La poetica del espacio en San Juan de la Cruz y el receptaculo platonico de la joora (chora)

This study provides the first intertextual reading of St. John of the Cross' spatial poetic against Plato's chora (joora), the famous cosmogonic space/receptacle of the Timaeus. Plato conceives the symbolic chora as a containing receptacle, the space of all becoming, which receives the changing images like a mother or a nurse, without ever joining any. The philosopher surrendered to the impossibility of rationally explaining his containing cosmogonic symbol, just as would happen to St. John of the Cross so many centuries later.;St. John, who could have learned about the old Platonic image through intermediaries authors such as Plotinus, symbolizes the ineffable process of deification of the soul under the simile of a receptacle in continuous transformation: the soul strives for its divine goal, and, once the theopatic union is achieved, receives the continuous epiphanies of God as a docile and voluble receptacle of Divinity. From a mystical--not philosophical--perspective, St. John compares the voluble soul in the process of mystical transformation with a container, which, in turn, is a symbolic polished mirror, reflector of the Otherness. The poems "Dark Night" and "Spiritual Canticle" are the ones that best illustrate many of the attributes of this soul in flux, so close to the volubility of the symbolic mystic receptacle of the Platonic chora.;St. John's of the Cross' critics have not examined the Platonic background of space/receptacle of the Timaeus, which seems to have left its mark not only in Plotinus and in Christian mysticism, but also in Jewish and Islamic mysticism, which explains the ecstatic process using the simile or the heart (qalb), a fluid receptacle that acquires any form in the pint of ecstasy.;We hope that our examination of the intertextual dialogue between the poetry of St. John - so novel in the European Renaissance - and the Timaeus proves to be a useful contribution to the studies of St. John of the Cross.