Hope from the Ashes: Juan Pérez de Pineda’s Mystical Body beyond Neoplatonic Consolation

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.