THE PRESENCE OF GOD History of Western Christian Mysticism

THE

FOUNDATIONS OF MYSTICISM

"Based in a nuanced and historical understanding of religious experience, Professor McGinn gives us here the opening chapters of what promises to be a learned, clear, and eminently readable history of Western mysticism. This volume is a significant improvement, in subtlety, in breadth, and in general interest, over available surveys. I found the treatments of Origen and Ambrose particularly fine. The extensive methodological appendices are intelligent and erudite, and should be of use to theologians, philosophers, and psychologists of religion, as well as historians. This work will have a wide appeal not just to scholars and pastors but also to any Christians curious about one of the most splendid, complex, and appealing strands of their

heritage." -Caroline Walker Bynum

*To those innumerable people who, believing in the real presence of God in Christ, claimed to have encountered him, what did happen! With a wealth of scholarship, Bernard McGinn presents the answer in terms of a sense of presence that also implics a form of absence developed with countless nuances over the centuries. Through all the times and cultures of Western Christianity, glimpses of these encounters with God have been experienced and interpreted. Never before has so much evidence about these encounters been so scientifically scrutinized according to the sources and the huge literature about them. The result is a mummia of mystical thought of unsurpassed value. It will matter for the knowledge of the past, and for

real life." -Jean Leclercq, O.S.B.