One of my former students, Elissa Cutter, is moving forward on her doctoral dissertation. Hers is an unteresting thesis: Mother Angelique Arnauld as a mystic and a theologian.
Teresa of Jesus is recognized as such, but Angelique is neglected or ostracized, and I think that is mainly due to the actions of her brothers Antoine and Henri who tended to politicize and polemicize. That turned the reflections of Cornelius Jansen into a feared ISM. How much did that have to do with Mere Angelique, who was a reforming Abbess and leader of a flourishing monastery at Port Royal? It will be refreshing to have a good look at Angelique in her own right.
Elissa comments that Mother Angelique can be a good model for women theologians today, and comments that if she is indeed a theologian and a mystic, this is not the norm for theologians, women or men, today.
Of course, one of the reasons why most theologians today are not mystics goes back to the conferences of ISSY, and the fear that the Sun King and his episcopal agents had for anything mystical. That had a very heavy effect on Catholic life and practice, devotion, and theology as well. For several centuries there was little theologizing happening in the West: only the safe reporting of doctrine through manuals. It is only in the last decades that theology has had a rebirth. With that there has been a new respect for contemplative prayer and mysticism. Hopefully we'll get these things together again, and link them with pastoral guidance too, as was so typical of the early centuries.
It would be a wonderful move toward true renewal.
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