Abstract
Mystical literature and spirituality from 16th-century Spain engage religious images from the three most prominent religions of al-Andalus—Christianity, Islam, and Judaism: among others, the dark night, the seven concentric castles, the gazelle, the bird, the sefirot‘s encircled iggulim or towering yosher, the sacred fountain, ruins, and gardens. Until the 20th-century, however, scholarship read these works mostly as “Spanish” mysticism, alienated from its Andalusī roots. This comparative study deploys theological, historical, and textual analysis to dwell in one of these roots: the figure of the garden’s vital element, water, as represented in the works of Teresa de Jesús and Ibn ‘Arabi. The well-irrigated life written by these mystics underscores the significance of this element as a path to life, knowledge, and love of and by God. Bringing together scholarship on Christian and Sufi mysticism, and underscoring the centrality of movement, flow, and circulation, this article pieces together otherwise disparate readings of both the individual work of these two figures and their belonging in a canon of Andalusī/Spanish mysticism. The weaving of these threads will offer readers a different understanding of early modern religion, alongside traditional readings of Spain’s mystical literature and its place in the global context.
Highlights
Mystical literature and spirituality from 16th-century Spain engage religious images from the three most prominent religions of al-Andalus—Christianity, Islam, and Judaism: among others, the dark night, the seven concentric castles, the gazelle, the bird, the sefirot‘s encircled iggulim or towering yosher, the sacred fountain, ruins, and gardens
Ibn ‘Arabi does not structure levels to irrigate the garden of the soul in four ways, as De Jesús does; his articulation of water as a spiritual path enumerates as many areas of representation, which Angela
To say that the structure of garden segments, types of irrigation, and degrees of prayer precisely crafted by De Jesús in the Life is the same as the four areas of meaning of water represented in various books by Ibn
Summary
“For each limb or organ there is a particular kind of spiritual knowledge stemming from the one source, which is manifold in respect of the many limbs and organs, even as water, a single reality, varies in taste according to its location, some being sweet and pleasant, some being salty and brackish. True to their faith as best as they could in a soil declared inhospitable for their religion, the perseverance of these individuals and their communities preserved religious pluralism inside the peninsula Be that as it may, the importance of their lives and voices has remained covered for centuries under the aegis of one national Catholic unity. In an era when moral virtue and religious rituals and iconography were heavily regulated to favor a Catholic gestalt (food, clothing, movements, inspirational figures, devotional imagery, and rituals, among others), mystics in Spain engaged in traditions from the three most prominent religions of al-Andalus—Christianity, Islam, and Judaism With this hybrid approach to religious life, they shaped a rich spiritual legacy being fully revealed only in the last century by scholarly work like that found in this special issue of Religions. With the sign of water, readers can piece together otherwise disparate readings of both the individual works of these two figures and their belonging in a revised continuum of Andalusıand Spanish mysticism
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