I am a well known champion of thin books, and some previous posts have celebrated a variety of slim volumes of around a centimetre thick. Which means you could get around 100 of them on one metre of bookshelf space. I've often wondered about the concentrated quality and value of such a bookshelf if I gathered together a year's reading of 100 such books, reading around 30-40 pages a day. The first month might include Vanstone's Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense; Nicholas Lash's Believing Three Ways in One God; Richard Bauckham's Theology of the Book of Revelation: Alastair Campbell's Rediscovering Pastoral Care; Jean Dauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; Henri Nouwen's Genesee Diary; Jonathan Sacks The Persistence of Faith; P T Forsyth's The Cruciality of the Cross; Denise Levertov's The Stream and the Sapphire; Dag Hammarskjold's Markings. Around 10 centimetres of distilled wisdom, theological imagining, contemplative reflection, human experience, passionate enquiry, honest confession, and not least, personal enrichment. Not a bad return for 10 centimetres of shelf space.
However, I am also an advocate of the carefully chosen tome, freighted with learning and weighted with significance in its field. So the arrival of Volume 5 of Bernard McGinn's magisterial and mind boggling history of Western Christian Mysticism is a welcome parcel which thuds impressively on the desk and makes you feel you've got your money's worth from Amazon's free delivery! This book would take up half the space of the ten volumes above, – it is 5.6 cms thick! 720 pages, 200 of them endnotes. Even the title forces the mind to slow down, The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism, 1350 – 5550. Once I've finished the biography of Hammarskjold this is next on my discretionary reading list. Some of the most important names in Christian mysticism are here – Jan Van Ruusbroec, Catherine of Genoa, Catherine of Sienna, Thomas a Kempis, and the English Mystics Julian of Norwich, the Cloud of Unknowing, Walter Hilton.I've read or spent time with most of these spiritual writers.
I've been baffled and blessed, fulfilled and frustrated, enriched and at times perplexed by strange discourse, conceptual complexity, the oddities and even extravagances of human experience, the cultural and historical canyons that separate medieval Europe from the post-postmodern West. These are formidable barriers to understanding, and are likely to try patience and stamina. But I've never doubted that these writers thought deeply and adventurously about their encounter with God, felt powerfully and passionately about Jesus Christ, and believed against criticism and rejection that what they experienced and expressed was mediated and befell them by the Spirit of God, calling to communion with the Father in the Son. And at the core of their convictional existence was a consuming apprehension of the Love that ignites, purifies, vivifies and draws the soul along the trajectory that leads to the heart of God. No they didn't always get it theologically right; at times they flirted dangerously with ideas corrosive of core Christian realities; the seduction of ecstatic experience and the afterglow of mystical encounter laid open the possibility of the individual's experience claiming a dogmatic authority free from the theology of the Christian tradition out of which it had grown.
All that is true. But there are rich and searching truths in Christian mystical writers which pose devastatingly apt questions to our own 21st Century understanding of what it means to be human; what our lives mean; which priorities in human society make for death and which make for life; how we construct a framework of moral awareness within which to think and decide in ways which are humane and responsive to others; offering as an alternative to the now this instant, remorselessly innovative, obsessively consumerist, savagely individualist mindset of our times, a perspective in which transcendence, other awareness, self knowing and generosity of mind and spirit have the opportunity to grow, perchance to flourish.
That probably claims too much for those mystical astronauts, pioneers of Christian exploration who boldly went where no one had gone before. But what McGinn's large volumes provide is a sympathetic, authoritative and comprehensive presentation of Christian mystics in the context of their time, by one who understands and can expound their ideas and experiences, and do so from within the mainstream Christian tradition with critical appreciation.
(The photo was taken from my study window)
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