Martin, Dennis D. [translator]. Carthusian Spirituality: The Writings of Hugh of Balma and Guigo de Ponte (Classics of Western Spirituality). Mahwah, New York: Paulist Press, 1997. ISBN: 9780809104802. [8136]
Quarter orange cloth with printed boards, 6 x 9 inches, binding fine with white spine label, ex college library with standard library matter within including ink call numbers on the title page. The book appears nearly new apart from the library additions. Very good. Hardcover.
"Mystical theology - these words resonate still in many contemporary minds and hearts. They suggest teachings at once systematic and attractive, a paradoxical effort to render verbally an ineffable human experience of the divine. The texts in this volume, two thirteenth-century Carthusian works ably translated by Dennis Martin, will probably surprise modern readers. They to not cater to the vague notions of the "mystical," breathy intimations of an invisible or immaterial reality hawked in brightly colored paperback arrayed in the religious section of mass-market bookstores. These medieval Carthusian texts put down in writing, first of all, practices meant to discipline the spiritual life of a few hermits - and any others who could read the Latin prose or benefit from its teachings. The authors aimed, second, to render mentally intelligible an extraordinary human experience of the divine, however difficult their consequent exposition. They did this by way of commenting on a difficult text ascribed to a figure from the apostolic age of the church, Pseudo-Dionysius's little work On Mystical Theology.