Soul Recreation: The Contemplative-Mystical Piety of Puritanism by Tom Schwanda (review)

Soul Recreation painstakingly and lovingly traces robust forms of mystical piety among the moderate strand of Puritans by focusing on Isaac Ambrose’s writings and ministry in Lancaster, England in the first half of the seventeenth-century. Within Schwanda’s larger scholarship, this constitutes a major step in retrieving a contemplative-mystical piety for today, nuanced well by his carefully argued position against commonly known Reformed resistance to mysticism instilled by Karl Barth in modern times. Through his careful hermeneutical and historical project and renaming the mystical and contemplative strands from within Puritan sources, rather than relying exclusively on Western Catholic ones for vocabulary and understandings of mysticism, he restores the historical authenticity of contemplative mystical piety to the Reformed tradition.

Schwanda carefully analyzes Isaac Ambrose’s texts, allowing him to trace common influences in the mystical tradition affecting both Puritans and Catholic Post-Reformation mystics, describing Ambrose’s intense and intentional spiritual practices, and the Puritan appropriation of love mysticism. Schwanda shows the dependence of several moderate Puritans on Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs, and their own appropriation of spiritual marriage with Christ in their theological and life-style contexts. Ambrose experiences himself in a spiritual marriage with Christ who is always the bridegroom, a union effected by the Holy Spirit, leading to spiritual joy and even ravishment, to describe the delight and intimacy between them. Ambrose (1604–64) is an exemplar of seventeenth century English Puritans who appropriated this Biblical mystical metaphor for relationship with Jesus and contemplative intimacy without celibacy or monastic reclusion. This Puritan understanding of “godly marriage” democratized love mysticism so that the erotic and spiritual experience of marriage complemented and supported the bridal relationship with Christ for both spouses. Of surprise to me was the robust, positive expression of spousal sexuality in this context that contrasts with common (mis)perceptions of Puritans as anti-sexual as well as anti-mystical. According to the research cited, they enjoyed sexuality within the bounds of marriage and male gender identifications were typically more fluid in the eighteenth-century than today.

The volume’s critical perspectives are complex and multiple, employing Bernard McGinn’s definition of the “mystical element” encompassing multiple strands of possibility for appropriation, careful historical analysis of Ambrose’s texts which provide narrative accounts of his key experiences and spiritual practices that include an annual month-long retreat in a beautiful natural setting, his writings which encourage his readers to follow his example and teachings that encourage them to experience Christ as their lover, and by contemplating, or “Looking on Christ” to be transformed by such prayer. Throughout, Ambrose keeps head and heart together, emphasizes the role of the Holy Spirit in this form of love mysticism, beginning with the union of Christ and the soul established at baptism, and presumes the context of family and ministerial life.

In this close reading of Isaac Ambrose’s exemplary texts as “classics,” Schwanda references other Puritans who were similar to Ambrose as well as those who differed. He cites a wide range of contemporary historical and formational scholarship in the Reformed tradition as well as other seventeenth-century writers who agreed or disagreed with Ambrose. He shows Ambrose’s appropriation of Calvin, whose understanding was not devoid of love and whose sense of faith included mind and heart as well as enjoyment of Christ through the Spirit, in addition to Ambrose’s reliance on Bernard who influences other Puritan writers.

In Schwanda’s treatment of Looking Unto Jesus, he discusses “looking on, beholding, gazing on Jesus” as aspects of Ambrose’s visio dei. Only recently, did I make the connection in Julian of Norwich, through the influence of hermit, Maggie Ross, (Marjorie Reeves) that “beholding” is the Middle English word for contemplation. Julian’s three stages of prayer are: beseeching, beholding, and oneing. And she quotes Irenaeus,” the glory of God is the human person fully alive, and the fully alive human...