Well, in the spirit of Abogado del Diablo, I offer this bit by Merton re: St. John of the Cross.
"Some of the most beautiful and valuable pages of St. John of the Cross are, as a matter of fact, in this category; they are observations of mystical experience, illustrated at times by Scriptural application. Nevertheless, St. John of the Cross is not content with this. He realizes that the applied sense of Scripture has no theological value, and that the use of Scriptural texts by mystical authors is not theology if it does not teach us some truth revealed by God. When a mystic takes a passage from the Bible out of its context and adapts it to his own spiritual experience, his use of Scripture is merely literary. Employed in such a way, a quotation from Scripture has no more theological force than a quotation from Homer. It is not enough, thinks St. John of the Cross, to use Scripture as the mirror of one's own interior life. Therefore, even though he draws upon his experimental knowledge of mysticism, he does not attempt to prove anything by that experience alone. All that he says of the graces of prayer serves him as an occasion to seek out the final theological answer, the true Catholic doctrine on each point, in the revealed word of God."
