Quick Answer
This is the standard history of Christian mysticism, and the first volume is where the definitions get set. McGinn refuses both union and experience as the defining terms, proposing instead the consciousness of God's immediate presence, and then works through the sources from the Jewish and Greek background to Gregory the Great. It is long, it is scholarly, and the appendix surveying theories of mysticism is worth the price of the book by itself.
Key Takeaways
- Presence, not union. The definitional move that opens the whole tradition up.
- Consciousness, not experience, because experience imports modern assumptions.
- The appendix is the best short survey of theories of mysticism in print.
- Volume one of many. A lifetime project, and this is the foundation.
- Historian first, believer second, and the line is held.
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What This Book Is
The Foundations of Mysticism was published in 1991 as the first volume of a series titled The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism.
It runs to nearly five hundred pages including apparatus, and it covers from the Jewish and Greek antecedents through the patristic period, ending around the year 600 with Gregory the Great.
The series has continued for three decades, volume by volume, and has become the reference work on its subject in English. Anyone writing academically about a Christian mystic now cites McGinn.
What makes the first volume distinct from the rest is that the definitional work happens here. The later volumes apply a framework; this one builds it, which is why it is the volume to read even if you care mainly about later periods.
The scope word matters. Western Christian, which excludes the Eastern churches and their considerable mystical literature. McGinn says so plainly and the omission is real. Readers wanting Orthodox material need a different book.
Who Bernard McGinn Is
McGinn was born in 1937, trained as a priest, studied at the Gregorian University in Rome, and left the priesthood before taking up an academic career.
He spent most of his working life at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he taught historical theology and the history of Christianity for decades.
His work before this series was on apocalyptic thought and on the twelfth century, and he has written extensively on Meister Eckhart, who occupies a later volume and is the figure he seems most drawn to.
He remains a practising Catholic, which he does not conceal and which matters less than a reader might expect, because the historical discipline he maintains is consistent and visible.
The Definition
The book's central intellectual act, and everything else follows from it.
McGinn defines the mystical element in Christianity as that part of its belief and practice which concerns the preparation for, the consciousness of, and the reaction to what can be described as the immediate or direct presence of God.
Three features of this deserve attention.
It names an element within Christianity rather than a separate thing. There is no mysticism standing apart from the religion; there is a dimension of the religion.
It includes preparation and reaction, not merely the central moment. What a person does beforehand and what follows afterwards are part of the subject, which brings ascetic practice, liturgy and communal life inside the boundary.
And it turns on presence rather than on any particular kind of state.
Why Not Union
The first refusal, and it opens up material that a union-based definition excludes.
Most popular accounts define mysticism by union: the mystic is someone who has achieved oneness with God, and the tradition is the record of such achievements.
McGinn's objection is that the sources do not support it. A great many figures universally regarded as mystics never describe union, or explicitly deny that it is possible, or use quite different language for what they are describing.
The vocabulary in the texts is various: vision, contemplation, birth of the Word in the soul, the wound of love, seeing in a mirror, the dark night. Union is one term among many and is not the most common.
Presence covers all of them. Something is directly present, in a way that differs from ordinary awareness of God through creatures or through doctrine, and how that presence is described varies with the writer and the period.
Why Not Experience
The second refusal, and it is the sharper of the two.
Experience in modern usage means a private inner event, felt by an individual, with a distinctive quality that could be described if one had the words.
McGinn argues this framing is anachronistic. It descends from a specific modern development, running through William James and the psychology of religion, in which mysticism was reconstructed as a category of exceptional private states.
The medieval writers were not describing private states in this sense. They were writing within a communal, liturgical and scriptural setting, and what they report is embedded in that setting rather than extracted from it.
Consciousness is his replacement term. It is broader, covers awareness that is not episodic, and does not import the assumption that what matters is a felt event.
The refusal of experience has consequences that reach well outside Christian history. Almost all popular writing about mysticism assumes that the subject is a kind of state, and that comparing traditions means comparing states. McGinn's position implies that this framing was constructed recently, for reasons of its own, and that the sources it is applied to were doing something else. If he is right, a great deal of comparative work about the mystical experience has been comparing an artefact of nineteenth-century psychology across traditions that did not have it.
The Jewish Background
McGinn begins before Christianity, and the ordering is an argument in itself.
The Hebrew scriptures supply the fundamental material: the theophanies, Moses at the burning bush and on the mountain, the prophetic visions, the Song of Songs which becomes the most commented text in the whole subsequent tradition.
Second temple and apocalyptic literature supplies the visionary ascent: journeys through the heavens, throne visions, the seer taken up and shown things.
Philo of Alexandria supplies the method. Writing in Greek in the first century, he read the scriptures allegorically using Platonic categories, and the technique he developed for finding spiritual meaning in narrative text passed directly into Christian hands.
McGinn is careful about continuity claims and clear that the raw material of Christian mysticism was substantially Jewish, whatever the Greek framing that came later.
The Greek Background
The other inheritance, and the one that supplied the vocabulary.
Plato provided the structure: a distinction between the sensible and the intelligible, an ascent from one to the other, and the possibility of contemplating what is unchanging.
Plotinus provided the intensity. The Enneads describe the soul's return to the One in language of stripping away, of the flight of the alone to the Alone, and this became the deep grammar of the Christian tradition even where it was resisted.
McGinn handles the influence question carefully. The Christian writers were not Platonists who added Christ; they were readers of scripture who found in Platonic vocabulary a way to articulate what they took the scriptures to be saying.
Whether that articulation distorted what it expressed is the perennial argument about the whole tradition, and it recurs in every generation.
Origen
The turning point of the volume, and McGinn treats him as the founder.
Origen, working in Alexandria in the third century, produced the first Christian mystical theology properly so called, and did it largely through biblical commentary rather than through systematic treatise.
His commentary on the Song of Songs established the reading that dominated for a thousand years: the erotic poem as an account of the soul's relation to God, with the language of desire and absence and searching taken as precise rather than decorative.
He developed the doctrine of the spiritual senses, that the soul has capacities analogous to sight, hearing and touch, by which it perceives what the body cannot.
And he supplied the ascent structure, moving from purification through illumination to union, which becomes the standard scheme of the entire tradition.
McGinn notes the irony that Origen was later condemned on several points, and that the tradition he founded continued to use his framework while distancing itself from his name.
The Desert
The practical tradition, and the corrective to reading this material as pure theory.
The monastic movement of the fourth century, in the Egyptian and Syrian deserts, produced a body of teaching concerned with what to actually do: how to pray, how to handle distraction, how to deal with the thoughts that arise in solitude.
Evagrius Ponticus systematised it, producing an analysis of the eight principal thoughts that became the ancestor of the seven deadly sins, and a doctrine of pure prayer in which the mind is free of images.
Cassian carried the material west, adapting it for Latin monasticism, and through him it reached Benedict and the whole subsequent monastic tradition of Europe.
McGinn stresses that this is where mystical theology and practical discipline meet, and that separating them, as later readers have tended to, misrepresents both.
The Cappadocians and Infinite Progress
A group McGinn treats at length and one whose central idea is among the most interesting in the whole volume.
Basil, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus were fourth-century bishops in what is now central Turkey, and their theological work settled several of the questions that produced the creeds.
The contribution that concerns McGinn is Gregory of Nyssa's doctrine of endless ascent. Because God is infinite, the soul that approaches never arrives. There is no final state, no point at which the seeking stops and possession begins.
His term for this is epektasis, a stretching forward, and he takes it from a phrase in Paul about straining toward what lies ahead.
The implications are considerable. It means that fulfilment and desire are not opposites here: the soul is satisfied and continues to want, because what it has found is inexhaustible rather than because it has found too little.
It also means that progress has no terminus, which cuts against the ladder models that the tradition otherwise favours, and Gregory is explicit that this applies beyond death as well as within life.
McGinn treats this as one of the tradition's genuinely original moves, and it is the section of the volume most likely to be new to a reader who thought they knew this material.
Augustine
The figure who shaped everything after him in the Latin west.
The Confessions contains the passages that made him a mystical writer: the ascent at Ostia, described with his mother shortly before her death, and the earlier interior turn in which he finds God more inward to him than his own innermost self.
What Augustine contributed above all was interiority. The path to God runs inward, through memory and self-knowledge, rather than upward through the cosmos, and this reorientation shaped Western spirituality permanently.
He is also, McGinn notes, ambivalent. The mystical passages are brief, they are set within a narrative of conversion rather than presented as a programme, and Augustine repeatedly emphasises that such moments do not last.
That ambivalence was inherited too, and the Western tradition carries a persistent tension between the desire for the vision and the insistence that it is not to be sought for its own sake.
Pseudo-Dionysius
The most influential unknown author in Christian history.
Writing around 500, probably in Syria, under the name of a figure from the Book of Acts, this author produced a small body of work that became foundational.
The negative theology is the contribution: the argument that God is beyond all affirmation and beyond all negation, so that the ascent proceeds by removing rather than by adding, ending in a darkness that is excess of light.
The pseudonym mattered enormously. Believed to be a disciple of Paul, the works carried near-apostolic authority for a millennium, and Aquinas cites them constantly.
When the attribution was demolished in the Renaissance, the influence was already permanent, embedded in the vocabulary of every subsequent writer.
McGinn treats him as the point where the apophatic strand enters Western Christianity as a formal method rather than as an occasional caution about language.
Gregory the Great
The volume ends with the figure who transmitted all of it to the medieval west.
Gregory, pope from 590, was an administrator running a city in crisis, a former monk who wrote about contemplation with evident longing and evident realism about its cost.
His distinctive contribution is the relation between contemplation and action. He held that the contemplative must return to serve, that the vision is not an escape, and that the alternation between the two is the shape of a serious religious life.
He also wrote about compunction, the piercing awareness of one's distance from God, which becomes a central category in medieval spirituality.
McGinn ends here because Gregory is the transmitter: what reaches the medieval centuries reaches them substantially in the form Gregory gave it.
The Absence of Women in Volume One
Something a reader will notice and that McGinn addresses directly.
The figures in this volume are all men, and the reason is documentary rather than interpretive. The surviving material from this period was produced by an educated clerical and monastic class from which women were largely excluded, and what women wrote has mostly not survived.
There are exceptions and they are fragmentary: the pilgrim Egeria's account of her travels, the martyr Perpetua's prison diary with its visions, some material preserved in the sayings of the desert.
The situation changes sharply in the later volumes. From the twelfth century onward women are among the most important figures in the tradition, and McGinn devotes substantial space to Hildegard, to the Beguines, to Mechthild and Marguerite Porete and Julian.
He argues that the shift is partly about the vernacular. When mystical writing moved out of Latin and into the spoken languages, it moved out of the clerical monopoly, and the people who took it up included many who had been shut out of the Latin culture entirely.
This is worth knowing before starting, so that the first volume is read as a description of what survives from one period rather than as a claim about the tradition as a whole.
The Theoretical Appendix
The part of the book most often recommended independently, and it deserves the reputation.
McGinn surveys twentieth-century theories of mysticism, organised into theological approaches, philosophical approaches, and psychological ones, with the major figures and positions in each.
He covers the perennialist position, that all mystical experience is fundamentally the same across traditions, and the constructivist reply, that experience is shaped by the concepts the experiencer brings to it, with the debate between them laid out fairly.
He treats the psychological approaches, from James through the pathological interpretations to the later cognitive work, with appropriate scepticism about explanations that assume what they set out to show.
It is around eighty pages and it is the best short orientation to the theoretical literature available in one place.
What It Does Not Do
Three limitations, all of them acknowledged.
It is not comparative. Non-Christian traditions appear only where they influenced Christian ones, and readers wanting cross-tradition analysis should look elsewhere.
It is not devotional. There is no instruction, no encouragement, and no suggestion about what a reader might do. It is history.
And it is Western. The Byzantine tradition, the hesychast controversy, and the whole Greek Christian development after Dionysius fall outside the plan.
How to Use It
Practical guidance, since five hundred pages is a commitment.
Read the introduction and the definitional chapter properly. They are the argument and everything else depends on them.
Then read the appendix, out of order, before the historical chapters. Knowing what the theoretical debates are makes the history land better.
Then use the historical chapters as reference. They are organised by figure and each is self-contained, so a reader who has encountered Eckhart or Teresa elsewhere can go to the relevant volume and chapter directly.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you want the authoritative account of Christian mysticism rather than the popular one.
Read it if you have met individual mystics through anthologies and want to know how they relate to each other.
Read the appendix if you read comparative material about mysticism, because it will show you what assumptions that material is making.
Do not read it for practice. The primary texts are where practice lives, and this is a book about them.
McGinn's refusal of the word experience is the thing worth taking away, and it applies far outside his subject. We are trained to think of the spiritual life as a series of states: moments of clarity, openings, breakthroughs, each felt and each recountable afterwards. The writers he studies mostly did not think that way. They thought in terms of a relation with something present, which has its own long weather of absence and attention and return, and in which the vivid moments are incidents rather than the point. That is a slower and less rewarding picture, and it is what the sources actually say.
The first volume of the standard history, where the definitions get made.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Foundations of Mysticism about?
The first volume of Bernard McGinn's multi-volume history of Western Christian mysticism, covering the Jewish and Greek background and the tradition through the patristic period to Gregory the Great.
Who is Bernard McGinn?
An American historian of Christianity, long at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and the leading scholar of Western Christian mysticism. He is a Catholic layman and a former priest.
How does he define mysticism?
As the part of Christian belief and practice concerning preparation for, consciousness of, and reaction to the immediate presence of God. He prefers presence to union and consciousness to experience.
Why does he avoid the word experience?
Because it carries modern assumptions about private inner states that the sources do not share. Consciousness of presence is broader and covers what the texts actually describe.
How many volumes are there?
The series has run to several volumes over three decades, covering the tradition period by period through the medieval centuries and into the early modern era, with more still appearing.
Is it readable for non-specialists?
Yes, with effort. The prose is clear and unpretentious, the organisation is generous, and the demands come from the volume of material rather than from difficult writing.
What is the appendix on theory?
A long survey of twentieth-century theories of mysticism, theological, philosophical and psychological, which many readers consider the most useful single thing in the volume.
Who does volume one cover?
The Jewish and Greek background, then Origen, the desert monastic tradition, the Cappadocians, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Gregory the Great, among others.
Does he take the mystics' claims seriously?
He takes them seriously as claims and does not adjudicate them. He is a believing Catholic writing as a historian, and the discipline he maintains between those roles is consistent.
How does it compare with Underhill?
Evelyn Underhill wrote a devotional and psychological account in 1911 that remains readable and is dated in scholarship. McGinn is a historian working with critical editions and current research.
Is it only about Christianity?
Yes, and specifically Western Christianity. The Greek and Jewish sources are covered as background, and Eastern Christian and non-Christian traditions are outside the scope.
Who should read it?
Anyone wanting the authoritative history of Christian mysticism, readers who have encountered individual mystics and want the context, and anyone interested in how the category of mysticism was formed.
Ask what the word was doing
McGinn spends a hundred pages establishing what mysticism should be taken to mean before he writes a word of history, and the care is not pedantry. The word arrived carrying a set of assumptions, mostly assembled around 1900, about private states and exceptional individuals and comparisons across traditions. Applied to writers from the fourth century, those assumptions do not describe what is on the page. Whenever you use a term for something old, it is worth asking when the term was made and by whom, because it will be doing work you did not authorise.
Sources & References
- McGinn, Bernard (1991). The Foundations of Mysticism, volume one of The Presence of God.
- Origen. Commentary on the Song of Songs and the doctrine of the spiritual senses.
- Evagrius Ponticus and John Cassian, the desert monastic tradition.
- Augustine. Confessions, the Ostia ascent and the interior turn.
- Pseudo-Dionysius. The Mystical Theology and The Divine Names.
- Gregory the Great. Moralia in Job and the writings on contemplation.