A concrete and human mysticism

The keenness and depth of the concept of love in Jacopone’s Laudi will be a point of reference for mystics who want to realise the discovery, the confirmation and the commitment not to practice a way of escape from the urgent need to live… understanding and explaining desire and passion, transforming love and deforming sorrow, life and death…

… While in many religious spheres of the late Middle Ages [and also later, up to the present day] there is a tendency to evade devotion in sentiment … the mystical-literary testimony of the poet from Todi describes the full meaning of a contemplative life that explains the whole of existence …

… The judgment according to which man is worthless, is definitively destroyed …

To the confused or reckless commentators who present Jacopone as a chronic pessimist with no prospects of resurrection, Cacciotti explains how, on the contrary, Jacopone sends a message of liberation and redemption of all of existence, of humanity with all its limitations, its joys and sufferings …

This is what makes Jacopone’s mysticism universal, as it is conceived today by Christians and non-Christians, religious and lay men and women, such as Karl Rahner, Josè Tolentino Mendonça, Henri Nouwen, Ernesto Balducci, Edgar Morin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and many others …

Claudio