The chronicler of mystical experience labors at a distinct disadvantage as a memoirist. After all, by definition, spiritual transcendence resides beyond story. It is even beyond words. That is its point or at least its strongest claim: that it cannot be described. But since when did "the indescribable" ever stop a writer?
The most convincing and enduring testaments of mystical union in the Christian tradition turn for a method -- it seems instinctively and against the let-me-be-lost-in-you-oh-Lord claims of the writer -- to the ways and means of autobiography. Perhaps it must be so. On this subject, personal experience alone is authority and intimate testimony the only thing that counts as expertise. No detached investigator can assess and no objective journalist can accurately "report" on transcendence. We're stuck with the claim of the first-person account.
Autobiography, a form that in our day bristles with sharply secular and psychological concerns, traces its literary taproot to St. Augustine's attempt, begun in 397, to struggle the angel of mystical union onto the mat of the page in his "Confessions." Nor is he alone. The history of Western autobiography is punctuated by such religious accounts, as if the very insubstantiality of spiritual life were, paradoxically, the real subject of any examined life, the engine powering every personal story.
After St. Augustine, there is the "great" St. Teresa of Avila's autobiography, another classic of Western autobiographical literature. In modern times, the slim "The Story of a Soul" by St. Therese of Lisieux ("The Little Flower," as she is known, to distinguish her more childlike spirituality from that of the mature Teresa) remains a perennial bestseller. The personal accounts of such unsettling 20th century mystics as Simone Weil and Edith Stein also retain a hold over the imaginations of readers. Describing the indescribable by using their own lives as their only evidence, these spiritual writers cannot stray far from personal testimony. Augustine, Teresa, Therese, Stein, Weil -- all mystics, all memoirists.
