Hope from the Ashes: Juan Pérez de Pineda’s Mystical Body beyond Neoplatonic Consolation
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Kathryn Phipps
Abstract
Juan Pérez de Pineda (ca. 1500–1567) was one of Spain’s most prolific reformers, and yet theological analysis of his work often dismisses the originality of his corpus. This article returns to Pérez’s two primary theological treatises to reconsider Pérez’s relationship to Neoplatonism by examining Pérez’s vision of mystical union in the context of consolation narratives. Pérez published his Brief Treatise of Doctrine and Consolatory Epistle from exile in Geneva, in the same year his colleagues were executed in the notorious autos-de-fe often credited with eradicating Protestantism from Spain. Taken together, these works reveal Pérez’s ambivalence towards Neoplatonic imagery, adapting and rejecting language of ascent in his description of mystical union as a present reality, unimpeded by the flesh. Noting a curious absence of Neoplatonic strategies common across humanist, mystical, and Reformed traditions, Pérez’s unique rejection of language of purification of the soul is poised to grant insight, with future study, into the intersections and transformations of Reformation theology in the Spanish milieux.
© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Winner of the REFORC Paper Award 2023
- Concerning the Defamation and Execution of the “Radical” Ludwig Hätzer (1500–1529): An Attempt at Using Social Network Analysis on Small Samples
- Research Articles
- Framing Religious Leadership in Dutch Nationalist Confessional Historiography: Anabaptism on the Lower Rhine in the 1540s–1550s
- Hope from the Ashes: Juan Pérez de Pineda’s Mystical Body beyond Neoplatonic Consolation
- True Worship in the Spirit: Martin Chemnitz and the Minor Role of the Body in Worship
- The Duke of Olyka and the Saint: The Meeting between Mikołaj Krzysztof Radziwiłł and Pope Pius V (1566)
- The Post-Tridentine Controversies at the Louvain Faculty of Theology: The Correspondence between Judocus Tiletanus and Michael Baius (1568)
- Between Jerusalem and Babylon: Catholic Discourses of Israel and National Identity in Elizabethan and Jacobean England (ca. 1560–1625)
- Enfance, martyre et mission dans L’Histoire des martyrs du Japon de Nicolas Trigault (1624)
- Critical Independence versus Christian Catholicity in Hugo Grotius’s Annotations on Matthew 23:2–3
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Winner of the REFORC Paper Award 2023
- Concerning the Defamation and Execution of the “Radical” Ludwig Hätzer (1500–1529): An Attempt at Using Social Network Analysis on Small Samples
- Research Articles
- Framing Religious Leadership in Dutch Nationalist Confessional Historiography: Anabaptism on the Lower Rhine in the 1540s–1550s
- Hope from the Ashes: Juan Pérez de Pineda’s Mystical Body beyond Neoplatonic Consolation
- True Worship in the Spirit: Martin Chemnitz and the Minor Role of the Body in Worship
- The Duke of Olyka and the Saint: The Meeting between Mikołaj Krzysztof Radziwiłł and Pope Pius V (1566)
- The Post-Tridentine Controversies at the Louvain Faculty of Theology: The Correspondence between Judocus Tiletanus and Michael Baius (1568)
- Between Jerusalem and Babylon: Catholic Discourses of Israel and National Identity in Elizabethan and Jacobean England (ca. 1560–1625)
- Enfance, martyre et mission dans L’Histoire des martyrs du Japon de Nicolas Trigault (1624)
- Critical Independence versus Christian Catholicity in Hugo Grotius’s Annotations on Matthew 23:2–3
