning interest in the story of women in the church.

Madre Castillo was a Colombian nun who spent more than fifty years in the convent of the Poor Clares in the provincial town of Tunja. She left behind a small body of writing that consisted of her spiritual autobiography (Vida), a collection of spiritual maxims, reflections, meditations (Afectos espirituales), and a small notebook with some poems and earlier maxims reworked into a somewhat more refined form (Cuaderno de Inciso - so named because she wrote in the blank pages of an accounting book). As McKnight argues, Madre Castillo was profoundly shaped by what was available to enclosed nuns of the time: the breviary, some of the writings of John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, the Ignatian spiritual exercises, Osuna's Spiritual Alphabet, and some standard collections of hagiography.

McKnight obviously did a lot of archival work in her research (was this originally a dissertation?) and pages in this volume were (for this nonexpert) quite instructive. She has a good analysis of the autobiographies produced (usually for confessors or spiritual directors) by religious women who followed the example of Teresa of Avila's autobiography. The author is also good in tracing out the space allotted to religious women to exercise their desire to write. I was also much instructed in the scholarship being produced on this new source of spiritual literature.

Each of the writings of Madre Castillo is given extended analysis in the second half of the book. The first half (marred here and there by the heavy sludge of postmodern literary palaver) discusses the place of Madre Castillo in literary history (she is evidently well known and highly regarded in Colombia) and provides some social context for studying her life. Life in the convent seems to have been punctuated by Castillo's need to deal with complex financial dealings (she was abbess more than once), convent squabbles over the interminable issue of laxity versus observance, and the other predictable breaks in the routine of the regular life.

Castillo's writings are only cited or paraphrased, so we can't tell if her interpreter gets it right. But one thing is clear. However much the author knows about colonial literature (a lot, evidently), feminist literary theory, and the culture of the time, she is woefully undernourished when it comes to handling theological questions. Her use of terms like mental prayer, mystical theology, visions, locutions, and the entire vocabulary of mystical and ascetical theology leaves much to be desired. Reading McGinn would surely have helped. The three stages of the spiritual life are not "early modern," Erasmus did not "redefine" theology as the study of Scripture (Aquinas and his contemporaries did that), and the division of memory, understanding, and will was not "neoscholastic" (the distinction goes back at least to the time of Augustine). I could go on. In other words, what one learns from this work (and I admit to having learned a good deal) one learns despite the patina of opaque critical jargon and the tin ear for religious discourse. In the most irritating paragraph in the book, the criticisms of a Colombian nun who wrote a biography of Madre Castillo are dismissed because McKnight's work deals with "social and economic determinisms" in a more integrated fashion. God help the man who would patronize a woman religious and scholar in that kind of tone.

In The Cloister Walk, Kathleen Norris says that it was the liturgy that pulled her back to the practice of faith. Doris Grumbach, by contrast, charts a spiritual journey in which she gives up on liturgy and other "church" practices for a life of solitary prayer. Grumbach, a celebrated essayist and critic, is under no illusion about how the Christian contemplative tradition warns against such solitary spirituality. Indeed, in more than one place she quotes everyone from her daughter (who is a seminary president) to the spiritual authors she is reading, as they attempt to dissuade her from this lonely path. Grumbach, however, remains steadfast. Her many years of church attendance and sacramental practice have not continued to nourish her. As a consequence, amid extreme pain (from neuralgia) and from the perspective of old age, she sets a course of prayer relying on some spiritual guidance from favorite authors (Simone Weil, Thomas Merton, Meister Eckhart, Kathleen Norris among others) and from the traditional source of all Christian prayer: the psalms.

Grumbach prays because she is a woman of deep faith and, further, because in her younger days she had an overpowering experience of God's presence which anchored her in faith and which she would love to re-experience. The Presence of Absence is an account of her years of prayer, reading, and struggle with pain and with what the old authors would call desolation. Her experiences are set out in graceful prose and with compelling honesty. Like all spiritual persons, Grumbach struggles both with God's absence and with the authors she encounters. The end result is a book that would inspire any person of faith.

The professor in me desperately wanted to debate all this with Grumbach. Do not take seriously Merton's Seeds of Contemplation (1949). Merton himself regarded it as such a naive book that he completely rewrote it in 1960-61 under the title New Seeds of Contemplation. Don't think of the Cloud of Unknowing as the work of a solitary person of prayer; he was a Carthusian monk whose ordinary liturgical practices were the context out of which his contemplative prayer arose (the same thing goes for writers like John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila). Don't think of the church as an institution; think of people within the church (like those with whom you correspond) as part of a community of prayer.

Despite such cautions, one must thank Grumbach for penning an authentic work. Anyone who despairs of the church but still clings to prayer will benefit from this woman's struggles and insights. Despite my dissatisfactions with some of what Grumbach has to say, my new resolution is to go back and read her earlier works such as Life in a Day and Fifty Days of Solitude. I have known of her writings mainly from her reviews and articles in magazines like the New Republic and this journal, but this recent book makes me wish for a more sustained encounter with this person of faith.

Johann Arnold is a well-known spiritual writer and peacemaker who belongs to the Anabaptist-inspired Bruderhof (whose life and origins are fully described in the final pages of this book). The Bruderhof are Christian communities who practice the sharing of goods, a life of simplicity, and a dedication to peacemaking. Anyone who thinks that pacifism is a synonym for passivity would do well to look at a manifesto of Arnold's father, written a generation ago and partially cited here. Each sentence begins with the phrase "We declare war against...cruelty to children, the search for power over the souls of people, the spirit of unforgiveness, envy," and so on.

The book, dedicated to an understanding of Christian peace, is divided into five large sections: Seeking peace, meanings of peace, the paradoxes of peace, stepping stones to peace, and the abundant life of peace. Under those rubrics, Arnold composes brief chapters that often take the form of meditations. He draws on a wide literature, with citations from everyone from Tagore to Merton. My favorite line is one he borrows from Karl Barth, who once wrote that to clasp one's hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.

Seeking Peace is not a systematic treatise. It is more fashioned like a book of meditations, even though it has a systematic structure which points to the section on the "abundant life." A good way to approach this work might be to read it in small doses. A quick reading runs the risk of thinking that the straightforward prose style indicates a "simple" book.

One of the paradoxes represented by the book is this: traditionally some strands of the Anabaptist tradition (like the Old Order Amish) shunned the outside world. Others, such as the Bruderhof, stand against the world by their communitarian style of life and are deeply concerned with advancing the peace of Christ among those who do not accept either their lifestyle or their faith. They work with death-row prisoners, struggle against abortion, and keep open lines to all seekers of peace. As Arnold writes, even though they would love for everyone to know Jesus Christ, "Jesus is a person, not a concept or an article of theology, and his truth embraces far more than our limited minds can comprehend."

Arnold's book is inspirational in the best sense of the word. It would make a superb companion for a retreat or as a chair-side book for daily reading.

Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame.