Bonus: Bernard McGinn on Mechthild, Eckhart, and Mysticism

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:07)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley.

Kirsten Oates (0:11)

And I'm Kirsten Oates.

James Finley (0:13)

Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Kirsten Oates (0:22)

Welcome everyone to this bonus episode of Turning to the Mystics. And Jim and I are so excited to be here today with our very special guest, Professor Bernard McGinn. So let me tell you a little bit about him. Bernard McGinn is an American Roman Catholic theologian, religious historian and scholar of spirituality. A specialist in medieval mysticism, McGinn is widely regarded as the preeminent scholar of mysticism in the Western Christian tradition. He is best known for his comprehensive nine volume series on mysticism under the general title of The Presence of God.

He is Naomi Shenstone Donnelly Professor Emeritus of Historical Theology and of the History of Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School and serves on the committees on Medieval Studies and on General Studies.

Today we're so excited to tap into Bernard's profound expertise and love of Christian mysticism and gain further insights into the two Rhineland mystics Jim shared this year, Meister Eckhart and Mechthild of Magdeburg. So I'm here with Jim and our very special guest, Professor Bernard McGinn. We've been so looking forward to having you with us today and so welcome, Bernard.

James Finley (1:46)

Yeah, thank you.

Kirsten Oates (1:48)

Welcome to you, Jim.

James Finley (1:49)

It's good to be together again like this, yes. To be with Bernard too.

Kirsten Oates (1:54)

So Bernard, I wanted to start by asking you, what inspired you to embark on your deep and profound studies of the Christian mystics?

James Finley (2:05)

Well, I was always interested in the mystics even when I was in school in the 1950s and 1960s and doing theology. But of course the mystics weren't a large part of the theological education in those days. So it was mostly reading on my own.

But after I came to University of Chicago in 1968, I began to discover in the late 60s and especially in the 70s that more and more of the graduate students who were coming to do theology were interested in mysticism.

And that of course fit in very much with my own interests. So I began teaching courses on the mystics and getting a number of students who did their dissertations on mysticism and the like.

And about the late 1970s, close to 1980, I realized that there was no adequate theological treatment of the mystics in English. There were numerous good studies of particular figures, excellent studies, but there was no really serious theological history of Western Christian mysticism, which I thought would be very important for the students who were coming and the students that I thought were also in a sense in the pipeline. So I envisaged my history originally is about 1980-81 as having three volumes.

So kind of substantial history. But as I got into it, it grew and grew and grew. And so eventually it reached nine volumes, which I finished off in 2021 So it was a much bigger project that I had anticipated. But I think it's fulfilled its purpose. I know it's very widely used, even for relatively big books. It's been translated into a number of different languages. And it's been part of not something that's much, much bigger than me and bigger than any of us. It's the turn to mysticism, which has been so crucial a part of both religious studies academically, but also of living the Christian life in the last four or 50 years.

I can remember the 1940s and the 1950s when the mystics were what we used to call rare birds. There were a few of them, but people weren't very, they would just put on the shelf, they're, oh yeah, there's Teresa of Avila, there's someone. Nowadays, reading the mystics and trying to learn from them, absorb their teaching, appropriate their teaching, is a part of the lives of I think many, many, many serious and devout Christians, far more than it has been, over the past century or two. So not only my work, but work like the classics of Western spirituality series, which I was heavily involved in and edited for 20, 25 years, has sold millions and millions of volumes with it. Oh, 135 different books beginning publication in 1978 Those books are read widely. They're used in classrooms all over the English speaking world. So it's part of something that I would say is a kind of movement of the spirit in contemporary society, not just in Christianity, but also in Islam and Judaism and other contexts. I've had many opportunities to teach with students of Jewish mysticism, less extent Sufi. This is an ecumenical age of mysticism, I would say.