50 Key Concepts in Theology

Part and John Tavener. This new Christian mystical music is enjoying
considerable popularity: recordings of Górecki’s Third Symphony have sold
on a scale normally reserved for pop musicians, and Tavener’s music was
used at the funeral of Princess Diana.
THINKERS
Augustine (354–422) records in Book 9 of the Confessions that he had a
mystical vision in prayerful contemplation with his mother in Ostia: ‘my
mother and I … were talking alone together and our conversation was serene
and joyful … As the flame of love burned stronger in us and raised us higher
towards the eternal God … At length we came to our own souls and passed
beyond them to that place of everlasting plenty, where you feed Israel for ever
with the food of truth.’
Jakob Böhme (1575–1624): a seventeenth-century shoemaker who saw
the direct affinity between the human soul and the reality of God: ‘I did not

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climb up into the Godhead, neither can so mean a man as I am do it; but the
Godhead climbed up in me, and revealed such to me out of his Love’
(Aurora).
Denys (or Dionysius) the Areopagite (c. 500) argued in The Mystical
Theology that knowledge of God comes from mystical practice.
Marsilio Ficino (1433–99): a classic ‘Renaissance man’ (scholar, doctor,
musician, priest) who drew upon the writings of Plato and Plotinus to develop
a pia philosophia (sacred philosophy) structured around the immortality of the
human soul and its ascent towards God: ‘There are three principal steps in
Platonic contemplation. The first ascends from the body through the soul to
God, the second abides still in God and the third descends to the soul and the
body.’
Henryk Górecki (1933– ): an avant-garde Polish Catholic composer who
uses liturgical and other sources to evoke a sacred, mystical sound-scape.
Olivier Messiaen (1908–92): a French Catholic composer who explored
the relationship between time and eternity in his music.
Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) wrote a classic work, The Idea of the Holy, in
which he argues that religion is founded on ‘non-rational, non-sensory
experience’ of something numinous beyond the self. The numinous is a
mysterium tremendum, something both mysterious and terrifying.
Arvo Part (1935– ): an Estonian composer who developed the technique
of ‘tintinnabulation’ or building up sound from simple components, producing
a unique style of Christian mystical music.
John Tavener (1944– ): a Greek Orthodox composer who strives to
communicate the mystical in his minimalist music.
IDEAS
Asceticism: the practice of seeking religious insight by denying oneself
earthly comforts.
The numinous: a word indicating the dimension of the sacred and
spiritual. (The word ‘numinous’ was used by Kant in a specific philosophic
sense to refer to ‘things in themselves’ beyond our perception of them.)
Ladder spirituality has been a staple of Christian mysticism. Jacob’s
ladder combined with Plato’s ideas about the ascent of the soul planted a
powerful image in Christian theology: the picture of prayer as a mystical
ascent towards God. Notable examples of this tradition have been St John

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Climicus’ The Ladder of Divine Ascent and Walter Hilton’s The Ladder of
Perfection. The ladder of spiritual ascent is contrasted by Origen with the
‘wheel’ of the imagination, which merely recycles human thoughts.
BOOKS
Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition (OUP,
2007)
William Alston,