Thought and Poetic Structure in San Juan de la Cruz's Symbol of Night is a comprehensive appraisal of the traditional critical perspectives of mysticism: philosophical, theological, literary, and psychological. Examining the a priori limitations of these approaches, the book presents an original definition of the symbol as an integral whole of experience and expression, and concludes that night is the form - the organizing principle - of spiritual life.

This book is a study of the nine short poems, called romances, composed by the Spanish mystic Saint John of the Cross (San Juan de la Cruz). The focus of the poems is the Trinity, and their point of departure is the opening verses of the Gospel of John. This is the first in-depth, English-language analysis of these poems, and looks at their literary, historical, scriptural, theological, and mystical elements. It also ties these works to San Juan’s better-known lyrical poems and his prose commentaries. It will appeal to anyone interested in Spanish mystical poetry and the sources that inform that poetry.

Through the 'dark night of the soul' to the depiction of the erotically-charged union of the soul and God, the poetry and prose works of the Spanish friar John of the Cross (1542-1591) offer a striking account of the transformation of the individual in the course of the Christian life. John of the Cross: Desire, Transformation, and Selfhood argues that these writings are animated by John's own creative and subtly conceptualized notion of erotic desire. John's understanding of desire has the potential to enrich recent theological discussion of the subject, but it has been curiously neglected in past scholarship. To correct this lacuna, this study undertakes a detailed historical analysis in three parts. Firstly, it attends to the patristic, medieval, and sixteenth-century Spanish influences on John's writings, showing how John reworks a long tradition of biblical, Christian, and Platonic reflection on the concept. Secondly, it traces the importance of desire through John's writings, demonstrating how he develops the theme through his poetry, his anthropology of the soul, and his account of the spiritual ascent. Thirdly, it explores the reception of his writings in the twentieth century, demonstrating how particular modern philosophical and theological commitments have prevented scholars from recognising the rich and distinctive shape of John's theological vision. John's account of the transformation of the self, with its hopeful vision of the graced transformation of the soul's desires, has significance beyond the constrained modern categories of systematic theology, Christian spirituality, pastoral theology, and mysticism--it is a vision that is worthy of recovery today.

"This book compares two mystical works central to the Christian Discalced Carmelite and the Hindu Bhakti traditions: the sixteenth-century Spanish Cántico espiritual (Spiritual Canticle), by John of the Cross, and the Sanskrit Rāsa Līlā, originated in the oral tradition. These texts are examined alongside theological commentaries: for the Cántico, the Comentarios written by John of the Cross on his own poem; for Rāsa Līlā, the foundational commentary by Srīdhara Swāmi along with commentaries by the sixteenth-century theologian Jīva Goswāmī, from the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava school, and other Gauḍīya theologians. The phrase "savoring God" in the title conveys the Spanish gustar a Dios (to savor God) and the Sanskrit madhura bhakti rasa (the sweet savor of divine love). While "savoring" does not mean exactly the same thing for these theologians, they use the term to define a theopoetics at work in their respective traditions. The book's methodology transposes their notions of "savoring" to advance a comparative theopoetics grounded in the interaction of poetry and theology. The first chapter explains in detail how theopoetics is regarded considering each text and how they are compared. The comparison is then laid out across Chapters 2, 3, and 4, each of which examines one of the three central moments of the theopoetic experience of savoring that is represented in the Cántico and Rāsa Līlā: the absence and presence of God, the relationship between embodiment and savoring, and the fulfilment of the encounter between the divine and the lovers"--

This critical survey examines the work of twentieth and early twenty-first century scholars about Spanish mystical literature. It particularly attends to how these scholars’ ideas were influenced by their notions of mysticism and Spain’s contested relationship to the Orient.