Buch, Englisch, Band 19, 540 Seiten, Format (B × H): 160 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 1025 g
Buch, Englisch, Band 19, 540 Seiten, Format (B × H): 160 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 1025 g
Reihe: Brill's Companions to the Christian Tradition
ISBN: 978-90-04-18350-6
Verlag: Brill
The “canon” of Hispanic mysticism is expanding. No longer is our picture of this special brand of early modern devotional practice limited to a handful of venerable saints. Instead, we recognize a wide range of “marginal” figures as practitioners of mysticism, broadly defined. Neither do we limit the study of mysticism necessarily to the Christian religion, nor even to the realm of literature. Representations of mysticism are also found in the visual, plastic and musical arts. The terminology and theoretical framework of mysticism permeate early modern Hispanic cultures. Paradoxically, by taking a more inclusive approach to studying mysticism in its “marginal” manifestations, we draw mysticism—in all its complex iterations—back toward its rightful place at the center of early modern spiritual experience.
Contributors: Colin Thompson, Alastair Hamilton, Christina Lee, Clara E. Herrera, Darcy Donahue, Elena del Río Parra, Evelyn Toft, Fernando Durán López, Francisco Morales, Freddy Domínguez, Glyn Redworth, Jane Ackerman, Jessica Boon, José Adriano de Freitas Carvalho, Luce López-Baralt, María Carrión, Maryrica Lottman, and Tess Knighton.
Fachgebiete
Weitere Infos & Material
I. Preface
Colin Thompson
II. Introduction
Hilaire Kallendorf
III. Chapter Summaries
IV. Larger Trends
1. Religious Autobiography
Fernando Durán López
2. Traditions, Life Experiences and Orientations in Portuguese Mysticism (1515-1630)
José Adriano de Freitas Carvalho
3. New World Colonial Franciscan Mystical Practice
Francisco Morales
4. The Alumbrados: Dejamiento and Its Practitioners
Alastair Hamilton
V. Specific Figures
1. Mother Juana de la Cruz: Marian Visions and Female Preaching
Jessica Boon
2. John of the Cross, the Difficult Icon
Jane Ackerman
3. Teresa of Jesus and Islam: The Simile of the Seven Concentric Castles of the Soul
Luce López-Baralt
4. The Mysticism of Saint Ignatius Loyola
Darcy Donahue
5. Cecilia del Nacimiento, Second-Generation Mystic of the Carmelite Reform
Evelyn Toft
6. The Influences of Saint Catherine of Siena and Saint Teresa of Ávila on the Colombian Nun Jerónima Nava y Saavedra (1669-1727)
Clara Herrera
7. A New Way of Living? Luisa de Carvajal and the Limits of Mysticism
Glyn Redworth
8. From Saint to Sinner: Sixteenth-Century Perceptions of “La Monja de Lisboa”
Freddy Domínguez
VI. Interdisciplinary Applications
1. The Gardens of Teresa of Ávila
Maryrica Ortiz Lottman
2. Home, Sweet Home: Teresa de Jesús, Mudéjar Architecture, and the Place of Mysticism in Early Modern Spain
María Mercedes Carrión
3. Interrupted Mysticism in Cervantes’s Persiles
Christina H. Lee
4. Suspensio Animi, or Mysticism in Literature
Elena del Río Parra
5. “Through a Glass Darkly”: Music and Mysticism in Golden Age Spain
Tess Knighton
VII. Bibliography
VIII. List of Figures
IX. Index
Introduction: Expanding the Mystical Canon
Hilaire Kallendorf
I was sitting at a café in Princeton two summers ago, chatting with a scholarly friend about an invitation I had received recently from the senior acquisitions editor at Brill. He wanted me to edit A New Companion to Spanish Mysticism, which would of course focus on the early modern period when Spanish mysticism had reached its zenith.
The editor explained how he had long felt that such a volume, published in English, would be welcome. While instinctively I agreed, I immediately started trying to establish the proposed handbook’s raison d’être. Why was it needed? Who would read it? And most crucially, what would be “new” about it that would have the potential to shape future directions for research in the field of mysticism studies?
Teaching (as I do) in a Department of Hispanic Studies, I quickly realized that the assignment would have to be modified slightly if I was to accept it at all: the title would have to be changed to A New Companion to Hispanic Mysticism to reflect the wide geographical range of Spain’s empire during its greatest era of world dominance. At the height of its reign, the Spanish monarchy controlled not only the entirety of the Iberian Peninsula (including Portugal), but also the Low Countries and southern Italy—in addition to its New World colonies. Surely a representative look at mystical texts and figures during this time period ought to take some of these places into account. While it would be impossible to cover such an immense set of territories, at least it could be feasible to extend the reach of the volume beyond Spain.
But as I talked with my friend, it soon became evident that this was not the only expansion in store for the project. We started tossing around possible topics for commissioned essays. (Perhaps I neglected to mention that my friend is a very well-respected scholar in this field.) Before long, a pattern started to emerge. Every time I would throw out an idea for a topic, my friend would shoot it down with the comment, “No, that’s not really mysticism.” Various and sundry “mystical” figures evidently became disqualified once they had been discredited by the Inquisition or the Catholic Church more generally in the course of beatification / canonization proceedings, etc. Finally becoming exasperated, I felt like asking: “who gets to decide?” At that moment I realized that I had just stumbled upon my angle for this essay collection . . .
Already back in 2003, in the epilogue to my first book Exorcism and Its Texts, I had begun to question the relationships among such apparently (at first glance) disparate phenomena as melancholy, ecstasy, epilepsy, and demonic possession. My aim in that first, preliminary incursion into this material was to show that these—to (post)modern sensibilities—rigidly-compartmentalized categories were divided by more permeable boundaries during the early modern age:
Ecstasy and enthusiasm were two other . . . polyvalent categories which were related to demonic possession . . . M.A. Screech explains how the term “ecstasy” became an umbrella for many different experiences of the early modern self:
Not all ecstasies were high, spiritual ones . . . . Ecstasies of various sorts were a common experience. Drunkenness was a form of ecstasy; so was falling in love; so were sexual climaxes; so was bravery on the field of battle; so was scholarly devotion to selfless inquiries; so was poetic inspiration; so were the revelations which made Socrates, say, and Hippocrates the authorities they are; so too were several kinds of madness, which share some spiritual powers with genius itself. “Ecstasy” covered them all.
While only sometimes distinguished from rapture per se, ecstasy was a term often associated with mystics and easily confused with demonic possession—a condition which, it was believed, God could also use to purify and refine his saints. As Fernando Cervantes notes, “diabolical possessions were frequently a sign of divine favour and mercy. There were countless ways in which God could make use of a possession in order to ‘purge’ a favourite soul in preparation for the mystical union.”
Thus it should come as no surprise that exorcism led me to mysticism. While this may seem like walking in the back door instead of the front, in a very real sense these two phenomena may be viewed as two sides of the same coin. Exorcism seeks to rid a human body of possession by a malign spirit, while the practitioner of mysticism seeks union with the Holy Spirit. But the tie that unites them is the interpenetration of the human with the divine.
Now, I’d like to make the caveat that the majority of these essays are not so polemical as this introduction may sound. I believe one purpose of any handbook or reference work ought to be to introduce graduate students or new scholars in the field to the subject matter. The essays printed here do that: any volume on Hispanic mysticism in the early modern era would be incomplete, for example, without articles on such towering figures as Saint Teresa of Ávila and Saint John of the Cross. Several masterful surveys, likewise—such as José Adriano’s sweeping panorama of the Portuguese mystical landscape and Fernando Durán’s encyclopedic treatment of the genre of spiritual autobiography—will give readers ample springboards for launching their own research agendas.
In deciding which of the many brilliant scholars in this field to approach, I felt that the goal was twofold. In order for this volume to really live up to its potential, I would need to take seriously several of the words in its title. I have already commented upon the distinction between “Spanish” and “Hispanic”. In parallel fashion, I realized that this work would need to serve as a “Handbook”, but that it would also have to be (at least in some sense) “New”. If successful, the result would be nothing short of an expansion of the mystical canon . . .
* * * * * *
So for the purposes of this volume, at least, what counts as mysticism? Who’s in and who’s out? Surely I, as a literary scholar with no formal theological training, would not feel qualified to make such a judgment. But as I mulled over these questions, I kept returning to a carefully-considered answer I had given to a question raised long ago at my dissertation defense. One of the professors present, willingly seduced by the sensationalism of the exorcism cases I had been describing, asked the obvious question: what really happened? Were these recorded instances of demonic possession real? Were they merely glimpses of “social energies circulating”, or perhaps the inevitable product of cynical “self-fashioning”? Knowing this question might come up, I delivered the answer I had thoughtfully prepared: the ontological moment is no longer with us. It is impossible for us to judge now what happened then. We will never capture that elusive quotient of wie es eigentlich gewesen ist.
But looking back now, I realize that even the bystanders at those (often public) exorcisms probably couldn’t tell what was going on either. Did the participants themselves even really know? It strikes me that this is the perennial dilemma for scholars who study religious phenomena, whether these find expression in theological treatises, literary novellas, Baroque cantatas or works of plastic art. In approaching this subject matter, I believe we would do well to start from a position of healthy respect for the distance separating us from the great mystics (in terms of spiritual maturity as well as simple lack of geographical proximity, or the most basic distinctions of time and place). This humbly respectful stance has been articulated well in recent years by such scholars of early modern religion as Lorraine Daston, Brad Gregory and Stuart Clark. As Daston reminds us, in the prevalent early modern world view, “the evidence of miracles was more than a spectacular appeal to the senses. Ideally, it was pure evidence, unequivocal in its interpretation, and irresistible in its persuasive power . . . because God was the author of miracles, they proved beyond a shadow of a doubt . . . Miracles were God’s signature.” To question what “really happened” whenever a miracle was performed, in an important sense, misses the point of the event. Paradoxically, as Jean de Viguerie has pointed out, the miracles that were held up to official scrutiny by the Inquisition and other official apparatuses have ended up being among the best-documented facts of the early modern period. But even if they were not, our modern and postmodern attempts to second-guess or silence early modern voices by refusing to hear them on their own terms seems ahistorical at best.
In defending this stance, these scholars have also expended considerable energy decrying its opposite, whether in the context of miracles or martyrdom. As Gregory notes in his prize-winning Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe,
[S]cholars . . . deploy reductionist theories . . . When they consider martyrdom at all, they seem uninterested in exploring what it meant to martyrs and their contemporaries. Instead, modern or postmodern beliefs underpin explanatory theories that assume a post-Enlightenment, materialist, and atheistic metaphysic . . . characterized mostly by an indifference toward religious claims . . . No social scientific or cultural theory undergirded by a tacit atheism, the historical imagination of which is restricted to people competing for influence, striving for power, resisting the exercise of power, “constructing” themselves, “reinventing” themselves, manipulating symbols, and the like, can explain martyrdom. The act of martyrdom makes no sense whatsoever unless we take religion seriously, on the terms of people who were willing to die for their convictions . . . What would it even mean to read the sources “against the grain”? That Christians did not really believe what they died for?
Here we see that a responsible approach to early modern mysticism, like to early modern martyrdom, presupposes a respect for the faith of its practitioners.
In his monumental Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe—although focusing on the darker side of early modern religious experience—Stuart Clark comes to similar conclusions about historiographical method:
A striking example [of irresponsible scholarly assumptions] is D. P. Walker’s argument that what we ought to be doing in cases of possession from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is discovering what actually happened. For him this excludes the possibility that demoniacs were actually possessed. The undoubted fact that this is not an explanation likely to appeal to a modern audience is his reason for siding with the other two available in the period itself. “Historians,” he urges, “should not ask their readers to accept supernatural phenomena.” The realism implicit in this recommendation is, no doubt, still seductive. It reassures the observer of exotic behaviour in the past that it can be described in ways that satisfy his or her own expectations of what can and cannot happen. Its limitations are none the less fundamental. The view that we cannot understand the actions and beliefs of others without accepting them as true and valid ourselves preempts the history of cultures with models of reality different from ours. It cannot even begin to account for the activity of the anthropologist. In the case of possession (and much else concerning demonism and witchcraft) our task cannot, therefore, be to trace the relationship between what was said about it and what it “actually” amounted to—as if the two can be successfully matched up or shown to be at odds. At the very least we are obliged to take up a relativist position with regard to what could count as real.
The same might be said of certain sensational aspects of mysticism. The bodily symptoms, the trances, the stigmata—all could be faked by a clever enough pretender; and this is in fact what happened (as was demonstrated at length by the Inquisition’s contemporaneous inquiry) in the case, described ingeniously in this volume by Freddy Domínguez, of La Monja de Lisboa. But if we were to use her subsequent repudiation as a worthy criterion to exclude her, would we not be allowing the Holy Office (which has itself been villified in recent studies) still to cast its nefarious shadow? How do we know for sure that the recorded experiences of other mystics were any different? Do we, ironically, have more surviving documentation on the charlatans who got caught?
In the course of pondering these often unanswerable questions, I came to see that it is the very messiness of the early modern period which fascinates me. This was a time when these distinctions were being interrogated, when many of these boundaries were becoming blurred. And I think what postmodernity has taught us—as it has sounded the death-knell of grand narratives—is that messiness and fragmentation are OK, particularly when we are confronted with phenomena we find impossible to categorize. Maybe that’s not really our job . . .
Editing this volume has been a spiritual experience for me, but perhaps not in all the ways you might expect. I came to see myself, in the great early modern humanist tradition, as almost a ventriloquist: a necromancer, of sorts. I came to see my role as that of a facilitator for letting the dead mystics speak. I made the editorial decision to include, rather than exclude, certain marginal or “fringe” figures, but not because I see myself as having the last word on their suitability for the mystical canon. Rather—in what is perhaps a tacit participation in the general trend within cultural studies to make of the margins a new center—their presence here is an acknowledgment that we’re not qualified to decide.
It would be the height of arrogance to presume to bring these historical figures to trial now, after so many years. Even if we could do so, what would we ask them? What would they say? In their defense, it could be stated simply that they participated in cultural trends which (both now and at the time when they lived) have been associated with a religious practice known as mysticism.
* * * * * *
Many of the essays contained in this volume themselves include theoretical reflections and / or metacommentary on these very questions. In “Traditions, Life Experiences and Orientations in Portuguese Mysticism (1515-1630)”, José Adriano offers the following working definition of mysticism, which he derives from a 16th-century treatise, Mística teologia, by Sebastião Toscano:
In the considerations that follow, “mysticism” is understood as the personal “theology” of “contemplative and devout people, given to prayer and contemplation”, which “consists more of feeling God within the soul by means of an enlightened, sweet, gentle and loving knowledge, than of knowing how to teach this knowledge by means of words” . . . This understanding will consequently lead us from the observation of the life experiences of some of the more outstanding individuals or groups, to the indoctrination in some works which, directly or indirectly, aimed to act as a guide in the search of this modus of “knowledge” as an “experience” of the love of God.
Here we see that Adriano, following Toscano, views mysticism as some combination of personal theology, life experiences or indoctrination, as well as a distinctive “mode of knowledge”. This seems to me a broad enough definition to use as a starting point for our discussion. In her essay on Saint Ignatius, Darcy Donahue privileges originality over tradition, individual experience over communal heritage, in her definition of mysticism: “[i]t is precisely the awareness that something completely new and transformative is occurring that characterizes the mysticism of infused contemplation, a
