Philip Sheldrake is professor and director of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Spirituality at Oblate School of Theology, San Antonio, Texas.  Sheldrake has written extensively on mysticism and spirituality and previously served as president of the international Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality. 

Citing Karl Rahner’s well-known statement that “the devout Christian of the future will either be a ‘mystic,’ one who has experienced ‘something,’ or he will cease to be anything at all,” Sheldrake believes that everyone is oriented toward the transcendent and that Rahner’s comment applies not only to Christianity but to other world religions. The current fascination with mysticism, he believes, lies in the desire to transcend boundaries and “experience a sense of union with other people or with the natural world” (p. 5). Additionally, Sheldrake thinks that people today are seeking something deeper than simply a purely material existence.  Mysticism seems to offer that “something.”

Unlike William James’ concept of a universal religious experience (a “pure consciousness event”) that exists prior to any specific belief system, Sheldrake argues that any theory of mysticism must begin not with an abstract essence but rather with the specific “personalities, historical moments, and cultural-religious contexts” (p  9). This background creates the “boundaries within which such experiences take place” (p. 27). Additionally, mysticism must concern itself with language and not simply abstract spiritual experiences. While acknowledging the importance of the apophatic approach to mysticism, Sheldrake argues that the use of images and the imagination (the kataphatic approach) keeps our understanding of God rooted in Scripture and our everyday experiences and relationships. This assures that mysticism is not simply an interior experience but rather reaches out into the practical areas of life.

The heart of this book is Sheldrake’s five approaches to mysticism.  Each category includes a description, examples, and ways in which the approach is evident in religions other than Christianity (Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism). The five approaches, with a few of his exemplars from Christianity, are:

1. Love and Desire (Song of Songs, “bridal mysticism,” Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross).
2. Knowing and Unknowing (Pseudo-Dionysius, hesychasm, Gregory Palamas, the Jesus Prayer, The Cloud of Unknowing, Meister Eckhart).
3. Beauty (Music, art, poetry, George Herbert, R.S. Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, the “nature mysticism” of Francis of Assisi, Thomas Traherne, Walt Whitman, Annie Dillard).
4. Mysticism and Everyday Practice (“Finding God in all things,” Ignatius Loyola, Dag Hammarskjold).
5. The Mystic as Radical Prophet (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Howard Thurman, Dorothee Solle, the writings of liberation theologians).  

 A World Transfigured is a fine introduction to the variety of approaches to mysticism in Christianity and other religions.  While the length of the book does not allow for expanded details, his taxonomy of the five different approaches to mysticism is a concise and useful classification for capturing the diversity of approaches to a complex subject.