The Loving Struggle Between God and the Soul

In this ground-breaking new translation of Juan de los Angeles's treatise on the spiritual life (Lucha espiritual y amorosa), one of the great sixteenth-century Spanish mystics becomes accessible to the English-speaking public for the first time.

What makes his work strikingly original is the way in which his contemplative approach is centered on the sacraments. Sometimes one gets the impression that certain mystics have found a way to God that bypasses these channels of grace, but for Juan de los Angeles, the mystical union of the human soul with our Lord is precisely a Eucharistic one; the individual believer in fact builds up the Church by his participation in this union with the One Body of Christ.

Juan de los Angeles (1532-1609) also teaches the accessibility of holiness: the universal call to contemplation of the divine mysteries. He did not place too much weight on scholarship, after all: the book ends with the charming story of Brother Giles telling the idiotic old women that if they love God they will be holier than St. Bonaventure. Holiness has never been reserved for the learned and the clever: It belongs to all those who struggle to love.