Women Mystics

Louis Bouyer, C.O.

The great theologian and spiritual writer, Bouyer, focusing on the lives and writings of five women mystics, shows that contrary to the modern idea that the supposed inferiority of women is an inheritance from Christianity, women have played a fundamental role in the Church. If the Church was able to pass beyond the collapse of medieval Scholasticism and the errors of the Renaissance and Protestant Reformation, it was especially due to a succession of exceptional feminine personalities.

Bouyer establishes this by studying those whose influence and sustained tradition, continually renewed, have been decisive in working an interior renaissance of which the Church has need of today as yesterday. He concentrates on Hadewijch of Antwerp, Teresa of Avila, Thérèse of Lisieux, Elizabeth of the Trinity, and Edith Stein, showing the striking, ever-creative continuity from one to the other. This book portrays how the prayer and interior life of each of these women has led modern Christians from idle speculations to the reality of the Christian experience in its purity and fecundity.