The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism - 1200-1350 - Review

Commonweal, March 26, 1999 by Lawrence S. Cunningham

Madre Castillo was a Colombian nun who spent more than fifty years in the convent of the Poor Clares in the provincial town of Tunja. She left behind a small body of writing that consisted of her spiritual autobiography (Vida), a collection of spiritual maxims, reflections, meditations (Afectos espirituales), and a small notebook with some poems and earlier maxims reworked into a somewhat more refined form (Cuaderno de Inciso - so named because she wrote in the blank pages of an accounting book). As McKnight argues, Madre Castillo was profoundly shaped by what was available to enclosed nuns of the time: the breviary, some of the writings of John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, the Ignatian spiritual exercises, Osuna's Spiritual Alphabet, and some standard collections of hagiography.

McKnight obviously did a lot of archival work in her research (was this originally a dissertation?) and pages in this volume were (for this nonexpert) quite instructive. She has a good analysis of the autobiographies produced (usually for confessors or spiritual directors) by religious women who followed the example of Teresa of Avila's autobiography. The author is also good in tracing out the space allotted to religious women to exercise their desire to write. I was also much instructed in the scholarship being produced on this new source of spiritual literature.

Each of the writings of Madre Castillo is given extended analysis in the second half of the book. The first half (marred here and there by the heavy sludge of postmodern literary palaver) discusses the place of Madre Castillo in literary history (she is evidently well known and highly regarded in Colombia) and provides some social context for studying her life. Life in the convent seems to have been punctuated by Castillo's need to deal with complex financial dealings (she was abbess more than once), convent squabbles over the interminable issue of laxity versus observance, and the other predictable breaks in the routine of the regular life.

Castillo's writings are only cited or paraphrased, so we can't tell if her interpreter gets it right. But one thing is clear. However much the author knows about colonial literature (a lot, evidently), feminist literary theory, and the culture of the time, she is woefully undernourished when it comes to handling theological questions. Her use of terms like mental prayer, mystical theology, visions, locutions, and the entire vocabulary of mystical and ascetical theology leaves much to be desired. Reading McGinn would surely have helped. The three stages of the spiritual life are not "early modern," Erasmus did not "redefine" theology as the study of Scripture (Aquinas and his contemporaries did that), and the division of memory, understanding, and will was not "neoscholastic" (the distinction goes back at least to the time of Augustine). I could go on. In other words, what one learns from this work (and I admit to having learned a good deal) one learns despite the patina of opaque critical jargon and the tin ear for religious discourse. In the most irritating paragraph in the book, the criticisms of a Colombian nun who wrote a biography of Madre Castillo are dismissed because McKnight's work deals with "social and economic determinisms" in a more integrated fashion. God help the man who would patronize a woman religious and scholar in that kind of tone.