Recherche – Detailansicht

Ausgabe:

September/2017

Spalte:

943–945

Kategorie:

Dogmen- und Theologiegeschichte

Autor/Hrsg.:

Nelstrop, Louise, and Simon D. Podmore [Eds.]

Titel/Untertitel:

Christian Mysticism and Incarnational Theology. Between Transcendence and Immanence.

Verlag:

Farnham u. a.: Ashgate Publishing (Routledge) 2013. XVI, 239 S. = Contemporary Theological Explorations in Christian Mysticism. Geb. £ 110,00. ISBN 978-1-4094-5670-4.

Rezensent:

Andrew Louth

Neben dem angegebenen Titel in dieser Rezension besprochen:

Nelstrop, Louise, and Simon D. Podmore[Eds.]: Exploring Lost Dimensions in Christian Mysticism. Opening to the Mystical. Farnham u. a.: Ashgate Publishing (Routledge) 2013. XVI, 226 S. = Contemporary Theological Explorations in Christian Mysticism. Geb. £ 110,00. ISBN 978-1-4094-5672-8.


These two books are the fruits of a conference held in Keble Col-lege, Oxford, January 2011, under the title Theology Explorations of Christian Mysticism, and form the first two volumes in a new series on Mystical Theology. The conference set out »to explore the (re)turn to mystical theology that we are currently witnessing both inside and outside the academy« (XV in either volume). It is curious to reflect that something similar might have been said a century ago, though it was manifest less in conferences than in a host of publications by people such as Inge, Underhill, von Hügel, Pourrat, Saudreau, Poulain, a little later Baruzi … the list could go on, as well in the foundation (at least in England) of orders of contemplative nuns and the growth of the retreat movement. Most of the contributors to these volumes are well aware of this, but there is an occasional breathless note of something utterly novel. The different titles to the two volumes (instead of a single title covering two vol-umes) suggests some kind of thematic division, but – from the contents, at least – it is difficult to discern what that is. One volume suggests something philosophical, Christian Mysticism and In-carnational Theology: Between Transcendence and Immanence, the other, Exploring Lost Dimensions in Christian Mysticism: Opening to the Mystical, something more in the nature of the discovery of something new, but most articles, it seems to me, could have ap-peared under either title. Nevertheless, whatever the rationale, the articles collected together are of great and diverse interest.
The more philosophical volume covers a range of the more philosophical »mystics«: Plotinus (by Mark Edwards), Nicholas of Cusa (Benjamin DeSpain, comparing him with Dionysius the Areo-pagite, Johannes Hoff), Meister Eckhart (Ben Morgan, Markus Vinzent), Heidegger (Duane Williams), Augustine (Edward Howells, Susannah Ticciati), Iris Murdoch (oddly coupled with the Anglican Fresh Expressions movement: Donna J. Lazenby), and then, perhaps less expectedly, Teresa of Avila with John of the Cross (Peter Tyler) and Julian of Norwich (Louise Nelstrop); there is also a game, but in my view, doomed attempt by Philip McCosker to distil some mys-tical insight from the notion of enhypostasia (once, at least, ren-dered in non-existent Greek as ἐνυποστασία).
Some of these articles are brilliant: Mark Edwards’, for example, clear and trenchant, with barely four pages, but worth every word, on »persons and personality«, which should be read by anyone using the word »person« in a theological context. Johannes Hoff and Markus Vinzent have also valuable things to say that would be hard to find elsewhere. A few times articles take an idea advanced by someone else and put to work in another context, with mixed success (Ticciati and Nelstrop, for instance; McCosker could come here, too). High claims are made, from time to time, for originality; Howells, for example, overlooks a by-no-means obscure book, published more than 35 years ago, that makes the case for Augus-tine’s De Trinitate as a »mystical« work that he essays here.
The other volume, »exploring lost dimensions«, is only slightly different in feel. So far as figures discussed are concerned, we encounter not so much philosophical mystics as philosophers/thinkers/ scholars interested in mysticism: William James, Ernst Troeltsch (which at first sight seems odd, though amply justified by Joel D. S. Rasmussen and Johannes Zachhuber), Rudolf Otto, and Evelyn Underhill (though Underhill could well have been included in the other volume as a philosophical, or at least learned and scholarly, mystic). None of these essays are quite what one might expect. It is odd that there is so little on William James; Rasmussen’s article is really about Troeltsch and his reading of James – the bibliography is overwhelm-ingly to do with Troeltsch, and misses, for example, Charles Taylor’s Vienna lectures on James. For better or worse, James’ influence is omnipresent in twentieth-century reflection on mysticism, at least in the English-speaking world: the worse has been remorsely ex-posed, the better might merit a look, and the background constituted by his works on psychology worth some investigation, now that the star of the psychoanalytical movement is sputtering, if not actually declining. Both Rasmussen and Zachhuber demonstrate the con-tinuing importance of Troeltsch’s observation that, whatever its as-pirations, mystical movements require social structures.
The volume begins with two essays that also seek to »place« our reading of the mystics: George Pattison in a loosely-structured meditation relates mystical insights to discourses of indirection (to summarize in a phrase an essay rich in allusion); Oliver Davies, mostly with reference to Eckhart, insists on reading the medieval mystics in the social and cultural context of their day. These lessons are heeded in many of the other contributions. Philip Endean SJ, with especial reference to Ignatius Loyola, reflects on a common theme: the way in which the institutionalization of spirituality, perhaps most obviously in the Catholic Church, often hinders understanding of the founding fathers. Endean’s essay is also a reflection on William James from a Catholic perspective; he finds in James an approach that parallels the rediscovery of the authentic message of the »mystics« themselves, illustrated from the example of Ignatius. Endean’s essay is tantalizingly short, suggesting far more than is actually set down in print. Simon D. Podmore focuses on Otto, and seems to offer a Jungian take on Otto’s notion of the mysterium fascinosum et tremendum. It is Otto’s other characterization of the mysterium that attracts Podmore’s attention: the mysterium horrendum (which Otto uses once), which means literally (or etymologically) the mystery that makes your hair stand on end. I am not sure that this is central to Otto’s understanding of the holy; it seems to me too subjective. Naturally, apprehension of the holy, or the divine, has a subjective element, but Otto’s attempt to see the holy as an a priori category seems to be an attempt to tran-scend that. Ann Loades’ article on Evelyn Underhill is particularly welcome: Underhill’s star seems to have declined (along with the women scholar/thinkers to whom Loades compares her: Dorothy Sayers and Helen Waddell), but many aspects of her thought are worth revisiting, as Loades makes clear. I am not sure that anything is clarified by Loades’s attempt to see her as a feminist pioneer; she admits that Underhill herself would not have understood this, though she exemplified a female dimension in the Church’s mi-nistry in an unmistakable and unparalleled way (at least in the Church of England), nor, I think, would Sayers or Waddell. Several articles are concerned with bringing broader intellectual strategies to the study of mysticism. Tina Beattie, in a carefully argued piece drawing on a wide range of sources, argues that the body and the Incarnation should transform the nature of mysticism with its too ready use of the notion of the soul; central to her argument is attention to the requirements of language, both of saying and non-saying, in whatever it is the mystics are concerned with. Raphael Cadenhead takes the case of Gregory of Nyssa, one of the fathers most com-monly in the last three-quarters of a century enlisted in the ranks of the mystics, and argues against the importation of modern understanding of sex and gender into the very different intellectual world of the fourth century. His is an article consisting of close readings of the text of Gregory (marred by a consistent, and impossible, accent on the first syllable of the word for male), which seem to me entirely convincing. Brian FitzGerald’s article on Peter John Olivi, a Fran-ciscan disciple of Bonaventure, with affinities in Joachim of Fiori, brings a lot of light to a figure scarcely known (at least to this reviewer). The volume ends on a wonderful essay by Sarah Apetrei on manifestations of mysticism, often in a prophetic vein, in seventeenth-century England. Jane Lead is a central figure: central in a sprawlingly rich world of often disturbing manifestations of God’s apprehended presence: manifestations frequently with radical po-litical implications. This is a world not often visited by those in-terested in Christian Mysticism (though Evelyn Underhill was as aware as any of this world, though even today there is little in the way of modern editions), but it had deep roots and profound in-fluence.
Jakob Boehme and his disciples (many of them English) are im­portant here, and this whole world needs to be taken on board if one’s intellectual history of European thought is not to be badly one-sided. One of these figures, a disciple of Boehme, was John Pordage, a name I first came across not in any English source, but in the Russian thinker Sergii Bulgakov. One might think, too, of Berd-yaev’s observation that German idealism cannot be understood apart from Boehme. Which leads to a final observation: it seems odd that in these two volumes no Orthodox theologians appear (they are not that rare in the West nowadays), not least because many of the terms bandied around – the apophatic is the most obvious – are borrowings from the Orthodox East. The importance of the tradi-tion Apetrei is exploring for some, at least, of those involved in the Russian Religious Renaissance of the early twentieth century only underlines this omission.