Book summary
Trama e riassunto di Ore con i mistici
- 7 min di lettura
- 10 key ideas
- Audio a breve
Three friends over wine and walnuts, Atherton, Gower and Willoughby, trace mystics from Plotinus to Madame Guyon.
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Ore con i mistici in breve
Riassunto: 7 min di lettura
- Tempo di lettura
- Circa 17 h 30 min13 h 50 min fast, 20 h 45 min slow
- Durata
- 249.500 parole
- Livello nella biblioteca
- Impegnativo long sentences, a rich vocabulary
- Prima pubblicazione
- 1856by Robert Alfred Vaughan
Reading time at 238 words a minute (fast 300, slow 200). Quanto tempo ci vuole per leggere i classici · Aggiornato
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Ore con i mistici in short
Vaughan argues that mysticism is a hunger for direct union with God, and he follows it from India and Alexandria to Clairvaux, the Rhineland, Spain, France and England. The same pattern recurs. The seeker turns inward, strips away images and waits passively for light.
What Ore con i mistici is about
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.
A chi è rivolto. 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.
The 10 key ideas
Key idea 1 · free to read
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.
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Mysticism means hidden, inward union with God
The second discussion is about words.
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India and Alexandria lay down the first pattern
The story starts in India with the Bhagavad Gita and the Yogis, whose seated stillness aims at absorption into the divine.
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Later Neoplatonists trade speculation for magic
Porphyry joined the school of Plotinus as an opponent and became his most devoted student.
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Dionysius froze the Eastern Church in darkness
Around the fifth century, a writer calling himself Dionysius the Areopagite brought Neoplatonism into the Church.
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Bernard and the Victorines join heart with learning
In the West the book turns to Bernard of Clairvaux.
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Eckart preaches boldly in the Rhineland
For the fourteenth century, Vaughan changes method.
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Tauler learns humility while plague tests faith
Adolf watches Doctor John Tauler preach in Strasbourg in December 1339 on the highest perfection of this life.
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After Luther, mysticism turns to nature's secrets
Willoughby argues that the fourteenth-century mystics prepared the way for the Reformation by speaking German and by resisting Rome in Christ's name.
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Quietism ends in love, trial and judgment
Gower's papers cover Saint Theresa and Saint John of the Cross.
Read all 10 key ideas now
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Domande su Ore con i mistici
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.
Cita questa edizione
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}
}
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