A new English translation of the Spanish mystical classic Rome condemned in 1687 ? made directly from Molinos's own Spanish of 1676, not from the Italian, and not the anonymous version of 1688.
In 1675 an Aragonese priest living in Rome published a short manual teaching people to pray without words. It appeared with ecclesiastical approbation and ran through ten editions in ten years, seven of them Italian. Then, on 18 July 1685, its author was arrested and taken to a cell of the Holy Office; in November 1687 the bull Coelestis Pastor condemned sixty-eight propositions drawn from his writings, and he died in prison in 1696 after eleven years of confinement. The condemnation did not stop the book: the Latin came out that same year, English, French and Dutch the next, German in 1699.
The Spiritual Guide teaches the soul to leave reasoning behind in prayer, not to flee dryness, and to surrender its own will to the point of annihilation. It is written in short sentences, without ornament, addressed to a "you" ? by a priest of more than twenty years who had spent a decade as one of the most sought-after confessors in Rome and knew exactly where people get stuck.
Why another translation. The version most widely available in English is the one printed in London in 1688, and its own title page states the problem: Translated from the Italian copy, printed at Venice, 1685. It is a translation of a translation, in the English of its own century. This one was made directly from the first Madrid printing of 1676, from the copy in the Biblioteca Nacional de España, in contemporary English that a reader does not have to fight.
What this edition contains. The complete work ? the author's preface, the Proem with its four Notices, and all three books, fifty-seven chapters. Every Latin quotation is translated in a footnote, with its source identified wherever it can be traced. An introduction on Molinos, the doctrine of annihilation and the reasons for his condemnation. A note on the translation declaring exactly what has been emended in the 1676 printing and why. A chronology, a glossary of forty-three technical terms, and a register of the thirty-two persons Molinos cites, explaining what each authority is doing in his argument.
Who it is for. Readers of Christian mysticism and contemplative prayer, and anyone who has met Molinos through the Quaker and pietist tradition that kept him in print long after Rome had silenced him.
Translated from the Spanish by Andrés Tacenda.
