and God’s eye are one and the same—one in seeing, one in knowing, and one in loving.”

Perhaps the best way to understand the introvertive mystical experience is by means of an analogy drawn from the modern world. Everyday perception is like seeing a succession of changing images projected on a blank screen, as with a movie. Normally, no one sees the blank screen on which all those images are projected. What the mystic does is free his mind of the images so that he experiences the blank screen, which is awareness itself, in all its simplicity—as it always is, was, and will be (although no such words of past and future can apply to it). Eckhart called this experience “isness,” in the sense that it is beyond “myness.” It is neither an objective nor a subjective experience; it is simply beyond such categories, and it is this that makes is so difficult for the rational mind to comprehend and for the mystic to describe. When the mystic does describe it, he is in effect capturing only his memory of it, since in the timeless moment in which it took place, “he” was not present, the individual self being wholly immersed in a state of undifferentiated unity, rest, and stillness.

If one had to identify a core mystical experience, common to all times and cultures, it would have to be, as Stace argues, the introvertive experience. The description of the experience of consciousness devoid of an object is consistently found in the spiritual writings of the East as well as the West. The Mandukya Upanishad, one of the oldest texts in the Hindu tradition, for example, says of reality:

It is not outer awareness,
It is not inner awareness,
Nor is it a suspension of awareness.
It is not knowing,
It is not unknowing,
Nor is it knowingness itself.
It can neither be seen nor understood,
It cannot be given boundaries.
It is ineffable and beyond thought.
It is indefinable.
It is known only through becoming it.

It would be hard to find a clearer description of the via negativa than this, and there is nothing in this quotation that Eckhart would have objected to. At this level of experience, differences between East and West tend to arise only when the mystic interprets his experience in the light of the doctrines of his own religious tradition. For the Hindu, the Mundakya Upanishad describes the essential Self that is identical by its very nature with Brahman, the universal consciousness.

The Christian mystic, on the other hand, is wary of how he describes this “unknowing” union of the soul with God. This is because in orthodox Christian doctrine, such “deification” is attained only through the grace of God, not by virtue of the intrinsic nature of the individual self, and the creature always retains its distinct identity even as it experiences its union with the divine. There is a certain tension between the theological position that mystics such as Eckhart and Ruusbroec felt the need to uphold and the introvertive experience itself, in which all distinctions of creature and creator, individual and universal, dissolve in the silent abyss of the divine ground.

Stace’s second category, “extrovertive” mystical experience, occurs when the mystic perceives the underlying unity of all things in the multiplicity of the world of nature. This is often accompanied by a perception of glorification, in which everything is seen in the light of the divine. Evelyn Underhill, in her classic study Mysticism, described this as “the illuminated vision of the world.” It is found in mystics such as Boehme and in mystically inclined poets such as Wordsworth, Blake, and Traherne. It is less common in the medieval mystics, who for the most part looked inward rather than outward.

But Eckhart, perhaps the most profound of all the medieval mystics, wrote numerous passages that allude in a subtle way to this extrovertive experience of seeing God in all things. Often his gnomic, paradoxical utterances must be unpacked before they yield his meaning. In his sermon on the passage in the Book of Acts, “Paul rose from the ground and with open eyes saw nothing” (as translated by Walshe), Eckhart gives a characteristic meaning to the word “nothing,” as referring to God, for God is “no-thing,” existing in the abyss beyond all “somethings.” So in Eckhart’s exegesis of the passage, when Paul got up he saw “nothing but God”; “in all things he saw nothing but God,” and when he saw God, “he saw all things as nothing.” Eckhart’s play on words makes his meaning clear: when a person is filled with God, like the apostle Paul, everywhere he looks, even at the meanest thing in creation, he sees God, for God is the nothing that underlies and is present within all the multiplicity of created “things.”

For a less intellectual, more practical (and devotional) example of the extrovertive experience, one might turn to St. Francis of Assisi (1182– 1226), whose sense of union with all things was so refined that he preached to the birds, soothed captured turtledoves, and befriended pheasants, among other things. Underhill describes the reality that St. Francis lived not as an idea but as a direct experience: “every living creature was veritably and actually a ‘theophany or appearance of God’ . . . [he was] acutely conscious that he shared with these brothers and sisters of his the great and lovely life of the All.” This kinship with all creatures, which is the practical fruit of mystical experience, is clear also in St. Francis’s well-known “The Canticle of Brother Sun,” in which he addresses the sun as “Sir Brother Sun” and the moon as “Sister Moon,” as well as addressing “Brother Water” and “Brother Fire.”

Given all these examples of introvertive and extrovertive mysticism, the question remains of the extent to which the mystical experience might be objectively evaluated. Does the mystic have genuine insight into the nature of reality? Does his experience add to our knowledge of human consciousness, or is it unverifiable in any meaningful sense? As William James pointed out, for the mystic, the experience by its very nature conveys a sense of truth. When the introvertive mystic sinks into a state of eternal peace and stillness, without boundaries of any kind, he finds it so immensely satisfying, so compelling, that he believes it to be self-evidently an experience of the ultimate truth, since it stands in such stark contrast to the transient, restless nature of everything that exists in the realm of time and space.

But in the scientific age in which we live, subjective claims of truth count for little. The introvertive mystical experience, in which consciousness remains awake but with no object of experience, falls outside the realm of what contemporary neuroscience, cognitive science, or rationalist philosophy can explain. This leaves the mystic in the position of a person trying to explain the taste of strawberries to someone who has never tasted one (and who also may doubt that such a thing as a strawberry really exists). No amount of description is going to help. The mystic says: taste for yourself, and only then will you know.

Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on the Medieval Mystics, in Literary Movements for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.

For sith in the first biginnyng of holy chirche in the tyme of persecucion, dyverse soules and many weren so merveylously touchid in sodeynte of grace that sodenly, withoutyn menes of other werkes comyng before, thei kasten here instrumentes, men of craftes, of here hondes, children here tables in the scole, and ronnen withoutyn ransakyng of reson to the martirdom with seintes: whi schul men not trowe now, in the tyme of pees, that God may, kan and wile and doth—ye! touche diverse soules as sodenly with the grace of contemplacion?

(The Book of Privy Counselling)

The later Middle Ages in England were indeed to prove such an age of contemplative saints, and ‘the medieval English mystics’ are often now grouped together. Viewed with one kind of hindsight, something new stirs with the writings of Richard Rolle (d. 1349), broadens and gathers the later fourteenth century—with Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich, and the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing—and also includes a corpus of translations into English of other mystical writings that point to contemporary interest in contemplation. Like most retrospects on ‘movements’ or ‘schools’ of writers, such a view simplifies both the continuities with earlier traditions and between the writers themselves. Hindsight differently focussed might emphasize the substantial earlier literature on contemplation available in England, or the tradition of meditations in the vernacular.Independent and original in their time the English mystics of the Middle Ages nonetheless remain. On the most demanding of subjects they write in their own tongue at a new level of intensity and complexity in English prose, while the surviving translations of continental mystics show no significant influence on the most creative English mystical writers. Their subject must be demanding, for it is nothing less than the way to God through love, and their aim is to give their reader direction, and signposting a schematic, progressive ascent. Mere knowledge or learning for its own sake is of no avail, and they dismiss it. The way to perfection described by the English mystics stands open—although the demandingness of contemplation will preclude all but the committed—and witnesses to the appeal of the inner life to a growing section of contemporary men and women readers, whether in solitary, monastic or secular life.

It is towards the cultivation and extension of that inward life that the English mystics seek to express their own understanding of the art of mystical loving. Rolle or Hilton achieved a much wider readership than the Cloud-author or Julian, and their approaches are as distinctive as their styles. A text that advises ‘First gnawe on the nakid blinde felyng of thin owne being’ (The Book of Privy Counselling) is working with different aims and assumptions from one that declares ‘In this felynge myne undyrstandynge was lyftyd uppe into heven, and thare I sawe thre hevens. . .’ (Revelations of Divine Love) Yet there are signs of interchangebetween mystics, of reading and commenting on the experiences and writings of others. Most vivid of interactions between the English mystics is Margery Kempe’s memory of her visit to consult Julian of Norwich, and she reports the anchoress as having a contemporary reputation as an expert in discerning truth and deception in revelations, locutions, ‘sweetness and devotion.’ Margery has evidently been affected by Rolle’s work, and it is his unforgettable example and pervasive influence on subsequent perceptions of contemplative experience in medieval England that prompt some of the intertextuality between the English mystics. Coming in his wake, such later English advisers on contemplation as Hilton or the Cloud-author are often writing, albeit implicitly, ‘against’ Rolle, at least in the sense that for them some of Rolle’s work prompted reservations and qualifications (although probably not such late work as The Form of Living). One surviving ‘Defence’ of Rolle by Thomas Bassett, against the now-lost criticisms of a Carthusian detractor, insists that God does reveal his secrets to the humble and simple of heart, and seeks to counter the charges that Rolle made men judges of themselves and that more have been led astray than have profited by his writings.

Neither the Cloud-author nor Hilton refers directly to Rolle, or denies the experiences to which he lays claim. Yet both are recurrently concerned to offset any spiritually undesirable influence of their predecessor. As Rolle memorably described it—especially in Incendium Amoris—his own experience might seem too easily accessible: its sensory qualities could encourage the impressionable to mistake merely physical sensations for mystical experience. The Cloud-author apparently has Rolle’s followers in mind when advising caption about ‘counfortes, sounes, & gladnes, & swetnes,’ or when characterizing would-be contemplatives who feel a physical sensation of heat in their breasts ‘& zit, parauenture, þei wene it be þe fiir of loue,’ concluding sharply: ‘For I telle þee trewly bat be deuil haþ his contemplatyues, as God haþ his.’ Hilton gives a similarly strong warning on the fire of love misconceived bodily rather than spiritually (The Scale of Perfection); he also warns against ‘felyng in þe bodily wittes,’ whether ‘in sownyng of þe ere, or saueryng in þe mouth, or smellyng at þe nese, or elles any felable hete as it wer fyr, glouand and warmand þe brest,’ because such is not true contemplation and a comparable warning occurs in his Epistle on the Mixed Life. In The Scale Hilton also seeks to allay the recipient’s disquiet, caused by what sounds like a reading of Rolle on devotion to the Holy Name, and Of Angel’s Song sets Rolle’s teachings on the hearing of heavenly melody in a proper context for Hilton’s correspondent.

Near the close of Angels’ Song Hilton’s warning against the ‘naked mynde’ might be read as a comment on the Cloud-author’s teachings, and the works of these two contemporary Midlands writers on contemplation do point to some interchange and mutual criticism, some learning from each other. At three points The Cloud acknowledges and refers its reader to ‘another man’s work,’ in each case possibly referring to Book I of The Scale. In recommending ‘Redyng, þinkyng & Preiing,’ The Cloud declares: ‘Of þeese þre þou schalt fynde wretyn in anoþer book of anoþer mans werk moche betyr þen I can telle þee,’ perhaps referring to Hilton’s account in The Scale. On the vexed question of whether ‘counfortes and sounes and swetnes’ be good or evil, The Cloud comments: ‘þou mayst fynde it wretyn in anoþer place of anoþer mans werk a þonsandfolde betir þan I kan sey or write,’ which could well refer to Hilton’s discussion in Scale. When the Cloud-author expresses reservation about ‘wher anoþer wolde bid þee gader þi miztes & þi wittes holiche wiþ-inne þi-self, & worschip God þere’—although he pays tribute to this other teacher: ‘þof al he sey ful wel & ful trewly, ze! and no man trewlier & he be wel conseiuid’—he may be criticizing such contexts as Hilton’s advice to ‘drawe in þi thoztes’ or ‘Geder þen þi hert togeder.’ Indeed, it may be that while the Cloud-author responds to Book I of The Scale, Hilton in Book II sometimes writes with the Cloud-author in mind. His warning against the misunderstanding of spiritual language in material and spatial terms may reflect Hilton’s absorption of The Cloud’s insistent teachings on this point. Yet Hilton’s very different application of the idea of the ‘lighty mirknes’ shows his distinctive independence, while the Christocentric emphases of Book II of The Scale may express implicitly Hilton’s critique of the via negativa in The Cloud and his concern to redress the balance. In his Privy Counselling the Cloud-author may himself be seeking to respond to such a criticism, to offset his earlier work’s emphasis on leaving behind meditation on the manhood and Passion of Christ, although in The Cloud he could not have been more succinct. In the preface to The Mirrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ, his early fifteenth-century translation of the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi, Nicholas Love, prior of the Mount Grace Charterhouse, notes that to ‘symple soules . . . contemplacion of þe monhede of cryste is more likyng, more spedefull & more sykere þan is hyze contemplacion of þe godhed,’ and the English mystics make such a distinction in pursuing their own way to ‘hyze contemplacion.’

When early in Privy Counselling the author dismisses the criticisms that ‘I here sum men sey’— that ‘my writyng to thee and to other is so harde and so heigh. . .’—he brings together the English mystics’ alertness to their works’ reception and a mode of intimate address, apparently directed in the first instance to a personally known recipient, which is characteristic of many of their writings. In Mixed Life Hilton is moved in part to write to his addressee ‘for tendre affeccioun of love whiche thou haste to me.’ The Cloud was initially written (as is made clear) for the direction of a particular twenty-four year old disciple, although the manner of address in the prologue (‘whatsoever thou be that this book schalt have in possession’) shows an awareness that what was written for one known individual will come to be seen and used by a wider unknown readership. The opening of Privy Counselling confronts this matter directly: the author prefers to write what he thinks ‘moste speedful’ to his particular ‘goostly frende’ rather than to write generally for a general audience, trusting that among others who may read his work those similarly disposed may find something rewarding to them. Even in the epistles that Rolle writes as if to known women recipients (‘Til the I write specialy’; ‘Loo, Margarete’) there is provision for ‘thou, or another that redes this,’ as in the mention of alternatives (‘or if thou be na mayden’). In the longer, presumably later version of her Revelations Julian addresses herself more emphatically and confidently in the first person plural to her ‘even- Cristen’; in Book II of The Scale Hilton apparently envisages a wider audience than the anchoress to whom Book I is ostensibly written, although even here Hilton comments: ‘Thou schalt be saufe as anker incluse, and noght only thou bot all Cristen soules.’ The mystics’ counselling directed to particular cases becomes more widely available without losing the immediacy of its address. Mixed Life sets out Hilton’s interpretation of such a ‘mixed’ life for the benefit of a known individual in specific circumstances, yet the appeal of his theme is such that the epistle is copied unchanged in itself but with an emended opening address to a more general audience.

In one manuscript of The Scale of Perfection is written the message: ‘My hert is ful heuy to send zow ois boke for I supposid þat ze suld hafe comen home þat we myght hafe comend togedir þer of’ (Trinity College, Dublin). The English mystics’ writings are often composed as if to inscribe such an intimate interchange, in the manner of a personal letter that stands in for a confidential conversation, and so represents parts of a larger implied dialogue between author and recipient. ‘A thousand mile woldest thou renne to comoun mouthly with one that thou wist that verrely felt it,’ and as an opening device to chapters, sections or whole works the mystics recurrently write as if responding to a request for guidance and direction. Of Angels’ Song begins in this way, as does the ‘Pilgrimage to Jerusalem’ chapter of The Scale, while another chapter opens as if Hilton is reacting to his recipient’s request to moderate the difficulty and adjust the level of his writing. That both the interpolation in this same chapter on the Holy Name and the later interpolation on charity begin with the similar ‘But now, seist thou . . .’ and ‘But now seist þou . . .?’ may indicate that such passages— evidently authentic, although absent from some manuscripts—represent Hilton’s later responses to questions posed by some readers of his work. Such anticipations of a reader’s possible questions, doubts and uncertainties are a characteristic feature of the implied dialogue that structures many of the mystics’ writings. Hilton makes adroit use of the device, and it occurs in Rolle’s epistles. Boldest use of such imagined questions from a reader is made by the author of The Cloud, not least when a question is forestalled only for the speaker to admit that it is unanswerable: ‘But now thou askest me and seiest: “How schal I think on himself, and what is hee?” And to this I cannot answere thee bot thus: “I wote never!”’ It is the Cloud-author whose mode of address to his contemplative pupil may recall that of a seasoned coach, coaxing a pace from an athlete under training: ‘Lette not therfore, bot travayle therin tyl thou fele lyst.’ It is also the Cloud-author who in Privy Counselling shrewdly confronts the issue of authorial control implicit in such one-sided ‘dialogues’: ‘Lo! here maist thou see that I coveite sovereinte of thee. And trewly so I do, and I wol have it!’

Why does a mystic write? To praise God? To make a record of experience, as a witness? To instruct others, as a guide? It is the impetus to offer direction, to share knowledge, that constitutes one unifying feature in theme and form among the English medieval mystics. To read them is to be in the presence of an experienced guide to a process that implies a progression or an ascent (‘I wyll that thou be ay clymbandetyll Jhesu-warde’). No wonder that in De Utilitate, his Latin letter to Adam Horsley, Hilton exclaims: ‘If not even the least of the arts can be learned without some teacher and instructor, how much more difficult it is to acquire the Art of Arts, the perfect service of God in the spiritual life, without a guide?’ and he criticizes those so overconfident as ‘to set out on the way of the spiritual life without a director or capable guide, whether it be a man or a book . . .’ A book in place of a man: the medieval mystics aim to be that guide to the Art of Arts, although the limits of books are acknowledged (‘For a soule þat is clene sterid bi grace to vse of þis werkynge may see more in an hour of swilk gostly mater þan myzt be writen in a grete book,’ Scale). The mystics offer guidebooks, maps and manuals, and readers are urged to read them over not once but repeatedly. They represent instructions for use, for an art of loving to be put into practice beyond the process of reading and not to be confused with it. Indeed, The Cloud specifically warns against possibly mistaking the pleasures of the text for contemplative vocation: ‘Alle þoo þat redyn or heren þe mater of þis book be red or spokin, & in þis redyng or hering þink it good & likyng þing, ben neuer þe raþer clepid of God to worche in þis werk, only for þis likyng steryng þat þei fele in þe tyme of þis redyng.’ Any frisson of interest quickened by the literary effectiveness of the writing as art is not to be confounded with the soul’s movement towards contemplation. Attainment lies over the horizon: it can rarely be more than adumbrated within the text and—always excepting Rolle—the English mystics are not generally concerned to strain after descriptive effects. Dame Julian, whose career begins in vision, leaves a text in which description is framed and transmuted by contemplation, while both Hilton and the author of The Cloud cast themselves as still travelling towards a goal, and so having limited personal experience from which to describe what they nonetheless assist their readers towards.

‘If thou aske what contemplacioun is, it is hard for to telle or utterly diffine,’ as one English version of Rolle admits, although such definition is the concern of almost every piece in this book. All description falls short—‘For al that is spokyn of it is not it, bot of it,’ as Privy Counselling notes—but the higher contemplation is defined in The Scale as illumination:

for to se by vnderstondyng sothfastnes whilk is God and also gostly thynges with a soft swete brennand loue in hym, so perfitely þat by rauyschyng of þis loue þe soule is oned for þe tyme and conformed to þe ymage of þe Trinite. þe biginnyng of þis contemplacioun may be feled in þis lyfe, bot þe fulhed of it is keped in þe blis of heuen.

Nor is contemplative accomplishment to be won by study or booklearning, and may be hindered. In short, ‘oure soule, bi vertewe of this reformyng grace, is mad sufficient at the fulle to comprehende al him by love, the whiche is incomprehensible to alle create knowable might’ (Cloud). One other thing is clear: fulfilment may only be yearningly awaited and prepared for, never claimed: ‘The swetnesse of contemplacioun . . . cometh not thoruh merite ne diserte of man, but oonly of the free yifte of God’ (Mendynge).

Source: Barry Windeatt, “Introduction,” in English Mystics of the Middle Ages, edited by Barry Windeatt, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 1–14.