Christian Mysticism

Apophatic theology and contemplative tradition. Pseudo-Dionysius, Eckhart, the Cloud of Unknowing, the Carmelite mystics, and Eastern Orthodox hesychasm.

The Christian mystical tradition is structured by a fundamental tension between the kataphatic (affirmative) and apophatic (negative) modes of speaking about God. Where the kataphatic proceeds by affirmation — God is good, God is wise, God is being — the apophatic proceeds by negation, holding that the divine essence transcends every concept available to the created intellect.

The apophatic line

The decisive figure is Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (late fifth or early sixth century), whose Mystical Theology, Divine Names, and Celestial Hierarchy set the agenda for over a millennium of contemplative writing. The unknown author writes under the persona of the Athenian convert of the apostle Paul, an ascription neither he nor his medieval readers treat as deception so much as a claim of theological lineage.

From Dionysius the line passes to Maximus the Confessor in the East, John Scotus Eriugena in the Latin West, and through the Rhineland mystics — Eckhart, Tauler, Suso — into the late medieval and early modern period. The anonymous English Cloud of Unknowing and the Spanish Carmelites Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross extend this apophatic inheritance into the contemplative practice of the religious orders.

Hesychasm and the Eastern line

In the Greek East, the mystical tradition runs through the desert fathers, The Philokalia, and culminates in the fourteenth-century Palamite synthesis. Gregory Palamas distinguishes the divine essence (radically unknowable) from the divine energies (the uncreated grace participated in by the saints), defending the practice of hesychastic prayer and the visio of the uncreated light against the rationalist critique of Barlaam.

The Christian mystical tradition is not separable from the dogmatic and sacramental life of the churches that preserve it. Hekhal’s editorial principle is to read these texts in the theological idiom they were written for, with scholarly apparatus that makes that idiom intelligible to readers outside it.

Primary texts

Region
Mediterranean, Western Europe, Byzantium
Period
c. 200 CE -- present
Languages
Greek, Latin, Middle High German, Spanish, Middle English
Key figures
Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart, Gregory Palamas, John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila