Abstract
George Matheson (1840–1906) is best known today as the author of the hymn ‘O love that wilt not let me go’. A prolific writer (who said of those verses that they were ‘the quickest bit of work I ever did in my life’ (p. 152)), he was minister of Innellan in Argyll (1868–86) and of St Bernard’s, Edinburgh (1886–99).
Scottish Presbyterians, with their Calvinist tradition, are not often associated with mysticism. Yet Scott McKenna, in this published version of his doctorate on Matheson for the University of St Andrews in 2018, suggests that this is the most illuminating lens through which to view Matheson’s life and work. It is indeed an appropriate category, given the spiritual yearning of Matheson’s writing and his strong sense of the divine suffusing all things. As McKenna rightly notes, Matheson followed the idealist and panentheist train of his Hegelian tutor John Caird (p. 110, on whom McKenna wrote his master’s thesis). After introducing the concept of mysticism, McKenna outlines Matheson’s biography (Chapter 1) and his early crisis of faith (Chapter 2), before treating four themes of Matheson’s literary output: evolution (Chapter 3), union (Chapter 4), ‘inner life, silence and immortality’ (Chapter 5), and ‘self-forgetfulness’ (Chapter 6).
It may be less commonly known that Matheson was blind. Drawing on the theologian John Hull, McKenna suggests that Matheson’s mystical antennae were all the more spiritually attuned by his physical blindness, which intensified his consciousness and imaginative discernment. Not unlike the apostle Paul, whose Christian convictions arose during a condition of sightlessness (pp. 119–20), Matheson seems to have been able to glimpse the mystery of God particularly in the darkness that enveloped him (pp. 16, 19, 111–14).
The aim of McKenna’s project is highly commendable, while its execution involves some flaws. There are some glitches in the references, and unfortunately no index is provided, nor is any indication given of what (if anything) might remain of Matheson’s papers and the potential for archival work. For example, McKenna alludes (p. 32) to a manuscript which Matheson had prepared and would have used for the Gifford Lectures, had he not declined the invitation to deliver them through ill-health, but whether or not this is still extant is left untold. Moreover, the supporting literature is thin, and tends to be worked through from beginning to end an item at a time, so that analysis remains more descriptive than evaluative, and integration with the mystical tradition does not penetrate far below the surface. Even Matheson’s own bibliography is not compiled comprehensively. McKenna numbers Matheson among the early British kenoticists (pp. 181–92) but not among the early British passibilists, perhaps because the text in which Matheson referred to the suffering of God, Words by the Wayside (James Clarke and Co., 1896), is one of the works not listed or consulted here. Finally, there is little critique of Matheson in considering his relevance for contemporary theology. For instance, there is no mention of the well-rehearsed feminist objection to Christian self-emptying in the section that sets out Matheson’s emphasis on the need for surrender and sacrifice. So overall, this study is not as sharp as it might otherwise have been.