Mystical union
LongingMystical union names the experienced culmination of a spiritual movement toward God: not merely an idea about the divine, but a relation or encounter that transforms the person who undergoes it. The book traces that movement through philosophical ascent, biblical interpretation, contemplative prayer, and shared worship. Its accounts do not reduce union to one formula. Some speak of a mind rising toward its source, others of a kiss, an inward meeting, or a silence in which attention becomes prayer; John of Ruusbroec insists that union does not make a human being identical with God.
Philosophical and Scriptural Foundations
In the account of Plotinus, mystical union belongs to a larger ascent through a hierarchy of reality. The One, also called the Idea of the Good, is the source from which lesser realms emanate: the Nous, the World Soul, and finally matter, the least real level. Physical existence binds human beings to what changes and deteriorates, yet they long for the eternal and unchanging. Intellectual and spiritual contemplation can free them from dependence on sense and direct them back toward the One. This is the book’s image of falling and rising: a journey of the mind to God, which some describe as union with the One. Plotinus wrote down his lectures in the Enneads from about age fifty; his student Porphyry reported four mystical experiences over six years.
Origen gives ascent a biblical pattern. He reads Scripture as having bodily, soulful, and spiritual levels: historical understanding is its body, a broader spiritual reading its soul, and its hidden wisdom its spirit. The three books of Solomon then illustrate three stages of the ascent. Proverbs trains moral life in the purgative way; Ecclesiastes teaches discernment in the illuminative way; The Song of Songs awakens desire and love in the unitive way. Its lovers’ kisses, embraces, and longing become more than erotic imagery in this interpretation: desire itself can turn the soul toward God. The resulting framework gives later mystical writing a sequence—purification, growing insight, and union—without making the stages interchangeable.
Encounter, Longing, and the Language of Union
Bernard of Clairvaux made the Song’s opening appeal, “Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth,” the point of departure for a sustained exploration of mystical encounter. Beginning around 1135–36, he composed sermons on the Song of Songs throughout the rest of his life. He devoted the first four sermons to the kiss, moved to other subjects, and later returned to it for four more. For Bernard, the kiss was not a greeting or decorative figure: it fulfilled the soul’s longing and signified the uniting of God with humanity. Christ, as mediator, strengthens faith and joins the person to God. Yet the encounter also resists explanation: Bernard writes that its meaning is grasped only by the person who receives it. The language is intimate, but the experience is not made publicly measurable by that intimacy.
Augustine’s account gives longing a personal and retrospective shape. After his conversion, he and his mother, Monica, rose in thought beyond bodily things and their own minds, briefly touching Wisdom before returning to ordinary conversation. The brevity matters: the experience changed his life, but it did not become a lasting escape from embodied existence. In Confessions, Augustine’s account of restless desire and its rest in God became, for the book’s author, an introduction to the possibility of experiencing the divine. The author describes the reading not simply as learning about a doctrine, but as a changed understanding of Christian faith and a lasting interest in mystical experience. The episode thus links a reported encounter, its later literary expression, and a reader’s own religious development.
The Inward Ground and the Limits of Identity
Meister Eckhart locates union in the “ground,” where the hidden depths of God and the innermost soul meet. His statement, “God’s ground and my ground is the same ground,” expresses a unity more radical than ordinary closeness. The book connects this claim to the Gospel of John’s language of being “in” one another and to Eckhart’s theme of the Word’s birth in the human soul. The movement is reciprocal in its imagery: the Word descends from God, while the human being ascends toward God. Eckhart’s account of true penance also directs attention away from spiritual achievement as a possession. Fasting, vigils, and other difficult practices are not the essence of repentance; what matters is turning from what is not God and raising the mind toward God. Even impressive ascetic accomplishments can become props on which a person relies.
John of Ruusbroec develops the language of meeting and embrace while drawing a boundary around what union means. In The Spiritual Espousals, meeting the Bridegroom means transcending the creaturely state and savoring the riches that flow from the spirit’s hidden depths. Ruusbroec describes the encounter as a meeting in love, even an embrace in the ineffable unity. But he explicitly distinguishes union from identification: the human person remains different from God. The experience teaches truth about love and virtue rather than abolishing the distinction between creature and Creator. In The Sparkling Stone, grace, free will, interior fervor, penance, devotion, and fraternal love all contribute to the spiritual life. Contemplation does not excuse withdrawal from others; Ruusbroec’s account of perfection includes going forth to all people in common.
Henry Suso’s spiritual marriage to Eternal Wisdom offers another personal image of union. In his account, Eternal Wisdom appears at different times as a maiden, mistress, queen, or noble youth, and also in relation to Jesus Christ. These shifting forms frame the divine not as a fixed human gender but as the beloved figure through whom intimacy with God can be imagined. The autobiography that conveys Suso’s spiritual development also has a layered history: his spiritual directee Elsbeth Stagel had taken notes from their conversations, and Suso began burning them before stopping because he believed God wanted him to stop. The resulting Life of the Servant drew on surviving notes and material he added for instruction, and he later gathered his writings in The Exemplar. Mystical life reaches readers through such acts of recollection and composition, not through unmediated access to an experience itself.
Attention, Worship, and Shared Life
The book also presents mystical awareness through disciplined attention and collective religious practice. At the Abbey of Gethsemani in the late 1950s, about 250 monks entered the church in white cowls, took their places in the choir stalls, and sang Latin psalms in Gregorian chant. A Protestant seminary student attending with a class was deeply moved by the sound, the silence, and the monks’ warmth. Professor Bard Thompson brought students there to see medieval monasticism as a living institution; the visit included the Divine Offices, meals, a tour, and a conversation with a monk about monastic life. Thomas Merton met the group on two of the student’s five trips. The scene makes mystical tradition tangible as a repeated communal discipline, not only as an exceptional private vision.
Simone Weil’s account joins suffering, prayer, and attention. At Solesmes, a young English Catholic introduced her to George Herbert’s poem “Love.” She learned it by heart and recited it as a prayer when headaches were severe. During one recitation she experienced Christ’s presence without relying on sense or imagination, and understood that love could be present amid suffering. Later, she practiced saying the Our Father in Greek each morning with absolute attention, starting over whenever her attention failed. She describes the result as a silence that was not an absence of sound, but a positive experience through which noises had to pass. From this practice she drew the principle that prayer consists of attention. In her account, mystical experience does not diminish social concern; it deepens the religious dimension of a life still directed toward human realities.
Shared worship can also generate a sense of unity among people. At Howard University, Howard Thurman experimented with silence, meditation, prayer, liturgical dance, and staged presentations of six European Madonna paintings. For the latter, living participants recreated each image behind a nine-by-five-foot frame, with silence between displays and “Ave Maria” accompanying each one. Thurman said the congregation and participants were fused in a moment of spiritual transcendence, and saw their unity as more compelling than what divided them. Douglas Steere described a related effect in Quaker silent worship: a meeting’s silence could level a barrier between two people and begin a process of asking forgiveness. His account of a prayer at an early meeting to organize relief in Finland likewise describes an intense experience of divine life and closeness to those present. These examples place mystical union alongside communal practice and action: inward encounter may be solitary, but it can also be expressed as renewed relation, forgiveness, or service.
