The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism.

Martin, Dennis D.

By Denys Turner. New York: Cambridge University, 1995. Pp. x + 278. $54.95.

This is a discursive commentary on a handful of authors and texts inspired by neo-Platonism: Pseudo-Denis, Augustine's Confessions and De Trinitate, Bonaventure's Itinerarium mentis in Deum, Eckhart, The Cloud of Unknowing, Denis the Carthusian, and John of the Cross. The texts are not included in this volume, but Turner's companion study, Eros and Allegory (Cistercian, 1995) provides translations of some of them. T. first traces the kataphatic and apophatic strands in Pseudo-Denis, Augustine, and Bonaventure. Then he explores apophatic elements of the late medieval writers, concluding that rather than a reification into "apophatic" and "kataphatic" spiritualities, the entire Christian mystical tradition is concerned instead with "the relation between the apophatic and the kataphatic `moments' within the trajectory of the Christian itinerarium in Deum" (256-57).

In many ways, T. presents a variation on the thesis first set forth by Francois Vandenbroucke in the 1950s regarding a late medieval divorce between theology and mysticism, by which theology became an acquired science accessible to human intellect and the once common and everyday experience of the mystic became a rarified "mystical experience," leading to a psychologizing rather than theological approach to the mystical. If Denis the Carthusian in the 15th century still firmly resisted this experientialization of mysticism, and even if John of the Cross's " `dark nights' are the metaphors not of experience, but of a dialectical critique of experientialist tendencies," John's very real "psychology of religious experience" was appropriated on behalf of the modern psychologizing and experientializing approach to mysticism (226-27). "`Experientialism' in its most extreme forms is therefore the displacement of a sense of the negativity of all religious experience with the pursuit of some goal of achieving negative experiences. Experientialism is, in short, the `positivism' of Christian spirituality. It abhors the experiential vacuum of the apophatic, rushing to fill it with the plenum of the psychologistic" (259). Even Bernard McGinn's definition of mysticism as the consciousness of the immediate presence of God and of apophasis as consciousness of God's absence must be trimmed to fit T.'s procrustean anti-experientialism (262-65).

T.'s goal is to call readers of medieval mystics back to a nonexperientializing reading of the apophatic mystics, a reading recognizing that even apophasis was "couched in terms descriptive of the rhythms of common religious ritual," in the everyday and ordinary (258): "theology in so far as it is theology is `mystical' and in so far as it is `mystical' it is theology" (265).

This is certainly a commendable project. Much of what T. reports as surprising insights are in fact commonplaces in secondary studies of medieval contemplative literature. E.g., his conclusion that "the apophatic in theology is simply the product of a properly understood cataphaticism and that we reach the point at which the apophatic begins by means of the comprehensiveness of our affirmations, whose combined and mutually cancelling forces crack open the surface of language" (33) is solid, but not at all new. Denis the Carthusian's list of mystical authorities (213-14) was neither the first of its kind nor the last during the Middle Ages; he and others of his era were self-consciously aware that mystical theology was simply a matter of commentary on the greatest of all theologians, Pseudo-Denis, and drew up their lists accordingly.

The valuable insights in the book are gems in the rough--glimpses of specific and technical interpretations of specific aspects of the writers T. has studied. Unfortunately, in order to find them, one has to fight against a convoluted pattern of exposition. All too often T. tells us it would be an exaggeration or an oversimplification to say such and such, then proceeds to take us part-way in that direction, before turning around and telling us where he really wants to go.

This book lives up to its dust-jacket billing as a "timely and important" and "exciting" book for those who come to it from a vague modern quest for "mystical experience." Those already familiar with medieval mystical texts on their own terms will occasionally find their labors repaid with new insights.