Mysticism

by Evelyn Underhill (kam's notes)

Julian of Norwich & St Francis of Assisi became entranced whilst gazing on the crucifix.

Denis the Carthusian, towards the end of his life, hearing the Veni Creator or certain verses of the psalms, he at once rapt in God and lifted up from the earth.

‘While I was in that condition it was opened unto me by the eternal Light and Power, and I saw clearly therein…….But O! then did I see my troubles, trials and temptations more clearly then ever I had done.’                                               George Fox’s journal 1647

‘I was swept up by Thy Beauty, and torn away from Thee by my own weight’

                                                                                                       St Augustine

‘He who knows this will know what I say, and will be convinced that the soul has then another life.’                                                                                      St Augustine

In this abrupt recognition of reality ‘ all things are made new’: from this point the life of the mystic begins.

I now became lost, and absorbed into the being or existence of the universe….and losing thus my separateness of being, came to seem like a part of the whole.

                                                                                                  Richard Jefferies

Purification from pride, evil, sin, illusions, desires, claims, attachments, possessions, false thoughts and imperfection of every kind.

Embrace humility.

All its life that self has been measuring its candle light by other candles. Now for the first time it is out in the open air and sees the sun.

Its business (humility) is getting rid of self-love; and secondly all of those foolish interests in which the surface consciousness is steeped.

1) The negative aspect: the stripping or purging away of those superfluous, unreal and

    harmful things that dissipate the precious energies of the self. This is the business of

    Poverty or detachment.

2) The positive aspect: a rising to their highest term, their purest state, of all that

    remains-the permanent elements of character. This is brought about by mortification,

    the gymnastic of the soul; a deliberate recourse to painful experiences and difficult

    tasks.

The 3 Methods of purification:

1  The great evangelical counsel of Poverty, the complete detachment from all things

    finite.

2  Chastity, the poverty of the senses, cleansed from personal desire.

3  Obedience, the poverty of the will, a holy indifference to the accidents of life.

These methods are to make the individual a scrape of the cosmos, an ordinary bit of Universal life, only important as a part of the All, an expression of Will Divine.

The ancient paradox of poverty: We only enjoy true liberty in respect to such things as we neither posses nor desire.

“That thou mayest have pleasure in everything, seek pleasure in nothing. That thou mayest know everything, seek to know nothing, That thou mayest possess all things, seek to possess nothing………….in detachment the spirit finds quiet and repose, for coveting nothing, nothing wearies it by elation, nothing oppresses it by dejection, because it stands in the centre of its own humility. For as soon as it covets anything, it is immediately fatigued thereby.’                                                     St John of the cross

The four ascending degrees of spiritual poverty:

1  The soul’s contempt of all things that are not God

2  Contempt of herself and her own works

3  Utter self-abandonment

4  Self-loss in the incomprehensible Being of God

“Forsake all earthly things. Separate thyself from the love of the creatures. Deny thyself.”                                                              God heard by Antoinette Bourignan

“Nought I am, nought I have, nought I lack”

‘This dying’, says Tauler, has many degrees, and so has this life. A man might die a thousand deaths in one day and find at once a joyful life corresponding to each of them. This is as it must be: god cannot deny or refuse this to death. The stronger the death the more powerful and thorough is the corresponding life; the more intimate the death, the more inward is the life. Each life brings strength, and strengthens to a harder death. When a man dies to a scornful word, bearing it in god’s name or to some inclination inward or outward, acting or not acting against his own will, be it in love or grief, in word or act, in going or staying or if he denies his desires of taste or sight or makes no excuses when wrongfully accused; or anything else, whatever it may be, to which he has not yet died, it is harder at first to one who is unaccustomed to it and mortified than to him who is mortified.

Self-love and self-will (the poisons of our spirits) are abated, and in time in a sort destroyed; and instead of them there enter into the soul the divine love and divine will, and take possession thereof.

The death of selfhood in its narrow individualistic sense is, then, the primary object of mortification.

The self-that-is-to-be will live upon a plane where her own prejudices and preferences are so uninteresting as to be imperceptible. She must be weaned from these nursery toys: and weaning is a disagreeable process.

Suffering is the ancient law of love, there is no quest without pain, there is no lover who is not also a martyr. Hence it is inevitable that he who would love so high a thing as Wisdom should sometimes suffer hindrances and griefs.

                                                                           Says the Eternal Wisdom to Suso.

He who desires to be wholly immersed in the fathomless sea of My Godhead must be deeply immersed in the deep sea of bitter sorrow.

‘The deeper and more supernaturally a man crushes himself beneath all things, the more supernaturally will he be drawn far above all things.’

                                                                Tauler, Sermon of St. Paul, the inner way.

Real detachment means the death of preferences of all kinds: even of those that seem to other men the very proofs of virtue and fine taste.

It sways easily between the extremes of pleasure and pain in its gropings after transcendental realty. It often attains for a moment to heights in which it is not able to rest; is often flung from some rapturous vision of the Perfect to the deeps of contrition and despair.

‘God showed Himself by turns harsh and gentle : To each access of misery succeeded the rapture of supernatural grace.’                                                           Rulman Merswin

There are in this struggle three factors:

1  The unchanging light of Eternal Reality; that Pure Being ‘which ever shines and nought

    shall ever dim.’

2  The web of illusion, here thick, there thin; which hems in, confuses and allures the

    sentient self.

3  The self, always changing, moving, struggling—always, in fact, becoming—alive in

    every fibre, related at once to the unreal and to the real, and, with its growth in true

    being, ever more conscious of the contrast between them.

The state of ‘quiet’, as we have said, entails suspension of the surface-consciousness: yet consciousness of the subject’s personality remains. It follows, generally, on a period of deliberate and loving recollection, of a slow and steady withdrawal of the attention from the channels of the senses. To one who is entering this state, the external world seems to get further and further away: till at last nothing but the paramount fact of his own existence remains.

He is there, as it were poised, resting, waiting, he does not know for what: Only he is conscious that all, even in utter emptiness is well.

Ceasing to attend to the messages from without, he begins to notice That which has always been within.

So the soul, if she would work inwardly, must call home her powers and collect them from all divided things to one inward work….if a man will work an inward work, he must pour all his powers into himself as into a corner of the soul, and must hide himself from all images and forms, and then he can do the work. Then he must come into a forgetting and a not-knowing.

The best and noblest way in which thou mayst come into this work and life is by keeping silence, and letting God work and speak.

And thus thine ignorance is not a defect but thy highest perfection, and thine inactivity thy highest work. And so in this work thou must bring all thy works to nought and all thy powers into silence, if thou wilt in truth experience this birth within thyself.

                                                                                                             ‘Eckhart’

It seems to her that she wants nothing more: The faculties which are at rest would like always to remain still, for the least of their movements is able to trouble or prevent her love. Those who are in this orison wish their bodies to remain motionless, for it seems to them that at least movement they will lose this sweet peace.

When contemplation appears:

a)  It produces a general condition of indifference, liberty and peace, an elevation above

     the world, a sense of beatitude.

b)  In this state, in which consciousness of I-hood and consciousness of the world

    disappear, the mystic is conscious of being in immediate relation with God

     himself.                                                 

                                                                                                            Delacroix

The mystic has more and more the impression of being that which he knows, and of knowing that which he is.

I could not sustain my gaze: my weakness was dashed back, and I was relegated to my ordinary experience, bearing with me only a loving memory.

                                                                                                       St Augustine

There is no certitude to equal the mystic’s certitude: No impotence more complete than that which falls on those who try to communicate it.

They speak, almost in the same breath, of an exceeding joy, a beatific vision, an intense communion, and a ‘loving sight’: and an exceeding emptiness, a barren desert, an unfathomable abyss, a nescience, a Divine Dark. Again and again these pairs of opposites occur in first-hand descriptions of pure contemplation: remoteness and intimacy, Darkness and Light.

But his total experience transcends mere feeling, just as it transcends mere intellect.

St Augustine said of time, he knows what it is until he is asked to define it.

This ground is so desert and bare, that no thought has ever entered there.

It is a simple and unchanging condition.

That here the extremes of possessions and surrender are the same, that ignorance and knowledge, light and dark are one.

Love has led him into that timeless, spaceless world of Being which is the peaceful ground, not only of individual striving spirit, but also of the striving universe; and he can but cry with Philip, ‘it is enough’.

Dante’s ‘Paradiso’, he tells of piercing the ‘secret of the Empyrean’

‘Love which casteth out fear’

She has learnt the world’s secret, not by knowing but by being; the only way of really knowing anything.

The whole vitality of the subject is so concentrated on the transcendental world, that body and brain alike are depleted of their energy in interests of this supreme act.

‘From the body she did not depart, because that cannot be except in death; the bodily powers alone departed, becoming united with Me through the affection of love. The memory is full of nothing but Me, the intellect, elevated, gazes upon the object of My Truth.’

‘The hand does not touch and the feet walk not, because the members are bound with the sentiment of Love.’

The ‘dark night of the soul’ is a name for the painful and negative state which normally intervenes between the Illuminative and the Unitive Life-no more.

The self in its first purgation has cleansed the mirror of perception; hence, in its illuminated life, has seen reality. In doing so it has transcended the normal perceptive powers of ‘natural’ man, immersed in the illusions of the sense. Now, it has got to BE reality: a very different thing. For this a new and more drastic purgation is needed-not of the organs of perception, but of the very shrine itself, the heart.

The self loses the power to Do; and learns to surrender its will to the operation of a larger Life, that it may Be.

‘At the end of such a long and cruel transition, says Lucie Christine, how much more the supple the soul feels in the Hand of God, how much more detached from all that is not God !’

The shadow of death and the pains and torments of hell are most acutely felt, and this comes from the sense of being abandoned by God. All this and more the soul feels now, for a terrible apprehension has come upon it that thus it will be forever. It has also the same sense of abandonment with respect to all creatures and that it is an object of contempt to all, especially to its friends.

Hence, its very contact with the spiritual world vanishes; and as regards all that matters, it does indeed seem to be dead.

Shall we fear this death, which is to produce in us the true divine life of grace.

There is a complete emotional lassitude: the disappearance of as all old ardours, now replaced by a callousness, a boredom, which the self detests but cannot overcome. It is also known as ‘aridity’.

He feel like some ignorant man who has lost all his learning and his works and of this misery there is born a fear of being lost.                                                    Ruysbroeck

“I have chosen suffering for my consolation, and will gladly bear these and all other torments in the name ofthe Saviour, for as long as it shall please His Majesty."

                                                                                          St Catherine of Sienna

The ‘Cloud of unknowing’ (author unknown), rolling up, seems to envelop the whole self.

There is stress and exasperation felt in this dark, this state of vague helplessness, by selves of an active and self-reliant type.

All these types of ‘darkness’, with their accompanying and overwhelming sensations of impotence and distress, are common in the lives of the mystics.

She is like a person suspended in mid-air, who can neither touch the earth, nor mount to heaven.

In the Dark Night the starved and tortured spirit learns through an anguish which is ‘itself an orison (a prayer)’ to accept lovelessness for the sake of the Love, Nothingness for the sake of All; dies without any sure promise of life, loses when it hardly hopes to find.

This is what the German mystics call the ‘upper school of true resignation’ or ‘suffering love’; the last test of heroic detachment, of manliness, of spiritual courage.

‘In order to raise the soul from imperfection, said the voice of God to St. Catherine of Sienna, in her dialogue, I withdraw Myself from her sentiment, depriving her of former consolations….which I do in order to humiliate her, and cause her to seek Me in truth, and to prove her in the light of faith, so that she may come to prudence. Then if she love Me without thought of self, and with lively faith and with hatred of her own sensuality, she rejoices in the time of trouble, deeming herself worthy of peace and quietness of mind. Now comes the second of three things of which I told thee, that is to say: how the soul arrives at perfection, and what she does when she is perfect. That is what she does. Though she perceives that I have withdrawn Myself, she does not, on that account look back; but perseveres with humility in her exercises, remaining barred in the house of self-knowledge, and continuing to dwell therein, awaits with lively faith the coming of the Holy Spirit, that is of Me, who am the Fire of Love…. This is what the soul does in order to rise from imperfection and arrive at perfection, that I withdraw from her, not by grace, but by sentiment. Once more do I leave her so that she may know her defects, so that feeling herself deprived of consolation and afflicted by pain, she may recognise her own weakness, and learn how incapable she is of stability and perseverance, thus cutting down to the very root of spiritual self-love: for this should be the end and purpose of all her self-knowledge, to rise above herself, mounting the throne of conscience, and not permitting the sentiment of imperfect love to turn again in its death-struggle, but with correction and reproof digging up the root of self-love with the knife of self-hatred and the love of virtue.

Such a sense of helplessness is really, the mystics say, a mark of progress.

It is the negative aspect of ‘deification’: in which the self, deprived of ‘perception, knowledge, will, work, self-seeking’-the I, the me, the mine-loses itself, denies itself, un-forms itself, drawing ‘ever nearer’ to the One, till ‘nothing is seen to be but a ground which rests upon itself-the ground of the soul, in which it has union with God.

‘Everywhere one Being, one Life’-this is the goal of mystic activity.

So Hilton says of the ‘naughted soul, ‘the less it thinketh that it loveth or seeth God, the nearer it nigheth for to perceive the gift of the blessed love.

Those who go on are great and strong spirits, who do not seek to know but are driven to be.

Rapid oscillations between joyous and a painful consciousness seem to occur.

(The game of love)

It is the last painful break with the life of illusion, the tearing away of the self from that World of becoming in which all its natural affections and desires are rooted, to which the intellect and the senses correspond; and the thrusting into the World of Being where at first, weak and blinded, it can but find a wilderness, a ‘dark.’ No transmutation without fire, say the alchemists: no cross, no crown, says the Christian.

In this upper school they teach the science of Perfect Self-abandonment;

That is to say, that a man is here taught to renounce himself so utterly that, in all those circumstances in which God is manifested, either by Himself or in His creatures, the man applies himself only to remaining calm and unmoved, renouncing so far as is possible all human frailty. Examine thyself inwardly and thou wilt see that thou hast still much self-will; thou wilt observe, that with all thy mortifications which thou hast inflicted on thyself, thou canst not yet endure external vexations. Thou art like a hare hiding in a bush, who is frightened by the whispering of the leaves. Thou also art frightened everyday by the griefs that come to thee: thou dost turn pale at the sight of those who speak against thee: when thou doest fear to succumb, thou takest flight; when thou oughtest to present thyself with simplicity, thou dost hide thyself. When they praise thee,thou art happy: when they blame thee, thou art sad. Truly is it very needful for thee that thou shouldst go to an Upper School.

The lower school of the holy spirit or the first mystic life:

After 22 years of constant mortification and intermittent illumination‘God showed him that all this severity and these penances were but a good beginning, that by these he had triumphed over the unruly sensual man: but that now he must exert himself in another manner if he desired to advance in the Way.’

                                                                          Suso who wrote ‘the book of truth’

The higher school of the holy spirit or second mystic life:

The lord said to Suso, amongst the innumerable pains which thou wilt have to support, I will tell thee three. The first is this. Hitherto it is you who has scourged thyself, with thine own hands: thou didst cease when it seemed good to thee, and thou hadst compassion on thyself. Now, I shall take from thee thyself, and cast thee without defence into the hands of strangers who shall scourge thee. Thou shalt see the ruin of thy reputation. Thou shalt be an object of contempt to blinded men; and thou shalt suffer more from this than the wounds made by the points of thy cross. When thou didst penances thou wert exalted and admired. Now thou shalt be abased and annihilated. The second pain is this: although thou didst inflict on thyself many cruel tortures, still by God’s grace there remained to thee a tender and loving disposition. It shall befall thee, that there where thou hadst thought to find a special and faithful love, thou shalt find nought but unfaithfulness, great sufferings and great griefs. Thy trials shall be so many that those men who have any love for thee shall suffer with thee by comparison. The third pain is this: hitherto thou has been but a child at the breast, a spoiled child. Thou hast been immersed in the divine sweetness like a fish in the sea. Now I shall withdraw all this. It is my will that thou shouldst be deprived of it, and that thou suffer from this privation; that thou shouldst be abandoned of God and of man, that thou shouldst be publicly persecuted by the friends of thine enemies. I will tell it thee in a word: all thou shall undertake, that might bring thee joy and consolation, shall come to nothing, and all that might make thee suffer and be vexatious to thee shall succeed.’

None can come to the sublime heights of the divinity, said the Eternal Wisdom to Suso in one of his visions, or taste its ineffable sweetness, if first they have not experienced the bitterness and lowliness of My humanity. The higher they climb without passing My humanity, the lower afterward shall be their fall. My humanity is the road which all must tread who would come to that which thou seeketh: my sufferings are the door by which all must come in.

Human pain is the price: the infinite joy peculiar to ‘ free souls’ is the reward.

                                                                                                             Piccarda

To the wise and intelligent, the world is a teacher; to others the world is hostile.

The unitive life or spiritual marriage or 4th degree of love

‘I live, yet not I but God in me’

When love has carried us above and beyond all things, above the light, into the divine dark.

Thus the unity is ever drawing to itself and inviting to itself everything that has been born of It, either by nature or grace.

All mystics agree that the stripping off of the I, the Me, the Mine, utter renouncement, or ‘self-naughting’-self-abandonment to the direction of the larger Will-is an imperative condition of the attainment of the unitive life.

It is the unifying principle; Life’s mightiest agent upon every plane.

Ormond ‘Foundations of knowledge.’

Love in its innermost motive is a unifying principle.

Not I, but Christ in me. ‘St. Paul’

Appendix :

We shall find that the great periods of mystical activity tend to correspond with great periods of artistic, material and intellectual civilization. As a rule, they come immediately after, and seem to complete such periods: those outbursts of vitality in which man makes fresh conquests over his universe producing, as their last stage, a type of heroic character which extends these victories to the spiritual sphere. When science, science politics, literature, and the arts-the domination of nature and the ordering of life-have risen to their height and produced their greater works, the mystic comes to the front; snatches the torch & carries it on. It is almost as if he were humanity’s finest flower; the product at which each great creative period of the race had aimed.

Each mystic, original though he be, yet owes much to the inherited acquirement of his ancestors.

Between the first century A.D. and the nineteenth, this curve exhibits three great waves of mystical activity ( 3rd, 14th & 17th Century) besides many minor fluctuations.

Unfortunately the great quietists were not great mystics. Hence their propaganda, in which the principle of passivity-divorced from, and opposed to, all spiritual action-was pressed to its logical conclusion, resulting in a doctrine fatal not only to all organised religion, but to the healthy development of the inner life.

***St Cathrine of genoa-failed marriage, depression, loneliness, wretchedness & four years upon the purgative path.

Ellina Von Crevelsheim-went silent for 7 yrs.

St. Teresa wrote ‘life.

Antoinette Bourignan

Augustine baker “holy wisdom”

Jacob Boehme, “the way to Christ”

History of saints

Philo-(20 B.-A.D. 40) jewish mystic

‘Odes of solomon’ & ‘Hymn of Jesus’ religious poetry

Clement of Alexandria (c.160-220)

Origen (c. 183-253)

Plotius (A.D. 205-270) great neo-platonic mystic

Porphyry (233-304)

St Angustine (354-430) wrote ‘confessions’ & seventh & eighth books?

***Dionysius the Areopagite (writing 475-525)

Proclus (412-c. 490) ‘pagan

St Mararius of Eqypt (c. 295-386)

John Cassian (c.350-?) wrote ‘dialogues’ on successive degrees of contemplative prayer

St Gregory the great (540-604)

John Scotus Erigena-irish ‘dionysian’

St. Romuald (c. 950-1027)

St. Peter Damian (1007-1072)

St. Bruno (1032-1101)

‘Meditations’ of St. Anselm (1033-1109)

***St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153) wrote tracts and epistles

St. Hildegarde of Bingen (1098-1179) Benedictine

Abbot Joachim of Flora (1132-1202)

***Richard of St. Victor (ob. c. 1173) ‘Benjamin Major’ & ‘Benjamin minor’

Hugh (1097-1141) abbey of St. Victor at Paris

Dante wrote about the degrees of Divine Love/stages of contemplation

St.Elizabeth of Schonau (1138-1165) Benedictine

Nun Gertrude (Abess 1251-1291)

St. Mechthild of Hackborn (ob. 1310)

Mechthild of Magdeburg (1212-1299) ‘The flowing light of the godhead’

St. Gertrude the great (1256-1311) ‘catholic visionary’

***St. Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) ‘catholic visionary’

St. Douceline (n. 1214)-woman mystic

John of Parma (ob. 1288)-Franciscan

John La Verna-Franciscan

Jocopone Da Todi (1228-1306) wrote poems

***Blessed Angela of Foligno-(1248-1309)-Franciscan

Ubertino Da Casale

St Fracoiso De Sales

***St. Bonaventura-(1221-1274) Franciscan

***St.Thomas Aquinas-(1226-1274) Dominican

Sufi’s

Rabi’a (717-801) (the Moslem St.Teresa)

Al Hallaj (ob.922)

Al Ghazzali (1058-1111) wrote ‘Confessions’

Attar (c.1140-1234)

Sadi (1184-1263)

Saintly Jalalu’d Din (1207-1273)

Hafiz (c.1300-1388)

Jami (1414-1492)

Ramon Lull (ob.1315)

Dante (1265-1321) wrote ‘Paradiso’

“The mirror of simple souls” anonymous writer

‘Theologia Germanica’ or book of perfect life loved by Luther

‘Theologia Mystica’

Meister Eckhart (1260-1327) Dominican

***John Tauler (c.1300-1361) Catholic fryer

***Henry Suso (c.1295-1365) Dominican-Catholic type

Margaret Ebner (1291-1351) nun, & her sister Christina

Henry of Nordlingen

Nicolas of Basle

Rulman Mersin (c.1310-1382) wrote ‘the book of nine rocks’

***Blessed John Ruysbroeck (1293-1381) one of the greatest mystics the world has yet known.

Gerard Groot (1340-1384)

***Henry De Mande (1360-1415)

Gerlac peterson (1378-1411) wrote ‘Fiery soliloquy with god’

Thomas a’ Kempis (1380-1471)

Henry de Herp or Haphius (ob.1477)

Nicolas of Cusa (1401-1464)

***Denis the Carthusian (1402-1471)

St.Aldred wrote meditations, abbot

Margery Kempe (c.1290)

***Richard Rolle of Hampole (c1300-1349) oxford educated

Walter Hilton (ob.1396) wrote ‘The scale of perfection’

Julian of Norwich (1343->1413) wrote ‘revelations of love’

St Bridget of Swedenor Birgitta (1303-1373)

***St Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) wrote ‘Divine Diologue’

Gerson (1365-1429)

St Colette of Corbie (1381-1447)

St Bernardino of Siena (1380-1444)

St Catherine of Bologna (1413-1463)

St Joan of Arc (1412-1431)

St Lydwine of Schiedam (1380-1432)

*** St Catherine of Genoa (1447-1431)

Venerable Battista Vernazza (1497-1587)

Osanna Andreasi of Mantua (1449-1505)

Columba Rieti (c.1430-1501)

Lucia of Narni

Blosius (1506-1565) Benedictine abbot

Francisco De Osuna (ob.c. 1540) Franciscan

St Peter of Alcantara (1499-1562) Franciscan

St Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556)

St Teresa (1515-1582) & her disciple

***St John of the cross (1542-1591)

‘Spiritual exercises’ & ‘interior castle’ & ‘dark night of the soul’

St Catherine Dei Ricci (1522-1590)

St Maria Maddelena Dei Pazzi (1566-1607)

St Rosa of Lima (1586-1617)

*** Jacob Boehme (1575-1624)

George Fox ( 1624-1690)-Quaker founder

Issac Penington (1616-1679)

John Woolman (1720-1772)

Gertrude More (1606-1633)

***Venerable Augustine Baker (1575-1641)

Thomas Vaughan

Henry Vaughan (1622-1652)

Henry More (1614-1687)

John Smith (1618-1652)

Benjamin Whichcote (1609-1683)

Peter Sterry (c. 1614-1672)

John Norris (1657-1711)

Thomas Tranherne (1637-1674)

Bishop Hall (1574-1656)

Dr. Pordage (1608-1698) The extrodinary ‘Philadelphians’

Jane Lead (1623-1704) The extrodinary ‘Philadelphians’

Benedict Canfield (1520-1611)

Madame Acarie (1566-1618)

Pierre De berulle (1575-1629)

St Jeanne Francoise De Chantal (1572-1641)

St Francois De Sales (1567-1622)

Marie De Incarnation (1599-1672)

Brother Lawrence (1611-1691)

Pascal (1623-1662)

Constantine Barbancon (1581-1632)

John Evangelist of Barluke (1588-1635)

Antoinette Bourignan (1616-1680)

Miguel de Molinos (1640-1697)

Madame Guyon (1648-1717)

J.P. de Caussade-Jesuit

Malaval wrote ‘Theologie Mystique’

Peter Poiret (1646-1719) Protestant Pastor wrote ‘Bibilotheca Mysticorum’-memorial of many lost works on mysticism.

John Gichtel (1638-1710)

Dionysius Andreas Freher

William Law (1686-1761)

Eckartshausen (1752-1803) Mystical Christianity

Saint-Martin (1752-1803)

William Blake (1757-1827) learnt from swedenborg/Boehme

The book of divine consolations of the blessed angela of foligno 1908

The confessions by Saint Augustine of hippo 1876

Suggestions on the method of meditation 1904 saint Bernard of clairvaux

The three principles of the divine essence, The way of Christ, Confessions,

Forty questions of the soul, six theosophical points, The signatures of all things,

Mysterium magnum, The epistles of JB, treatises of JB, Jacob Boehme

The Treatise on purgatory, saint Catherine of genoa

The divine dialogue of st Catherine of siena

The cell of self-knowledge, Dante and the mystics or Dantes ten heavens, Edmund

gardner

The works of dionysius the areopagate by rev. J parker

God is love most pure, my prayer and my contemplation, Eckartshausen, c. von

The writings of saint fransis of assisi1906

The flame of living love, complete works,1912 st john of the cross

Revelations of divine love, julian of Norwich

The form of perfect living by Richard rolle

Adorment of spiritual marriage byjohn of ruysbroeck

Little book of eternal wisdom, 1910 by suso

The history and life of JT, The inner way, 36 sermons by tauler

The way of perfection, The interior castle by saint teresa

Theologia germanica 1907 london

The imitation of Christ, thomas a kempis

Holy wisdom by Ven. Augustine baker 1908 london

*** indicates hard-core spiritual dudes