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ASCENT OF MOUNT CARMEL
Ascent of Mount Carmel
by Saint John of the Cross
DOCTOR OF THE CHURCH
THIRD REVISED EDITION
Translated and edited, with an Introduction,
by E. ALLISON PEERS
from the critical edition of
P. SILVERIO DE SANTA TERESA, C.D.
NIHIL OBSTAT: CEORGIVS SMITH, S.T.D., PH.D.
CENSOR DEPVTATVS
IMPRIMATVR: E. MORROGH BERNARD
VICARIVS GENERALIS
WESTMONASTERII: DIE XXIV SEPTEMBRIS MCMLII
TO THE
DISCALCED CARMELITES OF CASTILE,
WITH ABIDING MEMORIES OF THEIR HOSPITALITY AND KINDNESS
IN MADRID, ÃVILA AND BURGOS,
BUT ABOVE ALL OF THEIR DEVOTION TO
SAINT JOHN OF THE CROSS,
I DEDICATE THIS TRANSLATION
Mount Carmel
the greatest of all mystical theologians
Thus has Thomas Merton described St. John of the Cross, echoing the
considered judgment of most authorities on the spiritual life; and here in
this volume is the great mystic’s most widely appealing work. Ascent of
Mount Carmel is an incomparable guide to the spiritual life — because its
author has lived his own counsel. Addressed to informed Christians who
aspire to grow in union with God, it examines every category of spiritual
experience, the spurious as well as the authentic. With rare insight into
human psychology it not only tells how to become more closely united with
God, but spells out in vivid detail the pitfalls to avoid.
In his Apostolic Letter proclaiming St. John of the Cross a Doctor of the
Church, Pope Pius XI wrote that he “points out to souls the way of
perfection as though illumined by light from on high, in his limpidly clear
analysis of mystical experience. And although [his works] deal with
difficult and hidden matters, they are nevertheless replete with such lofty
spiritual doctrine and are so well adapted to the understanding of those who
study them that they can rightly be called a guide and handbook for the man
of faith who proposes to embrace a life of perfection.
This translation by E. Allison Peers was hailed by the London Times as “the
most faithful that has appeared in any European language.
St. John of the Cross was perhaps the greatest mystical writer the world has
ever known. Bossuets famous tribute that his writings€œpossess the
same
authority in mystical theology as the writings of St. Thomas possess in
dogmatic theology remains the most fitting testimonial to his august
place among spiritual writers.
John was born in Castile in 1542 eve of Spains century of greatness, to
which he himself was to add such lustre. He studied under the Jesuits and
worked for six years in a hospital. Entering the Carmelites in 1563, he was
professed a year later and sent to the great University of Salamanca. He was
ordained in 1567 but, shrinking from the apostolate of a priest in the
world, considered entering the Carthusians, a hermitical order.
Then came the turning point in his life. He met St. Teresa of Ãvila, who was
pursuing her epic work of restoring the pristine, stricter observance of the
Carmelite rule. John and two other members of the order took the vows of the
Discalced (or reformed) Carmelites the following year, binding themselves to
a more rigorous way of life which included daily (and nightly) recitation of
the Divine Office in choir, perpetual abstinence from meat, and additional
fasting.
Yet his religious vows were but a part of the rigors John was to undergo.
The main branch of the order, the Calced Carmelites, so opposed the Reform
that they twice had John kidnapped and jailed providentially, so it
proved, for much of his writing was done in prison.
The greater part of his twenty-three years as a Discalced Carmelite,
however, was spent in filling a number of important posts in the order,
among them Rector of two colleges, Prior, Definator, and Vicar-Provincial.
But it was in one of his lesser offices that he was to spend the most
decisive years of his life: he was confessor to the Carmelite nuns at Ãvila,
where St. Teresa was Superior.
The secret of St. Johns unique contribution to mystical theology was not
simply his mysticism, for there have been other mystics; not even his
profound grasp of Scripture, dogma, Thomism, and spiritual literature, for
there have also been learned mystics. What sets him apart is his
extraordinary poetic vision. To write of mystical experience is to try to
express the inexpressible. Because he was a great poet St. John of the Cross
was able, in the realm of mysticism, to push the frontiers of human
expression beyond where any writer has succeeded in venturing before or
since. This poetic intensity is found even in his prose, the major works of
which are Ascent of Mount Carmel, Dark Night of the Soul, Spiritual
Canticle, and Living Flame of Love.
St. John of the Cross died in 1591, was beatified less than a century later
in 1675, was canonized in 1726, and was named a Doctor of the Church by Pope
Pius XI in 1926.
TRANSLATORS PREFACE
TO THE FIRST EDITION
FOR at least twenty years, a new translation of the works of St. John of the
Cross has been an urgent necessity. The translations of the individual prose
works now in general use go back in their original form to the
eighteen-sixties, and, though the later editions of some of them have been
submitted to a certain degree of revision, nothing but a complete
retranslation of the works from their original Spanish could be
satisfactory. For this there are two reasons.
First, the existing translations were never very exact renderings of the
original Spanish text even in the form which held the field when they were
first published. Their great merit was extreme readableness: many a disciple
of the Spanish mystics, who is unacquainted with the language in which they
wrote, owes to these translations the comparative ease with which he has
mastered the main lines of St. John of the Crosss teaching. Thus for the
general reader they were of great utility; for the student, on the other
hand, they have never been entirely adequate. They paraphrase difficult
expressions, omit or add to parts of individual sentences in order (as it
seems) to facilitate comprehension of the general drift of the passages in
which these occur, and frequently retranslate from the Vulgate the Saints
Spanish quotations from Holy Scripture instead of turning into English the
quotations themselves, using the text actually before them.
A second and more important reason for a new translation, however, is the
discovery of fresh manuscripts and the consequent improvements which have
been made in the Spanish text of the works of St. John of the Cross, during
the present century. Seventy years ago, the text chiefly used was that of
the collection known as the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles (1853), which
itself was based, as we shall later see, upon an edition going back as far
as 1703, published before modern methods of editing were so much as
imagined. Both the text of the B.A.E. edition and the unimportant commentary
which accompanied it were highly unsatisfactory, yet until the beginning of
the present century nothing appreciably better was attempted.
In the last twenty years, however, we have had two new editions, each based
upon a close study of the extant manuscripts and each representing a great
advance upon the editions preceding it. The three-volume Toledo edition of
P. Gerardo de San Juan de la Cruz, C.D. (1912“14), was the first attempt
made to produce an accurate text by modern critical methods. Its execution
was perhaps less laudable than its conception, and faults were pointed out
in it from the time of its appearance, but it served as a new starting-point
for Spanish scholars and stimulated them to a new interest in St. John of
the Crosss writings. Then, seventeen years later, came the magnificent
five-volume edition of P. Silverio de Santa Teresa, C.D. (Burgos, 1929-31),
which forms the basis of this present translation. So superior is it, even
on the most casual examination, to all its predecessors that to eulogize it
in detail is superfluous. It is founded upon a larger number of texts than
has previously been known and it collates them with greater skill than that
of any earlier editor. It can hardly fail to be the standard edition of the
works of St. John of the Cross for generations.
Thanks to the labours of these Carmelite scholars and of others whose
findings they have incorporated in their editions, Spanish students can now
approach the work of the great Doctor with the reasonable belief that they
are reading, as nearly as may be, what he actually wrote. English-reading
students, however, who are unable to master sixteenth-century Spanish, have
hitherto had no grounds for such a belief. They cannot tell whether, in any
particular passage, they are face to face with the Saints own words, with a
translators free paraphrase of them or with a gloss made by some later
copyist or early editor in the supposed interests of orthodoxy. Indeed, they
cannot be sure that some whole paragraph is not one of the numerous
interpolations which has its rise in an early printed edition i.e., the
timorous qualifications of statements which have seemed to the interpolator
over-bold. Even some of the most distinguished writers in English on St.
John of the Cross have been misled in this way and it has been impossible
for any but those who read Spanish with ease to make a systematic and
reliable study of such an important question as the alleged dependence of
Spanish quietists upon the Saint, while his teaching on the mystical life
has quite unwittingly been distorted by persons who would least wish to
misrepresent it in any particular.
It was when writing the chapter on St. John of the Cross in the first volume
of my Studies of the Spanish Mystics (in which, as it was published in 1927,
I had not the advantage of using P. Silverios edition) that I first
realized the extent of the harm caused by the lack of an accurate and modern
translation. Making my own versions of all the passages quoted, I had
sometimes occasion to compare them with those of other translators, which at
their worst were almost unrecognizable as versions of the same originals.
Then and there I resolved that, when time allowed, I would make a fresh
translation of the works of a saint to whom I have long had great devotion
to whom, indeed, I owe more than to any other writer outside the
Scriptures. Just at that time I happened to visit the Discalced Carmelites
at Burgos, where I first met P. Silverio, and found, to my gratification,
that his edition of St. John of the Cross was much nearer publication than I
had imagined. Arrangements for sole permission to translate the new edition
were quickly made and work on the early volumes was begun even before the
last volume was published.
II
These preliminary notes will explain why my chief preoccupation throughout
the performance of this task has been to present as accurate and reliable a
version of St. John of the Crosss works as it is possible to obtain. To
keep the translation, line by line, au pied de la lettre, is, of course,
impracticable: and such constantly occurring Spanish habits as the use of
abstract nouns in the plural and the verbal construction˜ir + present
participle introduce shades of meaning which cannot always be reproduced.
Yet wherever, for stylistic or other reasons, I have departed from the
Spanish in any way that could conceivably cause a misunderstanding, I have
scrupulously indicated this in a footnote. Further, I have translated, not
only the text, but the variant readings as given by P. Silverio, [1] except
where they are due merely to slips of the copyists pen or where they differ
so slightly from the readings of the text that it is impossible to render
the differences in English. I beg students not to think that some of the
smaller changes noted are of no importance; closer examination will often
show that, however slight they may seem, they are, in relation to their
context, or to some particular aspect of the Saints teaching, of real
interest; in other places they help to give the reader an idea, which may be
useful to him in some crucial passage, of the general characteristics of the
manuscript or edition in question. The editors notes on the manuscripts and
early editions which he has collated will also be found, for the same
reason, to be summarized in the introduction to each work; in consulting the
variants, the English-reading student has the maximum aid to a judgment of
the reliability of his authorities.
Concentration upon the aim of obtaining the most precise possible rendering
of the text has led me to sacrifice stylistic elegance to exactness where
the two have been in conflict; it has sometimes been difficult to bring
oneself to reproduce the Saints often ungainly, though often forceful,
repetitions of words or his long, cumbrous parentheses, but the temptation
to take refuge in graceful paraphrases has been steadily resisted. In the
same interest, and also in that of space, I have made certain omissions
from, and abbreviations of, other parts of the edition than the text. Two of
P. Silverios five volumes are entirely filled with commentaries and
documents. I have selected from the documents those of outstanding interest
to readers with no detailed knowledge of Spanish religious history and have
been content to summarize the editors introductions to the individual
works, as well as his longer footnotes to the text, and to omit such parts
as would interest only specialists, who are able, or at least should be
obliged, to study them in the original Spanish.
The decision to summarize in these places has been made the less reluctantly
because of the frequent unsuitability of P. Silverios style to English
readers. Like that of many Spaniards, it is so discursive, and at times so
baroque in its wealth of epithet and its profusion of imagery, that a
literal translation, for many pages together, would seldom have been
acceptable. The same criticism would have been applicable to any literal
translation of P. Silverios biography of St. John of the Cross which stands
at the head of his edition (Vol. I, pp. 7-130). There was a further reason
for omitting these biographical chapters. The long and fully documented
biography by the French Carmelite, P. Bruno de Jésus-Marie, C.D., written
from the same standpoint as P. Silverios, has recently been translated into
English, and any attempt to rival this in so short a space would be
foredoomed to failure. I have thought, however, that a brief outline of the
principal events in St. John of the Crosss life would be a useful
preliminary to this edition; this has therefore been substituted for the
biographical sketch referred to.
In language, I have tried to reproduce the atmosphere of a sixteenth-century
text as far as is consistent with clarity. Though following the paragraph
divisions of my original, I have not scrupled, where this has seemed to
facilitate understanding, to divide into shorter sentences the long and
sometimes straggling periods in which the Saint so frequently indulged. Some
attempt has been made to show the contrast between the highly adorned,
poetical language of much of the commentary on the˜Spiritual Canticle and
the more closely shorn and eminently practical, though always somewhat
discursive style of the Ascent and Dark Night. That the Living Flame
occupies an intermediate position in this respect should also be clear from
the style of the translation.
Quotations, whether from the Scriptures or from other sources, have been
left strictly as St. John of the Cross made them. Where he quotes in Latin,
the Latin has been reproduced; only his quotations in Spanish have been
turned into English. The footnote references are to the Vulgate, of which
the Douai Version is a direct translation; if the Authorized Version
differs, as in the Psalms, the variation has been shown in square brackets
for the convenience of those who use it.
A word may not be out of place regarding the translations of the poems as
they appear in the prose commentaries. Obviously, it would have been
impossible to use the comparatively free verse renderings which appear in
Volume II of this translation, since the commentaries discuss each line and
often each word of the poems. A literal version of the poems in their
original verse-lines, however, struck me as being inartistic, if not
repellent, and as inviting continual comparison with the more polished verse
renderings which, in spirit, come far nearer to the poets aim. My first
intention was to translate the poems, for the purpose of the commentaries,
into prose. But later I hit upon the long and metrically unfettered
verse-line, suggestive of Biblical poetry in its English dress, which I have
employed throughout. I believe that, although the renderings often suffer
artistically from their necessary literalness, they are from the artistic
standpoint at least tolerable.
III
The debts I have to acknowledge, though few, are very large ones. My
gratitude to P. Silverio de Santa Teresa for telling me so much about his
edition before its publication, granting my publishers the sole translation
rights and discussing with me a number of crucial passages cannot be
disjoined from the many kindnesses I have received during my work on the
Spanish mystics, which is still proceeding, from himself and from his
fellow-Carmelites in the province of Castile. In dedicating this translation
to them, I think particularly of P. Silverio in Burgos, of P. Florencio del
Ni“o Jesús in Madrid, and
of P. Crisógono de Jesús Sacramentado,
together
with the Fathers of the˜Convento de la Santa in vila.
The long and weary process of revising the manuscript and proofs of this
translation has been greatly lightened by the co-operation and companionship
of P. Edmund Gurdon, Prior of the Cartuja de Miraflores, near Burgos, with
whom I have freely discussed all kinds of difficulties, both of substance
and style, and who has been good enough to read part of my proofs. From the
quiet library of his monastery, as well as from his gracious companionship,
I have drawn not only knowledge, but strength, patience and perseverance.
And when at length, after each of my visits, we have had to part, we have
continued our labours by correspondence, shaking hands, as it were,˜over a
vast and embracing˜from the ends of opposd winds.
Finally, I owe a real debt to my publishers for allowing me to do this work
without imposing any such limitations of time as often accompany literary
undertakings. This and other considerations which I have received from them
have made that part of the work which has been done outside the study
unusually pleasant and I am correspondingly grateful.
E. ALLISON PEERS.
University of Liverpool.
Feast of St. John of the Cross,
November 24, 1933.
Note. Wherever a commentary by St. John of the Cross is referred to, its
title is given in italics (e.g. Spiritual Canticle); where the corresponding
poem is meant, it is placed between quotation marks (e.g.˜Spiritual
Canticle). The abbreviation˜e.p. stands for editio princeps
throughout.
_________________________________________________________________
[1] The footnotes are P. Silverio's except where they are enclosed in square
brackets.
_________________________________________________________________
TRANSLATORS PREFACE
TO THE SECOND EDITION
DURING the sixteen years which have elapsed since the publication of the
first edition, several reprints have been issued, and the demand is now such
as to justify a complete resetting. I have taken advantage of this
opportunity to revise the text throughout, and hope that in some of the more
difficult passages I may have come nearer than before to the Saints mind.
Recent researches have necessitated a considerable amplification of
introductions and footnotes and greatly increased the length of the
bibliography.
The only modification which has been made consistently throughout the three
volumes relates to St. John of the Crosss quotations from Scripture. In
translating these I still follow him exactly, even where he himself is
inexact, but I have used the Douia Version (instead of the Authorized, as in
the first edition) as a basis for all Scriptural quotations, as well as in
the footnote references and the Scriptural index in Vol. III.
Far more is now known of the life and times of St. John of the Cross than
when this translation of the Complete Works was first published, thanks
principally to the Historia del Carmen Descalzo of P. Silverio de Santa
Teresa, C.D, now General of his Order, and to the admirably documented Life
of the Saint written by P. Crisógono de Jesus Sacramentado, C.D., and
published (in Vida y Obras de San Juan de la Cruz) in the year after his
untimely death. This increased knowledge is reflected in many additional
notes, and also in the˜Outline of the Life of St. John of the Cross (Vol.
I, pp. xxv“xxviii), which, for this edition, has been entirely recast.
References are given to my Handbook to the Life and Times of St. Teresa and
St. John of the Cross, which provides much background too full to be
reproduced in footnotes and too complicated to be compressed. The Handbook
also contains numerous references to contemporary events, omitted from the
˜Outline as being too remote from the main theme to justify inclusion in a
summary necessarily so condensed.
My thanks for help in revision are due to kindly correspondents, too
numerous to name, from many parts of the world, who have made suggestions
for the improvement of the first edition; to the Rev. Professor David
Knowles, of Cambridge University, for whose continuous practical interest in
this translation I cannot be too grateful; to Miss I.L. McClelland, of
Glasgow University, who has read a large part of this edition in proof; to
Dom Philippe Chevallier, for material which I have been able to incorporate
in it; to P. José Antonio de Sobrino, S.J., for allowing me to quote freely
from his recently published Estudios; and, most of all, to M.R.P. Silverio
de Santa Teresa, C.D., and the Fathers of the International Carmelite
College at Rome, whose learning and experience, are, I hope, faintly
reflected in this new edition.
E.A.P.
June 30, 1941.
_________________________________________________________________
PRINCIPAL ABBREVIATIONS
A.V.Authorized Version of the Bible (1611).
D.V.Douai Version of the Bible (1609).
C.W.S.T.J.The Complete Works of Saint Teresa of Jesus, translated and
edited by E. Allison Peers from the critical edition of P. Silverio de Santa
Teresa, C.D. London, Sheed and Ward, 1946. 3 vols.
H.-E. Allison Peers: Handbook to the Life and Times of St. Teresa and St.
John of the Cross. London, Burns Oates and Washbourne, 1953.
LL.The Letters of Saint Teresa of Jesus, translated and edited by E.
Allison Peers from the critical edition of P. Silverio de Santa Teresa, C.D.
London, Burns Oates and Washburne, 1951. 2 vols.
N.L.M.National Library of Spain (Biblioteca Nacional), Madrid.
Obras (P. Silv.)Obras de San Juan de la Cruz, Doctor de la Iglesia,
editadas y anotadas pot el P. Silverio de Santa Teresa, C.D. Burgos,
1929-31. 5 vols.
S.S.M.E. Allison Peers: Studies of the Spanish Mystics. Vol. I, London,
Sheldon Press, 1927; 2nd ed., London, S.P.C.K., 1951. Vol. II, London,
Sheldon Press, 1930.
Sobrino.-José Antonio de Sobrino, S.J.: Estudios sobre San Juan de la Cruz y
nuevos textos de su obra. Madrid, 1950.
_________________________________________________________________
AN OUTLINE OF THE LIFE OF ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS [2]
1542. Birth of Juan de Yepes at Fontiveros (Hontiveros), near vila.
The day generally ascribed to this event is June 24 (St. John Baptists
Day). No documentary evidence for it, however, exists, the parish registers
having been destroyed by a fire in 1544. The chief evidence is an
inscription, dated 1689, on the font of the parish church at Fontiveros.
? c. 1543. Death of Juans father.˜After some years the mother
removes,
with her family, to Arévalo, and later to Medina del Campo.
? c. 1552-6. Juan goes to school at the Colegio de los Ni“os de la Doctrina,
Medina.
c. 1556-7. Don Antonio lvarez de Toledo takes him into a Hospital to which
he has retired, with the idea of his (Juans) training for Holy Orders under
his patronage.
? c. 1559-63. Juan attends the College of the Society of Jesus at Medina.
c. 1562. Leaves the Hospital and the patronage of lvarez de Toledo.
1563. Takes the Carmelite habit at St. Annes, Medina del Campo, as Juan de
San MatÃas (Santo MatÃa).
The day is frequently assumed (without any foundation) to have been the
feast of St. Matthias (February 24), but P. Silverio postulates a day in
August or September and P. Crisógono thinks February definitely improbable.
1564. Makes his profession in the same priory probably in August or
September and certainly not earlier than May 21 and not later than October.
1564 (November). Enters the University of Salamanca as an artista. Takes a
three-year course in Arts (1564-7).
1565 (January 6). Matriculates at the University of Salamanca.
1567. Receives priests orders (probably in the summer).
1567 (? September). Meets St. Teresa at Medina del Campo. Juan is thinking
of transferring to the Carthusian Order. St. Teresa asks him to join her
Discalced Reform and the projected first foundation for friars. He agrees to
do so, provided the foundation is soon made.
1567 (November). Returns to the University of Salamanca, where he takes a
years course in theology.
1568. Spends part of the Long Vacation at Medina del Campo. On August 10,
accompanies St. Teresa to Valladolid. In September, returns to Medina and
later goes to Avila and Duruelo.
1568 (November 28). Takes the vows of the Reform Duruelo as St. John of the
Cross, together with Antonio de Heredia (Antonio de Jesus), Prior of the
Calced Carmelites at Medina, and José de Cristo, another Carmelite from
Medina.
1570 (June 11). Moves, with the Duruelo community, to Mancera de Abajo.
1570 (October, or possibly February 1571). Stays for about a month at
Pastrana, returning thence to Mancera.
1571 (? January 25). Visits Alba de Tormes for the inauguration of a new
convent there.
1571 (? April). Goes to Alcalá de Henares as Rector of the College of the
Reform and directs the Carmelite nuns.
1572 (shortly after April 23). Recalled to Pastrana to correct the rigours
of the new novice-master, Angel de San Gabriel.
1572 (between May and September). Goes to vila as confessor to the Convent
of the Incarnation. Remains there till 1577.
1574 (March). Accompanies St. Teresa from vila to Segovia, arriving on March
18. Returns to vila about the end of the month.
1575-6 (Winter of: before February 1576). Kidnapped by the Calced and
imprisoned at Medina del Campo. Freed by the intervention of the Papal
Nuncio, Ormaneto.
1577 (December 2 or 3). Kidnapped by the Calced and carried off to the
Calced Carmelite priory at Toledo as a prisoner.
1577-8. Composes in prison 17 (or perhaps 30) stanzas of the˜Spiritual
Canticle (i.e., as far as the stanza:˜Daughters of Jewry); the poem
with
the refrain˜Although˜tis night; and the stanzas
beginning˜In principio
erat verbum. He may also have composed the paraphrase of the psalm Super
flumina and the poem˜Dark Night. (Note: All these poems, in verse form,
will be found in Vol. II of this edition.)
1578 (August 16 or shortly afterwards). Escapes to the convent of the
Carmelite nuns in Toledo, and is thence taken to his house by D. Pedro
González de Mendoza, Canon of Toledo.
1578 (October 9). Attends a meeting of the Discalced superiors at Almodóvar.
Is sent to El Calvario as Vicar, in the absence in Rome of the Prior.
1578 (end of October). Stays for˜a few days at Beas de Segura, near El
Calvario. Confesses the nuns at the Carmelite Convent of Beas.
1578 (November). Arrives at El Calvario.
1578-9 (November-June). Remains at El Calvario as Vicar. For a part of this
time (probably from the beginning of 1579), goes weekly to the convent of
Beas to hear confessions. During this period, begins his commentaries
entitled The Ascent of Mount Carmel (cf. pp. 9-314, below) and Spiritual
Canticle (translated in Vol. II).
1579 (June 14). Founds a college of the Reform at Baeza. 1579-82. Resides at
Baeza as Rector of the Carmelite college. Visits the Beas convent
occasionally. Writes more of the prose works begun at El Calvario and the
rest of the stanzas of the˜Spiritual Canticle except the last five,
possibly with the commentaries to the stanzas.
1580. Death of his mother.
1581 (March 3). Attends the Alcalá Chapter of the Reform. Appointed Third
Definitor and Prior of the Granada house of Los Mártires. Takes up the
latter office only on or about the time of his election by the community in
March 1582.
1581 (November 28). Last meeting with St. Teresa, at vila. On the next day,
sets out with two nuns for Beas (December 8“January 15) and Granada.
1582 (January 20). Arrives at Los Mártires.
1582-8. Mainly at Granada. Re-elected (or confirmed) as Prior of Los
Mártires by the Chapter of
Almodóvar, 1583. Resides at Los Mártires
more or
less continuously till 1584 and intermittently afterwards. Visits the Beas
convent occasionally. Writes the last five stanzas of the˜Spiritual
Canticle during one of these visits. At Los Mártires, finishes the Ascent
of Mount Carmel and composes his remaining prose treatises. Writes Living
Flame of Love about 1585, in fifteen days, at the request of Doña Ana de
Peñalosa.
1585 (May). Lisbon Chapter appoints him Second Definitor and (till 1587)
Vicar-Provincial of Andalusia. Makes the following foundations: Málaga,
February 17, 1585; Córdoba, May 18, 1586; La Manchuela (de Jaén), October
12, 1586; Caravaca, December 18, 1586; Bujalance, June 24, 1587.
1587 (April). Chapter of Valladolid re-appoints him Prior of Los Mártires.
He ceases to be Definitor and Vicar-Provincial.
1588 (June 19). Attends the first Chapter-General of the Reform in Madrid.
Is elected First Definitor and a consiliario.
1588 (August 10). Becomes Prior of Segovia, the central house of the Reform
and the headquarters of the Consulta. Acts as deputy for the Vicar-General,
P. Doria, during the latters absences.
1590 (June 10). Re-elected First Definitor and a consiliario at the
Chapter-General Extraordinary, Madrid.
1591 (June 1). The Madrid Chapter-General deprives him of his offices and
resolves to send him to Mexico. (This latter decision was later revoked.)
1591 (August 10). Arrives at La Pe“uela.
1591 (September 12). Attacked by fever. (September Leaves La Pe“uela for
beda. (December 14) Dies at beda.
January 25, 1675. Beatified by Clement X.
December 26, 1726. Canonized by Benedict XIII.
August 24, 1926. Declared Doctor of the Church Universal by Pius XI.
_________________________________________________________________
[2] Cf. Translators Preface to the First Edition, II.
_________________________________________________________________
GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE WORKS OF ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS
I
DATES AND METHODS OF COMPOSITION.
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS
WITH regard to the times and places at which the works of St. John of the
Cross were written, and also with regard to the number of these works, there
have existed, from a very early date, considerable differences of opinion.
Of internal evidence from the Saints own writings there is practically
none, and such external testimony as can be found in contemporary documents
needs very careful examination.
There was no period in the life of St. John of the Cross in which he devoted
himself entirely to writing. He does not, in fact, appear to have felt any
inclination to do so: his books were written in response to the insistent
and repeated demands of his spiritual children. He was very much addicted,
on the other hand, to the composition of apothegms or maxims for the use of
his penitents and this custom he probably began as early as the days in
which he was confessor to the Convent of the Incarnation at vila, though his
biographers have no record of any maxims but those written at Beas. One of
his best beloved daughters however, Ana MarÃa de Jesús, of the Convent of
the Incarnation, declared in her deposition, during the process of the
Saints canonization, that he was accustomed to˜comfort those with whom he
had to do, both by his words and by his letters, of which this witness
received a number, and also by certain papers concerning holy things which
this witness would greatly value if she still had them. Considering, the
number of nuns to whom the Saint was director at vila, it is to be presumed
that M. Ana MarÃa was not the only person whom he favoured. We may safely
conclude, indeed, that there were many others who shared the same
privileges, and that, had we all these˜papers, they would comprise a large
volume, instead of the few pages reproduced elsewhere in this translation.
There is a well-known story, preserved in the documents of the canonization
process, of how, on a December night of 1577, St. John, of the Cross was
kidnapped by the Calced Carmelites of vila and carried off from the
Incarnation to their priory. [3] Realizing that he had left behind him some
important papers, he contrived, on the next morning, to escape, and returned
to the Incarnation to destroy them while there was time to do so. He was
missed almost immediately and he had hardly gained his cell when his
pursuers were on his heels. In the few moments that remained to him he had
time to tear up these papers and swallow some of the most compromising. As
the original assault had not been unexpected, though the time of it was
uncertain, they would not have been very numerous. It is generally supposed
that they concerned the business of the infant Reform, of which the survival
was at that time in grave doubt. But it seems at least equally likely that
some of them might have been these spiritual maxims, or some more extensive
instructions which might be misinterpreted by any who found them. It is
remarkable, at any rate, that we have none of the Saints writings belonging
to this period whatever.
All his biographers tell us that he wrote some of the stanzas of the
˜Spiritual Canticle, together with a few other poems, while he was
imprisoned at Toledo.˜When he left the prison, says M. Magdalena del
EspÃritu Santo,˜he took with him a little book in which he had written,
while there, some verses based upon the Gospel In principio erat Verbum,
together with some couplets which begin:œHow well I know the fount that
freely flows, Although˜tis night, and the stanzas or liras that begin
œWhither has vanishd? as
far as the stanzas beginningœDaughters of
Jewry. The remainder of them the Saint composed later when he was Rector of
the College at Baeza. Some of the expositions were written at Beas, as
answers to questions put to him by the nuns; others at Granada. This little
book, in which the Saint wrote while in prison, he left in the Convent of
Beas and on various occasions I was commanded to copy it. Then someone took
it from my cell who, I never knew. The freshness of the words in this
book, together with their beauty and subtlety, caused me great wonder, and
one day I asked the Saint if God gave him those words which were so
comprehensive and so lovely. And he answered:œDaughter, sometimes God gave
them to me and at other times I sought them. [4]
M. Isabel de Jesús MarÃa, who was a novice at Toledo when the Saint escaped
from his imprisonment there, wrote thus from Cuerva on November 2, 1614.˜I
remember, too, that, at the time we had him hidden in the church, he recited
to us some lines which he had composed and kept in his mind, and that one of
the nuns wrote them down as he repeated them. There were three poems all
of them upon the Most Holy Trinity, and so sublime and devout that they seem
to enkindle the reader. In this house at Cuerva we have some which begin:
œFar away in the beginning,
Dwelt the Word in God Most High. [5]
The frequent references to keeping his verses in his head and the popular
exaggeration of the hardships (great though these were) which the Saint had
to endure in Toledo have led some writers to affirm that he did not in fact
write these poems in prison but committed them to memory and transferred
them to paper at some later date. The evidence of M. Magdalena, however,
would appear to be decisive. We know, too, that the second of St. John of
the Crosss gaolers, Fray Juan de Santa MarÃa, was a kindly man who did all
he could to lighten his captives sufferings; and his superiors would
probably not have forbidden him writing materials provided he wrote no
letters. [6]
It seems, then, that the Saint wrote in Toledo the first seventeen (or
perhaps thirty) stanzas of the˜Spiritual Canticle, the nine parts of the
poem˜Far away in the beginning . . ., the paraphrase of the psalm Super
flumina Babylonis and the poem˜How well I know the fount . . . This was
really a considerable output of work, for, except perhaps when his gaoler
allowed him to go into another room, he had no light but that of a small
oil-lamp or occasionally the infiltration of daylight that penetrated a
small interior window.
Apart from the statement of M. Magdalena already quoted, little more is
known of what the Saint wrote in El Calvario than of what he wrote in
Toledo. From an amplification made by herself of the sentences to which we
have referred it appears that almost the whole of what she had copied was
taken from her; as the short extracts transcribed by her are very similar to
passages from the Saints writings we may perhaps conclude that much of the
other material was also incorporated in them. In that case he may well have
completed a fair proportion of the Ascent of Mount Carmel before leaving
Beas.
It was in El Calvario, too, and for the nuns of Beas, that the Saint drew
the plan called the˜Mount of Perfection (referred to by M. Magdalena [7]
and in the Ascent of Mount Carmel and reproduced as the frontispiece to this
volume) of which copies were afterwards multiplied and distributed among
Discalced houses. Its author wished it to figure at the head of all his
treatises, for it is a graphical representation of the entire mystic way,
from the starting-point of the beginner to the very summit of perfection.
His first sketch, which still survives, is a rudimentary and imperfect one;
before long, however, as M. Magdalena tells us, he evolved another that was
fuller and more comprehensive.
Mount Carmel
Just as we owe to PP. Gracián and Salazar many precious relics of St.
Teresa, so we owe others of St. John of the Cross to M. Magdalena. Among the
most valuable of these is her own copy of the˜Mount, which, after her
death, went to the˜Desert [8] of Our Lady of the Snows established by the
Discalced province of Upper Andalusia in the diocese of Granada. It was
found there by P. Andrés de la Encarnación, of whom we shall presently
speak, and who immediately made a copy of it, legally certified as an exact
one and now in the National Library of Spain (MS. 6,296).
The superiority of the second plan over the first is very evident. The first
consists simply of three parallel lines corresponding to three different
paths one on either side of the Mount, marked˜Road of the spirit of
imperfection and one in the centre marked˜Path of Mount Carmel. Spirit of
perfection. In the spaces between the paths are written the celebrated
maxims which appear in Book I, Chapter xiii, of the Ascent of Mount Carmel,
in a somewhat different form, together with certain others. At the top of
the drawing are the words˜Mount Carmel, which are not found in the second
plan, and below them is the legend:˜There is no road here, for there is no
law for the righteous man, together with other texts from Scripture.
The second plan represents a number of graded heights, the loftiest of which
is planted with trees. Three paths, as in the first sketch, lead from the
base of the mount, but they are traced more artistically and have a more
detailed ascetic and mystical application. Those on either side, which
denote the roads of imperfection, are broad and somewhat tortuous and come
to an end before the higher stages of the mount are reached. The centre
road, that of perfection, is at first very narrow but gradually broadens and
leads right up to the summit of the mountain, which only the perfect attain
and where they enjoy the iuge convivium the heavenly feast. The different
zones of religious perfection, from which spring various virtues, are
portrayed with much greater detail than in the first plan. As we have
reproduced the second plan in this volume, it need not be described more
fully.
We know that St. John of the Cross used the˜Mount very, frequently for all
kinds of religious instruction.˜By means of this drawing, testified one of
his disciples,˜he used to teach us that, in order to attain to perfection,
we must not desire the good things of earth, nor those of Heaven; but that
we must desire naught save to seek and strive after the glory and honour of
God our Lord in all things . . . and thisœMount of Perfection the said
holy father himself expounded to this Witness when he was his superior in
the said priory of Granada. [9]
It seems not improbable that the Saint continued writing chapters of the
Ascent and the Spiritual Canticle while he was Rector at Baeza, [10] whether
in the College itself, or in El Castellar, where he was accustomed often to
go into retreat. It was certainly here that he wrote the remaining stanzas
of the Canticle (as M. Magdalena explicitly tells us in words already
quoted), except the last five, which he composed rather later, at Granada.
One likes to think that these loveliest of his verses were penned by the
banks of the Guadalimar, in the woods of the Granja de Santa Ann, where he
was in the habit of passing long hours in communion with God. At all events
the stanzas seem more in harmony with such an atmosphere than with that of
the College.
With regard to the last five stanzas, we have definite evidence from a Beas
nun, M. Francisca de la Madre de Dios, who testifies in the Beatification
process (April 2, 1618) as follows:
And so, when the said holy friar John of the Cross was in this convent one
Lent (for his great love for it brought him here from the said city of
Granada, where he was prior, to confess the nuns and preach to them) he
was preaching to them one day in the parlour, and this witness observed
that on two separate occasions he was rapt and lifted up from the ground;
and when he came to himself he dissembled and said:˜You saw how sleep
overcame me! And one day he asked this witness in what her prayer
consisted, and she replied:˜In considering the beauty of God and in
rejoicing that He has such beauty. And the Saint was so pleased with this
that for some days he said the most sublime things concerning the beauty
of God, at which all marvelled. And thus, under the influence of this
love, he composed five stanzas, beginning˜Beloved, let us sing, And in
thy beauty see ourselves
portrayd. And in all this he
showed that there
was in his breast a great love of God.
From a letter which this nun wrote from Beas in 1629 to P. Jerónimo de San
José, we gather that the stanzas were actually written at Granada and
brought to Beas, where
. . . with every word that we spoke to him we seemed to be opening a door
to the fruition of the great treasures and riches which God had stored up
in his soul.
If there is a discrepancy here, however, it is of small importance; there is
no doubt as to the approximate date of the composition of these stanzas and
of their close connection with Beas.
The most fruitful literary years for St. John of the Cross were those which
he spent at Granada. Here he completed the Ascent and wrote all his
remaining treatises. Both M. Magdalena and the Saints closest disciple, P.
Juan Evangelista, bear witness to this. The latter writes from Granada to P.
Jerónimo de San José, the historian of the Reform:
With regard to having seen our venerable father write the books, I saw him
write them all; for, as I have said, I was ever at his side. The Ascent of
Mount Carmel and the Dark Night he wrote here at Granada, little by
little, continuing them only with many breaks. The Living Flame of Love he
also wrote in this house, when he was Vicar-Provincial, at the request of
Doña Ana de Peñalosa, and he wrote it in fifteen days when he was very
busy here with an abundance of occupations. The first thing that he wrote
was Whither hast vanishd? and that too he wrote here; the stanzas he had
written in the prison at Toledo. [11]
In another letter (February 18, 1630), he wrote to the same correspondent:
With regard to our holy fathers having written his books in this home, I
will say what is undoubtedly true namely, that he wrote here the
commentary on the stanzas Whither hast vanishd? and the Living Flame of
Love, for he began and ended them in my time. The Ascent of Mount Carmel I
found had been begun when I came here to take the habit, which was a year
and a half after the foundation of this house; he may have brought it from
yonder already begun. But the Dark Night he certainly wrote here, for I
saw him writing a part of it, and this is certain, because I saw it. [12]
These and other testimonies might with advantage be fuller and more
concrete, but at least they place beyond doubt the facts that we have
already set down. Summarizing our total findings, we may assert that part of
the˜Spiritual
Canticle, with perhaps the˜Dark
Night, and the other poems
enumerated, were written in the Toledo prison; that at the request of some
nuns he wrote at El Calvario (1578-79) a few chapters of the Ascent and
commentaries on some of the stanzas of the˜Canticle; that he composed
further stanzas at Baeza (1579-81), perhaps with their respective
commentaries; and that, finally, he completed the Canticle and the Ascent at
Granada and wrote the whole of the Dark Night and of the Living Flame the
latter in a fortnight. All these last works he wrote before the end of 1585,
the first year in which he was Vicar-Provincial.
Other writings, most of them brief, are attributed to St. John of the Cross;
they will be discussed in the third volume of this edition, in which we
shall publish the minor works which we accept as genuine. The authorship of
his four major prose works the Ascent, Dark Night, Spiritual Canticle and
Living Flame no one has ever attempted to question, even though the lack
of extant autographs and the large number of copies have made it difficult
to establish correct texts. To this question we shall return later.
The characteristics of the writings of St. John of the Cross are so striking
that it would be difficult to confuse them with those of any other writer.
His literary personality stands out clearly from that of his Spanish
contemporaries who wrote on similar subjects. Both his style and his methods
of exposition bear the marks of a strong individuality.
If some of these derive from his native genius and temperament, others are
undoubtedly reflections of his education and experience. The
Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy, then at the height of its splendour,
which he learned so thoroughly in the classrooms of Salamanca University,
characterizes the whole of his writings, giving them a granite-like solidity
even when their theme is such as to defy human speculation. Though the
precise extent of his debt to this Salamancan training in philosophy has not
yet been definitely assessed, the fact of its influence is evident to every
reader. It gives massiveness, harmony and unity to both the ascetic and the
mystical work of St. John of the Cross that is to say, to all his
scientific writing.
Deeply, however, as St. John of the Cross drew from the Schoolmen, he was
also profoundly indebted to many other writers. He was distinctly eclectic
in his reading and quotes freely (though less than some of his Spanish
contemporaries) from the Fathers and from the mediaeval mystics, especially
from St. Thomas, St. Bonaventura, Hugh of St. Victor and the
pseudo-Areopagite. All that he quotes, however, he makes his own, with the
result that his chapters are never a mass of citations loosely strung
together, as are those of many other Spanish mystics of his time.
When we study his treatises principally that great composite work known as
the Ascent of Mount Carmel and the Dark Night we have the impression of a
master-mind that has scaled the heights of mystical science and from their
summit looks down upon and dominates the plain below and the paths leading
upward. We may well wonder what a vast contribution to the subject he would
have made had he been able to expound all the eight stanzas of his poem
since he covered so much ground in expounding no more than two. Observe with
what assurance and what mastery of subject and method he defines his themes
and divides his arguments, even when treating the most abstruse and
controversial questions. The most obscure phenomena he appears to illumine,
as it were, with one lightning flash of understanding, as though the
explanation of them were perfectly natural and easy. His solutions of
difficult problems are not timid, questioning and loaded with exceptions,
but clear, definite and virile like the man who proposes them. No scientific
field, perhaps, has so many zones which are apt to become vague and obscure
as has that of mystical theology; and there are those among the Saints
predecessors who seem to have made their permanent abode in them. They give
the impression of attempting to cloak vagueness in verbosity, in order to
avoid being forced into giving solutions of problems which they find
insoluble. Not so St. John of the Cross. A scientific dictator, if such a
person were conceivable, could hardly express himself with greater clarity.
His phrases have a decisive, almost a chiselled quality; where he errs on
the side of redundance, it is not with the intention of cloaking
uncertainty, but in order that he may drive home with double force the
truths which he desires to impress.
No less admirable are, on the one hand, his synthetic skill and the logic of
his arguments, and, on the other, his subtle and discriminating analyses,
which weigh the finest shades of thought and dissect each subject with all
the accuracy of science. To his analytical genius we owe those finely
balanced statements, orthodox yet bold and fearless, which have caused
clumsier intellects to misunderstand him. It is not remarkable that this
should have occurred. The ease with which the unskilled can misinterpret
genius is shown in the history of many a heresy.
How much of all this St. John of the Cross owed to his studies of scholastic
philosophy in the University of Salamanca, it is difficult to say. If we
examine the history of that University and read of its severe discipline we
shall be in no danger of under-estimating the effect which it must have
produced upon so agile and alert an intellect. Further, we note the constant
parallelisms and the comparatively infrequent (though occasionally
important) divergences between the doctrines of St. John of the Cross and
St. Thomas, to say nothing of the close agreement between the views of St.
John of the Cross and those of the Schoolmen on such subjects as the
passions and appetites, the nature of the soul, the relations between soul
and body. Yet we must not forget the student tag: Quod natura non dat,
Salamtica non praestat. Nothing but natural genius could impart the vigour
and the clarity which enhance all St. John of the Crosss arguments and
nothing but his own deep and varied experience could have made him what he
may well be termed the greatest psychologist in the history of mysticism.
Eminent, too, was St. John of the Cross in sacred theology. The close
natural connection that exists between dogmatic and mystical theology and
their continual interdependence in practice make it impossible for a
Christian teacher to excel in the latter alone. Indeed, more than one of the
heresies that have had their beginnings in mysticism would never have
developed had those who fell into them been well grounded in dogmatic
theology. The one is, as it were, the lantern that lights the path of the
other, as St. Teresa realized when she began to feel the continual necessity
of consulting theological teachers. If St. John of the Cross is able to
climb the greatest heights of mysticism and remain upon them without
stumbling or dizziness it is because his feet are invariably well shod with
the truths of dogmatic theology. The great mysteries those of the Trinity,
the Creation, the Incarnation and the Redemption and such dogmas as those
concerning grace, the gifts of the Spirit, the theological virtues, etc.,
were to him guide-posts for those who attempted to scale, and to lead others
to scale, the symbolic mount of sanctity.
It will be remembered that the Saint spent but one year upon his theological
course at the University of Salamanca, for which reason many have been
surprised at the evident solidity of his attainments. But, apart from the
fact that a mind so keen and retentive as that of Fray Juan de San MatÃas
could absorb in a year what others would have failed to imbibe in the more
usual two or three, we must of necessity assume a far longer time spent in
private study. For in one year he could not have studied all the treatises
of which he clearly demonstrates his knowledge to say nothing of many
others which he must have known. His own works, apart from any external
evidence, prove him to have been a theologian of distinction.
In both fields, the dogmatic and the mystical he was greatly aided by his
knowledge of Holy Scripture, which he studied continually, in the last years
of his life, to the exclusion, as it would seem, of all else. Much of it he
knew by heart; the simple devotional talks that he was accustomed to give
were invariably studded with texts, and he made use of passages from the
Bible both to justify and to illustrate his teaching. In the mystical
interpretation of Holy Scripture, as every student of mysticism knows, he
has had few equals even among his fellow Doctors of the Church Universal.
Testimonies to his mastery of the Scriptures can be found in abundance. P.
Alonso de la Madre de Dios, el Asturicense, for example, who was personally
acquainted with him, stated in 1603 that˜he had a great gift and facility
for the exposition of the Sacred Scripture, principally of the Song of
Songs, Ecclesiasticus, Ecclesiastes, the Proverbs and the Psalms of
David. [13] His spiritual daughter, that same Magdalena del EspÃritus Santo
to whom we have several times referred, affirms that St. John of the Cross
would frequently read the Gospels to the nuns of Beas and expound the letter
and the spirit to them. [14] Fray Juan Evangelista says in a well-known
passage:
He was very fond of reading in the Scriptures, and I never once saw him
read any other books than the Bible, [15] almost all of which he knew by
heart, St. Augustine Contra Haereses and the Flos Sanctorum. When
occasionally he preached (which was seldom) or gave informal addresses
[pláticas], as he more commonly did, he never read from any book save the
Bible. His conversation, whether at recreation or at other times, was
continually of God, and he spoke so delightfully that, when he discoursed
upon sacred things at recreation, he would make us all laugh and we used
greatly to enjoy going out. On occasions when we held chapters, he would
usually give devotional addresses (pláticas divinas) after supper, and he
never failed to give an address every night. [16]
Fray Pablo de Santa MarÃa, who had also heard the Saints addresses, wrote
thus:
He was a man of the most enkindled spirituality and of great insight into
all that concerns mystical theology and matters of prayer; I consider it
impossible that he could have spoken so well about all the virtues if he
had not been most proficient in the spiritual life, and I really think he
knew the whole Bible by heart, so far as one could judge from the various
Biblical passages which he would quote at chapters and in the refectory,
without any great effort, but as one who goes where the Spirit leads him.
[17]
Nor was this admiration for the expository ability of St. John of the Cross
confined to his fellow-friars, who might easily enough have been led into
hero-worship. We know that he was thought highly of in this respect by the
University of Alcalá de Henares, where he was consulted as an authority. A
Dr. Villegas, Canon of Segovia Cathedral, has left on record his respect for
him. And Fray Jerónimo de San José relates the esteem in which he was held
at the University of Baeza, which in his day enjoyed a considerable
reputation for Biblical studies:
There were at that time at the University of Baeza many learned and
spiritually minded persons, disciples of that great father and apostle
Juan de vila. [18] . . . All these doctors . . . would repair to our
venerable father as to an oracle from heaven and would discuss with him
both their own spiritual progress and that of souls committed to their
charge, with the result that they were both edified and astonished at his
skill. They would also bring him difficulties and delicate points
connected with Divine letters, and on these, too, he spoke with
extraordinary energy and illumination. One of these doctors, who had
consulted him and listened to him on various occasions, said that,
although he had read deeply in St. Augustine and St. John Chrysostom and
other saints, and had found in them greater heights and depths, he had
found in none of them that particular kind of spirituality in exposition
which this great father applied to Scriptural passages. [19]
The Scriptural knowledge of St. John of the Cross was, as this passage makes
clear, in no way merely academic. Both in his literal and his mystical
interpretations of the Bible, he has what we may call a˜Biblical sense,
which saves him from such exaggerations as we find in other expositors, both
earlier and contemporary. One would not claim, of course, that among the
many hundreds of applications of Holy Scripture made by the Carmelite Doctor
there are none that can be objected to in this respect; but the same can be
said of St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, St. Gregory or St. Bernard, and no one
would assert that, either with them or with him, such instances are other
than most exceptional.
To the three sources already mentioned in which St. John of the Cross found
inspiration we must add a fourth the works of ascetic and mystical
writers. It is not yet possible to assert with any exactness how far the
Saint made use of these; for, though partial studies of this question have
been attempted, a complete and unbiased treatment of it has still to be
undertaken. Here we can do no more than give a few indications of what
remains to be done and summarize the present content of our knowledge. [20]
We may suppose that, during his novitiate in Medina, the Saint read a number
of devotional books, one of which would almost certainly have been the
Imitation of Christ, and others would have included works which were
translated into Spanish by order of Cardinal Cisneros. The demands of a
University course would not keep him from pursuing such studies at
Salamanca; the friar who chose a cell from the window of which he could see
the Blessed Sacrament, so that he might spend hours in its company, would
hardly be likely to neglect his devotional reading. But we have not a
syllable of direct external evidence as to the titles of any of the books
known to him.
Nor, for that matter, have we much more evidence of this kind for any other
part of his life. Both his early Carmelite biographers and the numerous
witnesses who gave evidence during the canonization process describe at
great length his extraordinary penances, his love for places of retreat
beautified by Nature, the long hours that he spent in prayer and the tongue
of angels with which he spoke on things spiritual. But of his reading they
say nothing except to describe his attachment to the Bible, nor have we any
record of the books contained in the libraries of the religious houses that
he visited. Yet if, as we gather from the process, he spent little more than
three hours nightly in sleep, he must have read deeply of spiritual things
by night as well as by day.
Some clues to the nature of his reading may be gained from his own writings.
It is true that the clues are slender. He cites few works apart from the
Bible and these are generally liturgical books, such as the Breviary. Some
of his quotations from St. Augustine, St. Gregory and other of the Fathers
are traceable to these sources. Nevertheless, we have not read St. John of
the Cross for long before we find ourselves in the full current of mystical
tradition. It is not by means of more or less literal quotations that the
Saint produces this impression; he has studied his precursors so thoroughly
that he absorbs the substance of their doctrine and incorporates it so
intimately in his own that it becomes flesh of his flesh. Everything in his
writings is fully matured: he has no juvenilia. The mediaeval mystics whom
he uses are too often vague and undisciplined; they need someone to select
from them and unify them, to give them clarity and order, so that their
treatment of mystical theology may have the solidity and substance of
scholastic theology. To have done this is one of the achievements of St.
John of the Cross.
We are convinced, then, by an internal evidence which is chiefly of a kind
in which no chapter and verse can be given, that St. John of the Cross read
widely in mediaeval mystical theology and assimilated a great part of what
he read. The influence of foreign writers upon Spanish mysticism, though it
was once denied, is to-day generally recognized. It was inevitable that it
should have been considerable in a country which in the sixteenth century
had such a high degree of culture as Spain. Plotinus, in a diluted form,
made his way into Spanish mysticism as naturally as did Seneca into Spanish
asceticism. Plato and Aristotle entered it through the two greatest minds
that Christianity has known St. Augustine and St. Thomas. The influence of
the Platonic theories of love and beauty and of such basic Aristotelian
theories as the origin of knowledge is to be found in most of the Spanish
mystics, St. John of the Cross among them.
The pseudo-Dionysius was another writer who was considered a great authority
by the Spanish mystics. The importance attributed to his works arose partly
from the fact that he was supposed to have been one of the first disciples
of the Apostles; many chapters from mystical works of those days all over
Europe are no more than glosses of the pseudo-Areopagite. He is followed
less, however, by St. John of the Cross than by many of the latters
contemporaries.
Other influences upon the Carmelite Saint were St. Gregory, St. Bernard and
Hugh and Richard of St. Victor, many of whose maxims were in the mouths of
the mystics in the sixteenth century. More important, probably, than any of
these was the Fleming, Ruysbroeck, between whom and St. John of the Cross
there were certainly many points of contact. The Saint would have read him,
not in the original, but in Surius Latin translation of 1552, copies of
which are known to have been current in Spain. [21] Together with Ruysbroeck
may be classed Suso, Denis the Carthusian, Herp, Kempis and various other
writers.
Many of the ideas and phrases which we find in St. John of the Cross, as in
other writers, are, of course, traceable to the common mystical tradition
rather than to any definite individual influence. The striking metaphor of
the ray of light penetrating the room, for example, which occurs in the
first chapter of the pseudo-Areopagites De Mystica Theologia, has been used
continually by mystical writers ever since his time. The figures of the wood
consumed by fire, of the ladder, the mirror, the flame of love and the
nights of sense and spirit had long since become naturalized in mystical
literature. There are many more such examples.
The originality of St. John of the Cross is in no way impaired by his
employment of this current mystical language: such an idea might once have
been commonly held, but has long ceased to be put forward seriously. His
originality, indeed, lies precisely in the use which he made of language
that he found near to hand. It is not going too far to liken the place taken
by St. John of the Cross in mystical theology to that of St. Thomas in
dogmatic; St. Thomas laid hold upon the immense store of material which had
accumulated in the domain of dogmatic theology and subjected it to the iron
discipline of reason. That St. John of the Cross did the same for mystical
theology is his great claim upon our admiration. Through St. Thomas speaks
the ecclesiastical tradition of many ages on questions of religious belief;
through St. John speaks an equally venerable tradition on questions of
Divine love. Both writers combined sainthood with genius. Both opened broad
channels to be followed of necessity by Catholic writers through the ages to
come till theology shall lose itself in that vast ocean of truth and love
which is God. Both created instruments adequate to the greatness of their
task: St. Thomas clear, decisive reasoning processes give us the formula
appropriate to each and every need of the understanding; St. John clothes
his teaching in mellower and more appealing language, as befits the exponent
of the science of love. We may describe the treatises of St. John of the
Cross as the true Summa Angelica of mystical theology.
II
OUTSTANDING QUALITIES AND DEFECTS OF THE SAINTS STYLE
The profound and original thought which St. John of the Cross bestowed upon
so abstruse a subject, and upon one on which there was so little classical
literature in Spanish when he wrote, led him to clothe his ideas in a
language at once energetic, precise and of a high degree of individuality.
His style reflects his thought, but it reflects the style of no school and
of no other writer whatsoever.
This is natural enough, for thought and feeling were always uppermost in the
Saint: style and language take a place entirely subordinate to them. Never
did he sacrifice any idea to artistic combinations of words; never blur over
any delicate shade of thought to enhance some rhythmic cadence of musical
prose. Literary form (to use a figure which he himself might have coined) is
only present at all in his works in the sense in which the industrious and
deferential servant is present in the ducal apartment, for the purpose of
rendering faithful service to his lord and master. This subordination of
style to content in the Saints work is one of its most eminent qualities.
He is a great writer, but not a great stylist. The strength and robustness
of his intellect everywhere predominate.
This to a large extent explains the negligences which we find in his style,
the frequency with which it is marred by repetitions and its occasional
degeneration into diffuseness. The long, unwieldy sentences, one of which
will sometimes run to the length of a reasonably sized paragraph, are
certainly a trial to many a reader. So intent is the Saint upon explaining,
underlining and developing his points so that they shall be apprehended as
perfectly as may be, that he continually recurs to what he has already said,
and repeats words, phrases and even passages of considerable length without
scruple. It is only fair to remind the reader that such things were far
commoner in the Golden Age than they are to-day; most didactic Spanish prose
of that period would be notably improved, from a modern standpoint, if its
volume were cut down by about one-third.
Be that as it may, these defects in the prose of St. John of the Cross are
amply compensated by the fullness of his phraseology, the wealth and
profusion of his imagery, the force and the energy of his argument. He has
only to be compared with the didactic writers who were his contemporaries
for this to become apparent. Together with Luis de Granada, Luis de León,
Juan de los Ãngeles and Luis de la Puente, [22] he created a genuinely
native language, purged of Latinisms, precise and eloquent, which Spanish
writers have used ever since in writing of mystical theology.
The most sublime of all the Spanish mystics, he soars aloft on the wings of
Divine love to heights known to hardly any of them. Though no words can
express the loftiest of the experiences which he describes, we are never
left with the impression that word, phrase or image has failed him. If it
does not exist, he appears to invent it, rather than pause in his
description in order to search for an expression of the idea that is in his
mind or be satisfied with a prolix paraphrase. True to the character of his
thought, his style is always forceful and energetic, even to a fault.
We have said nothing of his poems, for indeed they call for no purely
literary commentary. How full of life the greatest of them are, how rich in
meaning, how unforgettable and how inimitable, the individual reader may see
at a glance or may learn from his own experience. Many of their exquisite
figures their author owes, directly or indirectly, to his reading and
assimilation of the Bible. Some of them, however, have acquired a new life
in the form which he has given them. A line here, a phrase there, has taken
root in the mind of some later poet or essayist and has given rise to a new
work of art, to many lovers of which the Saint who lies behind it is
unknown.
It is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that the verse and prose works
combined of St. John of the Cross form at once the most grandiose and the
most melodious spiritual canticle to which any one man has ever given
utterance. It is impossible, in the space at our disposal, to quote at any
length from the Spanish critics who have paid tribute to its
comprehensiveness and profundity. We must content ourselves with a short
quotation characterizing the Saints poems, taken from the greatest of these
critics, Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, who, besides referring frequently to St.
John of the Cross in such of his mature works as the Heterodoxos, Ideas
Estéticas and Ciencia Española, devoted to him a great part of the address
which he delivered as a young man at his official reception into the Spanish
Academy under the title of˜Mystical Poetry.
˜So sublime, wrote
Menéndez Pelayo,˜is this poetry [of
St. John of the
Cross] that it scarcely seems to belong to this world at all; it is hardly
capable of being assessed by literary criteria. More ardent in its passion
than any profane poetry, its form is as elegant and exquisite, as plastic
and as highly figured as any of the finest works of the Renaissance. The
spirit of God has passed through these poems every one, beautifying and
sanctifying them on its way.
III
DIFFUSION OF THE WRITINGS OF ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS LOSS OF THE AUTOGRAPHS
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MANUSCRIPTS
The outstanding qualities of St. John of the Crosss writings were soon
recognized by the earliest of their few and privileged readers. All such
persons, of course, belonged to a small circle composed of the Saints
intimate friends and disciples. As time went on, the circle widened
repeatedly; now it embraces the entire Church, and countless individual
souls who are filled with the spirit of Christianity.
First of all, the works were read and discussed in those loci of evangelical
zeal which the Saint had himself enkindled, by his word and example, at
Beas, El Calvario, Baeza and Granada. They could not have come more
opportunely. St. Teresas Reform had engendered a spiritual alertness and
energy reminiscent of the earliest days of Christianity. Before this could
in any way diminish, her first friar presented the followers of them both
with spiritual food to nourish and re-create their souls and so to sustain
the high degree of zeal for Our Lord which He had bestowed upon them.
In one sense, St. John of the Cross took up his pen in order to supplement
the writings of St. Teresa; on several subjects, for example, he abstained
from writing at length because she had already treated of them. [23] Much of
the work of the two Saints, however, of necessity covers the same ground,
and thus the great mystical school of the Spanish Carmelites is reinforced
at its very beginnings in a way which must be unique in the history of
mysticism. The writings of St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross, though of
equal value and identical aim, are in many respects very different in their
nature; together they cover almost the entire ground of orthodox mysticism,
both speculative and experimental. The Carmelite mystics who came after them
were able to build upon a broad and sure foundation.
The writings of St. John of the Cross soon became known outside the narrow
circle of his sons and daughters in religion. In a few years they had gone
all over Spain and reached Portugal, France and Italy. They were read by
persons of every social class, from the Empress Maria of Austria, sister of
Philip II, to the most unlettered nuns of St. Teresas most remote
foundations. One of the witnesses at the process for the beatification
declared that he knew of no works of which there existed so many copies,
with the exception of the Bible.
We may fairly suppose (and the supposition is confirmed by the nature of the
extant manuscripts) that the majority of the early copies were made by
friars and nuns of the Discalced Reform. Most Discalced houses must have had
copies and others were probably in the possession of members of other
Orders. We gather, too, from various sources, that even lay persons managed
to make or obtain copies of the manuscripts.
How many of these copies, it will be asked, were made directly from the
autographs? So vague is the available evidence on this question that it is
difficult to attempt any calculation of even approximate reliability. All we
can say is that the copies made by, or for, the Discalced friars and nuns
themselves are the earliest and most trustworthy, while those intended for
the laity were frequently made at third or fourth hand. The Saint himself
seems to have written out only one manuscript of each treatise and none of
these has come down to us. Some think that he destroyed the manuscripts
copied with his own hand, fearing that they might come to be venerated for
other reasons than that of the value of their teaching. He was, of course,
perfectly capable of such an act of abnegation; once, as we know, in
accordance with his own principles, he burned some letters of St. Teresa,
which he had carried with him for years, for no other reason than that he
realized that he was becoming attached to them. [24]
The only manuscript of his that we possess consists of a few pages of
maxims, some letters and one or two documents which he wrote when he was
Vicar-Provincial of Andalusia. [25] So numerous and so thorough have been
the searches made for further autographs during the last three centuries
that further discoveries of any importance seem most unlikely. We have,
therefore, to console ourselves with manuscripts, such as the Sanlúcar de
Barrameda Codex of the Spiritual Canticle, which bear the Saints autograph
corrections as warrants of their integrity.
The vagueness of much of the evidence concerning the manuscripts to which we
have referred extends to the farthest possible limit that of using the
word˜original to
indicate˜autograph and˜copy indifferently. Even in
the earliest documents we can never be sure which sense is intended.
Furthermore, there was a passion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
for describing all kinds of old manuscripts as autographs, and thus we find
copies so described in which the hand bears not the slightest resemblance to
that of the Saint, as the most superficial collation with a genuine specimen
of his hand would have made evident. We shall give instances of this in
describing the extant copies of individual treatises. One example of a
general kind, however, may be quoted here to show the extent to which the
practice spread. In a statement made, with reference to one of the
processes, at the convent of Discalced Carmelite nuns of Valladolid, a
certain M. MarÃa de la Trinidad deposed˜that a servant of God, a Franciscan
tertiary named Ana MarÃa, possesses the originals of the books of our holy
father, and has heard that he sent them to the Order. Great importance was
attached to this deposition and every possible measure was taken to find the
autographs needless to say, without result. [26]
With the multiplication of the number of copies of St. John of the Crosss
writings, the number of variants naturally multiplied also. The early copies
having all been made for devotional purposes, by persons with little or no
palaeographical knowledge, many of whom did not even exercise common care,
it is not surprising that there is not a single one which can compare in
punctiliousness with certain extant eighteenth-century copies of documents
connected with St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa. These were made by a
painstaking friar called Manuel de Santa MarÃa, whose scrupulousness went so
far that he reproduced imperfectly formed letters exactly as they were
written, adding the parts that were lacking (e.g., the tilde over the letter
ñ) with ink of another colour.
We may lament that this good father had no predecessor like himself to copy
the Saints treatises, but it is only right to say that the copies we
possess are sufficiently faithful and numerous to give us reasonably
accurate versions of their originals. The important point about them is that
they bear no signs of bad faith, nor even of the desire (understandable
enough in those unscientific days) to clarify the sense of their original,
or even to improve upon its teaching. Their errors are often gross ones, but
the large majority of them are quite easy to detect and put right. The
impression to this effect which one obtains from a casual perusal of almost
any of these copies is quite definitely confirmed by a comparison of them
with copies corrected by the Saint or written by the closest and most
trusted of his disciples. It may be added that some of the variants may, for
aught we know to the contrary, be the Saints own work, since it is not
improbable that he may have corrected more than one copy of some of his
writings, and not been entirely consistent.
There are, broadly speaking, two classes into which the copies (more
particularly those of the Ascent and the Dark Night) may be divided. One
class aims at a more or less exact transcription; the other definitely sets
out to abbreviate. Even if the latter class be credited with a number of
copies which hardly merit the name, the former is by far the larger, and, of
course, the more important, though it must not be supposed that the latter
is unworthy of notice. The abbreviators generally omit whole chapters, or
passages, at a time, and, where they are not for the moment doing this, or
writing the connecting phrases necessary to repair their mischief, they are
often quite faithful to their originals. Since they do not, in general,
attribute anything to their author that is not his, no objection can be
taken, on moral grounds, to their proceeding, though, in actual fact, the
results are not always happy. Their ends were purely practical and
devotional and they made no attempt to pass their compendia as full-length
transcriptions.
With regard to the Spiritual Canticle and the Living Flame of Love, of each
of which there are two redactions bearing indisputable marks of the
authors own hand, the classification of the copies will naturally depend
upon which redaction each copy the more nearly follows. This question will
be discussed in the necessary detail in the introduction to each of these
works, and to the individual introductions to the four major treatises we
must refer the reader for other details of the manuscripts. In the present
pages we have attempted only a general account of these matters. It remains
to add that our divisions of each chapter into paragraphs follow the
manuscripts throughout except where indicated. The printed editions, as we
shall see, suppressed these divisions, but, apart from their value to the
modern reader, they are sufficiently nearly identical in the various copies
to form one further testimony to their general high standard of reliability.
IV
INTEGRITY OF THE SAINTS WORK INCOMPLETE CONDITION OF THE˜ASCENT AND
THE˜NIGHT DISPUTED QUESTIONS
The principal lacuna in St. John of the Crosss writings, and, from the
literary standpoint, the most interesting, is the lack of any commentary to
the last five stanzas [27] of the poem˜Dark Night. Such a commentary is
essential to the completion of the plan which the Saint had already traced
for himself in what was to be, and, in spite of its unfinished condition, is
in fact, his most rigorously scientific treatise.˜All the doctrine, he
wrote in the Argument of the Ascent,˜whereof I intend to treat in this
Ascent of Mount Carmel is included in the following stanzas, and in them is
also described the manner of ascending to the summit of the Mount, which is
the high estate of perfection which we here call union of the soul with
God. This leaves no doubt but that the Saint intended to treat the mystical
life as one whole, and to deal in turn with each stage of the road to
perfection, from the beginnings of the Purgative Way to the crown and summit
of the life of Union. After showing the need for such a treatise as he
proposes to write, he divides the chapters on Purgation into four parts
corresponding to the Active and Passive nights of Sense and of Spirit.
These, however, correspond only to the first two stanzas of his poem; they
are not, as we shall shortly see, complete, but their incompleteness is
slight compared with that of the work as a whole.
Did St. John of the Cross, we may ask, ever write a commentary on those last
five stanzas, which begin with a description of the state of Illumination:
˜Twas that light guided me, More surely than the noondays brightest glare
and end with that of the life of Union:
All things for me that day Ceasd, as I slumberd there, Amid the lilies
drowning all my care?
If we suppose that he did, we are faced with the question of its fate and
with the strange fact that none of his contemporaries makes any mention of
such a commentary, though they are all prolific in details of far less
importance.
Conjectures have been ventured on this question ever since critical methods
first began to be applied to St. John of the Crosss writings. A great deal
was written about it by P. Andrés de la Encarnación, to whom his superiors
entrusted the task of collecting and editing the Saints writings, and whose
findings, though they suffer from the defects of an age which from a modern
standpoint must be called unscientific, and need therefore to be read with
the greatest caution, are often surprisingly just and accurate. P. Andrés
begins by referring to various places where St. John of the Cross states
that he has treated certain subjects and proposes to treat others, about
which nothing can be found in his writings. This, he says, may often be due
to an oversight on the writers part or to changes which new experiences
might have brought to his mode of thinking. On the other hand, there are
sometimes signs that these promises have been fulfilled: the sharp
truncation of the argument, for example, at the end of Book III of the
Ascent suggests that at least a few pages are missing, in which case the
original manuscript must have been mutilated, [28] for almost all the extant
copies break off at the same word. It is unthinkable, as P. Andrés says,
that the Saintshould have gone on to write the Night without completing
the Ascent, for all these five books [29] are integral parts of one whole,
since they all treat of different stages of one spiritual path. [30]
It may be argued in the same way that St. John of the Cross would not have
gone on to write the commentaries on the˜Spiritual Canticle and the
˜Living Flame of
Love without first completing the Dark Night. P.
Andrés
goes so far as to say that the very unwillingness which the Saint displayed
towards writing commentaries on the two latter poems indicates that he had
already completed the others; otherwise, he could easily have excused
himself from the later task on the plea that he had still to finish the
earlier.
Again, St. John of the Cross declares very definitely, in the prologue to
the Dark Night, that, after describing in the commentary on the first two
stanzas the effects of the two passive purgations of the sensual and the
spiritual part of man, he will devote the six remaining stanzas to
expounding˜various and wondrous effects of the spiritual illumination and
union of love with God. Nothing could be clearer than this. Now, in the
commentary on the˜Living Flame, argues P. Andrés, he treats at
considerable length of simple contemplation and adds that he has written
fully of it in several chapters of the Ascent and the Night, which he names;
but not only do we not find the references in two of the chapters enumerated
by him, but he makes no mention of several other chapters in which the
references are of considerable fullness. The proper deductions from these
facts would seem to be, first, that we do not possess the Ascent and the
Night in the form in which the Saint wrote them, and, second, that in the
missing chapters he referred to the subject under discussion at much greater
length than in the chapters we have.
Further, the practice of St. John of the Cross was not to omit any part of
his commentaries when for any reason he was unable or unwilling to write
them at length, but rather to abbreviate them. Thus, he runs rapidly through
the third stanza of the Night and through the fourth stanza of the Living
Flame: we should expect him in the same way to treat the last three stanzas
of the Night with similar brevity and rapidity, but not to omit them
altogether.
Such are the principal arguments used by P. Andrés which have inclined many
critics to the belief that St. John of the Cross completed these treatises.
Other of his arguments, which to himself were even more convincing, have now
lost much weight. The chief of these are the contention that, because a
certain Fray AgustÃn AntolÃnez (b. 1554), in expounding these same poems,
makes no mention of the Saints having failed to expound five stanzas of the
Night, he did therefore write an exposition of them; [31] and the
supposition that the Living Flame was written before the Spiritual Canticle,
and that therefore, when the prologue to the Living Flame says that the
author has already described the highest state of perfection attainable in
this life, it cannot be referring to the Canticle and must necessarily
allude to passages, now lost, from the Dark Night. [32]
Our own judgment upon this much debated question is not easily delivered. On
the one hand, the reasons why St. John of the Cross should have completed
his work are perfectly sound ones and his own words in the Ascent and the
Dark Night are a clear statement of his intentions. Furthermore, he had
ample time to complete it, for he wrote other treatises at a later date and
he certainly considered the latter part of the Dark Night to be more
important than the former. On the other hand, it is disconcerting to find
not even the briefest clear reference to this latter part in any of his
subsequent writings, when both the Living Flame and the Spiritual Canticle
offered so many occasions for such a reference to an author accustomed to
refer his readers to his other treatises. Again, his contemporaries, who
were keenly interested in his work, and mention such insignificant things as
the Cautions, the Maxims and the˜Mount of Perfection, say nothing whatever
of the missing chapters. None of his biographers speaks of them, nor does P.
Alonso de la Madre de Dios, who examined the Saints writings in detail
immediately after his death and was in touch with his closest friends and
companions. We are inclined, therefore, to think that the chapters in
question were never written. [33] Is not the following sequence of probable
facts the most tenable? We know from P. Juan Evangelista that the Ascent and
the Dark Night were written at different times, with many intervals of short
or long duration. The Saint may well have entered upon the Spiritual
Canticle, which was a concession to the affectionate importunity of M. Ann
de Jesús, with every intention of returning later to finish his earlier
treatise. But, having completed the Canticle, he may equally well have been
struck with the similarity between a part of it and the unwritten commentary
on the earlier stanzas, and this may have decided him that the Dark Night
needed no completion, especially as the Living Flame also described the life
of Union. This hypothesis will explain all the facts, and seems completely
in harmony with all we know of St. John of the Cross, who was in no sense,
as we have already said, a writer by profession. If we accept it, we need
not necessarily share the views which we here assume to have been his. Not
only would the completion of the Dark Night have given us new ways of
approach to so sublime and intricate a theme, but this would have been
treated in a way more closely connected with the earlier stages of the
mystical life than was possible in either the Living Flame or the Canticle.
We ought perhaps to notice one further supposition of P. Andrés, which has
been taken up by a number of later critics: that St. John of the Cross
completed the commentary which we know as the Dark Night, but that on
account of the distinctive nature of the contents of the part now lost he
gave it a separate title. [34] The only advantage of this theory seems to be
that it makes the hypothesis of the loss of the commentary less improbable.
In other respects it is as unsatisfactory as the theory of P. Andrés, [35]
of which we find a variant in M. Baruzi, [36] that the Saint thought the
commentary too bold, and too sublime, to be perpetuated, and therefore
destroyed it, or, at least, forbade its being copied. It is surely unlikely
that the sublimity of these missing chapters would exceed that of the
Canticle or the Living Flame.
This seems the most suitable place to discuss a feature of the works of St.
John of the Cross to which allusion is often made the little interest
which he took in their division into books and chapters and his lack of
consistency in observing such divisions when he had once made them. A number
of examples may be cited. In the first chapter of the Ascent of Mount
Carmel, using the words˜part and˜book as synonyms, he makes it
clear
that the Ascent and the Dark Night are to him one single treatise.˜The
first night or purgation, he writes,˜is of the sensual part of the soul,
which is treated in the present stanza, and will be treated in the first
part of this book. And the second is of the spiritual part; of this speaks
the second stanza, which follows; and of this we shall treat likewise, in
the second and the third part, with respect to the activity of the soul; and
in the fourth part, with respect to its passivity. [37] The authors
intention here is evident. Purgation may be sensual or spiritual, and each
of these kinds may be either active or passive. The most logical proceeding
would be to divide the whole of the material into four parts or books: two
to be devoted to active purgation and two to passive. [38] St. John of the
Cross, however, devotes two parts to active spiritual purgation one to
that of the understanding and the other to that of the memory and the will.
In the Night, on the other hand, where it would seem essential to devote one
book to the passive purgation of sense and another to that of spirit, he
includes both in one part, the fourth. In the Ascent, he divides the content
of each of his books into various chapters; in the Night, where the argument
is developed like that of the Ascent, he makes a division into paragraphs
only, and a very irregular division at that, if we may judge by the copies
that have reached us. In the Spiritual Canticle and the Living Flame he
dispenses with both chapters and paragraphs. The commentary on each stanza
here corresponds to a chapter.
Another example is to be found in the arrangement of his expositions. As a
rule, he first writes down the stanzas as a whole, then repeats each in turn
before expounding it, and repeats each line also in its proper place in the
same way. At the beginning of each treatise he makes some general
observations in the form either of an argument and prologue, as in the
Ascent; of a prologue and general exposition, as in the Night; of a prologue
alone, as in the first redaction of the Canticle and in the Living Flame; or
of a prologue and argument, as in the second redaction of the Canticle. In
the Ascent and the Night, the first chapter of each book contains the
˜exposition of the stanzas, though some copies describe this, in Book III
of the Ascent, as an˜argument. In the Night, the book dealing with the
Night of Sense begins with the usual˜exposition; that of the Night of the
Spirit, however, has nothing to correspond with it.
In the first redaction of the Spiritual Canticle, St. John of the Cross
first sets down the poem, then a few lines of˜exposition giving the
argument of the stanza, and finally the commentary upon each line. Sometimes
he comments upon two or three lines at once. In the second redaction, he
prefaces almost every stanza with an˜annotation, of which there is none in
the first redaction except before the commentary on the thirteenth and
fourteenth stanzas. The chief purpose of the˜annotation is to link the
argument of each stanza with that of the stanza preceding it; occasionally
the annotation and the exposition are combined.
It is clear from all this that, in spite of his orderly mind, St. John of
the Cross was no believer in strict uniformity in matters of arrangement
which would seem to demand such uniformity once they had been decided upon.
They are, of course, of secondary importance, but the fact that the
inconsistencies are the work of St. John of the Cross himself, and not
merely of careless copyists, who have enough else to account for, is of real
moment in the discussion of critical questions which turn on the Saints
accuracy.
Another characteristic of these commentaries is the inequality of length as
between the exposition of certain lines and stanzas. While some of these are
dealt with fully, the exposition of others is brought to a close with
surprising rapidity, even though it sometimes seems that much more needs to
be said: we get the impression that the author was anxious to push his work
forward or was pressed for time. He devotes fourteen long chapters of the
Ascent to glossing the first two lines of the first stanza and dismisses the
three remaining lines in a few sentences. In both the Ascent and the Night,
indeed, the stanzas appear to serve only as a pretext for introducing the
great wealth of ascetic and mystical teaching which the Saint has gathered
together. In the Canticle and the Living Flame, on the other hand, he keeps
much closer to his stanzas, though here, too, there is a considerable
inequality. One result of the difference in nature between these two pairs
of treatises is that the Ascent and the Night are more solidly built and
more rigidly doctrinal, whereas in the Canticle and the Flame there is more
movement and more poetry.
V
HISTORY OF THE PUBLICATION OF ST. JOHN OF THE
CROSSS WRITINGS THE FIRST
EDITION
It seems strange that mystical works of such surpassing value should not
have been published till twenty-seven years after their authors death, for
not only were the manuscript copies insufficient to propagate them as widely
as those who made them would have desired, but the multiplication of these
copies led to an ever greater number of variants in the text. Had it but
been possible for the first edition of them to have been published while
their author still lived, we might to-day have a perfect text. But the
probability is that, if such an idea had occurred to St. John of the Cross,
he would have set it aside as presumptuous. In allowing copies to be made he
doubtless never envisaged their going beyond the limited circle of his
Order.
We have found no documentary trace of any project for an edition of these
works during their authors lifetime. The most natural time for a discussion
of the matter would have been in September 1586, when the Definitors of the
Order, among whom was St. John of the Cross, met in Madrid and decided to
publish the works of St. Teresa. [39] Two years earlier, when he was writing
the Spiritual Canticle, St. John of the Cross had expressed a desire for the
publication of St. Teresas writings and assumed that this would not be long
delayed. [40] As we have seen, he considered his own works as complementary
to those of St. Teresa, [41] and one would have thought that the
simultaneous publication of the writings of the two Reformers would have
seemed to the Definitors an excellent idea.
After his death, it is probable that there was no one at first who was both
able and willing to undertake the work of editor; for, as is well known,
towards the end of his life the Saint had powerful enemies within his Order
who might well have opposed the project, though, to do the Discalced Reform
justice, it was brought up as early as ten years after his death. A
resolution was passed at the Chapter-General of the Reform held in September
1601, to the effect˜that the works of Fr. Juan de la Cruz be printed and
that the Definitors, Fr. Juan de Jesús
MarÃa and Fr. Tomás [de Jesús],
be
instructed to examine and approve them. [42] Two years later (July 4,
1603), the same Chapter, also meeting in Madrid,˜gave leave to the
Definitor, Fr. Tomás [de Jesús], for the printing of the works of Fr. Juan
de la Cruz, first friar of the Discalced Reform. [43]
It is not known (since the Chapter Book is no longer extant) why the matter
lapsed for two years, but Fr. Tomás de Jesús, the Definitor to whom alone it
was entrusted on the second occasion, was a most able man, well qualified to
edit the works of his predecessor. [44] Why, then, we may wonder, did he not
do so? The story of his life in the years following the commission may
partly answer this question. His definitorship came to an end in 1604, when
he was elected Prior of the˜desert of San José
de las Batuecas. After
completing the customary three years in this office, during which time he
could have done no work at all upon the edition, he was elected Prior of the
Discalced house at Zaragoza. But at this point Paul V sent for him to Rome
and from that time onward his life followed other channels.
The next attempt to accomplish the project was successful. The story begins
with a meeting between the Definitors of the Order and Fr. José de Jesús
MarÃa, the General, at Vélez-Málaga, where a new decision to publish the
works of St. John of the Cross was taken and put into effect (as a later
resolution has it)˜without any delay or condition whatsoever. [45] The
enterprise suffered a setback, only a week after it had been planned, in the
death of the learned Jesuit P. Suárez, who was on terms of close friendship
with the Discalced and had been appointed one of the censors. But P. Diego
de Jesús (Salablanca), Prior of the Discalced house at Toledo, to whom its
execution was entrusted, lost no time in accomplishing his task; indeed, one
would suppose that he had begun it long before, since early in the next year
it was completed and published in Alcalá. The volume, entitled Spiritual
Works which lead a soul to perfect union with God, has 720 pages and bears
the date 1618. The works are preceded by a preface addressed to the reader
and a brief summary of the authors˜life and virtues. An engraving
of the
˜Mount of Perfection is included. [46]
There are several peculiarities about this editio princeps. In the first
place, although the pagination is continuous, it was the work of two
different printers; the reason for this is quite unknown, though various
reasons might be suggested. The greatest care was evidently taken so that
the work should be well and truly approved: it is recommended, in terms of
the highest praise, by the authorities of the University of Alcalá, who, at
the request of the General of the Discalced Carmelites, had submitted it for
examination to four of the professors of that University. No doubt for
reasons of safety, the Spiritual Canticle was not included in that edition:
it was too much like a commentary on the Song of Songs for such a proceeding
to be just then advisable.
We have now to enquire into the merits of the edition of P. Salablanca,
which met with such warm approval on its publication, yet very soon
afterwards began to be recognized as defective and is little esteemed for
its intrinsic qualities to-day.
It must, of course, be realized that critical standards in the early
seventeenth century were low and that the first editor of St. John of the
Cross had neither the method nor the available material of the twentieth
century. Nor were the times favourable for the publication of the works of a
great mystic who attempted fearlessly and fully to describe the highest
stages of perfection on the road to God. These two facts are responsible for
most of the defects of the edition.
For nearly a century, the great peril associated with the mystical life had
been that of Illuminism, a gross form of pseudo-mysticism which had claimed
many victims among the holiest and most learned, and of which there was such
fear that excessive, almost unbelievable, precautions had been taken against
it. These precautions, together with the frequency and audacity with which
Illuminists invoked the authority and protection of well-known contemporary
ascetic and mystical writers, give reality to P. Salablancas fear lest the
leaders of the sect might shelter themselves behind the doctrines of St.
John of the Cross and so call forth the censure of the Inquisition upon
passages which seemed to him to bear close relation to their erroneous
teaching. It was for this definite reason, and not because of an arbitrary
meticulousness, that P. Salablanca omitted or adapted such passages as those
noted in Book I, Chapter viii of the Ascent of Mount Carmel an |
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