Some Exponents of Mystical Religion

Some Exponents of Mystical Religion collects the Fondren Lectures that Rufus M. Jones delivered in 1930 at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Jones, a Quaker philosopher who taught at Haverford College for more than four decades and helped found the American Friends Service Committee, had spent his career reclaiming mysticism from two kinds of suspicion: the academic view that it was vague emotionalism, and the churchly view that it was a threat to doctrine. The lectures were a compact way of making his case by portrait rather than by abstraction, offering Methodist theological students and a wider audience a gallery of figures who had lived it.

The book proceeds by studying individual mystics rather than by defining the mystical in general. Jones moves through a series of lives, among them Plotinus, Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, and the Quaker George Fox, and lets each stand as an instance of a common thing. That common thing, as Jones understands it, is the direct and immediate awareness of God, an experience in which the human soul finds itself met by a divine presence it did not manufacture and could not do without. He treats this awareness as a normal capacity of the human spirit, one that ordinary people can cultivate, rather than as a rare pathology or an exotic trance.

Jones also resists the notion that mysticism sets itself against institutional religion. He argues that the mystics were often the most vital renewers of the traditions they inhabited, and that their inner experience fed rather than undermined their moral and social energy. This conviction reflects his Quaker inheritance, in which inward light and public service belong together. The lectures are written with a warmth that favors sympathetic understanding over critical dissection, and they reveal as much about Jones's own theology of the immanent God as they do about his subjects.

The book has lasted because it works as a readable doorway into a large subject. Jones wrote at a moment when the study of mysticism was still being shaped, and his insistence that mystical experience is continuous with ordinary spiritual life influenced a good deal of twentieth-century Protestant and Quaker thought about prayer and devotion. His portraits are now dated in some details of scholarship, and his sympathetic, somewhat harmonizing reading of the tradition smooths over real differences among his subjects, but the central witness remains clear.

Who should read this: readers new to the Christian mystical tradition who want a warm, unhurried introduction through the lives of its major figures, and those interested in how a Quaker philosopher understood inward religion. It is not for readers seeking up-to-date critical scholarship on any single mystic, nor for those who want a rigorous, doctrinally precise treatment of mystical theology.