Mystical Classics: A Reader's Guide

What it is

Mystical literature is writing that records, or prepares the reader for, direct experience of the divine or of ultimate reality. It takes many forms: the visionary's report, the spiritual director's manual, the love poem, the sermon, the paradox.

This guide follows the traditions separately, because each mystic wrote within one and for readers formed by it. The comparative question, whether they are all speaking of the same thing, is taken up at the end. Platonist mysticism is treated under Gnostic and Neoplatonic Texts, and Jewish mysticism under Kabbalah.

Where to begin

Read The Cloud of Unknowing, which is short and practical, and Attar's Conference of the Birds, which is a story. Then read William James's lectures on mysticism in The Varieties of Religious Experience.

The root: Dionysius

• The Mystical Theology Attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite. Greek. About 500 CE. E 2

  Five short chapters on the ascent to God by the denial of every name and concept, into what the author calls a darkness beyond light. Almost every later Christian mystic in the West read it, directly or at second hand.

Medieval Europe

• Scivias Hildegard of Bingen. Latin. Completed about 1151. E 2

  "Know the Ways": twenty-six visions of creation, redemption, and the end of time, each described and then interpreted by a voice from heaven. Hildegard was an abbess, composer, and naturalist as well as a visionary.

• The Flowing Light of the Godhead Mechthild of Magdeburg. Middle Low German. About 1250 to 1282. E 2

  Visions, dialogues, and love lyrics between the soul and God, written by a beguine in her own vernacular.

• The Mirror of Simple Souls Marguerite Porete. Old French. 1290s. E 2

  A dialogue on the soul so emptied of self that it wills nothing but what God wills. Its author was burned at Paris in 1310. Her book went on circulating without her name, which was restored to it only in 1946.

• The sermons of Meister Eckhart Middle High German. About 1300 to 1327. E 2

  Sermons of extraordinary daring on the birth of God in the soul and the Godhead beyond God. A number of his propositions were condemned after his death.

• The Spiritual Espousals Jan van Ruusbroec. Middle Dutch. About 1340. E 2

  A carefully ordered account of the active, the interior, and the contemplative life by the greatest of the mystics of the Low Countries.

• Theologia Germanica German. Later fourteenth century. E 2

  An anonymous treatise on the surrender of self-will. Martin Luther had it printed in 1516 and said he had learned more from it than from any book but the Bible and Augustine.

The English mystics

• The Cloud of Unknowing Anonymous. Middle English. Later fourteenth century. E 2

  A guide to contemplative prayer for a young beginner. Thought cannot reach God, it says, but love can, and a single short word of prayer pierces the cloud.

• Revelations of Divine Love Julian of Norwich. Middle English. After 1373. E 2

  Sixteen visions and twenty years of reflection upon them, by an anchoress who concluded that "all shall be well". The earliest surviving book in English known to have been written by a woman.

• The Book of Margery Kempe Middle English. 1430s. E 2

  The dictated life of a townswoman of Norfolk: her visions, her pilgrimages, and her uncontrollable tears. Often called the first autobiography in English. The only manuscript came to light in 1934.

Spain

• The Interior Castle Teresa of Avila. Spanish. 1577. E 2

  The soul as a castle of seven sets of rooms, through which prayer leads inward to the center where God dwells. Written under obedience in a few months, and the clearest map of the stages of prayer in Christian literature.

• The Dark Night John of the Cross. Spanish. Poem about 1578, commentary in the 1580s. E 2

  Eight stanzas of love poetry, and a prose commentary that explains them as the purification of the senses and the spirit on the way to union.

Later Western visionaries

• Aurora Jacob Boehme. German. 1612. D 4

  The first book of a shoemaker of Goerlitz whose visions of God, nature, and the origin of evil shaped Protestant mysticism and later esoteric thought. Shelved at the North Gate.

• The Cherubinic Wanderer Angelus Silesius. German. 1657. E 2

  Hundreds of rhymed couplets that compress the paradoxes of Eckhart and Boehme into epigrams.

• Centuries of Meditations Thomas Traherne. English. Written about 1670, first published 1908. E 6

  Prose meditations on the glory of the world as a child sees it. The manuscript lay unknown for more than two centuries until it was found on a London bookstall in the 1890s.

• Heaven and Hell Emanuel Swedenborg. Latin. 1758. D 4

  A scientist's matter-of-fact report of what he had seen and heard in the spiritual world. Widely read by poets and by the Spiritualists of the next century.

• The Marriage of Heaven and Hell William Blake. English. About 1790. E 6

  Etched and colored by the author. Part parody of Swedenborg, part manifesto, with the Proverbs of Hell at its center.

The Sufi tradition

• Deliverance from Error Abu Hamid al-Ghazali. Arabic. About 1108. E 4

  The spiritual autobiography of a great jurist and theologian who gave up his professorship in search of certainty and found it among the Sufis.

• The Conference of the Birds Farid al-Din Attar. Persian. About 1177. E 4

  The birds of the world set out across seven valleys to find their king. Thirty arrive, and discover what they were seeking.

• The Bezels of Wisdom (Fusus al-Hikam) Ibn Arabi. Arabic. 1229. E 4

  Twenty-seven chapters, each on the wisdom of one prophet, by the most influential metaphysician of Sufism. Dense, allusive, and much commented upon.

• The Masnavi Jalal al-Din Rumi. Persian. About 1258 to 1273. E 4

  Some twenty-five thousand couplets of stories within stories, opening with the lament of the reed flute cut from its bed. R. A. Nicholson's complete English translation appeared between 1925 and 1940.

South and East Asia

• The principal Upanishads Sanskrit. The oldest from about the seventh or sixth century BCE. E 5

  Dialogues and teachings on the identity of the inmost self with the ground of all being. The source of the philosophical traditions of Vedanta.

• The Bhagavad Gita Sanskrit. Last centuries BCE. E 5

  Seven hundred verses within the epic Mahabharata, in which Krishna teaches the warrior Arjuna the paths of action, knowledge, and devotion.

• The Yoga Sutras Attributed to Patanjali. Sanskrit. Early centuries CE. E 5

  Fewer than two hundred aphorisms on the stilling of the mind, the eight limbs of practice, and the states of absorption.

• Daodejing Attributed to Laozi. Chinese. About the fourth or third century BCE. E 5

  Eighty-one brief chapters on the Way that cannot be named. Among the most translated books in the world.

• Bardo Thodol Tibetan. Attributed to Padmasambhava and said to have been rediscovered in the fourteenth century. E 5

  Instructions read aloud to guide the dying and the dead through the states between death and rebirth. The title by which it is known in English, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, was given by the editor of the first translation in 1927.

The modern study of mysticism

• The Varieties of Religious Experience William James. 1902. E 6

  Proposes four marks of mystical experience: it cannot be put into words, it conveys knowledge, it does not last, and it comes unbidden.

• Mysticism Evelyn Underhill. 1911. T 3

  A study of the mystic way in its stages of awakening, purgation, illumination, the dark night, and union, drawn chiefly from Christian sources.

• The Idea of the Holy Rudolf Otto. German. 1917. E 6

  Introduced the word "numinous" for the experience of the holy as a mystery at once terrifying and fascinating.

• The Perennial Philosophy Aldous Huxley. 1945. E 6

  An anthology with commentary arguing that the mystics of all traditions teach one truth. The most popular statement of that view.

• Mysticism Sacred and Profane R. C. Zaehner. 1957. E 6

  A scholar of Asian religions replies to Huxley that there are distinct kinds of mystical experience and that they should not be run together.

Things to watch for

• The common core. Whether all mystics describe one experience in different words, or different experiences shaped by different traditions, is the central dispute of the field. Huxley and Zaehner mark its two poles.
• Loose versions. Some of the best-selling English versions of Rumi and other poets were made by writers who did not read the original language. They can be fine poems and poor guides to what the author said.
• Anthologies. A passage lifted from a sermon or a commentary loses its setting. Use anthologies to find authors and then read the authors.
• Technical terms. Words such as "union", "annihilation", "emptiness", and "the dark night" have exact meanings within their traditions that do not carry across.

On the shelves

Mystical literature is shelved at the East Gate in classes E 1 to E 6. Related guides: Gnostic and Neoplatonic Texts and Kabbalah.