Customer Reviews

Women Mystics: Hadewijch of Antwerp, Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, Elizabeth of the Trinity, Edith Stein

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This is an interesting book, enough that I wish it were a great one. Generous delving into Hadewijch of Antwerp, her mysticism and its rights, right to the essence of Hadewigian spirituality-- there are some fine passages illumined with Bouyer's considerable gifts, and a superb translation (by Mother Columba Hart) of a Hadewijch spring aubade that leaves you pinned to its two pages for a spell! Bouyer's thought is lean and clean, and admirable for that, but pointlessly smug with a really old-fashioned modernism. Some of his remarks on Elizabeth of the Trinity betray this tendency, and in fact nearly indicate that he hasn't understood her mystic gifts one whit, however well-schooled his observations are. This affectation is less noticable in his remarks on Therese Martin, although he reckons Elizabeth Catez's family "more open to the world and generally more cultured" than the Martins. He loves Edith Stein most of all, of course, and he manages some genuinely interesting insights into a rather overexposed spirituality. The lines he draws between Stein and Husserl are interesting enough, but nothing new, I think because he's apparently miles from grasping the living charism of Carmel. While he devotedly mentions Teresa- "such a scatterbrain, the copies of whose spiritual writings betray superficiality and a pretentious vacuum on every page"- Fr. Bouyer might benefit most from reading again not only the 'Life', but 'The Book of Foundations' as well, to receive, hopefully, what he has not yet learned-- interestingly, the very Thing received freely, learned quickly and lived profoundly by Elizabeth of the Trinity. Predictable scholarship, book has no soul, take a pass.