The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Negativity in Western Christian Mysticism)
Cambridge University Press
Edition: New Ed, 11/5/1998
EAN 9780521645614, ISBN10: 0521645611
Paperback, 288 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm
Language: English
For the medieval mystical tradition, the Christian soul meets God in a 'cloud of unknowing', a divine darkness of ignorance. This meeting with God is beyond all knowing and beyond all experiencing. Mysticisms of the modern period, on the contrary, place 'mystical experience' at the centre, and contemporary readers are inclined to misunderstand the medieval tradition in 'experientialist' terms. Denys Turner argues that the distinctiveness and contemporary relevance of medieval mysticism lies precisely in its rejection of 'mystical experience', and locates the mystical firmly within the grasp of the ordinary and the everyday. The argument covers some central authorities in the period from Augustine to John of the Cross.
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I. Two Sources and a Synthesis
1. The allegory and Exodus
2. Cataphatic and the apophatic in Denys the Areopagite
3. The God within
Augustine's Confessions
4. Interiority and ascent
Augustine's De Trinitate
5. Hierarchy interiorised
Bonaventure's Itinerarium Mentis in Deum
Part II. Developments
6. Eckhart
God and the self
7. Eckhart
detachment and the critique of desire
8. The Cloud of Unknowing and the critique of interiority
9. Denys the Carthusian and the problem of experience
10. John of the Cross
the dark nights and depression
11. From mystical theology to mysticism
Further reading
Index.