AMY HOLLYWOOD
In the ninth book of his Confessions, the North African theologian Augustine of Hippo (354-430) describes life immediately after his conversion to orthodox Christianity - a conversion for which Augustine's mother, Monica, prayed from the time of his birth. In the midst of recounting the transformations wrought in his life by conversion, Augustine writes in praise ofhis mother and teUs of an episode in which the close tie between her salvation and his own is rendered explicit.
Resting at Ostia before their long sea voyage from Italy to North Africa, Monica and Augustine lean 'from a window which overlooked the garden in the courtyard of the house' where they were staying. There they wondered together 'what the eternal life of the saints would be like' and their conversation led them to conclude 'that no bodily pleasure, however great it might be and whatever earthly light might shed luster upon it, was worthy of comparison, or even of mention, beside the happiness of the life of the saints'. As they spoke, Augustine writes, 'the flame of love burned stronger' in them both and raised them 'higher toward the eternal God'. Their thoughts ranged over all material things and up to the heavens and from thence beyond the material heavens to their own souls.
Yet 'the eternal life of the saints' lay beyond even the realm of immaterial souls, in a place of 'everlasting peace' governed by Wisdom:
And while we spoke of the eternal Wisdom, longing for it and straining for it with all the strength of our hearts, for one fleeting instant we reached out and touched it. Then with a sigh, leaving our spiritual harvest bound to it, we
Returned to the sound of our own speech, in which each word has a beginning and an ending - far, far different fTom your Word, our Lord, who abides in himself for ever, yet never grows old and gives new life to all things.603
Deeply dependent on the Neoplatonic ontologies crucial to the process of his conversion, Augustine here describes a movement through the material to the immaterial and, further, from the realm of souls to that of Wisdom.
Yet where the pagan philosopher Plotinus (d. 270) writes of the individual soul's movement into, through and beyond itself into universal Soul, the Mind and the One, Augustine insists on the necessity of divine mediation for this uplifting and return to occur. Just as the mediation of the incarnate Christ is necessary to Augustine's final conversion, here Wisdom is the Word, the God become human through whom salvation becomes possible. (And whereas in Plotinus the creation of all things occurs through the emanation of the One into the Mind, the Mind into Soul, and the Soul into the realm of material creation, for Augustine creation occurs through Christ as Word and Wisdom, who 'gives new life to all things'.)
I start with Augustine because his work sets the agenda for the mysticism of the high and late Middle Ages. If the years from 1100 to 1500 are often seen as the moment of mysticism's 'flowering' in the West,604 the foundations for this tradition are laid by Greek and Latin Christians writing in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. For this reason, I will at times make reference to this earlier work, which provides the background against which monks, nuns, members of the new religious movements and eventually the laity lived, practised, and thought about the mystical life.
Thus, although scholars continue to debate whether or not Augustine himself was a mystic,605 there is no doubt that this passage from the Confessions encapsulates themes crucial to the development of Western Christian mysticism. The episode is marked by four features that will play an important role in subsequent mystical traditions. First, Augustine and Monica strive to transcend not only the material realm, but also their own individual souls. Although primarily grounded in the use of the intellect, love - signified here by the heart - is also crucial to the process of transcendent uplifting. Secondly, in so far as they touch that transcendent Wisdom in which their souls are contained and unified, Augustine and Monica do so only fleetingly. This momentary grasp of the divine Word, thirdly, is explicitly contrasted to human speech. Augustine and Monica know that they no longer touch Wisdom when they return 'to the sound of [their] own speech, in which each word has a beginning and an ending'. Human speech, unlike the divine Word, occupies time, in which things have a beginning and an ending. The divine Word, on the other hand, is eternal and 'abides in himself for ever, yet never grows old'. The limitations of human speech to encompass divine Wisdom are further marked by the proliferation of metaphors - from the realms of sight, taste, touch, hearing and thought - with which Augustine attempts to articulate his and Monica's striving after and brief attainment of the divine. Finally, Augustine's experience is resolutely communal; he comes to the Word in and through his conversation with Monica. Together they 'reach out and touch' divine Wisdom and together they fall back into human speech and the 'region of unlikeness' in which creatures dwell until that time when they will come to eternal life in God.
Read in this way, Augustine provides a broadly phenomenological account of Christian mystical experience as it is articulated from the fifth to the sixteenth centuries (and in some cases, far beyond). More accurately, perhaps, his descriptions - in the Confessions and elsewhere - of the transcendence, transience, ineffability, and communal nature of mystical experience provide the parameters within which medieval Christians understand experiences of God and of union with God. Medieval Christian mysticism can be understood as a series of ongoing experiential, communal, and textual commentaries on and debates about the possibilities and limitations Augustine sets for the earthly encounter between God and humanity.
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