Religion booknotes
Cunningham, Lawrence S.
RELIGION BOOKHOTES Lawrence S. Cunningham The Flowering of Mysticism is the third volume of Bernard McGinn's monumental history of Christian mysticism. The generic title of McGinn's enterprise is...
...and, finally, new forms of literature, language, and modes of representing mystical consciousness...
...His decision to stand with this understanding has triggered some critiques in the scholarly community, but none has been so compelling as to cause him to change his position...
...he was a Carthusian monk whose ordinary liturgical practices were the context out of which his contemplative prayer arose (the same thing goes for writers like John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila...
...and, finally, the women mystics who belonged to traditional religious orders (such as the great tradition of the monastery of Helfta...
...In a postscript, McGinn notes that few of these figures have been conspicuous in the standard accounts of church history...
...She has a good analysis of the autobiographies produced (usually for confessors or spiritual directors) by religious women who followed the example of Teresa of Avila's autobiography...
...Having taught a seminar on trinitarian theology this past term, I was struck by the creative trinitarian motifs found in much of this literature...
...Grumbach, a celebrated essayist and critic, is under no illusion about how the Christian contemplative tradition warns against such solitary spirituality...
...McKnight obviously did a lot of archival work in her research (was this originally a dissertation...
...The first half (marred here and there by the heavy sludge of postmodern literary palaver) discusses the place of Madre Castillo in literary history (she is evidently well known and highly regarded in Colombia) and provides some social context for studying her life...
...Seeking Peace: Notes and Conversations along the Way by Johann Christoph Arnold Plough, $20,248 pp...
...As a consequence, amid extreme pain (from neuralgia) and from the perspective of old age, she sets a course of prayer relying on some spiritual guidance from favorite authors (Si-mone Weil, Thomas Merton, Meister Eckhart, Kathleen Norris among others) and from the traditional source of all Christian prayer: the psalms...
...One of the paradoxes represented by the book is this: traditionally some strands of the Anabaptist tradition (like the Old Order Amish) shunned the outside world...
...The three stages of the spiritual life are not "early modern," Erasmus did not "redefine" theology as the study of Scripture (Aquinas and his contemporaries did that), and the division of memory, understanding, and will was not "neoscholastic" (the distinction goes back at least to the time of Augustine...
...Life in the convent seems to have been punctuated by Castillo's need to deal with complex financial dealings (she was abbess more than once), convent squabbles over the interminable issue of laxity versus observance, and the other predictable breaks in the routine of the regular life...
...The Mexican polymath, Sor Juana de la Cruz, has been the subject of a number of studies, including a brilliant work by the late Oc-tavio Paz...
...and pages in this volume were (for this nonexpert) quite instructive...
...It would make a superb companion for a retreat or as a chair-side book for daily reading...
...The Bruderhof are Christian communities who practice the sharing of goods, a life of simplicity, and a dedication to peacemaking...
...But one thing is clear...
...Do not take seriously Merton's Seeds of Contemplation (1949...
...The book, dedicated to an understanding of Christian peace, is divided into five large sections: Seeking peace, meanings of peace, the paradoxes of peace, stepping stones to peace, and the abundant life of peace...
...the porous border between "low" devotionalism and "high" theology...
...Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame...
...The recovery of this corpus, of course, is due in part to the burgeoning interest in the story of women in the church...
...Grumbach, however, remains steadfast...
...God help the man who would patronize a woman religious and scholar in that kind of tone...
...In the most irritating paragraph in the book, the criticisms of a Colombian nun who wrote a biography of Madre Castillo are dismissed because McKnight's work deals with "social and economic determinisms" in a more integrated fashion...
...Anyone who thinks that pacifism is a synonym for passivity would do well to look at a manifesto of Arnold's father, written a generation ago and partially cited here...
...Anyone who despairs of the church but still clings to prayer will benefit from this woman's struggles and insights...
...Grumbach prays because she is a woman of deep faith and, further, because in her younger days she had an overpowering experience of God's presence which anchored her in faith and which she would love to re-experience...
...Over the last few decades, scholarship on mystics and mysticism has expanded beyond the Western world, and a number of studies of the writings of The Mystic of Tunja: The Writings of Madre Castillo, 1671-1742 by Kathryn Joy McKnight University of Massachusetts Press, $45, 284 pp...
...her from this lonely path...
...However much the author knows about colonial literature (a lot, evidently), feminist literary theory, and the culture of the time, she is woefully undernourished when it comes to handling theological questions...
...Madre Castillo was a Colombian nun who spent more than fifty years in the convent of the Poor Clares in the provincial town of Tunja...
...and, finally, the novelty of some of their religious formulations...
...Space does not permit even a resume of the careful elaborations McGinn makes of the texts attributed to these women, the men who wrote about them, and the scholarship devoted to them (there are nearly one hundred and fifty pages of notes in this volume...
...Each of the writings of Madre Castillo is given extended analysis in the second half of the book...
...Don't think of the church as an institution...
...Don't think of the Cloud of Unknowing as the work of a solitary person of prayer...
...In other words, what one learns from this work (and I admit to having learned a good deal) one learns despite the patina of opaque critical jargon and the tin ear for religious discourse...
...Some elements of the lives of the persons treated in this volume may seem odd or bizarre, but even such eccentricities are put into context in a sympathetic study like this one...
...The author is also good in tracing out the space allotted to religious women to exercise their desire to write...
...the reason(s) why there is such an emphasis on suffering in these writings...
...think of people within the church (like those with whom you correspond) as part of a community of prayer...
...The present volume treats what has been called the "new mysticism...
...Under those rubrics, Arnold composes brief chapters that often take the form of meditations...
...It is worthwhile pointing out the careful distinctions he draws between visionary and mystical literature...
...It is more fashioned like a book of meditations, even though it has a systematic structure which points to the section on the "abundant life...
...Command of the sources permits McGinn to set Francis into historical context...
...As Arnold writes, even though they would love for everyone to know Jesus Christ, "Jesus is a person, not a concept or an article of theology, and his truth embraces far more than our limited minds can comprehend...
...The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism— 1200-1350 by Bernard McGinn Crossroad Herder, $24.95, 526 pp...
...Arnold's book is inspirational in the best sense of the word...
...The generic title of McGinn's enterprise is The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism...
...I could go on...
...Her experiences are set out in graceful prose and with compelling honesty...
...Merton himself regarded it as such a naive book that he completely rewrote it in 1960-61 under the title New Seeds of Contemplation...
...Commonweal 2 8 March 26,1999...
...In the case of Marguerite of Porete, such innovation ended with her on an inquisitor's pyre...
...My favorite line is one he borrows from Karl Barth, who once wrote that to clasp one's hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising Commonweal 2W March 26,1999 against the disorder of the world...
...Johann Arnold is a well-known spiritual writer and peacemaker who belongs to the Anabaptist-inspired Bruderhof (whose life and origins are fully described in the final pages of this book...
...The new understanding argued that anyone prompted by grace could reach mystical union without necessarily being supported by the regular life of the cloister...
...In my estimation, the three extant volumes already constitute a major work of historical theological scholarship...
...I was also much instructed in the scholarship being produced on this new source of spiritual literature...
...The professor in me desperately wanted to debate all this with Grumbach...
...Her use of terms like mental prayer, mystical theology, visions, locutions, and the entire vocabulary of mystical and ascetical theology leaves much to be desired...
...He follows the trajectory of the lives of those men and women who use Francis as a paradigm for following the crucified Christ, including those who mix a love for Francis with the apocalyptic notions derived from Joachim of Flora...
...I have known of her writings mainly from her reviews and articles in magazines like the New Republic and this journal, but this recent book makes me wish for a more sustained encounter with this person of faith...
...Each sentence begins with the phrase "We declare war against...cruelty to children, the search for power over the souls of people, the spirit of unforgive-ness, envy," and so on...
...McGinn begins his treatment with an extended consideration of Saint Francis of Assisi, the Franciscan tradition, and the men and women who followed that path...
...McGinn's approach, argued at some length in volume 1, is that mysticism is best understood as the experience of the consciousness of God's presence in a deep and immediate way...
...Despite such cautions, one must thank Grumbach for penning an authentic work...
...His treatment of the Franciscan movement is so thorough (as he told me when he was writing it) that he knew before this volume was complete that it would require another book to do full justice to the more apophatic tradition represented by Meister Eckhart and the Dominican school...
...He draws on a wide literature, with citations from everyone from Tagore to Merton...
...Nonetheless, he observes, the task of historical theology is not only to reread the classics of a Francis of Assisi or a Gertrude of Helfta, but to reclaim and remember those who have been forgotten...
...A quick reading runs the risk of thinking that the straightforward prose style indicates a "simple" book...
...Such a widening of mystical opportunities was thought to reveal itself in the increased use of the vernacular, new experiments in the formation of religious communities (the Beguines), different vocabularies (the language of Minne in which the Dutch word for "love" gets a currency so wide that it become almost the affective equivalent of esse, the Latin word for being), and, inevitably, tensions with those more at home with older forms of religious expression...
...Those whose primary interests are not historical will still find much to nourish the mind by a careful reading of these pages...
...As McKnight argues, Madre Castillo was profoundly shaped by what was available to enclosed nuns of the time: the breviary, some of the writings of John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, the Ig-natian spiritual exercises, Osuna's Spiritual Alphabet, and some standard collections of hagiography...
...Judging from the bibliography in McKnight's work, there is a Commonweal 2 5 March 26,1999 whole range of such literature to be studied...
...The end result is a book that would inspire any person of faith...
...This approach permits him to bypass the sometimes sterile philosophical debates, which usually only focus on first-person accounts about the character of mystical experience...
...the interaction between holy women and their male counterpoints...
...a new relationship between men and women who are on the path of mystical union...
...One can only hope that the author's energies do not flag before he brings his whole work to conclusion...
...Others, such as the Bruder-hof, stand against the world by their communitarian style of life and are deeply concerned with advancing the peace of Christ among those who do not accept either their lifestyle or their faith...
...They work with death-row prisoners, struggle against abortion, and keep open lines to all seekers of peace...
...In The Cloister Walk, Kathleen Norris says that it was the liturgy that pulled her back to the practice of faith...
...He impressively searches the writings we have from the hand of Francis in order to place them into a broader theological framework...
...She left behind a small body of writing that consisted of her spiritual autobiography (Vida), a collection of spiritual maxims, reflections, meditations (Afectos espirituales), and a small notebook with some poems and earlier maxims reworked into a somewhat more refined form (Cuademo de In-ciso—so named because she wrote in the blank pages of an accounting book...
...Doris Grumbach, by contrast, charts a spiritual journey in which she gives up on liturgy and other "church" practices for a life of solitary prayer...
...The Presence of Absence is an account of her years of prayer, reading, and struggle with pain and with what the old auCommonweal 16 March 26,1999 thors would call desolation...
...Her many years of church attendance and sacramental practice have not continued to nourish her...
...the three great Beguine mystics (Hadewijch, Mechtild, and Marguerite of Porete...
...Like all spiritual persons, Grumbach struggles both with God's absence and with the authors she encounters...
...Reading McGinn would surely have helped...
...Three characteristics are symptomatic of this largely fourteenth-century movement: a new attitude about the relationship of the cloister to the world (with a detectable shift away from the cloister...
...Subsequent chapters treat women who experimented with new forms of religious living (for example, recluses, certain forms of the beguinage, urban solitaries...
...Indeed, in more than one place she quotes everyone from her daughter (who is a seminary president) to the spiritual authors she is reading, as they attempt to dissuade The Presence of Absence: On Prayers and an Epiphany by Doris Grumbach Beacon, $18,126 pp...
...religious women in Latin America in the period after the Reformation have also been published...
...Castillo's writings are only cited or paraphrased, so we can't tell if her interpreter gets it right...
...Despite my dissatisfactions with some of what Grumbach has to say, my new resolution is to go back and read her earlier works such as Life in a Day and Fifty Days of Solitude...
...Seeking Peace is not a systematic treatise...
...A good way to approach this work might be to read it in small doses...
...McGinn calls this the "democratization" of mysticism...
Vol. 126 • March 1999 • No. 6
