Studies in Mystical Religion

Studies in Mystical Religion is Rufus M. Jones's historical survey of mysticism in Christianity, from the apostolic age to the seventeenth century. Jones, a Quaker philosopher who taught at Haverford College, published it in 1909 as part of a larger project of recovering the mystical strand of the Christian tradition at a moment when it was widely dismissed as vague emotionalism or as a foreign import into the faith. The book grew out of lectures and years of reading in the sources, and it was written to give English-speaking readers a connected account of a tradition they usually met only in fragments.

Jones defines mysticism as religion in its most acute, intense, and living stage: the type of religion that puts the emphasis on immediate awareness of relationship with God, on direct and intimate consciousness of the divine presence. He then traces that experience through its major carriers, including Paul and John, the Greek and Latin fathers, Dionysius the Areopagite, the Rhineland mystics, Bernard and the medieval devotional writers, the radical movements of the Reformation era, and the English Quakers and Cambridge Platonists. Against the view that mysticism is a single experience repeated across religions, he insists on the particularity of each figure and community, and on the way mystical vision is shaped by the intellectual and social world in which it arises. He gives sustained attention to groups that mainstream church history tends to pass over quickly, such as the Friends of God, the Anabaptist spiritualists, and the Familists, and he argues that the mystical current ran alongside institutional Christianity as a recurring call back to inward life, sometimes in tension with church authority and sometimes enriching it. Throughout, he treats mystical experience as something to be examined historically and philosophically, not simply admired.

The book matters because it helped establish the serious historical study of Christian mysticism in the English-speaking world, and it shaped how a generation of Protestants came to read the mystics. It is also an early and influential statement of the liberal Quaker conviction that the inward life is central to Christian faith. Its limits are real: the scholarship is more than a century old, later work on many of the figures has refined or corrected Jones's readings, and his own Quaker sympathies color his judgments about which movements represent the tradition at its best.

Who should read this: readers who want a single-voice orientation to the long arc of Christian mystical tradition, and who are comfortable reading a historical argument with a clear point of view. It suits students of spiritual formation seeking context for the mystics they already read in isolation. It is not for those looking for a devotional guide, a practical introduction to contemplative practice, or the current state of scholarship on any one writer.