"Reading Ruusbroec in Argentina: Mysticism, Loss,and the Common Life" with Douglas E. Christie

Traditions of Christian mystical thought rooted in darkness and unknowing have long employed images of the night, the desert and the abyss to signal the power of losses too deep to name or comprehend; especially the loss of language, identity and intelligibility bound up with the experience of undifferentiated mystical union. In our own time, the language of darkness and unknowing has become freighted with the unspeakable losses born of historical violence and trauma, contributing to a radical rethinking of the meaning of apophatic language and images.

I want to consider here whether ancient apophatic mystical discourse can help us navigate and respond to the harrowing experiences of darkness and loss that have become so central to contemporary existence? And whether accounts of loss found in so much contemporary literary, poetic and political discourse can help us read these ancient mystical traditions with greater feeling and insight.

These questions emerged for me with particular force during the years I spent living in Argentina from 2013-15. The painful losses from the Argentine dictatorship (ca. 1976-83) were everywhere apparent, especially at a place called La Perla, an infamous detention camp a few miles outside of Córdoba where I spent a good deal of time with Argentine friends and colleagues and where conversations about those losses, often punctuated by halting silences, became a regular part of my life. It was also during this time that I returned to reading the work of John of Ruusbroec, the fourteenth century Flemish mystic who speaks in his Spiritual Espousals of a “dark silence in which all he loving are lost”--a depth of loss in the night that becomes the ground of what he calls “the common life,” a shared loss in which everyone claims some part.

I want to reflect here on what I learned from reading Ruusbroec in Argentina and ask what it might mean for us to articulate a contemporary mystical practice of loss and solidarity.

Douglas E. Christie is Professor Emeritus in the Theological Studies Department at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He is the author of The Word in The Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism (Oxford, 1993), The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Note for a Contemplative Ecology (Oxford, 2013), and The Insurmountable Darkness of Love: Mysticism, Loss and the Common Life (Oxford, 2022). He has been awarded fellowships from the Luce Foundation, the Lilly Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. From 2013-2015 he served as Co-director of the Casa de la Mateada study abroad program in Córdoba, Argentina, a program rooted in the Jesuit vision of education for solidarity. He lives with his family in Los Angeles. Otherwise you can usually find him wandering somewhere in the desert.