Oxymora in Spanish Mystics and English Metaphysical Writers

Abstract

jHETORIC and mystical philosophy spearheaded the assault of Neo-Latin Catholic zeal on post-Reformation England. Since that time much literal ink and some figurative blood have been spilled to determine why and how certain gifted writers of Spain's golden age of mysticism may have influenced the English metaphysical school. Yet there has been little attention to the common use of oxymora among the writers in question. An intellectual shock technique dating, perhaps from the original paradox of the fortunate fall, the oxymoron is notoriously adaptable. Half rhetoric and half philosophy, it was not ill placed among the grotesque images, puns, quibbling, Latinisms, allegory, and personifications of Gongorism, conceptism, and Marinism. Its spiritual summit was reached in the writings of ecstatic and downto-earth Spanish mystics who found such terms as dying life, sweet wounds of love, fire and water, and blind vision a subtle and exact means of defining the all-important body and soul relationships. Echoes of the rhetoric and the philosophy are to be found in English metaphysical literature. The oxymoron was a most natural way of expressing a core idea of Spanish mysticism: that the great unifying force of God's love blots out apparent contrarieties in the mind of the truly devout. As Diego de Estella explains with deceptively mild understatement: Very cold is that which God does not make hot, very hard that which He does not soften, and very ungrateful he who does not give space to His sacred