Introduction

Summary

This book argues that the early modern period was a vital juncture in the history of mysticism. It seeks to reposition the seventeenth century especially as a key period of distrust, suspicion and derision towards mystical experience in the West, one which still has significant ramifications for scholars today. This ‘twilight of the mystics’ witnessed the final separation of mysticism from the major institutional churches of the West. Gone was the privileged position mysticism commanded in the medieval period, along with any authority mystical experience had in shaping the doctrinal elements of Christianity. Instead, mysticism was now understood to be a personal and private spirituality, a ‘way of knowing’ which was ‘experimental’, ‘experiential’ and ‘extraordinary’, an ineffable experience an individual mystic ‘felt’. Critics of mysticism constantly reasserted that such private, subjective and emotional experiences could never be validated as legitimate sources of authority, nor be trusted as a basis of doctrine. This significant development has been theorized by several scholars but never given the full attention it deserves. The most astute, if perhaps too brief, description of this process was made by Bernard McGinn a decade ago when he commented that mysticism, as a creative aspect within the major institutional Western churches, was ‘moribund, if not quite dead’ by the end of the seventeenth century.

This problem was only compounded when mystical authors sought to defend themselves. Their immediate response was the creation of a ‘mystical tradition’ of authors who set a historical precedent for their experiences. But this development only further segregated mysticism as a separate and esoteric ‘way of knowing’, one with its own language, terminology, rhetoric and style. Through this, mysticism became a modus loquendi, a manner of speaking, as well as manner of writing; a separate literary genre with a language of its own. Scholars are only just beginning to realize that their own formulations of a ‘mystical tradition’, and their insistences on certain figures within that canon, is the repetition of a process initially undertaken in the early modern period in light of fierce criticism. This separate canon faced renewed attacks from critics, who now sought to prove the entire tradition was either unnecessary, delusional, heretical or anti-Christian (i.e. pagan). Equally, these defences produced ‘endless vocabularies’ of mysticism which aimed to clear up difficulties and inconsistencies in the terminology.