In seminary, I had a class on Spiritual Disciplines, which ended up being a study in Protestant Mysticism, something in which I wasn’t well-versed and with which I wasn’t very comfortable. We read books by Richard Foster and Dallas Willard, and I recall that some of our readings included the benefits of chanting and vows of silence. While I get it, taking a step outside one’s comfort zone physically can have some powerful effects spiritually (after all, fasting is a biblical discipline), many of the practices I’ve seen espoused by Christian mystics seem to come from eastern or other pagan religions rather than from the Word of God. For that reason, I’m skeptical and greatly reserved when approaching them, though I am also a mite curious.

I found this book in a thrift store for a quarter (ain’t America great?), and was surprised to see the list of names that Editor Anne Fremantle had selected for her collection. Her list of 67 authors moves chronologically according to birth year from Martin Luther to her own present-day in the mid-’60s, and it includes other such names as John Bunyan, Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, David Brainard, C.S. Lewis, and a host of poets, painters, theologians, and authors. I was intrigued.

For each person, Fremantle provides a tiny biographical sketch and then lets each “Protestant Mystic” speak for himself or herself, as she quotes their own writings for anywhere from 1-10 pages each. The selections generally stem from biographies, letters, or poems that include an instance of spiritual illumination in their lives, a moment in time during which they felt incredibly close to God, unmistakably aware of themselves, or irrevocably changed in some spiritual way. Some experiences come in the form of dreams or out-of-body experiences, some come with a suddenly understanding  of a passage in Scripture, while others are more subtle and simply a lifestyle of closeness to nature or prayerful attitudes.

Now, before I mention some of the notes I jotted down in the margins of this book, I need to acknowledge a few definitions this book presupposes. First, Freemantle’s definition of “Protestant,” for example, appears to be simply “not Catholic.” Some entries in this book boast deep biblical roots and I find it impossible to argue against their experiences. Other entries, however, sound like the writers (mostly Europeans or Americans) have been chugging absinthe and staring at the moon all week before their moment of spiritual illumination (or the voices) hits them.

Second, Freemantle’s definition of a “mystic” is anyone that enjoys a direct relationship with God. If that’s the case, then I’m a mystic. W.H. Auden (an Anglican), who penned the introduction to this collection, defines it a bit more narrowly as someone who has one of four distinct mystical experiences: the vision of dame kind, the vision of erros (both involved with the vision of creative glory), the vision of agape, and the vision of God (18). Smashing these two definitions together, then, it seems that one can have a direct relationship with God by suddenly falling madly in love or by giving himself wholly over to nature. God’s creation (whether a person or a spider) can represent God, and our utter infatuation with them can thus be a godly experience. This sounds more like Buddhism than anything, doesn’t it?

While I love my wife and am an unapologetic naturalist, and while I believe that these loves can help guide me toward God (Eph. 5, Psalm 19), I do not see them as replacements for my adoration of God. I cannot believe that a walk in the woods is a viable replacement for time in the Word. Both can be forms of worship, certainly, but a follower of Christ could ignore the former and lose something, while to ignore the latter would mean spiritual starvation. Nature or spousal love might supplement worship and even fuel it, but they could never replace it. I feel that the so-called “mystics” don’t agree.

With these two clarifying definitions in mind, I say, don’t take this book too seriously, yet enjoy it all the same. Don your discernment cap and appreciate the portions that are worth enjoying. From here on out, I’ll just jot some notes from various entries throughout the book, and through this I hope you get a sense of the book as a whole.

The first of sixty-seven Protestant Mystics to be explored is Martin Luther. Auden writes about these mystics as if they’re the folks who get their “real” revelation from dreams, visions, and experiences rather than from some dusty old book, so when he began with Luther, I was a bit perplexed. Luther’s “Aha moment” (no, I don’t watch Oprah) didn’t come why he was watching a sunset or dozing in the attic. It came while he was meditating on the book of Romans! His illumination was his conversion, when he suddenly understood the Gospel of Christ which come by faith. His epiphany came from the Word of God, and it resulted in his spiritual rebirth. If this is mysticism, then again, I’m a mystic! And I’m sure you are too.

John Amos Komensky (1592-1670) wrote this in his allegorical novel, The Labyrinth of the World (not much unlike Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress):

I am here, my Lord Jesus; take me to Thee. Thine I wish to be, and to remain forever. Speak to thy servant, and permit me to hear Thee; tell me what thou desirest, and grant that I find pleasure in it; lay on me what burden thou thinkest fit, and grant that I may bear it; employ me for whatever purpose though desirest, and grant me that I may not be found wanting; order me to act according to thy will, and grant me grace to do so. Let me be nothing, that thou mayest be everything. (50)

What prayer that finds its basis in the Word! I can’t help by say, “Amen!”

Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667) writes in Holy Living:

The temple itself is the heart of man; Christ is the High Priest, who from thence sends up the incense of prayers, and joins them to his own intercession, and presents all together to His Father; and the Holy Ghost, by his dwelling there, hath also consecrated it into a temple; and God dwells in our hearts by faith, and Christ by His Spirit, and the Spirit by His purities; so that we are also cabinets of the mysterious Trinity; and what is this short of heaven itself, but as infancy is short of manhood, and letters of words? The same state of life it is, but not the same age. It is heaven in a looking-glass, dark, but yet true, representing the beauties of the soul, and the graces of God, and the images of his eternal glory, by the reality of a special presence. (61)

Richard Baxter (1615-1691) helps explain in clearer terms what makes a mystic such:

The Christian knows by experience now that his most immediate joys are his sweetest joys: which have least of man, and are more directly from the Spirit. That is one reason, as I conceive, why Christians who are much in secret prayer, and in meditation and contemplation, rather than they who are more in hearing, reading, and conference, are men of the greatest life and joy, because they are nearer the well-head, and have all more immediately from God Himself. (68)

Johannes Kelpius (1673-1708) then muddies the waters as to what this “secret prayer” is all about:

The incessant prayer now consists in an everlasting inclination of the heart to God…Such prayer is performed in us, without us, or our cogitation. It is the same as with a person living in the air and drawing it in with his breath without thinking that by it he lives and breathes, because he does not reflect upon it. Wherefore this way is called a Mystical Way—that is, a secret and incomprehensible wat. In one word, that prayer of the heart my be performed at all times, though the heart cannot think or speak at all times. (97)

William Law (1686-1761) mentions the power which prayer promises us, if only we use it:

For poor and miserable as this life is, we have all of us free access to all that is great, and good, and happy, and carry within ourselves a key to all the treasures that heaven has to bestow upon us. We starve in the midst of plenty, groan under infirmities, with the remedy in our own hand: live and die without knowing anything of the One only Good, whilst we have it in our power to know and enjoy it in as great a reality as we know and feel the power of this world over us; for heaven is as near to our souls as this world is to our bodies; and we are created, we are redeemed, to have our conversation in it. God, the only good of all intelligent natures, is not an absent or distant god, but is more present in and to our souls than our own bodies; and we are strangers to Heaven and without God in this world for this only reason, because we are void of that spirit of prayer which alone can and never fails to unite us with the One only Good, and to open Heaven and he Kingdom of God within us. (102)

He continues by highlighting prayer as the most important of all disciplines:

Reading is good, hearing is good, conversation and meditation are good; but then, they are only good at times and occasions, in certain degrees, and must be used and governed with such caution as we eat and drink and refresh ourselves, or they will forth in us the fruits of intemperance. But the spirit of prayer is for all times and all occasions; it is a lamp that is to be always burning, a light to be ever shining; everything calls for it, everything is to be done in it and governed by it, because it is and means and wills nothing else but the whole totality of the soul, not doing this or that, but wholly, incessantly given up to God to be where and what and how He pleases. (107)

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) is perhaps the biggest weirdo in the book. Look him up, because he reminds me of some of the other oddballs that still claim “Protestantism” today. With an entry like this, I wonder how Joseph Smith never made it into the book. Hey, Fremantle, what gives?

Gerhard Tersteegen (1697-1769). All my notes say after this fella’s six pages is: “Refreshing! Now here’s a man who knew the Lord!” What he wrote was fantastic, but especially as it stands in sharp contrast to Swedenborg, it truly was refreshing.

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). I wrote that Jonathan Edwards was a “meditator” not a “mystic.” If mysticism really only requires that one pray often or “contemplate” the words of Scripture deeply, then most great men of God were “mystics.” The looseness in their translation of this moniker is troubling. Of Edwards’ meditations, he writes:

Spent most of my time in thinking of divine things, year after year; and used to spend abundance of my time in walking alone in the woods, and solitary places, for meditation, soliloquy, and prayer, and converse with God; and it was always my manner at such times to sing forth my contemplations.

Johann Christian Friedrich Holderlin (1770-1843). I put this guy in here because the short biographical sketch Fremantle has given him. Read this ask yourself if this sounds like a “Protestant Mystic” or a “Pagan Mental-case”:

He was born 20 March 1770 at Lauffen on the Neckar and studied theology at Tubingen. He was introduced to Schiller, who published some of his early writings in magazines and got him a job as tutor. In 1796, he became tutor to the family of a banker, J.F. Gothard in Frankfurt-on-Main, and he fell deeply in love with Gothard’s wife, Susette. She was the “Diotima” of Hyperion and other poems. After hear death in 1802, Holderlin traveled through France on foot “completely destitute and mentally deranged, in an advanced stage of schizophrenia.” In 1804, a friend got him a sinecure post as a librarian and took care of Holderlin for a while. Holderlin died on June 4 1843. (154)

Soren Kirkegaard (1813-1855)

Father in heaven! Hold not our sins up against us but hold us up against our sins, so that the thought of thee when it wakens in our soul, and each time it wakens, should not remind us of what we have committed but of what Thou didst forgive, not of how we went astray but of how Thou didst save us! (194)

Edwin Muir (1887-1959) was apparently a mystic because he dreamed, and apparently a “Christian” because he had tapped into some type of spiritual visionary. Try this salvation testimony out at your next church bonfire and see what happens:

I had believed for many years in God and in the immortality of the soul; I had clung to the believe even when, in horrifying glimpses, I saw animals peeping through human eyes. My belief receded then, it is true, to an unimaginable distance, bit it still stood there, not in an territory of mine, it seemed, but in a place of its own. Now I realized that, quite without knowing it, I was a Christian, no matter how bad a one… (271)

AS you can see the book is as hit-and-miss and the title suggests. Enjoy it if you feel like it…or if your dream tonight that you should.

©2020 E.T.