Our approach to the development of Western Christian apophatic theology has thus far been severely and narrowly textual, an approach which would have very little justification were our purposes otherwise than with theoretical issues, specifically of the relationship between a metaphorical discourse and the ontological and epistemological conditions of its employment; moreover, with theoretical issues raised by works in the genre of the ‘high’, technical theological treatise. Had our concerns been with popular piety and spirituality, or with texts written for specific readerships less academically equipped than were their authors, or with texts responsive to immediate and historically specific circumstances, it could not have been seriously proposed to examine them without reference to those historical contingencies. But since Denys and Augustine, Hugh of St Victor, Gallus and Bonaventure wrote their most influential works of spirituality without any conscious sense of occasion and as set-pieces intended to stand on their own, it has been at least possible, if not in every way desirable, to consider them in those terms in which they were written.

In the early fourteenth century, however, the apophatic tradition becomes for the first time in its long Christian history embodied in formulations which are regarded with suspicion of heresy. Though it is possible to consider these formulations without regard to their contemporary reception or to the historical conditions which determine it, it is rather less easy to justify doing so. Two cases stand out, those of Marguerite Porete and of Meister Eckhart.