Introduction:
The Renaissance imposes a division between the natural and the supernatural things, as opposed to the Middle Ages in which they were mixed in such form that God, the Virgin and the Saints took part in all type of worldly subjects with appearances and miracles. At this new time, there are worldly writers, like -Garcilaso de la Vega-, and authors who express religious feelings solely, as much in verse as in prosa. In the Renaissance these feelings are developed and declared widely, strongly impelled by the Counterreformation, the fight against the Protestant Reformation, on which the Spanish Church and Crown insisted.
The religious literature can be manifested in treaties in prose on spiritual matters (like The names of Christ of fray Luis of León), or in poems loaded of spirituality (San Juan de la Cruz). The forms of religious life, denominated "ascetic" and "mystic", were expressed in both ways.
The ascetic tries to perfect the people urging them to strictly fulfill the Christian obligations, and instructing them on it. Important writers are fray Luis de Granada (1504-1588), San Juan de Ávila (1500-1569) and fray Juan de los Ángeles (1536-1609).
The mystic tries to express the prodigies that some privileged people experiment in their own soul when entering in communication with God. The mystics preferredly wrote in verse (San Juan de la Cruz), although they did not renounce to the prose (Santa Teresa de Jesús).
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