Explaining illness Book

After reading this book, I find it hard to imagine that any way of thinking could be more finely balanced than mystical theology.

Turner interprets and connects the work of the most prominent Medieval mystical writers, including Denys the Areopagite, Augustine, Eckhart, the Cloud of Unknowing author, Denys the Carthusian and John of the Cross. He works through a history of misreading and misapplication, some scholarly and some more popular and cultural. Turner's "thesis," if I understood it, is a polemic against a mysticism of "experience." Experience can always be the object of a positivistic philosophy, and it was precisely against such premises, Turner argues, that these mystical theologians wrote. The Darkness of God works delicately to counter these trends, which are, essentially, failures to think outside the box.

Yet, while Turner seeks to locate the mystical tradition in the everyday and the ordinary - dethroning it from the enigmatic individualism of transcendent experiences - he only moves the pile of stones from one spot to another. Mysticism is no more accessible for its groundedness, for now its experiential privileges have only become intellectual privileges, inaccessible to all but the well-studied.

Of course, the fruits of mysticism have always hinged on the near-athletic capacity of its students to walk with it along the tight-rope of intertwined language and silence. It seems, almost, that the most difficult of God's commands may just be the fourth: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth." Perhaps for this reason Eckhart, at the end of his life, "revoked and also deplored the twenty-six articles which he admitted that he had preached, and also others written and taught by him… insofar as they could generate in the minds of the faithful a heretical opinion, or one erroneous and hostile to the true faith."