Mystics

There is a stream in Christian theology that works by subtraction. It holds that every name we give God — good, wise, being, light — is true and yet not true, since the One named exceeds the name; and that the mind comes nearest to God not when it has understood most but when it has fallen silent. It is called the apophatic or negative way, and it runs from Gregory of Nyssa and Dionysius through The Cloud of Unknowing and John of the Cross into every serious school of contemplative prayer since.

This shelf reads that stream in its primary texts, whole — not summarised, not filtered through a modern interpreter, and not excerpted down to the quotable lines. Each text is set out complete and typeset to be read, with whatever notes its translator left, and a colophon saying plainly where the text came from and what was done to it. No verdict is offered on any of it.

Only public-domain translations are published here, which is a real constraint and occasionally a painful one: the best modern rendering of a text is often the one that cannot be posted.