ABSTRACT
Unusually perhaps, we need to be able to read our classical ‘mystical’ texts both innocently, but also skilfully, with a real depth of historical understanding. There may be few other categories of text for which this is true (though the Bible itself comes to mind)1. Indeed, there would seem to be no point in reading the classical mystical texts unless we are sensitive to what we might call their ‘spiritual force’. But to read them only naively in this way undoubtedly leads to the possibility that a whole host of false presuppositions in the mind of the modern reader may be reinforced and may multiply. Indeed, it may be that we finally judge that these are texts which, if only read according to Ricoeur’s ‘second naïveté’, will necessarily be read in the wrong way. In other words, their capacity to illuminate us may not only be a ‘spiritual’ one, but may also be historical in the sense that they can open a window onto something about their own times which needs to be understood and known if we are to lose our innocence about our own age. Perhaps we can learn something from these texts not only about modern ‘spirituality’ but also about what it is to be modern in the first place. And surely, as students of mysticism, we?will want to be open to new forms of self-understanding which may arise precisely from the reading of medieval mystical texts.
