John of the Cross

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John of the Cross — San Juan de la Cruz, born Juan de Yepes y Álvarez near Ávila in 1542 — was a Spanish Carmelite friar and poet whose short, dense body of work became one of the central documents of Christian contemplative mysticism. He is remembered above all for a phrase that has outlived its context: the dark night of the soul.

He came from poverty, lost his father young, and entered the Carmelite order in 1563. The decisive meeting of his life was with Teresa of Ávila, who in 1567 recruited him into her reform of the order — the Discalced (“barefoot”) Carmelites, a return to a stricter, contemplative observance. The reform made enemies. In 1577 friars of the unreformed branch seized him and held him for some nine months in a cramped cell in Toledo, where, by tradition, he began composing in his head the verses that became the Spiritual Canticle. He escaped, and spent his remaining years founding houses, writing, and falling in and out of favor within his own movement. He died in 1591, was canonized in 1726, and was named a Doctor of the Church in 1926.

The arc of a life

The boy was born at Fontiveros, a poor town on the Castilian plain west of Ávila, into a family the wool trade had ruined. His father, Gonzalo de Yepes, had married beneath his station and been cut off by his kin; he died while Juan was small, and the widow Catalina moved her sons toward whatever charity and apprenticeship a poor town offered. Juan attended a school for the children of the destitute, served in a hospital for the sick poor at Medina del Campo, and studied at the Jesuit college there. The poverty is not incidental decoration. The doctrine he would later set down — that the soul comes to God by being emptied of everything it can hold — is the doctrine of a man who had owned almost nothing and learned early what it is to be stripped.

In 1563 he took the Carmelite habit at Medina and the name Juan de Santo Matía. He was sent to study at Salamanca, then the foremost university in Spain, where the curriculum was Thomist and the air thick with the controversies of the Reformation and the Catholic answer to it. He was ordained priest in 1567, restless and drawn to the severer life of the Carthusians. That year, at Medina, the meeting came that redirected him. Teresa of Ávila, then in her fifties and well into her project of returning the Carmelite order to its early austerity, was looking for friars to carry the reform into the men’s branch. She found the small, intense young priest and, by her own account, did not let him slip away. He joined her, and in 1568 took the name by which the world would know him — Juan de la Cruz, John of the Cross.

The reform was not a quiet matter of stricter rules. It split a religious order down the middle, set the reformed Discalced houses against the established Calced or unreformed ones, and drew in the politics of the Spanish church and crown. By the mid-1570s the conflict had hardened into a jurisdictional war. On a December night in 1577 a party of Calced friars and their men took John by force from his quarters near the convent at Ávila and carried him to their priory in Toledo. There they held him for roughly nine months in a cell so small a tall man could not stretch out in it — by older accounts a converted closet off a guest room, lit by a slit too high to read by except when the light fell right. He was brought out for meals to be made to kneel and take a circle of lashes from the assembled community. He was told the reform was finished and he could end his suffering by abandoning it.

He did not. What he did instead, in that cell, was begin to make poetry. By the tradition of the order he composed the first stanzas of the Spiritual Canticle there, holding the lines in memory until a sympathetic jailer brought paper. In August of 1578 he escaped — working the lock loose, lowering himself from a window on a rope improvised from bedding, and finding his way to the Discalced nuns of the city, who hid him. The episode sits at the center of his life and of his legend. The man who would write that the soul reaches God by passing through a darkness in which every support is taken away had passed, first, through a literal dark.

The years after the escape were spent governing and founding houses across Andalusia — Granada, Baeza, Segovia — and in these years the great prose commentaries were written. The end was not serene. By 1591 the reform he had helped build had its own hardliners, and John, on the losing side of an internal quarrel, was stripped of his offices and sent to a remote house; there he fell ill and died, in pain and obscurity, at Úbeda on the fourteenth of December 1591. He was beatified in 1675, canonized in 1726, and in 1926 declared a Doctor of the Church under the title given to no one else, the Mystical Doctor.

The form: poem, then commentary

His writing has an unusual structure: brief, intensely lyrical poems, followed by his own prose commentaries that unfold them line by line. Four works carry the weight of his teaching — the Ascent of Mount Carmel, the Dark Night, the Spiritual Canticle, and the Living Flame of Love. The poetry borrows the imagery of human love, the lover slipping out into the night to meet the beloved; the commentaries read it as a map of prayer.

The arrangement is deliberate and worth dwelling on, because it carries an argument about what mystical knowing is. The poem comes first and comes whole — a compressed lyric, written in the liras and eclogues of the Renaissance love tradition, that says more than it can explain. The commentary follows as a second, slower act of attention, taking the verse apart phrase by phrase and asking what each image means for a soul in prayer. John is explicit that the poems overflow their own prose: the experience the verse touches cannot be set down in plain statement, only circled and approached. So the structure itself enacts his theology. The lyric is the kataphatic gesture, the saying; the commentary keeps confessing that the saying falls short.

The Ascent of Mount Carmel and the Dark Night are in fact two commentaries on a single poem, the Noche oscura, eight stanzas in which a soul, on fire with love, leaves a house gone still and crosses the night to a union figured as the meeting of bride and bridegroom. The Ascent treats the active side — what the soul does to dispose itself — and breaks off unfinished; the Dark Night treats the passive side, what God does in the soul, and is the text that gave the phrase its currency. The Spiritual Canticle, modeled openly on the Song of Songs, stages the whole drama as a search: the bride hunting the hidden Beloved through field and mountain until they are joined. The Living Flame of Love is the briefest and most incandescent of the four, a commentary on a poem about the soul already in union, scorched by a fire that no longer wounds but consummates. Around these stand minor works — the Sayings of Light and Love, the Precautions, the letters of spiritual direction — and his own famous emblem-sketch of the Mount of Perfection, a diagram of paths up a mountain on which the road to the summit is the one marked, again and again, nada — nothing.

The night as taught

What the poems call night, the prose explains as a stripping-away: the senses, then the deeper faculties of memory, understanding, and will, are emptied of everything they can grasp, so that nothing finite stands between the soul and God. He held that God is reached not by adding images and consolations but by losing them, and that the seasons of dryness and abandonment the soul dreads are, on his account, often the work itself, not its failure.

The architecture is precise. John distinguishes two nights, each with an active and a passive phase. The first is the night of sense: the beginner who has come to enjoy prayer, to find sweetness in devotion and warmth in the practices of religion, is led into a phase in which all of that sweetness drains away. Prayer goes dry; the imagery and feeling that once carried the soul give it nothing. The natural reading of this is failure or sin, and John’s counsel inverts it. The dryness, he teaches, is most often a sign that God is weaning the soul from its attachment to the consolations of God rather than to God, drawing it from a love that runs on feeling toward a love that does not need it. The soul is being moved from active meditation — picturing, reasoning, stirring up affection — into the stiller, darker mode he calls contemplation, in which the faculties fall quiet and a knowing arrives that the mind cannot manufacture.

The second and deeper purification is the night of spirit. Here the stripping reaches the three faculties John inherits from the Augustinian map of the soul: memory, understanding, and will. The understanding is darkened, emptied of the concepts and certainties it leaned on, and aligned with faith — which for John is precisely a dark knowing, a hold on God past the reach of any clear idea. The memory is voided of its hoard of images and securities and turned toward hope, which fixes on what is not yet possessed and cannot be pictured. The will is purged of its disordered loves and turned wholly to charity. Each faculty, in his scheme, is matched to one of the theological virtues, and each virtue works by negation — by detaching the faculty from the finite thing it had seized so that it can open onto the infinite it cannot seize. This is why the night feels like loss. From inside, the removal of every familiar support is indistinguishable from abandonment, and John insists that it can be agonizing, a darkness in which the soul believes God has cast it off at the very moment God is closest. The pain is real and the diagnosis is the opposite of the appearance: the darkness is the inflow of a light too pure for the eyes that meet it, the way the sun blinds rather than illumines a gaze turned full upon it.

What unites the whole is the principle his Mount-diagram repeats as a refrain: todo y nada — all and nothing. To possess everything, desire to possess nothing; to come to the knowledge of all, desire the knowledge of nothing; to arrive at being everything, desire to be nothing. The soul does not climb to God by accumulation. It climbs by a disciplined emptying, until it is poor enough to be filled. He does not counsel that the world is evil or that the senses are to be despised for their own sake; the point is that nothing created, however good, is God, and that to rest in any creature short of God is to stop short of the summit. The night is the name for the whole movement by which the soul lets go its grip — first on pleasures, then on the subtler holds of its own understanding and self — so that the only thing left holding it is God.

The negative way, given a Spanish voice

This is the apophatic, or negative, way — the conviction that the divine exceeds every concept and is met most truly in unknowing. It descends from the sixth-century writer known as Dionysius the Areopagite and runs through the medieval mystics; John gave it a Spanish voice and a rigorous psychological detail it had not had before.

The lineage is worth naming, because John stands near the end of a long inheritance and transforms it. The taproot is Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the anonymous author writing around the year 500 whose Mystical Theology taught that one approaches God by denying of him every name in turn, climbing past affirmation into a ray of divine darkness where the mind, stilled, is united to what it cannot comprehend. That grammar of negation — the heart of apophatic theology — passed into the Latin West through translators and commentators, among them the ninth-century Irishman Johannes Scotus Eriugena, who rendered the Dionysian corpus into Latin and built it into a cosmology of God beyond being. It runs through the Rhineland of Meister Eckhart, with his imageless ground of the soul and his God beyond God; through the English Cloud of Unknowing, which sets the seeker in a darkness between two clouds, beating against the unknowable with the sharp dart of a longing love; and it stands beside the affective, bridal-mystical stream of Bernard of Clairvaux and Bonaventure, and the learned-ignorance of Nicholas of Cusa, for whom God is grasped only as the coincidence of opposites past all reasoning. In the Christian East the same insistence that God’s essence is unknowable, met only in his uncreated energies, runs through the hesychast theology that Barlaam of Calabria attacked and Gregory Palamas defended — a parallel working-out of the apophatic principle within Orthodoxy at the very time the Latin West was absorbing it differently.

What John adds is not a new metaphysics but a new precision about the experience. The earlier apophatic writers told the soul that God lies past concept and image; John charts what it is like to be brought there — the specific desolations, the false readings the soul gives its own state, the marks by which a genuine night of God is told from mere depression or sloth, the slow handing-over of memory and understanding and will. He turns the via negativa from a theology of God’s unknowability into a clinical map of a human interior under transformation. In this he is the heir of the Cloud and of Eckhart, but more analytic than either, and his dark night became the standard name for a stage that later writers — the German poet Angelus Silesius among the apophatic heirs, and the English scholar Evelyn Underhill, whose Mysticism gave the night a chapter and a settled place in the modern map of the contemplative life — would treat as a fixed feature of the inner geography. He belongs, in the long view, to the company of the great Christian mystics — the cataphatic visionary Julian of Norwich, the ardent Richard Rolle — even as his particular gift is for the way down into darkness rather than the way up into light.

The poet

Scholars also rank him among the finest poets in the Spanish language, a literary standing independent of any verdict on the theology. The poems are few — three carry his fame, the Noche oscura, the Cántico espiritual, and the Llama de amor viva — and they are short, but they are made with a control that the critic Dámaso Alonso, the modern authority on his verse, traced to a fusion of sources: the biblical Song of Songs, the Italianate love-lyric of the Spanish Renaissance that Garcilaso de la Vega had naturalized, and the popular Castilian song. From these he made something that does not sound like any of them. The verse is sensuous where the doctrine is austere; it speaks of night air and lilies and wounded deer and a lover’s hair stirring at the neck, and only the commentary tells the reader that all of it means the soul and God. That gap — between the warm, particular surface of the poem and the bare metaphysics it carries — is part of why the poetry survives independent of belief, read by people who care nothing for the theology and everything for the Castilian.

Texts, translations, and study

The Spanish writings are in the public domain worldwide; the questions for a reader are which edition and which translation. The standard older English rendering, long out of copyright, is David Lewis, The Complete Works of Saint John of the Cross, of the Order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, translated from the original Spanish, edited by the Oblate Fathers of St Charles with a preface by Cardinal Wiseman (London: Thomas Baker, 1864; later editions revised by the Carmelite scholar Benedict Zimmerman), digitized in full and freely readable — the second volume’s scanned text is mirrored on Wikimedia Commons, and the older English version of the Ascent of Mount Carmel is transcribed at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. The modern scholarly standard in English is the Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez Collected Works of St. John of the Cross (ICS Publications, 1979; revised 1991), prepared by the Discalced Carmelites of Washington and still in copyright; the E. Allison Peers three-volume Complete Works (1934–35) is a respected mid-century version, also under copyright. For the poetry as poetry, the indispensable critical study is Dámaso Alonso, La poesía de San Juan de la Cruz (desde esta ladera) (Madrid, 1942), which placed the verse firmly among the summits of Castilian lyric.

For the apophatic genealogy behind him, the primary source is the Pseudo-Dionysian corpus itself, available in John Parker’s translation, The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (London: James Parker, 1894 and 1899), whose Mystical Theology is the seed-text of the entire negative way; the English Cloud of Unknowing is the nearest vernacular kin, translating Dionysius into a practical discipline of dark contemplation. The broader picture is set out for the general reader in Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (London: Methuen, 1911), which treats the dark night as a stage in the soul’s development and reads John alongside Eckhart and the Rhineland. Among modern scholarship, Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge University Press, 1995), traces the apophatic line from Dionysius through Eckhart and reaches John as its late and most psychologically exact representative, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s article on mysticism sets his apophatic practice against the kataphatic, image-rich mysticism it answers. The full secondary literature on the four works and the contested chronology of the commentaries is large; the introductions in Kavanaugh and Rodriguez survey it.

His phrase has since drifted into common speech as a name for ordinary despair, which is nearly the opposite of what he meant: for him the night was not a breakdown but a passage, and the darkness was where the work was done.

→ In the library: The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (Parker, 1899) — the apophatic source · The Cloud of Unknowing (Underhill, 1912) — its English apophatic kin

→ Related: Richard Rolle De Hampole · The Reformation · The Renaissance · Apophatic Theology · Pseudo Dionysius The Areopagite · Christian Mysticism · Mysticism · Meister Eckhart · The Cloud Of Unknowing · Julian Of Norwich · Bernard Of Clairvaux · Bonaventure · Nicholas Of Cusa · Angelus Silesius · Evelyn Underhill · Johannes Scotus Eriugena · Barlaam Of Calabria · Song Of Songs