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

Commonweal, March 26, 1999 by Lawrence S. Cunningham

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.