Union with God as transformation in beauty

Abstract

The present work deals with Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi (1566-1607) and her spiritual journey towards transformative union with God from the perspective of a powerful attraction to Divine Beauty. In other words this study deals with mystical experience understood both as the story of God’s intervention into a person’s life and also of the person’s docile response to divine grace. The account of this experience was handed over to us through various writings that report Maddalena’s spiritual adventure. Perhaps, her mystical experience can best be appreciated in the context of what Jean Gerson (1363-1429) states in his treatise entitled “De Mystica Theologia”. In this treatise, while seeking to analyse mystical knowledge in theological terms, Gerson forewarns the reader with the following words: “As those who never experienced love cannot perfectly and intimately say by way of induction what love is, so those who have not had this interior experience [of God], cannot intimately and directly grasp what really takes place in it, because they are inept to do so”. Convinced that mystical life can be best understood by those who have an interior experience of God, this study attempts to interpret de’ Pazzi’s spiritual journey with the help of other writings left to us by those who trod the pathways of mystical life. Hence the present dissertation deals with the theme of union with God as a journey of transfor mation in Beauty. The method used to deal with this theme is a literary spiritual analysis of the writings that report in detail Maddalena’s spiritual journey.