By Dave Armstrong (3-10-14)
[from
public domain Internet
writings:
Wikipedia,
The
Catholic Encyclopedia
(1913), and descriptions from the Christian
Classics Ethereal Library
website: source of most of the books used in this collection]
St. Bernard of
Clairvaux (1090-1153) / On Loving God:
Cistercian and Doctor of the Church
Bernard of Clairvaux, O.Cist was a French abbot and the primary builder of
the reforming Cistercian order. He had a great taste for literature
and devoted himself for some time to poetry. He wanted to excel in
literature in order to take up the study of the Bible.
Bernard
would expand upon St. Anselm of Canterbury's role in transmuting the
sacramentally ritual Christianity of the Early Middle Ages into a
new, more personally held faith, with the life of Christ as a model
and a new emphasis on the Virgin Mary. Rather than the more rational
approach to divine understanding that the scholastics adopted,
Bernard would preach an immediate faith.
St.
Bernard was named a Doctor of the Church in 1830. At the 800th
anniversary of his death, Ven. Pope Pius XII issued an encyclical on
Bernard, Doctor
Mellifluus,
in which he labeled him “The Last of the Fathers.” Bernard did
not reject human philosophy which is genuine and leads to God; he
differentiates between different kinds of knowledge, the highest
being theological.
He
was instrumental in re-emphasizing the importance of Lectio
Divina
and contemplation on Scripture within the Cistercian order. Bernard
had observed that when Lectio
Divina
was neglected monasticism suffered, and considered Lectio
Divina
and contemplation guided by the Holy Spirit the keys to nourishing
Christian spirituality.
His
mystical treatise, De
diligendo Dei
(On
Loving God),
possibly written around 1128, outlines seven stages of ascent leading
to union with God, and urges the reader to love God without measure.
He surveys the four types of love that Christians
experience as they grow in their relationship with God: loving one's
self, selfish love, loving God as God, and loving one's self in God.
He reminds us that not only did God give us life, but He gave us
Himself, and that we are indebted to God for his love and His
sacrifice.
Not only should we love God because
it is what He deserves, but also because loving God does not go
without reward. Loving God is to our advantage. The Lord rewards
those who love Him with the blessed state of heaven, where sorrow and
sadness cannot enter. St. Bernard's medieval prose is poetic and full
of clever imagery. His work is as beautiful as it is knowledgeable.
St. Bonaventure (c. 1217-1274) / The Mind's Road to God: Franciscan and Doctor of the Church
Bonaventure,
O.F.M.; born Giovanni di Fidanza, was an Italian medieval scholastic
theologian and philosopher. The seventh Minister General of the Order
of Friars Minor, he was also a Cardinal Bishop of Albano. He was
canonised on 14 April 1482 by Pope Sixtus IV and declared a Doctor of
the Church in the year 1588 by Pope Sixtus V. He is known as the
“Seraphic Doctor” (Latin: Doctor
Seraphicus),
and was ranked along with Thomas Aquinas as the
greatest of the Doctors of the Church by another Franciscan, Pope
Sixtus V, in 1587. Bonaventure was regarded as one of the greatest
philosophers of the Middle Ages.
He
steered the Franciscans on a moderate and intellectual course that
made them the most prominent order in the Catholic Church until the
coming of the Jesuits. His theology was marked by an attempt
completely to integrate faith and reason. He thought of Christ as the
“one true master” who offers humans knowledge that begins in
faith, is developed through rational understanding, and is perfected
by mystical union with God.
A
master of the memorable phrase, Bonaventure held that philosophy
opens the mind to at least three different routes humans can take on
their journey to God. Non-intellectual material creatures he
conceived as shadows and vestiges (literally, footprints) of God,
understood as the ultimate cause of a world philosophical reason can
prove was created at a first moment in time.
Intellectual
creatures he conceived of as images and likenesses of God, the
workings of the human mind and will leading us to God understood as
illuminator of knowledge and donor of grace and virtue. The final
route to God is the route of being, in which Bonaventure brought
Anselm's argument together with Aristotelian and Neoplatonic
metaphysics to view God as the absolutely perfect being.
Many
historians, theologians, and philosophers consider Bonaventure’s
essay, The
Mind's Road to God
a masterpiece among the shorter works of medieval philosophy. It
contains Bonaventure’s interpretation of a vision St. Francis of
Assisi had. In the vision, St. Francis receives the wounds of Christ
from a six-winged seraph. The six wings symbolized six steps along
the road to perfection and the divine. The steps or stages he details
integrates the Neoplatonic hierarchy of being with Christian doctrine
concerning God’s relationship with his creation.
Blessed John of
Ruysbroeck (c. 1293-1381): priest
John of Ruysbroeck (Dutch: Jan van Ruusbroec, Jan or Johannes van
Ruysbroeck), was one of the Flemish mystics. From 1318
until 1343 he served as a parish priest at St Gudula. He led a life
of extreme austerity and retirement. After John’s death in 1381,
his relics were carefully preserved and his memory honoured as that
of a saint. After his death, stories called him the Ecstatic
Doctor or Divine Doctor. He was beatified on 1 December
1908, by Pope St. Pius X.
Literally, Ruysbroeck wrote as the spirit moved him. He loved to
wander and meditate in the solitude of the forest adjoining the
cloister; he was accustomed to carry a tablet with him, and on this
to jot down his thoughts as he felt inspired so to do. Late in life
he was able to declare that he had never committed aught to writing
save by the motion of the Holy Ghost.
In
his dogmatic writings he explains, illustrates, and enforces
traditional teachings with remarkable force and lucidity. In his
ascetic works, his favourite virtues are detachment, humility and
charity; he loves to dwell on such themes as flight from the world,
meditation upon the Life, especially the Passion of Christ,
abandonment to the Divine Will, and an intense personal love of God.
In common with most of the German mystics Ruysbroeck starts from God
and comes down to man, and thence rises again to God, showing how the
two are so closely united as to become one.
Ruysbroeck
insisted that the soul finds God in its own depths, and noted three
stages of progress in what he called the spiritual ladder of
Christian attainment: (1) the active life, (2) the inward life, (3)
the contemplative life. He did not teach the fusion of the self in
God, but held that at the summit of the ascent the soul still
preserves its identity.
In
relation to the contemplative life, he held that three attributes
should be acquired: The first is spiritual freedom from worldly
desires (“as empty of every outward work as if he did not work at
all”), the second is a mind unencumbered with images (“inward
silence”), and the third is a feeling of inward union with God
(“even as a burning and glowing fire which can never more be
quenched”).
Blessed
John Ruysbroeck's writings are considered classics of spirituality,
anticipating the writings of St. John of the Cross in their clarity
and doctrine. He strongly opposed the quietist tendencies of many of
his contemporaries, and his books are lucid commentaries on the
Augustinian doctrine of the life of grace.
Adornment
of the Spiritual Marriage
is a study of the Bible's metaphor of Christ as the Bridegroom and
the church as the Bride, a “marriage” that produces perfect
union. Union with God is also the theme of The
Sparkling Stone
and The
Book of Supreme Truth,
which describe several mystical levels of union with God in which the
human body and mind are forgotten.
Blessed
John Ruysbroeck is known for having an extraordinary propensity for
theology and philosophy, and his works exhibit his great mind. These
classic pieces of spiritual literature are rife with imagistic
language and readers will be in awe of this spiritual giant's mind.
Blessed Henry Suso (1295-1366): Dominican
Henry Suso, O.P. (also called Amandus, a name adopted in his writings, and
Heinrich Seuse in German), was a German Dominican friar, who was a
noted spiritual writer and mystic. He was beatified by the Catholic
Church in 1831 by Pope Gregory XVI. Suso was widely
read in the later Middle Ages.
In
the prologue to his Life, Suso recounts how, after about five
years in the monastery (in other words, when about 18 years old), he
had experienced a conversion to a deeper form of religious life
through the intervention of Divine Wisdom. He made himself “the
Servant of the Eternal Wisdom”, which he identified with the divine
essence and, in a concrete form, with the personal Eternal Wisdom
made human. Henceforth a burning love for the Eternal Wisdom
dominated his thoughts and controlled his actions.
Suso often subjected himself to
extreme forms of mortifications, which he prudently moderated in
maturer years, and bore with rare patience corporal afflictions,
bitter persecutions, and grievous calumnies.
The mutual love of God and man
which is his principal theme gives warmth and colour to his style.
His intellectual equipment was characteristic of the Scholastic
theologians of his age. In his doctrine there was never the least
trace of an unorthodox tendency. Suso is the poet of the early
mystic movement. His faith is purely medieval in tone, inspired by
the romanticism of the age of chivalry.
C. H. McKenna, in his introduction
to A Little Book of Eternal Wisdom stated: “It would
be difficult to speak too highly of this little book or of its
author. In soundness of teaching, sublimity of thought, clearness of
expression, and beauty of illustration, we do not know of a spiritual
writer that surpasses Henry Suso.”
Johannes Tauler (c.
1300-1361): Dominican
Johannes Tauler, O.P., was a German mystic, preacher and theologian: one of the
greatest of the Middle Ages. He belonged to the Dominican order, and
was known as one of the most important Rhineland Mystics. He promoted
a certain neo-platonist dimension in spirituality.
In
Basel, around 1339-1343, he became acquainted with the circles of
devout clergy and laity known as the Friends of God (Gottesfreunde).
Tauler mentions the Friends of God often in his sermons. Influenced
by this group, he taught that the state of the soul was
affected more by a personal relationship with God than by external
practices.
Tauler left no formal treatises,
either in Latin or the vernacular. Rather, we have around eighty of
his sermons, which began to be collected during his lifetime. They
were considered among the noblest in the German language: intensely
practical, and touching on all sides the deeper problems of the moral
and spiritual life. They are full of fervour and of profound
spiritual feeling. The language is quiet and measured, yet warm,
animated, and full of imagery. His sermons warmed and inflamed the
hearts of his hearers by the quiet flame of the pure love that burned
in his own breast.
The centre of Tauler's mysticism is
the doctrine of the visio essentioe Dei, the blessed
contemplation or knowledge of the Divine nature. He takes this
doctrine from Thomas Aquinas, but goes further than the latter in
believing that the Divine knowledge is attainable in this world also
by a perfect man, and should be sought by every means. God dwells
within each human being. In order, however, that the transcendent God
may appear in man as a second subject, the human, sinful activities
must cease. Aid is given in this effort by the light of grace which
raises nature far above itself. The way to God is through love; God
replies to its highest development by His presence. Tauler gives
advice of the most varied character for attaining that height of
religion in which the Divine enters into the human subject.
Tauler was entirely medieval (i.e.,
Catholic) in spirit and never thought of withdrawing his allegiance
to the Catholic Church. He expresses his opinion very plainly in his
sermon on St. Matthew.
Walter Hilton (c.
1340/45 -1396): Augustinian
WalterHilton was an English Augustinian mystic, probably educated at
Cambridge.
The
first book of his most influential work: The Scale
[or, Ladder]
of Perfection, is addressed to a woman recently enclosed as an
anchoress, providing her with appropriate spiritual exercises; the
bulk of its ninety-three chapters deal with the extirpation of the
“foul image of sin” in the soul – the perversion of the image
of the Trinity in the three spiritual powers of Mind, Reason and Will
(reflecting the Father, Son and Holy Spirit respectively, according
to a tradition drawn from St Augustine) – through a series of
meditations on the seven deadly sins.
The second book seems from its
style and content rather to be addressed to a larger, perhaps more
sophisticated audience; its major themes are the reformation of the
soul in faith and in both faith and feeling. This latter is described
in an extended metaphor as a spiritual journey to Jerusalem, or
“peace” in meditation, a gift which is also its own giver,
Christ.
Hilton's spiritual writings were
influential during the fifteenth century in England. The Scale
of Perfection survives in some sixty-two manuscripts, and was
first work originally written in English to circulate on the European
continent (in Latin translation).
Anyone who desires to strike a
balance between worldly and spiritual life will find Hilton's direct
and instructive prose a useful resource.
Julian[a] of Norwich
(c. 1342-c. 1416): anchoress; probably Benedictine.
Julian (or, Juliana) of Norwich was an English anchoress who is regarded as
one of the most important Christian mystics. Very
little is known about Julian's life. Her personal name is unknown and
the name “Julian” simply derives from the fact that her
anchoress's cell was built onto the wall of the church of St Julian
in Norwich.
She
is venerated by Anglicans and Lutherans, but has never been
canonized, or officially beatified, by the Catholic Church, probably
because so little is known of her life aside from her writings;
although she is unofficially venerated in the Catholic Church, much
as St. Hildegard of Bingen was before her canonization in 2012.
Her
fame rests on her book The
Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love,
which she wrote in 1393. She claimed to have received fifteen
revelations on one day in 1373 and another on the following day. In
prolonged states of ecstasy she saw visions of the sufferings of
Christ and of the Trinity, in particular, the vast love of God and
the existence of evil.
She
meditated on these visions for twenty years, concentrating on the
love of God, which supplies the answer to all life's problems and
especially to the evil in the world. she also emphasizes the need to
follow God in order to receive the beautiful vision of God in the
afterlife. For her deep and penetrating descriptions of God and love,
countless readers have found this work uplifting, encouraging, and
challenging. Revelations
of Divine Love
astounds readers, engulfing them in a powerful revelation of God's
love. Her book contains both the original visions and her meditations
on them. Revelations
is a celebrated work in Catholicism and Anglicanism because of the
clarity and depth of Julian's visions of God. Julian of Norwich is
now recognized as one of England's most important mystics. The book
is also believed to be the earliest surviving volume written in the
English language by a woman. It represents the most perfect fruit of
later medieval mysticism in England.
Like
St. Catherine, Juliana has little of the dualism of body and soul
that is frequent in the mystics. God is in our “sensuality” as
well as in our “substance”, and the body and the soul render
mutual aid. Knowledge of God and knowledge of self are inseparable:
we may never come to the knowing of one without the knowing of the
other. She lays special stress upon the “homeliness” and
“courtesy” of God's dealings with us. In the Blessed Virgin the
Lord would have all mankind see how they are loved. Throughout her
revelation Juliana submits herself to the authority of the Church: “I
yield me to our mother Holy Church, as a simple child oweth.”
Scholars
hold that Julian of Norwich was influenced by a famous book on
mystical experience, The
Cloud of Unknowing,
as well as by Neoplatonic philosophy.
St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) / The Dialogue: Dominican and Doctor of the Church
St. Catherine of Siena, T.O.S.D. (Italian) was a tertiary of the
Dominican Order, and a Scholastic philosopher and theologian. She was
canonized in 1461, and on 3 October 1970 she was proclaimed a Doctor
of the Church by Ven. Pope Paul VI.
Catherine
is said by her confessor and biographer Raymond of Capua’s Life
to have had her first vision of Christ when she was age five or six:
experiencing a vision of Him seated in glory with the Apostles Peter,
Paul, and John. At age seven, Catherine vowed to give her whole life
to God.
Her major
treatise is The Dialogue of Divine Providence
(1377-1378), written in the beautiful Tuscan vernacular of the
fourteenth century. Her contemporaries are united in asserting that
much of the book was dictated while Catherine was in ecstasy, though
it also seems possible that Catherine herself may then have re-edited
many passages in the book.
It is a
dialogue between a soul who “rises up” to God and God himself. It
treats of the whole spiritual life of man in the form of a series of
colloquies between the Eternal Father and the human soul (represented
by St. Catherine herself), and is the mystical counterpart in prose
of Dante's Divine Comedy.
The Eternal Father
describes, through many different analogies, allegories, and
metaphors, the spiritual life of humankind. In his description, the
Eternal Father emphasizes the importance of cultivating virtue,
continually praying, and the need for obedience. Any reader will be
inspired by the sound advice throughout this dialogue.
St.
Catherine ranks high among the mystics and spiritual writers of the
Church. She remains a greatly respected figure for her spiritual
writings, and political boldness to “speak truth to power”: it
being exceptional for a woman, in her time period, to have had such
influence in politics and on world history.
The
keynote to St. Catherine's teaching is that man, whether in the
cloister or in the world, must ever abide in the cell of
self-knowledge, which is the stable in which the traveler through
time to eternity must be born again.
The
Cloud of Unknowing: late 14th century
anonymous work
The
Cloud of Unknowing is an anonymous work of Christian mysticism written in Middle English
in the latter half of the 14th century: probably around 1375. The
text is a spiritual guide on contemplative prayer. The underlying
message is that the only way to truly “know” God is to abandon
all preconceived notions and beliefs or “knowledge” about God and
be courageous enough to surrender to the realm of “unknowingness,”
at which point, the seeker begins to glimpse the true nature of God.
It
draws on the mystical tradition of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite
and Christian Neoplatonism, which focuses on the via
negativa
road to discovering God as a pure entity, beyond any capacity of
mental conception and so without any definitive image or form.
The
English Augustinian mystic Walter Hilton has at times been suggested
as the author, but this generally doubted. It is possible that the
writer he was a Carthusian priest, though this is not certain.
The book
counsels a young student to seek God, not through knowledge and the
intellect, but through intense contemplation, motivated by love, and
stripped of all thought. This is brought about by putting all
thoughts and desires under a “cloud of forgetting”, and thereby
piercing God's cloud of unknowing with a “dart of longing love”
and spiritual union with God from the heart.
The work was not all that popular
in late medieval England, perhaps because the Cloud
is addressed to solitaries and concentrates on the advanced levels of
the mystical path. It is found in only 17 manuscripts. But it became
increasingly popular over the course of the twentieth century, with
nine English translations or modernizations produced during this
period. In particular, the Cloud
has influenced recent contemplative prayer practices.
The
book documents techniques used by the medieval monastic community to
build and maintain that contemplative knowledge of God. Written as a
primer for the young monastic, the work is instructional, but does
not have an austere didactic tone. Rather, the work embraces the
reader with a maternal call to grow closer to God through meditation
and prayer.
Theologia
Germanica: late 14th century work by
an anonymous priest (member of the Teutonic Order)
Theologia Germanica,
also known as Theologia
Deutsch
or as Der
Franckforter,
is a mystical treatise believed to have been written in the later
14th century by an anonymous author. According to the introduction of
the Theologia
the author was a priest and a member of the Teutonic Order living in
Frankfurt, Germany.
The
author is usually associated with the Friends of God: a lay mystical
group within the Catholic Church and a center of German mysticism:
influenced by Suso and Tauler. It was founded between 1339 and 1343
in Basel, Switzerland, and was also fairly important in Strasbourg
and Cologne.
Martin
Luther gave the
treatise its modern name and produced an edition of it in 1518. It
has not been widely known before that time (only eight manuscripts
from the fifteenth century are known). He wrote about it: “Next to
the Bible and St. Augustine, no book has ever come into my hands from
which I have learned more of God and Christ, and man and all things
that are.”
Theologia
Germanica proposes that God and
man can be wholly united by following a path of perfection, as
exemplified by the life of Christ, renouncing sin and selfishness,
ultimately allowing God’s will to replace human will. It had a
large following in later Lutheran and pietist traditions. John Calvin
didn't like it much, and wrote that it was “conceived by Satan's
cunning” and “contains a hidden poison.”
The Lutheran mystic Johann Arndt reedited an earlier printing based
on Luther in 1597; this version was endorsed by Philipp Jakob Spener
(1635-1705: the “father” of Lutheran pietism), and went through
more than sixty printings. Some hundred editions were published up to
our time.
It
was listed in the Index of Prohibited Books by the Catholic Church
from 1612 to the late twentieth century, and, therefore, should be approached with considerable caution by Catholics.
Thomas à Kempis (c. 1380-1471) / The Imitation of Christ: Augustinian
Thomas à Kempis, C.R.S.A. was a German canon regular and author of The Imitation of Christ,
which is one of the best-known Christian books on devotion. He was
associated with the Brethren of the Common Life: a
pietist religious community founded in the Netherlands in the 14th
century by Gerard Groote, formerly a successful educator who had had
a religious experience and preached a life of simple devotion to
Jesus Christ.
Thomas's
life was a quiet one, his time being spent between devotional
exercises, composition, and copying. He copied the Bible no fewer
than four times, one of the copies being preserved at Darmstadt,
Germany. In its teachings he was widely read and his works abound in
biblical quotations, especially from the New Testament.
Thomas
was kind and affable towards all, especially the sorrowful and the
afflicted; constantly engaged in his favorite occupations of reading,
writing, or prayer; in time of recreation for the most part silent
and recollected, finding it difficult even to express an opinion on
matters of mundane interest, but pouring out a ready torrent of
eloquence when the conversation turned on God or the concerns of the
soul.
Thomas
à Kempis reflected the mystical spirituality of his
times, the sense of being absorbed in God. The Imitation of Christ
is a charming instruction on how to love God. This small book, free
from intellectual pretensions, has had great appeal to anyone
interested in probing beneath the surface of life. It has come to be,
after the Bible, the most widely translated book in Christian
literature.
For almost six hundred years, this
gentle book, filled with the spirit of the love of God, has brought
understanding and comfort to millions of readers in over fifty
languages, and provided them with a source of heartfelt personal
prayer.
St. Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510): layperson
St. Catherine of Genoa was an Italian mystic, admired for her work among
the sick and the poor and remembered because of various writings
describing both these actions and her mystical experiences. She and
her teaching were the subject of Baron Friedrich von Hügel's classic
work The
Mystical Element of Religion
(1908). She was beatified in 1675 by Pope Clement X, and canonized in
1737 by Pope Clement XII. Her writings also became sources of
inspiration for other saints such as Robert Bellarmine and Francis de
Sales.
She
wished to enter a convent at age 13 or so, but the nuns
refused her on account of her youth, after which she appears to have
put the idea aside without any further attempt. She was married: very
unhappily until her husband's religious conversion around 1477, and
was widowed at age 50.
St.
Catherine had a mystical experience in 1473: an overpowering sense of
God's love for her: one of the most extraordinary operations of God
in the human soul of which we have record, the result being a
marvelous inward condition that lasted till her death. In this state,
she received wonderful revelations, of which she spoke at times to
those around her, but which are mainly embodied in her two celebrated
works: the Dialogues
of the Soul and Body
(or, Spiritual
Dialogue),
and the Treatise
on Purgatory.
This
marked the beginning of her life of close union with God in prayer,
without using forms of prayer such as the rosary. She began to
receive Holy Communion almost daily, a practice extremely rare for
laypeople in the Middle Ages.
From
the moment of that sudden vision of herself and God, the saint's
interior state seems never to have changed, save by varying in
intensity and being accompanied by more or less severe penance,
according to what she saw required of her by the Holy Spirit Who
guided her incessantly.
St. Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582): Carmelite and Doctor of the Church
St. Teresa of Ávila, also called St. Teresa of Jesus, was a prominent
Spanish mystic, Carmelite nun, an author of the Catholic Reformation
and theologian of contemplative life through mental prayer. She was a
reformer of the Carmelite order and is considered to be a founder of
the Discalced Carmelites along with St. John of the Cross.
In
1622, she was canonized by Pope Gregory XV and on 27 September 1970,
was named a Doctor of the Church by Ven. Pope Paul VI. St. Teresa
is revered as the Doctor of Prayer. The mysticism in her works
exerted a formative influence upon many theologians of the following
centuries.
In 1559, Teresa became firmly
convinced that Jesus Christ presented himself to her in bodily form,
though invisible. These visions lasted almost uninterrupted for more
than two years. In another vision, a seraph drove the fiery point of
a golden lance repeatedly through her heart, causing an ineffable
spiritual-bodily pain. The memory of this episode served as an
inspiration throughout the rest of her life, and motivated her
lifelong imitation of the life and suffering of Jesus, epitomized in
the motto usually associated with her: Lord, either let me suffer
or let me die.
The kernel of Teresa's mystical
thought throughout all her writings is the ascent of the soul in four
stages. The first, or “mental prayer”, is that of devout
contemplation or concentration, the withdrawal of the soul from
without and especially the devout observance of the passion of Christ
and penitence. The second is the “prayer of quiet”, in which at
least the human will is lost in that of God by virtue of a
charismatic, supernatural state given by God, while the other
faculties, such as memory, reason, and imagination, are not yet
secure from worldly distraction. The third stage the “devotion of
union” is not only a supernatural but an essentially ecstatic
state. Here there is also an absorption of the reason in God, and
only the memory and imagination are left to ramble. This state is
characterized by a blissful peace, a sweet slumber of at least the
higher soul faculties, or a conscious rapture in the love of God.
The fourth is the “devotion of ecstasy or
rapture,” a passive state, in which the feeling of being in the
body disappears. Sense activity ceases; memory and imagination are
also absorbed in God or intoxicated. Body and spirit are in the
throes of a sweet, happy pain, alternating between a fearful fiery
glow. Later it is followed by a reactionary relaxation in a
swoon-like weakness, attended by a negation of all the faculties in
the union with God. The subject awakens from this in tears; it is the
climax of mystical experience, producing a trance.
Her book, The Way of Perfection, remains
accessible to modern readers. In it, she sets out to lead others
along the way to union with God through prayer, silence, and
meditation. She suggests ways for readers to seek self-perfection,
and her words are practical, heartfelt, and drawn from personal
experience. It's also less formal and less poetically obscure than
others of her books.
The Interior Castle was inspired by
a vision she received from God. In it, there was a crystal globe with
seven mansions, with God in the innermost mansion. St. Teresa
interpreted this vision as an allegory for the soul's relationship
with God; each mansion represents one place on a path towards the
“spiritual marriage”-- i.e. union with God in the seventh
mansion. One begins on this path through prayer and meditation. She
also describes the resistance that the Devil places in various rooms,
to keep believers from union with God. Throughout, she provides
encouragements and advice for spiritual development. It also has much
literary merit as a piece of Spanish Renaissance literature.
In her Autobiography, St. Teresa expresses
in beautiful language her deep relationship with God, and her wisdom
and hopeful outlook have inspired Christians everywhere for
centuries. She begins her story with tales of her childhood in the
early 1500s, the death of her mother, how she became a nun, and the
hardships of her life including illness and a period of
“lukewarmness” during which she ceased to pray. She also relates
the visions and instructions she received from God later in her life.
St. John of the Cross (1542-1591):
Carmelite and Doctor of the Church
St. John of the Cross, O.C.D. (Spanish) was a major figure of the
Catholic Reformation, a mystic, a Carmelite friar and a priest. He
was a reformer of the Carmelite Order and is considered, along with
St. Teresa of Ávila, as a founder of the Discalced Carmelites. He is
also known for his writings. Both his poetry and his studies on the
growth of the soul are considered the summit of mystical Spanish
literature and one of the peaks of all Spanish literature. He was
canonized as a saint in 1726 by Pope Benedict XIII and declared a
Doctor of the Church in 1926 by Pope Pius XI.
The
Spiritual Canticle
(a poem of forty stanzas) tells the story of the soul’s search for
Christ. is describes a bride (representing the soul) searching for
her bridegroom (representing Jesus Christ), anxious at having lost
him; both are filled with joy upon reuniting. It can be seen as a
free-form Spanish version of the Song of Solomon and
serves as an allegorical reading thereof in light of the gospel.
Dark
Night of the Soul narrates the journey of the soul from
her bodily home to her union with God. It happens during the night,
which represents the hardships and difficulties she meets in
detachment from the world and reaching the light of the union with
the Creator. There are several steps during this night, which are
related in successive stanzas. The main idea of the poem can be seen
as the painful experience that people endure as they seek to grow in
spiritual maturity and union with God.
A poet at heart, St. John describes
the journey and the union with beautifully rich and deeply symbolic
language. He also offers encouragement and comfort directly to
readers as they, too, struggle with the excruciating dark night.
Offering hope to the downtrodden and discouraged, Dark Night is
one of the most difficult books a person can read, but its difficulty
is surpassed by its reward. It's one of the most profound works of
Christian mysticism.
Ascent of Mount Carmel is a
more systematic study of the ascetical endeavour of a soul looking
for perfect union with God and the mystical events happening along
the way. St. John depicts the soul's ascent to Mount Carmel
(allegorically, the place of God) and the “dark night” that the
soul must endure to reach it. St. John describes the different mystic
experiences the soul encounters on its way to union with God through
the dark night. It's a hauntingly beautiful and profound account of
Christian spirituality.
St. John of the Cross was clearly
influenced by the Bible. Scriptural images are common in both his
poems and prose. In total, there are 1,583 explicit and 115 implicit
quotations from the Bible in his works. Many other influences of
earlier mystical writers have been proposed, but most theories cannot
be definitively proven. It is most certain that the pseudo-Dionysian
tradition was a key influence on his thought.
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