Résumé
Résumé de Heures avec les mystiques
Go deeper: the whole of Heures avec les mystiques
About 18 h to read.À qui s’adresse-t-il ?
Readers drawn to religious history, philosophy and spiritual biography will love these dialogues. Those curious about Plotinus, Eckart, Tauler, Behmen and Madame Guyon will find inner experience and outward faith explored with care.
De quoi parle ce livre ?
What happens when three friends sit down after dinner, with a log fire crackling and the wind moaning round the house, and decide to study the dreamers who tried to melt into God? That is how Hours with the Mystics begins.
Robert Alfred Vaughan published it in 1856, a year before his death. He was a minister and writer who had studied in Germany and read mystics in many languages. He tells their history through talk, essays and an invented journal. You travel from India to Clairvaux, the Rhineland, Spain and the court of Louis the Fourteenth, and you get the main figures, their teachings and a fair judgment of each.
Dans ce résumé
- 1Three friends set out to study mysticismFree
- 2Mysticism means hidden, inward union with God
- 3India and Alexandria lay down the first pattern
- 4Later Neoplatonists trade speculation for magic
- 5Dionysius froze the Eastern Church in darkness
- 6Bernard and the Victorines join heart with learning
- 7Eckart preaches boldly in the Rhineland
- 8Tauler learns humility while plague tests faith
- 9After Luther, mysticism turns to nature's secrets
- 10Quietism ends in love, trial and judgment
Point clé 1 sur 10
Three friends set out to study mysticism
The book opens on a November evening at Ashfield House. Three friends sit over wine and walnuts while a log fire crackles. Henry Atherton, the host, is a rich scholar who fills his library with old chronicles. Lionel Gower is a young painter who once treated beauty as the whole of religion. Frank Willoughby is a bearded writer who was meant for the Church.
Atherton has seen a painting of a Spanish cathedral with a huge staircase climbing into darkness. Stone griffins crouch at its foot, and light and shadow alternate as the steps rise. He reads it as the mystic's road, from first terrors to a final loss of self in the Divine Dark.
The friends decide to study the mystics through history, since history tests every system by what it produces. They will judge mysticism by its fruits.
That’s 1 of 10 key points.
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Questions about Heures avec les mystiques
What is Hours with the Mystics about?
It is a history of mysticism told through talks between three friends at a country house. They trace the longing for direct union with God from India and Alexandria through medieval monks, German preachers and Spanish nuns to the Quietists of France.
Who are Atherton, Gower and Willoughby?
They are the three friends who carry the discussion. Atherton is a scholar and historian who owns Ashfield House, Gower is a painter, and Willoughby is a writer. Each reads papers and offers a different view of the mystics.
What does mysticism mean in this book?
The word comes from a Greek root for closing, meaning secret rites and later the closing of the senses. Vaughan uses it for a religion of inward feeling that takes the working of the mind for a divine voice.
Which mystics does the book cover?
It covers Plotinus, Dionysius, Bernard, Hugh and Richard of Saint Victor, Eckart, Tauler, Ruysbroek, Suso, Behmen, Saint Theresa, John of the Cross, Madame Guyon, Fenelon, the Quakers and Swedenborg.
Cite this edition
Vaughan, Robert Alfred. Hours with the Mystics. Library of Alexandria, 2026, libraryofalexandria.com/products/hours-with-the-mystics.
Vaughan, R. A. (2026). Hours with the mystics. Library of Alexandria. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/hours-with-the-mystics (Original work published 1856)
Vaughan, Robert Alfred. Hours with the Mystics. Library of Alexandria, 2026. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/hours-with-the-mystics.
@book{vaughan2026hours,
author = {Vaughan, Robert Alfred},
title = {Hours with the Mystics},
publisher = {Library of Alexandria},
year = {2026},
url = {https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/hours-with-the-mystics},
note = {First published 1856}
}
