John Sanford opens a new door to the Gospel of John and discovers a treasure-house of psychological wisdom. The Fourth Gospel is the most mystic of all the gospels. And Mystical Christianity sheds light on its myriad meanings. It is a book that John Sanford was meant to write.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Volume 1: Henry Atherton; Lionel Gower; Frank Willoughby; Connexion of the Arts; Etymology; Causes of Mysticism; Classification of Mystics. Early Oriental Mysticism: The Bagvat-Gita; Characteristics of Hindoo Mysticism. The Mysticism of the Neo-Platonists: Philo; Plotinus; Neo-Platonism in the Christian Church; Porphyry. Mysticism in the Greek Church: Saint Anthony; The Hierarchies of Dionysius. Mysticism in the Latin Church: Intellectual Activity of the West; Hugo of St. Victor. German Mysticism in the Fourteenth Century: The Chronicle of Adolf Arnstein of Strasburg; The Doctrine of Eckart discussed; The Interdict; Tauler's Disappearance; Nicholas of Basle and Tauler; Further Thoughts on Tauler and Middle-Age Mysticism; Views of God and the Universe; The Black Death; Heinrich Suso; Nicholas of Basle. Volume 2: Persian Mysticism in the Middle Age; Theosophy in the Age of the Reformation: Luther, Cornellius Agrippa, Theophrastus Paracelsus, Jacob Behmen, The Rosicrucians; The Spanish Mystics: Neo-Platonism, St. Theresa, St. John of the Cross; Quietism: Madame Guyon, Antoinette Bourignon, Peter Poiret, Madame de Krudener; Mysticism in England: George Fox, Henry More Norris of Bemerton; Emanuel Swedenborg. A massive work!

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

William Law was a kind and gentle soul who clearly perceived the mystic oneness of all existences. His writings should be read by any mystic. "What is a good Book? A good Religious Book is one full of such truths and Spiritual information will lead us to see and know who, and what and where we are; that God is our All, and that all is misery but a heart and life devoted to him. The best Book is undeniably that which will turn to us that inward one, which, with noon day clearness, shows us the strength of sin, the power of every evil temper, the secret workings of our hearts, the weakness of all our virtues; and to the Teacher, whose instructions consist in an inward birth of Divine Light and Goodness.

Jacob Behmen (Boehme), the greatest of the mystics, and the father of German philosophy. Whyte gives a brief account of the life and writings of Behmen. An excellent primer for the student of Jacob Behmen. Contents: Autobiographic; The Aurora; Persecution of Behmen by Gregory Richter; Behmen's Depth; His Style; The Three Principles; The Threefold Life of Man; The Fourth Questions; A Treatise of the Incarnation of the Son of God; Signatura Rerum; The Way to Christ; A Treatise of the Four Complexions; His Apologies; Upon Election; Theoscopia, or Divine Vision; Holy Week; As a Theologian; His Doctrine of God; Eternal Nature in Behmen; The Heart of Man; The Wrath of God; Sin; Love; His Death.

Volume 3 of Boris Mouravieff's Gnosis contains ancient keys to a tradition of Christian esotericism that was necessarily hermetized 1800 years ago and has since remained unpublished, surviving to the present only in unwritten form.

In the popular mind, the mystic is seen as the supreme solitary. This image, if accurate, would make the mystical quest marginal in an era when much theology has emphasized socially responsible praxis. Against the popular image, Mary Frohlich develops a theological model -- based on the writings of Bernard Lonergan and the "self-psychology" of Heinz Kohut -- that both respects mysticism's irreducible character and shows how it concretely transforms people and systems. She then applies this model to an interpretation of a classic expression of spiritual transformation, the Interior Castle of the sixteenth-century mystic Teresa of Avila.

Contents: Essays on the Life of the Soul in God. A collection of thirty-two Essays in Three Parts. Lamps of Quest: The Path of Reality: An Ex-parte Statement; Oblation and Service; Consecrations of Life and Thought; The Higher Understanding; The Sense of the Infinite; Life and Doctrine; A Study in Contrast; The Higher Aspect; Spiritism and the Mystic Quest; Official Churches and Spiritism; The Path of the Mysteries. Lamps of Life: Of Crowned Masters; The Dionysian Heritage; The Everlasting Gospel; The Message of Eckehart; Ruysbroeck's Journey in the Divine Distance; A bride of Christ; Voices from Carmel; Post-Reformation Mystics; Molinos and the Quietists; Later Witnesses to the Life of Life; In the Shadow of Revolution; A Modern Daughter of Desire; . Lamps on Heights: Mystical Realization; Faith and Vision; The Path of Contemplation; The World to Come and the World of the Holy One; Grounds of Unity in Grace and Nature; The Poet's Glass of Vision; A Study in Christian Pantheism; The Grades of Love; The Inward Holy of Holies.

Being the Story of Mysticism through the ages told in the biographies of representative seers and saints with excerpts from their writings and sayings. Contents: The Golden Age and the Mystic Poet Lao-Tse; The Buddha, the Great Light, and the Bliss of Nirvana; The Age of Reason in Greece: Pythagoras and Plato; The Tardy Flowering of Greek Mysticism: Plotinus; Christian Mysticism, from the Founders to St. Bernard; The Medieval Flowering: Eckhart and the Friends of God; Fra Angelico, the Saintly Painter and Tool of God; Jacob Boehme, the Shoemaker-Illuminate of the Reformation; Brother Lawrence, the Lay Monk Who Attained Unclouded Vision; A Mystic in the Age of Enlightened Skepticism: William Blake.

In this collection of 25 essays, travel writer Mike Tidwell gets marooned on a desert island, travels the Silk Road with nomadic shepherds and hitchhikes on Cajun shrimp boats through Louisiana's bayou country. What makes Tidwell's writing different is his ability to draw out those he meets - a Bombay prostitute, a Hanoi barber and a real-life Tarzan in the Amazon rain forest.

Introduction by Evelyn Underhill. "Jacob Boehme, who reveals to us in this book some of the secrets of his inner life, was among the most original of the great Christian mystics. With a natural genius for the things of the spirit, he also exhibited many of the characteristics of the psychic, the seer, and the metaphysician; and his influence on philosophy has been at least as great as his influence on religious mysticism.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

The High and Deep Searching Out of the Three Principles. Contents: Of the Original Matrix, or Genetrix; Further of the Genetrix; Concerning the Birth of Love; Of the Wellspring of Light; Of the Wisdom of God, and of the Angelical World; Of the World, and also of Paradise; Of the True Corner Stone; Of the Transitory, and of the Eternal Life; Of the Threefold Life; How Man may find himself; Of the True Knowledge, what man is; Of the True Christian Life and Conversation; Of Christ's most precious Testaments; Of the Broad Way, and of the Narrow Way; Of the Mixed World and its Wickedness; Of Praying and Fasting; Of God's blessing in this World; Of Death, and of Dying.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

This comprehensive anthology will serve both as a text for serious students of mysticism and a reflective collection for those first exploring its thought. Biographical and historical data, as well as the mystic's key ideas and information about why the particular text was selected introduce each mystic to the reader.

Fifty-five mystics or mystical theologians, ancient and modern, are represented, including: Origen, Augustine of Hippo, Hildegard of Bingen, Francis of Assisi, Bonaventure, Angela of Foligno, Catherine of Siena, the anonymous author of "Cloud of Unknowing, " Thomas a' Kempis, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Francis de Sales, Therese of Lisieux, Elizabeth of the Trinity, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Merton, and Karl Rahner.

In the half century since its first publication in English, this small book has become a classic of medieval theology. Directing his attention to 'perhaps the most neglected aspect' of Cistercian mysticism, the great French medievalist and philosopher Etienne Gilson directs attention to 'that part of [Bernard's] theology on which his mysticism rests', his 'systematics'.Cistercian Publications brings this important book back into print in celebration of the nine-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Saint Bernard, hoping that new generations of scholars will find it food for thought and further research.

Margery Kempe, a middle-class English housewife at the turn of the fifteenth century, was called to weep and to pray for her fellow Christians and to adopt an unconventional way of life. Separating herself from her husband and many children, she became a pilgrim travelling around England and as far away as Jerusalem. In old age, she dictated to scribes an autobiography that recounts her extraordinary intimacy with Christ as well as her intense, commotion-filled life. At first glance, she does not seem very saintly in character or disposition, and her spiritual experiences can easily appear to be extreme or egotistical. To appreciate and interpret Margery Kempe's life and spirituality properly, one must go beyond conventional categories of social and religious history.

In Mystic and Pilgrim, Clarissa Atkinson does this from six perspectives: the character of Margery's autobiography, her mysticism and pilgrim way of life, her social and family environment, her relations with her church and its clergy, the tradition that shaped her piety, and the context of late medieval female sanctity. Margery's Book was shaped by the writings of famous holy women and by pressures on memory and motivation that come with age.

The vocation that called Margery to mysticism and pilgrimage made her unusual, therefore open to suspicion. It required her to leave her husband and children, to dress in white (a color usually reserved for virgins), to go on pilgrimage as a way to participate in Christ's earthly life and death. It graced her with a conspicuous gift: tears she could not control or resist. Her domestic and social background (she came from a powerful merchant family) gave her the courage to persist in her strange vocation and unpopular way of life. She met scorn from most of her relatives, but found encouragement in Christ, the saints, and the representatives of the Church. During Margery's lifetime the Church displayed intense anxiety over the related issues of religious enthusiasm, discernment of spirits, and female visionaries. Yet many church officials, including Dame Julian of Norwich, advised Margery to accept what God sent her and judged her feelings to be "the work of the Holy Ghost."

Having examined these aspects of Margery's life and piety, Atkinson goes on to make an original and significant contribution by explaining their specific spiritual context. It is in the tradition of affective piety and of late medieval female sanctity, she argues, that Margery's religious emotions and expressions can best be understood. From Anselm of Canterbury, through Francis of Assisi, to Nicolas Love, affective writers and preachers aimed to promote intense feelings. Principal among these were compassion and contrition. Margery incorporated these feelings in her own devotional life: identification with the human Christ, conspicuous humility inspired by Saint Francis, and "boistrous" emotion in sympathy with Mary grieving at the Cross.

Against this background, the religious life of Margery Kempe seems neither aberrant nor even very unusual. Rather, it is her unique response to a tradition established by great saints. Among the saintly persons of late medieval Europe were many women: Catherine of Siena, Birgitta of Sweden, Joan of Arc, Julian of Norwich. They characteristically saw visions, communicated directly with God, found scribes or biographers who publicized their experiences. An increasing number of them were wives and mothers who struggled, like Margery, with the married state and eventually transcended it, becoming in effect "honorary" virgins through their holiness and by God's special favor. Traveling widely, speaking publicly, departing from traditional women's roles, these women were a new creation of the late Middle Ages.

Included in this collection of Medieval writings are Ray Petry's careful essays on the province and character of mysticism and the history of mysticism from Plato to Bernard of Clairvaux.

Long recognized for the quality of its translations, introductions, explanatory notes, and indexes, the Library of Christian Classics provides scholars and students with modern English translations of some of the most significant Christian theological texts in history. Through these works--each written prior to the end of the sixteenth century--contemporary readers are able to engage the ideas that have shaped Christian theology and the church through the centuries.