Historian and theologian Bernard McGinn is one of the most prolific scholars of, and certainly among this century’s foremost authorities on, Christian mysticism. His latest contribution, Modern Mystics: An Introduction, though not included in his nine-volume series The Presence of God, which covers the history of mysticism from its origins through the seventeenth century, extends this scholarship from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries (1858–1968). According to McGinn, Modern Mystics almost did not happen due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which severely limited his opportunity for research. Thus, he chose a to draw upon sources he “had mostly on hand” (vii).
This explains, at least in part, the interesting collection of figures included in Modern Mystics, as well as the omission of other possible choices. Still, McGinn’s personal library must be quite impressive. McGinn had intended to include a greater number of mystics, but, as he began writing, realized that short essays could not do them justice, so he elected to focus in a more detailed manner on ten significant individuals. Sensitive to history’s tendency to neglect the writings of women, McGinn’s contribution includes five women mystics, some more familiar to the general reader than others: Therese of Lisieux, Elizabeth of the Trinity, Edith Stein, Simone Weil, and Etty Hillesum.
Although at first glance this cluster of women may seem a curious choice by McGinn, given that three were Carmelite nuns and three were Jewish by birth. Edith Stein, who was born Jewish, became a Carmelite after converting to Catholicism, thereby providing a connecting point between the two groups of women. This hardly represents the diversity of women mystics during the time period McGinn covers. However, McGinn’s inclusion of these women serves his thematic movement. Among the characteristics he identifies as special to modern mysticism is what he calls “crossing traditions” or “spiritual hybridity,” a way in which one not only learns from other religions or traditions, but in some way comes “to live within other traditions” (23, emphasis in original). “Crossing traditions/spiritual hybridity” refers not only to Edith Stein’s conversion from Judaism to Carmelite Catholic Christianity but also to Simone Weil’s embrace of Catholicism and exploration of other religions. Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jewish mystic who, like Edith Stein, died as a victim of the Holocaust, completes this thematic movement in his cluster of women mystics. McGinn notes that Hillesum “sits on the margins of the religious traditions of Judaism and Christianity.” By the end of her life, although not identifying with any particular religious tradition, Hillesum was “the very definition of a nondenominational mystic” (273).
The theme of crossing traditions/spiritual hybridity runs through the male mystics he includes in his book as well: Charles de Foucauld, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Dag Hammarskjöld, Henri Le Saux (Swami Abhishiktānanda), and Thomas Merton. By marrying science and theology in his mystical view of the Cosmic Christ, Teilhard de Chardin crosses traditions, thus creating a kind of spiritual hybridity. Henri Le Saux integrates Christianity with Hindu advaitic experience, and Thomas Merton puts Christianity in dialogue with Zen Buddhism. Merton, as Simone Weil does, also integrates social activism with mystical experience. Although McGinn’s expertise lies primarily within the realm of Christian mysticism, in Modern Mystics he fittingly pays attention to the interreligious and interdisciplinary dimensions of spirituality that saturate the contemporary sensibility.
McGinn highlights other themes characteristic of modern mysticism, with the qualification that in some ways these themes are as old as Christianity itself; they include action and contemplation (lived out in the world as social activism), suffering, the return of the apophatic way, and most poignantly, marginality of the mystic themself. “Mystics,” McGinn reflects, “insofar as they are seeking a deeper awareness of God in their lives, have always been marginal in the sense that most members of society disregard, even when they do not reject, their fundamental commitment to a different, ‘atopic’ life” (24). On the other hand, McGinn argues that twentieth-century mysticism breaks from the mysticism of prior centuries in bearing a more holistic perspective, that is, one that turns from the denial of the physical to an embrace of what is incarnational, although he acknowledges that a close reading of a number of mystics throughout history shows they had “a profound sense” of the holistic path to God (21). Indeed, Thomas Merton, whose own mysticism is deeply influenced by such mystics, writes that one of the needs for a “revival of Christian consciousness today” is the “integral experience of the self on all its level, bodily, as well as imaginative, emotional, intellectual, spiritual” (321).
Despite the limitations of research caused by the pandemic, McGinn’s Modern Mystics: An Introduction is as rich and engaging as any of his earlier works and is accessible across a range of audiences. Typical of McGinn’s writings, Modern Mystics is a well-grounded scholarly work useful for academic research. Additionally, McGinn’s mastery of the pen allows college students in theology courses as well as motivated readers with a general understanding of Christianity who desire to expand their understanding of mysticism to enjoy this book. Hopefully, McGinn will grace us with a follow-up volume that addresses the other great mystics whom he had originally intended to include.
