St. John of the Cross (1542-1591), a priest of the Order of Discalced Carmelites, is a Doctor of the Church and one of the greatest poets in the Spanish language.
Juan de Yepes y Álvarez was born into a poor family in Fontiveros, near Ávila, Castille. His widowed mother brought the young John and his surviving brother to Médina del Campo, where eventually he studied at the Jesuit school.
In 1563, he entered the Carmelites. He studied at the prestigious University of Salamanca and one of his teachers was Fray Luis de León. Shortly after his ordination to the priesthood, he met Teresa of Ávila, became a spiritual director to her and her nuns, and joined her project to restore the Carmelite Order to its original observance.
The Carmelite Order was opposed to some of the Discalced Carmelite’s expansion and in 1577 John was even taken prisoner by Carmelites and submitted to deplorable mistreatment, but managed to escape nine months later.
In 1580, Gregory XIII authorised the formal separation of the Discalced Carmelites from the Carmelites, and John occupied various positions in the government of the newly erected order. However, in 1591, after contesting some of the Vicar General’s decisions, he was removed from his position as counsellor and sent to a remote monastery in Andalucia, where he fell ill.
He died in Úbeda in 1591 but left behind a series of exquisite lyrical poems and treatises on the spiritual life.
Benedict XIII canonized him in 1726 and, two hundred years later, Pius XI declared him a doctor of the Church.
His memory is celebrated on 14 December and he is known as the Mystical Doctor.
In this interview, Dr. Edward Howells discusses the works of St. John of the Cross.
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What would you add to the preceding biographical sketch of St. John of the Cross? He was born in Fontiveros, a small village in Castile in 1542 and into a family which had fallen upon hard times.
His father was in the textile trade and died when he was probably about two or three. His mother was then cast into poverty and scraped a living by weaving. John's elder brother, Luis, died, possibly because of a famine which was ravaging Castille at the time. So, John had a hard beginning.
The family moved a few times before settling in Medina del Campo, where John went to a charity school called the Doctrina. There, he learned basic grammar and would have helped out at a local Augustinian convent a few hours every morning.
Then, he managed to get into the Jesuit school in Medina. This was his making. By all accounts, he received a very good education there.
From a fairly young age, at least from his teens, he considered entering a religious order. He entered the Carmelites in Medina del Campo at the age of twenty. A year later, he made his profession and was sent by the Carmelites to the University of Salamanca, where he studied arts and then theology. The BA in Arts would have included philosophy.
Academically, he was extremely gifted. His superiors probably expected him to stay longer at the university, but, during the summer vacation after his fourth year of studies, he met Teresa of Ávila while on a visit home in Medina.
He was unsure of his vocation in the Carmelites. He was thinking of becoming a Carthusian because he was attracted to a harsher and more ascetic regime of greater solitude and contemplation. St. Teresa told him that she was starting a reform of the Carmelite order that would return it to its contemplative roots. John found that a very attractive idea and joined Teresa's reform.
At some point during the next year, he was sent with a couple of other friars to start a Reformed Carmelite Monastery in a remote village of Castille, Duruelo. He built that community up.
He was then promoted through various positions in the Discalced Carmelite Order. During this time, there was a falling out between the reformed and the unreformed parts of the order Many monastic orders were undergoing reforms during the sixteenth century in Spain. The Carmelites had yet to be reformed and the reform started by Teresa of Ávila seemed to be the way to do it. However, there was a dispute about who was in charge of this reform. The various parties were divided on this point: the King of Spain, who was interested in the reform, the pope, the nuncio, and the general of the order. John was caught in the crossfire.
He was captured by the opposing party and imprisoned in the Carmelite Priory in Toledo for nearly a year. He was told that he was disobeying the order. Of course, this cut him very much to the heart because he had taken his vow of obedience very seriously.
It is assumed that his teaching on the dark night of the soul grew out of what he experienced while imprisoned. He may have doubted his vow of obedience. He asked where God was in this darkness that was both a psychological and a physical suffering.
He then made a remarkable escape, apparently by throwing himself out of a high-up window and landing on a ledge beneath.
He made his way to the Discalced Carmelite nuns in Toledo. They took him in and he spent several months recovering from the deprivations of his time in prison.
Encouraged by the nuns, he began to write his remarkable works.
He wrote spiritual poetry as a hobby but, through his commentaries, he came to use it also as an aid to teaching.
Now he is considered one of the greatest poets of the Spanish Golden Age. Even if we did not have the spiritual teachings of his longer works, he would still be remembered as a great poet.
The nuns asked him to write some commentaries to explain how his poems apply to the spiritual life. Hence, he wrote long commentaries on quite short poems. In them, he uses the images of the poems to describe the soul's journey towards union with God. Many of the images are taken from the Bible but are elaborated and developed with his own words and poetry. Best known is the image of darkness and light in the Dark Night.
His phrase—the dark night of the soul—has become a household word.
After this period, he enjoyed a very fruitful spell of teaching and writing. Unfortunately, there were further problems in the Carmelites, now divided between the Calced and the Discalced, that is, the unreformed and reformed branches of the order.
Within the Discalced Carmelites, John had a disagreement with how things were going and volunteered to go on a missionary expedition to Mexico. However, before leaving, a cut in his leg went septic. Coming down with a fever, he went to the Carmelite monastery in Úbeda to be cured. He did not recover but went downhill rapidly and died there at the age of 49.
St. John of the Cross entered the Carmelites out of devotion to the Blessed Virgin. The order’s full title is Order of the Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel. How is it connected to Mount Carmel and to Mary? During the Crusades, some religious started a hermitical community on Mount Carmel, in what is modern Israel. Mythologically, they traced their origins as a contemplative order back to Elijah on Mount Carmel. Hence, the name of the order and of John’s work The Ascent of Mount Carmel.
When the order moved back from the Holy Land to Western Europe, it became a major order. Its members became more like friars than hermits and the rule was mitigated to allow for preaching and teaching outside the monasteries. Indeed, there are various versions of the rule. So that is where the associate with Mount Carmel comes from.
However, I am a little hazy about the devotion to the Virgin Mary, though it was always strong.
It had to do with St Simon Stock, who was prior general of the order. He received an apparition of the Blessed Virgin holding the brown scapular. That is where the order’s connection with the Blessed Virgin comes in. He was the one responsible for the order’s early expansion.
St. John of the Cross was influenced deeply by St. Teresa of Ávila. Are there any significant differences between their thought and approach to the spiritual life? They were great friends.
Teresa very much appreciated John's spiritual direction, for which she invited him to her monastery in Ávila, the Incarnation, which she had reformed. As part of that reform, she invited him to be the confessor to her nuns. That was a high accolade and she says very positive things about him in her letters. So, we know that they were close.
John also recommends her writings in his own. The first edition of her writings had been published while he was writing his Living Flame of Love.
However, they were very different characters. This comes out in their writings. Teresa had a very developed interior life but was an extrovert and a larger-than-life character. John was much more unassuming and self-effacing. He was a very good at spiritual-direction and one-to-one encounters, but less comfortable in a crowd.
In terms of teaching, the main difference is that John is interested in what goes on when God feels absent: the psychological suffering of feeling that God is not present even though you have devoted your life to him in prayer and so on.
Teresa does not really deal with this. She does talk about trials. However, usually they are trials that come from the outside rather than from within. So, the focus in John's Dark Nightand The Ascent of Mount Carmelis different from that of anything that Teresa writes.
What led you to study St. John of the Cross? I first read John of the Cross in a third-year course of my undergraduate theology degree and was struck immediately by the depth and richness of his teaching.
I was particularly interested in the pastoral or psychological question of what you should do when you cannot or do not experience God as you expect.
What I found very exciting was John's notion that such a situation can be an invitation of God. He had the courage to go into that sort of experience and to reassure us that God can be found even when he feels absent. I found that paradox an exciting one back then and still do.
1.
You have proposed two preliminary readings from St. John of the Cross and then five books. You recommend that those new to St. John start with the preliminary readings. The first one is the poem on which he bases his commentaries The Ascent of Mount Carmel and Dark Night of the Soul: “One dark night” (En una noche oscura). Why should someone approaching the works of St. John of the Cross for the first time start here? In most editions of John's works—indeed all the ones I have come across—the order is The Ascent of Mount Carmel, Dark Night of the Soul, The Spiritual Canticle, and Living Flame of Love. These are his four main works. Most people begin by reading the first of these commentaries, the Ascent of Mount Carmel. However, they soon get bogged down because it is an intricate and quite long-winded work. It is not the best place to start.
There is a way to counteract that problem. Looking at the poetry first is much more inviting. Moreover, “One Dark Night” contains the central paradox that John goes on to talk about: even when things look dark, there is some invitation from God that draws the soul forth. That comes out very powerfully in this poem but is harder to see in the commentary.
The poem begins thus:
“One dark night, fired with love’s urgent longings — ah, the sheer grace! — I went out unseen, my house being now all stilled.
In darkness, and secure, by the secret ladder, disguised, — ah, the sheer grace! — in darkness and concealment, my house being now all stilled.
On that glad night, in secret, for no one saw me, nor did I look at anything, with no other light or guide than the one that burned in my heart.
This guided me more surely than the light of noon to where he was awaiting me —him I knew so well— there in a place where no one appeared."
While everything looks dark, something deeper is drawing the soul forth towards the one she loves. Not surprisingly, this turns out to be God: it is Christ. But it is not clear in the darkness; there is only the inward drawing towards—towards what? It only emerges that it is God in the burning of the heart and the deep personal engagement in love. This paradox comes out strongly in the poem. It is the central paradox of the poem and the commentary.
2.
One of the best-known works of modern religious art is Salvador Dalì’s Christ of Saint John of the Cross (Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow). It was inspired by the saint’s sketch of Christ on the cross. Instead of looking at Christ crucified from below or in front of him, it looks at him from above his left side. Why have you selected this sketch, together with the prologue and diagram of the Ascent of Mount Carmel (Subida del Monte Carmelo), as the second preliminary reading?
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