Edward Howells. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila: Mystical Knowing and Selfhood.

Abstract

Using Carmel’s two greatest mystical authors as its primary sources, this
brief but masterful study deals with “the type of self and the anthropological transformation required for mystical experience to  become known” (p. 1). The question Howells poses at the outset is this: Given the sharp distinction that John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila draw between the “natural” and the “spiritual”, to the point of seeming to establish two parallel epistemological processes (one of the ordinary natural knowledge of created things and the other for the mystical experience of God “in the center of the soul”), how can the fundamental unity of the human person be maintained? The question is a crucial one, not just for the interpretation of John and Teresa, but for contemporary mystical studies. All too often current authors (including some theologians and philosophers of religion) still proceed as if mysticis were simply a matter of unusual states of consciousness enjoyed by the same familiar post-Cartesian autonomous subject, largely ignoring (at leat for their analytic purposes) what the mystcis themselves say about how the knowing human subject itself is fundamentally transformed in its being and operations during the process of growth toward mystical union.