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Paul Klee, Movement of Vaulted Chambers, 1915, watercolor on paper mounted on cardboard, 23.5 x 28.3 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Berggruen Klee Collection.
Mysticism and Dei Verbum
Charles Hughes-Huff
Introduction
Dei Verbum’s legacy is a battlefield of interpretation. On one side stand those who stress the human authors of Scripture and confine its meaning to the historical horizon of language, culture, and context. On the other side are those who stress divine authorship and read the Bible theologically, through the lenses of canon and creed. Both camps claim the Council. Both aim to define how the Church reads.
Mystical theology approaches this debate from a slant. It does not deny history, nor does it collapse every word into doctrine. It begins with the letter, fragile and contingent, yet reads through it toward the eternal Word. For the mystics, Scripture is shadow and symbol, a path that discloses light beyond itself. Their reading does not settle the contest between history and theology. It reframes it by showing how both are caught up in the deeper question of revelation: how all words reveal the Word.
Dei Verbum
Historical-critical readings are vivid. Immersion in ancient languages, cultures, and contexts yields particular voices, sharp with their own theologies. Yet some critics push this line so far that theology itself is bracketed off. In their view, the Old Testament cannot bear a christological reading. To find Christ there is naïve—fit for parish piety but not responsible exegesis.
Canon-centered readings move the other way. They gather Scripture’s diverse threads into coherent theological reflection. At their best, they recognize canonization as an ecclesial act, unity emerging from diversity. But apologetic versions trade one reduction for another. They accept the terms of historical criticism, then trim the Old Testament to fit New Testament frameworks, often a narrow reading of Paul’s critique of the law. They honor the human authors in theory, but in practice they ventriloquize them.
These debates begin in Dei Verbum’s section on Scripture (DV 11–13) rather than its opening chapter on revelation (DV 2–6). Revelation is first and finally Jesus Christ, the Eternal Son (2). Salvation history (2–4), Scripture (2–4), even creation itself (3) are words of God only as mediated by this Word. This revelation can only be seen by faith through the help of the Holy Spirit (5), for the revelation is “divine treasures which totally transcend the understanding of the human mind” (6). The Incarnate Word is fullness; all else is shadow.
Mystical theology knows this point by heart. Its warp and woof is the relation of Scripture, liturgy, and cosmos to the Son. The letter is historical, contingent, fragile, and yet charged. It conceals and reveals. It is shadow, yet it opens onto light.
Early Christian Mysticism
The Catholic mystical tradition distinguishes between historical referents and spiritual ones. For Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, the Old Testament has a literal sense and historical meaning. In Origen’s commentary on the Song of Songs, he distinguishes carefully between reading the Old Testament as a hidden promise of Christ to the Church and reading it as the soul’s relation to the Eternal Son.
So, for instance, while Origen does favor the spiritual, allegorical reading of Scripture, he does not do so by claiming historical authors knew of whom they spoke. On the contrary; he thinks their words created longing even in their first readers for what they had not yet received. He says that the Song of Songs, the height of mystical truth and the place of his deepest reading of Christ and the Church and the soul and the Son of God, was written as a kind of romantic play by Solomon for his bride on their wedding day. Solomon had no idea, in Origen’s view, that the spiritual sense of the Song of Songs pointed to Christ. Nor could anyone else have known until the Son of God incarnated in human flesh.
But for Origen, seeing Christ in the Old Testament’s prophecies or in the Song of Songs was not only a matter of re-reading after Christ was manifest. It of course involved that, but the Incarnation also revealed what is most real about the world. Origen thought that the Old Testament with its words, images, stories, and oracles is a platonic shadow cast by the real light of the Son, who is more real than anything in the Bible. To be clear: while the Old Testament presents types and shadows made manifest in the Incarnation described in the New Testament, for Origen and Nyssa this always concerns the Son of God, the Word. The New Testament uniquely witnesses to the Incarnate Son, but it does not establish the image of which the Old Testament is a type. The Son of God is the light to which all Scripture points in varying degrees. Human language and historical knowledge are shadows beside God’s unending light. Scripture is a true shadow, but still a shadow; it points to the Word beyond human words. Neither solution of constraining the theology of Scripture to what the human authors knew, in a historicist frame, nor insisting that the human authors knew what they could not have known before the Incarnation, in an apologetic frame, would have made sense to them. For these mystics, reading Scripture was not a way to infer theological arguments from historically contingent language. Reading and study of Scripture—including Origen’s comparison of ancient manuscripts—was a way of experiencing the Son.
Gregory of Nyssa saw that Scripture sometimes in its literal sense appears to sanction what is unethical or even portrays God as speaking unethically. Gregory calls such passages enigmas that push the reader toward the text’s deeper mysteries. He sees spiritual reading of these dilemmas as “worthy of God” (θεοπρεπές), an adjective Origen and Gregory also use to describe the Incarnation itself. Gregory does not rescue the text by insisting on its historical and ethical positivity. He begins with the letter but insists it must be sublated into what must be true about God. Again we see an overt dialectic: Gregory’s ethics do not derive, line by line, from the literal sense of Scripture but transform the text even as the text transforms him.
Since the Scripture leads from shadow to light, it also transforms the soul. For Gregory this entails shedding illusion by contemplating truth. Careful attention to Scripture guides the soul in both action and contemplation. Such attention becomes an experience of light that carries the soul into further stages of union with the Son. In his profound book on the life of Moses, Nyssa describes the soul leaving the darkness of vice for the light of contemplation like Moses at the burning bush—but only as a beginning. The next step is Moses’ entry into the first cloud at Sinai, where he learns how paltry not only the senses but even the intellect are in speaking of God. Even good images of God may become idols, and these must be discarded, actively and contemplatively, as well. Moses ascends once more, into the darkest cloud, and there, in absence of light, asks to see God. In this cloud, thought, action, and contemplation cease, and all that remains is desire for God. Only God can give a glimpse—first denied, then partially given—of joy beyond measure yet never complete. The finite human can only receive God in love and yet long all the more. This grace bridges, in part, the unbridgeable gap between God and creatures, but only as infinity always satisfies the finite while soaring beyond it. Scripture provides the cloud, but the truth within the cloud is the heavenly Tabernacle, the Eternal Son.
To see why Scripture’s language both gives truth and leads beyond it, the best guide is the most famous—and most mischaracterized—proponent of negative theology, Pseudo-Dionysius. What Gregory of Nyssa relates about the soul’s journey, Dionysius applies to scriptural and liturgical language about God. He begins with natural and concrete images such as “God is a rock.” The mystic first considers the meaning and beauty of this claim. For Pseudo-Dionysius, such names speak truth and illumine those who attend to them. Yet the reader must then take a further step: “God is not a rock.” This negation is equally important, and the movement from one to the other shapes mystical formation. Both are necessary.
Pseudo-Dionysius multiplies, amplifies, and glories in concrete names for God throughout his works. In every case, even with claims like “God is perfect,” a turn is required: “God is beyond perfection.” God is ὁ ὑπερούσιος θεός—God beyond being. His goodness surpasses any human notion of good. Yet this negation does not null the truth of revelatory language. In Scripture and liturgy, human words symbolize real experience of God beyond being (as in Nyssa, only by grace). Negative language, too, remains human language. This point is not to escape theological language but to move beyond both affirmation and denial toward the one who transcends them.
Some theologians stress only the negative side of Dionysius’s dialectic. But the divine names themselves lead deeper. They not only reveal but also transform.
In their rhythm of light and shadow, affirmation and denial, Dionysius builds a symbolic world: images, radiant shadows, sacramental signs, all ordered to draw the soul upward.
Early mystics, then, do not fit neatly into modern debates on Scripture. They face the problem of historical contingency yet find in the words of Scripture a path that rises beyond it. This transcendence does not rest on a human author’s grasp of the Eternal Son. The mystics find in Scripture’s language a light no history can constrain.
The Medieval Littera
A twelfth-century renaissance led to the translation and reading of older texts throughout Europe, which was no less important for monks than for scholars. Medievals translated and commented on Psuedo-Dionysius especially, and took up not only Pseudo-Dionysius’s negative theology, but his multiplication of Scriptural images as symbols. This can be seen in the writings of Hildegard of Bingen, who wrote and commentated on her visions in Scivias. They bristle with scriptural language. She paints the cosmos in biblical hues, with Christ at the center.
For Hildegard, Scripture is the brightest rung in the ladder of creation. Stones, herbs, and stars mediate divine truth in nature; biblical images mediate it in revelation. The two “books” are companions, written in the same hand.
In Scivias she begins with a scriptural figure—the bride, the mountain, the temple—and unfolds it into cosmic vision. These figures are not metaphors but symbols that transform the soul: “As the soul is hidden in the body, so the Word of God is hidden in the words of Scripture. And as the body shows forth the soul by its movements, so Scripture shows forth the Word through the figures of words.” Scripture itself is the sacrament of the Logos.
Hildegard’s liturgy echoes Pseudo-Dionysius’s emphasis on hymning God-beyond-being, the richest use of human language. In hymns she turns biblical figures into song: Mary the green branch (O viridissima virga), Christ the blazing light (O ignis Spiritus Paracliti), the Spirit fiery harmony (O virtus Sapientiae). Each image, being sung, draws the soul upward. This Neoplatonic sacramental ontology means her Scriptural images participate in divine truth. They mediate the invisible through the visible and aim at transformation. Reading and singing Scripture becomes conversion: lectio divina as epistrophē, the soul’s turn back to God.
For Hildegard’s French contemporaries at St. Victor, the relationship between book, creation, and divine light meant reading itself (of any literature) could be mystical practice. Hugh and his students at St. Victor cared deeply for the littera— the historical, literal sense, pursued even with the help of Parisian Rabbis. Hugh knew its difficulty and the rigor it demanded. In a dialectical metaphor, he writes of the Bible’s surface as rough terrain. He points out that one cannot build a spiritual sense on such terrain at the moment of interpretation. A spiritual sense cannot be built on such ground unless the foundation is carefully laid. Trinitarian doctrine, piece by piece, must be fitted to the text’s contours to form a stable structure for spiritual interpretation. Following Augustine, Hugh regards the letter itself as an object of reverence, truly perceived only by the spiritual person willing to labor at this work. In meditating on the letter of Scripture—and even on secular texts—the monk opens to contemplation of the truth inaccessible. Text thus opens to mysteries, and reading becomes a mystification opening rather than obscuring.
It is the St. Victor student Thomas Gallus, however, who most fully recontextualizes a mystical-Platonic tradition. He developed a Christology of the Word (verbum), synthesizing Dionysius with Augustine’s analogy between the eternal Word and human speech. Sacred texts manifest the Word through mystical language—deliberately ambiguous, reflecting experiences of union that surpass the intellect. The soul’s speech in such moments is a kind of babble, born of participation in the Word, yet capable of moving others and even touching the Word.
In his vision of the soul’s ascent, Gallus uses Dionysius’s angelic hierarchies to map the powers of the mind. The highest orders—Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim—become places of passive reception of grace. When the soul passes the cherubim, all language falls away. The deepest union of soul and God is found in silent love.
If Gallus maps the soul’s ascent in Dionysian hierarchies, contemporary Bernard of Clairvaux turns again to shadows—whether in the Old Testament or in Christ’s own flesh—showing how desire carries the soul through them to the Son. Like Origen, Bernard sees the shadow as a positive image, a shade in the vale. But he knows that beyond this world there lies a greater hope. As a soul progresses from love to love, the image leads through desire to the Son beyond them:
For indeed, whereas among the ancients we say that there existed a shadow and a mere figure, but for us, through the grace of Christ, the truth itself shines forth in the flesh of the present by itself; so too, we will not deny that we live in a certain interim truth shadow with respect to the future age…Therefore the righteous shall live by faith (Habakkuk 2:4), the blessed exult in appearance; and therefore the holy man lives in the shadow of Christ in the interim, while the holy angel boasts in the brightness of the glory of his face.
For Bernard, “his shadow is his flesh; his shadow is faith.” Christ’s flesh, in the Eucharist, overshadows believers. Faith is a shadow cast by direct experience of divine majesty. One does not stop at the shadows: “The first thing is to come to the shadow, and then to pass on to that of which it is the shadow.”
Conclusion
Reading mystical theology approaches the debate over Dei Verbum’s interpretation obliquely. Mystical theology does not deny history, nor does it collapse every text into doctrine. Instead, it treats the words of Scripture as shadows of uncreated light, leading beyond themselves to the Eternal Son. This conviction is rooted not in the meaning of texts as they were written; nor in the meaning of texts as interpreted by a community making sense of its life; nor in hidden meanings of the texts present in the words but only discerned after the Incarnation in history. Rather, this conviction stems from the fact that the Son of God is the realest reality, as Gregory puts it, and Scripture only understandable as the Word of God inasmuch as it participates in him.
All Scripture is a good shadow; all words symbols, destined to fall away when the believer has experienced the Light directly.
The mystics read not only to understand but to encounter God. In Scripture’s figures they glimpse the radiance of Christ. Its symbolic world reshapes their vision of life, cosmos, and the divine. Its images kindle theology, animate prayer, and shape contemplation. Scripture itself is transfigured—taken up into mystical vision and theological reflection. Essential, but not ultimate; indispensable, yet always ordered beyond itself. Like creation, Scripture becomes a sacrament of the Logos: mediating light through shadow, figure through flesh, sound through silence.
Such an approach does not discard historical-critical study, nor does it require a rigid schema that flattens Scripture’s diversity. The letter’s rough terrain neither confines interpretation nor guarantees doctrinal fullness. Dei Verbum argues that neither Scripture alone, nor tradition, but only both together form a sacred deposit from the wellspring of the Word of God Incarnate (DV 6; 10). Revelation is the person of Christ, the Word made flesh. Scripture and tradition are modes of this one Word, interpenetrating in Christ so that theology has no single point of access, and there is no foundational method apart from him. Both are shadows of the Light, sacraments of the Logos, revelatory only insofar as they disclose the Son. Mystical reading, then, emphasizes encounter: it invites a mystification of the text that does not obscure but opens, cultivating awe, curiosity, attention, and love.
Charles Hughes-Huff
Charles Hughes-Huff is Associate Professor of Scripture Studies at Sacred Heart Seminary and School of Theology. He writes about mysticism and the Bible at inmediamabul.substack.com and hosts the podcast History and Dogma with Jordan Daniel Wood.
104. Origen, The Song of Songs: Commentary and Homilies, trans. R. P. Lawson, Ancient Christian Writers 26 (New York: Newman Press, 1957), I:1–3 (58ff).
105. Origen, On First Principles, trans. John Behr, Oxford Early Christian Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), II.9.3; Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, trans. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), II.163.
106. Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs, II.8.
107. Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Song of Songs, trans. Richard A. Norris Jr., Writings from the Greco-Roman World 13 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012), prol.
108. Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Song of Songs, Homily 11.
109. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses, II.231–239.
110. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses, II.162.
111. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses, II.164–169.
112. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses,, II.230–239.
113. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), I.7.
114. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, XIII.1.
115. Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927).
116. Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Columba Hart and Jane Bishop, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1990).
117. Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, II.2.
118. Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, I.2.2.
119. Each can be found in Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia: A Critical Edition of the Symphonia Armonie Celestium Revelationum, ed. and trans. Barbara Newman, 2nd ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).
120. Hugh of St. Victor, The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts, trans. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), VI.3.
121. Hugh of St. Victor, The Didascalicon, VI.4.
122. See Craig Tichelkamp, The Mystified Letter: How Medieval Theology Can Reenchant the Practice of Reading (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2023), 25–27.
123. See Craig Tichelkamp, The Mystified Letter, 83–125.
124. Thomas Gallus, Explanatio in Canticum Canticorum, in Thomas Gallus: Explanations of the Songs of Songs, ed. and trans. Boyd Taylor Coolman (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2017), esp. prol. and hom. 1.
125. Thomas Gallus, Super Dionysii Mysticam Theologiam et Epistolas, in Thomas Gallus: Selected Works, trans. Boyd Taylor Coolman (New York: Paulist Press, 2018), esp. Expositio in mysticam theologiam §§11–12.
126. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, sermo 31.8, in Sancti Bernardi Opera, vol. 2, ed. Jean Leclercq, C.H. Talbot, and H.M. Rochais (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1958), 112–13. My translation.
127. Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs II, trans. Kilian Walsh and Irene Edmonds, CF 31 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1983), 13–15. See Isaac Slater, OCSO, Beyond Measure: The Poetics of the Image in Bernard of Clairvaux, CF 279 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2020), 34–35.