Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- 1 EXPLORING THE MYSTICAL IMAGINATION: PERFECTION AND ITS QUINQUE VIAE
- 2 CAVES, CLOUDS AND MOUNTAINS: THE APOPHATIC TRADITION
- 3 THE MYSTIC TELOS: CATAPHATIC AND ECSTATIC TRADITIONS
- 4 JOURNEY'S END: TOWARDS AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE WAY
- Notes
- Bibliography of Works Cited
- Index
3 - THE MYSTIC TELOS: CATAPHATIC AND ECSTATIC TRADITIONS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- 1 EXPLORING THE MYSTICAL IMAGINATION: PERFECTION AND ITS QUINQUE VIAE
- 2 CAVES, CLOUDS AND MOUNTAINS: THE APOPHATIC TRADITION
- 3 THE MYSTIC TELOS: CATAPHATIC AND ECSTATIC TRADITIONS
- 4 JOURNEY'S END: TOWARDS AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE WAY
- Notes
- Bibliography of Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Guidebooks to Paradise: A Traveller's Bookshelf Surveyed
It is a wise precaution on the part of any traveller to consult the guide books written by those who have gone before. Those who omit to do so risk getting lost in well-mapped territory.
With these words, E. W. Trueman Dicken begins chapter 5 (‘Contemplation and Spiritual Progress’) of his volume The Crucible of Love, which surveys and analyses the mystical thought of Juan de la Cruz and Teresa of Ávila. And, Dicken adds, only God can ‘teach us to pray’. As we have seen from both The Cloud and the Noche Oscura, the way is facilitated for the would-be mystic by that mental prayer known as contemplation, generally regarded as the highest form of prayer. This is not for the beginner, however, but, rather a Divine gift for the ‘proficient’, to use Juan's vocabulary. And, in so much of this type of mystical doctrine, the vocabulary of the road, the path, the way, the journey, the ṭarīqa (to deploy the Islamic term) is paramount. Discussing Santa Teresa, Elizabeth Howe cites the saint as admitting ‘that the soul advances to God by means of his “secretos caminos’” but also suggesting ‘that the mystic must follow the example of those who have already traversed these roads’.
The best road to follow, in the view of mystics like Juan de la Cruz and Santa Teresa of Ávila, may very well be the road of the cross; but even these two saints envisage that road in somewhat different ways.
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- Information
- Islam, Christianity and the Mystic JourneyA Comparative Exploration, pp. 87 - 131Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011