individual for “mystical experience,” as well as with visions, voices, and other
extraordinary phenomena that occur as persons follow discipline. Some interpreters, and
some mystics, contend that visions and other extraordinary phenomena have little or
nothing to do with “mysticism” and can be misleading. If, however, “mystic experience”
includes a spectrum of experiences that relate variously to the transcendent divine,
present in unmediated mystical experience in one mode but present in a different,
mediated form in voices and visions, then “mysticism” must embrace the whole spectrum
of experiences recorded by those who have good claim to be counted among the mystics.
Though the Christian tradition draws upon scriptural passages to support
interpretations of the mystic way and mystic experience, Jesus is not presented as the
archetypal mystic; rather, as one Person of the divine Trinity, he becomes the object of
the mystic’s experience.
Fundamental lines of Christian mysticism were laid down in late antiquity. Five
mystics and theologians had more influence than others on the medieval tradition in
France: Origen of Alexandria, Pseudo-Dionysius the Are-opagite, John Cassian,
Augustine of Hippo, and Gregory the Great. Origen set an important pattern for later
biblical exegetes and mystics by taking the relationship of the Bride and Bridegroom in
the Song of Songs as a “drama” symbolic of the union between Christ and his church or
God and the soul. While Origen paid more attention to this imagery as symbolic of
ecclesiastical ideas, he did pursue the symbolism of the mystical experience through the
nuptial and erotic imagery of the Song. In this, he was followed by such mystics as
Gregory of Nyssa in the Greek East and, much later, Bernard of Clairvaux in the Latin
West.
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite claimed to be the 1st-century convert of Paul at
Athens but seems to have been a 6th-century Syrian monk. His writings combined
Neoplatonism and biblical imagery, stressing on the one hand the material world as a set
of partial symbols of the divine realm and on the other an “ascension” from immersion in
the material world to a purely spiritual and immaterial apprehension of the divine
presence in the “divine darkness” of “unknowing.”
Cassian was a monastic author whose Conferences, a summary of the teachings of
Egyptian desert mystics-ascetics, exerted a decisive influence on Christian spirituality.
Augustine, a great theologian and bishop of the late 4th and early 5th centuries, also
combined Neoplatonic philosophy and biblical thought to produce an understanding of
the spiritual path as an ascent from the material world, through the world of mind, to a
momentary glimpse of Absolute Reality, understood as pure light, beheld in a trembling
glance. Augustine’s Confessions were an enduring personal account of a spiritual journey
from Mani-chaeanism, through Neoplatonism, to Christianity.
Gregory the Great, more than any other author, sums up the Christian spirituality of
late antiquity and transmits it to the medieval period. His commentary on the book of Job,
Moralia in Iob, has sections that are miniature treatises on the mystic way. Gregory’s
characterization of the contrast between the “active life” of engagement in the world and
the “contemplative” life of withdrawal for asceticism and prayer was widely influential,
as were his description of the mystical experience as a glimpse of the “unbounded light of
divinity” and his conception of the way in which the soul makes a “ladder” of itself to
“ascend” from experience of the external world of sense, to the in-terior world of mind,
to the transcendent world of spiritual realities and the “unbounded light” that is God.
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