Christian Mysticism

The essence of sin is self-assertion or self-will, and consequent separation from God. Tauler has, perhaps, a deeper sense of sin than any of his predecessors, and he revives th...

Thus Weigel, who begins with Paracelsus, leaves off somewhere near Eckhart--and Eckhart in his boldest mood. But his chief concern is to attack the Bibliolaters (_Buchstabentheo...

Ruysbroek reverts to the mystical tradition, partially broken by Eckhart, of arranging almost all his topics in three or seven divisions, often forming a progressive scale. For...

In St. John, as in mystical theology generally, the Incarnation, rather than the Cross, is the central fact of Christianity. "The Word was made flesh, and tabernacled among us,"...

In aloofness and loneliness of mind he is exceeded by no mystic of the cloister. It may be said far more truly of him than of Milton, that "his soul was like a star, and dwelt a...

"O heart, the equal poise of Love's both parts, Big alike with wounds and darts, Live in these conquering leaves, live still the same, And walk through all tongues one triumphan...

Origen, like the Neoplatonists, says that God is above or beyond Being; but he is sounder than Clement on this point, for he attributes self-consciousness[124] and reason to God...

In this Lecture we are following the line of speculative Mysticism, and we have now to consider the greatest of all speculative mystics, Meister Eckhart, who was born soon after...

This view of reality, as a vista which is opened gradually to the eyes of the climber up the holy mount, is very near to the heart of Mysticism. It rests on the faith that the i...

There are two views of this sacrament which the "plain man" has always found much easier to understand than the symbolic view which is that of our Church. One is that it is a mi...

All things flow out from God, and all will ultimately return to Him. The first emanation is the Thing in itself ([Greek: auto to einai]), which corresponds to the Plotinian [Gre...

[Footnote 345: I do not find it possible to give a more honourable place than this to a system of biblical exegesis which has still a few defenders. It was first developed in Ch...

The way in which Hilton conceives the "truly mystical darkness" of Dionysius is very interesting. As a psychical experience, it has its place in the history of the inner life. T...

[Footnote 85: St. Paul's mystical language about death and resurrection has given rise to much controversy. On the one hand, we have writers like Matthew Arnold, who tell us tha...

In the "third night"--that of memory and will--the soul sinks into a holy inertia and oblivion (_santa ociosidad y olvido_), in which the flight of time is unfelt, and the mind...

The subject of St. Paul's visions and revelations is one of great difficulty. In the Acts we have full accounts of the appearance in the sky which caused, or immediately precede...

I attempted in my second Lecture to analyse the main elements of Christian Mysticism as found in St. Paul and St. John. But since in the later Lectures I have been obliged to dr...

----"I give and bequeath my Lands and Estates to the Chancellor, Masters, and Scholars of the University of Oxford for ever, to have and to hold all and singular the said Lands...

There is one more fundamental doctrine which we must not omit. Purification removes the obstacles to our union with God, but our guide on the upward path, _the true hierophant o...

The idea of mystical union by means of a common meal was, as we have seen, familiar to the Greeks. For instance, Plutarch says (_Non fosse suav. vivi sec. Epic._ 21), "It is not...

St. Augustine arranges the ascent of the soul in seven stages.[206] But the higher steps are, as usual, purgation, illumination, and union. This last, which he calls "the vision...

[Footnote 24: _Life of Tennyson_, vol. i. p. 320. The curious experience, that the repetition of his own name induced a kind of trance, is used by the poet in his beautiful myst...

[Footnote 219: Erigena was roused by a work on predestination, written by Gotteschalk, and advocating Calvinistic views, to protest against the doctrine that God, who is life, c...

To us it seems that the Mysticism of the counter-Reformation was bound to fail, because it was the revival of a perverted, or at best a one-sided type. The most consistent quiet...

[Footnote 402: I had written these words before the publication of Principal Caird's _Sermons_, which contain, in my judgment, the most powerful defence of what I have called Ch...

The Germans have two words for what we call Mysticism--_Mystik_ and _Mysticismus_, the latter being generally dyslogistic. The long chapter in Nordau's _Degeneration_, entitled...

[Footnote 132: The passages in which Plotinus (following Plato) bids us mount by means of the beauty of the external world, do not contradict those other passages in which he bi...

The English Platonists are equally sound on the subject of ecstasy. Whichcote says: "He doth not know God at all as He is, nor is he in a good state of religion, who doth not fi...

Between the two ideas of essentialisation and of substitution comes that of gradual _transformation_, which, again, cannot in history be separated from the other two. It has the...