The Liturgical Mystery

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, and pre-eminently the eucharist, the divine liturgy. It is argued further that the eucharist is to be seen less as a text than an action, or movement, and an action performed by Christ: on the cross, eternally in heaven, and now in the eucharist. He is coming to draw the whole cosmos into unity with him and his offering himself to the Father. This is an act of reconciliation and love, with entailments, ascetical, ontological, metaphysical, and cosmic.

Mystical Theology in Contemporary Perspective

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 is intertwined in distinctive ways with issues such as secular politics or interreligious dialogue and with the emergence of intra-ecclesial spiritualism. In doing so, we elaborate the new challenges that the experience of and reflection upon mysticism poses for Christian theology and its discourse about humanity.

Mysticism of the Social Life

Famous for its contribution to ecclesiology, the 1943 encyclical of Pius XII, Mystici Corporis Christi also marks a landmark in mystical theology both by affirming spiritual developments in Catholic Action organizations, which fostered an ideal of holiness accessible to the laity, and by opposing the ‘false mysticism’ of the mass movements (Fascism, Communism, Nazism, nationalism, global capitalism) of the day. Taking up a favourite theme in the ‘French School’ of saints and mystics, the idea of the ‘Mystical Body of Christ’ inspired new communities and ecclesial movements (Focolare, Catholic Worker, Schoenstatt), whose founders anticipated, read, and responded to Mystici Corporis amidst wartime suffering, while taking an apophatic and resistant approach to dominant social formations.

Ecclesiology

Holiness is as crucial an element within the Church’s authentication as union, universality, apostolic origin, and outward dynamism. This holiness originates not in the Church’s members but in the holiness of the Spirit of God dwelling within the community. The tradition of holiness within the Church is essential to its very life and sustainability and must be viewed within an eschatological perspective that acknowledges the fallen nature of all believers and the reality of sin while affirming that all are called without exception to be faithful to the Spirit alive within the community. The mystical tradition, while including its noted proponents and practitioners, is part of the universal baptismal vocation to holiness. A tension between hierarchy and charism, holiness and authority, has existed since the Church’s foundation. Despite this inevitable tension, where sin abounds universally within the Church so grace also abounds by God’s mercy throughout its history.

Christology

This chapter examines the Christologies found not only among scholastic theologians but also in hagiography, vision books, didactic letters, poems, and spiritual guidebooks. At the forefront are male and female authors within the Western Christian tradition who claim that human beings might be so fully united with Christ as to be an alter Christus or, alternatively, who are claimed by others to have attained that state. The chapter begins with more recognizable Christological arguments before exploring how certain medieval texts and communities, through their claims about the possibility of being conformed to Christ, make theological arguments about Christ that stand in tension with his purported singularity.

Cataphasis, Visualization, and Mystical Space

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 theologies as fundamentally spatial, even geometrical, phenomena. This model is applied to Hildegard of Bingen’s major works, Scivias and Liber divinorum operum. In both texts, Hildegard’s images construct complex spaces of enclosure, from Mary’s womb to the cosmic egg to God’s unfathomable Wisdom. But where her images remain static allegories in the earlier work, in the later they manifest greater mobility and depth, demanding a more spatialized hermeneutics. The example of Hildegard’s visionary mysticism suggests that space is a useful category for understanding the nature of cataphasis and the limits of apophasis today.

Mystical Theology and Christian Self-Understanding

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 definition and definitional reserve: some new things must be said about God, but there is an intensified sense of what cannot be said of God, and of the truth that God cannot be an object among others. This becomes a central tension in the tradition of ‘mystical’ writing and reflection, but is congruent with central theological affirmations about the encounter of finite and infinite action in Christ and in Christ’s people. In both individual and corporate prayer, this is understood as a present anticipation of eternal relatedness, so that the ‘mystical’ is essentially an eschatological category.

The Ascetic Life

In classical antiquity the term asceticism described the training necessary to acquire a skill. In Christianity asceticism comprises the practices or exercises that Christians undertake as part of the quest for moral virtue and spiritual freedom. This, in turn, prepares the soul for both the contemplation of God in creation and the ineffable contemplation of God beyond words and images. Asceticism, thus understood, comprises a wide range of spiritual practices that must be constantly assessed and employed as needed in the maintenance of spiritual balance. Ascetical practices discussed in this chapter include: fasting, almsgiving, prayer, martyrdom, celibacy, simplification of life, biblical exegesis, watchfulness over thoughts, discernment, liturgical asceticism, penitential practices, pilgrimage, dispossession, labour, and the service of others.

The Trinity

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 of mystical theological authors, such as Hadewijch or Ruusbroec, can assist us in solving systematic theological problems. More particularly, we argue that Ruusbroec’s notion of regyratio (i.e. the Holy Spirit as the principle of the return of the divine Person into their shared unity) can circumvent the problem of ‘Trinitarian inversion’ (which refers to the problematic tension between accounts of the immanent processions, on the one hand, and the sequence of historical missions of the Son and Holy Spirit in the economic Trinity, on the other).

Eschatology

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 souls of the blessed do not have full union with God until they are reunited with their bodies and their fellow Christians at the final resurrection, Julian of Norwich’s struggle to understand how all can be well when there is sin, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s vision of the divine presence in matter and of the responsibility of humanity to evolve toward the fullness of Christ. These intersections of mysticism and eschatology are elucidated by Jean-Yves Lacoste’s phenomenology of prayer.