This article critically engages Christina Van Dyke's interpretation of ‘annihilation’ in Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls. Van Dyke's interpretation – well in accord with the consensus line among Porete scholars – emphasizes the alienness of Porete's understanding of union with God, and so seemingly guts the challenge of Porete's text. In other words, if Porete is saying what Van Dyke takes her to be saying, it is no wonder that anyone would find her vision alien, her posited end of Christian life undesirable, and the challenge to attain it inert. In this article, I describe and defend an alternative reading of the Mirror, one that makes the goal of ‘self-annihilation’ surprisingly more palatable.

Given that the more apophatic strand of mysticism resonates more with the way contemporary philosophers are apt to think about mystical experience, the fact that apophatic mysticism was a bit of a fringe enterprise in the Middle Ages calls for explanation. The explanations that are suggested within the pages of Christina Van Dyke's A Hidden Wisdom are not typically historical-contextual explanations, but theological ones. This article examines apophatic mysticism in terms of three of the standard theological loci: creation, Incarnation, and Trinity. In each case we will find that some of the characteristic claims of the apophatic mystics are so much at odds with the mainstream of Christian theology that the mystery is not so much their being marginalized but rather their being largely tolerated.

One way of understanding the significance of Christina Van Dyke's book A Hidden Wisdom is as a plea for the recovery of an ideal of philosophy as, in part, ‘a way of life’, and for a reintegration of that ideal into current philosophical practice. In this review, I consider how this proposal might be developed.