Mysticism and Reform: 1400–1759 ed. by Sara S. Poor and Nigel Smith (review)

This collection of essays explores in fascinating detail the pluralistic, complicated ways in which mystical writers from 1400–1759 drew upon late-medieval contemplative writers. Each contributor focuses on the paradoxical tensions between yearning for union with God in the writings of the apophatic mystics and the push by ecclesiastical authority for order and control. The conflicts were many: between image and iconoclasm, between the ecstasy of union with God and doctrinal orthodoxy, between mystical longing and liturgy, between prophetic criticism and political authority.

The contemplative desire for mystical union with God, as each of these essays demonstrates, is contextualized by the politically unstable and dangerous times of the Reformation’s spread throughout Europe and North America. Or stated more simply, these essays explore the ways that the survival of the mystical quest for apophatic union with God in both the medieval and early modern periods is closely linked with the politics of reform. Mysticism and Luther’s theology, each essay argues, are not unimportant remnants of older traditions surviving in the backwaters of a postmodern world. Mysticism and its political implications continue into our own time.

Accordingly, each essay focuses on a different period of the development of the relationship between mysticism and political reform. While each essay is excellent, I discuss three, not because I think they are better than the others, but because I want to illustrate how this anthology’s overall theme—the persistence of the longevity of mystical thinking and the politics about how to best love God—relates to three different periods. Another reviewer could have easily chosen other essays.

Euan K. Cameron’s lead essay, “Ways of Knowing in the Pre- and Post Reformation Worlds,” argues that mysticism and the quest for apophatic union with God never existed in isolation from other ways of knowing in Christian culture. Late-medieval theologians were interested in the connection between different ways of apprehending God, so that tradition, reason, authoritative texts, and the illumination of the Holy Spirit had their respective places. The Protestant Reformation disrupted this balance between the different means to knowledge. So in the controversies over Scripture, tradition, and reason, personal mystical experience seemed to Protestants a too familiar relationship between sinful human beings and God. For Catholics it threatened to disrupt the world of hierarchy and obedience that the Council of Trent tried to consolidate.

That mysticism was seen as a threat to the regulation of devotional life in both Protestant and Catholic communities is evident a century later in women’s writings that played such an important role among English Roman Catholics. Arthur F. Marotti’s essay, “Saintly Idiocy and Contemplative Empowerment: The Example of Dame Gertrude More,” focuses on the great granddaughter of Sir Thomas More. Marotti discusses Gertrude More’s personal contemplative practices found in her posthumously published book, The Spiritual Exercises of the Most Virtuous and Religions D. Gertrude More. More was a nun and a rebellious spirit who managed to interrelate her withdrawal from the world while maintaining a fierce devotion to Catholicism in spite of pressures upon Catholics by the Church of England.

Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Hildegard Elizabeth Keller in “A Battle for Hearts and Minds: The Heart in Reformation Polemic” explore the return to mysticism after the Reformation within Catholic and, to some degree, Protestant traditions. This “return” was motivated by the desire to address the relationship between mysticism and modernity. The authors argue that the interdependent interaction between the inner images of mystical experiences and their outer expressions within the rough and tumble of ecclesiastical and secular politics continues to the present time.

The editors have brought together important essays that shed new light on the relationship between inner mystical experience and political and social engagement from the Late Middle Ages to the Modern Age. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the relationship between mystical experience and the concrete political problems of life in the world...