A New Companion to Hispanic Mysticism

It is both a privilege and a pleasure to have been asked to write a prologue to A New Companion to Hispanic Mysticism. When I began my own doctoral research some 40 years ago, the study of Spanish mysticism of the Golden Age was well established in its own small corner of the English-speaking academic world, not least thanks to the pioneering work of E. Allison Peers. But there was scarcely any interaction between its literary scholars on the one hand and its historians, philosophers and theologians on the other; with few exceptions, they worked within their own disciplinary boundaries. No one then could have known how the subject was going to develop, nor have predicted the trajectory it would follow, as the New Companion now maps it out.
Perhaps that is as it should be: mystics habitually confound expectations and resist the tidy explanations some might wish to impose on them, as this volume so persuasively hows concerning the mystics of the early modern Hispanic worlds, Old and New. Just as any attempt to privilege one term of the central doctrinal paradoxes of orthodox Christianity over another will fail to respect the creative tension which inheres in holding them together, so critical approaches to mysticism which try to i t it into predetermined categories or explain it by reductive theories may have a glib persuasiveness but are unlikely to do it justice. Wherever one looks among the mystics, paradox and contradiction appear. But they are not a mark of weak-mindedness; they are the outward sign of an inherent inward complexity.