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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
Mystical Theology aims to be a ‘wisdom of experience’, not a ‘wisdom of doctrine’.1 It is not as theology that it is mystical, but in the fact that it brings mystical experience to expression in words. Mystical experience, however, cannot be communicated in doctrinal propositions. So the ‘theology of mystical experience’ always tells only of the way, the journey, the transition to that unutterable and incommunicable experience of God. So far as its doctrinal content is concerned, the theology of the mystics has up to the present seldom appeared particularly impressive. By tracing the history of ideas, one can easily enough recognise the augustinian, the neoplatonic and the gnostic motifs, and track them back to their roots. With this approach, however, one is not on the same path as the mystical theologians. It is therefore more appropriate to ask what experiences they were seeking to express with the help of those images and ideas. In order to share in their experience, it makes sense to join with them on the same journey, whether with Bernard of Clairvaux on the ‘ladder of love’, with Bonaventura on the ‘pilgrimage of the soul to God’, with Thomas à Kempis on the road of the Imitatio Christi or with Thomas Merton on the ‘seven-storey mountain’.
page 501 note 1 Luther, M., Randbemerkungen zu Tauler (1516), Clemen, V, p. 306Google Scholar: ‘Unde totus iste sermo procedit ex theologia mystica, quae est sapientia experimentalis et non doctrinalis.’
page 502 note 1 cf. Cardenal, E., Das Buch von der Liebe, with the foreword by Merton, Thomas (Siebenstern-Taschenbuch, 1976 4), p. 168Google Scholar. (English: To Live is To Love. New York: Herder, 1972.)
page 502 note 2 Marx, K., Die Frühschriften, ed. Landcshut, S. (1953), p. 275.Google Scholar
page 504 note 1 cf. von Balthasar, H. Urs, ‘Aktion und Kontemplation’, in Verbum Caro (Einsiedeln, 1960), pp. 245–259Google Scholar; Merton, T., Contemplation in a World of Action (New York, 1973)Google Scholar. On the classical Greek understanding of theoria see Kerenyi, K., Antike Religion (Munich, 1971), pp. 97ffGoogle Scholar; and on the modern conception, Horkheimer, M., Kritische Theorie I & II (Frankfurt, 1968).Google Scholar
page 506 note 1 On what follows here cf. Merton, , Contemplation… also The Cloud of Unknowing and the Book of Privy Counseling (New York, 1973)Google Scholar. The thought of the awareness of awareness as an experience of the Holy Spirit is developed by Taylor, J. V., The Go-Between God (London, 1972).Google Scholar
page 506 note 2 cf. for example on the Protestant side the devotion to the cross in Count Zinzendorf, the founder of the Herrnhut communities, and on the Roman Catholic the piety focused on the Passion in St. Paul of the Cross, the founder of the Passionist Order.
page 507 note 1 This has been demonstrated and illustrated by Heppe, H., Geschichte des Pietismus und der Mystik in der reformierten Kirche, nanuntlich der Niederlande (Leiden, 1879)Google Scholar; and Weber, H. E., Reformation, Orthodoxie und Rationalismus II (Gütersloh, 1951)Google Scholar. My own essays in the study of Protestant mysticism are to be found in ‘Grundzüge mystischer Theologie bei Gerhard Tersteegen’, Ev. Th. (1956), pp. 205–224; and ‘Geschichtstheologie und pietistisches Menschenbild bei Johann Coccejus und Theodor Undereyck’, Ev. Th. (1959), pp. 343–61.
page 508 note 1 So for example Arndt, Johann, Vier Bücher vom wahren Christentum (1857 1), p. 18Google Scholar: ‘Aus Christus wird der gottförmige Mensch geboren’; p. 11: ‘Das Bild Gottes im Menschen ist die Gleichförmigkeit der menschlichen Seele mit Gott’. (‘From Christ the God-shaped man is born’; ‘The image of God in man is the likeness of form of the human soul with God’.) This image-christology runs back in Protestant theology to Osiander's doctrine of essential righteousness.
page 509 note 1 The following quotations are taken from Grabmann, M., Die Grundgedanken des Heiligen Augustinus über Seele und Gott (Cologne, 1929 2), pp. 10ff.Google Scholar
page 510 note 1 Eckhart, Meister, Deutsche Predigten und Schriften, ed. and trans. Quint, H. (Munich, 1977 4). P. 216.Google Scholar
page 512 note 1 Schaefer, E., Meister Eckharts Traktat ‘Von Abgeschiedenheit’. Untersuchung und Textausgabe (Bonn, 1956), pp. 210ff.Google Scholar
page 512 note 2 Meister Eckhart, op. cit., ed. Quint, p. 214.
page 513 note 1 The thought of the transcending of the mediations of God through man's love for God brings Christian mysticism astonishingly close to Zen: cf. Merton, T., Zen and the Birds of Appetite (New York, 1968)Google Scholar; Mystics and Zen Masters (New York, 1967).Google Scholar
page 514 note 1 John of the Cross composed his ‘dark night of the soul’ in a prison cell in the Carlemite monastery in Toledo: cf. his Sämtliche Werke II (Einsiedeln, 1961), pp. 63–66, 172–80Google Scholar; Herbstrith, W., Therese von Lisieux. Anfechtung und Solidarität (Frankfurt, 1974 1)Google Scholar. von Balthasar, H. Urs, Wer ist ein Christ? (Einsiedeln, 1965), pp. 82ffGoogle Scholar, describes this ‘night’ with sober precision: ‘…that the way of contemplation, followed honestly and directly, normally ends in a night: in seeing no longer why one prays or why one has sacrificed, in no longer knowing whether God even listens, whether he still wills the offering and accepts it …’
page 514 note 2 On what follows cf. Moltmann, J., The Crucified God (London, 1974), pp. 45ff.Google Scholar
page 515 note 1 The studies by Peterson, E., Zeuge der Wahrheit (Leipzig, 1937)Google Scholar, are still the best on the relation between apostles and martyrs.
page 515 note 2 Schrage, W., ‘Leid, Kreuz und Eschaton. Die Peristasenkataloge als Merkmale paulinischer theologia crucis und Eschatologie’, Ev. Th. (1974), pp. 141–175Google Scholar. Christian action and Christian contemplation lead unavoidably to the passion of Christ. That is their common point of reference, whatever other connexions between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa one may also draw.
page 516 note 1 Metz, J. B., Zeit der Orden? Zur Mystik und Politik der Nachfolge (Freiburg, 1977).Google Scholar
page 518 note 1 Theologia Deutsch, ed. Mandel, H.. Quellenschriften zur Geschichte des Protestantismus Heft 7 (Leipzig, 1908), pp. 88ffGoogle Scholar; Cardenal, E., Das Bitch von der Liebe, pp. 21ff; 34ff; 101ff.Google Scholar
page 518 note 2 Meister Eckhart, op. cit., ed. Quint, p. 60.
page 519 note 1 No-one has presented this better than Rolt, C. E., The World's Redemption (London, 1913)Google Scholar. Similar thoughts were expressed quite independently of Rolt by Berdyaev, N., Der Sim der Ceschichte (Darmstadt, 1925)Google Scholar. In his posthumous Glaubens-lehre, edited by Gertrud von le Fort (Leipzig, 1925), $14; ‘God as Love’, pp. 212ff, Ernst Troeltsch spoke of the ‘pain of God’ which begins with the creation and only ends with the return of God to himself. The ‘breaking through of the finite soul to the life of God’ is a step on this ‘road of God towards himself’.