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THIS BOOK is John Macquarrie’s account of his engagement with the principal texts of the Christian mystical writers, read and thought over in the course of a couple of years, and distilled into a lucid, sympathetic, and idiosyncratic exploration of this rarefied landscape.

Macquarrie declares himself from the beginning to be a somewhat detached guide to the spiritual phenomena he is describing: he admires the mystics, and considers them to have been on the whole beneficial to Christianity, but he does not number himself among them.

His opening chapter defines mysticism by drawing together various related themes and characteristics: the mystic’s claim to know God directly, the way in which that knowledge is often mediated as a sort of spiritual darkness, the consciousness of divine indwelling within the individual, and the dangers of passive individualism and pantheism that go with this.

He begins by establishing the foundations of Christian mysticism in the scriptures, where he follows St Gregory of Nyssa in identifying Moses as the Old Testament exemplar of the mystical life, to whom the divine name is revealed in Exodus 3.13-14. However, in dealing with the New Testament he is quite tentative, and even cursory: only St Paul is considered, and even here there is as much speculation about whether he was struck by lightning on the Damascus road as about the Christ-mysticism of Galatians 2.20, which both Bishop Westcott and Dean Inge thought the most enduring element of Pauline theology.

The author then traverses the familiar territory of patristic spirituality, and the assimilation of Platonic and neo-Platonic speculation with Christian theology. Sometimes the pace is a little breathless (Augustine gets three-and-a-half pages), but Macquarrie handles the more esoteric elements of the teaching of writers as diverse as Origen, Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, and John Scottus Eriugena with clarity and concision.

He is also illuminating about many of the medieval authors, whose style of scriptural exegesis can seem so alien to modern readers — particularly astute is a convincing identification of a passage in Bonaventure on the nature of God as the source of a chapter in Heidegger on the nature of being.   

When he comes to the end of the Middle Ages, Macquarrie naturally deals with the great Spanish mystics (he has his doubts about St John of the Cross). But he is more stimulating on those mystics who arose outside the Roman Catholic Church. In particular, the highly speculative mysticism of Jakob Böhme is given due prominence, although it would have been interesting to see the influence of this carried forward from his own time, especially as so much of what was once thought of in the West as classic Russian spirituality in fact derives from Böhme’s idiosyncratic teaching about the role of Sophia as the feminine personification of divine wisdom.   

The Anglicans included are the non-juror William Law and the Tractarian John Keble: I wonder if Keble deserves being singled out here as a noteworthy mystic, especially as we have nothing on either the Cambridge Platonists or the metaphysical poets.

This is a good book. It provides the reader with a compendious amount of material to stimulate further investigation; and, most important, it seeks to present the mystics speaking and writing in their own words.

There are some distinctive Macquarrie touches, familiar from his past work (Paul Tillich is the theologian most often mentioned); and the occasional bizarre speculation (were the Egyptian first-born killed by an early form of AIDS?). But, as an introduction to those Christian mystics who have been able to express something of their insight in writing and teaching, it provides a reflective, insightful, and straightforward guide.   

Canon Dr Robin Ward is Vicar of St John the Baptist, Sevenoaks, and Hon. Canon Theologian of Rochester Cathedral.

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MYSTICS: A guide to happiness, compiled by Teresa de Bertodano, comprises short quotations from Christian mystics, the Bible and other sources, on seven themes: the love of God, prayer, joy, suffering, and growing older are among them (Lion, £4.99; 0-7459-5098-1).