Guidebooks to Paradise: A Traveller's Bookshelf Surveyed

With these words, E. W. Trueman Dicken begins chapter 5 (‘Contemplation and Spiritual Progress’) of his volume The Crucible of Love, which surveys and analyses the mystical thought of Juan de la Cruz and Teresa of Ávila. And, Dicken adds, only God can ‘teach us to pray’. As we have seen from both The Cloud and the Noche Oscura, the way is facilitated for the would-be mystic by that mental prayer known as contemplation, generally regarded as the highest form of prayer. This is not for the beginner, however, but, rather a Divine gift for the ‘proficient’, to use Juan's vocabulary. And, in so much of this type of mystical doctrine, the vocabulary of the road, the path, the way, the journey, the ṭarīqa (to deploy the Islamic term) is paramount. Discussing Santa Teresa, Elizabeth Howe cites the saint as admitting ‘that the soul advances to God by means of his “secretos caminos’” but also suggesting ‘that the mystic must follow the example of those who have already traversed these roads’.

The best road to follow, in the view of mystics like Juan de la Cruz and Santa Teresa of Ávila, may very well be the road of the cross; but even these two saints envisage that road in somewhat different ways.