11 - Introducing the Mystics

Summary

AS we all know, mystical writing is itself a paradox: the Ineffable is itransmitted by voice and image, and these are then to be inscribed for an audience. All record of perceptions under rapture can only be approximations to the event itself. Mystics write under a burning urge to convey their primary experience, in such a way that the reader can read back behind or through it, and them, to their primary contact. Students today, trained to focus on the text itself rather than the idea of an author, should find mystical writing easier to engage with. Critical interest in biography and autobiography, and especially in Freudian readings of literature, works against real engagement with mystical purpose. ‘Who is this writer’, rather than ‘what and how is this writing’, becomes a distraction that it is hard even for instructors to avoid. Talking back but speaking out is just one of the paradoxes of mystical writing. However, students familiar with using a variety of critical approaches find mystical writing a rich source of interest, open to all sorts of different interpretive methods.

How then to introduce students to the Middle English mystics? We are honour bound to continue the work that the authors themselves feel a great urgency to attempt: the instruction of others in what has been made known to them. Many of them are highly gifted communicators whose impact on those who share the foundations of their own faith has been maintained across the centuries. Julian of Norwich, not well known, it seems, in her own lifetime, has gathered a huge following in the last hundred years, perhaps for the very last reason she would have wanted, the attraction of her own gracious personality (here and throughout the essay I quote from the Long Text of her work):

I pray you al for Gods sake and counsel you for your owne profitt that ye levyn the beholding of a wretch that it was shewid to, and mightily, wisely and mekely behold God, that of his curtes love and endles godenes wolde shewyn it generally in comfort of us al. (chapter 8)