Abstract
This thesis compares the mystical experiences of Suhrawardi and San Juan de la Cruz as an extension of the traditional devotion to God. Suhrawardi and San Juan de la Cruz believed that both knowledge and love was established in the path to mystical experience. While religion is seen as a necessary foundation that imbues both particular pre-experiential virtues and technologies that establish the methodological conduit for the purification of the soul, the personal journey of the mystic ventures beyond tradition to focus on intense devotion of ritual mysticism. For Suhrawardi and San Juan de la Cruz ritual mystical practice enabled the decomposition of the material self by means of purification and perfection. Once this material self was stripped from the mystic, the true ontological human form would be present to perceive the epistemological truth of the absolute reality of existence. Yet even though this process seems similar in the writings of both Suhrawardi and San Juan de la Cruz, ultimately, these mystics viewed the final unveiled concept of mystical union with subtle discrepancies. Nevertheless, Suhrawardi and San Juan de la Cruz maintained a universal post-experiential rendition of mystical experience as a transcendent realm of absolute understanding and discernment. This transcendence was phenomenologically based on the soul’s proximity to the Absolute.