Christian Mysticism

Christian mysticism is the pursuit of direct experience of God, and it grew inside the church, not at its edges. It begins with the Desert Fathers, the hermits of the Egyptian desert from the third century. It runs through the Dominican preacher Meister Eckhart, the anonymous fourteenth-century English author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Teresa of Ávila and her reformed Carmelites, and Jakob Boehme, a Lutheran shoemaker in Görlitz.

The Cloud of Unknowing goes furthest. Its author holds that God can be loved but not thought, and tells the reader to reach for him by love alone: ‘By love may He be gotten and holden; but by thought never.’

Expect primary texts in translation, lives of the saints and the desert monks, histories of the religious orders, and theological commentary from Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant writers. In 1970 Pope Paul VI named Teresa of Ávila a Doctor of the Church, the first woman to receive the title.