The Flowering of Mysticism: The Friends of God in the Fourteenth Century

The Flowering of Mysticism is the third and final volume of Rufus M. Jones's history of Christian mysticism, published in 1939 under the subtitle The Friends of God in the Fourteenth Century. Jones, a Quaker philosopher who taught for decades at Haverford College, had spent his career arguing that mystical experience is not an eccentric fringe of religion but its living center. The book is a work of historical retrieval. It takes up a fourteenth-century movement in the Rhineland and the Low Countries that Jones believed had been neglected by Protestant and Catholic historians alike, and it sets out to show how a network of preachers, laypeople, and devout communities carried the mystical tradition into ordinary parish and household life.

The movement Jones follows is the circle known as the Friends of God (Gottesfreunde), and the figures through whom he tells its story are Meister Eckhart, John Tauler, Henry Suso, and Jan van Ruusbroec, together with the anonymous author of the Theologia Germanica and the Brethren of the Common Life. Jones reads Eckhart's speculative daring alongside Tauler's pastoral steadiness and Suso's devotional warmth, and he treats their shared conviction that the soul can know God directly, and that the divine life can be lived out in the world, as the real subject of the book. His method is biographical and interpretive rather than systematic. He lets each figure speak at length and then draws out the continuity between them, arguing that this lineage prepared the ground for later reforming movements, including the Reformation's emphasis on inward religion. Throughout, Jones writes as an advocate as well as a historian. He wants the reader to see mysticism as a practical, communal, and morally serious way of life, distinct from both rationalist religion and mere ecstasy.

The book has continued to matter because it was one of the first English-language studies to give these Rhineland writers sustained and sympathetic attention, and because Jones's reading shaped how twentieth-century Protestants, and Quakers in particular, came to value the medieval mystics. Later scholarship has refined or corrected many of his historical judgments, especially about Eckhart and about the unity of the movement, so the book is best read as both a guide and a document of its own era. Its enduring strength is its warmth and its insistence that the interior life belongs to ordinary believers.

Who should read this: Readers who want an accessible, humane introduction to the fourteenth-century Rhineland mystics and to the Quaker tradition's reading of Christian mysticism will find it rewarding. It is a poor choice for those seeking a current critical edition of Eckhart or up-to-date historical scholarship on the Friends of God, and it presumes some patience with an earlier style of narrative church history.