There is a version of Christianity that most people who grew up in Western countries have encountered: institutional, moralistic, concerned with belief-statements and behavioral rules. And there is another version that exists in the same textual tradition — stranger, more demanding, less interested in doctrinal compliance and more interested in the direct encounter with what it calls God — that most people have not encountered at all.
The Christian mystical tradition is not a soft alternative to orthodox religion. Some of its central figures were condemned by ecclesiastical authorities. Others lived at the extreme edges of social life. What they shared was a conviction that the theological frameworks available to them were insufficient to describe an experience that exceeded those frameworks — and a willingness to say so in language that still compels attention seven centuries later.
Here are five entry points.
1. Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1328)
The Dominican friar Johannes Eckhart was put on trial for heresy shortly before his death. Pope John XXII condemned 28 propositions from his sermons posthumously. The condemned propositions include: “There is something in the soul which is uncreated and uncreatable”; “We are totally transformed into God”; “We are God.”
Eckhart’s theology is apophatic — meaning that it defines God primarily by negation, by stripping away all attributes. God is not a being among beings. God is not wise, not good, not powerful, in the sense that we understand those terms. God is the ground from which all being emerges, and the deepest ground of the self is continuous with that ground. The mystical moment — what Eckhart calls abgeschiedenheit, releasement or detachment — is the dropping of everything, including the concept of God, until what remains is bare awareness.
The closest contemporary analogue is probably Advaita Vedanta or certain strands of Zen. Eckhart’s language sounds strange in Christian context because it doesn’t ask you to believe something — it asks you to stop believing, in order to arrive somewhere prior to belief.
Start with: Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defense, translated by Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn (Paulist Press, 1981).
2. Julian of Norwich (c. 1343–c. 1416)
Julian received a series of visions during a near-death illness at thirty years old and spent the next twenty years interpreting them. The result, Revelations of Divine Love, is the earliest surviving book in English written by a woman — and one of the most unusual theological documents in any tradition.
The most often quoted passage is her assurance: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” This tends to be read as comforting optimism. In context it is theological dynamite: Julian received this assurance while contemplating the reality of sin and suffering, and she could not reconcile it with the orthodox doctrine of damnation. She did not resolve the contradiction. She held it.
Julian lived as an anchorite — walled into a small cell attached to a church in Norwich, with a window onto the street through which she counseled visitors for decades. Her theology is remarkable for its tenderness and for its unwillingness to simplify.
Start with: The long text of Revelations of Divine Love, translated by Elizabeth Spearing (Penguin Classics, 1998). Read the long text, not the short text — the twenty years of reflection are what make it.
3. John of the Cross (1542–1591)
The Spanish Carmelite priest wrote his major poems while imprisoned by his own religious order — a conflict over the reform of Carmelite monasteries that became violent. Dark Night of the Soul and The Ascent of Mount Carmel describe a passage through the stripping-away of consolation, spiritual feeling, and eventually God-as-concept, toward what John calls union.
The “dark night” is not depression, though it overlaps with descriptions of depression in ways that have interested psychologists. It is, in John’s account, the soul’s experience of being emptied of its attachments to spiritual experience itself — including the pleasures of prayer and devotion. What happens after the emptying is, in his account, a different kind of contact.
Start with: The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (ICS Publications, 1991).
4. Thomas Merton (1915–1968)
The American Trappist monk is the most accessible entry point for contemporary readers. His autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain (Harcourt, 1948) describes his conversion and entry into monastic life in language that remains immediately readable. His later writing — particularly New Seeds of Contemplation (New Directions, 1961) and the posthumously published The Asian Journal (New Directions, 1973) — shows him in conversation with Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, and Hindu traditions, increasingly interested in the contemplative core that he believed was common to all of them.
Merton died unexpectedly in Bangkok in 1968, electrocuted by a faulty fan in his hotel room, one day after meeting the Dalai Lama.
Start with: New Seeds of Contemplation — shorter than The Seven Storey Mountain, and more directly concerned with interior life.
5. Simone Weil (1909–1943)
Weil is the most difficult figure on this list — a French philosopher who was drawn irresistibly toward Christianity while remaining outside the Church, unable in conscience to accept baptism because she could not accept the Church’s historical exclusivity. She died at thirty-four, probably from tuberculosis complicated by self-starvation undertaken as solidarity with the French under German occupation.
Her theology is extreme. Waiting for God (Putnam, 1951) contains her famous account of the attention required for spiritual life — a quality of receptive, non-grasping awareness that she saw as both the form of love and the precondition of genuine perception. For Weil, affliction (malheur) — deep, impersonal suffering — was the place where contact with God most reliably occurred.
She is not comforting reading. But she is honest in a way that makes most spiritual writing feel managed by comparison.
Start with: Waiting for God, particularly the letters and the essay “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.”
The tradition these five figures belong to is not the Christianity of Sunday morning services, though it drew on the same texts. It is the Christianity of people who pushed further into the claims of that tradition than the institution found comfortable — and found, on the other side, something that resists easy description.
That resistance is precisely what makes it worth reading.