Who Are All These Strange People? A Year With the Mystics

& Why Theology and Mysticism 'Belong Together'

Oct 18, 2024

The mystics are a vibrant and timely cast of characters we often overlook within the protestant Christian tradition for two reasons. Firstly, we tend to have a specific gap in our church history knowledge—who are all these eccentric people who populated the ecclesiastical timeline between Augustine and Martin Luther, some of whom are called saints? Secondly, as protestants, we tend to expend our energy on doctrine, meaning that most of our attention is fixated on theologians. While there’s nothing wrong with this, it does mean we can miss the lives and wisdom of these men and women uniquely devoted to union with Christ and encountering His love afresh. We may subconsciously perceive theologians as sturdy and credible, while mystics can seem wishy-washy and questionable. I hope this little series can push back on some of these assumptions.

A Case for Spending Quality Time with the Mystics

Theology and mysticism ‘belong together’1 and should not be separated, like the two lobes of the brain. Ian McGilchrist2, philosopher and psychiatrist, argues that our current society has become dominated by a kind of left-hemispheric worldview and that the church has often gone along with these currents. He outlines how historical developments like the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution have produced a modern outlook characterised by analysis, logic, control, and categorisation. The scientific method triumphs over revelation as a mode of credible knowledge. McGilchrist believes that civilisation was formerly more balanced between left and right-brain thinking in the ancient and medieval eras, and it should become so again in certain ways. The right brain brings a kind of holistic thinking to the table, with intuition, emotion, relationship, narrative, beauty, metaphor, and religious belief all seated around.

There’s a gaggle (British word for group) of pastors and theologians (NT Wright, John Mark Comer, James K.A. Smith, Elizabeth Oldfield, Dallas Willard, and Mako Fujimura to name a few) also contending that Christians have fallen into the same pitfall as our contemporary society and leaned far too heavily on left-hemispheric ways of knowing God, smugly confident in our systematic theology. On the grounds and example they see in scripture, they, too, call for a rebalancing between the intellect (left brain) and spiritual experience (right brain). When mainly leaning on the left hemisphere, these thinkers decry the detrimental consequences on the richness of our relationship with God, our personal virtue, and the church’s ability to retain and also grow flourishing congregations.

Because of this, there is a tremendous movement in theological circles and by Christian publications to study the mystics, who are far more right-hemispheric and may have something paramount to teach us in this cultural moment. Their writings are being dusted off and consumed with fresh energy.

The mystics are trending.

Again, the key here is the symbiotic relationship between theologians/theology and mystics/mysticism. Thomas Merton brilliantly surmises how one is inherently dependent on the other:

“It makes very clear the close relationship between mysticism and theology. In a certain sense it shows them to be one and the same thing. By 'mysticism' we can mean the personal experience of what is revealed to all and realized in all in the mystery of Christ. And by 'theology' we mean the common revelation of the mystery which is to be lived by all. The two belong together. There is no theology without mysticism (for it would have no relation to the real life of God in us) and there is no mysticism without theology (because it would be at the mercy of individual and subjective fantasy)."

Because of all this, I’d like to spend a year with the mystics.

Please join me if you also feel like you’ve missed out on some of these wild and wide-eyed people, who were remarkably alive to the presence of God in our cosmos. I hope they will guide us in loving God with both our emotions and our intellect.

One bonus reason to read them: Specifically spending time with female mystics can offer an alternative view of church history than the one we often carry. We accidentally imbibe that men have been the main characters for millennia until women in the last century butted their way in via the ripples of the various waves of feminism. Instead, when you take a closer look, you’ll see that women have been present all along in church history. It is packed with female leaders, saints, and mystics possessing far-reaching influence, both institutionally and informally (albeit they were still a minority and faced many difficulties). All the same, these women can complicate and frustrate our more simplistic and linear story of women’s place in Christian community.

Monthly Features

I’m planning to spend a month in one mystic’s writings and consume resources about their life. Then I’ll post something similar to this one on Julian of Norwich. I’ll share a bit about their background, historical context, theology, and plug some of their quotes.

As of right now, I’m planning to narrow this list down and cover these women and men, primarily ancient but some contemporary:

Teresa of Ávila
Edith Stein
Hildegard of Bingen
Simone Weil
St. Catherine of Siena
Margery Kempe
Thérèse of Lisieux
Gregory of Nyssa
Meister Eckhart
Bernard of Clairvaux
Francis of Assisi
Isaac of Nineveh
Thomas Merton
Ignatius of Loyola

As I’ve written about here, these figures might make us modern readers squeamish. Think John the Baptist in the wilderness surviving on dead bugs and sticky honey in clothing made of camel hair. Prepare yourself for weirdness. Hopefully, these posts will be sprinkled with some content on how we can better read the mystics as well. But mostly, be prepared to read about the lives of people who were wholly devoted to forgetting themselves and instead dedicated to the mighty and mysterious Love of God.