SCHOLARSHIP

Introduction and Table of Contents | World Wisdom | Amazon

“This well-chosen collection of excerpts from spiritual writings in the Catholic, Protestant, Anglican, and Orthodox traditions offers abundant material for meditation. It is a book to be prayed as well as to be read. Professor Cutsinger has ordered his book in accordance with the traditional stages of spiritual progress: purgation, illumination, and union, thereby making it an initiation to spiritual life through its historical sources. This imaginative chrestomathy, which includes writers seldom found in the common canons of mystical literature, must be highly recommended for its successful attempt to render Christian piety of past ages a living source of contemporary inspiration.”

Louis Dupre, Yale University

“In this anthology Professor Cutsinger has prepared a mystical feast of a very high order. An astutely chosen, brilliantly edited bouquet of spiritual writings, Not of This World will likely produce an extraordinary effect on the attentive reader, for this is an anthology unlike any other. More than a mere collection of ‘wise sayings’ between two covers, this book is a catalogue to the curriculum of a higher school, a wardrobe to the land of true and everlasting knowledge, a hint of God’s own breath in the inner ear. It does not ask to be read like an ordinary book; it calls the reader himself to be reader, text, book, and truth in the experience of the ‘joyful instant’ of Christian gnosis. The last sentence of the book’s final selection says it all and says it best: ‘Reader, it is enough. But if thou still wouldst read, then be thyself the book, in thought, word, life, and deed.'”

Vincent Rossi,
Director of Education for the American Exarchate of the Jerusalem Patriarchate of the Orthodox Church

“Although there are numerous anthologies of Christian mysticism, I know of no other that offers such a rich and luminous selection. The great spiritual writers of the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant traditions appear, along with more obscure, but equally provocative, authors. Only a scholar like Cutsinger, as adept in philosophy as in mystical theology, could arrange so many jewels of wisdom with structure, beauty, and light.”

Robert Fastiggi, Sacred Heart Major Seminary