John of the Cross: Desire, Transformation, and Selfhood (Christian Theology in Context) 9780198863069, 0198863063

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C H R I S T IA N T H E O L O G Y I N C O N T E X T SERIES EDITORS TIMOTHY GORRINGE  SERENE JONES  GRAHAM WARD

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C H R I ST IA N T H E O L O G Y I N C O N T E X T Any inspection of recent theological monographs makes plain that it is still thought possible to understand a text independently of its context. Work in the sociology of knowledge and in cultural studies has, however, increasingly made obvious that such divorce is impossible. On the one hand, as Marx put it, ‘life determines consciousness’. All texts have to be understood in their life situation, related to questions of power, class, and modes of production. No texts exist in intellectual innocence. On the other hand, texts are also forms of cultural power, expressing and modifying the dominant ideologies through which we understand the world. This dialectical understanding of texts demands an interdisciplinary approach if they are to be properly understood: theology needs to be read alongside economics, politics, and social studies, as well as philosophy, with which it has traditionally been linked. The cultural situatedness of any text demands, both in its own time and in the time of its rereading, a radically interdisciplinary analysis. The aim of this series is to provide such an analysis, culturally situating texts by Christian theologians and theological movements. Only by doing this, we believe, will people of the fourth, sixteenth, or nineteenth centuries be able to speak to those of the twenty-first. Only by doing this will we be able to understand how theologies are themselves cultural products—projects deeply resonant with their particular cultural contexts and yet nevertheless exceeding those contexts by being received into our own today. In doing this, the series should advance both our understanding of those theologies and our understanding of theology as a discipline. We also hope that it will contribute to the fast-developing interdisciplinary debates of the present.

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John of the Cross Desire, Transformation, and Selfhood S A M HO L E

1

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Sam Hole 2020 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020937546 ISBN 978–0–19–886306–9 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198863069.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Acknowledgements This book originated as a PhD thesis at the University of Cambridge. I first and foremost express my enormous thanks to my supervisor, Sarah Coakley, who was an unfailing guide and support in the writing of this study. I could not have wished for more sustained and committed care for my work than she provided. Other scholars—notably Edward Howells, Peter Tyler, Colin Thompson, and the anonymous readers from Oxford University Press—also generously contributed their time and wisdom to answer my questions. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided by the award of a doctoral studentship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I also thank the Master and Fellows of Selwyn College, Cambridge for the award of a Gosden Scholarship. Financial support from the funds administered by the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge was invaluable, enabling early versions of the ideas laid out in this study to be presented at conferences in Nottingham, Durham, Oxford, and San Diego. It was a great privilege to be able to study the life and works of John of the Cross in the context of formation for ordained ministry in the Church of England. My time spent at Selwyn College chapel and Westcott House was invaluable in helping me to set my learning in the context of the church’s wider ministry and mission. In recent years I have been grateful to those who have ensured that, amidst the many commitments of parish life, I was able to develop the thesis into the study as it is presented here. Jonathan Sedgwick, Rector of St George the Martyr, Southwark, was a particular help in this regard. I also benefited greatly from time as a Dean’s Scholar at Virginia Theological Seminary. I am indebted to friends and family who have supported me on the way. I am inestimably grateful to the faith and love shown to me by my parents. I have found insightful conversation partners in many, including: Silvianne Bürki, Hugh Burling, Alec Corio, Isidoros Katsos, Nathan Lyons, Ragnar Mogård Bergem, Preston Parsons, Julian Perlmutter, Richard

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vi Acknowledgements Stanton, Jonathan Teubner, David Torrance, and Daniel Trott. I found joy in spending time with friends, among them David and Clare O’Hara, Tom and Emma Nixon, Stephen Wastling, Alice Howell, Jon and Sarah Reynolds, Ben and Lizzie Osborne, Jeremy Martin, and Mark Bostock. Finally, words cannot express my gratitude to my wife, Emily S. Kempson. She has been a source of all those qualities I found in friends and family—joy, faith, love, and insightful conversation—as well as much else besides. She is the one to whom, in this world, I can declare John’s final exclamation in The Living Flame of Love: ‘how tenderly you swell my heart with love’. I dedicate this work to her.

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Contents List of Illustrations A note on translations and abbreviations

Introduction: desire in recent theology

ix xi

1

I. Desire, transformation, and selfhood: four contributions II. Desire in recent theology III. Chapter summary

2 9 20

1. The neglect of desire: modern reception of John of the Cross

25

I. The modern recovery of John of the Cross

Questions of genealogy: the importance of the late nineteenth-century recovery A guide to the spiritual life: the neo-scholastic revival of mystical theology John and mysticism

27 27 30 35

II. Developments since the mid-twentieth century

45

III. Desire and the spiritual ascent

58

The rise of ‘spirituality’ Mysticism and experience

2. Desire and the spiritual ascent

I. John of the Cross: a life II. The role of the appetites in John’s anthropology of the soul III. The interior ascent IV. Love and the ascent Dionysian erōs and the metaphysical basis of the appetites Late medieval reworkings of Augustine and Aquinas Recogimiento prayer

V. The limitations and potential of language Dionysianism and the limits of language Cancionero and Italian Renaissance poetry Carmelite reading of the Song of Songs

VI. Conclusions

45 52

62

64 68 73 82 82 86 90

94

94 95 99

103

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viii Contents

3. Language, form, and imagery in John’s poetry

105

I. Narrative and the God of love: the Romances107 II. Paradox and ineffability in the glosas and coplas112 III. Desire in the Noche, Llama, and Cántico115 Noche oscura116 Llama de amor viva120 Cántico espiritual122 The two redactions of the Cántico122 Yearning in CB1–12 124 Spiritual betrothal and marriage in CB13–40 126

IV. Conclusions: language and the spiritual ascent

4. The ‘dark night of the soul’ and the purification of desire

130

132

I. The relationship between the Ascent and Night133 II. Human sin and divine transcendence: the necessity of the dark night 136 III. The night of sense 138 The active night of sense The passive night of sense

138 143

IV. The night of spirit

147

V. Conclusions

161

The active night of spirit 148 Intellect149 Memory151 Will154 The passive night of spirit 158

5. Union in the Canticle and Flame163 I. Yearning for a ‘vision’ of divine ‘beauty’ II. Pneumatological incorporation in spiritual ‘betrothal’ and ‘marriage’

165

III. Union and the beatific vision

173

IV. The anthropology of the transformed soul

181

V. Conclusions

189

Conclusion: desire retrieved

191

Spiritual betrothal Spiritual marriage

169

169 171

Union in the Canticle173 Union in the Flame176 Memory182 The unity of the soul 185

References Index

205 217

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List of Illustrations 1. Copy of the original sketch of ‘Mount Carmel’ drawn by John of the Cross

141

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A note on translations and abbreviations English quotations of John’s poetry and prose are, unless otherwise stated, taken from Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD, and Otilio Rodriguez, OCD, eds, The Collected Works of Saint John of the Cross, rev. ed. (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1991), and have been anglicized. Quotations of the original Spanish text are taken from San Juan de la Cruz, Obras Completas, ed. Lucinio Ruano de la Iglesia, OCD, 2nd ed. (Madrid: BAC, 1991). Given the greater significance of the Spanish to understanding John’s poetry, I typically quote the poetry in both Spanish and English, but his prose only in English. For clarity, I will generally refer to John’s poetry (notably the Subida, Noche, Cántico, and Llama) by their Spanish titles, and to his prose works by their English titles. This distinction between the genres is not, of course, hard and fast; where discussing both aspects of a work I use the English title. Citations of John’s prose works will use the following abbreviations: Ascent of Mount Carmel Dark Night of the Soul The Living Flame of Love, second redaction The Spiritual Canticle, first redaction The Spiritual Canticle, second redaction

A N F CA CB

Given the limited differences between the two redactions of the Flame and the undisputed authenticity of the second redaction, I follow common practice in studying the second redaction of the Flame and citing it with the abbreviation ‘F’. Given the wide familiarity with the anglicized versions of their names, I will refer to John of the Cross rather than Juan de la Cruz and to Teresa of Avila rather than Teresa de Jesús. I continue to refer to place names and other figures of the period, however, by their Spanish names (hence reference to the town of Ávila but to Teresa of Avila).

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Introduction Desire in recent theology

This book examines the distinctive account of desire developed in the writings of the Spanish Discalced Carmelite friar John of the Cross (1542–91), and locates its vital significance for modern depictions of Christian life and the transformation of the self. John is undeniably one of the major theological figures of the sixteenth century, despite extensive subsequent periods of neglect. As Teresa of Avila’s junior partner in her reform of the Carmelite Order, he helped to institute numerous friaries and convents that, even before his death, established a distinguishable way of life for the Discalced Carmelite Order. His poetry represents a pinnacle of Spanish art’s so-called ‘Golden Age’. Many of his most famous poems depict erotic love as vividly as any in the literary corpus. His four prose works, written as guides to the religious and laypeople with whose spiritual care he was charged, and which read as commentaries on three of these poems, offer deep wisdom on the Christian life. They detail the path of spiritual ascent in the Christian life, a course undertaken by a soul seeking nothing less than union with God. Such diversity in a relatively small corpus has occasioned a range of interpretations of John’s writings. Most focus predominantly either on his poetry at the expense of his prose or vice versa, or else single-mindedly point out other apparent contradictions in his writing. By contrast, I contend that John’s delineation of the changes that are undergone by the ‘soul’ in the spiritual ascent is in fact rooted in a distinctive and systematic theological vision. A rich notion of desire animates his poetry and prose works and draws with creativity and novelty on biblical, Platonic, and Christian sources. This book traces the crucial role played by this underlying erotic driver of the spiritual ascent, and suggests that it represents a unique working out of the scholastic narrative of the graced John of the Cross: Desire, Transformation, and Selfhood. Sam Hole, Oxford University Press (2020). © Sam Hole. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198863069.003.0001

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2  John of the Cross transformation of the sensory appetites and the faculties of intellect, memory, and will. John offers an account of the transformation of the self through the progressive purification of desire which is, accordingly, worthy of renewed contemporary theological attention.

I.  Desire, transformation, and selfhood: four contributions This chapter begins by laying out four significant contributions offered by John. I then turn to survey recent theological approaches to desire, before finally indicating, as will be laid out more fully in the Conclusion, the resources offered by John’s thought that may aid the ongoing theo­logic­al recovery of desire. Four interconnected aspects of John’s thought constitute, I suggest, a bold and sophisticated account of desire that may enrich current research and reflection. None of these aspects is, by itself, unique to John. Taken as a whole, however, they form an account that has not been adequately recognized in recent academic studies of John’s thought, and which may deepen and enrich the theological grounding of recent accounts of desire. Accordingly, I now programmatically describe these four aspects. In the first place, John understands that a description of human desire requires reference to the entirety of the self, which he describes using the equivalent terminology of the ‘soul’ (John’s understanding of the soul should not be anachronistically confused with modern understandings of that term).1 John recognizes that desire is not simply to do with a narrow aspect of the anthropology of the soul—be it the passions, the

1  In line with Aquinas, John understands the ‘soul’ to be the ‘form of the body’. His use of the notion therefore refers both to the physical and spiritual aspects of a single unified entity. In modern discussion, however, there is a rather different tendency to speak of the soul as distinct from the body. To avoid misinterpretation, therefore, although I continue to speak of the ‘soul’ when considering John’s writings, at times (particularly when considering the modern significance of John’s thought) I refer to the ‘self ’. It is in the language of selfhood that modern discussion would recognize the unity of the human in its physical and spiritual aspects. ‘Self ’ accordingly better represents John’s thought for modern discussion than would reference to the ‘soul’.

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Introduction  3 will, or a particular conception of sexuality. He frequently evokes the notion of ‘desire’ through the technical anthropological terminology of the sensory appetites (apetitos), passions (pasiones), affects (afectos), and will (voluntad), using an anthropology that is largely—though by no means entirely—aligned with that of Thomas Aquinas. He also regularly explores the notion through his account of the growth of love (amor) or charity (caridad) in the soul. Yet desire serves a less technical but more unifying role in John’s thought through a series of terms that are typ­ic­al­ly translated using terms such as ‘desire’, ‘yearning’, ‘seeking’, and ‘longing’ (ansia, aspiración, codicia, concupiscencia, gustar, hambre, inclinación, pretender, querer), and above all in the term ‘desire’ itself (desear/deseo). As I observe shortly, recent theological revival of interest in desire has tended to focus on desire as eros, placing great emphasis on the sexual implications of desire. John offers a more holistic theological account of desire, deploying a rich range of language to depict the progressive purification and redirection of the soul’s desires as it is brought to union with God. The second salient aspect of John’s account of desire is that it is embedded in a holistic account of the Christian life, articulated in terms of the spiritual ascent, which lays out a process by which the soul’s desires are transformed. There exists a long Christian tradition of the discernment of desires (or sometimes ‘passions’) that stretches from the Desert Fathers, Evagrius Pontus, and Ignatius of Loyola into the present day. In common with all these figures, John recognizes that the spiritual ascent requires a transformation in the soul’s understanding of—and consequent response to—its desires. A soul’s desires may either be lifegiving or destructive to itself and others; the spiritual ascent accordingly demands growth in discernment of those desires that are good. For John, souls are typically enslaved to the desires of their sensual appetites, with the consequent distortion of their spiritual faculties of intellect, will, and memory. Moreover, John argues, while the purification of these sinful desires should begin in the sensual appetites, these desires permeate the whole soul. John’s sketch of the ascent of Mount Carmel accordingly graphically lays out the necessity, for any transformation to take place, of the progressive and total purification of first sensual and then ­spiritual desire.

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4  John of the Cross This spiritual ascent, traversed through the ‘dark night’ of the soul, is a task requiring extended ascetic discipline. It will, John emphasizes, involve engaging with the depths of the soul, bringing to light the mo­tiv­ ations, fears, and hopes that for most lie hidden from view. This is not simply a matter of self-improvement: divine grace (and not merely human effort) is integral to the spiritual ascent. Moreover, as John emphasizes in a manner distinctive to much of the theological tradition, depth of feeling is not in itself a good guide to the value of specific desires. In contrast to many understandings of desire in recent academic contributions, in other words, this study contends that John’s writings more adequately represent the distortions, conscious and unconscious, of much ordinary human desire. Despite his stark vision of the depth and pervasiveness of human sin, though, John offers the striking combination of this deep awareness of sin with a highly optimistic vision of the extent of transformation that is possible in this life. His poetic depiction of this union draws on all his powers of language to describe a pneumatologically driven participation in God that is as positive and hopeful about the potential for human transformation as any in the Christian tradition. In short, John sophisticatedly draws on and extends historic theological reflections on the many kinds of desire that may arise in the soul, offering a holistic account of the spiritual ascent to describe their purification and redirection. Third, John’s guidance on the discernment, purification, and redirection of the soul’s desires is set within a nuanced appreciation of the relationship between the desire in the created order and desire as it pertains to God Godself. The created order is, in John’s vision, itself suffused with desire. The transformation of the soul accordingly requires a concomitant transformation, in the course of the spiritual ascent, in the extent to which divine desire is recognized to suffuse the created order. John uses images of the beauty of the created order, as well as bold variations of language in both poetry and prose forms, to explore the quality of this desire. And, in his most tantalizing indications in the final pages of the Canticle and Flame, he suggests that the desire experienced by the transformed soul is equivalent to the love that binds together the persons of the Trinity. Desire is, it might be said, not simply the means by which the soul attains an entirely distinct end: desire is both the means and the

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Introduction  5 end of the spiritual ascent. John would have been well aware of the theological dangers in attributing desire to God—notably, as modern thought has highlighted, with reference to the difficulties occasioned by implying that God may lack something. Yet he is willing to pursue this daring path. Evidently he envisages that the soul’s desire, when appropriately purified and directed, is participatively reflective of the inner life of God. Yet John’s distinctiveness with regard to the soul’s discernment of its desires lies in his recognition that this reordering of the soul’s perception of the created order is itself essential for a true vision of God. John recognizes, long before Feuerbach, the extent to which projection shapes the human relationship with God. John’s account of human projection does not come in the context of an argument for atheism, however, but rather in the course of his account of how souls may come to know God. The soul’s projection of certain visions of God is, in John’s account, a result of the self-centredness of the untransformed soul. The ‘dark night of the soul’ is perhaps the most renowned element of John’s response to this dilemma: a ‘darkening’ of the soul’s attachment to created objects so that in ‘dark faith’ the soul may proceed on the spiritual ascent. But the dark night is set by John within the context of a far broader graced and life-long transformation of the soul’s desires so that they may be united with God’s own desire. Fourth and finally, study of John’s treatment of desire, and his associated insights on affectivity, experience, and prayer, must not be consigned to a subdiscipline of spiritual, mystical, or pastoral theology, but needs treating as central to his own theological vision. The inseparability of the theological from these latter disciplines has been proclaimed for many decades. Yet precisely what this entails for systematic theology remains a point of contention, and recent systematic theologies have attempted in diverse ways to draw on the wisdom of these fields to theo­ logic­al ends.2 John’s works offer a valuable resource for this knotty dilemma. His works may be primarily directed at those in his spiritual care, but this by 2 See, for example, the diverse approaches taken in the recent systematic theologies of Kathryn Tanner, Graham Ward, Katherine Sonderegger, and Sarah Coakley.

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6  John of the Cross no means makes them belong to a different genre from the theological. His writings are, as A.N.  Williams neatly puts it, ‘not a set of how-to manuals on spiritual discipline or prayer, but a series of reflections on the conditions under which human persons come to God and on the identity of the God who is sought in contemplation’.3 Increase in theo­ logic­al understanding is, for John, inseparable from treading the spiritual ascent that is encountered above all through prayer, in its various states of meditation and contemplation. Moreover, in contrast to any account of prayer that describes the undertaking without reference to that most intimate of human activities (namely, sexual desire), John offers an account of prayer that highlights the connections between prayer and the full range of human desires. An underlying theme in the middle chapters of this work is accordingly the historical question of how John himself understood theology itself to relate to the entirety of human life and experience. In the final chapter, I suggest ways in which reflection on John’s understanding of the nature of theology may aid consideration of the comparable questions that press on theo­lo­gians today. In sum, this book seeks both to restore desire to its rightful centrality in John’s thought, and to promote this account as worthy of con­tem­por­ ary attention. Desire serves as a constellating metaphor for other key themes in John’s thought, among them the search, the journey, and the relationship between darkness and light. John recognizes that desires pervade the individual, and provides a subtle anthropology of the soul that allows for their intricate analysis. His account of the spiritual ascent, with its progressive movement from deep sin to union with God, is framed around the discernment, purification, and redirection of the soul’s desires. And John’s heightened sense of the soul’s desires is underpinned by the way in which desire is emphasized as a fundamental feature not simply of the created order but of God himself. This book therefore engages in an in-depth historical study of John’s thought. Moreover, it undertakes this historical task with sustained attention to the context of John’s thought. It provides, in other words, an intellectual history of John’s novel articulation of desire, yet it contends 3  A.N. Williams, ‘The Doctrine of God in San Juan de la Cruz’, Modern Theology 30, no. 4 (2014): 502.

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Introduction  7 that such historical understanding can be most profoundly realized through sensitive attention to the social, economic, ecclesial, and wider cultural context in which these ideas were both articulated by John and also received in subsequent centuries. Such an approach recognizes that language shifts in meaning over time, possibly obscuring what someone in the receding past may once have tried to convey; attention to the context in which ideas were articulated and received is necessary if they are to be appropriately understood today. It has, admittedly, been a commonplace since at least the 1970s for intellectual historians to emphasize the importance of study of context.4 Such an emphasis recognizes that study of the context of writings and their reception, far from committing the ‘genetic fallacy’ of claiming that to explain the background or origins of an idea is to explain the idea away, is a necessary part of the sensitive translation of that work to modern thought. Yet although this commitment is now widely assumed in historical theology, a fair proportion of works continue either to treat a past thinker’s writings as straightforwardly applicable to modern thought, or restrict investigation of context to exploration of the pos­sible intellectual influences on the topic of study. Through the delivery of an in-depth and contextualized historical study of John’s thought and its reception, this work aims to challenge that continuing tendency. Accordingly, in relation to John’s own time it attends, for instance, to the importance of the interplay between John’s formal academic theo­ logic­al study and his extensive reforming activities within the Carmelite order. It examines contemporary Spanish understandings of language and poetic form. And it notes the resonances of John’s work with the series of contemporaneous theological reappraisals of selfhood influentially developed by Ignatius of Loyola and Teresa of Avila. Arguably, one of the reasons that it has been tempting in modern times to depict John as a timeless ‘mystical’ writer is the relative absence of explicit and easily understood references in his work that contextualize his writing; this work’s study of the setting of John’s writing serves as a reminder of the necessity for good theology of attending to his historical context. 4  For an influential argument to this end see Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory 8 (1969): 3–53.

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8  John of the Cross It is also essential, however, to attend to the context that informed the reception of John’s work in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Chapter 1 traces the significance of John’s writing for the emergence of modern conceptions of mysticism and spirituality, unpicking the context from which these frameworks emerged so as to release John from these constrictive impositions on his thought. Subsequent chapters emphasize that any interpretation of John through the lens of concepts such as experience, affectivity, contemplation—and of course desire— must attend to the complex and subtle shifts over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in usage of these concepts. During this time John has been drawn into a series of modern debates. He has been co-opted into disputes within Roman Catholicism, largely divided along the lines of religious orders, on the meaning of contemplation. He has become, for some, a standard-bearer of a faith that downplays or even rejects ecclesial institutions and authority in favour of the individual’s encounter with God. His mid-twentieth-century role as a Spanish national hero has further obscured the full shape of his life and thought. In short, attention to the context of modern reception of John is crucial to prevent the current framework of discussions about desire and many other concepts from being naively or unconsciously projected onto John’s texts. Whether reading modern studies of John or reading the most widely used modern English translation of John’s writings (which has a particular tendency to impose modern frameworks of thought on John’s words), careful attention to the context in which ideas were received and reworked is required if his genuinely constructive and distinctive theo­ logic­al take on desire is to emerge with clarity. Yet this in-depth study of John and his reception is not undertaken for purely historical purposes. Instead, what follows is presented in the belief that this approach generates constructive outcomes for systematic theology, since successful theological enquiry must ‘think with’ the sources of the tradition if it is to deliver systematic theological insight. Far from being enquiry of merely arcane interest, detailed historical research of the sort undertaken here is resolutely theologically con­struct­ ive insofar as it delineates the parameters of the tradition and opens up lines of thinking closed off by more recent modes of conceiving of the theological task. This an important reminder for much theological

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Introduction  9 enquiry. It is, however, particularly pertinent for the theo­logic­al study of desire. Recent discussion of the theme has been extensively conducted with reference to contributions from continental philosophy and its engagement with Freudianism, a tradition that has tended to show far less interest in the kind of detailed historical work undertaken here. Recovery of John of the Cross’s understanding of desire may therefore significantly enrich the options for theological articulation of this theme.

II.  Desire in recent theology The past two decades have witnessed academic theological circles turn increasing attention to the theme of desire. Multiple scholarly conversations using the term have developed, often exhibiting little explicit engagement with one another. Yet the dominant strands of debate have, I suggest, only partially engaged desire’s full theological implications and potential. For much of the second half of the twentieth century, the dominant theological definition of desire was provided by the Swedish Lutheran Anders Nygren, in his enduringly influential but highly problematic analysis of eros and agape as two fundamentally opposed understandings of love.5 For Nygren, eros was an essentially egocentric love that takes the form of an acquisitive desire for goodness and beauty. Agape was the gratuitous, self-sacrificial love that finds expression in the cross and takes the form of wholehearted surrender to God. Nygren himself preferred to use the Greek terms, but the implications of his work for English terminology became widely accepted: love, as a shorthand for Christian agape, remained an acceptable theological term; desire, cryp­tic­ al­ly a reference to Platonic eros, became unacceptable. Nygren’s arguments had a huge influence towards the neglect of desire in both Protestant and Catholic circles. That influence was greatest in Protestant discussions where, endorsed by such heavyweight figures as Karl Barth, Nygren’s 5  Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson (London: SPCK, 1953). See also the insightful critiques by M.C. D’Arcy, The Mind and Heart of Love, Lion and Unicorn: A Study in Eros and Agape (London: Faber and Faber, 1954) and Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1997), 211–14.

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10  John of the Cross definitions achieved the status of near orthodoxy, and desire became a little-used theological term.6 Catholic ignorance of the theological significance of desire was also caused, though, by simple lack of interest in the theme in the first half of the century. Neo-Thomist interpretation of Thomas Aquinas emphasized his Aristotelian heritage in a manner that neglected the aspects of Thomas’s thought which most evidently displayed his interest in desire. Accordingly, although the term has been the subject of much debate in Catholic theology in the past half century, it has been within the context of a far more restricted understanding of desire—namely, the longrunning controversy concerning Henri de Lubac’s study of the ‘natural desire for the vision of God’ (desiderium naturale visionis Dei). It is with reference to this ongoing debate concerning the relationship between nature and grace that desire is still primarily used—the excellent recent Encyclopedia of Christian Theology, for example, directs readers interested in desire to the entry on the ‘supernatural’.7 While recognizing the importance of that particular theological discussion, I suggest that one negative impact of the terms of debate as they have emerged has been to obscure the broader theological possibilities of the theme of desire. Given this sustained inattention to and near dismissal of desire in theological circles, it is perhaps unsurprising that the increasing and widespread theological interest in desire that has arisen in recent decades has been largely inspired by the prominence of desire in other academic traditions such as continental philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, and semiotics. Desire features strongly in—to name just a few of the major theorists of the last seventy years—the work of Lacan, Barthes, Levinas, Deleuze, Ricoeur, Foucault, and Derrida. The analyses of desire provided by these thinkers have proved highly attractive to many theologians.8 The most notable early impact of their work was the explosion 6  Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.2: The Doctrine of Reconciliation, trans. G.W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), 734. 7  See p. 436 in volume 1 of Jean-Yves Lacoste, ed., Encyclopedia of Christian Theology (New York; London: Routledge, 2005). 8  For a sense of this enormous variety, see Margaret  R.  Miles, Desire and Delight: A New Reading of Augustine’s Confessions (New York: Crossroad, 1992) using Barthes’s theory of text­ual pleasure, Richard Kearney, ‘Desire of God’, in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, ed. John  D.  Caputo and Michael  J.  Scanlon (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), 112–45, examining the possibilities for a non-ontotheological desire for God in Derrida’s writings, and Mario Costa, ‘For the Love of God: The Death of Desire and the Gift of Life’, in Toward

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Introduction  11 of theological interest in sexuality and the body that occurred during the 1980s and 1990s, which employed ‘desire’ as a primary interpretive lens for engaging with these areas. Michel Foucault’s interest in the historical production of cultural discourses around concepts such as sexuality was an important background influence. Gender analysis, ­borrowed from women’s studies, also figured prominently. An increased methodological emphasis on experience as a source for theological reflection gave greater scope to phenomenological analyses of the human experience of gender and sexuality.9 During the 1990s, these developments proved of particular value for feminist theologians, who used these insights to attend urgently to the importance of eros for accounts of personal identity, power relationships and politics.10 This interest in desire—often referred to simply as eros—in relation to questions of sexuality and the body has in the last two decades been maintained, while expanding in the range of theoretical and theological dialogue partners. Four recent works may serve as representative of the various approaches typically taken in this most recent wave of thinking. The Embrace of Eros, Margaret Kamitsuka’s recent edited volume, exemplifies how studies of eros in historical theology and critical theory may aid theologically focused reflections on sexuality.11 The writers of the recent Seducing Augustine explore the relation of desire, asceticism, and sexuality in the Confessions by drawing variously on literary theory, theology, and philosophy.12 Jean-Luc Marion examines the ‘erotic ­phenomenon’ using the lens of a phenomenological account of human a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discipline, ed. Virginia Burrus and Catherine Keller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 38–62, re-examining the age-old questions of the relation of whether desire implies lack and whether desire can be satisfied in the post-metaphysical writings of Lacan and Derrida. The analytic philosophical trad­ition has undertaken thoughtful consideration of desire, which has not been so dominated by sexual desire (e.g., William Braxton Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)), but this has not been extensively taken up in theological discussion. 9  This is neatly summed up by Margaret D. Kamitsuka, ed., The Embrace of Eros: Bodies, Desires and Sexuality in Christianity (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010), 7–8. 10  For an overview of various approaches taken here, see Sandra Friedman and Alexander Irwin, ‘Christian Feminism, Eros and Power in Right Relation’, in Christian Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender, ed. Elizabeth Stuart and Adrian Thatcher (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), 152–67. 11 Kamitsuka, The Embrace of Eros. 12  Virginia Burrus, Mark D. Jordan, and Karmen MacKendrick, Seducing Augustine: Bodies, Desires, Confessions (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010).

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12  John of the Cross interpersonal love, a love that Marion understands (he asserts in his final pages) to find its fullest expression in love of the divine.13 And the range of essays in Towards a Theology of Eros contain a wealth of reflection on many of the most pertinent contemporary topics, among them eros in Plato’s Symposium, reading the Song of Songs, and the relationship between the passions, love, and desire.14 The renewed philo­soph­ic­al attention to desire, exhibiting great diversity though continuing to draw largely from the continental philosophical tradition, shows no sign of abating. This explosion of theological attention to desire in the last quarter century occasioned the writing of various historically focused studies of desire in Christian thought. Three surveys written in the 1990s examined subtle shifts over time in the patristic and medieval understanding of desire, recognizing the intertwining of biblical, Platonic, and Christian ideas in the repeated reworking of the theme.15 In particular, the importance of scriptural and literary influences is well studied in Denys Turner’s work, which examines how the erotic themes in the Song of Songs, reflecting desire in its earthly and divine fullness, were taken up in medieval monastic literature. Likewise, recent historical studies of specific figures such as Gregory of Nyssa,16 Augustine,17 pseudo-Dionysius,18 Aquinas,19 and Kierkegaard20 take time to study the role of desire in their respective theologies, doing so with a subtlety

13  Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 14 Virginia Burrus and Catherine Keller, eds, Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discipline (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006). 15  Denys Turner, Eros and Allegory: Medieval Exegesis of the Song of Songs (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1995); Bernard McGinn, ‘God as Eros: Metaphysical Foundations of Christian Mysticism’, in New Perspectives on Historical Theology: Essays in Memory of John Meyendorff, ed. Bradley Nassif (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 1996), 189–209; Ysabel de Andía, ‘Eros and Agape: The Divine Passion of Love’, Communio 24 (1997): 29–50. 16  Sarah Coakley, ed., Re-Thinking Gregory of Nyssa (Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). 17  Burrus, Jordan, and MacKendrick, Seducing Augustine; John E. Thiel, ‘Augustine on Eros, Desire, and Sexuality’, in The Embrace of Eros, ed. Margaret D. Kamitsuka (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010), 67–82. 18 Sarah Coakley and Charles  M.  Stang, eds, Re-Thinking Dionysius the Areopagite (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). 19 Nicholas  E.  Lombardo, The Logic of Desire: Aquinas on Emotion (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011), though this understanding of ‘desire’ is focused on Aquinas’s account of the affects in the Prima Secundae. 20 Carl  S.  Hughes, Kierkegaard and the Staging of Desire: Rhetoric and Performance in a Theology of Eros (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).

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Introduction  13 and conceptual precision unknown in previous studies. These works are all invaluable for a broader appreciation of how desire has been understood within the theological tradition, and represent the set of works alongside which this study (with important shifts in emphasis) may most obviously be located. Finally, again likely stimulated by this philosophical revival, various recent short theological works predominantly aimed at a popular audience have recognized the theological possibilities of the theme of desire. Philip Sheldrake’s study of desire and selfhood, in particular, provides a sensitive and accessible overview of how a focus on the desiring nature of the self may aid consideration of the Christian life.21 Sebastian Moore and Michael Buckley have also in recent decades written insightfully on the theme.22 (It is telling of the way in which academic theology has sometimes limited its terms of reference that it is among this set of thinkers, all professed either in Benedictine or Jesuit settings, that the most astute and pastorally toned insights into the importance of desire for human selfhood are to be found.) Yet these works, despite mining a rich seam of theological thinking on desire, have not had as much influence as they might on current theological discussion of desire. Recognizing this lacuna, this study also draws on these various books, seeking to demonstrate the significance of their pastoral and affective insights for a systematic theological account of desire. It is in aid of these diverse conversations concerning the constructive theological significance of desire that this study recovers John’s ar­ticu­la­ tion of the theme. In particular, it suggests that the four interconnected aspects of John’s distinctiveness outlined at the start of this Introduction may enrich current theological discussion of desire. It is, accordingly, to these that I now turn. First, John’s distinctive articulation of desire challenges the postFreudian obsessions of recent decades. The reductive physiological overtones that have often accompanied discussion of desire, approached 21 Philip Sheldrake, Befriending Our Desires, 3rd ed. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2016). 22 Sebastian Moore, Jesus the Liberator of Desire (New York: Crossroad, 1989); Michael  J.  Buckley, SJ, What Do You Seek? The Questions of Jesus as Challenge and Promise (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016).

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14  John of the Cross primarily through the lens of sexual desire, have enjoyed particular influence in theological discussion of the theme for too long. This is partially due to the huge influence of Anders Nygren, whose identification of desire with a sexualized definition of eros cemented this association for a subsequent generation of theologians. Yet the influence of secular theoreticians of desire such as Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida has also been profound in maintaining this narrow association of desire with sexual desire. Theologians who have in recent years explored the significance of desire have disproportionately tended to draw on this post-Freudian source, exhibiting a heightened concern for questions of the body and sexuality. By contrast, John delivers an account of desire that is well aware of the sexual significance and possibilities of this terminology, but draws from multiple directions on Platonic traditions to depict the much wider and more creative possible implications of desire. Three resonances with these Platonic traditions are noteworthy here. First, John’s account, like so many stemming ultimately from Plato’s seminal description of eros in the Symposium,23 takes the form of an ascent, in which the movement of the soul towards God requires a progressive series of changes. Second, the ascending soul must progressively engage the wide variety of desires by which souls are ordinarily dominated. There exist, for instance, basic physical desires such as hunger and thirst. And there exist a huge range of other desires (as a representative spread of examples: for a specific food or drink, to hear a particular piece of music, to understand a particular idea, to be understood, for friendship, to be at peace with one’s past, to have a sense of purpose in life) that typically animate much human activity. These sit in complex relation to one another and yet may, as John in accord with many others insists, be ordered so as to lay out the progressive changes that form the spiritual ascent. Third, only in the final stages of this ascent may the correct ordering of sexual desire be fully addressed.24 Flourishing sexual desire therefore represents the 23 201d–212a. 24  This Platonic ordering resonates with the caution that theology has consistently shown in discussion of sexual desire. That caution should not naively be assumed to be merely a result of prudishness, although this has certainly on occasion played a role. Recall that many of the theological expositions of the topic most celebrated today (Origen, Gregory of Nyssa,

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Introduction  15 culmination of this ascent towards God. Yet despite occupying this pos­ ition, sexual desire does not thereby represent the unifying form of desire, as if all other desires could in their structure, means of reso­lution, and affective impact be depicted as partial instantiations of sexual desire. The right ordering of sexual desire is a prerequisite, in other words, for the soul’s union with God at the height of the spiritual ascent, yet this cannot be achieved without the right ordering of a series of other desires that exist in complex relation to sexual desire. By contrast with the narrow modern association of the erotic with the sexual, therefore, John’s understanding of desire offers a far richer ar­ticu­la­tion of the overarching Platonic logic of erotic desire. While using ‘erotic’ imagery extensively, John works with a radical and comprehensive picture of the soul as innately desirous of joy or fulfilment at a number of different levels, not reducible to sexual longing alone.25 It should be noted, however, that in this work I argue for ‘desire’ alone, rather than ‘erotic desire’ as the concept that lies at the heart of John’s thought. There are two reasons for this. This is, in the first place, because John (in line with almost all pre-nineteenth-century thinkers influenced mainly by Latin-dominated theological traditions) does not refer to the erotic, and I have chosen in this regard to remain faithful to John’s own terminology. Second, given the degree to which contemporary parlance now associates erotic desire solely with the sexual, it might invite extensive misunderstanding to argue that John’s thought is underpinned by erotic desire. I have therefore chosen to refer solely to the importance of ‘desire’ in John’s thought. Despite, however, holding back in this study from the ambitious step of rehabilitating for modern discussion the notion of the erotic in all its Platonic fullness, it must not be forgotten

monastic exegesis of the Song of Songs, many medieval mystical theologians, Thomas Traherne) wrote for extremely restricted, and often monastic, audiences. The topic was, in effect, recognized to be both difficult to articulate well, and highly open to misunderstanding: it was best served only to those who could handle a diet of meat as well as milk (cf. 1 Cor 3.2). In this respect, John follows in a long tradition of recognizing the simultaneous value and difficulty of en­ab­ling others to understand correctly the relationship between sexual desire and divine desire. 25  I am grateful to an anonymous reader for this judicious summary of the erotic dimension of John’s thought.

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16  John of the Cross that John’s work represents a distinctive rendition of this long tradition of exploration of erotic desire. This fact is significant for two modern debates. First, it offers counsel in relation to recent theological discussions that have engaged in extensive discussion of desire, yet have taken their inspiration from much modern continental philosophy in the tradition of Freud. To these discussions, this study urges that John’s thought offers for modern theo­logic­al consideration a sensitive account of flourishing human sexuality that is deeply informed by erotic sensibilities, yet delivered in a far more holistic vision than most modern articulations of erotic sexual desire. Second, despite the discrediting of much of Nygren’s historical and conceptual framework, much theological discussion continues to be conducted through the language of ‘love’ rather than ‘desire’.26 This study recognizes the enormous theological significance of both terms, but contends that ‘desire’ offers greater possibility than ‘love’ for bringing pressing contemporary questions of the body, sexuality, and affectivity into engagement with theological consideration both of selfhood and God. It therefore urges the rehabilitation of the theme among those theo­logic­al discussions that continue, in the shadow of Nygren, to avoid discussion of desire. To turn now to the second aspect of John’s distinctiveness that may enrich current theological discussion of desire: John’s writing lays out a process for the transformation of the soul’s desires. His description of the spiritual ascent balances a recognition of human sinfulness with expectant hopefulness in the possibilities of transformation in this life, a combination that is rarely achieved by many modern theological accounts. Optimistic ideologies of self-improvement, with little attention to the framework of ‘sin’ that would traditionally have been used to describe the initial behaviours of the untransformed self, constitute the dominant theme of many modern accounts. Self-improvement may involve

26  To give two examples from contrasting traditions: first, the Lutheran theologian Werner Jeanrond recognizes the problems with Nygren’s account, but ultimately continues to insist on a distinction between erotic love and other forms of love (Werner G. Jeanrond, A Theology of Love (T&T Clark, 2010)). Second, Pope Benedict XVI’s 2005 encyclical Deus Caritas Est critiques Nygren’s distinction of agape and eros in section 7, yet it ultimately offers an understanding of ‘love’ very much in the style of Nygren’s agape.

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Introduction  17 a form of ascetic detachment as urged by John, but may more frequently involve for a search for fulfilment by some other means—by valorization, for example, of the perfection of the body or material objects. For the authors of Seducing Augustine, for instance, salvation is primarily of interest insofar as it relates to transformation in this life, rather than the next. The essays retain some of the traditional theological language of sin and salvation; without some of their associated theological commitments, however, these terms take on a very different meaning. Similarly, Jean-Luc Marion’s work The Erotic Phenomenon pays extensive and insightful attention to the human ex­peri­ence of desire, but shows little interest in discerning the relative values of these various desires, or in attending to the phenomenology of those desires that might in trad­ ition­al Christian parlance be termed ‘sinful’. John’s account of the spiritual ascent is infused, to an extent almost without equal in patristic and medieval theology, with a sense of the possibilities of union with God in this life that resonates with this modern commitment to the value of the self ’s desires. Yet John approaches his effusive accounts of union only after a repeated series of warnings of the extent to which the untransformed soul is held captive by a series of thoughts and behaviours which he calls sin. In doing so, John actively resists two mistaken understandings of sin, still pertinent today, that prevent souls from tackling its effect in their own lives. In the first place, he attacks any account of sin that restricts it to specific categories of desire (in our day, notably, misplaced sexual desire), that have become the object of heightened moral sanction. For John, sin is pervasive, and the priority is not to develop a hierarchy of sins but to aid souls in turning away from whatever desires may be negatively dominating them at their stage of the spiritual ascent. Second, John offers a perceptive alternative to superficial characterizations of sin in modern discussion as the result of the free action of the human will (a characterization that accords sin the juridical flavour of an action for which the individual is worthy of blame). John identifies the complex of desires, memories, fears, and hopes, many of them unrecognized by the soul, that motivate much human action. The point of identifying sinfulness within the soul is, in other words, not to attribute blame but rather to highlight (and thereby seek ways to avoid) those behaviours that do not lead the soul

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18  John of the Cross towards God. Amidst modern confusion about the value of the notion of sin, John’s realistic and hopeful account both of the pervasion of sin in the soul and of its progressive purification offers a distinctive com­bin­ation of commitments that are of particular value to modern discussions. In describing these changes to the soul over the course of its life, this study speaks in terms of transformation. In the Ascent and Night, John mainly delivers his account of the spiritual ascent through the conceptual framework of ‘nature’ and ‘grace’. In the Canticle and Flame, however, he uses this framework alongside a series of other terms that similarly represent the progressive conformation of the self to God: absorbimiento, abstracción, transfiguración, participación, but above all transformación. While John’s writings have often been read through the lens of the nature–grace framework, this study suggests that John’s ter­min­ology in his later words represents his mature approach. Rather than foregrounding the question of the agent of change as is invited by the language of nature and grace, John’s mature terminology is sensitive to the difficulties in identifying divine or human agency in changes in the self. The various terms used by John shift attention away from this question, instead enabling him to delineate the successive stages of the ascent, their related affective states, and the work that the soul may undertake in the course of the ascent. It is the ‘transformation’ of the self, albeit with its sometimes misleading optimistic modern connotations of the extent of change possible for the soul, that I will accordingly trace in my analysis of John’s writings. ‘Transfiguration’ would also be an appropriate overall description of these changes over the course of the spiritual ascent, and might more explicitly highlight the graced nature of what takes place. Yet John only speaks of the transfiguración of the soul once (CB11.12). Instead, this study’s use of transformation as an overarching description allows for a whole series of other questions explored by John about these changes to be addressed—for instance, their agency, their extent, their speed, and precisely what is transformed in the spiritual ascent. It is with the ter­ min­ ology of the transformation of the soul (a transformation that requires a concomitant transformation of the soul’s own desires), therefore, that this study explores the spiritual ascent laid out by John.

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Introduction  19 The third aspect of John’s distinctiveness is his insistence that any theological account of desire must be presented within a coherent broader vision of the relationship of God and the created order. In relation to modern discussion, this offers a powerful response to those theo­ logic­al construals of desire that have drawn heavily on the theme as it has been understood in the philosophical descendants of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. The recognition that projection is central to much human relationship with God is often credited to Ludwig Feuerbach, with seminal thinkers such as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud subsequently extending this insight. For these thinkers—and, of course, many in their wake—atheism was the logical response of this recognition of the role of projection in human conceptions of God. Many centuries before, however, John had recognized the extent to which projection shapes the human relationship with God. His account of the ‘dark night of the soul’ grows out of the insight that the spiritual ascent requires a repeated recognition by the soul that it has shaped its vision of God in its own image. Souls, he emphasized, are poor judges of their own spiritual state, and require skilled spiritual directors (all too rare in John’s opinion) to support them on the ascent. John agrees, in other words, with the nineteenth-century so-called ‘masters of suspicion’ that projection typically permeates human conceptions of the divine. Yet the crucial fault line lies in the fact that John believes that this projection is the result of misdirected desires in souls that prevents them from correctly identifying God and so proceeding with the necessary ‘dark faith’, whereas Feuerbach and his successors contend in diverse ways that recognition of human projection undermines the very notion of the existence of God.27 Much recent theological recovery of desire has drawn extensively from the philosophical traditions underpinned by these same ‘masters of suspicion’, despite the historic antagonism of these traditions towards Christian thought. By contrast, it is the suggestion of this study that particular caution is required from theologians accepting the understanding of desire embedded in these secular writings. John offers 27  This aspect of John’s distinctiveness is powerfully stated in Michael J. Buckley, SJ, ‘Atheism and Contemplation’, Theological Studies 40, no. 4 (1979): 680–99.

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20  John of the Cross resources for a theological account of desire deeply rooted in patristic and medi­eval consideration of the theme, which accordingly offers a powerful alternative structure to that founded on the very different presuppos­itions of much modern continental philosophy. Fourth and finally, successful study of John’s understanding of desire offers two insights of significance for effecting the reconciliation between the disciplinary subdivisions of systematic theology, pastoral theology, Christian mysticism, and Christian spirituality. First, analysis in Chapter 1 of the twentieth-century reception history of John suggests that the fundamental division between so-called ‘theology’ and ‘spirituality’ approaches to John emerged primarily in the 1960s. In contrast to influential genealogies that locate the division between spirituality and theology as early as the seventeenth century, this suggests that the divide between these disciplines is more recent (and hence less deeply entrenched) than many others have suggested. Second, John’s work offers elements of a method by which this reconciliation may be effected. In particular, John insists that prayer and the self-knowledge that comes from the right ordering of desire is essential to good theology. This deep study of the structure and logic of John’s thought offers, accordingly, resources that may aid modern recovery of the unity of the theo­logic­al task.

III.  Chapter summary What follows accordingly begins by unpicking some of the diverse and conflicting interpretations of John’s work that have dominated twentiethcentury scholarship, before turning to examine John’s immediate milieu of sixteenth-century Spain, and subsequently using these insights to recover John’s distinctive theological understanding of desire. In Chapter 1 I examine the intellectual, ecclesial, and wider cultural context underpinning the diverse modern interpretations of John’s thought. Twentiethcentury studies of John, for all their methodological variety, have been dominated by three traditions of interpretation that have only grasped partial elements in his teaching, important though these elem­ents are. These traditions have emphasized the importance of ‘affectivity’ in the spiritual life, the meanings of ‘mysticism’ or ‘mystical experience’,

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Introduction  21 and  the theological significance of John’s poetic language. Each strand of thought, however, originates from particular early twentieth-century theological and philosophical commitments whose legacy continues to inform present-day reading of John. Recognition of the extent to which previous works have been shaped by disciplinary boundaries that took their shape in the last century enables a renewed appreciation of John’s theology on its own terms. Through this insight aspects of his work which have all too often been split between spirituality, mysticism, literary studies, and theological anthropology—in particular, his creative reworking of the notion of desire—may be better appreciated. Chapter  2 proceeds to explore the distinctiveness of John’s writing, examining the various theological and non-theological traditions by which John’s notion of desire was informed. I first offer a brief biography of John, to give the reader entirely unfamiliar with John an initial understanding of his context. I subsequently inspect John’s appropriation of Thomas Aquinas’s anthropology, attending chiefly to John’s understanding of the desiring nature of the soul as instituted in the operation of the appetites. John’s thought was also rooted, however, in a sixteenthcentury reappraisal of the Augustinian tradition that emphasized the spiritual ascent as undergone through the transformation of the interior faculties of the soul. This tradition had a highly equivocal attitude to the soul’s desires, viewing them both as empowering the soul’s longing for God, but also as ensnaring the disordered soul in sin. In addition, John was influenced by his reading of late medieval Dionysian traditions, with their heightened sense of the metaphysical rootedness of the soul’s appetites in the desiring quality of divine love. It is, of course, difficult to speak uncomplicatedly of a Dionysian, Augustinian, or Thomist understanding of any given theological topic. Accordingly, the chapter pays particular attention to how these diverse traditions may have been transmitted to John and received by him, embarking on a study of John’s late medieval intellectual and monastic context that aids understanding of the distinctiveness of his own reworking of the theme of desire. At the end of Chapter 2 I observe the elevated attention that John pays to the potential and limits of language for describing the divine nature and the soul’s union with God. John’s depiction of the significance of language on the ascent is influenced by Dionysian thought, by non-theological

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22  John of the Cross poetic traditions and by traditions of allegorical exegesis of the Song of Songs. John’s thought, in short, draws creatively on a range of theo­logic­al and non-theological traditions that themselves draw in diverse fashion on biblical, Christian, and Platonic understandings of desire. By exploring how language itself may have been understood within these traditions, we may better appreciate the significance of John’s understanding of language to his account of desire. The intricate historical contextualization of these first two chapters underpins the close study of John’s thought in the following three chapters. In these, discriminating attention is given to the specific details of John’s depiction of the transformation of desire in the course of the spiritual ascent. Chapter 3 turns to John’s poetry, the first genre in which he wrote and the foundational form of his thought. In their imaginative, narratival depiction of the inner life of the Trinity, John’s Romances explore the communicative nature of language, examining how the loving desire that constitutes the pneumatological bond of Father and Son is also is to be found in the creativity of language itself. John is certainly intrigued by the limits of language that are encountered in the spiritual ascent, which he explores in his glosa and copla poems by playing in various fashions on the theme of the paradoxes involved in human union with the divine. Yet his lira poems, which serve as the basis for his prose commentaries, show him to be chiefly animated by the value of the language and imagery of erotic desire for the depiction of the spiritual ascent. The form and imagery of these poems present a heightened sense of the erotic potential of language itself, which in its very super­abun­dance and excess supports the poem’s accounts of the lovers’ yearning and consummation. Through his poetry, therefore, John presents erotic desire as a force that propels the soul towards its goal, and whose eventual realization in union with God may be meaningfully depicted through the superabundant deployment of images and language drawn from human sexual love. Chapters 4 and 5 turn to John’s prose works, examining his penetrating insights as a cartographer of the transformation of desire. I first examine John’s account of the initial stages of the transformation of the soul in The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night of the Soul. The appetites that dominate the untransformed soul, giving rise to the sin

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Introduction  23 that permeates ordinary human existence, must be stilled and purified before the soul can be united with God—and so strong is John’s commitment to divine transcendence that this process of transformation is, he believes, best depicted as the undergoing of a process of noetic, sensual, and spiritual ‘darkness’. Yet despite this vision of the apparent human separation from God, and despite John’s insistence throughout the ascent on the negation of all desire for the created order, his account does not present a pessimistic view of the desiring self. Instead, it relentlessly sets out (by means of his own distinctive, although at root Thomist, anthropology of the sensual and spiritual faculties) the stages by which the soul is progressively transformed. I trace John’s account of the purification of these desires through the two stages of the ‘dark night of the soul’, and the associated passage of the soul from meditation to contemplation. In doing so, I attend both to John’s description of the deeply ascetical performance required in the ‘active night’ and the disorienting loving graced interventions of God (a prime example of his thoughtful and complex theory of the affections) in the ‘passive night’. Only, however, in the highest stages of the spiritual ascent, depicted in the Spiritual Canticle and Living Flame of Love, does the desire that has propelled the soul through the contradictions and apparent meaninglessness of the dark night fully materialize in the soul. Chapter 5 examines how John uses sensory metaphors of beauty, touch, and taste, as well as a series of deeply erotic images of yearning and consummation, to depict the re-engagement of the soul with the created order, its desires now appropriately reoriented towards God. In the state of union, the soul’s desire for God is revealed to be not only a yearning on the part of the soul itself, but more truly a reflection of the loving desire that unites the persons of the Trinity. John’s anthropology terminology concomitantly shifts towards the use of terms such as the ‘substance of the soul’, as a means of depicting the intense and cohesive desire of the entire soul for God. John’s striking reworking of the highly traditional theological concept of desire therefore plays a crucial role throughout his theology, mediating and uniting what would otherwise appear a disjunctive passage for the soul from an originary state of deep sin, through the noetic, sensual, and spiritual darkness of the dark night, to the state of union with God.

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24  John of the Cross Finally, in Chapter 6, I turn to the implications (as has been already briefly laid out in this Introduction) of John’s thought for contemporary theological discussion of desire. The narrowly sexual connotations that the notion of desire has acquired in modern theological and philo­soph­ic­al debate, particularly through its erotic Platonic formulations conjoined to modern Freudianism, have prevented recognition of John’s insightful construal of desire. John’s account should no longer be the subject of neglect by systematic theologians. He is a magisterial thinker whose theology is worthy of comparison with some of the greatest sixteenthcentury accounts of the transformation of the soul. Reconsideration of John’s thought, with its creative reworking of the notion of desire as a constellating category for the depiction of the spiritual ascent, may enrich the ongoing current theological re-evaluation of desire. His thought is, I conclude, a rich resource for the purposes of contemporary theological discussion.

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1 The neglect of desire Modern reception of John of the Cross

The purpose of this first chapter is to acknowledge the significance and variety of modern receptions of John of the Cross, but to indicate the significant lacuna in their coverage which this study will address. The writings of John of the Cross are generally agreed to be made up of thirteen poems, four prose works written as commentaries on three of these poems, thirty-three letters, and isolated other occasional writings.1 It is striking, however, how few of his modern interpreters have even interpreted a comprehensive account of the material. Indeed, it could be said that three apparent enigmas succinctly represent the disjunctive options in the reception of John’s writings during the twentieth century. First, there is the apparent contradiction between John’s relentless account of interior darkness and his extraordinarily effusive accounts of union. As Colin Thompson observes, it seems that the ‘central paradox’ of John’s poetry is the question, ‘how could a mystic who seeks God by way of negation have created such marvellous and sensual witnesses to his search?’2 The second enigma is a difference of opinion about whether John is describing a whole series of ‘experiences’ on the spiritual ascent, or, in contrast, whether his account of the dark night calls into question the whole idea of experience of God. Third, there has been recurrent disagreement about whether the core of John’s work lies in his striking and creative poetry, or in the more extensive theological analysis of the ascent provided by his prose writings.

1  I follow the decisions concerning the authenticity of specific letters and poems made by Lucinio Ruano de la Iglesia, OCD, in his Spanish edition of John’s works. 2  Colin P. Thompson, book review of José Servera Baño, ed., En torno a San Juan de la Cruz (Madrid: Júcar, 1987) in Modern Language Review 85 (1990): 224. John of the Cross: Desire, Transformation, and Selfhood. Sam Hole, Oxford University Press (2020). © Sam Hole. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198863069.003.0002

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26  John of the Cross But this profusion of disjunctive options in fact arises not from any inconsistencies or ambiguities in John’s own thought. Rather, these apparent enigmas arise from the restrictive modern theological, philosophical, and cultural commitments that have dominated sanjuanist scholarship in the past century. In the first half of the chapter, I examine these prominent trajectories of twentieth-century sanjuanist reception, first attending to John’s reception in the early twentieth century and subsequently turning to explore how these two strands of interpretation were taken up in the second half of the century. It is in the development of the concepts of ‘spirituality’, ‘mysticism’, and closely related notions of ‘religious experience’ over the course of that century, I suggest, that the most significant factors shaping the recent reception of John may be observed.3 While both strands of thought have contributed significant insights to the understanding of John, overall each has partially obscured the entire shape of his thought through excessive reliance on specific twentiethcentury theological frameworks. In the second half of the chapter, I turn to examine the neglected notion that in fact serves as the unifying principle in John’s account of the transformation of the soul. John’s poetry and prose, written for and at the request of individuals connected to the Discalced Carmelite Order—both nuns and lay followers—who wished to benefit from John’s spiritual guidance, is embedded in a striking theorization of the notion of desire. His development of this notion produces a theological vision that reworks a long tradition of biblical, Platonic, and Christian reflection on the concept. Yet the notion of desire has been consistently rejected or restrictively interpreted in twentieth-century scholarship, and this neglect of the notion’s theological significance has extended to sanjuanist scholarship (with the aforementioned concepts of spirituality and mysticism being the generally preferred frameworks). Although isolated studies have pointed to the importance of the notion of desire to John’s writings, past scholarship has not sufficiently explored the full significance of this theme. Renewed consideration of John’s creative

3  A close study of the twentieth-century shifts in understanding of these concepts is yet to be written; strikingly, it is a subject absent from the various recent relevant companion volumes.

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Modern Reception of John of the Cross  27 reworking of desire, the task to be undertaken in forthcoming chapters, offers a more fruitful theological development of the notion than the current restricted modern interest in the sexual resonances of desire.

I.  The modern recovery of John of the Cross Questions of genealogy: the importance of the late nineteenth-century recovery It might be questioned why this study focuses on the reception of John since the late nineteenth century, rather than since his death. The point is pertinent, because two recent genealogies of John’s thought—albeit in very different ways—trace the roots of the malaise in twentieth-century interpretation of John to the early seventeenth century. For James Arraj, the first interpretation of John’s work developed a distinction between ‘acquired’ and ‘infused’ contemplation (broadly, between contemplation gained through graced human effort and that which is bestowed on the individual by God alone) that has plagued subsequent interpretation up to the present day.4 For Michel de Certeau, the writings of John, and above all those of his early commentator Diego de Jesús, evidence the creation of a mystical discourse as a separate category of language, marking a seminal shift from medieval to modern conceptualizations of the mystical.5 Clearly, these two genealogies (which broadly correlate with the two strands of early twentieth-century interpretation shortly to be studied) point to significant intellectual shifts that were taking place in the ­seventeenth century. Yet I am wary of too unproblematically tracing a trajectory from seventeenth-century interpretation to modern thought, given the extensive theological developments over the intervening three centuries. There is, not least, an extensive time gap in the reception of 4  James Arraj, From St. John of the Cross to Us: The Story of a 400 Year Long Misunderstanding and What it Means for the Future of Christian Mysticism (Chiloquin, OR: Inner Growth Books, 1999). 5  Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable: Volume One: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 129–50.

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28  John of the Cross John that complicates any notion of a consistent transmission of the same understanding of John’s thought. While John’s writings were not published until 1618 (I will examine the reasons for this quarter-century delay later in this chapter), he quickly became a fairly widely read authority. Twelve Spanish editions of John’s work appeared between 1618 and 1703, as well as Italian, Dutch, Latin, and German translations.6 It is also possible that the seventeenth-century English poets trad­ition­al­ly known as the ‘Metaphysical Poets’, who exhibit similarly heightened concerns for the yearning and consummation of human and divine desire, knew of John’s work, although the means of transmission remains unclear.7 It was in France, however, that John was particularly widely read during the seventeenth century. He exerted a broad influence by being mediated through prominent thinkers such as Pierre de Bérulle, as well as being frequently cited as an authority in scholastic treatises on the spiritual life.8 There then followed a long period of neglect of John, largely an effect of the more general ecclesial suspicion towards contemplative prayer that first targeted the Spanish group loosely known as dejados, and subsequently confronted a set of positions that came to be termed Quietism.9 The problem was exacerbated by the tendency of the subsequent century of Catholic scholarship to read John through a fairly nar6  Jean Vilnet, Bible et Mystique chez Saint Jean de la Croix (Bruges: Desclée de Brouwer, 1949), 198. 7  Jean Baruzi considers these similarities in language, but is able to point only to anecdotal evidence that might suggest a direct connection between John and these poets: Jean Baruzi, Saint Jean de la Croix et le problème de l’expérience mystique, 2nd ed. (Paris: F. Alcan, 1931), 695–6, 719–21. It is possible that Augustine Baker may have mediated John’s thought to the English context. Perhaps more likely, though, is the suggestion that both John and the Metaphysical Poets were influenced by the same late medieval interest in the various affective states of the soul. On this, see for example Colin Thompson’s demonstration of George Herbert’s probable use of the pseudo-Augustinian Meditations, and therefore possibly also the Soliloquies used by John: Colin P. Thompson, St John of the Cross: Songs in the Night (London: SPCK, 2002), 19 n11. 8  On seventeenth-century interpretation of John, see Lucien-Marie de Saint Joseph, ‘S. Jean de la Croix’, in Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, vol. VIII (Paris: Beauchesne, 1974), cols 408–74; André Bord, Jean de la Croix en France (Paris: Beauchesne, 1993); Antonio José Mialdea Baena, La recepción de la obra literaria de San Juan de la Cruz en España: siglos XVII, XVIII y XIX (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 2004). 9  I am grateful to an anonymous Oxford University Press reader for clarifications here. John was probably rendered suspect by his emphasis on states of passivity and the need to ‘do nothing [no hacer nada]’—though, characteristically, what he means by this is not at all what his critics supposed.

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Modern Reception of John of the Cross  29 row lens of scholastic writing on the spiritual life. These works were especially wary of various aspects of John’s thought. They were suspicious not just of the extent to which John’s condemnation of the sinful appetites appeared to deny the value of the body, but also of his hopeful claims about the extent of union possible in this life. Moreover, concerned about the moral risks of his erotic imagery, and being rooted in a theological culture that prized the logical and analytical structure of prose ‘scholastic’ thought, they paid virtually no attention to his poetry.10 Only three Spanish editions of John’s work were published between 1703 and the 1870s, even in the wake of his canonization in 1726 after a ­century-long Discalced Carmelite campaign. During the final decades of the nineteenth century, interest in John’s writings gradually began to grow again. Discalced Carmelite houses were re-established in Spain and turned to John as a figure worthy of national devotion, while Pope Leo XIII’s promotion of Thomism as synonymous with Catholic theology inspired fresh attention to John’s writing in the final decade of that century. John’s poetry achieved new prominence through the inaugural lecture as a member of the Spanish Academia Real given in 1881 by the literary critic Menéndez y Pelayo. And in England, R.A. Vaughan’s Hours with the Mystics and Dean Inge’s Christian Mysticism raised initial public awareness of John’s prose writings, even if often treating him critically. In other words, for nearly two centuries John was almost ignored. Yet neither Arraj nor de Certeau provide any evidence for the transmission to or reception by modern sanjuanist scholarship of the seventeenth-century ideas whose significance they emphasize. Indeed, as I observe below, it is striking that in the first decade of the twentieth century Auguste Saudreau criticized Augustin Poulain for being too influenced by seventeenth-century thought: even among the first modern recoveries of John there was great divergence on the value of those first interpretations of John. My caution concerning this gap in time between seventeenth-century thought and the modern revival of interest in John echoes others’

10  Although, as will be seen in forthcoming chapters, it is these aspects of John’s thought, widely ignored since the earliest interpretations of him, that are so central to his own development of the notion of desire.

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30  John of the Cross concerns about genealogies that strongly emphasize the importance of the seventeenth century for the development of the modern categories of mysticism and spirituality. Such genealogies rightly point to a period of important theological and philosophical developments with which the strands of interpretation of John examined here sit in complex relation. Yet these genealogies weaken under detailed historical investigation, often containing (as Leigh Eric Schmidt puts it), a ‘gaping eighteenthand nineteenth-century hole with only Schleiermacher to plug it’.11 In the final pages of this chapter, I point to certain factors in seventeenth and eighteenth-century reception of John that may have brought about the neglect of John’s concept of desire in those in­ter­pret­ations. Yet with reference to present-day reception of John, this study instead points to the significance of the decades either side of the turn of the twentieth century. This is the period in which the categories of mysticism, spirituality, and religious experience acquired the shape they have today.12 It is through surveying the reception of John in the twentieth century that the origins of the enigmas in interpretation of John given at the start of this chapter may be found. And so it is through examining this reception history that the intellectual and cultural presuppositions that have constrained interpretation of John may be recognized, and the way opened for a fresh appreciation of his thought.

A guide to the spiritual life: the neo-scholastic revival of mystical theology The first set of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century in­ter­pret­ ations of John I survey are those that have examined his thought while maintaining some form of commitment, typically from a Roman Catholic perspective, to Christian doctrine as traditionally understood. 11  Leigh Eric Schmidt, ‘The Making of “Mysticism” in the Anglo-American World: From Henry Coventry to William James’, in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. Julia A. Lamm (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 453. 12  Full historical studies of the emergence of these categories are yet to be written. The best places to start are Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005); Schmidt, ‘The Making of “Mysticism” ’; Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkeley; London: University of California Press, 1985).

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Modern Reception of John of the Cross  31 The distinctively modern version of this strand of reception of John began with the neo-scholastic revival of interest in John, which was specifically animated in the first two decades of the twentieth century by a dispute concerning the nature of mystical union. This was an issue on which John’s works were accorded an authoritative value by both disputants, and from the outset exhibited a fault line that would remain in subsequent interpretation. These discussions were extensively conducted in a series of works by the French writers Augustin Poulain and Auguste Saudreau that sold thousands of copies and went through numerous editions between 1896 and Poulain’s death in 1919.13 Brief examination of the issues at stake in this debate may, therefore, help to shed light on the shape of subsequent Catholic debate over the in­ter­pret­ation of John. For Poulain, a Jesuit, the task of mystical theology was to delineate the affective states (commonly discussed today through the complexly related language of the ‘emotions’) that might arise in the heights of the spiritual life. Mystical union involves the immediate perception of God, and consists of a series of experiences and affective states. It is the task of the modern mystical theologian to order these appropriately, from the ‘prayer of quiet’ and loving sentiments and yearnings of ecstasy of acquired contemplation to the visions, revelations, prophecies, and ecstasy of infused contemplation. And while Poulain found Teresa of Avila to be an especially useful source for descriptions of these states, he also drew extensively on John’s writings in his account of the mystical way. In particular, Poulain pointed to the significance of John’s account of the dryness and darkness felt in the entry into contemplation in the ‘passive night of sense’; for the Jesuit, this ‘aridity’ corresponded to the moment of transition from acquired to infused contemplation, a transition he termed the ‘ligature’ because it consisted in the ‘binding’ of the bodily senses during the entry into infused contemplation.14 13 Helpful surveys of these debates are the essay (originally written in 1922) by J.V. Bainvel, ‘Introduction to the Tenth Edition’, in Augustin Poulain, The Graces of Interior Prayer, trans. Leonora L. Yorke Smith (London: Butler and Tanner, 1950), xxxii–cxii, Joseph Maréchal, ‘Sur les cimes de l’oraison: quelques opinions récentes de théologiens’, Nouvelle Revue Théologique 56 (1929): 107–27, 177–206, and numerous articles on the debate contained in the long entry on ‘Contemplation’ in the second volume of the Dictionnaire de Spiritualité (Paris: Beauchesne, 1949). 14 Poulain, The Graces of Interior Prayer, 178–90.

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32  John of the Cross These affective states were not to be expected for all Christians. Poulain argued that there were two forms of the unitive way—ascetical union and mystical union. Only in mystical union might the soul enter into contemplative prayer, first in the form of acquired contemplation and potentially thereafter through infused contemplation. And while ascetical union was the vocation of all Christians, mystical union was an extraordinary unitive way, the vocation of only a few Christians.15 For Poulain, in short, John’s writings described a series of states that were the vocation of an elite minority. Poulain’s understanding was, however, directly challenged by Auguste Saudreau, a priest in the diocese of Angers in western France. Saudreau proposed that although the division of the spiritual life according to the classical triplex via was certainly an important heuristic classificatory tool, with regard to the operation of grace the spiritual life should instead (contra Poulain) be considered as a continuous whole, rather than divided among different forms of operation of grace on this ascent.16 Accordingly, mystical theology does not involve the description of a distinct state, given only to the few. Nor does it involve the experiential ‘knowledge’ or ‘perception’ of God (Maréchal terms Saudreau’s account a ‘minimizing’ account in this regard, in contrast to Poulain’s ‘maximizing’ vision).17 Rather, it is a particular tradition of using images and symbols to describe the perfect exercise of the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. In Saudreau’s view, this conclusion points to two significant problems in Poulain’s work—and demonstrates Poulain’s excessive dependence on the over-schematic analysis of seventeenth-century scholastic writing on the spiritual life. First, mystical theology is a specific tradition of describing the vocation of all Christians.18 Second, given its reliance on metaphor, it is a mistake to understand past writers to be delineating a series of affective states involved in the different stages of the spiritual

15 Poulain, The Graces of Interior Prayer, 577. 16 Auguste Saudreau, L’ état mystique, sa nature, ses phases (Paris: Librarie Vic & Amat, 1903), 101–19, 145–64. 17  Maréchal, ‘Sur les cimes de l’oraison’, 107–8. 18 Saudreau, L’ état mystique, 69, 371–2.

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Modern Reception of John of the Cross  33 life.19 Alongside other figures such as Teresa of Avila and Francisco Suárez, moreover, John of the Cross is a significant representative of this tradition of mystical theology. John’s work describes a state to be sought by all Christians; his writings do not seek to lay out a series of extra­or­ din­ary affective states and experiences but rather describe far broader affective dispositions (‘loving knowledge’, for example) that may arise in the course of the exercise of the theological virtues. It was these broad commitments that were in different ways influentially transmitted to later English-language discussion by the writings of Cuthbert Butler and John Chapman.20 The accounts given by Poulain and Saudreau represent heavily contrasting responses to the question of whether mystical theology describes the growth in theological virtues for all Christians, or whether it describes a series of affective states. In the early 1920s, however, the great Dominican neo-Thomist systematizers Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange and Juan González Arintero were at the forefront of the development of a mediating reaction to these debates. Both preferred Saudreau’s democratizing account of the mystical state, but also upheld (with Poulain) the importance of attention to specific affective states. Both rejected the division of ascetical and mystical theology. They criticized the notion of acquired contemplation that underpinned the former, which they saw as an over-systematization dating from the seventeenth century, and instead insisted on the unity of the spiritual life.21 They insisted that infused contemplation was the general call to all Christians, not simply

19 Saudreau, L’ état mystique, 57–69. 20  Butler’s summary of these debates is provided in the ‘Afterthoughts’ with which he prefaced the second edition of his substantial study: Cuthbert Butler, Western Mysticism: The Teachings of SS Augustine, Gregory, and Bernard on Contemplation and the Contemplative Life, 2nd ed. (London: Constable & Company, 1927), xi–lxxxv. John Chapman attempts to interpret John in terms of Thomist categories of thought. In doing so, he is similar to both Poulain and Saudreau, although his work is far more animated by criticism of Poulain (whose interest in affective states Chapman loathes) than praise of Saudreau. See Dom John Chapman, OSB, The Spiritual Letters of Dom John Chapman  O.S.B., 4th Abbot of Downside (London: Sheed & Ward, 1935). 21  Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, OP, Christian Perfection and Contemplation, according to St. Thomas Aquinas and St. John of the Cross, trans. Sr M Timothea Doyle, OP (St Louis, MO; London: B.  Herder Book Co., 1937), 23–42; J.G.  Arintero, Cuestiones místicas, 2nd ed. (Salamanca: Calatrava, 1920), 66–75, 286–310, 468–95.

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34  John of the Cross those in the enclosed religious life.22 Visions, revelations, ecstasies, and the like might, they urged, accompany infused contemplation, but are by no means a necessity of Christian perfection.23 Comparable neo-Thomist analyses of John were later provided both by Jacques Maritain, in the influential Thomist epistemology (drawing on both Aquinas and John) that he set out in The Degrees of Knowledge, and in the doctoral thesis of Karol Wojtyla, subsequently Pope John Paul II.24 In these neo-Thomist accounts, therefore, John came to assume particular significance above other writers in the mys­tic­al tradition, being presented as the figure who most eminently expounded and expanded on the themes in Aquinas’s treatise on the infused virtues and gifts of the Holy Spirit.25 These neo-Thomist accounts were not, it should be emphasized, the only confessionally oriented interpretations of John that were developed in the interwar decades. While some viewed John as a loyal and thoroughgoing adaptor of the thought of Thomas Aquinas, a number of other writers pointed to the multiple influences on John’s thought, some of them insisting that John’s thought represented a sanjuanist system worthy of attention on its own terms.26 In pursuit of answers to these questions, the 1920s witnessed an intense flourishing of research that attempted to delineate with greater precision both John’s biography and the intellectual influences on his thought, as well as making use of more sophisticated textual criticism to analyse his works.27 Pope Pius XI’s 22 Garrigou-Lagrange, Christian Perfection, 337–436; Arintero, Cuestiones místicas, 160–81, 341–90. 23 Garrigou-Lagrange, Christian Perfection, 436–61; Arintero, Cuestiones místicas, 30–43. 24  Jacques Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge, trans. Bernard Wall and Margot R. Adamson (London: Geoffrey Bles, The Centenary Press, 1937); Karol Wojtyla, Faith according to St. John of the Cross, trans. Jordan Aumann, OP (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1981). Wojtyla’s thesis was completed in the mid-1940s at the Gregorianum under the supervision of GarrigouLagrange, and takes the form of a systematic, work-by-work investigation of the doctrine of ‘faith’ in John’s prose works, concluding (263–8) that John’s thought on this matter is entirely in accord with that of Thomas Aquinas. 25 Garrigou-Lagrange, Christian Perfection, 2–3; Arintero, Cuestiones místicas. For a succinct summary of these authors’ stated differences from Saudreau, see Bainvel, ‘Introduction’, lxx–lxxv. 26  Father Crisógono de Jesus Sacramentado, San Juan de La Cruz: su obra científica y su obra literaria (Madrid: Editorial Mensajero de Santa Teresa y de San Juan de la Cruz, 1929); Alois Winklhofer, Die Gnadenlehre in der Mystik des Heiligen Johannes vom Kreuz (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1936). 27  Most notably in the debate over the authenticity of the second redaction of the Canticle commentary, a debate that continues to be the subject of differing views, and which I briefly survey in Chapter 3.

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Modern Reception of John of the Cross  35 proclamation in August 1926 of John as a Doctor of the Church, the so-called ‘Mystical Doctor’, the result of thirty years of lobbying by the Discalced Carmelite Order on his behalf, only heightened John’s alreadyelevated authority in matters of mystical theology. Despite these disagreements, however, there remained a broad consensus that John’s writings offered both a distinctive understanding of contemplation and its insights into the affective states that might concomitantly be expected to arise. There was also a wide agreement (evident in English-language scholarship in the writings of John Chapman and Eric Mascall) that the writings of John spoke of the mystical life as the vocation of all Christians, not simply as the vocation of a narrow elite.28

John and mysticism At roughly the same time as the late nineteenth-century revival of Catholic interest in mystical theology, there developed a second strand of in­ter­ pret­ation of the writings of John of the Cross. This second strand may be distinguished by its interest in the notions of mysticism and mystical experience, and its typical (although not universal) lack of confessional commitment. Animating these various early twentieth-century theories of mysticism was a concern to develop an account of the mys­tic­al that would restore the potential for faith—or, otherwise put, know­ledge of the transcendent—in a world in which it was facing increasing challenge.29 Here, I survey in highly programmatic form three scholars within this strand of interpretation who either drew on John, or whose work has been very influential for subsequent sanjuanist scholarship: William James, Evelyn Underhill, and Jean Baruzi.30 After individually sum­mar­iz­ing the 28  Concerning the question of whether the mystical is a special vocation, or the call to all, see E.L. Mascall, A Guide to Mount Carmel (Westminster: Dacre Press, 1939), 11 and Chapman, Spiritual Letters, 266, both of whom oppose the idea that John’s writings are intended only for a spiritual elite. 29  This was at root an intellectual challenge, the epistemological conundrum raised by Kant of the very possibility of the knowledge of God, but given new urgency in the early twentieth century by the increasing turn to scientific reductionistic accounts of the world. 30  A fourth significant figure in this strand is Friedrich von Hügel, who, in the Preface to his study of the mystical, acknowledges a great debt in his thought to John of the Cross. (Friedrich von Hügel, The Mystical Element of Religion as Studied in Catherine of Genoa and Her Friends,

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36  John of the Cross key features of James, Underhill, and Baruzi’s account of mysticism, I compare their various accounts. In doing so, I examine both the substantive commonalities and differences in their thought as well as the different contexts and audiences they sought to address. These various theories of mysticism, animated by a shared series of concerns, would prove to be hugely influential in interpretation of John of the Cross. This was especially because it was through the excerpts contained in works such as these that the works of John first became accessible to a wider English-speaking audience, who were otherwise restricted to the 1864 translation by David Lewis.31 These scholars therefore provided the selected quotations of John that formed many readers’ first encounter with the saint. Yet most significant for subsequent interpretation of John is the influence of the frameworks that these scholars developed for understanding the broader category of mysticism. Moreover, I will suggest in turning to examine mid and late twentieth-century reception of John, it is these frameworks that have structured the dominant options of the last half-century for consideration of religious experience and the mystical, informing the interpretation of John not just in the­ology but in disciplines as diverse as literature and neuroscience. The first of these three scholars to write—and almost without doubt the most influential in his own day and now—was William James. The Harvard philosopher and psychologist’s renowned analysis of what he termed the ‘varieties of religious experience’ draws from a number of descriptions of apparent ‘mystical experiences’ in order, finally, to lay out four distinguishing marks of such experiences.32 First, such an ex­peri­ence is ineffable: it ‘defies expression’, and ‘no adequate report of

2nd ed. (London, 1923), xxix). Yet his lengthy philosophical-theological analysis of the three ‘elements’ of religion, among them the ‘mystical’ element, has not figured prominently in subsequent reception of early twentieth-century discussions of the mystical (particularly with reference to John of the Cross). For this reason, I do not discuss it here. 31  Between 1906 and 1912 Lewis’s English translation of each of John’s four prose works was published separately, responding to the wider scholarly and public interest in the mystical that arose in that decade. 32  In lectures XVI and XVII of William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901–1902 (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1902). James’s account of the four marks is given on pp. 380–1.

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Modern Reception of John of the Cross  37 its contents can be given in words’. Second, it has a noetic quality: it is not experienced solely as a state of feeling, but seems to the individual to be also a state of knowledge, being ‘states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect’. The presence of these two marks, James claims, entitles any state to be called mystical, though two further qualities are usually found. These are, third, transiency (such states rarely last longer than an hour or two); and fourth, passivity (‘the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power’). These four characteristics, James claims, ‘are sufficient to mark out a group of states of consciousness’ that should be called mystical. James then proceeds to examine a series of accounts that describe what are, for him, mystical experiences. (It is in this section that James engages at greatest length with John of the Cross, giving an extended quotation from the Dark Night to illustrate the absence of sensory images in the mystical states James describes, and briefly mentioning John’s account of the ‘touch’ of God on the soul.33) James concludes by assessing what warrant for truth such experiences provide, giving an answer in three parts. These experiences are authoritative warrants for truth for the individuals who experience them. Such a warrant only applies to that individual: others have no duty to accept the testimony of the one who experienced the state. Yet as a whole, such states demonstrate that warranted belief does not solely depend on the evidence of reason and senses.34 This is an important claim for James’s deeper purpose of revivifying the possibility of knowledge of the transcendent. Evelyn Underhill’s most-developed and widely known account of the mystical is given in her 1911 book, Mysticism. Underhill structures the work in two parts. In the first, ‘The Mystic Fact’, she provides an introduction to the various recent discussions about the nature of mysticism, summarizing its relationship with theories and disciplines, among them vitalism, psychology, theology, symbolism, and magic. Mysticism is, she suggests, best defined as ‘the expression of the innate tendency of the human spirit towards complete harmony with the transcendental order’, 33 James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 407, 413–14. 34 James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 422–8.

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38  John of the Cross a movement that represents ‘the true line of development of the highest form of human consciousness’.35 When she comes to set out in greater detail the characteristics of this mysticism, she engages directly with James’s four marks, finding them wanting and giving her own set of four characteristics.36 Mysticism is ‘active and practical, not passive and theoretical’. Second, ‘its aims are wholly transcendental and spiritual’, not concerned with ‘improving anything in the visible universe’. Third, the One is for the mystic ‘not merely the Reality of all that is, but also a living and personal Object of Love; never an object of exploration’. Fourth, union with this One is arrived at by ‘an arduous psychological and spiritual process’ called the Mystic Way. The second part of the book, itself titled ‘The Mystic Way’, represents an attempt to lay out in detail an account of the stages of growth in ‘mystical consciousness’. Underhill describes the ‘awakening’, ‘purification’, and ‘illumination’ of the soul. In the penultimate chapter of that analysis, she turns to the ‘dark night of the soul’, examining the moment in that ascent that is characterized by ‘impotence, blankness, solitude’.37 Finally, she examines the experience of, and language used by mystical writers to describe, the attainment of the ‘Unitive Life’. Underhill would subsequently move away, however, from the understanding of the mystical given in Mysticism and other works of the early 1910s. In 1920 Underhill looked back on the years since her conversion to Christianity in 1907 as a period when she had been excessively influenced by a Neoplatonic worldview.38 In 1921 she acquired Friedrich von Hügel as a spiritual director, one of a series of figures who aided her transition into a Christianity that was more sensitive to its institutional and communal aspects. She also in that year became a practicing member of the Church of England. In her 1930 preface to the twelfth edition of Mysticism, she briefly detailed the different emphases she would have included if writing the book then. Among them she recognized the importance of the stress laid by von Hügel on divine transcendence in 35  Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (London: Methuen & Co, 1911), xxi. 36 Underhill, Mysticism, 81. 37 Underhill, Mysticism, 381. 38 John  R.  Francis, ‘Evelyn Underhill’s Developing Spiritual Theology: A Discovery of Authentic Spiritual Life and the Place of Contemplation’, Anglican Theological Review 93, no. 2 (2011): 285.

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Modern Reception of John of the Cross  39 any account of the mystical, the need to study mysticism as ‘embodied in some degree in history, dogma and institutions’, and the value for study of prayer and contemplation of the Thomist-inspired conceptual frameworks developed in the 1920s by Bremond, Maritain, Maréchal, and others.39 While continuing to maintain the importance of the mys­ tic­al for faith, Underhill’s later thought accordingly (and in contrast to James’s understanding) situated this within what she considered a much richer context of the Christian community, one which appropriately acknowledged its sacramental and traditional aspects. James and Underhill are well known in surveys of early twentiethcentury mysticism. Jean Baruzi, the third figure to be studied in this strand of interpretation, is far less familiar. Yet while rarely examined in English-language discussion of John, Jean Baruzi has had an enormous impact on French and Spanish reception of John’s writings.40 Baruzi’s study of ‘mystical experience’ in John of the Cross (a phrase, it should be said, that John never himself uses) first appeared in 1924, with a revised second edition that sought to address the concerns of his critics following seven years later.41 It is a vast work of over 700 pages, beginning from a very different series of commitments to the Catholic theologians surveyed above. Baruzi knew the work of James and Underhill, and on one occasion critiques a specific part of James’s work, but they are in total cited around ten times, and so are not major dialogue partners. For Baruzi, the questions posed by neo-Kantian thought, especially concerning the possibility of passing from knowledge of a specific phenomenon to knowledge of ‘the idea’ itself, make clear that two approaches to John’s works are no longer defensible.42 On the one hand, 39  Evelyn Underhill, ‘Preface’, in Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness, 12th ed. (London: Methuen & Co., 1930), xv. 40  Varieties of Religious Experience received a Spanish translation in 1907, but does not appear to have been widely read: Jaime Nubiola and Izaskun Martínez, ‘The Reception of William James in Spain and Unamuno’s Reading of the Varieties’, Streams of William James 5, no. 2 (2003): 7–9. 41 Baruzi, L’expérience mystique. The continued importance of this work to sanjuanist scholarship is evident in the production both of a Spanish translation in 1991 and of a new French edition in 1999. One of the few discussions of Baruzi in English-language literature may be found in N. Grace Aaron, Thought and Poetic Structure in San Juan de la Cruz’s Symbol of Night (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 4–48. 42  On the philosophical questions at stake in Baruzi’s account, see Juan Varo Zafra, ‘Jean Baruzi y el problema del símbolo sanjuanista’, Revue Romane 43, no. 1 (2008): 137–51.

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40  John of the Cross it is not possible (as was undertaken in the Catholic theological approaches just surveyed) to appeal to Thomistic principles such as infused grace that imply the possibility of God making himself known in so unmediated a manner. Yet neither can the text be understood as a secondary product that one can pass ‘behind’ in an attempt to reach an original ‘mystical experience’, since this would be to introduce a false disjunction between the experience and the subsequent depiction of it. (Baruzi would therefore reject from the outset the route taken by James’s rather uncritical view of the relationship between the mystical ex­peri­ence and the resultant text.) Inspired by Bergson’s account of the ‘creative intuition’, Baruzi instead argues that enquiry into the nature of the divine must instead undertake a search for the ‘symbol’ that lies within the text itself. In other words, since such enquiry can neither take the account of the text’s description of the ‘mystical experience’ at face value, nor probe behind it to the prelinguistic expression, the search for understanding of the divine must be deeply attentive to the text itself. Baruzi consequently turns to John of the Cross, whom he views as the first figure to recognize (in protoKantian fashion) the epistemological limits within ‘mystical experience’. Baruzi begins with an assessment of the most authoritative manuscripts of John’s writing—both prose and poetry—in order to discern the most reliable version of John’s expression of his experiences. There follows a long biography of John which, in Baruzi’s description, approaches its historical undertaking in a far more ‘scientific’ manner than the hagiographical accounts that had previously circulated. Through this biog­ raphy, and inspired by Henri Delacroix (one of the two people to whom the book was dedicated), Baruzi highlights specific events in John’s life that were, he believed, likely to have had such a strong psychological impact on John that their effects were evident in his works.43 In the third part of the book, Baruzi is at last ready to tackle the relationship between ‘experience’ and ‘doctrine’. He turns to John’s three poems on which commentaries were written, arguing that the ‘lyricism’

43  See the analysis of John, whose writings are viewed as arising from experiences rooted in his subconscious mind, in Henri Delacroix, Études d’histoire et de psychologie du mysticisme; les grands mystiques chrétiens (Paris: F Alcan, 1908), 325–44.

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Modern Reception of John of the Cross  41 of the poetry is closest to John’s personal experience and that the prose works simply seek to lay this ‘lyricism’ out in systematic form. And he proceeds to point, in particular, to the symbol of ‘night’ contained in the Noche poem as the fullest articulation of John’s mystical experience. It arises, he argues, from John’s imprisonment in Toledo, but also encapsulates his insistence on the necessity of the annihilation of all conscious activity and of proceeding in ‘dark knowledge’.44 Knowledge of past uses of ‘night’ in the mystical tradition are not of significance, since the use of this symbol represents an ‘original intuition’ on John’s part.45 It is, as such, a ‘symbol’ that is not simply a ‘figure’ of the experience but which is intrinsically connected to an original experience, a translation of the experience which is at the same time the experience itself. I shall not examine Baruzi’s subsequent analysis of John’s other works, in which he argues that the symbol of ‘night’ encompasses both the ‘allegory’ (a series of images but with fixed meanings imposed on them) of the Cántico and the symbol of ‘fire’ that is put forward in what Baruzi terms allegorical mode in the Llama.46 Nor shall I examine the extensive final part of the book in which Baruzi sets out what may be said about John’s doctrine from the manner in which he develops these symbols in poetry and prose. Yet it is important, finally, to attend to Baruzi’s cul­ min­at­ing discussion of the nature of mystical union in John because of its significance for illuminating the ‘theological’ shape of Baruzi’s entire project. For Baruzi, John’s works arise from an experience of mystical union which may be said to have given John ‘metaphysical knowledge’ of God. Accordingly, John’s symbol of ‘night’ does not simply point to the conditions of the ascent itself; rather, it points to the very nature of the ‘Deity’ itself that is beyond all human knowledge. And talk of such a ‘Deity’, Baruzi concludes, is best conducted through Plotinus’ account of the ascent to contemplation of the eternal One.47 Baruzi’s closing comments, therefore, point to the theism that he suggests may legitimately be the result of study of John’s writings—but it is a theism based on an understanding of the Plotinian One far removed from the Christian ­the­ology on which John based his thought. 44 Baruzi, L’expérience mystique, 307. 46 Baruzi, L’expérience mystique, 298–367.

45 Baruzi, L’expérience mystique, 337. 47 Baruzi, L’expérience mystique, 675–6.

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42  John of the Cross Baruzi’s work immediately attracted extensive attention from Catholic theologians representative of the first strand of thought considered above.48 Many, it must be said, found that fruitful use could be made of Baruzi’s groundbreaking contributions to historical and literary research on John (although sadly few were inspired by Baruzi to pay greater attention to John’s poetry). In this respect, the mood may perhaps be well summed up by the comment made some years later by the Carmelite nun Edith Stein during her writing of The Science of the Cross: ‘I well know that Baruzi is an unbelieving author, but I believe one cannot easily do without him if one wants to write about Holy Father [John]’.49 Yet Baruzi faced far stronger criticism from others. Crisógono’s study of John, mentioned above, repeatedly criticized Baruzi for his in­ter­pret­ ation of John.50 And Jacques Maritain took him to task for too easily abandoning Thomist theology and metaphysics in the face of modern philosophical questions: in pulling John of the Cross into this ‘metaphysic which is corrupt to the core’, he stated, Baruzi openly ac­know­ ledged that he perceived that John’s account eventually ‘leads us “in some manner beyond Christianity” ’. Baruzi had rendered John’s ‘mys­tic­al theology’, Maritain argued, ‘a process of detachment in which the spirit of man does all the work’—quite the opposite of how John himself intended to be understood.51 James, Underhill, and Baruzi were animated by a shared concern for revitalizing discussion of religion by turning to the category of the ‘mys­ tic­al’. But the way that they went about this task led them in very different directions, thereby laying the groundwork for the series of options taken up in mid- and late twentieth-century appropriation of religious experience and the mystical. Some of these differences are evident in the divergent responses to questions that would continue to animate much subsequent study of 48 See especially the series of responses by Garrigou-Lagrange and others in La Vie Spirituelle 12, (1925). 49 Edith Stein, Letter 324 (13 Oct 1941), quoted in Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD, ‘I.C.S.  Introduction’, in Edith Stein, The Science of the Cross: A Study of St. John of the Cross (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2003), xxii. 50  Crisógono de Jesus Sacramentado, San Juan de la Cruz, I:18, 93–4; II:264. 51 Maritain, Degrees of Knowledge, 10–11. The quote is from Baruzi, L’expérience ­mystique, 230.

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Modern Reception of John of the Cross  43 mysticism. For instance, did mysticism refer to discrete experiences, or to a series of experiences that constituted some form of ascent of the soul towards God? James’s study examined specific mystical ex­peri­ences, with little interest in whether these formed some kind of hier­archy. His psychological interests, moreover, caused him to include a number of ex­peri­ ences described by occultists and clairvoyants. By contrast, Underhill and Baruzi sought to delineate a spiritual ascent, Baruzi following John’s account closely and Underhill drawing from a wide range of spiritual writers. Underhill was among many in Anglo-American studies of mysticism who, in reaction against James, downplayed the importance of these ‘abnormal’ experiences, seeking instead to focus attention on the ‘normal’ experiences that appeared to occur more commonly.52 Likewise, how might exploration of the mystical experience take appropriate account of the role of tradition, memory, and language in shaping that experience? For James and the early Underhill, this is barely a question. Accounts of mystical moments are taken up with virtually no examination of the role of these factors in shaping both the ex­peri­ ence and the memory of it. Baruzi, by contrast, pays extensive attention to these factors. For him, examination of John’s account of mystical experience must be preceded by investigation of John’s biography, establishment of the authoritative versions of the texts, and clarification of how John understood language (in the shape, for instance, of metaphor and allegory) to relate to his experience. These various articulations of the concept of mysticism were heavily influenced, of course, by the diverse intellectual, institutional, and cultural contexts from which these works arose. All these authors wrote in various ways from outside the traditional sites of religious enquiry, being unconstrained by the restrictions faced by scholars in other situ­ ations. Baruzi’s method of opening up theological texts to literary enquiry (in a manner that was rare in the Catholic theology of his day), for example, was possible because he was, at the time, a layperson teaching philosophy in the Collège Stanislas, a Parisian secondary school.53

52  Schmidt, ‘The Making of “Mysticism” ’, 465. 53  He would in 1925 go on to become assistant to Alfred Loisy at the prestigious Collège de France, before succeeding to Loisy’s chair in the History of Religions in 1934.

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44  John of the Cross And James’s innovative understanding of mysticism was in part a product of the cultural and religious milieu of the USA—and in particular New England. James grew up deeply shaped by the Transcendentalism of Swedenborg and Emerson (his father, Henry James, Sr, was a close friend of Emerson),54 and spent his entire academic life at Harvard. His approach to the mystical was deeply shaped by the questions concerning the nature of religion that were raised by those figures. Mysticism, with its promise of laying out an underlying unity to religious belief, was also an attractive subject in a country seeking unity in the wake of the ragged divisions of the American Civil War.55 Moreover, by contrast with a European setting in which many university posts in religion were tied to a specific confessional commitment, James’s setting in the psychology department at Harvard (which at its inception was tied to the department of philosophy) opened up new possibilities for broadening intellectual enquiry. Similarly, Underhill was a woman who always wrote from outside an academic position (few such posts, of course, would have been available to her). Despite eventually becoming a member of the Church of England, her first spiritual allegiance was in the mid-1900s membership of the occult Hermetic Society of the Golden Dawn, whose members studied, among other things, astrology, alchemy, and divination.56 For William Ralph Inge, an explorer of mysticism sympathetic to Underhill’s early writings, the Church of England was itself promoting an ‘exaggerated institutionalism’; mysticism of the sort advocated by Underhill offered, he suggested with praise, an alternative conception of religion, ‘that of a direct intercourse between God and the individual soul’.57

54  For more on James’s transcendentalist influences, see Eugene Taylor, ‘The Spiritual Roots of James’s Varieties of Religious Experience’, in William James, Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Centenary Edition (London; New York: Routledge, 2002), xv–xxxviii; Catherine Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 413–23. 55  Schmidt, ‘The Making of “Mysticism” ’, 464. 56  Jane Shaw, The Mystical Turn: Religious Experience in the Modern World (The TwentyThird Eric Symes Abbott Memorial Lecture), 2008 [unpaginated]. Available at https://www.kcl. ac.uk/aboutkings/principal/dean/thedean/23rd%20ESA%20lecture%202008.pdf. Accessed 6 January 2020. 57  William Ralph Inge, ‘The Mystical Revival’, The Times Literary Supplement, 20 March 20 1913, 117.

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Modern Reception of John of the Cross  45 James and Underhill, moreover, aimed their writings not simply at a scholarly audience but also at the educated public. (Their appeal was in large part enabled by the authors’ status as ‘outsiders’ to the traditional circles of study of spiritual writings.) Underhill’s writings largely took the form of shorter texts aimed at a reading public, with Mysticism being the most widely read of these works and going through thirteen editions by the time of her death in 1941. From the mid-1920s, she combined her writing with directing retreats and serving as a spiritual director, ac­tiv­ ities that further aided the dissemination of her ideas to a wider public. James’s work was even more popular: Varieties of Religious Experience sold 11,500 copies in the first year and has continued to be widely read in every decade since.58 Part of the attraction of these writings was doubtless their practical tone. Underhill and James laid out a form of religion that was distinguished not by intellectual enquiry, with all the consequent challenges to faith of recent decades. Neither did they offer an account of religion that paid much attention to the Bible, thereby avoiding the various challenges of nineteenth-century biblical criticism and scientific questions. Rather, they developed memorable categories to delineate the ex­peri­ ences and activities that might distinguish the ‘religious’ life, whether Underhill’s map of a series of spiritual activities with their concomitant affective states, or James’s four criteria. As will shortly be seen, in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond these writings con­ tinued to exert a strong influence on popular thinking on religion.

II.  Developments since the mid-twentieth century The rise of ‘spirituality’ In turning now to examine the development of these two strands of reception of John in the mid- and late twentieth century, I first return to the Roman Catholic interpretations surveyed earlier in the chapter. This 58 Robert  D.  Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism: A Biography (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 421.

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46  John of the Cross neo-scholastic tradition of interpretation continued to be widespread in the 1950s and 1960s. In particular, the work of Eric Trueman Dicken, drawing on Saudreau and the neo-Thomists in creating a grand schematic account of the spiritual ascent which understood the writings of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross to describe one unified ascent, perhaps represents the final flourishing of the earlier tradition.59 Yet in the wake of the seismic mid-twentieth-century shifts in Catholic the­ ology most commonly described as the nouvelle théologie, this broad consensus in interpretation of John was widely rejected. In its place arose a new approach, emerging from the same root as Poulain and Saudreau although increasingly diversifying in different directions and drawing on other forms of thought. This new approach often identified itself by the novel label of ‘spirituality’, continuing to draw much in­spir­ation from John of the Cross in addressing questions that had previously been largely dealt with under the banners of ‘ascetical’, ‘mystical’, and ‘spiritual’ theology. The changing nature of the work of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, a hugely influential figure in his own time and subsequently, may help to illustrate this shift. John of the Cross was a figure of great importance for the young Merton; he first read John in 1938, aged 23, recalling that he underscored his volume assiduously but eventually ‘found it too simple for me to understand’.60 While training for the priesthood in the 1940s, Merton engaged in extensive study of the neoscholastic texts, drawing in the domain of spiritual theology on the thought of Saudreau and his successors.61 He would bring this approach to bear on some of his early reading of John of the Cross. The Ascent to Truth, published in 1949, was Merton’s attempt to explain John’s thought while drawing heavily on the neo-scholastic thought in which he had been trained. In it, Merton engages in a heavily schematized exegesis of John that is also reliant on Jacques Maritain’s epistemology as it lays out 59  E.W. Trueman Dicken, The Crucible of Love: A Study of the Mysticism of St Teresa of Jesus and St John of the Cross (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1963). 60  Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1948), 186, 238. See Christopher Nugent, ‘Born “On the Borders of Spain”: Thomas Merton and John of the Cross’, Mystics Quarterly 21, no. 3 (1995): 93. 61  William H. Shannon, Christine M. Bochen, and Patrick F. O’Connell, eds, The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002), 470.

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Modern Reception of John of the Cross  47 a series of stages of spiritual ascent. The work demonstrates how steeped he was in John’s thought at this relatively early stage of his writing career. Yet even at this point, Merton was pushing against this neo-scholastic frame. (As Evelyn Waugh evocatively puts it in his Foreword to Merton’s Elected Silence, also published in 1949, ‘His spirituality, though French in discipline, is a flower of the Catholic life of the New World.’62) The traces are evident in The Ascent to Truth and other early works such as Seeds of Contemplation, but find their fullest expression in mature works such as New Seeds of Contemplation (an extensive rewriting of the early work) and Contemplative Prayer. Some of the traditional language of Catholic spiritual writing—meditation, contemplation, faith, recollection, mental prayer—remains present. So too do many of the themes that reflect Merton’s deep rootedness in John of the Cross—the centrality of the ‘dark night’, the signs of the movement from meditation to contemplation, and the relationship of knowledge and love in the spiritual life. Rather than entirely rejecting this language, Merton tends to create new emphases, for instance by rooting his definition of meditation in reading the Bible, an activity from which contemplative prayer may grow.63 Yet John tends to become a rather less prominent presence in these works. Merton draws increasingly on other traditions, especially that of Zen Buddhism, and turns to phrases that seek to resonate with modern audiences: the true and the false self, the need for authenticity, and the isolation, loneliness, and ‘dread’ of the modern world.64 Even after his untimely death in 1968, Merton’s approach to the spiritual life for the modern era would prove to be enduringly influential.65 One particularly significant way in which Merton’s use of John of the Cross has been developed is through the movement of ‘Centering Prayer’ established by the American Trappist monks M.  Basil Pennington,

62  Evelyn Waugh, ‘Foreword’, in Thomas Merton, Elected Silence (London: Hollis & Carter, 1949), v. The text is an abridged version of The Seven Storey Mountain. 63  Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer (New York: Herder, 1969), 42–5. 64 Thomas Merton, The Ascent to Truth (London: Hollis & Carter, 1951); Merton, Contemplative Prayer, 23, 42–5. 65  Note, for example, the continuing publication of Merton’s work: by the time of his death he had published or contributed to over fifty works, a number that has now doubled. A bibli­og­ raphy is provided in Shannon, Bochen, and O’Connell, The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia, xi–xv.

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48  John of the Cross William Meninger, and Thomas Keating. The phrase ‘Centering Prayer’ is inspired by Merton, who, as Pennington notes, stressed that the simplest way to come into contact with the living God is to ‘go to one’s center and from there pass into God’.66 Those engaging in Centering Prayer—whether alone or in organized groups—are instructed to choose a ‘sacred word’ (for example, Jesus, Abba, Love, or Amen) as ‘the symbol of your intention to consent to God’s presence and action within’. They should then sit in silence for twenty to thirty minutes, returning to this word whenever thoughts start to draw the pray-er away from this intention.67 This practice is to be repeated once or twice each day. In doing so, Keating states, ‘we consent to God’s presence and to receive Divine love without self-reflection . . . We move beyond thoughts and feelings into a more intimate exchange with God, from conversation to communion.’68 Keating and his companions understand their work to be part of the recovery of the universal call to contemplation that was first articulated by Auguste Saudreau and recognized in early twentieth-century Catholic scholarship, but only came to be widely accepted by the Roman Catholic church at the Second Vatican Council.69 With reference to older mys­ tic­al traditions, Centering Prayer’s use of a ‘sacred word’ to direct an individual’s thoughts is understood to be most directly informed by The Cloud of Unknowing.70 Yet John of the Cross remains an important presence. The night of sense and spirit structures Keating’s account of contemplative prayer in Invitation to Love, and various other writings of the movement align this practice of prayer with John’s writings.71 To an even greater extent than Merton, however, Centering Prayer understands certain terms in a manner that would be foreign to John. The emphasis on the universal call to contemplation is developed in a 66  M. Basil Pennington, ‘Centering Prayer’, in Finding Grace at the Center: The Beginning of Centering Prayer, ed. M. Basil Pennington, Thomas Keating, and Thomas E. Clarke (London: SPCK, 2002), 28. 67  Thomas Keating, ‘The Method of Centering Prayer’, in The Diversity of Centering Prayer, ed. Gustave Reininger (New York: Continuum, 1999), 129–35. 68  Thomas Keating, ‘Practicing Centering Prayer’, in The Diversity of Centering Prayer, ed. Gustave Reininger (New York: Continuum, 1999), 17. 69  Thomas Keating, ‘Contemplative Prayer in Christian Tradition’, in Finding Grace at the Center: The Beginning of Centering Prayer, ed. M.  Basil Pennington, Thomas Keating, and Thomas E. Clarke (London: SPCK, 2002), 76. 70  Pennington, ‘Centering Prayer’, 39, 48. See especially chapter 7 of the Cloud. 71  Keating, ‘Contemplative Prayer’, 74–6.

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Modern Reception of John of the Cross  49 manner that maintains the notion of a gradually deepening life of prayer, but does not speak in terms of a staged ascent. Contemplation is treated synonymously with contemplative prayer and, at times, meditation—the emphasis is on these terms as describing acts rather than states.72 It is, moreover, a movement that (again like Merton) draws extensively on the language of Eastern meditation and depth psychology, aiming to demonstrate how this may be aligned with the long traditions of Christian contemplation.73 This is in part a matter of intended audience, attempting to reach out to those who might not respond to the trad­ition­al language of Christian spiritual writing, and instead to show the consonance of this framework with other, more popular forms of thought. Yet this emphasis on seeking certain psychological states seems (as others have noted) to downplay the integrity of body and soul, activity and contemplation, in the growth of the self in faith, hope, and love. This is a subtle yet important shift from the anthropological and theological understanding of John and other older Christian figures. A third, and rather different, interpretation of John’s writings is provided by Ruth Burrows, an English Discalced Carmelite sister. Like Merton and the proponents of Centering Prayer, Burrows is concerned to open up the tradition of mystical theology to a modern audience, and she remains in agreement with Saudreau and his successors that the ‘mystical’ way is the vocation of all Christians.74 She does so through examining the writings of John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, and (to a lesser extent) Teresa of Lisieux. Two features that distinguish her from the figures examined above stand out, however, in her particular appropriation of John’s thought. First, the idea of a spiritual ascent consisting of three stages is far more important to Burrows. There exist, as she puts it in Guidelines for Mystical Prayer, three ‘islands’ in the spiritual life, traditionally expressed as the purgative, illuminative, and unitive stages, that are connected by 72 See the critique by Ernest  E.  Larkin, ‘Contemplative Prayer Forms Today: Are They Contemplation?’, in The Diversity of Centering Prayer, ed. Gustave Reininger (New York: Continuum, 1999), 27–38. 73 M.  Basil Pennington, Centering Prayer: Renewing an Ancient Christian Prayer Form (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1980); Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love: The Way of Christian Contemplation (Rockport, MA; Shaftesbury: Element, 1992). 74  Ruth Burrows, Guidelines for Mystical Prayer (London: Sheed & Ward, 1976), 10.

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50  John of the Cross the ‘bridges’ formed by what John calls the passive nights of sense and spirit.75 Second, Burrows decisively rejects the association of the ‘mys­tic­al’ life with particular experiences. Her Guidelines for Mystical Prayer opens with the example of two sisters—Sr Claire and Sr Petra. The former has particular experiences that many around her understand to be mystical graces; the latter seems to Burrows to be just as faithful but to have none of the same spiritual experiences.76 Both, Burrows insists, are living a mystical life: this life is distinguished not by experiences in the sense of moments of ‘transient emotional impact’, but by the development of faith that is exhibited in ‘living wisdom, living involvement’.77 Mid- and late twentieth-century writings of ‘spirituality’ that draw on John’s thought—surveyed in the varied responses of Merton, Centering Prayer, and Burrows—have, in short, typically understood themselves to belong to the tradition established by Saudreau, but have drawn se­lect­ ive­ly on the legacy of this strand of thought. There has been, in particular, a strengthening of the emphasis (given by Saudreau, Garrigou-Lagrange, and others) that all are called to contemplative prayer: the prayer described by John is the vocation of all Christians, not just an elite minority. Yet this insight has been taken up in different ways. All these figures reject the traditional neo-scholastic terminology of spiritual theology. Yet Burrows remains committed to various aspects of this older tradition, notably the tradition of the three-stage ascent in the spiritual ascent. Merton and the proponents of Centering Prayer are more radical, rejecting the distinctions between meditation and contemplation, and acquired or infused contemplation, that underpinned this framework. They reject, in other words, the appeal to a distinct trad­ition of mystical theology, marked by the exegesis of authoritative figures such as John of the Cross. Such works have been highly democratizing in instinct, rejecting any lingering suspicion of spiritual elitism that continued to surround John. What results from this position is an in­ter­pret­ation of John that acknowledges the development that takes place over the life of faith, while downplaying any traditional concept

75 Burrows, Guidelines for Mystical Prayer, 13. 76 Burrows, Guidelines for Mystical Prayer, 2–3. 77 Burrows, Guidelines for Mystical Prayer, 55.

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Modern Reception of John of the Cross  51 of stages that might (as Rahner influentially feared) impose too restrictive a framework for the spiritual life.78 Instead, the emphasis is that contemplation is open to all. Moreover, all these figures attend extensively to the affective states that might be expected to accompany the spiritual life, albeit with rad­ ical­ly different interpretations. For Merton, Keating, and other works of spirituality, John is a guide to specific feelings and practices which could be of service to all ‘spiritual’ people, although the graced operations which John understood to give rise to such feelings might be questioned or largely ignored. (There are echoes here of Poulain’s intense interest in the various affective states that might be involved in the Christian life, although admittedly while being less prescriptive than Poulain about a series of progressive stages in a spiritual ascent that might underlie these states.) Burrows adopts a different position: experiences are an entirely extraneous aspect of the spiritual life. In both instances, what is striking is the significant contrast from the broader Thomist framework of the progressive development of the theological virtues through the op­er­ ation of grace that was developed by Saudreau, Garrigou-Lagrange, and others, a framework that interpreted these affective states within the context of a much wider range of changing dispositions in the soul. There are various reasons for this highly selective reception of the early twentieth-century tradition. Most important, these recent works are short and accessible, heavily and explicitly aimed at a public audience interested in prayer. On occasion, the writers are direct in their criticism of the role of academic scholarship in prayer, in a manner that would have been surprising to an earlier generation.79 The frameworks that are relied upon to communicate contemplation to a new audience are not those of the first half of the century. Instead, they draw on phil­oso­phy, on the thought of other (particularly Eastern) religions, and on psych­ ology and other related disciplines. In this, they are responding to a

78  Karl Rahner, ‘Reflections on the Problem of the Gradual Ascent to Christian Perfection’, in Theological Investigations 3 (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1967), 3–23. 79  Witness M. Basil Pennington in recent discussion with James Arraj on the relationship between Centering Prayer and earlier views of contemplation: ‘Let the scholars play with their distinctions if they want but leave pray-ers [sic] at peace’ (http://www.innerexplorations.com/ chmystext/cm1.htm; accessed 17 February 2020).

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52  John of the Cross series of shifts in wider religious culture: increasing interest in Europe and North America in other religions, declining levels of Christian understanding, and an increasing focus on the interior self (especially the exterior self, the community, or a wider institution such as the church) as the primary site of interaction with the divine. Yet the overall effect is the interpretation of John with a rather different focus both from John himself, and from the early twentieth-century scholarship in which these writings find their roots.

Mysticism and experience While appeals to spirituality have today largely taken the place of early twentieth-century Roman Catholic understandings of the spiritual life, the accounts of mysticism provided by Baruzi and James have since the mid-twentieth century continued to be hugely influential in in­ter­pret­ ation of John, both in theology and in other disciplines. Baruzi’s influence has chiefly been felt in French- and Spanish-language scholarship and James’s in writings in English, although there are hints that the American’s influence may be extending to areas of Spanish scholarship on John. Indeed, it is typically Baruzi and James that continue to function as authorities on the nature of ‘mysticism’ in much interpretation of John, despite the extensive theoretical debate on the subject (and critical evaluation of James) that has occurred during the second half of the twentieth century. To explore this influence further, I turn first to the interpretations that, while energized by theological motives, have been particularly interested in the ‘mystical experiences’ described by John. It is note­ worthy that the translators of the widely used modern English translation of John’s oeuvre have decided, in what is otherwise a fairly literal translation, to translate as ‘experience’ a series of Spanish terms relating to sensation and action (sentir, gustar, tener, acercar, moverse, and traer) that John uses to depict the effect of God’s action on the soul. For instance, John’s discussion at the outset of the Canticle of what the soul might ‘feel’ (sentir) is taken to be a discussion of experiences: ‘who can express with words the experience he imparts to them [lo que las hace sentir]? . . . As a

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Modern Reception of John of the Cross  53 result these persons let something of their experience [lo que sienten] overflow in figures, comparisons and similitudes’ (CB.Prol.1).80 Although the interpolation of ‘experience’ in this manner throughout the translation is not in itself wrong, the effect of the replacement of a wide range of metaphors with this single term is to impose a rather more onedimensional account of the effect of God’s action on the soul than is given by John in his prose. Yet the translators of John’s work are by no means alone in rendering his writings as a description of what the soul will ‘experience’; indeed, it might well be said that it constitutes the dominant framework in recent decades both for theological interpretation of John’s thought and for interpretation of Spanish mystical theology more widely.81 The threevolume study undertaken by Georges Morel, who transposed Baruzi’s analysis of John into a context more animated by Hegelian dialectic than Kantian idealism, was an influential extension of Baruzi’s thought, even if (like Baruzi) barely mentioned in English-language scholarship.82 Representative examples from the work of two prolific modern Spanish interpreters of John may illustrate the continued development of this strand of thought. First, Federico Ruiz, when tasked with producing a ‘doctrinal synthesis’ of John’s thought, draws heavily from Baruzi’s work as he begins from a ‘synthesis of the experience’ that is recorded in John’s oeuvre; while Ruiz’s approach takes a more existentialist direction than Baruzi, it remains indebted to the account of doctrine and the understanding of God that is developed in the Frenchman’s work.83 Second, Eulogio Pacho consistently (in a way that seems rather more resonant of James than Baruzi) understands John’s work to be the result of a series of experiences. In a recent volume, for instance, he argues that the words cited above from John’s prologue to the Canticle make clear that the 80  Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD, and Otilio Rodriguez, eds, The Collected Works of Saint John of the Cross, rev. ed. (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1991), 469. The same interpretative gloss is made by these translators in their three-volume translation of the works of Teresa of Avila. 81  Such surveys of ‘mysticism’ in sixteenth-century Spain include Melquíades Andrés Martín, Historia de la mística en la Edad de Oro en España y América (Madrid: BAC, 1994); Hilaire Kallendorf, ed., The New Companion to Hispanic Mysticism (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2010). 82 Georges Morel, Le sens de l’existence selon Saint Jean de la Croix, 3 vols (Paris: Aubier, 1961). 83  Federico Ruiz, ‘Síntesis doctrinal’, in Introducción a la lectura de San Juan de la Cruz, ed. Salvador Ros García and A. Garcíá Simon (Salamanca: Junta de Castilla y León, 1991), 206.

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54  John of the Cross poem is the ‘best expression or communication of the inexpressible experience’, which preceded the writing of the poem. The prose ­commentary is simply an attempt to explain it to ‘those who have not enjoyed similar experiences’: it cannot help those who already enjoy these ex­peri­ences, but it will aid those who have not had such experience and who require guidance and clarifications.84 The enduring influence of Baruzi and James is particularly evident in literary studies of John’s work. In studies of the literary qualities of John’s poetry, a widespread starting point among scholars of the Spanish sixteenth-century ‘Golden Age’ is the presupposition that they arise from a ‘mystical experience’. John is, accordingly, frequently categorized as a ‘mystical poet’, with his lyrical words arising from his mystical ex­peri­ence. The dominance of this approach is perhaps partly due to its im­port­ance in the recovery of attention to John’s poetry. While in 1881 the Spanish literary scholar Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo praised John’s oeuvre effusively (‘it hardly seems to be of this world, and neither is it possible to assess it in literary terms’), the poetry remained the subject of only intermittent attention in the decades that followed.85 Jean Baruzi’s study was, in short, a novelty simply for the attention it accorded to John’s poetry—and accordingly in turn stimulated further attention to the poetry along the lines of enquiry established by the Frenchman. Most notably, Baruzi’s framework was heavily drawn on by the Spanish literary scholar Dámaso Alonso.86 For Alonso, questions concerning the metaphysics that underlay John’s writing could be left to Baruzi: his work was instead, as its subtitle indicated, an attempt to analyse John’s work desde esta ladera—from the human, rather than divine, side of the event. Accordingly, the first half of Alonso’s study was devoted 84  Eulogio Pacho, Apogeo de la mística cristiana: historia de la espiritualidad clásica española, 1450–1650 (Burgos: Monte Carmelo, 2008), 1073. This emphasis on ‘experience’ is also evident in many articles in the recent reference volume on John edited by Pacho: see for instance Luis Aróstegui, ‘Experiencia mística’, in Diccionario de San Juan de la Cruz, ed. Eulogio Pacho (Burgos: Monte Carmelo, 2000), 591–612. 85  Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, Estudios y discursos de crítica histórica y literaria, vol. II (Santander: Aldus, 1941), 97. 86  Dámaso Alonso, La poesía de San Juan de la Cruz (desde esta ladera) (Madrid: CSIC, 1942). For a survey of the reception of John’s poetry from the late nineteenth century onwards, see San Juan de la Cruz, Cántico espiritual y poesía completa, ed. Paolo Elia and María Jesús Mancho (Barcelona: Crítica, 2002), cvi–cx.

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Modern Reception of John of the Cross  55 to an innovative analysis of the possible influences—from Scripture, Golden Age Spain and past centuries of Spanish popular poetry—on John’s poetry. As he turned in the second half of his work to literary analysis of the poetry, however, Alonso drew heavily on the framework of lyricism, symbol, and allegory by which Baruzi had analysed the poetry. The poems, Alonso argued, were composed in the intense glow of inspiration; by contrast, the commentaries were later rationalizations by John to serve a predefined theological purpose.87 It was in the poetry, in short, that the true genius of John’s response to his mystical ex­peri­ence could be found. Thus began what is now almost three-quarters of a century of literary engagement with John’s works, in which the works of both Baruzi and Alonso have continued to be touchstones for subsequent literary scholars’ enquiries into John’s thought.88 Four examples of later literary scholarship may exemplify the variety in these studies. Helmut Hatzfeld agrees with Baruzi’s proposal that the symbol of ‘night’ is central to John’s account of the ascent and union, but suggests that examination of its meaning in past mystical traditions is a necessary aspect of the task of ascertaining its meaning to John.89 The Spanish literary scholar Jorge Guillén, in an essay dedicated to Baruzi, draws extensively on the concepts of symbol and allegory as they are used by the Frenchman, but seeks to point to the poetry as producing suggestive images of an ex­peri­ ence of love that cannot be entirely captured in analysis of the poetry.90 It seems plausible that Hans Urs von Balthasar, who expresses his appreciation for Baruzi’s work, is influenced by the Frenchman in his judgement that John’s poetry is superior to his ‘unsuccessful, defective commentary’; Balthasar concludes his analysis of John in The Glory of the Lord by commenting that it is in the ‘simplicity’ of the poetry, ‘like the meaning contained in an inexhaustible symbol, that the fullness of 87  See particularly Alonso, Poesía, 200–27. 88  For a fuller survey of Spanish literary reception of John’s poetry in the second half of the twentieth century, which reveals the extent of interpretation of John as a ‘mystical poet’, see Elia and Mancho, eds, Poesía completa, cx–cxix, 415–18, 599–606, 666–82. 89  Helmut Hatzfeld, Estudios literarios sobre mística española (Madrid: Gredos, 1955). 90  Jorge Guillén, ‘The Ineffable Language of Mysticism: San Juan de la Cruz’, in Language and Poetry: Some Poets of Spain, ed. Jorge Guillén (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 79–121.

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56  John of the Cross the Godhead dwells bodily’.91 Finally, to turn to an important English scholar of John’s poetry, Colin Thompson (who does not develop Baruzi’s account of symbol and allegory) suggests that John provides his own ‘mystical poetics’ that begins from the ‘topos of ineffability’: John understands his own poetry, Thompson proposes, to be ‘an overflow from experience, in one sense prolonging it by representing it in words, in another incapable of containing it within the selected signifier’.92 In short, as is evident from these four scholars, studies of John’s poetry have not always adopted Baruzi’s theory of ‘symbol’ and ‘allegory’, and many have doubted (like Alonso) whether such concepts need be examined independently of past mystical and literary traditions. Yet these studies have very widely held to the view (and here it is particularly the case that the influence of Baruzi and, at times, James can be seen) that John’s poetry is the first and most fruitful attempt to describe an ‘ineffable’ mystical experience, with the prose a subsequent, more formulaic, and consequently less ‘real’ approximation of the event.93 Literary studies of the poetry continue to be deeply informed by the partial framework of interpretation of ‘mystical poetry’ that has arisen, in different ways, from the work of Baruzi and James. This succinct survey of the interpretation of ‘experience’ in John has not addressed discussions of the theme (emerging in complex ways from the thought of Baruzi and James) that have not been taken up in the mainstream of sanjuanist scholarship. It has not, for instance, been possible either to examine the analysis of John’s ‘experience of nonexperience’ (itself informed by Baruzi’s emphasis on the importance of ‘night’ to John) put forward in very different ways by Hans Urs von Balthasar and Jean-Yves Lacoste.94 Nor will I engage in detail with the

91 Hans Urs von Balthasar, ‘John of the Cross’, in The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics. Vol 3, Studies in Theological Style: Lay Styles, ed. John Riches, trans. Andrew Louth (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1986), 171. 92 Thompson, Songs in the Night, 228–31. 93  For an exception to this, which seeks to recover the interdependency of poetry and prose, see the essays in José Ángel Valente and José Lara Garrido, eds, Hermenéutica y mística: San Juan de la Cruz (Madrid: Tecnos, 1995). 94  Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Volume I: Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982), 412–13; Jean-Yves Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man, trans. Mark Raftery-Skehan (New York: Fordham University Press, 1994), 145–9, 191–2. On the importance to Lacoste of John of the

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Modern Reception of John of the Cross  57 recurrent interest that scholars in analytic philosophy of religion have shown in the potential epistemological value for a defence of theism that many have perceived to be contained in John’s accounts of ‘mystical experience’,95 or the rather different appeal to John’s depiction of the ‘dark night’ that has been made in response to the question of so-called ‘divine hiddenness’ raised by J.L.  Schellenberg.96 Similarly, it is not within the scope of this survey to explore the attention that psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts have shown to John’s writing, with particular interest shown in his account of the feelings involved in, and guidance concerning, the ‘dark night of the soul’.97 These various ways in which John’s thought has been taken up also point, however, to the enduring influence of certain early twentieth-century theories of mysticism in sanjuanist scholarship in the past half-century. * * * This survey has highlighted two strands of interpretation of John of the Cross that have dominated scholarship in the past century. Both strands, I have sought to suggest, are subtly informed by specific early twentiethcentury concerns; each, accordingly, offers only a rendition of part of the entirety of John’s thought. The three apparently disjunctive options in John’s thought that were noted at the very start of this chapter may accordingly be seen to owe more to the conceptual frameworks that have dominated twentiethcentury interpretation than to John himself. For, in the first place, it is apparent that the perception that there exists a tension between the ‘dark night’ and the state of union stems in large part from neglect of the Cross, including as mediated through Baruzi, see Matthew David Farley, ‘Jean-Yves Lacoste on John of the Cross: Theological Thinker Par Excellence’, Modern Theology 32, no. 1 (2016): 3–19. 95  Nelson Pike, ‘John of the Cross on the Epistemic Value of Mystic Visions’, in Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment, ed. Robert Audi and William Wainwright (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986); Steven L. Payne, John of the Cross and the Cognitive Value of Mysticism (Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990). 96  Laura L. Garcia, ‘St John of the Cross and the Necessity of Divine Hiddenness’, in Divine Hiddenness: New Essays, ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder and Paul  K.  Moser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 83–97. 97 For example, Francis Kelly Nemeck and Marie Theresa Coombs, O Blessed Night: Recovering from Addiction, Codependency and Attachment Based on the Insights of St. John of the Cross and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Staten Island, NY: Alba House, 1991); Gerald G. May, The Dark Night of the Soul: A Psychiatrist Explores the Connection between Darkness and Spiritual Growth (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 2005).

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58  John of the Cross progressive nature of the transformation on the spiritual ascent. This diachronic aspect of John’s thought has been consistently neglected by the interest of the past century in ‘mystical experience’ and by recent writings in the domain of ‘spirituality’, which have both downplayed any notion of a progressive, graced transformation in the course of the Christian life. The result has been that two states that John anticipates will occur at entirely different stages of the spiritual ascent come to appear as somewhat conflicting depictions of the state of the soul in relation to God. Second, at the start of the chapter I noted a series of concerns about whether John is describing a series of experiences, or is calling into question the whole idea of experience of God. Yet the preceding survey has highlighted the extent to which these concerns arise out of a specific series of early twentieth-century epistemological and metaphysical beliefs about the nature of ‘experience’. If John’s own understanding of the ‘experiential’ quality of the spiritual ascent is to be appropriately understood, renewed attention to his thought on its own terms is required. Finally, in relation to the third and final apparent disjunction raised at the start of this chapter, the tendency to study one genre of John’s work—the poetry or the prose—to the almost total neglect of the other may be seen to emerge from these same restricted traditions of in­ter­ pret­ation. In the first strand has been observed a form of thought that attended almost exclusively to his prose, seeking in John a scholastic figure who could clearly delineate the various aspects of the spiritual life. The second strand has been most likely to examine both John’s poetry and prose, but has largely done so through the assumption that both are ultimately secondary pieces of evidence to the main subject of enquiry— namely, the originary mystical experience. And in the recent emphases of literary scholarship may be seen one outworking of this assumption: since the poetry was John’s first production, only attention to the poetry is ultimately necessary in order to shed light on what may be said of his ‘mystical experiences’.

III.  Desire and the spiritual ascent Some isolated recent work, it has must be said, has recognized something of the importance of desire to John’s thought. An interest in John’s

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Modern Reception of John of the Cross  59 development of the notion of desire is apparent, on the one hand, in those works that have explored the intellectual influences behind John’s thought: through attention to the ‘Platonic’ or ‘Dionysian’ aspects of John’s thought, or through exploring the importance of the theme of ‘love’ to his writings, certain scholars have touched on important aspects of this broader theme of desire. Henri Sanson’s 1953 study of John’s anthropology of the soul, for example, draws suggestively on Baruzi’s comparison of John with Plotinus (while acknowledging that John is unlikely to have read this Neoplatonic thinker). Sanson compares John’s thought repeatedly to Plotinus’s account of the yearning of the soul for its return to the One, viewing John’s work as a synthesis of Plotinian and scholastic anthropology that thereby affirms the immanence of God in the soul, and, at the same time, God’s transcendence.98 This schematization of ‘Plotinian’ and ‘scholastic’ forms of thought may seem rather dated today. Yet Sanson does at least begin to recognize the importance of Platonic desire to John’s thought. In subsequent decades, sporadic scholarly attention has been paid to John’s intellectual background. A number of studies, for instance, note the importance of medieval traditions of Dionysianism to John’s thought. Yet few have examined the relationship between his work and the understanding of desire developed by previous Western Dionysian tradition.99 Where this connection has been explored and the heightened affectivity of John’s thought noted, the claim has sometimes been made that John is an ‘affective Dionysian’—a tradition which, in its technical sense as stemming from Thomas Gallus and understanding the locus of contemplation to occur in the will rather than the intellect, is not a position that John holds.100 Exploring a related tradition, Denys Turner rightly highlights the mediation to John of related understandings of desire through medieval monastic interpretation of the Song of  Songs; this study will, however, counter Turner’s suggestion that 98  Henri Sanson, L’esprit humain selon Saint Jean de la Croix (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953), 45–9, 78, 345. 99  One interesting exception, which opens with an examination of different understandings of love and the will in this tradition, is Raúl Gutiérrez, Wille und Subjekt bei Juan de la Cruz (Tübingen: Francke, 1999), 17–49. 100  The ‘affective Dionysian’ tradition is, for example, an important element of the so-called ‘theologia mystica’ tradition theorized by Peter Tyler, St John of the Cross (New York: Continuum, 2010), 59–78.

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60  John of the Cross ‘the language of erōs’ was by John’s time ‘theologically and metaphysically deracinated’, a dead metaphor that had lost its theological power.101 Occasional historical studies of John’s thought have, in other words, explored specific aspects of his inheritance of the notion of desire, but have not sought to explore the broader connections of this terminology. While frequently drawing on these historical studies, a few scholars have also examined John’s thought through the lens of specific modern construals of desire. Four are worthy of specific mention. I have already cited the work of Georges Morel, who draws on Baruzi’s work whilst developing it in a more Hegelian direction, and who argues that John sought to explore the transformation of human consciousness in its search for the Absolute. Second, Alain Cugno’s short study of John from 1979 draws productively on French phenomenology (particularly Levinas) as it suggestively explores the role of bodiliness, temporality, and desire in John’s thought.102 Max Huot de Longchamp examines John through the lens of structuralist thought. He explores John’s anthropology as ‘evolving’, possessing a ‘dynamism’ that is generated both by the ‘temporality’ of the soul and by its ‘desire’ that emerges as the ‘conscious’ (that is, desiring) soul progressively becomes open to the work of God. The radical tension that thereby emerges between the desiring soul and its desired object is, Longchamp proposes, explored by John at the level of language: John’s poetic ‘mystical language’, he suggests, creates a ‘spiritual movement’ by which, through paradox and other distinctions, the completion of the ‘mystical anthropology’ is depicted.103 Finally, Rowan Williams’s exploration of the role of desire in the depiction of the intratrinitarian relations in the Romances, a valuable expansion of a theme explored in his former doctoral supervisee Iain Matthew, has made a distinctive contribution to reflections on the significance of negative theology.104 101 Turner, Eros and Allegory, 199. 102  Alain Cugno, Saint John of the Cross: The Life and Thought of a Christian Mystic (London: Burns & Oates, 1982). See also the anthropology developed on the basis of Cugno’s thought in Paul Gilbert, ‘Une anthropologie à partir de Saint Jean de la Croix: á propos d’un ouvrage récent’, Nouvelle Revue Theologique 103 (1981): 551–62. 103  Max Huot de Longchamp, Lectures de Jean de la Croix: essai d’anthropologie mystique (Paris: Beauchesne, 1981), esp. 117–34. 104 Rowan Williams, ‘The Deflections of Desire: Negative Theology in Trinitarian Disclosure’, in Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation, ed. Oliver Davies and

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Modern Reception of John of the Cross  61 The past half-century has seen the production of a series of suggestive studies that have fruitfully explored aspects of the significance of the broader notion of desire to John’s thought (although this represents a minority strand when compared to the two interpretative strands of ‘spirituality’ and ‘mysticism’ writings examined earlier in this chapter). Yet none of these works has explored the role that this notion in its fullest sense plays in his account of the transformation of the soul in the spiritual ascent as it is presented in his poetry and prose. Moreover, the three recent studies of John that have shown most interest in his per­tin­ ence for modern theological discussion of selfhood have shown little awareness of the importance of desire for John’s thought, being predominantly concerned either with the workings of cognition or of affect in his anthropology.105 The insights into desire provided by John of the Cross have not, in other words, been appropriately drawn on in the recent revival of theological interest in the theme. As noted in the Introduction, the middle chapters of this study operate predominantly in the mode of a historical study, recovering John’s reception and creative reworking of the notion of desire. In the final chapter, however, I revisit the recent theological interest in desire surveyed above, pointing to particular ways in which John’s account of the transformation of desire is a valuable resource for the pressing presentday task of deepening theological reflection on that theme. To reach that point, I begin in the next chapter by examining the various traditions from which John receives his striking understanding of desire.

Denys Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 115–35; Iain Matthew, ‘The Knowledge and Consciousness of Christ in the light of the Writings of St John of the Cross’ (DPhil, Oxford University, 1991). 105 Tomislav Begović, Gott, der Weg des Menschen zu sich selbst: zur theologischen Anthropologie in der mystischen Lehre des heiligen Johannes vom Kreuz (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1990); Gutiérrez, Wille Und Subjekt; Edward Howells, John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila: Mystical Knowing and Selfhood (New York: Crossroad, 2002).

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2 Desire and the spiritual ascent Chapter  1 revealed how twentieth-century scholarly attention to John has been somewhat restricted in the scope of its enquiry, often being captivated by modern theoretical commitments that John himself would have found perplexing. Rather, I propose in the rest of this study, the historical and present-day significance of his account of the spiritual ascent may be appropriately appreciated through the exploration of John’s appropriation and creative reworking of a series of traditions that themselves draw in diverse fashion on the biblical, Christian, and Platonic understandings of desire. In this chapter, I explore the various influences that inform his revision of this notion. In the first place, John is heavily influenced by Thomas Aquinas’s account of the workings of the appetites in the soul, a conceptual framework that draws in part on pseudo-Dionysius’s account of the working of erotic desire. It is on Aquinas’s understanding of appetition that John relies to emphasize the manner in which the soul is drawn towards objects in the created order. John applies this framework, however, in conjunction with an Augustinian understanding of the ascent as a transformation that occurs primarily through an interior turn within the soul. And it is through the sixteenth-century Spanish writings in this Augustinian tradition that John inherits a greater ambiguity than is held by Aquinas about the operation of the soul’s appetites. For John, in a distinctive rendition of Aquinas’s understanding of the appetites, the purification and redirection of the soul’s desires is necessary so that the soul’s interior search for God may not be diverted by the concerns of the external world. But while warning in Augustinian fashion of the extent to which the unpurified appetites give rise to sin within the soul, John also accords a distinctive role to love in propelling the transformed soul on the spiritual ascent. This is in large part an effect of the influence of diverse John of the Cross: Desire, Transformation, and Selfhood. Sam Hole, Oxford University Press (2020). © Sam Hole. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198863069.003.0003

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Desire and the Spiritual Ascent  63 strands of late medieval thought—especially certain so-called ‘affective Dionysian’ traditions, but also the influence of pseudonymous texts through which John read Augustine and Aquinas. In certain sixteenthcentury Spanish traditions that influenced John, moreover, this heightened emphasis on the role of love extends to a subtle attention to diagnosing the position of the soul on the spiritual ascent through attention to specific affective states in the soul.1 The overall effect is that John emphasizes more than Aquinas does the desiring nature of divine love itself. John’s account of the love for God that arises in the soul whose appetites have been stilled and purified depicts such love, in other words, as a graced reflection of the same love that sustains the relations among the persons of the Trinity. Finally, it is significant that John’s poetry and prose pay elevated attention to the potential and limits of language for describing the divine nature and the soul’s union with God. This emphasis in John’s writing may well reflect the concern shown by Dionysian traditions for the transformation of language on the spiritual ascent. Yet John’s extension of this tradition is distinctive in the extent to which he draws both on multiple traditions of poetry and on the medieval tradition of commentary on the Song of Songs. By drawing on these sources, John demonstrates a heightened interest in the manner in which poetic and biblical resources may be appropriated to portray both the purification and realization of the desires of the soul. In exploring the role that the notion of desire played in John’s thought, it is important to be clear from the outset that it does not appear that John had read Plato, whose own understanding of desire and selfhood is most famously delivered in Diotima’s account in the Symposium to Socrates of the role of erōs in the ascent of the soul (201d–212a).2 Nor 1  By ‘affective states’ I refer to those positively and negatively experienced felt states that are commonly discussed today within the complexly related category of the ‘emotions’. 2  Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, ‘A Beautiful Ending: Juan de la Cruz’s “Cántico Espiritual” ’, Journal of Theological Studies 54, no. 2 (2003): 539–42 points out the direct knowledge of Plato’s Phaedrus shown by those teaching at Salamanca in the years in which John attended it, and their use of it to comment on Aquinas and to criticize Luther (in particular, as Boyle shows, with reference to beauty, an important theme in John). Yet while she suggests that this connection may provide a means of positing the direct historical influence of Plato on the Cántico, it is the proposal of this chapter that these resonances in imagery are better explained in terms of the mediation of various subsequent ‘Platonic’ Christian and Renaissance traditions of thought.

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64  John of the Cross does it seem likely, despite suggestions to the contrary, that John knew (at least, in any detail) the writings of Gregory of Nyssa, a figure whose distinctive reworking of Platonic erōs was chiefly influential in the East.3 Through his reception and appropriation of a multitude of other tra­di­ tions of reflection on desire, however, John engages in a creative and distinctive reworking of a significant theological notion. Recognition of these intellectual origins enables, as subsequent chapters will demonstrate, fresh appreciation of the novelty and vitality of John’s account of the spiritual ascent.

I.  John of the Cross: a life In order to situate John within the context from which his distinctive theology of desire emerged, I begin with a brief account of John’s life. For readers less familiar with John, this succinct biography may be valuable for its own sake. Yet it is also worth revisiting for those more acquainted with John’s work, since it highlights the centrality to his life of the Carmelite Order, and situates him within the sixteenth-century Spanish context of prayer and reformism that was such a great influence on his thought. The rest of this chapter demonstrates the importance of understanding John in relation to this immediate context. The boy who would grow up to be John of the Cross was born in 1542 in the small town of Fontiveros, halfway between Madrid and Salamanca, the third child of two weavers.4 Much of Europe was engulfed in the 3  John’s first biographer, Quiroga, states (probably on the basis of the testimony of witnesses) that John read Gregory of Nyssa while a student at Salamanca. (José de Jesús María [Quiroga], Historia de la vida y virtudes del venerable padre fray Juan de la Cruz, ed. Fortunato Antolín (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 1992), I, 35.) If true, this would point to a highly intriguing connection with a further theological reworking of Platonic erotic desire. Yet John’s reading of Gregory of Nyssa is hard to substantiate. While Quiroga’s report at the very least reveals that Nyssa was known in early modern Spain, Quiroga’s evidence is questionable, and there is little evidence within John’s works of the influence of Gregory of Nyssa. I will therefore not consider the potential influence of the Nyssen further. For further critical appraisal of Quiroga’s testimony, see Eulogio Pacho, San Juan de la Cruz y sus escritos (Madrid: Ediciones Cristiandad, 1969), 56–9. 4  For a much fuller biography of John, delivering a synthesis of the most recent biographical research, see José Vicente Rodríguez, San Juan de la Cruz: la biografía (Madrid: Ediciones San Pablo, 2012). No extensive recent English-language biographical studies exist; most older English-language studies of John tend to rely on the biographical information given in Father

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Desire and the Spiritual Ascent  65 religious upheaval involved in the series of events trad­ition­al­ly known as the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. The continent’s intellectual elites were widely paying new attention to classical philosophy, not least in the form of humanism. Under the control of Emperor Charles V, while gaining vast wealth from the silver mines of the New World, Spain was the most powerful country in the continent. Yet the parents of Juan de Yepes, as he was first named, would have known and cared little for any of this. For them, life was a daily struggle in an economically fragile region, where death and illness were ever-present fears. John himself knew these dangers well. Shortly after his birth, both his father Gonzalo de Yepes and John’s older brother Luis died. John, his remaining brother Francisco, and his mother Catalina Álvarez repeatedly moved between towns in the local area in search of support, eventually settling in Medina del Campo.5 There, in his late teens, John was fortunate enough to benefit from one effect of the humanist revival taking place in Spain at the time: he received what seems likely to have been a total of four years of education in Greek, Latin, grammar, rhetoric, and possibly also philosophy, from a newly founded Jesuit college in the town, one of a series of such colleges then being founded in Spanish cities. The surviving books published by one of the teachers in the college, Juan Bonifacio, are evidence of the sophisticated understanding of humanist traditions to which John was presumably exposed for the first time during his studies here.6 In 1563, aged 21, John entered the Carmelite monastery in Medina, taking the name Juan de San Matías. After a year as a novice, he made Crisógono de Jesus Sacramentado, The Life of St John of the Cross, trans. Kathleen Pond (London; New York: Longmans; Harper, 1958), originally published in Spanish in 1929. This is now outdated in various respects, particularly concerning the question of possible intellectual influences on John. 5  Rodríguez, San Juan de la Cruz, considers numerous stories in his first chapter about John’s early life which might (as seems plausible with the writings of Teresa of Avila) be used to point to John’s distinctive thought as arising out of his awareness of his marginal position in society. Rodríguez accepts the story that the noble family of John’s father, who had disagreed with their son’s marriage to a poorer woman, refused to help John’s mother in her time of need after the death of her husband. He also considers plausible, in the light of recent research, the suggestion that John had Jewish—converso—ancestry, a fact about which he would have had to remain silent in Catholic Spain. 6 Rodríguez, San Juan de la Cruz, 30.

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66  John of the Cross his profession as a Carmelite friar and was sent to study in Salamanca. John lived at the studium generale of the Carmelite Order, the Colegio de San Andrés, and studied both there and at the University of Salamanca, then home to a revival of Thomist thought that would be hugely influential for Catholic theology in subsequent centuries. The course of John’s life was shortly, however, to take a rather different turn. On returning to Medina del Campo in September 1567 to say his first Mass in the presence of his mother, he met Teresa of Avila. She was in the city for the foundation of a second community of nuns who would make profession of the Carmelite life according to the reformed order of life that she had first instituted five years earlier in the city of Ávila. Like many across sixteenth-century Europe, Teresa was seeking to renew her religious order by returning it to its original practices and observances— in this case the primitive rule established in 1247 by Innocent IV—and so reversing the perceived laxity that had crept in during past centuries. Now, having received tentative support from local bishops and from the Order itself, she was seeking to expand her reform beyond Ávila. John agreed to join Teresa’s reform, but did not do so immediately. Instead, he returned to Salamanca to continue his studies. In summer 1568, however, he abandoned his studies—the assumption must be that he had decided to join Teresa’s reform—and returned to Medina.7 There, he met Teresa again and joined her movement, first accompanying her to the foundation of a convent in Valladolid in order to learn her way of life, and then setting up with two others the first male community of the reform in the small hamlet of Duruelo. With the foundation of this community in November 1568, he changed his name to Juan de la Cruz—or, in its Anglicized form, John of the Cross. In the following years, John was an energetic promoter of Teresa’s reforms. After spending a few months training novices at the newly founded priory in Pastrana, in 1571 John was appointed rector of a newly founded college for the Order in Alcalá, in an attempt to generate 7  Luis Enrique Rodríguez-San Pedro Bezares, La formación universitaria de Juan de la Cruz (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 1992), 131. Older biographies tend to assume that John left Salamanca in 1568, after three years’ study of philosophy and a final year of theology, having finished his studies. Yet, as Bezares shows, other Carmelites who studied at Salamanca followed the pattern that was standard for most others in the university—namely, to study theology for four years. It therefore seems much more likely that John abruptly ended his studies in the summer of 1568.

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Desire and the Spiritual Ascent  67 interest in the movement from students at the thriving university in the city. In the event, this attempt proved largely unsuccessful. John, however, quickly moved on, arriving at Teresa’s request in Avila in September 1572 to become spiritual director and confessor at the convent of the Encarnación, where Teresa had recently been appointed prioress. He would remain there for the next five years, the longest period John would serve in one location. The status of Teresa’s movement for reform remained, however, uncertain. Teresa aspired for the movement to bring about reform within the whole Carmelite Order, yet many within the Order opposed her plans, and her reforms continued to depend on the support of a few influential individuals. In 1576, the tide turned against the reform. Teresa was removed from her position as prioress of the Encarnación. Shortly after, in December 1577, John was taken prisoner by a number of Carmelites for his failure to leave the Encarnación. He underwent months of imprisonment in the Carmelite priory in Toledo, suffering poor health from the conditions in which he was placed and hearing no news of the outside world except for all that the friars told him of the suppression of the Discalced houses. It is entirely possible that no more would ever have been seen of John, had he not escaped in August 1578 by unscrewing the lock on his door and knotting together his bedsheets in order to let himself down from a window into freedom. Yet his escape and survival coincided with what eventually turned out to be a reversal in the fortune of Teresa’s reform. In 1580, after some Discalced friars were sent to Rome to petition the Holy See, the Discalced were allowed to erect an autonomous province, although under the higher jurisdiction of the general of the Order. Accordingly, although complete independence only came in 1593, from 1580 the position of Teresa’s reform was increasingly that of a separate order from the Carmelites. In the years after his escape from prison, as the Discalced Carmelites gradually acquired a firmer footing, John continued to serve as spiritual director for many religious and laypeople. He was also, however, a busy administrator and leader of the reform. He spent time as rector of various houses of the Order, in El Calvario, Baeza, and Granada, and in 1585 was appointed Vicar Provincial of Andalucia, which obliged him to travel extensively, visiting all the houses of friars and nuns in the

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68  John of the Cross province at least once a year. It was in these years, between 1578 and 1585, that John’s four prose works were written (barring small emend­ ations in 1591 to the Living Flame of Love). The final years of John’s life were not, however, to end peacefully. In 1590, tensions erupted within the Discalced Carmelite Order concerning its leadership, and John found himself on the losing side of the dispute. He moved, without office, to the isolated monastery of La Peñuela, in Andalucia. There, in September 1591, he began to suffer from fevers and gangrenous sores, a result of a skin infection today known as ­erysipelas. Eventually, aged 49, he died in the nearby town of Úbeda on 13 December 1591.

II.  The role of the appetites in John’s anthropology of the soul John’s work must be situated within the intellectual and cultural context of sixteenth-century Spain. An important aspect of this is the revival of interest in Thomas Aquinas that occurred during his lifetime, with Aquinas’s theology being an important influence on many specific aspects of John’s theological vision. Admittedly, John only explicitly cites Thomas three times—and one of these in fact refers to a later pseudoThomist work (N2.18.5; cf. also A2.24.1; N2.17.2). Yet John regularly draws on Aquinas in his citation of a range of scholastic maxims (e.g. A1.6.1; A2.3.2; A2.8.2; A3.26.6), and he is frequently indebted to Aquinas in his understanding of specific issues, such as prophecy (A2.24.10), limbo (CB11.10), or angels (CB20–21.10). Overall, while John’s thought is far too distinctive to be unproblematically identified (as was the neo-Thomist inclination) with Aquinas’s, it should be acknowledged that the anthropology that John develops—exploring the status and role of the external and internal senses, the working of the passions, and the operation of intellect and will in the act of cognition— is in its fundamental forms indebted to Aquinas.8 8  A comparison of the anthropologies of John and Aquinas which is excellent on the role these anthropological features play in both figures’ understanding of cognition, although less clear on their accounts of appetition, is Steven L. Payne, John of the Cross and the Cognitive

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Desire and the Spiritual Ascent  69 John’s anthropology admittedly exhibits a rather more uneven use of anthropological terminology than Aquinas. John’s intention is primarily to trace the progressive transformation in the course of the spiritual ascent, and the terminology and emphases of his anthropology of the soul sometimes shift to support this purpose. So, for example, while John assumes Aquinas’s Aristotelian position that the soul is the ‘form of the body’ (ST I.76.1),9 he also on isolated occasions speaks of the presence of the soul in the body resembling ‘the presence of a prisoner in a dark dungeon’ (A1.3.3; cf. A1.15.1; A2.8.4; CB18.1) in a manner that might imply a dichotomy between body and soul, but which is in fact rhetorically intended to emphasize the extent of transformation required in the course of the spiritual ascent. Like Aquinas, John structures his anthropology around a distinctive division between the lower ‘sensory’ part of the soul and the higher ‘spiritual’ (or, for Aquinas, ‘intellective’) part of the soul (ST I.78.1). This division is fundamental to John’s account of the lower stages of the spiritual ascent, serving to structure his analysis of the purifications required in the two ‘dark nights’. It is in the sensory part that the sensory appetites are located, with the five external senses of sight, taste, touch, hearing, and smell drawn to seek their own completion in the created order. It is also in the sensory part that, for John, the soul’s two internal senses are to be found.10 One of these, the phantasy, acts to collect and store the impressions received by these senses. The other, the imagination, en­ables the soul’s reflection on those phantasms, whether this be in focused reflection on particular images, or merely in the loose combinations of Value of Mysticism (Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), 16–90. The question of the relationship between Thomist and sanjuanist anthropology has a long and fraught history. Points of controversy have centred around: first, the number and function of the in­ter­ ior senses, and, second, how great a shift in anthropology is represented by John’s elevation of memory to the status of a spiritual faculty. For a summary of past points of debate, see André Bord, Mémoire et espérance chez Jean de la Croix (Paris: Beauchesne, 1971), 300–5; Payne, Cognitive Value of Mysticism, 40 n1; Dominic Doyle, ‘From Triadic to Dyadic Soul: A Genetic Study of John of the Cross on the Anthropological Basis of Hope’, Studies in Spirituality 21 (2011): 219–41. 9  Quotations from Thomas Aquinas are taken from The Summa Theologica of St Thomas Aquinas, ed. and trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 22 vols, 2nd ed. (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1920–4). 10  This is a change from Aquinas, who speaks of four internal sense powers (ST I.78.4).

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70  John of the Cross impressions that may arise in daydreaming and the like. Within the spiritual part of the soul, John’s understanding of cognition seems indebted to Aquinas. The phantasms that have been stored in the phantasy are abstracted by the intellect as forms, which, when presented to the will, cause the intellect to direct its attention towards that which is desired. The memory seems to function in an analogous manner to the intellect, although its operation particularly serves to cause the soul to reflect on broader aspects of its past. John certainly, in other words, introduces distinctive emphases into his appropriation of Aquinas’s account of the anthropology of the soul. Yet the fundamental structure of his anthropology is drawn from Aquinas. This knowledge of Aquinas’s anthropology seems likely to have been indebted to John’s study of the Summa Theologiae during what turned out to be the final year of his education at the University of Salamanca between 1564 and 1568. After three years in the Faculty of Arts studying logic as well as natural and moral philosophy, John moved to the Faculty of Theology—but dropped out to join Teresa’s reform after only one year of the four-year course. The painstaking reconstruction of that year’s timetable by Luis Rodríguez-San Pedro Bezares indicates that John probably attended one course of lectures on the Bible, two series of lectures on Scotus, and three or four series of lectures on Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, as well as instruction in the Carmelite tradition at the Colegio de San Andrés.11 It is instructive to note that, of the various lectures on Aquinas that John probably attended, one focused on questions concerning the ultimate end of human acts (ST I–II.1–5), and another largely considered questions of creation and human anthropology (ST I.63–83).12 While it is possible that John knew of Aquinas’s anthropology from other works, it seems plausible that it was predominantly developed from his study at Salamanca of the Summa Theologiae.13 11  Rodríguez-San Pedro Bezares, Formación universitaria, 83–127. 12  Rodríguez-San Pedro Bezares, Formación universitaria, esp. 90, 105, 109, 112. It is not clear whether John attended the course on ST I.63–83 since it clashed in the timetable with another series of lectures on penance. Bezares proposes that the lectures on Aquinas’s anthropology may in fact have taken place at a different time, and that John may therefore have attended them. 13  Although this was a period in which notable new readings of Thomas were emerging from the University of Salamanca (with contrasting interpretations of Aquinas being provided

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Desire and the Spiritual Ascent  71 It is on this work, therefore, that I shall base most of my analysis of the significance of desire in John’s appropriation of Aquinas’s anthropology in what follows. John accepts the fundamental features of Aquinas’s account of the operation of the appetites (appetitus) in the soul; in particular, John follows Aquinas in insisting on the ultimate dependence of the will on the intellect in cognition (A1.8.2; CB26.8; F3.49). He seems, as such, to follow the account presented by Aquinas in his treatise on human anthropology of the ‘appetitive powers’ as one of the five ‘genera’ of powers of the soul (ST I.78.1). An appetitive power indicates, Aquinas states, the inclination that every form has towards its perfection (and, accordingly, to the good existing or apprehended in a thing). All animals possess a sensitive appetite, which represents their inclination towards objects apprehended by the senses. Only in the rational soul, however, does there also exist the intellectual or rational appetite, also known as the will, which inclines the soul towards that which is apprehended by the intellect (ST I.80.2). The will’s inclination to perfection ultimately seeks the happiness (beatitudo) that consists ‘in nothing else than the vision of the Divine Essence’ (ST I–II.3.8). Only in the beatific vision is this inclination to perfection natural and therefore complete. In this life, the intellect must engage in the complex task of discerning the good (ST I–II.9.1). Accordingly, not every movement of the will occurs towards perfection: in this life the intellect may fail to apprehend those goods that tend towards perfection, and may accordingly cause the will to incline towards specific objects in a manner that is to be called ‘evil’ insofar as it lacks goodness (ST I–II.18.1).14

on one side by Bartolomé de Medina and Domingo Báñez, and on the other side by Domingo de Soto and Francisco de Toledo), there is no clear evidence that John was influenced by these. 14  Aquinas had already recognized that, since it is by the agency of the will that the intellect is moved to apprehend these ends, there is an apparent risk that an infinite regress exists in relation to the question of whether it is intellect or will that moves first. In response, however, he answers directly—in a manner that in part depends on his insistence that the soul’s know­ledge of God is an act of the intellect—that the first movement is an act of the intellect (ST I.82.4.ad3).

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72  John of the Cross Just as John’s account of the interaction of intellect and will draws on Aquinas, so does his account of the relationship between intellect and will in contemplation accord with the model presented by Aquinas. For Aquinas, the contemplative life primarily involves the knowledge and  contemplation of truth—and is therefore an act of the intellect (ST II–II.179.2). Yet the ‘motive cause’ of the contemplative life is the will, which ‘moves all the other powers, even the intellect, to their actions’ (ST II–II.180.1). Contemplation therefore ‘has its beginning in the appetite, since it is through charity that one is urged to the contemplation of God’ (ST II–II.180.7.ad1). Moreover, the exercise of the contemplative life (since it is an act that is not entirely perfected in advance of the beatific vision) in turn moves the appetite. This is because the delight caused in the soul through the contemplation of truth arouses ‘a yet greater love’ in the appetitive powers (ST II–II.180.7.ad1). In the areas where John’s account of contemplation diverges from Aquinas, it tends to do so while drawing on other aspects of Aquinas’s thought. For example, John draws on Aquinas’s understanding of cognition as he defines contemplation as a graced infusion of God into the possible intellect that is received passively (A2.32.4; CB14–15.14; CB39.12).15 Likewise, John’s account of God’s action in the ‘active’ and ‘passive’ nights, in which the ‘infusion’ of contemplation is an important aspect, has as a background influence Aquinas’s own account of the various workings of grace (ST I–II.109–14). Although, as will be shown in Chapter  4, John differs from Aquinas in paying more attention to the role of the will in drawing the intellect to contemplation and in emphasizing the love that results from contemplation, it is from Aquinas that the basic structure of his account of the relationship between will and intellect is drawn.

15  How to understand Aristotle’s distinction between the active and possible intellect was a matter of extensive medieval debate. For Aquinas, the possible intellect receives and retains the intelligible species presented to it by the active intellect (ST I.79.2). It is in this sense passive. But it is important to note that the possible intellect is not the same as the passive intellect, which is a sensory power (ST I.79.2.ad2). This has been a recurrent confusion in modern English translations of Aquinas, although not a confusion that John appears to have shared. I am grateful to Daniel de Haan for clarifying this issue for me.

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Desire and the Spiritual Ascent  73

III.  The interior ascent John’s account of the transformation of the soul was also deeply shaped, however, by the widespread sixteenth-century reappraisal of ‘Augustinian’ interiority, a tradition that itself had often been equivocal about the moral value of the soul’s desires. For Augustine, desire—a notion for which he had several words—was always ambiguous. On the one hand, the soul’s longing for God is a form of desire. On the other hand, however, it is the soul’s desires that snare it into sin.16 John’s writings also seem to be shaped by this sense of the ambiguity of the soul’s desires, and the need for an interior turn so that these desires may be rightly reordered. He seems to have inherited this interest both from the spiritual writings of his Carmelite Order and the influence of ­sixteenth-century Spanish writing. John’s entire life and work was deeply shaped by the traditions of the Carmelite Order. Only in the years immediately before John’s death did the Discalced Carmelite Order begin to establish a spiritual identity that was distinct from the Calced Order, as reflected in its replacement of the 1312 Carmelite breviary with the breviary of Pius V.17 It was the trad­ition­al Carmelite Breviary, therefore, that John would have known from the time of his entry into the Carmelite novitiate in 1563, and which he would have continued to recite during almost the entire period in which his works were written. Reading and meditation on the Scriptures was central to the daily rhythm of Carmelite life: his extensive attention to the Old Testament prophets (particularly Elijah) and to the Virgin Mary is emblematic of Carmelite writing, and his cursory mention of two feasts that were commemorated in the Carmelite calendar makes ­evident his assumption that his readers would be familiar with Carmelite 16  Augustine’s most common terms for desire include concupiscentia, desiderium, and libido, alongside other terms such as amor and caritas; his analysis of the faculty of voluntas is also relevant. While Augustine is typically critical of the libido, he uses both concupiscentia and desiderium to describe both the praiseworthy and sinful forms of desire. Lucid summaries of Augustine’s understanding of desire are provided in William  S.  Babcock, ‘Augustine and the Spirituality of Desire’, Augustinian Studies 25 (1994): 179–99; John C. Cavadini, ‘Feeling Right: Augustine on the Passions and Sexual Desire’, Augustinian Studies 36, no. 1 (2005): 195–217. 17  The Discalced Carmelite Order introduced a slightly revised version of the 1312 Breviary in 1584, but in 1586 instead decided to adopt the Breviary of Pius  V.  Jean Vilnet, Bible et Mystique chez Saint Jean de la Croix (Bruges: Desclée de Brouwer, 1949), 12–14.

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74  John of the Cross traditions (A3.42.5; CB29.2). It may well also be from readings prescribed in the Breviary that John came to know three writings mentioned in his prose works—a text apocryphally ascribed to Thomas Aquinas (considered below) and two sermons by Gregory the Great.18 In living and writing within this Carmelite tradition, John thought within a context that by the mid-sixteenth century perceived a strong tension between its origins (both mythically and in reality) as an eremitical order devoted to contemplation and its existing status as a ceno­bit­ ic­al, mendicant, and largely urban order.19 It was a paradoxical feature of the Carmelite Order that despite the increasingly strong emphasis by John’s day on the centrality of the interior life of prayer to the Christian life, the Order had little tradition of spiritual writing on this subject. The most influential work to engage with such guidance on the spiritual life was the late fourteenth-century Institution of the First Monks, a text that almost all Carmelites of John’s time would have read, and which describes the spiritual ascent as consisting in the withdrawal from the usual preoccupations of life and entering into solitude, culminating with the reception of the gift of union with God in love.20 By John’s day, in other words, attention to the interior life was also a commitment that was (particularly within reform movements) increasingly understood to be central to Carmelite spiritual traditions, although one on which limit­ed texts of guidance existed. This emphasis on the importance of the interior life was similarly transmitted to John by wider trends in sixteenth-century Spanish spiritual writing. The turn of the sixteenth century saw an enormous growth in Spanish demand for popular devotional vernacular writing, with over 3000 books with a predominantly religious focus coming to be 18 Vilnet, Bible et Mystique, 14–18. 19  The Carmelites mythically traced their roots to Elijah and a long tradition of contemplative figures in the pre- and early Christian era, although the true origins of the Order lay in a series of hermits who gathered on Mount Carmel in the crusader states in the early thirteenth century. On the background of Carmelite spiritual writing, see Keith J. Egan, ‘The Spirituality of the Carmelites’, in Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation, ed. Jill Raitt, Bernard McGinn, and John Meyendorff (London: SCM, 1989), 50–62; Bernard McGinn, ‘The Role of the Carmelites in the History of Western Mysticism’, in Carmelite Studies VIII: Carmel and Contemplation, ed. Kevin Culligan, OCD, and Regis Jordan, OCD (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2000), 25–52. 20  Egan, ‘The Spirituality of the Carmelites’, 56.

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Desire and the Spiritual Ascent  75 published in the following two centuries.21 A number of genres of religious writing were popular. In particular, however, it appears that readers exhibited a consistent interest in texts that dealt with the transformation of the interior self through prayer. A rough sense of the scale of this may be gained from the fact that, under the heading of ‘spirituality’—in modern usage a term closely related to but not always used coextensively with this emphasis on interiority—a recent study lists 1200 books published in Spain and the New World between 1485 and 1750.22 Such works focused primarily neither on the role of corporate religious observance, nor simply on the most desirable forms of visible religious devotion. Rather, they attended principally to the means by which, through examination of thoughts, feelings, moods, and passions, souls might come to recognize their interior states, and to act so as to order them rightly for growth in the Christian life. Such writers almost never intended to imply that the sacraments and ceremonies of the Catholic Church were to be ignored (such forms of writing risked immediate ecclesial censure); rather, they simply sought to point to the interior transformation of the soul as the primary means by which the highest possible forms of the Christian life achievable in this life might be attained. The sponsorship of Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros, appointed by the Spanish monarchs to pursue religious reform, provided an important boost to these interests. With his support, between 1500 and 1515 a number of medieval devotional works that both responded to and further stimulated these interests were translated into the vernacular. The Ejercitatorio de la vida espiritual, published in 1500 by García de Cisneros (cousin of the aforementioned Cardinal Cisneros), provided a florilegio of medieval spiritual writings which ordered them according to the traditional medieval schema of the threefold way. Whole texts translated and published included the Vita Christi by Ludolf of Saxony,

21  Alison Weber, ‘Religious Literature in Early Modern Spain’, in The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature, ed. David T. Gies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 149. 22  This estimate is formed of those works published in Spain and the New World between 1485 and 1750, including Spanish editions of older foreign works. See Melquíades Andrés Martín, Historia de la mística en la Edad de Oro en España y América (Madrid: BAC, 1994), 151–201.

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76  John of the Cross the Imitatio Christi of Thomas à Kempis (known at the time as the Contemptus Mundi), the Book and Life of Angela of Foligno, the Ladder of Divine Ascent by St John Climacus, and the Moralia of Gregory the Great. Yet in addition to the vernacular translation of medieval texts, there also developed a heightened Spanish interest in books which gave methodical guidance concerning the life of prayer. Two tendencies marked the new set of emphases in these sixteenth-century writings. In the first place, there emerged a tendency to present vocal prayer, typ­ic­al­ly understood as prayer which relied on the use of words and images, as to be surpassed by mental prayer, which relied on neither. (Opinion differed over whether vocal prayer represented a first stage to be eventually rejected, or whether mental prayer was preferable for all.) Second, these writings offered far more detailed and systematic guides by which the individual could plan and chart his or her spiritual growth, often paying heightened attention to the feelings that might accompany this journey. Neither of these tendencies was a new feature in Christian thought, but the combination of both marks out these sixteenth-century writings as a distinctive theological trend. A number of new compositions, frequently aimed at a lay readership, represent this change in emphasis: between 1500 and 1559, more than 22 of these were published in Castilian, many of them in multiple editions.23 The most famous of these today (and, given the rapid mid-century growth of the Jesuits in Spain, also well known in its own time) is undoubtedly the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. Yet another widely influential approach was represented by the series of mainly Franciscan writings that are today known as writings on recogimiento (literally, ‘recollection’). As I explore in greater detail below, it was these writings which had an especially strong influence on John. John was, in short, brought up in a religious context in sixteenthcentury Spain that paid heightened attention to the interior states of the soul. In its immediate context, this marked an extension and intensification of the late medieval interest in personal piety and of the interest of medieval mystical theological traditions in the propulsion of the 23  Weber, ‘Religious Literature’, 152.

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Desire and the Spiritual Ascent  77 spiritual ascent by interior practices of prayer. In the longer term, these interests may be traced to the long-standing interest in introspection, a concern that may ultimately be traced back to Augustine, as a means of reflecting on the soul’s relationship with God.24 John was certainly deeply influenced by this context. It is possible, in the first place, that John may have read texts by Augustine himself that would have informed his interest in this theme. John may well have read the Confessions, Augustine’s hugely influential recounting of the journey of his ‘restless heart’ from its state of sin to the moment of his conversion, which were first published in Spain in 1554 and read by Teresa that same year.25 Yet although John may have engaged in isolated reading of Augustine’s works, and have picked up certain widely known phrases through medieval florilegia, it does not seem that John engaged in extensive reading of Augustine. Notably, for instance, Bezares shows that Augustine was not the subject of lectures at Salamanca during John’s time there.26 Aside from Augustine, John would almost certainly have read a number of the medieval spiritual texts that were published in Spain during the sixteenth century. His own references to ‘los espirituales’ (A1.1.1), ‘los contemplativos’ (N2.5.1), and ‘otros místicos teólogos’ (N2.5.3) point to his awareness of a number of different traditions, even if the precise groups of which he was thinking remain somewhat obscure. Given his education in a Jesuit college in Medina del Campo, it is widely presumed that he would have been exposed to the Spiritual Exercises during his years there, even if it is not an explicit influence in his work. Moreover, if Teresa’s account of her own devotional reading, and her instructions for the Discalced Carmelite Order more generally, is taken as indicative of the works her reforming companion may have read, evidence for John’s even wider familiarity with these traditions may be gained. In her Life, Teresa recounts her reading of the Vita 24  A brief discussion of the roots of this interiority may be found in Edward Howells, ‘Early Modern Reformations’, in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. Amy Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 119–20. 25 Teresa of Avila, Life 9.7–8. Translations of Teresa’s works are taken from Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez, eds, The Collected Works of St Teresa of Avila, 3 vols (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1976–85). 26  Rodríguez-San Pedro Bezares, Formación universitaria, 83–127.

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78  John of the Cross Christi;27 in her 1568 Constitutions for the Discalced Carmelites, she recommends that libraries in Carmelite convents should buy the Moralia, the Vita Christi, and the Imitatio Christi.28 These works were certainly likely also to have been read by John. The broadly Augustinian tenor of this emphasis on the interior ascent also appears to have influenced John’s account of the soul’s appetites. While the fundamental structure of John’s anthropology is indebted to Aquinas, John incorporates what might be called a somewhat more Augustinian sense of the power of the appetites’ yearning on the soul, and an associated ambivalence about the moral value of human desires.29 For Aquinas the sensory appetites and the will are passive and therefore morally neutral, only responding to stimuli presented to them (respectively, by external objects and by the intellect). John’s account of appetition, however, draws extensively on the range of less technical anthropological terminology mentioned in the Introduction (ansia, concupiscencia, desear, gustar, hambre, pretender, querer). John uses these terms to depict the sensory appetites and the will as consistently yearning for satisfaction.30 The consequence is to impute much greater moral agency to the appetites, with John’s account emphasizing the extent to which these powers constitute one significant aspect of the sinfulness of the soul. His is an account of the appetitive nature of the soul which resonates with the firmly Augustinian tenor of much sixteenthcentury discussion of the interior transformation of the soul. The influence of these Augustinian traditions is also evident in John’s elevation of the memory to the status of a spiritual faculty alongside intellect and will. This is a feature that differentiates him from Aquinas, who does not make memory a spiritual faculty. It has been a recurrent point of debate whether John’s account can be described as

27  Teresa of Avila, Life 38.9. 28  Teresa of Avila, Constitutions 1.13. 29  Augustine’s exploration of the yearning nature of the soul’s desires (for which he typically uses the term cupiditas) is most vividly depicted in the Confessions. On his more ambivalent assessment of the potential of such desire to be directed towards God and not sin, see City of God, Book 14. 30  For this list, see Payne, Cognitive Value of Mysticism, 34. John’s use of apetito almost always refers to the sensitive appetites, pointing to the importance that these play in his anthropology of the soul. Yet on occasion (e.g. CB26.18) he gives it a much broader meaning, using it to point to the yearning that characterizes the state of the entire soul.

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Desire and the Spiritual Ascent  79 fundamentally Augustinian or Thomist—or, if conceived of as an internally coherent sanjuanist system, to which of these theological ­traditions it was more indebted.31 Certainly, John’s triadic anthropology may reflect the influence of past Augustinian spiritual traditions—both of writers on recogimiento such as Osuna and Laredo, and of older influential writers who were themselves read in sixteenth-century Spain such as Gregory the Great, Bernard of Clairvaux, and William of St Thierry.32 It may also reflect a desire to align himself with typical Carmelite thought: the fourteenth-century scholar John Baconthorpe, whose work remained a compulsory part of the study required in Carmelite training (to whose thought John would accordingly have been exposed during his time in Salamanca), adopted this Augustinian anthropology, and so by adopting a triadic structure, John’s work would have acquired greater explanatory appeal in Carmelite circles.33 Yet John’s account of the memory is hardly a straightforward reproduction of Augustine’s thought. The functions that John attributes to the memory, for instance, are rather different from those that Augustine suggests.34 Moreover, John never explicitly makes the association between these faculties and the persons of the Trinity that Augustine makes in his famous exposition of the subject in De Trinitate 9–15, even if there are sentences in which he comes close to making such an association.35 Rather than seeking to draw direct connections between John

31  The question of whether John believed that there were two or three spiritual faculties was heavily connected with the question of his faithfulness to Thomas. For surveys of older literature on this question, see Elizabeth Wilhelmsen, ‘La memoria como potencia del alma en San Juan de la Cruz’, Carmelus 37 (1990): 88 n2, 96, 130–4; Karol Wojtyla, Faith according to St. John of the Cross, trans. Jordan Aumann, OP (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1981), 54 n45. In recent literature, André Bord’s commitment, in Mémoire et espérance, to seeing a coherent, unchanging ‘système sanjuaniste’ has been very influential. The recent work of Doyle, ‘From Triadic to Dyadic Soul’, however, offers a thoughtful rebuttal of this aspect of Bord’s analysis. 32 Bord, Mémoire et espérance, 231; Edward Howells, ‘John of the Cross (1542–91)’, in The Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine, ed. Otten Willemien, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1230–2. 33 Bord, Mémoire et espérance, 291–305. 34 Bord, Mémoire et espérance, 79–90. 35  On this point I depart somewhat from Howells, ‘John of the Cross’ and am closer to Doyle, ‘From Triadic to Dyadic Soul’, 234–6. As Doyle points out, the passage that is typically cited to make this association of faculties and persons is F1.15—and yet John does not ex­pli­ cit­ly mention the memory here, instead making a much broader point (more in accord with an equation of the two human operations of knowing and loving with two divine processions) about the absorption of the soul ‘in the unfathomed embrace of the Father’s sweetness’. Other

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80  John of the Cross and Augustine’s understandings of the memory, it instead makes more sense (as I will do in Chapter 4) to explore how John’s understanding of the memory contributes to his broader account of the spiritual ascent. John’s elevation of the memory to the status of a spiritual faculty emphasizes, in brief, the importance of the transformation of the soul’s relationship to its past actions for the reorientation of its future hopes. The memory of these actions exerts a powerful effect on the soul: only by ceasing to be dominated by them may the soul fully turn its desires towards God. By John’s time, there was mounting ecclesial and state suspicion of the theological and political consequences of some of the intense popular interest in the interior life that had been shown in the first half of the sixteenth century. Individuals and groups—predominantly women— who were perceived to pose a threat to the state or the church were increasingly accused of ‘Erasmianism’, ‘Lutheranism’, and alumbradismo (‘enlightenment’), the latter being a term of abuse applied to a variety of seemingly unconnected groups whose proponents were believed to rely on a heterodox practice of dejamiento (‘abandonment’) that denied the role of all bodily activity in an abandonment of the soul to the love of God.36 On a theological level, from the 1550s a series of Dominican writings reasserted the centrality of ‘vocal’ prayer, informed by speculative scholastic theology, against the view (more closely associated throughout the period with Franciscan writers) that so-called ‘mental prayer’ was also a means to knowledge of God.37 The changing official mood is perhaps most strikingly evident in the growing assertiveness of

passages that Howells cites to back up this point (N2.4.2; N2.13.11; CB20–21.4; CB39.4; F2.1; F2.34; F4.17) are similarly unclear. 36 Alastair Hamilton, ‘The Alumbrados: Dejamiento and its Practitioners’, in A New Companion to Hispanic Mysticism, ed. Hilaire Kallendorf (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2010), 103–24; Eulogio Pacho, Apogeo de la mística cristiana: historia de la espiritualidad clásica española, 1450–1650 (Burgos: Monte Carmelo, 2008), 291–341. 37 Melquíades Andrés Martín, ‘Common Denominators of Alumbrados, Erasmians, Lutherans and Mystics: The Risk of a More Spiritual “Intimate Spirituality” ’, in The Spanish Inquisition and the Inquisitorial Mind, ed. Angel Alcalá, trans. Esther da Costa-Frankel (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 1987), 457–94.

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Desire and the Spiritual Ascent  81 the Inquisition: the 1559 Index, in particular, reaffirmed the prohibition of the 1551 Index on vernacular editions of the Bible and sought to remove from circulation all those books that advocated potentially heterodox forms of prayer, including works by Francisco de Osuna, Juan de Ávila, and Luis de Granada.38 John does not seem, however, to have been especially concerned by these shifts of mood. He would certainly have been aware of them, not least given Teresa’s experience of increasing suspicion by her Dominican confessor García de Toledo, which was the reason for her writing of her Life.39 His more reserved account in the second redaction of the Canticle of the extent of union possible in this life may represent a degree of caution on his part. Yet high caution against ecclesiastical censure is not otherwise a dominant feature of his writings. For example, although John quotes Scripture extensively, he rarely (far less than most other Spanish spiritual writers of his age) seeks to show that his in­ter­pret­ ations were in accordance with patristic and medieval authorities.40 This omission was certainly a concern after John’s death, since the editor of the first (1618) edition of John’s works, Diego de Jesús Salablanca, included in the work an essay that addressed precisely this point.41 Moreover, the long delay after his death in the publication of his works was in part a result of concerns (reflective of the suspicion of what would later be termed Quietism) about possible advocacy of dejamiento in John’s writings. This relative absence of caution (perhaps since he had no intention of publishing his works) makes John’s work resonate more with the atmosphere of the first half of the century: he is in large part a figure engaged in the creative reworking of theological traditions in service of the delivery of guidance concerning the spiritual ascent.

38 Weber, ‘Religious Literature’, 153. The prohibition on many of these writings was rescinded in 1566, but the effect of this brief ban was to make many cautious of these writings and the methods advocated in them. 39  Teresa of Avila, Life, Prologue.2. 40 On John’s relatively limited citation of other theological writers, see Manuel Diego Sánchez, ‘La herencia patrística de San Juan de la Cruz’, in Experiencia y pensamiento en San Juan de la Cruz, ed. Federico Ruiz (Madrid: Editorial de Espiritualidad, 1990), 84. 41  I am grateful to an anonymous reader for this information.

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82  John of the Cross

IV.  Love and the ascent Dionysian erōs and the metaphysical basis of the appetites John’s account of the appetites, delivered through a broadly ‘Augustinian’ interest in the interior ascent, is particularly marked by the significance he accords to the role of ‘love’ (amor) in propelling the soul on the spiritual ascent. The result is that John’s notion of desire emphasizes further than Aquinas, and in a manner that more resembles the understanding of pseudo-Dionysius, the extent to which appetition is not simply a property of the soul but has a broader metaphysical significance. This is in large part a result of the influence of Dionysius and subsequent Dionysian traditions on John, but was also—as I now show—underpinned by broader late medieval interest in the foundational role of love in the Christian life. Certainly, Aquinas partially acknowledges this broader metaphysical significance of appetite. In opening his enquiry into the nature of goodness in the earliest stages of the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas agrees with Aristotle that ‘goodness is what all desire’ (bonum est quod omnia appetunt, ST I.5.1). Yet instead of then following Aristotle in understanding the good essentially in reference to human relations and character, Aquinas proceeds to present the good in a much broader metaphysical context, pointing to goodness as identical with being. Goodness and being differ only, Aquinas insists, in relation to ‘aspect’, in that ‘goodness presents the aspect of desirableness (appetibilis), which being does not present’ (ST I.5.1). To be is itself desirable because it is perfective; accordingly, being (that which exists) is also good (it is appetible). The various questions in the Prima Secundae on the will and the passions examined above that are frequently characterized as belonging to Aquinas’s ‘ethical’ treatise are, in other words, rooted in the underlying metaphysics of the desire of the created order for the good that is established at the start of the Summa Theologiae. Yet when he turns to examine the extent to which appetite may be imputed to God, Aquinas is far more cautious. He is careful to insist that, although one may speak of a divine appetite, this relates only to the acts of loving and delighting in what is already possessed, rather than

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Desire and the Spiritual Ascent  83 the act of seeking what is not yet possessed, since the latter act would imply imperfection in God (ST I.19.1.ad2). Likewise, as he proceeds to discuss divine love (amor), which is the first act of the divine will, Aquinas is careful to insist that such language is metaphorical insofar as it might imply an increase in divine perfection (ST I.20.1.ad2). And in discussing the theological virtue of charity, while his account on occasion resembles the framework set up by Dionysius, Aquinas is explicit from the outset that caritas is not erōs but rather ‘the friendship (amicitia) of man for God’ (ST II–II.23.1). John, however, is much more willing to speak, like Dionysius, in terms of the erotic quality of the appetites, especially when describing the appetites of the soul that have been purified through the ‘dark night’. John gives, in this sense, an account of the metaphysical framework that underpins the operation of the appetites that owes much more to Dionysius than to Aquinas’s assimilation of Dionysius. For Dionysius, erōs is a term that may first and foremost be used to describe the divine nature, and is only derivatively a property of the created order. As Dionysius puts it in The Divine Names, it is through erōs that the One who is Himself the Beautiful and the Good is erotically drawn by Beauty and Goodness ‘towards all things that have being’.42 All this takes place by an ecstatic process in which God is, paradoxically, ‘drawn from His transcendent throne above all things, to dwell within the heart of all things’, while yet able ‘through a super-essential and ecstatic power’ to stay ‘within Himself ’.43 At the same time, Dionysius urges, the love of the creation for God is also rightly called erōs. There is, in other words, one erōs, the divine erōs that is always going out from God and sim­ul­ tan­eous­ly yearning to return to its source. Three possible routes might explain the means by which this elevated ‘Dionysian’ sense of the metaphysical rootedness of desire may have come to inform John’s thought. In the first place, it is possible but

42  The Divine Names (DN) 4.11–13, 708A–713A. Following a growing preference among recent Dionysian scholarship, I quote not from the recent Luibheid (1987) translation but from the older translation by C.E. Rolt that adheres more closely to the syntax and terminology of Dionysius’ Greek: Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, On the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology, trans. C.E. Rolt (London: SPCK, 1920). 43  DN 4.13, 712A–B.

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84  John of the Cross unlikely to have come from any of Aquinas’s writings that John may have read. It is possible, in particular, that John had read Aquinas’s Commentary on the Divine Names. Yet this hardly helps to explain John’s distinctiveness, since Aquinas is just as cautious in this work as in the Summa Theologiae about the potential for Dionysian erōs to point to divine love.44 Alternatively, it is certainly possible that John had directly read the works of pseudo-Dionysius himself, to whose thought John is indebted in multiple other respects. John’s account of the ‘dark night’ explores in striking fashion the Dionysian trope of ‘darkness’, with all his four direct quotations of the Areopagite citing the same maxim to describe the divine infusion of contemplation—which is for John the definition of ‘mystical theology’—as a ‘ray of darkness’ to the soul (A2.8.6; N2.5.3; CB14–15.16; FB3.49).45 Likewise, the tripartite schema of ascent through purgation, illumination, and union (e.g. CB.Theme), the mul­ tiple uses of the metaphor of divine communication as a ray of sunlight shining through glass (e.g. N2.12.3), and the comparison of God and His attributes to a circular shape without beginning or end (CB37.7) may all also be found in Dionysius’s work.46 Yet it is no easy task to establish the direct influence of Dionysius on John’s writings, whether on the basis of biographical information or of comparison of their works. John’s four quotations of the ‘ray of darkness’ hardly provide conclusive evidence of John’s direct contact with the corpus of the Areopagite, and show a knowledge of Dionysius that could plausibly have been acquired through medieval florilegia.47 The other tropes invoked by John are commonplace within later Dionysian thought. 44  Commentary on the Divine Names 4.10. Currently, the only published English translation of Aquinas’s commentary is contained in Harry  C.  Marsh, ‘Cosmic Structure and the Knowledge of God: Thomas Aquinas’ In Librum Beati Dionysii De Divinis Nominibus Expositio’ (PhD, Vanderbilt University, 1994), 265–549. On John’s possible reading of this text, see Luis M. Girón-Negrón, ‘Dionysian Thought in Sixteenth-Century Spanish Mystical Theology’, Modern Theology 24, no. 4 (2008): 695. 45  The Mystical Theology (MT) 1.1, 1000A. 46  Girón-Negrón, ‘Dionysian Thought’, 704. 47  Girón-Negrón notes (695, n9) that John’s language of ‘rayo de tiniebla’ seems closer to the older Latin translations of Sarrazin and Grosseteste than to the more recent Renaissance translations by Traversari or Ficino; he acknowledges, however, that although these older editions were available in the library of the University of Salamanca, John could also have acquired this phraseology elsewhere.

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Desire and the Spiritual Ascent  85 And while Quiroga’s 1628 biography cited Dionysius alongside Gregory of Nyssa as a figure whom John studied at Salamanca, the same problems as cited above surround the use of this evidence to conclude that John knew Dionysius’s works. It seems more likely that the influence of this tradition, with its depiction of God’s gracious love as itself having the quality of desire, came primarily from John’s reading of late medieval works in the Dionysian tradition that placed a heightened emphasis on the role of love in propelling the ascent to contemplation and union. For instance, John contrasts ‘scholastic theology, through which the divine truths are understood’, with ‘mystical theology, which is known through love and by which these truths are not only known but at the same time enjoyed’ (CB.Prol.3): the Dionysian ‘mystical theology’ certainly involves the knowledge of ‘truths’, but in a manner that is extensively marked by the affective response of the soul. It is plausible that John may have known (even if mediated through early sixteenth-century Spanish writings) aspects of the writings of German and Flemish mystical theologians such as Eckhart, Tauler, Suso, and Ruusbroec.48 In addition, Ysabel de Andía points out that John’s attraction in 1567 to joining the Carthusian Order may well have in part arisen through his reading of works within this tradition—and two of the most widely circulated Carthusian writings in sixteenth-century Spain were Denys the Carthusian’s commentary on the Mystical Theology and Hugh of Balma’s affectively accented work known today as Viae Sion Lugent.49 Whichever of these three routes was the main way in which John was exposed to this Dionysian thought, it is clear that John adopts Aquinas’s fundamental account of the appetites, but with a more ‘Dionysian’ sense 48  Jean Orcibal, Saint Jean de la Croix et les mystiques rheno-flamands (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1966). Orcibal draws with critical care on the older exploration of this possible connection in A Benedictine of Stanbrook Abbey, Mediaeval Mystical Tradition and John of the Cross (London: Burns & Oates, 1954). The fullest English-language survey of arguments on this possible connection is given by Marie M. Gaudreau, Mysticism and Image in St John of the Cross (Bern; Frankfurt am Main: Herbert Lang; Peter Lang, 1976), 35–65. It is hard to demonstrate John’s direct exposure to these texts; it is perhaps most likely that these ideas were mediated to him through recogido writing. 49  Ysabel de Andía, ‘San Juan de la Cruz y la “Teología Mística” de “San Dionisio” ’, in Actas del congreso internacional sanjuanista, ed. A. García Simón, vol. 3 (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 1993), 97.

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86  John of the Cross of the metaphysical erōs that underpins their operation in the soul. Yet John’s work is certainly characterized by an effusive affectivity, ascribing a heightened importance to the role of the transformed will, enflamed in love, in drawing the intellect towards union. He is indebted to a series of late medieval shifts in Dionysian thought that emphasized the role of love on the ascent.

Late medieval reworkings of Augustine and Aquinas The emphasis that John places on the role of love in propelling the ascent of the soul is not only a result, however, of the influence of the interest in metaphysical erōs shown by Dionysian traditions of thought. In add­ ition, John’s distinctive understanding of desire seems to have been influenced both by late medieval reworkings of the ideas of Augustine and Aquinas, and, more immediately, the significant role assigned to the affects by Spanish recogimiento guidance on prayer. As already noted, it is possible that John had read parts of the work of Augustine himself. In addition, John’s works also show extensive influence from the thirteenth-century pseudo-Augustinian Soliloquorum animae ad Deum—a text which is a first-person monologue describing in affectively charged language the soul’s longing to know and love God, while at the same time deeply regretting the sinfulness of the human soul. This is a work which, ascribed to Augustine himself, went through multiple editions in sixteenth-century Spain.50 Four of the six quotations that John attributes to Augustine are in fact drawn from this work, providing a sign of the authority that this work bore for John. Two of these pick up on recurrent Augustinian themes already noted. In the 50  The work, as was first recognized by Marcel Bataillon, was issued alongside two other pseudo-Augustinian works (though ascribed to Augustine) in a Spanish translation entitled Meditaciones, soliloquio y manual which went through six editions between 1511 and 1550. A second translation of the work was printed at Medina del Campo in 1553. (Jesús Gómez, ‘El soliloquio de tradición agustiniana como límite del diálogo’, Revista de Literatura 66 (2004): 26 n7.) The work was also influential for Teresa’s writing (see Interior Castle 4.3.3, Life 41.10 and Way of Perfection 28.2), as is recognized by Alfred Morel-Fatio, ‘Les lectures de Sainte Thérèse’, Bulletin Hispanique 10 (1908): 33–4. The Soliloquorum is reprinted in Migne, PL 40.863–98. The English translation is: LMFG, trans., The Soliloquies of Saint Augustine. A Manual of Contemplative Prayer. A New and Exact Translation (Edinburgh: Sands & Co, 1912).

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Desire and the Spiritual Ascent  87 Ascent, John quotes the Soliloquorum to emphasize the unmeasurable distance between human sinfulness and divine righteousness (A1.5.1). In the first stanza of the Canticle, John emphasizes the importance of introspection for knowledge of God (CB1.6). Yet John’s two further quotations of the Soliloquorum are only the most explicit instantiations, as Colin Thompson rightly emphasizes, of a much broader influence of the work on John’s thought that is particularly evident in the first ten stanzas of the Canticle poem and commentary.51 In the first place, John’s understanding of the ascent as he presents it in these early stanzas seems to be deeply informed by the emphasis in the pseudo-Augustinian work on the principle that, since the soul’s senses cannot find God, the ascent must take place through the soul’s recognition of the beauty first of irrational and then of rational creatures (CB4.1; CB5.1). In this respect, John’s account of the ascent introduces an emphasis on physical desire as rooted in desire of God that is, one might say, more resonant of Diotima’s account of the ascent in the Symposium than is usual in the Augustinian tradition, which tended to introduce a stricter delineation between earthly and divine desires. In addition to this striking subject matter, John also draws extensively on the heightened affective tone and the imagery of the Soliloquorum, which particularly emphasize the soul’s loving yearning for God. In the first ten stanzas of the Canticle John depicts the ‘groaning’ and ‘cries’ of the Bride, and the use of creatures as ‘messengers’ sent by the Bride to seek her Beloved (CB6). The anguished exclamations and antitheses of these stanzas of the poem also, as Thompson points out, resemble the language of the Soliloquorum. John was, in short, heavily influenced by the Augustinian sense of the ambiguity of human desires. He received this sense in part, however, through a late medieval pseudonymous text that placed a greater emphasis than did Augustine on the affective qual­ ities of the soul’s desire for God. In the case of John’s reception of Thomas Aquinas, one may point in the same way to the manner in which he was influenced by his reception of two late medieval pseudo-Thomist texts. The first of these two works,

51 Colin P. Thompson, St John of the Cross: Songs in the Night (London: SPCK, 2002), 108–10.

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88  John of the Cross De decem gradibus amoris (‘On the Ten Degrees of Love’), is used extensively by John near the end of the Night to deliver a summary of the spiritual ascent which places heightened emphasis on the soul’s love as that which propels the spiritual ascent (N2.19–20). It is an anonymous mid- or late thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century text, contained within the opuscule De dilectione Dei et proximi (‘On the Love of God and Neighbour’).52 The work makes no reference to Aquinas and may even have been written before Aquinas—indeed, its emphasis on the affective states resulting from love is especially redolent of the affectively heightened reworking of Augustinian thought initiated by Bernard of Clairvaux. John, following the traditional attribution of the work, states that it was written by Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas (N2.18.5). Given that he most likely read it in the 1571 ‘Piana’ edition of Aquinas’s works, however, it seems likely that John viewed it primarily as a work by Aquinas.53 In drawing on this work, John adopts the work’s outline of the ten stages of the mystical ladder of divine love to deliver a further summary of the spiritual ascent. He extensively incorporates the quotations of biblical and patristic sources made by the anonymous author, though does not make use of the speculative philosophical elements of the work.54 The result is the creation of a section in the Night, which, while broadly in line with the account of the ascent in the rest of John’s writings, places great emphasis on the different experiences of the soul’s love for God (sickness, unceasing searching, intense activity, continual suffering, and so on) that will arise at each stage of the spiritual ascent. In short, while drawing on a text that he thinks to be by Thomas Aquinas, John in fact imports a far more affective, late medieval emphasis into his account of the spiritual ascent.

52  The influence of this text on John is examined in P.  de Surgy, ‘La source de l’échelle d’amour de Saint Jean de la Croix’, Revue d’Ascétique et de Mystique 27 (1951): 18–40, 237–59, 327–46. De dilectione Dei et proximi is reprinted in D. Thomae Aquinatis Opera Omnia, volume 28 (Paris: Vives, 1875), 324–94, with De Decem gradibus amoris secundem Bernardum printed on 351–67. 53  de Surgy, ‘La source’, 22–4. 54  de Surgy, ‘La source’, 38–9.

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Desire and the Spiritual Ascent  89 John also makes extensive use in his depiction of mystical union of the pseudo-Thomist work De Beatitudine (‘On Beatitude’).55 This is an anonymous text that first appears in early fifteenth-century manuscripts, already attributed to Aquinas, although it appears to date from at least a century before this period, with its later growth in circulation potentially resulting from the consonance of its subject matter with elements of the devotio moderna movement.56 Whether John believed it to be by Aquinas himself is unclear: although he explicitly attributes it to Aquinas (CB38.4), the ‘Piana’ edition through which John probably also encountered this work printed the text in small type, insinuating its apocryphal character.57 This is the only occasion on which John makes explicit reference to the text, but it plays an extremely important role in the manner in which his doctrine of love is brought together with his elevated pneumatology in the final stanzas of both the Canticle and the Flame. The text itself considers the seven human acts that are involved in the beatific vision: the knowledge, love, enjoyment, union, praise, ac­know­ ledge­ment, and worship ‘of ’ God, ‘through’ God, and ‘in’ God. This theme is most explicitly picked up by John in F3.78–85, which (chiefly in 3.82–5) draws extensively on the framework of De Beatitudine. It also extensively informs the later stanzas of the Canticle, for instance in John’s depiction of the soul’s entry into God and its participation in the divine attributes (CB37.1–7; CB38.4–5; CB39.9; cf. F2.36). And it is a crucial source for the important role that John accords to the Holy Spirit in these final stages of union (CB38.3; CB39.3; CB39.5; F4.7).58 As in the case of De decem gradibus amoris, John’s use of De Beatitudine introduces an affective emphasis to his use of what he likely thinks to be the writings of Thomas Aquinas. 55  The influence was first noted by Dom Philippe Chevallier, ‘Le Cantique espiritual interpolé’, La Vie Spirituelle 16 (Jan 1927): 85. The most extensive study of the influence of this work is contained in Miguel Angel Diez González, ‘La “reentrega” de amor así en la tierra como en el cielo: influjo de un opúsculo seudo-tomista en San Juan de la Cruz’, Ephemerides Carmeliticae 13 (1962): 299–352. The work itself is reprinted in D. Thomae Aquinatis Opera Omnia, volume 28 (Paris, 1875), 404–23. 56  Diez González, ‘La “reentrega” de amor’, 305–6. 57  Iain Matthew, ‘The Knowledge and Consciousness of Christ in the Light of the Writings of St John of the Cross’ (DPhil, Oxford University, 1991), 109. 58  Diez González, ‘La “reentrega” de amor’, 334–48.

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90  John of the Cross

Recogimiento prayer John was probably, in short, directly familiar with some passages in the writings of Augustine, Aquinas, and Dionysius, especially those that were excerpted in collections of florilegia. He also encountered these traditions of thought through a series of late medieval texts that exhibited a heightened interest in the role of love in propelling the soul on the ascent. John’s emphasis on the importance of love, and his use of various other images and concepts, was undoubtedly also strongly influenced— and likely mediated to him—by earlier sixteenth-century Spanish spiritual writings, especially Franciscan writing on recogimiento, to which I now turn. As has already been observed, Cardinal Cisneros’s reforms at the turn of the sixteenth century both drew on and further encouraged widespread Spanish interest in spiritual writings, especially those that explored the transformation of the interior life. Of these spiritual writings, John was most heavily influenced by those that promoted prayer in the form of recogimiento (‘recollection’). The roots of this approach may be found in Spain in the 1480s: during reforms of the Franciscan order, a series of writings on prayer came to emphasize the importance of the ‘gathering’ of the senses in meditation. The term recogimiento was itself first used in various works published in the 1520s and 1530s by writers associated with the practice, among them Alonso de Madrid, Francisco de Osuna, Bernardino de Laredo, and Bernabé de Palma. It was through these writers that recogimiento prayer came to particular prominence.59 A series of concerns united these advocates of recogimiento prayer. All were interested in the role of the interior self in the spiritual ascent. This ascent was, they emphasized, a path to which all Christians were called, not simply a select elite; their works therefore sought (successfully) to reach beyond the friaries and to aid laypeople in prayer. For those embarking on this path, these writers emphasized the importance of quietness and self-reflection (in other words, the ‘recollection’ of the soul). 59  Bernardino de Laredo, The Ascent of Mount Sion: Being the Third Book of the Treatise of That Name (London: Faber and Faber, 1952); Francisco de Osuna, The Third Spiritual Alphabet, trans. Mary  E.  Giles (New York: Paulist Press, 1981); Francisco de Osuna, Tercer abecedario espiritual, ed. Melquíades Andrés Martín (Madrid: BAC, 1972).

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Desire and the Spiritual Ascent  91 They saw the development of self-knowledge as an important elem­ent of that ascent, especially in its earliest stages. Imitation of Christ was an important theme both in the suffering expected for those on the ascent and in the quality of life that might be expected to emerge in the heights of the ascent. And the final stages of that ascent involved what these writers, drawing on other late medieval thinkers, termed ‘union’ with God, a union characterized especially in terms of love rather than the intellect. By this stage the fully recollection soul might engage in quiet contemplation, being able to no pensar nada (‘think of nothing’) while enjoying union with God. Francisco de Osuna’s Third Spiritual Alphabet, to take one example, developed these themes in a particularly influential manner (between 1527 and 1556, twenty-six editions of Osuna’s Spiritual Alphabets were published).60 Osuna advises readers that beginners, proficients, and ‘those who are greatly experienced in prayer’ will pray in different ways.61 The beginner will practice vocal prayer, the audible recitation of prayers, with the best prayer to recite being the Lord’s Prayer. Proficients will, however, be able to engage in ‘sensible prayer’, in which speech is no longer needed since ‘our hearts speak alone with the Lord and we beseech him from within for everything we need’.62 Finally, however, in ‘mental’ or ‘spiritual’ prayer the ‘highest part of the soul is lifted more purely and affectionately to God on the wings of desire and pious affection strengthened by love’. The greatest love, Osuna counsels, is marked by the cessation of words altogether: rather, the soul ‘becomes silent and achieves great things, knowing that if it withdraws from creatures and becomes recollected with God, it will be entirely received by him’.63 Writings on recogimiento were by no means alone in their promotion of the inward turn as a path to union with God. Mystical visionaries such as the Castilian nun Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534), currently receiving heightened scholarly attention, described contact with God in far more graphic, affectively toned ways than writers on recogimiento.64 60  Weber, ‘Religious Literature’, 153. 61 Osuna, Third Spiritual Alphabet, 13.1. 62 Osuna, Third Spiritual Alphabet, 13.3. 63 Osuna, Third Spiritual Alphabet, 13.4. 64  See Jessica A. Boon, ‘Mother Juana de la Cruz: Marian Visions and Female Preaching’, in A New Companion to Hispanic Mysticism, ed. Hilaire Kallendorf (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2010), 127–48.

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92  John of the Cross Yet most directly challenging to such writers, and more likely to have been known by John, were a series of works accused by ecclesial au­thor­ ities of advocating dejamiento (‘abandonment’) practices of prayer, with those associated with these writings also often accused of claiming alumbradismo (‘enlightenment’).65 Trials of dejados and alumbrados began in earnest in the 1530s. The boundary between recogimiento and these suspect practices was always fuzzy: charges of dejamiento or alumbradismo were often wildly directed, and those accused typically fell foul of ecclesial authorities as much for their actions or associations as for their writings. Indeed, modern scholarship has only recently attended both to the extensive internal diversity of these traditions of prayer and the extent to which these labels were applied perjoratively, rather than accurately characterizing particular forms of thought.66 The overall effect was that by the mid-sixteenth century those aiming to follow in the footsteps of writers on recogimiento needed to take great care to ensure that their writings were seen to promote the continued activity (that is, recollection) of the soul’s senses and faculties in prayer, rather than their total cessation (hence abandonment). To be accused of het­ ero­doxy was a dangerous matter in the age of the Inquisition. John’s thought was deeply shaped by this wealth of explorations of the interior life, and mostly extensively so by writing on recogimiento. Yet it is extremely hard to be sure precisely by whom John was influenced, since he never acknowledges the influences of any of these writers or quotes directly from them.67 These influences must instead be worked out through observing similarities of ideas and images.68 It is hard to 65  Hamilton, ‘The Alumbrados’, 114–15 points out that in the 1520s and 1530s these terms (alumbrado always pejorative, though dejado accepted by some early practitioners) were often used to make slightly different accusations. By the middle of the century, however, they were typically used interchangeably as accusations of heterodoxy. 66 Notably in Alastair Hamilton, Heresy and Mysticism in Sixteenth-Century Spain: The  Alumbrados (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 1992); Hamilton, ‘The Alumbrados’; Jessica A. Boon, The Mystical Science of the Soul: Medieval Cognition in Bernardino de Laredo’s Recollection Method (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 29–59. 67  Teresa of Avila recounts the importance to her thought of the time she spent at her uncle’s house reading devotional books in the vernacular and writes of the influence on her of Osuna, Madrid, and Laredo (Life 3.4–5, 4.7, 12.2, 23.12). It is hard to believe John would not have been similarly exposed to these writings. 68  A fairly detailed analysis is provided in Melquíades Andrés Martín, Los recogidos: nueva visión de la mística española (1500–1700) (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1976), 643–52. This is far superior to the widely cited but very basic comparisons provided in Fidèle

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Desire and the Spiritual Ascent  93 believe, for instance, that John was not aware that the title of his account of the Ascent of Mount Carmel echoed Laredo and Palma’s separate accounts of the Ascent of Mount Zion. In total, John uses the vocabulary of recoger and recogido on forty-five occasions in his four prose works. John lays great importance on the purification of the senses and the faculties. He speaks of a ‘recollection pleasant to the senses’ that will arise in the early stages of the ascent (N1.5.1), and insists that the ‘highest recollection’ of the soul ‘consists in concentrating all the faculties on the incomprehensible Good and withdrawing them from all apprehensible things’ (A3.4.2). He attends extensively to the affective state of the soul as a means of diagnosing its position on the ascent. John’s terminology of God as the ‘ “centre” of the soul’, the divine ‘touch’ on the soul, a ‘pure essential substance’, of ‘not knowing’, and so on are all used before him by writers on recogimiento.69 And for John as for such writers, it is predominantly love that propels the soul on the final stages of the ascent towards union with God, and it is by love that this union is most extensively characterized (e.g. N2.12.7). Of course, John’s differences from the recogidos must not be forgotten. John is far less interested in meditating on the Passion of Christ. He places more emphasis on the importance of the intellect guiding the will than do most writers on recogimiento. And even on small matters, John by no means sees recogido writing as an authority: as Martín points out, John describes ten gradations of unitive love, following a pseudo-Thomist work (N2.19–20), and thereby choosing not to follow Laredo (who describes four gradations) or Osuna (nine).70 Yet the influence of writing on recogimiento on John must not be understated. It is within this vernacular literature of affective spirituality that the basis for John’s cre­ ative reworking of the notion of desire is most immediately to be found. de Ros, Le pére François d’Osuna. (Un maître de Sainte Thérèse.) Sa vie, son œuvre, sa doctrine spirituelle (Paris: Beauchesne, 1936), 625–30 and Fidèle de Ros, Un inspirateur de Sainte Thérèse: le frère Bernardin de Laredo (Paris: J Vrin, 1948), 322–4. 69  Andrés Martín, Los recogidos, 651. The language of ‘depth’ and ‘centre’ originated with German and Flemish mystical theologians such as Tauler, and probably came to John through the writers on recogimiento. Given the earlier doctrinal condemnations, however, it seems likely that such writers and John inherited the language but not the original accompanying theological framework. 70  Andrés Martín, Los recogidos, 127–8.

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94  John of the Cross

V.  The limitations and potential of language Dionysianism and the limits of language John drew on various traditions in his distinctive attention to the limits and potential of language for the representation of desire within both the divine nature and the soul’s union with God. John’s writing was, in the first place, deeply influenced by the concern for language shown in Dionysian thought. If John knew the writings of Dionysius himself, he would have encountered a series of texts deeply imbued with the sense of the simultaneous capacity and incapacity of language to describe the divine. It is right, Dionysius argues in The Divine Names, to begin talk of God by using an abundance of metaphor (ἀναλογία), since this profusion is what is provided by Scripture itself. But these metaphors then need to be progressively pushed to the point of failure, perhaps beginning with names such as ‘lion’, ‘person’, or ‘light’. This process culminates, he states, in the enquiry into those names that are used exclusively of God: it is in this naming of God as ‘hyper-’ (‘ὑπέρ-’) good, divine, or existing, being an act ‘wherein the negative expresses excess’, that the most that can be said about God is reached.71 In this sense, as Dionysius puts it more succinctly in The Mystical Theology, the so-called ‘negative theologies’ are the necessary corollary of the ‘affirmative theologies’.72 Each form of language must be in turn be pushed to the failure that results in silence, before beginning again with a new, higher form of language. Eventually, Dionysius warns, ‘the more that we soar upwards the more our language becomes restricted to the compass of purely intellectual conceptions, even as in the present instance plunging into the Darkness which is above the intellect we shall find ourselves reduced not merely to brevity of speech but even to absolute dumbness both of speech and thought’.73 The silence that results is a failure of created language; yet it is at the same time a fuller recognition than before of the divine nature, since it is to delimit divine transcendence with new clarity. 71  DN 2.3, 640B.

72  MT 3, 1032D–1033D.

73  MT 3, 1033B.

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Desire and the Spiritual Ascent  95 Medieval thinkers drew on these Dionysian concerns about language in different ways. Aquinas recognized the challenge of Dionysius’s thought, repeatedly citing the Dionysian corpus for the objections in his discussion of the ability of language to describe God. Aquinas’s specific account of ‘analogy’ (analogia) is confident that the terms expressing perfection in creatures such as ‘wisdom’ or ‘love’ can be ‘appropriately’ used for God (ST I.13.5). Yet writings in the tradition of mystical the­ ology, drawing extensively on Dionysius, often imitated the Areopagite’s willingness to describe God through metaphorical language whose meaning (such as ‘rock’ or ‘lion’) ultimately lies in the created order.74 Whether through direct reading of Dionysius himself or through know­ ledge of the later medieval tradition, therefore, John was clearly animated by the Dionysian concern for the potential and limitations of language to describe God and the state of union. Language is, in this sense, just as much a part of the created order as all visible objects: a piece of human creativity, analogous to divine creativity. Accordingly, language can function, just like all forms of sensible beauty, to arouse the love that propels the soul upwards on the spiritual ascent.

Cancionero and Italian Renaissance poetry The importance of language to John’s examination of desire is especially apparent in his poetry. It is important to remember that John was a poet. It was poetry that he first composed, some of them during his Toledo imprisonment, only later writing prose commentaries at the request of specific individuals.75 Many of these poems were, according to certain biographical sources, set to music,76 and John’s innovation within a var­iety of established poetic genres suggests an awareness of an attempt to please listeners through such demonstration of poetic skill. And it

74  On the late medieval difficulties with the workings of language in the Dionysian ‘dia­lect­ ic­al theology’, see Denys Turner, ‘Dionysius and Some Late Medieval Mystical Theologians of Northern Europe’, Modern Theology 24, no. 4 (2008): 651–65. 75  A good survey of the probable dates of John’s poetry, based on witness depositions and other evidence, may be found in Pacho, San Juan de la Cruz y sus escritos, 99–150. 76  Gerardo Diego, ‘Música y ritmo en la poesía de San Juan de la Cruz’, Escorial 9 (1942): 165.

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96  John of the Cross was by word of mouth or by song (both of which were prominent in the life and devotions of the Carmelite Order) that the poems came to be spread within the Order during John’s lifetime.77 John’s poems are therefore essential for the development of an understanding of the role of desire in his theological vision. John’s poetry and his broader use of language will be studied in greater detail in the next chapter. While still in this chapter examining the possible influences on John’s thought, however, it is worth pointing to the significance of two poetic forms on which John drew. It would be possible to delve in depth into the rich range of in­spir­ations—scriptural, theological, literary, and even biographical—that are apparent in the poems.78 For my purposes, however, I solely seek to indicate programmatically how these two forms may have had an especial influence on how John used language to depict the spiritual ascent. In the first place, John draws on the resources of the language and imagery of romantic yearning and consummation provided to him by traditional Spanish cancionero poetic forms. These glosa and copla forms were frequently used by other poets to depict the anguished suffering and contradictory emotions of the lover. John follows a trend that had developed since the Cancionero espiritual of 1549 in ‘divinizing’ such poetry by applying its language and imagery to the description of the soul’s love of God.79 Yet John’s most renowned poems—the three on which he composed his prose commentaries—drew instead on the lira style and associated pastoral and sexual imagery that had been developed within Italian Renaissance poetry.80 Indeed, given these Italian origins, ultimately stemming back to Petrarch, this is a poetic tradition which might ultimately be seen as another outworking of the Platonic exploration of desire. The lira form had been introduced to Spanish literature in the Canción Quinta by Garcilaso de la Vega, and in fact takes its name from the last word of the first line of that poem, which runs

77  Emilio Orozco Díaz, Poesía y mística: introducción a la lírica de San Juan de la Cruz (Madrid: Ediciones Guadarrama, 1959), 115–70. 78  An extensive survey of these sources is made by Paola Elia and María Jesús Mancho, in Cántico espiritual y poesía completa (Barcelona: Crítica, 2002), xix–clii. 79 Thompson, Songs in the Night, 61. 80  I am grateful to Colin Thompson for clarifying the following points to me.

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Desire and the Spiritual Ascent  97 ‘Si de mi baja lira’. That poem first appeared in the works of Juan Boscán and Garcilaso de la Vega, published posthumously by Boscán’s widow in 1543.81 Although it is unclear precisely which poems he had read, John surely had extensive knowledge of lira poetry, enabling him to become a cre­ ative reworker of the form rather than a doctrinaire follower of others. As John himself points out in the Prologue to the Flame commentary, the Llama is modelled on part of a stanza of ‘divinized’ versions of lira poetry that were produced in 1575 by Sebastián de Córdoba (F.Prol.4). These a lo divino poems (which did not originate with Córdoba, although he was an influential composer of them) took an existing popu­lar poem or song and ‘divinized’ its sense to give it a religious meaning. John had a broader acquaintance with lira poetry than with Córdoba alone, however, since the Noche and Cántico are written in the more usual lira pattern of a five-line mixture of hepta- and hendecasyllabic lines, rhyming ABABB. That said, the structured expectations of poetic form and style that existed in Garcilaso are not obeyed by John. The Cántico, in particular, develops a far more fractured use of language, imagery, and syntax than the lira form typically allowed.82 Two features of lira poetry, consonant with John’s broader interest in the spiritual ascent, may also have enhanced the appeal of that verse form. In the first place, Garcilaso’s lira poetry exhibited a strong interest in interiority, often recounting events from a first-person perspective with a heightened self-awareness of the artificiality and imitation involved in the act of poetic composition.83 While exhibited in some of the cancionero poetry on which John also drew, Garcilaso’s exploration of interiority was greater than in most Spanish poetry.84 Moreover, lira poetry extensively drew on a stock of images—the pastoral, the play between seeing and not-seeing, the emphasis on sexual desire—which resonated at a deep level with the Platonic elements of John’s intellectual

81  Elia and Mancho, eds, Poesía completa, lv–lvi. 82 Thompson, Songs in the Night, 98. 83  Daniel Weiss, ‘Renaissance Poetry’, in The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature, ed. David T. Gies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 161–3. 84  Isabel Torres, Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age: Eros, Eris and Empire (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2013), 11.

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98  John of the Cross inheritance.85 Through Garcilaso and Boscán, it was Petrarch’s characteristic imagery that became the accepted poetic language of love in late sixteenth-century Spain, a model for others to imitate: the hyperbole used to describe the desired, but unattainable lady; the alternating hope and despair of the lover, and the extensive use of images drawn from nature and the universe to depict these themes.86 The poetic forms on which John drew offered him, in short, a cluster of images portraying the experience of sexual desire between two lovers. This was a powerful resource for his depiction of the spiritual ascent and arose, John suggested, from the very experience of the ascent. As John puts it in his prologue to the Canticle, persons inspired by the Spirit will let something of what they experience ‘overflow in figures, comparisons and similitudes’ (CB.Prol.1). John is unlikely to have been aware of the venerable Neoplatonic heritage of the language of ‘overflow’, which is to be found in Plotinus, but the metaphor helpfully illuminates his understanding of poetic language. In both his poetry and prose, John draws heavily and graphically on these poetic models. The metaphors and images resonate with the in­ter­ ior and affective concerns that John brings to his account of the spiritual ascent, providing him with a vibrant series of images by which to explore, in metaphorical terms, not only the yearning of love but also its consummation. In appropriating these images of human love to refer to the spiritual ascent, John takes metaphors of vision and touch to serve not as paradoxical expressions of the seeing/not-seeing and feeling/notfeeling of union, but as signs of the analogous resemblance of human and divine desire. Indeed, it might even be said (as will be explored further in the Chapter 3) that in these representations of sexual desire, poetic language ceases solely to be a means by which the inadequacy of speech may be highlighted. Rather, it is through the very superabundance of language that these poems use to portray sexual love that John points to the 85  On Garcilaso’s use of these themes, see Torres, Love Poetry, 1–59. 86 R.O. Jones, A Literary History of Spain. The Golden Age: Prose and Poetry: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1971), 90–2; Ignacio Navarrete, Orphans of Petrarch: Poetry and Theory in the Spanish Renaissance (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 97–125; Weiss, ‘Renaissance Poetry’, 161–3.

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Desire and the Spiritual Ascent  99 insufficiency not just of human language but also of all created feeling and knowledge to attain union with the divine. It gives John, in other words, a means by which to temper the Dionysian emphasis on the limitations of language through the use of poetic traditions that explore these same themes of love. John’s description of ascent and union continues to break out of the bounds of ordinary speech, here through sheer sexual intensity.

Carmelite reading of the Song of Songs John’s confidence in the ability of poetic language to explore the union of the soul with God did not, however, arise simply from the imagery provided to him by cancionero and Italian Renaissance poetry. It also seems to have been influenced by his allegorical reading of Scripture, especially through the influence of the medieval commentary tradition on the Song of Songs. Many of the late medieval works that John is likely to have read were steeped in this long traditional of spiritual, and chiefly allegorical, exegesis. The traditions of John’s Carmelite Order seem, however, to have been the main influence in John’s adoption of this manner of reading Scripture. Late medieval Carmelite writings appear to have preserved a commitment to the spiritual exegesis of the Bible, with the influential Carmelite text The Institution of the First Monks exemplifying this commitment: its insistence on the solitary life is developed largely through the spiritual exegesis of God’s commandments to Elijah in 1 Kings 17.2–6, interpreting events in the life of Elijah as re­flect­ive of the demands of the Carmelite life. In this manner, a trad­ ition of exegesis that had become either ossified or entirely abandoned in other theological circles by the late medieval period was sustained in the Carmelite tradition, in a manner that seems to have been taken up cre­ative­ly by John of the Cross.87

87 Henri de Lubac, Exegese médiévale: les quatre sens de l’écriture, vol. 4 (Paris: Aubier, 1959), 498–9.

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100  John of the Cross John’s writing displays a continuing commitment to the vitality of this tradition.88 The centrality of Scripture to John’s thought is highly evident in his four prose works, which (when considering the second rather than the first redaction of the Canticle) contain 1060 explicit quotations from the Bible.89 In addition, John makes constant use of biblical themes, metaphors, and ideas to illustrate his arguments. He insists that his writing is itself guided by Scripture (A.Prol.2; CB.Prol.4), and emphasizes that all Scripture must be interpreted through Christ, since ‘in giving us his Son, his only Word, . . . he [God] spoke everything to us at once in this sole Word—and he has nothing more to say’ (A2.22.3; cf. A2.19–21). John’s knowledge of the Bible extends, moreover, far beyond those texts that were prescribed in the Carmelite Breviary,90 and it is no longer thought likely that John gained an extensive education in humanist reading of Scripture at Salamanca or Alcalá: in contrast, this know­ ledge seems that to have been developed through John’s own process of reading and meditation on the scriptural text.91 This meditative process also seems to have occurred in his writing of his prose works. It is the Vulgate that John seems to have known most closely, and the translations of scriptural quotations into Spanish seem to be his own. He once refers to ‘another translation’ (N2.11.5), which could have been a Latin version of the Septuagint.92 Yet while the vast majority of quotations are translated into Spanish, these translations are often fairly loose and quotations occasionally remain untranslated (with no clear rationale behind this decision).93 Moreover, John clearly did

88 Vilnet, Bible et mystique; de Lubac, Exegese médiévale, 4:500–5. 89 Vilnet, Bible et mystique, 35. If CA is considered, this total drops to 924, since CA contains far fewer (165) biblical citations than CB (301); this is largely due to the longer length of CB, though certain stanzas (notably CA37/CB38) contain many more biblical citations in the second redaction. It should be emphasized that other totals are given by other scholars, depending on the extent of John’s oeuvre considered and the willingness of the scholar to accept certain resonant phrases as deliberate citations. 90 Vilnet, Bible et mystique, 15. 91 Vilnet, Bible et mystique, 18–29, like much mid-twentieth-century scholarship, follows Jean Baruzi, Saint Jean de la Croix et le problème de l’expérience mystique, 2nd ed. (Paris: F. Alcan, 1931), 94–151 in suggesting that John may have been exposed to humanist readings of Scripture during his time at Salamanca by teachers such as Luis de León. Yet more recent research by Bezares suggests that, although possible, these classes are unlikely to have formed part of John’s set curriculum: Rodríguez-San Pedro Bezares, Formación universitaria, 130 n183. 92  Kavanaugh and Rodriguez, Collected Works, 421. 93 Vilnet, Bible et mystique, 43.

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Desire and the Spiritual Ascent  101 not always work with the Scriptures in front of him. John twice claims the authority of St Paul for a statement whose basis in the Pauline epistles remains obscure (A2.8.6; N2.16.11).94 He misattributes a quotation from 1 John 4.10 to St Peter in the first redaction of the Canticle (CA22.8).95 John’s use of Scripture, in other words, makes evident his deep knowledge of the text that enabled him to draw on it freely, with only occasional inaccuracy, in his writing. Spiritual exegesis in the manner of the Carmelite tradition is, on the one hand, evident in John’s account of the ‘dark night of the soul’. This period, especially in the ‘passive night of spirit’ in the second book of the Night, is portrayed through extensive analogy with figures from the Old Testament—with the cries of David in the Psalms, the words of Lamentations, Jonah, Job, and Jeremiah (esp. N2.5–7). Yet these figures do not simply, as John points out in his longest explicit reflections on the meaning of Scripture, provide important examples of faith. Rather, their witness also points to God’s Son who has now come in the flesh (A2.22.3–6). Although John does not explicitly equate these accounts of suffering with Christ’s own passion, the enduring faith of these figures through their sufferings is, for him, a series of spiritual reminders of the despair and doubt of the ‘dark night of the soul’. Most importantly for his confident exploration of the articulation of the soul’s union with God, however, John was influenced by a long trad­ ition of monastic allegorical exegesis of the Song of Songs’s poetic narrative of the Bride’s hunt for her Bridegroom that stemmed distantly from Origen but owed its medieval revival to Bernard of Clairvaux.96 This was a tradition that, in its frequent rendition of the biblical epithalamium as an allegory of the ascent of the soul, was engaged in a creative reflection on the process by which the animation of the soul’s desires might then be turned to desire for God. In doing so, it was steeped in scriptural language and metaphor, as well as exploring the poetic freedom of which the biblical text makes such fruitful use. While frequently 94 Vilnet, Bible et mystique, 45. 95 Vilnet, Bible et mystique, 46. The mistake is corrected in the second redaction (CB31.8). 96  For broader accounts of this medieval exegetical tradition, see Richard  A.  Norris, The Song of Songs: Interpreted by Early Christian and Medieval Commentators (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003).

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102  John of the Cross rooted in a distantly Augustinian concern for the interior nature of this ascent, and at times intersecting with medieval Dionysian account of the erotic ascent, this tradition of commentary on the Song of Songs accordingly offered its own distinctive creative renditions of the spiritual ascent. John’s Spiritual Canticle famously reworks the long medieval monastic tradition of commentary of the Song of Songs, reworking the themes of the Song as a poem on which John then proceeds to write a prose commentary.97 While John may have known of earlier medieval commentaries on the Song, he never explicitly cites any, and the resonances seem more to take the form of images that were common currency within the commentarial tradition on the Song.98 It is possible, too, that he drew on his famous contemporary Luis de León’s 1562 translation of the Song, though the evidence is ambiguous.99 Rather, it seems most likely that he knew of this tradition through its continued vibrancy within the Carmelite Order. The Order continued to possess a living trad­ition of commentary on the Song, as evident, for instance, in Teresa of Avila’s Meditaciones sobre los Cantares, written in 1566–7, or María de San José’s composition of a version of the Song in octosyllabic verse. It seems plausible that John knew of these figures and possibly others engaged in the composition of such commentaries, from whom he may have inherited the storehouse of images and metaphors associated with the long-standing tradition.100 While drawing on well-established Carmelite tradition, however, John’s famously innovative combination of poetry and commentary constitutes a creative contribution to the genre. His reworking of the Song in poetic form allowed John to 97 Colin  P.  Thompson, The Poet and the Mystic: A Study of the Cántico Espiritual of San Juan de la Cruz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 62–5 gives a full survey of phrases from the Song which John seems to have used in the Canticle. As Thompson points out, occasional phrases in the early stanzas of the Canticle certainly resonate with the language of the Song. The influence of the Song becomes far more prominent, however, from CB16 onwards. 98  See the attempts to isolate specific images that John drew from medieval exegetical tra­di­ tions of the Song made in Turner, Eros and Allegory, 186–8, and Terence O’Reilly, ‘The Cántico Espiritual of Saint John of the Cross and the Mystical Interpretation of the Song of Songs’, Hallel 19 (1994): 5–16 (reprinted with same pagination in Terence O’Reilly, From Ignatius Loyola to John of the Cross: Spirituality and Literature in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995)). 99  Rodríguez-San Pedro Bezares, Formación universitaria, 116. 100  On the resonances with other contemporary Discalced Carmelite commentaries on the Song, see Valentín Núñez Rivera, Poesía y biblia en el Siglo de Oro: estudios sobre los Salmos y el Cantar de los Cantares (Madrid; Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana; Vervuert, 2010), 229–31.

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Desire and the Spiritual Ascent  103 capitalize on the freedom to explore the nature and experience of desire that this tradition enjoyed, in a manner that subsequently emerges in John’s prose commentary on his poem. John’s poetry and prose, in short, draws on a number of traditions as it explores the role of language, form, and imagery in the transformation of the soul. While certainly influenced by Dionysian thought, John’s appropriation of various traditions of love poetry, and his continued commitment to the allegorical exegesis of Scripture (especially of the Song of Songs) provides poetic and biblical resources that attenuate this Dionysian ‘apophaticism’. In addition to the manner in which the tra­di­ tions of his own Carmelite Order rooted John in a long tradition of in­ter­ior prayer, which was the focus of renewed attention in his day, his reading of the Bible was also informed by Carmelite traditions that en­abled him to access a still-living tradition of the spiritual exegesis of Scripture. The redirection of the soul’s desire is not bound to be depicted through the progressive failure of language in the attempt to depict the union of the soul with God. Rather, John is aided by multiple poetic and biblical traditions that provide him with a wealth of poetic form and imagery as he portrays the flourishing of divine and human desire in the state of union.

VI.  Conclusions The distinctive nature of John’s theological vision has often been noted by past scholars, with his depiction of the divine–human encounter at times distinguished from ‘scholastic’ thought by virtue of its so-called scriptural, Greek, or patristic emphasis.101 This chapter has demonstrated that the sources of John’s thought are rather more complex than is captured by any single one of these terms, given the multiple

101  These are, at least, the summaries of certain scholars whose analysis of John’s thought will otherwise (given their insights into the difficulties of investigating John as a scholastic figure) be an important source in Chapters 4 and 5: Henri Sanson, L’esprit humain selon Saint Jean de la Croix (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953), 89–90, 163, 166; Max Huot de Longchamp, Lectures de Jean de la Croix: essai d’anthropologie mystique (Paris: Beauchesne, 1981), 45.

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104  John of the Cross intersecting traditions present in the major sources by which John seems likely to have been influenced. John was instead likely influenced by a number of theological and non-theological traditions—notably Aquinas, Augustine, pseudo-Dionysius, cancionero and Italian Renaissance poetry, and allegorical readings of the Song of Songs—that themselves draw diversely on biblical, Christian, and Platonic resources. Yet common to many of these writings, it has been proposed, is a heightened concern for the role of love and desire—especially in its sexual formulations—in the Christian life. John draws on these inspirations extensively, albeit largely anonymously. Yet in his account of the structure of the soul, in his analysis of the role of love both in the spiritual ascent and in union with God, and in his use of language both in his poetry and prose, John creatively reworks these traditions to deliver a striking account of the transformation of desire in the spiritual ascent. John is in this respect a distinctive and creative theological thinker who engages in a sophisticated theorization of the nature of desire as it is purified and redirected on the spiritual ascent. Having provided an account of these major influences on John, in the following three chapters I examine in greater detail John’s account of the spiritual ascent as he develops it in his poetry and prose.

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3 Language, form, and imagery in John’s poetry In the following three chapters, I explore how John’s account of the spiritual ascent is shaped around a distinctive and creative reworking of the various understandings of desire surveyed in Chapter 2. Towards the end of that chapter, I pointed out that John was first and foremost a poet, whose commentaries served to explain these poems for friends and readers. Any attempt to explore John’s theological vision must therefore begin with an examination of the significance of language to John’s thought before it proceeds to examine his prose commentaries. In this chapter I undertake this task through an examination of John’s poetry, advising that its use of language, form, and imagery is constitutive of his theology in a manner that has not been the subject of serious recent scholarly attention.1 I first examine the Romances, in which John’s insistence on the transformation of the soul’s relationship to the created order includes a commitment to the transformation of language itself. This series of nine poems is John’s most extensive articulation of his doctrines of Trinity, creation, and incarnation. In undertaking his examination of these doctrines in poetic form, John provides an imaginative, narratival depiction of the inner life of the Trinity that emphasizes the communicativity that underpins the divine life. Such communicativity is, in John’s account, pre-eminently present in the Love that constitutes the pneumatological bond of Father and Son, with the action of this same Spirit representing 1  As mentioned in the note in the front matter, translations of the poetry are typically taken from Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD, and Otilio Rodriguez, eds, The Collected Works of Saint John of the Cross, rev. ed. (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1991). Where I state that my own translation has been given, this is almost always intended to clarify the significance of an aspect of the original Spanish that has been obscured by a poetic rendering of the translation. John of the Cross: Desire, Transformation, and Selfhood. Sam Hole, Oxford University Press (2020). © Sam Hole. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198863069.003.0004

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106  John of the Cross the loving desire that extends to the world in the acts of creation and incarnation. And, as the Romances represent this story, it is this same communicativity that is to be found in the creative nature of language itself, with poetic narrative being one means of depicting the loving desires that mark both the divine life and its engagement with the created order. In the rest of the chapter, I explore two further poetic forms used by John. In each case, John draws on diverse mechanisms of language, form, and imagery as he poetically explores the spiritual ascent. I first examine John’s poems that make use of the traditional Spanish cancionero forms of glosa and copla poetry. These forms traditionally made extensive use of paradox—the deliberate combination of two contra­ dict­ory ideas—especially as they explored the tensions of romantic love. John adopts this linguistic device in order to explore the inexpressible nature of union with God, on account of the infinite difference between the created and divine natures. In doing so, John emphasizes how meta­ phors of sensation and knowledge, through heightened attention to their own paradoxicality, may depict the soul in the state of union. The realization of the soul’s desire for God demands, in these poems, language that deliberately conveys a heightened sense of the failure of all language to describe the soul’s union with God. Most significant to John’s oeuvre as a whole, however, are the three poems written in lira form—the Noche, the Llama, and the Cántico— which use diverse poetic language, form, and imagery to explore the soul’s ascent and union in terms of the yearning and consummation of sexual desire. It is no accident that it is these three poems on which John wrote his prose commentaries, since these represent John’s most sophisticated poetic exploration of the progressive transformation and consummation of desire on the ascent. I examine each poem in turn, comparing the role of narrative, metaphor, and sensation in each poem’s depiction of the spiritual ascent. The recurrent tendency in recent scholarship (noted in Chapter 1) to depict John’s poetry as the immediate production of an ineffable experience has often taken the form of attention to John’s writings as ‘apophatic’ pieces which are interpreted as emphasizing the limited

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Language, form, and imagery in John ’ s poetry  107 ability of language to describe union with God.2 Yet this summary does not fully encapsulate the manner in which John draws on language, experience, and theological insights in his account of the spiritual ascent. This chapter accordingly explores John’s attention to the manner in which the different forms taken by language, as is most extensively evident in his poetry, underpin John’s understanding of desire.

I.  Narrative and the God of love: the Romances It is not without reason that a number of recent works have suggested that it is the Romances that best express the roots of John’s theology.3 The 310-line work is formed of a set of nine romances, a ballad form which was typically used for telling stories focused on the theme of romantic love.4 Yet John’s Romances instead recount, largely from the perspective of a dialogue among the Father and Son, the story of creation and incarnation in terms of the Father’s provision of a partner for the Son of God. In tune with the broader romance tradition, in short, John is telling a love story—except that this is not simply a story of the yearning of cre­ ation and Word for one another, but at root a story of the love that exists within the Trinity itself. Why does John choose to deliver his most explicit depictions of these fundamental Christian doctrines in this particular linguistic form? In the first place, John’s choice of a narrative form implies that talk of divine

2  See Luce López-Baralt, ‘Poesía sanjuanista’, in Diccionario de San Juan de la Cruz, ed. Eulogio Pacho (Burgos: Monte Carmelo, 2000), 1182. 3  The list of works that recognize the importance of the Romances to John’s theology would be extensive: for a helpful survey of past writers, see José Mario Faraone, La inhabitación trinitaria según San Juan de la Cruz (Rome: Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 2002), 24–64. In recent scholarship, see in particular Tomislav Begović, Gott, der Weg des Menschen zu sich selbst: zur theologischen Anthropologie in der mystischen Lehre des heiligen Johannes vom Kreuz (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1990), 33–101, Iain Matthew, ‘The Knowledge and Consciousness of Christ in the Light of the Writings of St John of the Cross’ (DPhil, Oxford University, 1991), and Rowan Williams, ‘The Deflections of Desire: Negative Theology in Trinitarian Disclosure’, in Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation, ed. Oliver Davies and Denys Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 115–35. 4  Nigel Griffin et al., ‘Preface’, in The Spanish Ballad in the Golden Age, ed. Nigel Griffin et al. (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2008), vii–xviii.

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108  John of the Cross love (and, perhaps, all love) cannot simply be achieved through a series of propositional statements: only through telling a story can the nature of the perfect relationships within God and the parameters of human relationships with God be truly explored. In particular, the celebration of salvation history can best be undertaken through a form of language— the poetic—that is itself particularly suited to doxological expression. The romance form is especially suited to this task. John adopts the basic features of this form, which traditionally consisted in the direct and simple telling of a story, relying on a repetitive octosyllabic rhythm that assonated at the end of every other line: in the first romance, for instance, alternate lines consistently end with the imperfect tense verb-ending of ‘-ía’.5 The effect is twofold. First, this regular rhythm and repeated use of the imperfect tense gives an energy that pushes John’s narrative forward, even if at the expense of a certain monotony. Second, the heightened continuity of the form of John’s poetry ensures that the entire story retains a recognizable shape: whether in depiction of the life of the Trinity before the creation or of the Incarnation, it is recognizably the same language that is required. Yet the first two romances also reveal John to be particularly interested in the manner in which language itself might serve to describe the divine life, and the associated role of language in generating and sustaining relationships of love. This is a striking feature of John’s first romance, structured as an extended commentary on the Prologue to John’s Gospel. What was already a scriptural text that is striking for its wordplay—its repetition of key words, the contrasts of light and darkness, and its luxuriation in paradox—is further accentuated by John. John begins in simple fashion, signalling the theme of his text: ‘En el principio moraba / el Verbo’ (‘In the beginning was / the Word’, R1.1–2).6 Yet he immediately proceeds to extend, further even than the Gospel writer, the Evangelist’s paradoxes surrounding the eternal God who is the beginning, was in the beginning, and had no beginning. ‘Principio’

5 Colin P. Thompson, St John of the Cross: Songs in the Night (London: SPCK, 2002), 57. 6  I follow the common system for referencing the Romances which cites first the particular romance (1–9) from which the quotation is taken, followed by the line number (1–310) based on a sequential numbering of the entire set of poems.

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Language, form, and imagery in John ’ s poetry  109 (‘beginning’) is used six times in the first twelve lines, most emphatically in the declaration: El mismo Verbo Dios era, que el principio se decía; él moraba en el principiohe y principio no tenía. El era el mismo principio, por eso de él carecía.

That same Word was God who is the Beginning; was in the beginning and had no beginning He was himself the Beginning and therefore had no beginning. (R1.5–10)

John continues to draw on the Evangelist’s language in the lines that follow. The Word, recounts John, ‘del principio nacía; / hale siempre concebido / y siempre le concebía’ (‘was born of the Beginning / who had always conceived him, / and was always conceiving him’, R1.12–14). As a consequence, John continues, ‘la gloria del Hijo / es la que en el Padre había, / y toda su gloria el Padre / en el Hijo poseía’ (‘the glory of the Son / was the Father’s glory, / and the Father possessed / all his glory in the Son’, R1.17–19). John is undoubtedly well aware of the tensions present in his words: the conceiving that is an eternal process, and the glory that redounds between Father and Son. Yet he chooses to foreground the paradoxes and inadequacies of everyday language that must arise as a result of any attempt to depict the origins or inner life of the Trinity. In the second half of the first romance, John extends his reflections beyond the language of the Gospel Prologue, developing in romantic terms an extended depiction of the love among the persons of the Trinity. Again setting up his theme, John describes how the Father and Son lived in one another ‘como amado en el amante’ (‘as the lover in the beloved’, R1.21). At this point, it is the Holy Spirit that enters into the poem for the first time, with John drawing on the Augustinian identification of the Spirit as the bond of love between Father and Son: ‘aquese amor que los une / en lo mismo convenía’ (‘the Love that unites them / is one with them’, R1.23–4). The following lines proceed to play on this paradox of three and one: there are three lovers but one love, all three have one being, and each loves the others who have this being. Finally, in the final lines of this first romance, John makes these paradoxes clear,

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110  John of the Cross even breaking into the present tense (‘tienen’) to make clear the eternal nature of what had up to now been described in the imperfect: por lo cual era infinito el amor que las unía, porque un solo amor tres tienen, que su esencia se decía; que el amor cuanto más uno, tanto más amor hacía.

Thus it is a boundless Love that unites them, for the three have one love which is their essence; and the more love is one the more it is love. (R1.41–6)

The heightened attention to language of the Johannine Prologue may, John implies, go so far—yet the fullest depiction of the divine life may be found in the description of the Trinity as a relationship of love. This awareness of the means by which any language may describe the divine life means that the opening lines of the second romance do not simply mark a transition to the narrative of the creation and incarnation. Rather, the Father speaks to the Son, initiating a conversation and thus inviting reflection on the importance of communication—spe­cif­ic­al­ly, in the form of language—to the divine relationships of love (R2.47–55). It is notable that the Romances only refer to the Son as the Word in the context of allusions to the Johannine Prologue (R1.1, 5, 11; R8.274, 277). Instead, it is the Spirit—never named but obliquely present as Love— that consistently effects communication in the poem. The simultaneous inadequacy and ability of language to represent this communication is placed front and centre by John. ‘No one could understand’ the words that the Father spoke to the Son. Yet, at the same time, the conversation of the Father and Son can be laid down in the poetic language of the romances. In the following stanzas, John’s narrative proceeds to tell the story of creation and Incarnation. It is, in essence, a narrative of divine selfcommunication that results in the gradual consummation of the yearning desire that exists between God and his creation: the Father’s creation of the world, in the image of the Son, in order to provide in humanity a bride for the Son (R2.57–3.87). These same themes of love, yearning, and betrothal lie at the heart of the way that the Noche, Llama, and

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Language, form, and imagery in John ’ s poetry  111 Cántico speak of the soul’s ascent. Yet they are first and foremost used by John in the Romances to speak of the nature of the Godhead itself. In the Romances, this is not a result of sin (which is nowhere mentioned), but an effect of the different order of created beings. Humanity is placed lower by the Father in the order of creation than the angels (R4.117–18). Anticipating a theme of deification that will be brought out particularly strongly in John’s account of union, however, the promise remains that, finally, ‘dentro de Dios absorta, / vida de Dios viviría’ (‘taken wholly into God, / she [the Bride] will live the life of God’, R4.165–6). Subsequent stanzas draw extensively both on Psalms and on Old Testament prophecies that emphasize of the yearning of humanity for the Incarnation, so that they might come to see God face-to-face (R5–6). Finally, John tells of the Son’s promise to the Father to become incarnate for the sake of humanity. The romances end with the birth of the Son. The union of the Word with human flesh is the cause of the songs of men and angels, even while Christ is imagined as lying, crying, in the manger among the animals. Yet, John concludes: Y la Madre estaba en pasmo de que tal trueque veía en llanto del hombre en Dios y en el hombre la alegría, lo cual del uno y del otro tan ajeno ser solía.

The Mother gazed in sheer wonder on such an exchange: in God, man’s weeping, and in man, gladness, to the one and the other things usually so strange. (R9.305–10)

The poem ends with the image of Mary’s silent gaze on the newborn Word. The fulfilment which, in John’s narrative, has been sought by both Son and humanity, has been attained: the Son has acquired his bride, and humanity has gained the vision of God for which it yearned. The poetic form in which John presents this narrative is significant because its apparently mundane and repetitive form serves to highlight some of the tensions surrounding the use of language. The romances are certainly keenly aware of the difficulties that face any attempt to describe the nature of the divine life. While acknowledging this difficulty, though, John continues to feel confident to deliver a depiction of this same divine

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112  John of the Cross life in a narrative form that often depends on conversations between the protagonists. Language itself, as John makes the reader aware, is a work of Love: it is in speech that the love that is the foundation of all communication is to be found, and so the effusive love that permeates the life of the Trinity demands language for its description. And the form that this takes—narrative—is significant because it en­ ables (as Vittorio Montemaggi puts it in his thought-provoking exam­in­ation of Dante’s Commedia, a work that develops its theology through similar narratival, poetic means) a multitude of insights: ‘representation of the ways in which language not only speaks, but also generates community; and of the ways in which language not only expresses understanding but embodies understanding as individual human beings move and interact in space and time . . .; and, finally, of the ways in which language might be related not only to saying and knowing but also to loving’.7 Any depiction of the Trinity is, John recognizes, fraught with risk of what might in modern theological discourse be termed ‘idolatry’. Yet his solution to this is not silence but narrative that reflects the vibrant loving communication at the heart of the triune life, delivered through poetry—structured, precise speech that is consciously aware of its own nature as language—which may acknowledge the inevitable distance of this account from the true reality of the transcendent divine life.

II.  Paradox and ineffability in the glosas and coplas John’s exploration of the spiritual ascent is animated, therefore, by attention to the manner in which language might depict the concomitant transformations in human and divine desire. John’s poems written in glosa and copla form make particular use of paradox and language of ineffability to explore these transformations. John uses this form to prod­uce poems that place prominently the difficulties involved in all language about God, making rhetorical emphasis on the incapability of

7  Vittorio Montemaggi, ‘In Unknowability as Love: The Theology of Dante’s Commedia’, in Dante’s Commedia: Theology as Poetry, ed. Vittorio Montemaggi and Matthew Treherne (Notre Dame, IN; London: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 70.

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Language, form, and imagery in John ’ s poetry  113 language to describe the divine life and the state of union. To do so, the themes of these poems draw on a number of highly traditional paradoxes that John may have known both from both other writings in the Dionysian tradition and earlier cancionero poetry—of seeing while notseeing, of feeling while not-feeling, of knowing while not-knowing, of speaking in order to point out the impossibility of language. Much could of course be said here, but I take the ‘Fonte’ poem, written in glosa form, as representative of these themes. The poem’s subject matter is indicated by its title in the Sanlúcar manuscript, ‘Song of the soul that rejoices in knowing God through faith’. In the first eight ­stanzas of the poem, John describes what he knows (as established by the regular repetition of the verb ‘sé’, ‘I know’) of the spring that is God, ending each stanza with the short refrain ‘aunque es de noche’, ‘because it is night’. By contrast with the lira poems, which frequently could conceivably be read as secular love poems with a pastoral setting, the theo­logic­al references of the poem are clear. The spring is not simply ‘bella’ (‘beautiful’) but is ‘tan capaz y omnipotente’ (‘mighty and omnipotent’). It is not animals that drink at the spring but rather ‘cielos y tierra’ (the heavens and the earth’). So plentiful is the spring that its streams ‘infiernos, cielos riegan y las gentes’ (‘water the lands of hell, the heavens, and all people’). The metaphors on which the poem draws often have rich Johannine and Dionysian heritage, making the theological allusions of the poem clear: ‘Su origen no lo sé, pues no le tiene, / mas sé que todo origen de ella viene’ (‘I do not know its origin, nor has it one, / but I know that every origin has come from it’), states the second stanza, evoking the Johannine prologue that was so important to the Romances. Paradoxes and ambiguities, too, play on the well-worn theme of darkness and light. The first stanza’s lines—‘Aquella eterna fonte está escondida, / que bien sé yo do tiene su manida’ (‘That eternal spring is hidden, / for I know well where it has its rise’)—throw the reader off-kilter: the spring is, apparently, only known to be hidden because the speaker knows its origin. Or, as the fifth stanza runs, ‘Su claridad nunca es oscurecida, / y sé que toda luz de ella es venida, / aunque es de noche’ (‘Its clarity is never darkened, / and I know that every light has come from it, / although it is night’). Does the final ‘it is night’ refer to the spring, implying that the spring is itself paradoxically ‘dark’ despite being the source of all light?

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114  John of the Cross Or does it refer to the state in which the speaker stands, implying that despite the darkness, the speaker is still able to possess, through faith, certain pieces of knowledge of God? John appears to be uninterested in resolving these ambiguities: his willingness to let a certain ‘darkness’ of meaning pervade the poem mirrors a central theme of the poem. And while the poem abounds in depictions of the fecund, ­productive activity of created order, the reader is regularly reminded that the spring described by the poem produces something more than mere water. The ‘Fonte’ is distinctive in comparison to most other glosa and copla poems, however, in being given, in its final three stanzas, explicit theo­ logic­al resolution, with reference to the Eucharist: Aquesta eterna fonte está escondida   This eternal spring is hidden En este vivo pan por              in this living bread for our darnos vida             life’s sake, aunque es de noche.          although it is night. Aquí se está llamando a las       It is here calling out to criaturas,                 creatures; y de esta agua se hartan,         and they satisfy their thirst, aunque a oscuras,           although in darkness, porque es de noche.            because it is night. Aquesta viva fuente          This living spring that I que deseo,              long for, en este pan de lida yo la veo,         I see in this bread of life, aunque es de noche.             although it is night.

The language of these later stanzas shifts from that of the earlier stanzas, becoming grounded, particular, and personal. The first stanza’s ‘Aquella eterna fonte’, ‘that eternal spring’ becomes ‘aquesta eterna fonte’, ‘this eternal spring’. Similarly, it is ‘este vivo pan’, ‘this living bread’; ‘aquesta viva fuente’, ‘this living spring’; ‘este pan de vida’, ‘this bread of life’ (my emphasis). The bread is ‘aquí’, ‘here’. And alongside such particularity given to objects previously spoken of only in abstract terms, no longer is this speaker simply the first-person singular of the opening stanzas: John pushes the reader into the frame, claiming that the spring is hidden

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Language, form, and imagery in John ’ s poetry  115 in the bread ‘por darnos vida’ (‘for our life’s sake’, or, more literally, ‘to give us life’). While the beginning of the poem may seem to be the description of an intense experience, the final stanzas turn the gaze onto the reader. The poem quietly, and yet insistently, presses onto the reader the question of its title: What it is like to rejoice in ‘knowing God through faith’? The shift of the tenth stanza’s refrain—‘porque es de noche’ (‘because it is night’)—serves, accordingly, to highlight the denouement of the poem. The poem’s first eight stanzas, with their repeated use of ‘sé’, ‘I know’, might have appeared to be an attempt to affirm as much as could be said about God despite (‘although it is’) the night. Yet in this tenth stanza it is made clear that precisely because of the darkness which surrounds all human knowledge of God, it is through the presence of the divine as seen and received in the eucharistic bread that the yearning of creatures for God will be satisfied. This vision of night is, accordingly, rather different from the existential terror and sense of divine absence described in the Dark Night commentary; instead, the darkness that surrounds all human knowledge of God is depicted as an unavoidable condition of existence. And such resolution and satisfaction of desire as is possible in this life, with all its continuing darkness and paradox, is to be found in the particular—and, most specifically, in the Eucharist.

III.  Desire in the Noche, Llama, and Cántico John’s glosa and copla poems emphasize how, in the face of the transcendence of God, language is especially aware of its inherent inability, by virtue of its created nature, to depict God. In these times, confidence in the ability of the created order—be it matter or language—to point towards the divine may, as John recognizes in the ‘Fonte’, only remain in specific icons of creaturely desire such as the eucharistic bread. This emphasis on paradox and the limits of language is not, however, the dominant theme in John’s poetry. Rather, as has already been apparent in the Romances, it is the theme of desire that John understands as most capable of depicting the nature of ascent and union. This notion represents both God’s desire for his creation and also the human desire for

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116  John of the Cross God that stems from and is itself a reflection of this divine desire. It is this theme that is developed at greatest length in John’s most renowned poems, the Noche, Llama, and Cántico. What particularly distinguishes the poems, all written in an ‘a lo divino’ adoption of the Italian Renaissance lira form, is the centrality assumed by desire as a force that propels the soul towards its goal, and whose eventual realization may be depicted in images and language drawn from human love.

Noche oscura Even without the two commentaries that develop their striking account of the spiritual ascent around the image of the ‘dark night of the soul’, the Noche poem would represent one of John’s most distinctive contributions to Christian thought. In this poem John deploys the full force of the language of desire, using language that rejoices in its excess, and which is used to deliver the narrative not of the inner life of the Trinity, but of the soul’s ascent to union. The two images which John conjoins in the poem—the image of the night both as the ascent and God himself, and the depiction of human desire for God in romantic terms—both have extensive scriptural and theological backgrounds, and John would certainly have had a partial knowledge of this past tradition.8 Yet John explores the relationship of these images to a degree unparalleled in previous writing, and in doing so delivers a poem which forms a stark contrast to those in his oeuvre so far examined. The poem’s narrative takes the form of an unidentified female voice describing her night-time escape from her house in order to find and embrace her lover: En una noche oscura, con ansias, en amores inflamada,

One dark night, fired with love’s urgent longings

8  Helpful surveys of previous uses of the metaphor of ‘night’ may be found in Georges Morel, Le sens de l’existence selon Saint Jean de la Croix: Vol III, Symbolique (Paris: Aubier, 1961), 159–74; Alois Haas, ‘Die dunkle Nacht der Sinne und des Geistes: Mystische Leiderfahrung nach Johannes vom Kreuz’, in Mystik als Aussage: Erfahrungs-, Denk- and Redeformen Christlicher Mystik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), 446–52; Paola Elia and María Jesús Mancho, eds, Cántico espiritual y poesía completa (Barcelona: Crítica, 2002), 599–623.

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Language, form, and imagery in John ’ s poetry  117 ¡oh dichosa ventura! salí sin ser notada estando ya mi casa sosegada.

– ah, the sheer grace! –9 I went out unseen, my house being now all stilled.

This first stanza depicts a variety of moods. The opening lines give a sense of pressing need, perhaps even of danger. The night is ‘dark’. The speaker is pervaded by ‘ansias’, a somewhat ambiguous word that can refer both to fears and desires, and is ‘enflamed’ with love, an image contrasting with the darkness of the night. The grammar of the stanza is as restless as the speaker’s soul, being interrupted by the interjection of the third line, literally ‘Oh happy fortune!’, a feature that recurs in the second and fourth stanzas. Yet at the same time the final lines speak of calm: the speaker leaves ‘unseen’, her house ‘stilled’, with the sibilance of ‘salí sin ser’, and ‘sosegada’ evoking the tranquillity of the scene.10 As the narrator proceeds to describe her escape from her house down the ‘secreta escala’ (‘secret ladder’), the Noche continues to evoke some of the paradoxes that sustained so many of John’s glosas and coplas. The image of the ‘dark night’ continues to allow, in these early stanzas, for the same paradoxes of knowing while not-knowing and seeing while not-seeing that were so prevalent in John’s other poetry. The darkness is no longer a threat, as so often, but is ‘secure’, the means by which the speaker trusts that she will finds her lover. The speaker no longer relies on the light of day to find her way, but is in the final three lines of the third and first two lines of the fourth stanza propelled by the desire that is alight within her: ni yo miraba cosa, nor did I look at anything sin otra luz y guía with no other light or guide sino la que en el corazón than the one that burned in ardía. my heart. Aquésta me quiaba This guided me Más cierto que la luz del more surely than the mediodía, light of noon 9 For consistency I retain the English translation given in Kavanaugh and Rodriguez’s Collected Works. Note, however, that the line might be better translated as ‘Oh, happy fortune!’ 10  Dámaso Alonso, La poesía de San Juan de la Cruz (desde esta ladera) (Madrid: CSIC, 1942), 158.

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118  John of the Cross This desire is depicted in far more explicit terms than in John’s coplas and glosas: in those, where love was a theme of the ascent (most strongly in Vivo sin vivir en mí, but also to an extent in Por toda la hermosura), it was presented as the cries of unrequited love. In the Noche, it is this loving desire that pulls the speaker onwards, both giving her strength and guiding her towards her lover. The climax of this quest is in fact never, however, depicted. Instead, the preterite tense of the fifth stanza points to the union that already belongs to the past, having occurred in the hiatus between the fourth and fifth stanzas. The union is celebrated in the fifth stanza’s intense series of exclamatory addresses to the night itself: ¡Oh noche que guiaste! O guiding night! ¡Oh noche amable más que O night more lovely than el alborada! the dawn! ¡Oh noche que juntaste O night that has united Amado con amadathe Lover with his beloved, Amada en el Amado transforming the beloved transformada! in her Lover.

The words probably allude to the addresses made by the ancient Exsultet hymn to the Easter night in which the redemption of the world was accomplished.11 Yet the setting is very different. The narrative, so frequently unsettled in the earlier stanzas, is here cast aside in a string of praise addressed to the night itself. It is the night itself, the speaker proclaims, that has brought about this union—and as the stanza draws on, the sounds of the verse begin to flow in and out of one another (‘amado . . . amada . . . amada . . . Amado . . . transformada’), perhaps representing the very union that the words of the stanza depict.12 The final three stanzas of the Noche move away from the restless energy of the previous stanzas, as the scene becomes the intimate caress 11  For evidence of John’s likely familiarity with the Exsultet, see John Sullivan OCD, ‘Night and Light: The Poet John of the Cross and the Exultet of the Easter Liturgy’, Ephemerides Carmeliticae 30, no. 1 (1979): 52–68. 12 R.O. Jones, A Literary History of Spain. The Golden Age: Prose and Poetry: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1971), 111.

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Language, form, and imagery in John ’ s poetry  119 of the lovers after union. The union that was depicted in such precise, paradoxical terms in a copla poem such as Entréme donde no supe here acquires an entirely different character. Rather than emphasizing the incomparable nature of created metaphors of vision, touch, or taste with descriptions of divine union, and rather than repeatedly emphasizing the incapability of any language to assume this task, the final stanzas of the Noche present a scene as sensuously depicted as any to be found in secular love poetry of the period. This dark night is neither a Dionysian dazzling darkness, nor the darkness of doubt and despair that John will later depict in parts of his prose commentary on the work, but rather a fecund night, filled with the riches of creation and brimming with romantic possibilities. The lovers lie in an embrace, he sleeping on her breast and she caressing him. Creation appears to infiltrate the entire scene, itself supporting and aiding the love of the lovers. The speaker’s breast is ‘florido’ (‘flowering’), and as the two lie together they are cooled by ‘el ventalle de cedros’ (‘the breeze from the fanning cedars’). As the speaker runs her hand through her lover’s hair, the wind blows, wounding her neck ‘con su mano serena’ (‘with its gentle hand’), and ‘suspendía’ (‘suspending’) all her senses. The speaker lies with her Beloved, her cares lie ‘entre las azucenas olvidado’ (‘forgotten among the lilies’). This is not to say that the Noche unqualifiedly presents ascent and union in terms of sexual desire and consummation. There remains a dreamlike, fantastical quality to the poem that pervades the entire scene: this is, after all, in the manner of the fictional tale, ‘una noche oscura’, not ‘la noche oscura’. The setting of the poem is never fully clarified, and the ‘almena’ (‘turret’) from which the breeze blows in the seventh stanza introduces a rather militaristic image that seems to jar with the calm of the climax. The lovers themselves remain mysterious: they never speak directly to one another, and even the moment of encounter is passed over in silence in the hiatus that exists between the fourth and fifth ­stanzas. The language and syntax of the poem itself continues this theme: much of the poem lacks any main verb, and is instead constructed out of a series of disjointed phrases that ensure that the journey and consummation remain mysterious.13 John, in other words, is clear 13 Thompson, Songs in the Night, 88–9.

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120  John of the Cross that the Noche depicts a world not quite as the reader might ordinarily expect it. It is a story of desire and consummation, sensuously delivered and for which the poetic use of language and syntax is as crucial as any image or metaphor. Yet it is a scene that remains shrouded in mystery as to its particulars: this is not the story of the love of any two named pro­ tag­on­ists, but rather a story that remains focused on the dynamics of desire and consummation itself.

Llama de amor viva The sensuality of the Noche may be striking when compared to John’s coplas and glosas. Yet it pales when set alongside the passionate ex­clam­ ations of the Llama, to which I now turn. This is in large part because the Llama, in contrast to the Noche, only describes the heights of union: the poem is, in the title given it by the Sanlúcar manuscript, ‘Canciones del alma en la intima communicación de union de amor de Dios’ (‘Songs of the soul in the intimate communication of loving union with God’). The poem centres around the image of the ‘flame of love’, burning in the soul not to destroy but to transform and divinize. Like the night, it is a highly traditional image, used in Scripture, much previous theology, and contemporary Spanish literature.14 Yet, just as in the Noche, John’s development of the image of the ‘flame’ is particularly distinctive for the manner in which he accentuates the sexual potential of the image beyond previous efforts, developing highly sensuous metaphors in order to depict the loving action of God on the soul. The language of the Llama lays out the sexual references far more explicitly than even the Noche: the flame ‘tiernamente hieres’ (‘tenderly wounds’) the soul of the speaker, whose gender remains undefined. Yet the speaker demands it to ‘acaba’ (‘consummate’), to ‘¡rompe la tela de este dulce encuentro!’ (‘tear through the veil of this sweet encounter!’). The senses that are stimulated—the ‘toque delicado, / que a vida eterna sabe’ (‘delicate touch that tastes of eternal life’)—depict this union in the intimate imagery of ‘touch’ and ‘taste’, with the taste of ‘vida eterna’ not 14  For a survey of these potential sources, see Elia and Mancho, eds, Poesía completa, 666–71.

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Language, form, and imagery in John ’ s poetry  121 belonging to the typical vocabulary of Petrachan poetry and therefore pointing more explicitly to the spiritual connotations of this union. The second stanza’s repeated moans of ‘¡Oh!’ are perhaps the most intense expressions of the soul’s love for God, a response to the loving action of the flame. Yet the intensity of the poems remains particularly elevated throughout all four stanzas, and the almost total use of the present tense provides the poem with a much greater immediacy than the Noche.15 The urgency and intensity that was mediated in the Noche through the past-tense narrative form is here presented in all its ­passion: when told as if from the moment of union, John might be saying, it is only the fullness of sexual desire that can approximate the force of feeling. The Llama speaks of this desire through a whole series of objects, both physical and non-physical—the flame, the soul, the cautery, the wound, the hand, and the touch. A particular part of the attraction to John of the image of the flame lies in its ambiguous physical status—an object that stimulates the senses, and yet is apparently immaterial. This is, he emphasizes in the opening line, the living flame of love: like the Noche’s address to the night, the only direct address is made to an inanimate object, but one to which active, personal powers are attributed. None of these objects is presented in technically precise or affectively neutral terms: the desire depicted in the Llama causes the soul to perceive every object in a new light. The soul, for instance, is wounded ‘en el más profundo centre’ (‘in its deepest centre’); like ‘las profundas cavernas del sentido’ (‘the deep caverns of feeling’) that appear in the third stanza, it appears that only metaphor, and not the terminology of quotidian anthropology, can do justice to this transformation. The adjectives attributed to the nouns of this stanzas—the ‘cauterio suave’ (‘sweet cautery’), the ‘regalada llaga’ (‘delightful wound’), the ‘mano blanda’ (‘gentle hand’), and the ‘toque delicado’ (‘delicate touch’) point to the soul’s changed perception of the created order: just like the dreamlike vision of creation contained in the later stanzas of the Noche, the soul

15  The only verb in the past tense, as pointed out by Thompson, Songs in the Night, 246, is the third stanza’s use of ‘estaba’.

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122  John of the Cross perceives the created order with joy, recognizing its role in pointing it to God.

Cántico espiritual Both the Noche and Llama, therefore, possess an optimistic vision of the potential for language to describe union with the divine. In drawing on these created artefacts for the description of the divine, they provide an elevated vision of love as the force that propels the lover through the ascent, towards a union that is itself distinguished by the flourishing of love. It is in the light of these studies that I turn finally to the Cántico.

The two redactions of the Cántico I first briefly address the knotty problems of the two redactions of the poem and commentary, in a discussion that will remain pertinent to the examination in Chapter 5 of the prose commentary. The Cántico poem and commentary exists in three distinct forms, not all of which are agreed to have been written by John, and any examination of the poem must therefore begin with an examination of this difficult question of its origins. The poem itself seems to have been written before the commentary: the evidence of witnesses suggests that John composed the first thirty-one stanzas of the Canticle poem while he was imprisoned in Toledo, with eight stanzas then added intermittently between 1579 and 1582, during John’s years in Beas, Baeza, and Granada.16 During these same years, John seems to have begun to write commentaries on individual stanzas, probably responding to requests from nuns to explain particular passages they could not understand rather than as part of a systematic exposition of the whole poem. There gradually developed a process of the progressive extension of the poem combined with the production of commentaries on individual stanzas. All this seems to 16 Colin P. Thompson, The Poet and the Mystic: A Study of the Cántico Espiritual of San Juan de la Cruz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 21–32. These pages also examine the relation of CA and CB to the version known as CA’ that served as the basis for many early printed editions of the work; or, for a more detailed manuscript study of this early textual history, see Elia and Mancho, eds, Poesía completa, cxix–cxxiv.

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Language, form, and imagery in John ’ s poetry  123 have been pulled together by John in the formation of the thirty-ninestanza version of the Cántico poem and commentary that is preserved in the Sanlúcar manuscript of 1584 and that was first published in Brussels in 1627. This poem and commentary are conventionally known as CA, and the existence of annotations in John’s hand in the Sanlúcar manuscript is one among various pieces of evidence that cause few to doubt John’s authorship of this version of the Cántico. There exist, however, two further versions of the Cántico poem and commentary. The first, known as CA´, is largely identical to CA except for a few simply rephrasings, and the insertion of a new stanza 11 with commentary (meaning that stanzas 11–39 of CA become stanzas 12–40 of CA´). This redaction was the one published in the first Italian edition of John’s works in 1627, and the first Spanish edition in 1630, and is widely accepted as John’s work. The other version, known as CB, differs greatly from CA, and its authorship is far more debated. Like CA´, it contains a stanza (CB11) not present in CA. Furthermore, stanzas CB12–33 are extensively reordered from CA and CA´, with their accompanying commentaries similarly rearranged. The commentary is given an ‘Argumento’ section at the start of the work which explains the relationship of the poem to the traditional schema of the threefold way. There is also much more explicit discussion in the course of in­ter­pret­ ation of each stanza, setting each more explicitly within John’s own schema of spiritual betrothal, spiritual marriage, and union. This second redaction of the Cántico first appears in the Jaén manuscript of 1703, and the late appearance of CB in published form, as well as particular intratextual features and aspects of its theology, have given ballast to an extensive debate on its authenticity. This is a debate that was first raised by Philippe Chevallier, and then taken up by Jean Baruzi in the 1920s, with Baruzi cautiously following Chevallier’s insistence that the second redaction was a later reworking of the poem and commentary by another hand, undertaken with the purpose of making John sound more orthodox.17 It has since been recurrently raised in sanjuanist scholarship, with a belief that CB was not an authentic redaction 17  Dom Philippe Chevallier, ‘Le Cantique spirituel de Saint Jean de la Croix a-t-il été interpolé?’, Bulletin Hispanique 24 (1922): 307–22.

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124  John of the Cross by John being particularly widespread both in French scholarship in the middle of the century. Such theories continue to be taken up by literary scholars, in part because of their concerns that the revisions made in the formation of the second redaction are disruptive to the literary qualities of the poem as it was first written.18 I follow, however, the wide consensus among scholars (arising in large part thanks to Eulogio Pacho, who has undertaken significant work on these early manuscripts and printed editions) that the second redaction was an authentic revision produced by John.19 It was possibly produced during his stay in Granada between October 1585 and June 1586, and may well have been reworked by him with the aim of making the poem function better as a guide to the spiritual ascent. Recognizing the concerns of literary scholars, however, I also attend in the following analysis of the Cántico to the ordering of CA, exploring the significance of the changes in John’s ordering of the stanzas of the poem.

Yearning in CB1–12 It is the language and imagery of the Song of Songs, and the medieval commentarial tradition on the work that continued to flourish in Carmelite circles in John’s time, that served as John’s main sources in the composition of the Cántico.20 John is not tied to any particular in­ter­ pret­ation of the Song. He does not adopt images and phrases for the Cántico in a manner that respects the order of the Song, and he frequently makes considerable alterations to the imagery that he adopts. Images from the Song are reworked and reshuffled, being mingled with images that may be drawn from elsewhere in the Bible, or another source entirely. Rather than the urban setting of the Song, the Cántico is 18  For a recent example of such doubt, see Elia and Mancho, eds, Poesía completa, cxxxvi– cxxxix and the work’s consequent reproduction of CA as the authentic sanjuanist version. 19  See, for instance, the series of arguments put forward in Faraone, La inhabitación trinitaria, 79 n3. 20  In this conclusion, the most important study remains Thompson, Poet and the Mystic, esp. 60–9. A brief survey of recent work on possible influences may be found in Elia and Mancho, eds, Poesía completa, 406–8. On medieval exegesis of the Song, see Terence O’Reilly, ‘The Cántico Espiritual of Saint John of the Cross and the Mystical Interpretation of the Song of Songs’, Hallel 19 (1994): 5–16. Important emphasis on the Carmelite influences behind John’s work is given in Valentín Núñez Rivera, ‘Del Cantar al Cántico de Juan de la Cruz’, in Poesía y biblia en el Siglo de Oro: estudios sobre los Salmos y el Cantar de los Cantares (Madrid; Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana; Vervuert, 2010), 229–44.

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Language, form, and imagery in John ’ s poetry  125 located in a pastoral setting, perhaps better to resonate with existing sixteenth-century Renaissance trends in love poetry. Instead, John incorporates the language and imagery of the Song into the Cántico, recurrently exploring a series of images and notions that include ‘eyes’, the ‘gaze’ of the Beloved, the role of ‘grace’ and ‘beauty’, the ‘touch’, and the effect of the ‘wound’. He draws on these in a manner that opens them up to explicit theological interpretation in the commentary, and that therefore extends the themes of sexual yearning and consummation that have been so significant in the Noche and Llama. This is not quite the ‘mysterious’ poetry that it has sometimes been called: despite the many sparse and unusual poetic devices in the poem, there is a sense of purpose and confidence regarding the consummation of the lovers’ desire that pervades the Cántico’s imagery and language.21 The first twelve stanzas of the Cántico depict a scene of absence and yearning of the same kind as that which appears in the Noche, and similar in tone to the yearning for further consummation in the first stanza of the Llama. The poem plunges the reader straight into the action with the mystery of the opening line, which will be the theme of the poem: ‘¿Adonde te escondiste, / Amado, y me dejaste con gemido?’ (‘Where have you hidden, Beloved, and left me moaning?’). The Bride yearns to see her Beloved, the one who has ‘hidden’ (CB1), and sets off to find him.22 This search is given urgency by the pressing sense of suffering: the Bride was ‘wounded’ by the first brief encounter with her Beloved (CB1); without him, she warns, ‘adolezco, peno y muero’ (‘I am sick, I suffer, and I die’). Her pressing determination to find her Beloved is emphasized not simply by the third stanza’s series of purposeful assertions delivered in the present tense—‘iré . . . ni cogeré . . . ni temeré . . . pasaré . . .’ (‘I will go . . . I will not gather . . . I will not fear . . . I will go beyond . . .’)—but also by the series of present participles (‘clamando’, ‘buscando’, ‘derramando’) that

21  Note that while Thompson’s early work emphasizes the ‘mystery’ summoned up by the poem (Poet and the Mystic, 91), his more recent work has followed this more optimistic ana­ lysis of the vision of love that is presented by John (Thompson, Songs in the Night, 98). 22  This emphasis on sight is developed by CB11, the stanza that is a new addition to the second redaction of the poem. The Bride yearns to see ‘los ojos deseados / que tengo en mis entrañas dibujados!’ (‘the eyes I have desired, / that I bear sketched deep within my heart’): the search for the Beloved is also the quest for the one who gazes at her.

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126  John of the Cross drive the narrative forward with their depiction of an ongoing, unresolved state of affairs.23 From the sixth to the twelfth stanza, however, the Bride’s initial determination gives way to a series of exclamations (many of them drawn from the pseudo-Augustinian Soliloquies examined in Chapter  2) that evoke the despair that serves as the dialectic of love’s hope. The Bride asks questions: ‘¡Ay, quién podrá sanarmé!’ (‘Ah, who has the power to heal me?’), and issues commands in the imperative: ‘Apaga mis enojos’ (‘Extinguish these miseries!’). Indeed, as the Bride begins to express her yearning in even more graphic terms, the failure of language itself points to the intensity of her desire, and contrasts with the precise statements of the Bride in the first five stanzas. A series of episodes of polyptoton, the placing of different grammatical forms of the same stem word in close proximity (‘muriendo’/‘mueras’ (CB7, 8); ‘vida’/‘viviendo’/‘vives’ (CB8); ‘robado’/‘robo’/‘robaste’ (CB9)) draws attention to the Bride’s failures of creativity. Likewise, the Bride utters vague phrases, unable to articulate her desires (‘decirme lo que quiero’ (CB6), ‘de lo que del Amado’ (CB8)); all things that she hears of her Beloved, she states, ‘wound me more / and leave me dying / of, ah, I-don’t-know-what behind their stammering (un no sé qué que quedan balbuciendo)’ (CB7).

Spiritual betrothal and marriage in CB13–40 The opening stanzas therefore depict a yearning similar to that represented in John’s other lira poetry, albeit in a far more extended manner than in either the Noche or Llama. Suddenly, however, midway through the thirteenth stanza, the Bridegroom appears, with the moment of encounter itself passed over (like in the Noche) in silence. The yearning of the early stanzas has ended, and the middle section of the Cántico (CB13–34) depicts in dialogue form the growth in love of Bride and Bridegroom. This depiction is striking: the narrative structure and language of the poem now disintegrate, being replaced by a series of kal­ eido­ scop­ ic scenes, sometimes independent, sometimes overlapping, sometimes juxtaposed, that depict the progressive growth in love of Bride and Bridegroom. 23 Thompson, Poet and the Mystic, 102.

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Language, form, and imagery in John ’ s poetry  127 The effect of the Bridegroom’s arrival is abruptly marked by the Bride’s single-sentence, verb-free exclamation of the subsequent stanzas (CB14–15): Mi Amado, las montañas, My Beloved, the mountains, los valles solitarios nemorosos, and lonely wooded valleys, las ínsulas extrañas, strange islands, los ríos sonorosos, and resounding rivers, el silbo de los aires the whistling of love-stirring amorosos, breezes, la noche sosegada the tranquil night en par de los levantes del aurora, at the time of the rising dawn, la música callada, silent music, la soledad sonora, sounding solitude, la cena que recrea y the supper that refreshes, and enamora. deepens love.

In the Bride’s joy at the discovery of her Bridegroom, narrative is replaced by a series of highly evocative images piled onto one another. The absence of verbs and concentration of adjectives slows the pace of reading, marking this crucial moment of transition brought about by the return of the Bridegroom.24 The nouns used begin with concrete objects (‘mountains’, ‘valleys’) and become increasingly abstract (‘music’, ‘solitude’, the obviously metaphorical ‘supper’). The adjectives on which John draws, moreover, become increasingly auditory; the paradox of ‘silent music’ may draw the reader’s attention to this, but John has been building up to this (‘resounding’, ‘whistling’, ‘tranquil’) for many lines previously. Like the final stanzas of the Noche, the arrival of the Bridegroom heralds the onset of the Cántico’s depiction of an unfamiliar new world. The most extensive reordering of the stanzas of the Cántico in the second redaction takes place in the following verses.25 In CA, it is the Bride who then speaks for a number of stanzas (CA13–26), describing the

24 Thompson, Poet and the Mystic, 82. 25  For a survey of these changes, see Henri Sanson, L’esprit humain selon Saint Jean de la Croix (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953), 291–307.

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128  John of the Cross development of their love in a series of unconnected images. It is here, moreover, that direct allusions to the Song for the first time become notably more pervasive (up to this point the use of specific images from the work have only been occasional), perhaps to indicate the effects of the love of Bride and Bridegroom.26 ‘Nuestro lecho florido’ (‘Our bed is in flower’), states the Bride, proceeding to describe its hangings (CA15; Sg 1.15, 4.8, 4.4); she recounts how ‘En la interior bodega / de mi Amado bebí’ (‘In the inner wine cellar / I drank of my Beloved’; CA17; Sg 2.4, 5.1); she describes how she occupies ‘todo mi caudal en su servicio’ (‘all my energy in his service’, CA19; Sg 7.13). When the Bridegroom responds, as is depicted in CA27, he similarly evokes Sg 8.3 in the pas­ tor­al imagery he draws on. As the lovers rejoice in one another, in this first redaction’s ordering of the stanzas, they seem to become progressively more interwoven with creation. In the second redaction, however, John reorders these paragraphs. The poem loses what sense it had of a progression in this section from the long exclamations of the Bride to the shorter response of the Bridegroom. Instead, what in CA were long passages of separate speeches by Bride and Bridegroom become interlaced in CB, a series of striking images that place less emphasis on narrative progression and more on the mutuality of the relationship between the two lovers, by placing them in dialogue with one another. In part, this is a result of the particular aspects of the ascent that John wished to highlight in his commentary, with the new order allowing on occasion for a more systematic account of the purifications involved on the ascent.27 Yet it also appears that the fractured narrative of CB could without difficulty take its place as another means by which John depicts the mysterious, disjointed growth in love of the Bride and Bridegroom. 26 Thompson, Poet and the Mystic, 62–5, from which the citations below are drawn, lists nine direct borrowings of phrases from the Song in CA1–12, but 22 in CA15–32. Certainly, these images do not only use images from the Song. The images of roses, thickets, and springs and, most strikingly, CA31’s ‘nymphs of Judah’, bring ideas that owe more to Renaissance pas­ tor­al imagery into the scene. 27  For example, see E.W. Trueman Dicken, The Crucible of Love: A Study of the Mysticism of St Teresa of Jesus and St John of the Cross (London: DLT, 1963), 451 for one example of the difficulties raised by John’s commentary on CA31, which were resolved by its earlier placement, as CB19, in the second redaction.

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Language, form, and imagery in John ’ s poetry  129 The final stanzas of the Cántico, in both redactions, emphasize in multiple ways the unity of the lovers that has been achieved—in the fourfold repetition in the following stanza of ‘en soledad’, interlaced with the single ‘a solas’ (CB35), in the desire of the Bride to ‘vámanos a ver en tu hermosura’ (‘let us go forth to behold ourselves in your beauty’, CB36) and to ‘el mosto de granadas gustaremos’ (‘taste the fresh juice of the pomegranates’, CB37), and in her anticipation that ‘Allí me mostrarías / aquello que mi alma pretendía’ (‘There you will show me / what my soul has been seeking’, CB38). No longer does there exist the absence that separated Bride and Bridegroom in the earlier stanzas; rather, as they progress ‘al monte y al collado, / do mana el agua pura; / entremos más adentro en la espesura’ (‘to the mountain and to the hill, / to where the pure water flows, / and further, deep into the thicket’, CB36) they will become lost to the outside world, known only to each other. These final stanzas continue to echo the verb-less celebration of cre­ ation that began with the Bride’s exclamations of CB14–15. What the Bridegroom will give the Bride, it turns out in CB39, is both a gift of nature, a series of sensory images not capturable in physical form and doubtless in part evoking John’s other favourite poetic images: El aspirar del aire, the breathing of the air el canto de la dulce the song of the sweet filomena, nightingale, el soto y su the grove and its donaire, living beauty en la noche serena, in the serene night, con llama que consume y with a flame that is no da pena. consuming and painless.

What might have seemed to be a simple, unifying ending is again ­disrupted by the final stanza (CB40). The frame of the poem seems to widen, shifting from the first person to the third person, adopting the imperfect tense and unexpectedly bringing in a final reference from the Song:

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130  John of the Cross Que nadie lo miraba, No one looked at her, Aminadab tampoco parecía, nor did Aminadab appear y el cerco sosegaba, the siege was still; y la caballería and the cavalry, a vista de las aguas         at the sight of the waters, descendía.           descended.

Having focused more and more intensely on the couple’s conversation, the reader is suddenly reminded of the outside world, even if only through their absence; the note of calm on which the poem ends is jolted by the militaristic images of Aminadab and his horses (Sg 6.12) through which it is unexpectedly delivered. The sexual desire that animated the whole poem, culminating in the union of the lovers, is finally dissipated as this love is set back into the context of the allegorical love of the Song of Songs from which the poem began.

IV.  Conclusions: language and the spiritual ascent In this chapter I have shown that John’s poetry makes substantially richer use of language, imagery, and poetic form than is typically assumed by many of the modern interpretations surveyed in Chapter 1. John’s poetry is rooted in the divine communicativity that is depicted most extensively in the Romances, and explores the tensions involved in all use of language to describe the spiritual ascent in multiple ways. In his extensive use in his glosa and copla poetry of paradox, stammering, and the imagery of overwhelming force of certain sensations, John shows himself to be well aware that one form of language about union and the divine is that which consciously accepts its own failure, and which presses on the listener the question of what it is to think of oneself in relation to the non-objectifiable divine love. This is also a regular feature of John’s prose works, in which he various explores this principle in terms of the limited ability of language to describe the divine nature (cf. CB26.4; F3.48), the experience of the ascent (A.Prol.1), and the divine infusion of contemplation (N2.17.2–3; CB39.12). In this respect, John’s emphasis on the purification of language required in the ascent itself is

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Language, form, and imagery in John ’ s poetry  131 in accord with the frequent emphasis of modern writers reflecting on the poetic craft that it is only through silence, through the surrendering of all past conceptions (the ‘dark night’), that the attentiveness necessary to articulate afresh a perception of the world may arise.28 Yet although John is highly capable of using this form of language, this is not the form in which John flourishes. Rather, his own personal preference (as well as the form which has found most favour with ­scholars) is for the use of language for the description of union, which, through the development of the notion of desire, particularly in its Dionysian formulations, luxuriates in its own sense of excess and superabundance.29 The articulation of the desire that looms so large in John’s poetry points, as such, to a language of praise that can only arise out of the soul’s progressively attained recognition that its language (and, by extension, its selfhood) finds its root not in its own capabilities but in a source that lies irreducibly outside itself. The significance of this unusually elevated attention to John’s poetry for his account of the spiritual ascent will become fully apparent in the following two chapters, as I turn to examine how this heightened attention to language is played out in John’s prose works. In contrast to the restrictive interpretations surveyed in Chapter  1, these commentaries represent neither the later opportunistic use of a poem as a creative gloss for an unrelated theological schema nor a stultified, formulaic rendition of the original freer poetry. Instead, John was deeply soaked in biblical and theological traditions that placed great value on allegorical and mystical interpretation. John’s poetry drew much of its language and imagery from these traditions. His poetry, and his subsequent prose interpretation of his poems, represents a further extension of these traditions of interpretation. He uses such interpretation to great effect as he turns, in his prose works, to lay out more systematically the significance of desire throughout the spiritual ascent.

28  See for instance Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 125. 29 Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 150–1.

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4 The ‘dark night of the soul’ and the purification of desire John’s account of the soul’s passage through the ‘dark night of the soul’, given in the Ascent and Night, is a novel and striking depiction of the progressive transformation in selfhood through the alignment of human and divine desires. The narrative of the Noche poem around which John structures the works describes a woman’s night-time escape from her house in search of her lover. In a similar way, John characterizes the soul as propelled by desire, which in its untransformed state takes the form of the yearning of the soul’s appetites for objects within the created order. Yet this persistent desire is, John emphasizes in these works, entirely inimical to union with the transcendent God. The soul’s ascent towards the state of union requires the progressive stilling and purification of all the soul’s sensory and spiritual appetites and faculties through the ‘dark night of the soul’. It is through this process of purgation that the soul’s pervasive desires, as analysed through the anthropological ­categories of the sensory appetites, passions, internal senses, intellect, memory, and will, may be first stilled and then redirected towards God. This purification is no easy task: the risk that the soul’s desire for God will remain a desire for a God projected in the image of itself means that the transformation of all the faculties, powers, and appetites of the soul is required. Only by this process may the soul give up its ordinary desires and open itself to the graced activity of God in the infusion of faith, hope, and love. This reorientation of selfhood may be far greater than the soul ever initially imagined possible, and for this very reason may be experienced at the time as disconcerting—a ‘dark night’ involving far more extensive noetic, sensual, and spiritual darkness than in

John of the Cross: Desire, Transformation, and Selfhood. Sam Hole, Oxford University Press (2020). © Sam Hole. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198863069.003.0005

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The ‘ Dark Night of the Soul ’   133 pseudo-Dionysius’s account of the soul’s ascent into divine darkness.1 Yet the night is, for John, the vocation of all Christians, a process that is purgative or transformative rather than annihilative or obliterative, and all within the soul that is made into nothing in the night is not entirely destroyed, but will be eventually re-engaged once transformed and graced. This night—especially the passive night—may feel to the individual like a simultaneous divine assault and abandonment; understood correctly, however, it is to understand what it feels like to be drawn into the light of Christ. It is this process of the purification of the desires of the soul that this chapter explores.

I.  The relationship between the Ascent and Night The relationship between the stages of the ascent outlined in the Ascent and Night commentaries was the subject of extensive early twentiethcentury scholarly dispute, and I therefore address this conundrum before analysing the precise details of John’s account. In both works, John speaks of a ‘night of sense’ followed by a ‘night of spirit’. Yet the Ascent describes the purifications of these stages as they occur in the ‘active night’, while the Night speaks of the purifications in the ‘passive night’. This study accepts the view of Juan de Jesús María that the relationship between the Ascent and the Night is best characterized as a ‘diptych’, with these two works most appropriately understood to be describing one dark night, a single process of purgation (A1.2.1; N1.8.1; N2.24.2).2 On the occasions 1  Excellent analyses of the distinctiveness of John’s understanding of darkness are given in Ysabel de Andía, ‘San Juan de la Cruz y la “Teología Mística” de “San Dionisio” ’, in Actas del congreso internacional sanjuanista, ed. A. García Simón, vol. 3 (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 1993); Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 176–84. 2  Juan de Jesús María, ‘El díptico Subida-Noche’, Sanjuanistica (1943): 25–83 (in which reference to previous debates on this matter may also be found). See also E.W. Trueman Dicken, The Crucible of Love: A Study of the Mysticism of St Teresa of Jesus and St John of the Cross (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1963), 215–37, who largely follows Jesús María. It should be acknowledged, however, that John is hardly clear-cut on this point: Eulogio Pacho, for instance, lists five different schemas that John promises in the Ascent before he eventually (in A2.2–5) provides the schema which proves definitive for the work as a whole. Eulogio Pacho, ‘Subida del Monte Carmelo (obra)’, in Diccionario de San Juan de la Cruz, ed. Eulogio Pacho (Burgos: Monte Carmelo, 2000), 1370–2.

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134  John of the Cross where John speaks of two nights (A1.1.1; cf. N1.13.3), or even of three nights (A1.2.5; A2.2.1), he is employing heur­is­tic distinctions to aid his guidance to his readers. Three of the four parts of the dark night (A1, N1, N2) are described through a commentary on the first stanza of the Noche poem: each part is, it could be said, a reiteration of the same structure, albeit in new depth. As such, while I will follow John’s usage of referring, with varying use of single and ­plural, to the ‘dark night of the soul’, the ‘active night’, the ‘active and passive nights’ and so on, it must be remembered that despite this ter­mino­logic­al variation in the service of concision there is at root one night. John makes a number of distinctions to aid his account of this dark night. He develops the anthropological distinction between the sensual and spiritual parts of the soul to insist that the soul on the spiritual ascent must first pass through the ‘night of sense’, pertaining to the purification of the lower part of the soul, before it can begin the ‘night of spirit’ (N2.14; N2.16.4). In relation to the traditional schema of the threefold way of ascent, he insists that the night of sense corresponds to the moment of transition from beginner to proficient (N1.1.1), and the night of spirit to the transition from proficient to perfect (N2.1.1), with the period between the two nights typically lasting several years (N2.1.1). In both the night of sense and spirit, moreover, John distinguishes between an active and a passive night. He invokes this distinction to distinguish between those elements of the ascent that must be actively undertaken by the soul in cooperation with God (the active night) and those that must be infused by God onto the passive soul (the passive night). In putting matters forward in these terms, John presumably saw himself as explaining the distinctions of operative and cooperative grace provided by Aquinas in his own discussion of grace (ST II–II.109–14, esp. ST II–II.111.2): some forms of grace occur through an act of the will in which human agency cooperates with divine grace, but other forms are brought about solely by the operation of God on the soul. As will be seen in Chapter 5, John does not rely heavily on this schema of the relation of nature and grace in depicting the higher stages of the ascent. He finds it a suitable means, however, to lay out the need for the graced transformation of the whole soul in the early stages of the ascent.

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The ‘ Dark Night of the Soul ’   135 It is the chronological relationship between the active and passive nights that has proved the most difficult aspect of John’s vision of the dark night for scholars to agree on, not least because of the fact that they are discussed in separate works. Certainly, it is possible to discern the chronological outline of this relationship by setting the various affective states that John describes in relation to one another. Such a method can help to establish that, in the case both of night of sense and of spirit, John seems to speak of the bulk of the passive night as occurring after the equivalent active night.3 It is difficult, however, to say anything more than this, and John’s ambiguity on this front seems to be deliberate: to seek to establish the precise chronological interrelation of active and passive nights by drawing up a linear chart of the associated affective states would be to assume a mechanistic picture of the operation of the relation of divine and human agency which is entirely alien to him. The division of active and passive is in fact primarily heuristic, a means of distinguishing different forms of divine action that may well be taking place simultaneously and of providing the relevant kinds of advice in relation to each.4 The Ascent and Night, in other words, describe what is at root a single story of transformation. The ‘dark night’ portrays a series of trans­form­ ations that might initially appear appalling and insurmountable, but the desire depicted in the Noche poem provides the propulsion that mediates the contradictions experienced by the soul. Despite all the terrible experiences that John graphically describes in the course of these works, there is also a calmness and confidence that runs through his account. While implicit in the prose, it emerges explicitly in the Noche poem on which the prose works are based: the yearning and eventual 3  In relation to the night of sense, while John speaks of passively infused divine longings for union as a prerequisite for the night of sense (A1.14), he more frequently describes aspects of the passive night that are subsequent to those of the active night (N1.8.4; N1.10.2). In relation to the night of spirit, although N2.7.7 seems to imply that the theological virtues are already possessed by souls in the passive part of the night of spirit (as if the active night of spirit takes place before the passive night), John makes clear in the longer introductory section of N2.1–4 that he envisages the active and passive nights to begin from the same state of the soul. 4  Georges Morel, Le sens de l’existence selon Saint Jean de la Croix: Vol I, Problématique (Paris: Aubier, 1961), 167.

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136  John of the Cross consummation of the poem point towards the dynamic of desire that is, obliquely, relentlessly pressing the soul onwards on the ascent.5

II.  Human sin and divine transcendence: the necessity of the dark night In Chapter 2 I noted John’s broad reliance on Thomas Aquinas’s account of the appetites, while also pointing to a more Augustinian ambiguity in John’s account concerning the moral agency of the appetites. It is with an exploration of the damage caused by these appetites in their ‘natural’ state that John begins his account of the ascent.6 The continual and pervading tendency evident in this anthropology for the soul to seek pleasure in the created order constitutes, for John, the state of deeply permeating sin with its consequent noetic darkness from which all begin the ascent. In both the Ascent and the Night, John develops this point by means of lists of metaphorical damages that afflict the soul of the beginner whose appetites remain uncontrolled. In the Ascent, this is developed in terms of the five harms that stem from the incommensurability of attachment to the created order with love of God: namely, that unreformed appetites ‘weary, torment, darken, defile, and weaken’ souls in whom they remain (A1.6.1), drawing the soul away in various ways from true love of God (A1.6.6–A1.10). In the Night, John develops similar concerns according

5  Despite the fact that the Ascent abandons all reference to the poem from A2.2.1 onwards, the rest of the Ascent and Night is broadly structured as commentary on the Noche poem. Although these commentaries’ engagement with the poem is rather more limited than is undertaken in the Canticle and Flame commentaries, the Noche poem remains crucial in providing the structure for the ascent itself. It is the stanzas of the poem that make evident the chronological relationship that John envisages between the nights, and it is the sexual yearning of the poetry that mediates the apparent contradictions and periods of apparent meaninglessness experienced in the ‘dark night’. 6  John’s use of ‘natural’ (lo natural; la naturaleza) is most frequently (and especially in the Ascent and Night) pejorative, serving to contrast the ‘natural way’, ‘natural reason’, or ‘natural being’ that cannot lead to union with God with the ‘supernatural’ or ‘spiritual’ way. Yet it is also in the ‘natural being’ (el ser natural) of the soul that John locates the ‘natural’ presence of God, with this deep connection with God in the ‘substance’ of the soul being significant in John’s account of the state of union. See Henri Sanson, L’esprit humain selon Saint Jean de la Croix (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953), 99–103.

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The ‘ Dark Night of the Soul ’   137 to a schema of the seven ‘cap­ital vices’ of pride, spiritual avarice, lust, anger, spiritual gluttony, spiritual envy, and sloth (N1.2–7).7 In the untransformed soul, these appetites are powerfully drawn towards objects in the created order, phantasms of which they then ­proceed to present (through the interior sense of the phantasy) to the intellect, that the intellect cannot but in turn direct the will back towards the created order, rather than to God. The influence of the appetites consequently extends to the internal senses of imagination and phantasy as well as to the spiritual faculty of memory. For example, John warns that the soul with unreformed appetites may continue to rely on objects and images in worship, rather than passing on to the true substance of the devotion (N1.3.1). The record of these sensory images will, in John’s account, remain in the internal sense of the phantasy (which functions as the storehouse of memories acquired through the natural operation of the soul) and will continue to be retrieved by the imagination as an object of cognition. Souls at prayer may therefore find themselves affected by ‘spiritual lust’, the advent of impure thoughts that are ­shadows of the sensory gratification in which the soul still finds ultimate pleasure (N1.4.1–2). John’s emphasis on the inability of the untransformed appetites to bring the soul to union with God is also rooted in his high sense of divine transcendence, which is evident in his emphasis on two features of the divine nature. In the first place, he emphasizes the incomprehensibility of God, a consequence of divine transcendence: ‘It is extremely easy’, as John says in one representative passage, ‘to judge the being and height of God less worthily and sublimely than befits his incomprehensibility’ (A3.12.1; cf. A2.8.3, A2.12.5). A.N. Williams neatly sums up the implications of this emphasis in her excellent study of John’s doctrine of God: ‘The apparently pessimistic tone of his anthropology is in fact doxologically motivated: if Juan deems human nature a poor thing by comparison with the divine, his purpose is not to denigrate human 7  While John implies in N1.7.5 that the causes of these various ‘capital vices’ are removed through the passive night of sense, their similarity with the various conditions diagnosed in the discussion of the active night of sense in the first book of the Ascent leads me to agree with Steven  L.  Payne, John of the Cross and the Cognitive Value of Mysticism (Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), 62, that John is in fact describing vices that are purged in both phases of the night of sense.

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138  John of the Cross nature, but to highlight the sublimity of the divine.’8 Second, however, John is clear that the attachment of the soul’s appetites to the created order is incompatible with the freedom of God: ‘all the sovereignty and freedom of the world compared to the freedom and sovereignty of the Spirit of God is utter slavery, anguish, and captivity’ (A1.4.6). John, accordingly, repeatedly emphasizes that the dissimilarity between the divine and created order is so great—his repeated refrain is that ‘two contraries cannot coexist in the same subject’ (A1.4.2; A1.6.1)—that the soul must abjure all attachment to the created order in its thoughts, behaviour, and desires in order to develop in its love of God. Certainly, there are moments where John’s tone appears even more strident—calling, for instance, for the appetites to be ‘annihilated’ (A1.5.7; N2.21.11), ‘eliminated’ (A1.5.6), or ‘extinguished’ (A1.8.3). More ­typically, however, he speaks in the somewhat more restrained language of the need for the sensory appetites to be ‘stilled’ and ‘purified’ in order for the spiritual ascent to proceed (A3.16.2; cf. A1.3.1). In both cases a comparison with Aquinas is instructive. Aquinas’s analysis of the soul’s growth in virtue—an account which attends closely to the workings of the sensory appetites, passions, and will—particularly attends to the manner in which the intellect may increasingly apprehend objects that are closer to the truly good. John is, by contrast, far more suspicious of the moral effects of the untransformed sensory appetites. The dark night is for John the period during which the soul must cease to direct its attentions towards the created order as an end in itself. Until its appetites cease to yearn powerfully for the created order, the soul cannot in John’s view proceed on the spiritual ascent.

III.  The night of sense The active night of sense In his account of the active night in the Ascent, John describes the rigorous ascetical negation of desire for joy in and possession of the

8  A.N. Williams, ‘The Doctrine of God in San Juan de la Cruz’, Modern Theology 30, no. 4 (2014), 523–4.

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The ‘ Dark Night of the Soul ’   139 created order that the soul must undertake through its own graced efforts. This negation is necessary, in John’s account, for the soul to give up those deeply ingrained patterns of thought, formed over decades, by which it has conceived both of itself and of God. It is a ‘dark night’ in part because it may well be a painful process, but most fundamentally because it requires a ‘darkening’ of all sensory appetites, knowledge, memories, and desires to which the soul previously clung, in order to allow for the divine infusion of faith, hope, and love. The Ascent’s advice concerning the active night of sense provides guidance that focuses on the methods a soul should use to still the external senses, delivered by John through four rhyming maxims at the end of the first book of the Ascent (A1.13.6, 9, 11, 12). It in these maxims that John most repeatedly, and emphatically, presents his strident demands for the ascetical negation of desire and pleasure in all things. The first of these maxims begins with the exhortation that those on the spiritual ascent should endeavour to be inclined always: not to the easiest, but to the most difficult; not to the most delightful, but to the most distasteful; not to the most gratifying, but to the less pleasant; not to what means rest for you, but to hard work. (A1.13.6)

John implicitly equates these instructions with the comment that this is what it means to ‘have habitual desire to imitate Christ in all your deeds by bringing your life into conformity with his’ (A1.13.3). Yet the kind of Christlikeness that John demands here may understandably appear to be a rejection of all goods of the created order, with its renunciation of ‘any sensory satisfaction that is not purely for the honour and glory of God’ (A1.13.4), its deliberate search for discomfort, and its call for those on the ascent to seek to act, speak, and think contemptuously of themselves, and to desire that all others do likewise (A1.13.9). All this is most apparent in the most widely known of the maxims, which begin, and then continue in similar vein: To reach satisfaction in all desire satisfaction in nothing.

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140  John of the Cross To come to possess all desire the possession of nothing To arrive at being all desire to be nothing To come to the knowledge of all desire the knowledge of nothing. (A1.13.11)

The general theme of the maxims, and the methods which John a­ dvocates to achieve them, are not new: comparable insistence on the necessity of a process of ascetical withdrawal from the world may, for instance, be found in the Desert Fathers and Evagrius Pontus. Yet the stark language in which John expresses his message of self-denial, evident in John’s frequent use of todo (all) and nada (nothing), reflects the dis­tinct­ive combination of John’s high doctrine of divine transcendence and pessimistic appraisal of the untransformed appetites.9 So strong is the pull of the appetites towards the pleasures of the created order, instead of towards the transcendent God who is the proper end of the soul’s ascent, that it is only through a vigorous practice of negation that individuals may begin to draw themselves away from their customary patterns of longing and behaviour. This emphasis on nada is not, however, the whole story in John’s account of the active night of sense. A fuller vision of John’s significance as a ‘cartographer’ of desire may be found in his sketch of the ascent of Mount Carmel, in which the maxim of A1.13.11 is incorporated. John refers to this sketch in A1.13.10, indicating his expectation that it would be examined alongside the text of the Ascent. The original does not survive, but there does exist a mid-eighteenth-century copy of John’s ori­gin­al (see Fig. 1).10 9  For Maritain’s study of the emphasis on ‘Todo y nada’ in John, see Jacques Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge, trans. Bernard Wall and Margot R. Adamson (London: Geoffrey Bles, the Centenary Press, 1937), 431–71. John uses nada 373 times and todo 274 times. 10  The copy of the image was made in 1759, and first published in 1929. See Trueman Dicken, Crucible of Love, 238–9 for a brief discussion of its history. It is also important to turn to this top-down sketch rather than one of the various versions of the more commonly reproduced image, deriving from the frontispiece of the 1618 edition of John’s works, that from a perspectival angle depicts a series of pathways up a mountain, only one of which reaches the

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The ‘ Dark Night of the Soul ’   141

Fig. 1  Copy of the original sketch of ‘Mount Carmel’ drawn by John of the Cross. MS.6296, f.7, Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid

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142  John of the Cross It is the need for the negation of desire for all created things that dominates John’s instructions in the sketch. From the bottom of the sketch, on which John’s maxims of A1.13.11–12 are reproduced, there rise up three paths. On either side of the outer paths is marked a ‘way of the imperfect spirit’. Various attributes are marked on these two ways: both point to joy, knowledge, consolation, and rest; to one is added ‘goods of heaven’ and ‘glory’, to the other, ‘goods of earth’ and ‘possessions’. Beside each of these attributes, however, John writes ‘neither this . . . nor this . . . nor this . . .’ Only one path, centrally sited, passes straight up through the mount. This is ‘the path of Mount Carmel, the perfect spirit’. All along its way it is marked nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, aun en el monte nada (‘nothing . . . nothing . . . even on the Mount nothing’). This path passes beyond the others, and touches the edge— though does not enter it—of the circular summit of the Mount in the top half of the sketch. Yet this apparent insistence on the negation of joy in all things is not the full story. The text that demarcates the summit of the Mount, the suggestive remark of Jeremiah 2.7 that ‘I brought you into the land of Carmel to eat its fruit and its good things’, points to a continued joy in created goods. Moreover, the texts that bound the paths on either side (‘Now that I no longer desire them, I have them all without desire’; ‘Now that I least desire them, I have them all without desire’) sit in plain tension with the obviously sexual nature of the whole image. The paths that thrust their way up from the bottom of the image towards the centre of the mount might contain text that insists on the negation of all desire— yet the image itself sets this negation of misdirected desire within an image suffused with sexual desire. It is in the context into which the demand for nada is set by the sketch that John’s demands for negation in the active night should be situated. For John, the soul that desires certain attributes (even goods such as joy, consolation, and rest) as ends in themselves will find itself on a path that undoubtedly constitutes a spiritual ascent—but one that will never reach the summit of the Mount. Such an attitude, John states, will only in the end be self-defeating; as he states at the point where these two paths reach a dead end before the summit: ‘The more I desired to possess them, the less I had’, and, ‘The more I desired to seek them, the less I

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The ‘ Dark Night of the Soul ’   143 had.’ Desire for the aspects of the created order as ends in themselves is fruitless, as the two outer paths demonstrate. The middle path, however, invites a temporary negation of all joy in knowledge of the created order, in order that (in a manner that John will depict more fully in the Canticle and Flame) the senses and faculties eventually may be reactivated in a  manner that acknowledges the whole created order in its rightful context.11 Given the biographical record of John’s love for others around him and for the natural world and the sensuality of John’s poetry, it should hardly come as a surprise that John’s instructions for the reordering of desire do not involve its total renunciation.12 John’s attention, rather, is to the dangers of the desire expressed in the soul’s appetites—to the soul’s need to stop living as a ‘being of appetite’.13 Paradoxically, as he suggests in his maxims and in his chart of the ascent, only by ceasing to desire all created goods will the soul acquire them all.

The passive night of sense Yet the ascetical activities undertaken in the active night in no way suffice, John warns, to bring the soul to union with God. The active night may well deliver the initial ascetical control of the soul’s sensory appetites that is necessary for the ascent, but it brings with it the dangerous summit. As Melquíades Andrés Martín points out, this latter series of images frequently arose from, and in turn perpetuated, those same restrictive seventeenth-century accounts of John’s thought as were surveyed in Chapter  1. For a history of the various, doctrinally misleading images of mountains, typically based on the 1618 image, which have been more commonly reproduced in editions of John’s works, see Melquíades Andrés Martín, Historia de la mística en la Edad de Oro en España y América (Madrid: BAC, 1994), 342–5. 11  In language that John would have found familiar, Maritain explains this through distinguishing between the few who are called to the physical and material renunciation of the vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, and the attitude—demanded of all souls by John—of a ‘lack of possessiveness’ demanded of all in relation to these virtues. Maritain, Degrees of Knowledge, 440. 12  The witness depositions for John’s beatification contain various anecdotes reporting his enjoyment of the natural world. Many of these are recounted in Gerald Brenan, St John of the Cross: His Life and Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), esp. 43, 48, 65. 13  Alain Cugno, Saint John of the Cross: The Life and Thought of a Christian Mystic (London: Burns & Oates, 1982), 54.

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144  John of the Cross sense of self-sufficiency that John, with his deeply Augustinian sense of the insufficiency of human effort for union with God, roundly rejects. What is also required are those transformations that are brought about in the passive night of sense by the infused grace of God, and that cause the soul to discover that even its best ascetical efforts cannot orient it towards the transcendent God. John describes these transformations in the passive night of sense through his distinctive appropriation of the traditional terminology of the passage from meditation to contemplation. John understands this passage to mark the soul’s transition from the way of beginners to the way of proficients (N1.1.1; CB22.3; F3.32).14 Meditation is, he states, the work of the interior senses, ‘a discursive act built on forms, figures, and images, imagined and fashioned by these senses’ (A2.12.3). Meditation is therefore particularly a work of the internal sense of the imagination, creating new images in prayer based on that which is already known through the internal senses. Yet, since meditation draws from the external and internal senses, it does not represent the highest form of prayer possible, since the soul continues to ‘feel’ and ‘taste’ God ‘as if he were comprehensible and accessible’ rather than in ‘pure faith’ (N1.6.5), and the soul continues to be affected by the passions arising from the sensory appetites (cf. N1.13.3). The dependence on sensory images means that the understanding of God that results is imperfect in many respects. Through the ascesis that has begun to be undertaken in the active night of sense, however, the soul has come no longer to be dependent on these sensory images. Having stilled the senses, it is ready to cease meditation.15 The soul has opened itself to the divine infusion of ‘loving knowledge’ (A2.13.7), an ‘inflow’ of God so-called because it exerts strong effects on both intellect and will (A2.13.4; N2.12.2–7; F3.32–49).

14  This transition is also described in terms of a shift from the ‘way of sense’ to the ‘way of spirit’ (A2.13.5; A2.17.5; N1.9.9), and from the ‘state of meditation’ (A2.11.10; A2.13.5) to the ‘state of contemplation’ (A2.6.8; A2.7.13). John’s description in N2.1.1 of the night of spirit as the ‘night of faith’ and the ‘night of contemplation’ points to the equivalent state on the ascent that he understands to be represented by these three terms. 15  John emphasizes that the transition from meditation to contemplation of God, is not clear-cut. Souls may find that meditation continues to be spiritually fruitful for some time, even while beginning to contemplate God (A2.15.1). Spiritual directors therefore need to exercise care in their guidance of souls.

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The ‘ Dark Night of the Soul ’   145 John elsewhere refers to this ‘loving knowledge’ as ‘dark and general knowledge’ (A2.10.4), ‘supernatural knowledge’ (A2.15.1), and Dionysian ‘mystical theology’ (A2.8.6). Above all, however, he refers to it as ‘contemplation’ (e.g. A2.15.5). This infusion is, in John’s account that draws closely but complexly on Aquinas’s depiction of ‘operative grace’, the soul’s reception into the passive intellect (A2.34.4; CB14–15.14; CB27.5; CB39.12; F3.34) of the communication of God untied to the senses. It therefore marks the beginning of a new depth of prayer in the soul, in which the soul is more fully attuned to the divine intellect and will, and thereby begins to find its desires increasingly aligned with those of God.16 The majority of John’s analysis of the passive night of sense then proceeds in diagnostic fashion, providing guidance to souls and spiritual directors concerning the feelings that may help to discern the spiritual state of the soul. Most extensively, John provides multiple lists of three ‘signs’ of specific feelings that may help the spiritual director to discern particular stages of the passive night in a soul (A2.13–14; N1.9.2–8; F3.32; Sayings 119).17 The soul in the passive night may report a range of experiences to their spiritual director—different forms of trial and temptation, the experience of being ‘assailed’ by ‘foul thoughts and very vivid images’, a restlessness and inability to find certainty and peace in anything (N1.14.1–3). The task of the spiritual director is to discern in these ‘aridities’ a transformation that is not a result of ‘some sin and imperfection, or weakness and lukewarmness’ (N1.9.1), but rather the disorientating effects of the infusion of a divine communication that is unexpected and accordingly not recognized by the soul. The com­bin­ation both of the 16 The legacy of Poulain continues to overshadow the passive night of sense, given his i­nfluential description of this stage as the ‘ligature’, a moment in which the soul finds its use of the imagination ‘tied and bound’, this sensation being a sign of its readiness to begin contemplation. Aside from the problematic reconciliation of passages required, the concept of the ‘ligature’ misleadingly equates the passive night of sense with the binding of the senses, when it is, for John (as evident in the preceding discussion) in fact about the giving up of the appetites. 17  Given that these sets of signs are delivered in different contexts and refer to slightly different stages of the ascent, the numerous attempts that have been made to develop a single set of three signs by reconciling the differences between these passages seems to be a misplaced endeavour. For examples of such attempts, see Crisógono de Jesús Sacramentado, San Juan de la Cruz: su obra científica y su obra literaria, vol. 1 (Madrid: Editorial Mensajero de Santa Teresa y de San Juan de la Cruz, 1929), 207–9; Karol Wojtyla, Faith according to St. John of the Cross, trans. Jordan Aumann, OP (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1981), 184–6.

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146  John of the Cross soul’s increasing lack of satisfaction in discursive meditation and of the soul’s increasing desire to remain in a state of ‘loving awareness’ of God points, in short, to the means by which discernment of the passive night may be made. In recognizing that there may be particular periods when the individual is unable to discern their own spiritual state (and hence the crucial importance of the spiritual director to excavate from the feelings of despair and doubt the ‘real’ story of gradual, divinely graced, purification), John makes a valuable contribution to the Christian tradition of spiritual direction. John’s account of the passive night of sense depicts a period in which, through a process that is inevitably experienced as disorientation, confusion, and doubt, souls become more fully attuned to God’s presence within them, and accordingly to their lack of self-mastery. Those that pass from meditation to contemplation come to engage in a form of prayer that, rather than constraining the operation of God within created forms, is attuned to the new nature of the divine op­er­ ation in the soul. Such contemplation may, at first, be ‘secret’, in that it is dimly understood or perceived by souls, and so causes them to remain ‘alone and in quietude’, still focused on the confusing transitions going on within them (N1.9.6). Yet, in time, while apparently ‘doing nothing and wasting time’, such souls are opening themselves to a ‘freedom of soul’, a liberation ‘from the impediment and fatigue of ideas and thoughts’ (N1.10.4). Accordingly, souls undergoing the passive night of sense ‘must be content simply with a loving and peaceful attentiveness to God, and live without the concern, without the effort, and without the desire to taste or feel him’, since ‘all these desires disquiet the soul and distract from the peaceful, quiet, and sweet idleness of the contemplation that is being communicated to it’ (N1.10.4). Yet this period of turning inwards is only temporary, since this contemplation is an infusion that, ‘if not hampered, fires the soul in the spirit of love’ (N1.10.6), thereby turning souls again outward towards the world and those around them in new love. As a result of the inflow of divine contemplation, souls may come to feel ‘a certain longing for God’, sometimes felt very intensely, perhaps manifesting itself as ‘a habitual care and solicitude for God accompanied by grief or fear about not serving him’ (N1.11.1–2). In due course, all seven ‘capital vices’ that

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The ‘ Dark Night of the Soul ’   147 previously held the soul in sin may be transformed into their related ‘spiritual virtues’ (N1.12.7–1.13.9). Such transformation is evident, in John’s account, in multiple ways: in souls’ greater knowledge of self, in their behaviour as they ‘walk with purity in the love of God’ and act with new love and concern for others (N1.12.8; N1.13.12), and in the deepening fearfulness and disquiet with which the soul approaches God (N1.13.12). This is not yet the fully graced love that will develop in the soul in the wake of the night of spirit. It represents, however, a new depth of desire for God than could be attained during the period before the night of sense while the sensory appetites continued to dominate the soul.

IV.  The night of spirit The resultant period of apparent calm after the night of sense may last for an extended time, even many years (N2.1.1), although it also seems entirely plausible from John’s descriptions that the transition to the night of spirit may be almost immediate, perhaps even overlapping with the night of sense.18 Liberated from the control of the forms of temporary satisfaction that the soul has up to now derived from the activity of the external senses, John advises that souls will pray ‘with much more freedom and satisfaction of spirit and with more abundant interior delight’ than they experienced as beginners (N2.1.1). Given that John expects the night of sense to occur fairly early on to most beginners (A.Prol.3–4), that he expects most of his readers to be in this state of proficients (A.Prol.9), and his counsel that God does not grant the entire passive night of spirit to all (N2.1.1), it seems that he expects souls on the ascent to spend most of their lives in this state between the two nights, or in the early stages of the active night of spirit, gradually developing in the theological virtues but not undergoing the felt darkness of the passive night of spirit. This stage between the nights will not, in John’s account, be experienced as painful by the soul. No longer, as John puts it, is the soul dominated by the ‘longings of sensory 18  Dom John Chapman, OSB, The Spiritual Letters of Dom John Chapman O.S.B., 4th Abbot of Downside (London: Sheed & Ward, 1935), 92, 147.

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148  John of the Cross love’ that dominated before the active night of sense (A2.1.2). It is in this intermediate stage between the nights that, on account of the imbalance between the purification of the sensory and spiritual parts of the soul, certain extraordinary phenomena such as ‘raptures’ and ‘imaginative visions’ may occur (A2.11.1; N2.1.2; N2.2.3; CB13.4–6). In general, however, the soul may proceed, in the words of the Noche poem, ‘in darkness and secure’. The purification of the soul is not complete, John advises, for a variety of reasons. Immediately after the night of sense, the senses themselves can only be described as stilled, not purged. The spiritual faculties still need to be emptied of all that is rooted in the data gained from the external senses. Indeed, John warns that the imbalance in the soul resulting from the conjunction of the purified senses with an unpurified spirit will throw up new challenges for the soul, be it darknesses and aridities akin to those that will be felt in the forthcoming night of spirit (N2.1.1) or an increased number of spiritual visions and communications whose divine or demonic origin may be difficult for the soul to ascertain (N2.1.3). The transition from the state of proficients to union therefore demands a further process of purgation, a night of spirit. Just as in the night of sense, this is a journey involving the purification both of the appetites and all the imperfections derived from them, and that demands the passage of the soul through both the active (Books 2 and 3 of the Ascent) and passive (Book 2 of the Night) nights.

The active night of spirit The active night of spirit requires that the soul actively cease to turn its spiritual faculties of intellect, memory, and will towards natural objects, instead proceeding by the ‘dark’ means of faith, hope, and love. Like the active night of sense, this night involves the imitation of Christ’s life and teaching through the same maxims that shaped John’s ‘cartography’ of desire in his sketch of the Ascent.19 John seems to deny that Christ 19  On the continued pertinence of the maxims of the sketch and A1.13 to the active night of spirit, see Sanson, L’esprit humain, 259–60; Raúl Gutiérrez, Wille und Subjekt bei Juan de la Cruz (Tübingen: Francke, 1999), 92–3.

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The ‘ Dark Night of the Soul ’   149 himself underwent the night of spirit, apparently following Aquinas’s argument that Christ himself continued even on the cross to enjoy the fullness of the beatific vision in his spiritual part (A2.7.10–11; cf. ST III.46.7).20 Yet John emphasizes that this is the path, however un­attract­ ive to those about to embark on it, that is required for all who seek to follow Christ. It is the path repeatedly commanded by Christ (A2.7.4, 6). Moreover, it is the path exemplified in ‘the pure spiritual cross and nakedness of Christ’s poverty of spirit’ (A2.7.5), and paradigmatically undergone by him on the cross (A2.7.11).

Intellect John first examines the transformation of the intellect by means of the theological virtue of faith (fe). He sees the development of this virtue, identified with contemplation (A2.6.8; A2.10.4) and developed through the church (A2.3.5), as particularly important to the soul’s passage through the active night of spirit: at times, he even extends the meaning of ‘faith’ so that it refers also to the means by which ‘all the spiritual faculties and gratifications and appetites’ may be negated (A2.1.2), or uses the term to describe the ‘dark’ effects of faith (A2.1.3).21 Indeed, John once goes so far as to name the active night of spirit the ‘night of faith’, the period in which the soul ceases to rely on the ‘rational, superior part’ (A2.2.2) of the soul and instead ascends by faith. At root, however, faith is defined by John in terms akin to Aquinas’s understanding of faith as the proper, or proximate, means by which the soul may come to be united with God (A2.8.1; A2.9.1; A2.24.8; A2.30.5; cf. CB12.2, CB26.16).22 Continuing his emphasis on the infinite difference between the created and divine orders, John insists that it is only by means of the supernatural, infused virtue of faith, that the soul’s own, natural, spiritual faculties may be prepared for union. In presenting his account of the purification of the intellect, John repeatedly emphasizes, 20  Edward Howells, John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila: Mystical Knowing and Selfhood (New York: Crossroad, 2002), 196 n36. 21  Aniano Alvarez-Suárez, ‘Fe teologal’, in Diccionario de San Juan de la Cruz, ed. Eulogio Pacho (Burgos: Monte Carmelo, 2000), 620–1; Wojtyla, Faith, 33–45. 22  José Damián Gaitán, ‘Conocimiento de Dios y sabiduria de la fe en San Juan de la Cruz’, in Actas del congreso internacional sanjuanista (Avila 23–28 Sept 1991), ed. A. García Simón, vol. 3 (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 1993), 262–4.

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150  John of the Cross in tones perhaps even more stark than Aquinas, the contrast between knowledge gained naturally and knowledge gained supernaturally; between knowledge known by reason (ciencia) and by faith (cf. A2.1.3; A2.6.2).23 ‘Nothing created or imagined’, says John, ‘can serve the intellect as a proper means for union with God’ (A2.8.1). The language that John uses to emphasize this point is unremitting: he warns, for instance, that ‘the intellect must advance by unknowing rather than by the desire to know, and by blinding itself and remaining in darkness rather than by opening its eyes’ (A2.8.5); the soul must ‘empty’ itself (desnudar (A2.4.2); vaciar (A2.6.1)), ‘dispossess’ itself and remove obstacles within itself (desapropiar (A2.7.3), desembarazar (A2.7.3)), and be ‘annihilated’ in the spiritual part (aniquilar (A2.7.4)).24 It is only, therefore, through the virtue of faith that is itself both divinely infused and supernatural that the intellect may be prepared for union. Citing the maxim, used extensively by Aquinas, that ‘all means must be proportionate to their end’, John emphasizes that faith’s supernatural nature indicates that it shares an ‘essential likeness to its divine object’, and accordingly is the suitable means by which ‘the desired end may be attained’ (A2.8.2).25 Souls must advance, in other words, by ‘leaning on dark faith’ (A2.4.2). Only by refusing all representations of God or of spiritual things may souls continue to open their intellect to divinely infused contemplation, which John equates with Dionysius’s ‘ray of darkness’ (rayo de tiniebla), and by means of which faith is infused (A2.8.6).26 Having established the difference between faith and natural know­ ledge in these initial chapters of the second book of the Ascent, in the rest of this book John proceeds to distinguish the ‘vague, dark, and general knowledge’ of faith from three other kinds of knowledge that, although supernaturally gained, do not themselves give the soul 23  Contrast, for example the distinction between reason and faith developed by Aquinas in ST II–II.1.5 and II–II.2.3. 24  Alvarez-Suárez, ‘Fe Teologal’, 623.    25 Cf. ST II–II.4.2. 26  A.N. Williams rightly points out (‘Doctrine of God’, 505–6) that John’s understanding of divine simplicity also seems to underpin the inability of natural knowledge to unite the soul with God (A2.16.6–7; F3.2). It is human sin and divine transcendence, however, that John most forcefully and recurrently emphasizes in his justification of the need for the trans­form­ ation of the intellect in faith.

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The ‘ Dark Night of the Soul ’   151 know­ledge of God (A2.11–12, 16–32). In doing so, he continues to depend on the principles explored above. He regularly emphasizes the incomprehensibility of God to the intellect (A2.24.9; A3.5.3; CB36.10; F3.48), and the inability of the soul to describe (indecible; inefable) such knowledge (N2.17.5; CB34.1; CB37.6; F2.20; F3.8). Yet John’s intention is neither to argue that nothing can be said of God, as some more ‘apophatic’ assessments of John would have it (the Canticle and Flame vividly demonstrate that this is not his view), nor to present the more radical position that God is unknowable even to himself. Rather, John’s emphasis on divine incomprehensibility is part of his broader insistence on the need for the intellect to be entirely transformed by grace to ascend to union, even though this is an ascent that is not fully completed until the perfect knowledge of God in the beatific vision. Thomas Merton aptly sums up John’s view: ‘the temptation to prefer any clear knowledge, whether natural or supernatural, to this dark knowledge of God puts the soul in danger of abandoning a reality for an illusion’.27 True knowledge of God must involve the deliberate dismantling of all ideas about God, and all assumptions about the world’s deepest structures and purposes, that the soul has painstakingly constructed. Souls must instead develop the receptivity and openness that are the preconditions of the infusion of faith. In prayer, this means that they must learn ‘to abide in that quietude with a loving attentiveness to God’ (A2.12.8). Anything else bears no relation to the dark, unknowable reality of God, and accordingly must be set aside in order to continue on the ascent.

Memory John then turns to the second of the three spiritual faculties requiring purification in the active night of spirit, exploring the transformation of the memory through the theological virtue of hope (esperanza). The identification of the memory as a spiritual faculty alongside intellect and will is, of course, a striking divergence from Aquinas’s anthropology, bearing closer resemblance to an Augustinian anthropology. Yet it is not

27 

Thomas Merton, The Ascent to Truth (London: Hollis & Carter, 1951), 64.

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152  John of the Cross possible to draw quite so a clear distinction as these labels might imply. As André Bord observes in his important study of this aspect of John’s anthropology, John resembles Aquinas in situating the storage of past memories in the internal senses, even if the two theologians differ in the precise structures that they believe to undertake this task.28 Both t­ hinkers also understand the recall of past memories to be a power of a spiritual faculty. Yet Aquinas was predominately concerned with explaining the human ability both to reflect on objects not present to the senses and to recall previous acquired concepts and knowledge, rather than being interested in what might be described as the existential effects of such recall. Memory is of the cognitive order and hope is desire, and the two cannot therefore be united (ST II–II.18.1). As Chapter  2 intimated, however, it does not appear that loyalty to any specific theological tradition was a dominant influence in the dis­ tinct­ive role ascribed by John to the memory. Instead, understanding memory as a spiritual faculty allows John to accord much greater prominence than Aquinas to the temporally constituted nature of the human.29 The memory mediates the effects of the intellect and will, manifesting them in the past and future action of the soul.30 While the recall of past memories is for Aquinas a power of the intellect (ST I.79.6), John ascribes this power to the spiritual faculty of the memory. The memory can recall past events to the soul (A3.14.1); it can dwell on these memories (A3.9.4), or can deliberately avoid recalling them 28  André Bord, Mémoire et espérance chez Jean de la Croix (Paris: Beauchesne, 1971), 80–98. Aquinas distinguishes between (a) memories of forms received through the external senses, which he states are stored in the internal sense called the phantasy (also known as the imagination), and (b) intentions not received through the senses, which are said to be preserved in the internal sense called the memory (ST I.78.4). The distinction that John articulates is rather different, and should not be mapped onto Aquinas’ division: John attributes the function of (i) the storage of past memories gained from the natural operation of the soul to the internal sense of the phantasy, with (ii) the storage role for spiritual forms of knowledge being performed by what he calls the ‘soul itself ’. It seems, as Bord suggests (90–1), that that these two structures formed part of a broader parallelism that John envisaged between the interior corporal senses of phantasy and imagination and a set of interior spiritual senses. 29  Dominic Doyle, ‘From Triadic to Dyadic Soul: A Genetic Study of John of the Cross on the Anthropological Basis of Hope’, Studies in Spirituality 21 (2011), 241; Dominic Doyle, ‘Changing Hopes: The Theological Virtue of Hope in Thomas Aquinas, John of the Cross, and Karl Rahner’, Irish Theological Quarterly 77, no. 1 (2012): 26–7, 35. 30  Georges Morel, Le sens de l’existence selon Saint Jean de la Croix: Vol II, Logique (Paris: Aubier, 1961), 270–1.

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The ‘ Dark Night of the Soul ’   153 (A3.3.5; A3.9.4).31 The yearning that constitutes the soul’s nature is not simply a matter of its directedness towards objects in the here and now—rather, just as necessary for the ascent is the purification of the soul from the extent to which it is drawn towards, and so governed by, its own past actions. The pronounced status that John gives to the memory accordingly ‘calls attention’, as Dominic Doyle has recently put it, ‘to the concrete, particular experience of the individual over time’, ac­know­ ledg­ing to a greater extent than Aquinas that ‘the past exercises a profound influence over any present anticipation of what one can hope for the future’.32 John recognizes that the activity of memory involves not simply knowledge but appetite, acting both to recall past events and giving rise to cognitive and affective reactions in the soul. Just as the intellect must be transformed in faith, ceasing to rely on natural cognition and instead proceeding in darkness, the memory must cease to draw the soul’s attention to past events. (John has none of Augustine’s enthusiasm, later developed in the medieval monastic use of memory as a stimulus for meditative prayer, for the practice of discerning hope for the future by the practice of sifting through past memories in order to see where providence has already been at work.33) The purgation of the memory should take two forms. First, the memory must stop focusing on the recollection of past events, ceasing to draw phant­ asms out of the phantasy and to present them to the intellect (A3.3.3–6; A3.5.1).34 Dwelling on such memories may cause the soul to become too immersed in past-directed affective states such as regret, grief, and nostalgia. It may also give rise to ongoing resentment in the soul, or proud or envious comparisons with the actions and achievements of others (A3.3.3–4; A3.4.2; A3.5.1–3; A3.6.3–4; A3.10.2; A3.11.1). Second, the memory must avoid dependence on the reception both of supernat­ural apprehensions (A3.7–13; cf. A2.16–32) and of the spiritual know­ledge 31 Bord,

Mémoire et espérance, 76–8.   32  Doyle, ‘Changing Hopes’, 27. Doyle, ‘Changing Hopes’, 26–7. 34  John on occasion implies that the memory is itself a storehouse (cf. A2.16.2; A3.2.7–8). Elizabeth Wilhelmsen, Cognition and Communication in John of the Cross (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1985), 30, takes this to be John’s overall position. However, these remarks are contradicted by John’s far more consistent ascription of this role to the phantasy (A2.16.2; A3.13.7; F3.69). The purgation of the spiritual faculty of the memory, it is accordingly worth emphasizing, does not involve the forgetting of all past memories (cf. CB26.16). 33 

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154  John of the Cross that might be received directly in the spiritual faculties by divine revelation (A3.14). Nothing that is acquired from the created or supernatural order may unite the memory with God. Rather, ‘the soul must empty itself of all that is not God in order to go to God’ (A3.7.2) and instead be transformed by its associated theological virtue, hope. John’s association of memory and hope (and indeed his broader alignment of the three theological virtues with the spiritual faculties of intellect, memory, and will) is, it must be said, highly unusual in Christian thought. Bord finds only one other association of memory and hope, in a sermon by Bernard of Clairvaux.35 There is no evidence, however, that John had read this. Rather, the association seems more likely to be John’s own creation, perhaps (as Bord suggests) motivated by John’s love of triadic structures,36 and, it is tempting to think, inspired by his own experience of survival in and escape from his Toledo prison cell.37 The soul that continues to dwell on past events will find its judgements and choices for the future constrained by its past orientations. Yet John twins this highly critical account of the damaging effects of the untransformed memory with a confident account of the soul’s potential for trans­ formation: the soul need not remain trapped and conditioned by past experiences, but can be liberated from them and redirect its attachments and yearnings through the vigorous negation of the active night of spirit. The inward- and backward-looking attention that arises from the memory’s recollection of past events needs to be transformed into hope—that which looks beyond the soul, not seeking to possess its object, but instead looking forward to the glory of the life hereafter.

Will John finally turns to examine the purgation of the will through the theological virtue of charity (caridad). As in his discussion of the intellect and memory, John aims both to justify the necessity of the purgation of this spiritual faculty and to advise how this may progressively be undertaken. John’s account is faithful in its essential features to Aquinas’s 35 Bord,

Mémoire et espérance, 234–6.   36 Bord, Mémoire et espérance, 34 n43. Iain Matthew, ‘The Knowledge and Consciousness of Christ in the Light of the Writings of St John of the Cross’ (DPhil, Oxford University, 1991), 81. 37 

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The ‘ Dark Night of the Soul ’   155 analysis of the graced development of the theological virtue of ‘charity’ (caritas) in the Christian soul: charity is the ‘form’ of faith that develops in the soul as the result of the divine infusion of faith (ST II–II.4.3). As in his discussion of the sensory appetites, however, John imputes a much more active agency than Aquinas to the rational appetite, emphasizing the extent to which it draws the other faculties in the soul to good or bad.38 The ‘faculties, passions and appetites’, says John, are governed by the will. When the will ‘directs these faculties, passions, and appetites toward God . . . the soul preserves its strength for God, and comes to love him with all its might’ (A3.16.2). The purification of the will in the night of spirit therefore requires the removal of all ‘inordinate’ passions, so that by ‘purging the will of its appetites and affections’ the soul might be united with God, having been ‘made identical with the will of God’ (A3.16.3; cf. A3.34.1). To explore further precisely how this purgation may be undertaken, John promises to explore in turn how the four ‘passions’ (pasiones) or ‘affections’ (afecciones) of the will, terms used synonymously by John that map closely but complexly onto the modern category of the ‘emotions’, may be correctly ordered towards God (A3.16.2). It is Aquinas’s analysis of the operation of the passions that serves as the fundamental basis for John’s approach to the subject (A2.21.8; A3.16.2; CB20–21.4), although John speaks not of the full list of eleven passions identified by Aquinas but rather of the four ‘principal passions’ (as Aquinas, following Boethius, puts it) of joy, hope, fear, and sorrow (ST I–II.25.4).39 For Aquinas, the passions are movements of the sensitive appetite from dormancy to act in response to the apprehension of an object to which the sense appetite is inclined (ST I–II.22.2.ad3). These movements in turn give rise to the eleven different forms of bodily change that lend their name (hatred, pleasure, sorrow, and so on) to the passions, and which themselves owe their differences to the various reactions of the two sensitive motive powers (concupiscible and irascible) to different objects (ST I–II.23.1–4). 38 Gutiérrez,

Wille und Subjekt, 98. Aquinas’s account of the passions was the subject of much dispute in John’s day, including from those teaching at Salamanca. John appears, however, to base his thought on Aquinas’s own account and to be unaware of these disputes. 39 

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156  John of the Cross John’s ambivalence about the moral agency of the sensitive appetites that was apparent in his prescriptions for the active night of sense extends to his appraisal of the passions. For Aquinas, as long as the passions are controlled by reason they can aid the inclination of the appetitive powers to the good (ST I–II.24.2). John insists, however, that the passions merely distract the soul from the ascent, continuing to hold its attention to the created order and therefore having no positive value. Indeed, the continued operation of the passions is most insidious in the temptation for souls to continue to seek sensible comfort in prayer (N1.6.6; F3.32). It is perhaps as a result of this opposition to the op­er­ ation of the passions in the higher stages of the spiritual ascent that John shows little interest in distinguishing the passions, describing them as ‘so interlinked and brotherly that where one goes actually the others go virtually’ (A3.16.5). John accordingly announces his intention to discuss in turn, beginning with ‘joy’, the manner in which each of these four passions may be stilled and the will transformed. Joy may, he declares, be both active and passive. The former occurs ‘when a person understands distinctly and clearly the object of its joy and has power either to rejoice or not’, while the latter is presumably that which would be indistinctly and involuntarily experienced as the fruit of divine action in the soul (A3.17.1).40 Active joy, moreover, may itself variously arise from the effect on the soul of six different kinds of goods: temporal, natural, sensory, moral, supernatural, and spiritual. John then proceeds to address how joy in each of these kinds of good must be purified, in order to satisfy the overall principle that ‘the will should rejoice only in what is for the honour and glory of God’ (A3.17.2). In the first five cases, he undertakes this task through a rigorous structure of one chapter denoting how joy in such goods should be directed to God, one chapter describing the harm that is caused to the unpurged will, and one chapter describing the bene­ fits of the purgation of the will. When John comes to address the final distinction of the active joy that arises from spiritual goods, however, he begins to lose control of this structure. Within his consideration of spiritual goods, John 40 

Kavanaugh and Rodriguez, Collected Works, 294 n1.

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The ‘ Dark Night of the Soul ’   157 introduces three further subdivisions to his discussion of the purgation of the will. By the time the treatise is abruptly broken off mid-paragraph shortly afterwards, John has become entangled in the six subdivisions of describing the purification of active joy in provocative, clearly and distinctly understood, and delightful spiritual goods.41 There is no evidence to back up the speculative theory that the abrupt ending indicates that the work was finished in a more extended form but then partially lost.42 Rather, John’s sudden abandonment of the treatise reflects the bigger conceptual difficulties into which he had run in his account of the purification of the will. As well as threatening to cause the treatise to swell far beyond John’s intended length, these new subdivisions are problematic in that they do not neatly sit within the framework that John had previously established: notably his investigation of the correct direction of joy in relation to temporal, natural, sensory, and spiritual goods (A3.18–26; 35–44) in fact pertains to the active night of sense, rather than the active night of spirit. The logical order of purgation that John seems to want to present in his account of the night of sense and night of spirit has begun to unravel. This tangle is reflective of the conflict between John’s intention to emphasize (following Aquinas) the importance of the intellect as the ultimate locus of contemplation, and his elevated sense of the appetitive nature of the soul, continuously seeking its fulfilment in that which is outside itself. In retrospect, this emphasis on the transformation of the will is apparent also in John’s reflections, early in the second book of the Ascent, on Christ’s demands of the negation that is described in the active night: ‘It is in the will that all negation takes place’ (A2.7.6). In his account of the purification of the will, it becomes clear that John wants to emphasize, to a far greater extent than Thomas, the importance of love guiding faith, drawing and propelling the soul further through the darkness of the ascent. This tangle represents a tension in John’s thought which, I will suggest in Chapter 5, finds its resolution in John’s mature thought in the Canticle and Flame. It is in these works that John’s account 41  These six subdivisions within John’s discussion of the purgation of the will are given in A3.16.2, A3.17.1, A3.17.2, A3.33.3 (two subdivisions), and A3.35.1. 42  Pacho, ‘Subida del Monte Carmelo’, 1363–8.

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158  John of the Cross of the soul’s yearning is given its fullest expression, with John foregrounding the role of the will in uniting the soul with God to an extent that John does not seem initially to envisage in the Ascent and Night. John’s discussion of the progressive purgation of the spiritual faculties in the active night of spirit begins, in short, by emphasizing the importance of the transformation of the intellect in faith. Yet this night at root requires the purification of the desires of the soul, through the purgation of the memory and, above all, the will.

The passive night of spirit Like the passive night of sense, John indicates that the passive night of spirit involves a series of events that begin to occur at some point after the start of the active night of spirit, and which involve God’s graced trans­ formation of the entire soul—the purgation both of the senses and of the spiritual faculties (N2.3.1–3). All in the intellect, will, and memory that remains derived from or attached to objects in the created order must be purged, so that the soul’s attention can become entirely directed towards God (N2.8.2; N2.9.3). This night is, as John puts it, ‘an inflow of God into the soul, which purges it of its habitual ignorances and imperfections, natural and spiritual, and which the contemplatives call infused contemplation or mystical theology. Through this contemplation, God teaches the soul secretly and instructs it in the perfection of love without its doing anything or understanding how this happens’ (N2.5.1; cf. N1.1.1). As in his discussion of the passive night of sense, John provides extensive description of the ‘affliction and torment’ experienced in the passive night of spirit (N2.5.2). In doing so, he aims to aid those individuals and directors seeking to diagnose it, while also providing justifications of the  inevitability of this night and an explanation of the accompanying ­trans­form­ations in the soul. The passive night of spirit may last for many years. It may include moments that appear to be the dawn but are in fact only passing moments before the onset of an even greater darkness that is felt with extreme agony in the soul (N1.14.1; N2.7.4–6). Yet the extent of the soul’s suffering also arises from the contrast between the purity of infused divine contemplation and the sinfulness of the soul that it touches;

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The ‘ Dark Night of the Soul ’   159 it is, as Jacques Maritain puts it, ‘no longer a question of accommodating the senses to the spirit, but the created spirit to the Uncreated’.43 Such is the depth of the suffering here, warns John, that ‘both the sense and spirit, as though under an immense and dark load, undergo such agony and pain that the soul would consider death a relief ’ (N2.5.6). The deepest suffering portrayed in the Old Testament al­le­gor­ ic­ al­ ly represents this passive night of spirit, with Jonah, Job, Lamentations, and parts of the Psalter quoted at length to demonstrate these experiences (N2.6–7).44 Whatever spiritual directors may say about the bene­fits that will eventually result from such suffering, and of God’s mercy in bestowing it, no soul in the midst of such a state will feel blessed by God, even though it the infused contemplation given by God that is the cause of this suffering (N2.7.3; N2.5.1). Moreover, it is particularly difficult for souls to recognize when this purgation is taking place within themselves. Precisely because contemplation is divinely infused, it is ‘secret and dark to the work of the intellect and the other faculties’ (N2.17.2; cf. also N2.9.3, N2.13.1), since it is ‘infused into the soul through love’, with the intellect remaining in darkness (N2.11.1; N2.17.2). Souls will struggle to endure such privations stoically. Even though souls may habitually possess the three theological virtues, and may be aware of their love of God, all this may be of no help. Indeed, this very sense of contradiction that souls will experience—of being aware of loving God while feeling the privation of God and believing that God does not love them—will give rise to an even greater sense of affliction (N2.7.7). Yet having laid out with graphic detail the horror of the darkness, dryness, and agony that the soul may undergo as it finds itself purged to become fit for divine union, John proceeds to describe the new forms of understanding and love that will, from the very beginning of this night (N2.13.5), begin to arise from the soul. Even though both intellect and will are being purified in the passive night of spirit, it is a feeling of love 43 Maritain,

Degrees of Knowledge, 443; cf. N2.2.1. John does not go so far as to interpret the yearnings and sufferings of these Old Testament figures through the lens of Christ’s own suffering, perhaps because of his insistence (noted above) that the incarnate Christ remained united with God in his spiritual part. The pain of the passive night of spirit is, in this sense, closer to those prophets who craved knowledge of the love of an apparently angry or absent God than it is to the suffering of Christ’s own passion. 44 

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160  John of the Cross for God rather than an understanding of God that is first likely to be experienced by the soul (N2.12.7; N2.13.3; cf. N2.12.5, N2.13.1). These are, John advises, ‘passions of divine love’ arising in the soul in response to the knowledge that is darkly known and yet which the intellect is not yet sufficiently purged to understand (N2.12.6; N2.13.3).45 In time, however, as the purgation of the spiritual faculties and the divine infusion of contemplation progresses, these longings of love may cease to arise. Rather, like wet wood that requires time to be dried and heated in the fire (N2.12.5), the progressively purified soul will eventually come to be ‘enkindled’, with these longings now becoming a ‘burning love’ (N2.12.5; N2.13.5). (The resonance of the image of the log in the fire with the Flame is no coincidence: John’s imagery in these final stages of the passive night of spirit increasingly resembles that in the Canticle and Flame, reflective of John’s depiction of the transition to the state of union.) With its faculties now entirely purified from their nat­ ural operations, the soul is open to the divine operation of its appetites, affections, and faculties (N2.13.11). As such, the soul may allow the divine fire to burn within itself. The resultant state is the ‘burning and warmth of love’ (N2.12.5); while the faculties remain passive, the divine action now takes place in such accord with the soul’s own faculties that the soul itself appears to be a ‘living flame’ (N2.12.5). Drawing on the pseudo-Thomist De decem gradibus amoris, whose influence on John has already been examined in Chapter 2, John’s subsequent comparison of the spiritual ascent to a ten-runged ‘ladder’ reinforces the point. The image of the ‘ladder of love’ is appropriate because ‘it is only love that unites and joins the soul to God’. What is being described is a ‘science of love’ (ciencia de amor), the progressive development of ‘an infused loving knowledge that both illumines and enamours the soul, elevating it step by step to God, its Creator’ (N2.18.5). John then traces the ten steps on this ladder, revisiting the earlier stages of the spiritual ascent as he lays out how the mystical infusion of contemplation propels the soul, through loving desire, towards union with God. Finally, the depiction of the soul towards the end of the Night draws increasingly heavily on the sexual desire depicted in the Noche poem. 45  Because the external appetites are aroused by a divine object, John appraises this ‘passion of love’ far more positively than he does the various passions of the soul that are aroused by created objects, and which must be stilled in the dark night.

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The ‘ Dark Night of the Soul ’   161 John points to the Song of Songs for a bridal analogy for the soul’s ceaseless desire for God (N2.19.2; N2.24.4), and points also to Mary Magdalene’s firm determination to encounter Christ, evident in her desire both to wash his feet with her hair and to anoint his body (N2.13.6–7; N2.19.2). These images hint at the resonance in this stage of the ascent of the nuptial metaphor that will dominate the Canticle. Yet they also point to the importance of the loving desire that arises in the soul as a result of its graced transformation through the entirety of the ‘dark night’. The appetites that dominated the soul before the dark night have now been stilled and purged; instead, the soul is oriented towards God by the virtues of faith, hope, and love.

V. Conclusions It has been the purpose of this chapter to suggest that John’s account of the ‘dark night’ in the Ascent and Night creatively and productively charts the progressive transformation of the soul. The ascent of the soul out of a state of permeating sin requires the purgation and redirection of the soul’s pervasive desires, as analysed through the anthropological categories of the sensory appetites, passions, internal senses, intellect, memory, and will. This occurs both through the ascetic practices that John uncompromisingly demands in the ‘active’ night and the disorientating inflow of divine grace that he describes in the ‘passive’ night. This is an ascent that draws with insight and novelty on multiple scriptural narratives: the active night is principally associated with the dispossession of self demanded both by Christ’s teaching and by the pattern of his own life and passion (A1.13, A2.7–8, A2.22.3–7), while the passive night is understood by John to be allegorically anticipated by the anguish of the Israelites in response to the perceived absence of God (N2.5–7).46 The notion of the ‘night’ is central to John’s account of this ­trans­form­ation of the soul’s desires. John takes up pseudo-Dionysius’s striking depiction of the divine nature that is so dazzling to the created soul as to appear like 46  Karl Rahner’s concern that John’s account of the ascent and union tended towards pantheism, lacking sufficient concern with Christ’s humanity, does not engage with this range of scriptural narratives on which John draws: Karl Rahner, ‘The Eternal Significance of the Humanity of Jesus for Our Relationship with God’, in Theological Investigations 3 (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1967), 42.

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162  John of the Cross darkness, and ramifies it in multiple ways. For John, darkness is not, as it is for Dionysius, the divine darkness that is finally entered into by the soul whose love for God has already been purified. Rather the ‘night’ is in John’s writings the means by which the purification of the soul is effected in this life. In doing so, John ascribes an abundant range of connotations to the notion. The ‘night’ represents both the active restraint of the senses and faculties and the soul’s feelings of divine absence or affliction brought about by God’s loving purifying action. Yet the notion is above all in John’s writing the setting for the night-time escape of the lover in search of her Beloved, and the yearning and encounter that is depicted in John’s Noche poem is the basis for his depiction in his prose of the same desire that propels the soul through the dark transformations of the ‘night’. John’s night constitutes, moreover, a far greater caesura in the spiritual ascent of the soul than Dionysius’s relatively smooth and linear account. The purification of the soul is no straightforward matter. It takes time, perhaps more than a lifetime. It effects a thoroughgoing transformation of the soul’s sensual and spiritual parts that depends on God’s assistance, and that requires the negation of all delight in the created order. And it concomitantly involves a passage through a ‘dark’ period of disorientation and doubt that worsens as the soul progresses further into the night. Yet the soul engaged in the spiritual ascent must pass through the silence and apparent absence of the night in order to still the soul’s yearning for self-satisfaction that so easily results in self-projection and self-deception. Only in this way can the soul’s desires be deepened and transformed so that the soul’s desire for God is no longer a projection of itself. The ascent towards union with God, therefore, depends on the stilling and purification through the ‘night’ of all the deceptive desires of the untransformed soul. John’s analysis in the Ascent and Night represents, however, only part of his daring theological vision of the transformation of selfhood. It is in his account of union that John provides his fullest re-visioning of selfhood and the soul’s desire for God in the light of divine transcendence and divine love. This is undertaken with very systematic complexity, to take account not just of John’s Augustinian sense of each soul’s in­erad­ic­ ably dark spirit but also of his extremely high vision of inner-trinitarian unification at the height of the spiritual ascent. It is, accordingly, to these themes as they are set out in the Canticle and Flame that I now turn.

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5 Union in the Canticle and Flame With the soul’s desires at last systematically purified through the dark night and reoriented towards God, the Flame and later parts of the Canticle depict the final stages of the spiritual ascent in a manner that emphasizes both the importance of the graced love (amor) that arises in the soul in the wake of the ‘dark night’ in propelling the soul towards union with God and the prominence of this love in the state of union itself. They offer a vision of the realization of the soul’s desires that rep­ resents John’s fullest account of the spiritual ascent. The vision offered by the Canticle and Flame is different in striking and illuminating respects from that provided in the Ascent and Night.1 The change is especially apparent in the more careful attention that John’s prose in the Canticle and Flame exhibits to the role of poetic meta­phor, imagery, and form. John does not exclusively depict the transformed desire of the soul through the terminology of grace, nature, contemplation, and the supernatural that dominated the Ascent and Night, even though this framework remains important to him. Instead, both of these later commentaries engage in the highly unusual task of explaining the allegorical and metaphorical significance of their re­spect­ ive poems stanza by stanza and verse by verse, with John making exten­ sive use of the metaphors and imagery of the poems in order to chart the series of transformations in the soul as it nears and enters union with

1  My commitment to the centrality of the Canticle and Flame challenges the assumption of early twentieth-century neo-Thomist scholarship, subsequently taken up in analytic philo­ soph­ic­al appropriation of John, that the Ascent and Night constitute the heart of John’s oeuvre. In English-language scholarship, see for example the preference of Steven L. Payne, John of the Cross and the Cognitive Value of Mysticism (Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), xiii–xiv for the ‘clarity’ of the Ascent and Night, or the disproportionate attention paid by E.W. Trueman Dicken, The Crucible of Love: A Study of the Mysticism of St Teresa of Jesus and St John of the Cross (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1963) to the Ascent and Night (215–68) than to the Canticle and Flame (457–76). John of the Cross: Desire, Transformation, and Selfhood. Sam Hole, Oxford University Press (2020). © Sam Hole. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198863069.003.0006

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164  John of the Cross God. It is the poem’s sensory metaphors—taste, touch, audition, olfaction, and most extensively the Bride and Bridegroom’s yearning to ‘see’ the beauty of the other figure—that provide the fundamental structure to John’s depiction of the progressively realized desire that serves as an allegory for the spiritual ascent. In other words, only through the meta­ phors and imagery of desire as they are most inexorably presented in his lira poetry does John feel able to do justice to his vision of the fullest possible Christian life. Through this emphasis on the desire that propels the soul through the higher stages of the ascent, John presents a richly pneumatological vision of divine action on the soul, delineating a series of stages by which the Spirit purifies the soul and draws it into ever-closer union with the divine.2 This process culminates in John’s depiction of the state of union, the fullest possible transformation of the soul in this life. This graced love, the desire by which God has been progressively deifying the soul and which has propelled the soul through the ruptures and darkness of the Christian life, is in these final stages identified with the desire by which the three divine persons continuously express their love for one another in the depths of the life of the Trinity. The depiction of these culminating stages of the ascent requires, finally, adjustments to the anthropological terminology that John laid out in the Ascent and Night in order better to represent the desiring nature of the soul itself. John greatly reduces his emphasis on the memory as a spiritual faculty, and makes increasing reference to terms such the ‘substance’, ‘centre’, or ‘root’ of the soul. These shifts serve to emphasize 2 How the various stages of ascent described in the Canticle relate to the ‘dark night’ described in the Ascent and Night, or indeed to the traditional threefold schema of purgation, illumination, and union, has been the topic of extensive scholarly debate. John does not seem very interested in precision on this matter: he gives, for example, various accounts of the rela­ tion between spiritual betrothal and the illuminative way (CB.Theme.2; CB22.3). Broadly, the first three stanzas of the Canticle, with their account of a ‘departure from all things’ (CB1.20), seem to revisit in general terms the strictures of the Ascent and Night, and the feelings described by the Bride during her search for the Bridegroom in CB1–12 resemble some of the states described by John in the ‘dark night’. Crucially, however, these stanzas and those that follow that describe the states of ‘spiritual betrothal’ and ‘spiritual marriage’ are written from the per­ spective of the soul that has passed through the dark night, and whose attention now returns to the created order with new intensity. Consequently, the tone of these stanzas is markedly dif­ ferent from that of the Ascent and Night. The Flame is easier to situate: it depicts the soul in the state of union, both in this life and the next.

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Union in the Canticle and Flame  165 the unity of the soul and what might be called its ‘directionality’. The portrayal of the soul whose desire for God is finally being realized demands, in short, terminology (at times metaphorical) capable of depicting the incorporation of the entire soul into God. John’s repeated injunctions that the spiritual ascent can only be described by those who have passed through it and whose soul is appro­ priately ‘recollected’ (A.Prol.4–9; C.Prol.1; F.Prol.1) indicates that he must have understood himself to be in some form of the state of union. John’s biography and his surviving letters show, moreover, that he was well aware that this state by no means released the soul from the pres­ sures of worldly stresses and troubles.3 The poetry and its associated prose commentaries on the Canticle and Flame must not, in other words, be taken to imply the attainment of a trouble-free culminating state on the spiritual ascent. In depicting the higher stages of the ascent in these poetic terms, however, John emphasizes the transformed state of the soul that has passed through the dark night. Once purified and oriented to the love of God, it is the language, form, and imagery of poetry that can best depict the desires of the transformed soul.

I.  Yearning for a ‘vision’ of divine ‘beauty’ I begin by examining the higher purgative stages as they are depicted in the Canticle. A crucial factor underpinning John’s distinctive approach in the Canticle is the fact that the work is a commentary on John’s own allegorical reworking of the Song of Songs, providing a highly imagina­ tive, self-involving allegorical entry into the world that John under­ stands to be set up in Scripture. The Christian life is not primarily to be expressed as comprised of particular creeds and doctrines drawn from Scripture and now approached as external propositions. Neither should 3  The examination of John’s life in Chapter 2 made evident the extent to which his adult life was shaped by recurrent resistance to his attempts at reform (notably in his brief imprison­ ment, but also his treatment in the final years of his life) and his administrative responsibilities within the Carmelite order. These commitments are evident in John’s letters: see for instance the business acumen shown in Letter 5, the administrative role assumed by John in Letter 14, the awareness in Letter 9 of the ‘trials’ faced by Discalced Carmelite nuns, and the mention in Letter 28 of his own 1591 exile to the ‘desert’ of La Peñuela.

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166  John of the Cross the Bible serve either as the prior model of experience or as the framework through which experiences might subsequently be interpreted.4 Rather, these creeds and doctrines represent truths that the soul comes to live through stepping into the world reached through allegorical exegesis of Scripture, a process which is for John best described through the poetic. The effect of this heightened attention to the manner in which scrip­ tural imagery may be used to depict the spiritual ascent first becomes evident in the prominent role that John ascribes to the Bride’s yearning for a ‘vision’ of the ‘beauty’ of her Beloved in the early stanzas of the Canticle. It is noteworthy that John’s account of the ascent emphasizes, perhaps more than Augustine or even Plato, the extent to which the soul in the higher stages of the spiritual ascent ascends further through observation of the beauty of the created order. Indeed, beauty is the attribute of God to which John’s entire corpus most frequently refers, so regularly is it mentioned in the Canticle and Flame.5 In the Ascent and Night, John’s emphasis lays firmly on the infinite difference between divine and created beauty: ‘All the beauty of crea­ tures compared to the infinite beauty of God’, John states in in A1.4.4, ‘is the height of ugliness’. (John does not explain what he means by his des­ ignation of beauty as a divine attribute, but it seems reasonable, as A.N. Williams suggests, to see this identification as a result both of the saturation of his prose with imagery drawn from Scripture, and possibly the fruit of his exposure to the Dionysian tradition.6) In the Canticle and Flame, however, the rigorous negation of all desire for created things prescribed for the lower stages of the ascent is replaced by a more opti­ mistic assessment of the role of the created order in the ascent. The Canticle describes how the lower stages of the ascent required the soul to develop a detachment from these created objects as ends in themselves,

4 Henri de Lubac, Exegese médiévale: les quatre sens de l’écriture, vol. 4 (Paris: Aubier, 1959), 502. 5  Federico Ruiz Salvador, Introducción a San Juan de la Cruz: el escritor, los escritos, el sistema (Madrid: BAC, 1968), 346, cited in A.N. Williams, ‘The Doctrine of God in San Juan de la Cruz’, Modern Theology 30, no. 4 (2014): 511. 6  Williams, ‘Doctrine of God’, 511. John’s account certainly resonates with pseudo-Dionysi­ us’s account of beauty in Divine Names IV.7–9, particularly in the significance ascribed to beauty in propelling the soul upwards on the ascent, although Chapter 2 noted the difficulty of confirming John’s knowledge of the Dionysian corpus.

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Union in the Canticle and Flame  167 with the result that the purified soul has become ‘naked, strong, and free from all evils and goods that are not purely God’. Having given up its pursuit of ‘delights and satisfactions’, the soul is able to recognize the divine origins of the beauty of the created order, and to ascend ‘in the knowledge of God by considering his greatness and excellence manifested in creatures’ (CB4.1).7 Once the transcendence of God is appropriately recognized, it is possible to acknowledge and praise his created effects. Accordingly, the soul’s intense love for God is expressed not through the terminology of nature and grace but instead through its passionate re-engagement with the beauty of the created order, as it yearns along with the whole created order for the ‘vision’ of God’s beauty.8 Drawing on Paul’s image that those ‘who have the first fruits of the spirit moan within ourselves’ (Romans 8.23, quoted in CB1.14), John explains that the Bride’s ‘moaning’ described in the poem arises from the wound of love given by the Beloved, and that the Bride ‘ever cries out in the feeling of his absence’ (CB1.14). Having been similarly wounded, the soul now recognizes both the true origin of its being and the object of its desire, and is inflamed by love in its single-minded desire for God (CB3.1; CB7.2; CB8–11). John’s commentary on CB5 emphasizes, moreover, that the beauty of the created order that the soul seeks to enjoy points towards the incar­ nate Christ.9 As the creatures answer the entreaties of the Bride in 7  Some past scholarship has recognized the significance to John’s account of the ascent of his heightened attention to beauty in the Canticle and Flame (e.g. Henri Sanson, L’esprit humain selon Saint Jean de la Croix (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953), 91; Max Huot de Longchamp, Lectures de Jean de la Croix: essai d’anthropologie mystique (Paris: Beauchesne, 1981), 156–61; Tomislav Begović, Gott, der Weg des Menschen zu sich selbst: zur theologischen Anthropologie in der mystischen Lehre des heiligen Johannes vom Kreuz (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1990), 106–10). It has offered no unified explanation, however, of the discordance between John’s apparent denial in the Ascent of the value of beauty and his sensuous language in the Canticle. A.N. Williams gives a lucid and insightful examination of the role played by beauty in John’s doctrine of God (Williams, ‘Doctrine of God’, 511–13), although she does not distinguish between the role played by beauty in the lower and higher stages of the ascent as much as I do here. 8  Reflecting this shift, John’s description of the work of ‘grace’ (gracia) is often depicted through a series of other terms such as ‘favour’ (favor), ‘mercy’ (merced), and ‘gift’ (don) that similarly serve to depict God’s action on the soul (Sanson, L’esprit humain, 89–92). 9  While such an association of beauty and Christ is a recurrent feature in Christian the­ ology, it is highly possible that John may have learned of this association through Aquinas, who discusses it in ST I.39.2.

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168  John of the Cross CB1–4 to tell her which way her Beloved has gone, they point to the ‘graces’ with which God endowed nature ‘through his own Wisdom, the Word, his only begotten Son’ (CB5.1).10 Christ, John explains, assumed all creatures in the Incarnation, imparting ‘supernatural being’ to them above and beyond their natural being that left them ‘clothed them entirely in beauty and dignity’. It is now the gaze of Christ, the ‘Image of God’, that continues to impart ‘infinite supernatural beauty’ to all crea­ tures, since his ‘look clothes the world and all the heavens with beauty and gladness’ (CB5.4). The soul’s attention to the beauty of the created order is not simply reflective of a general divine attribute: it is a sign of the presence of the incarnate Christ. Yet the soul’s heightened awareness of the beauty of the created order, at a time when it is still unable to gaze on the Creator directly, is also a cause of frustration. ‘The soul’, John states, ‘wounded with love through a trace of the beauty of her Beloved, which she has known through creatures, and anxious to see the invisible beauty that caused this visible beauty’, continues to demand the pres­ ence of God (CB6.1). The Bride’s series of addresses to the created order in search of her Beloved, and the poem’s frequent references to eyes and sight (e.g. CB8–13), accordingly point to the soul’s determined quest, through attention to the created order, for the vision of God. In his commentary on CB11 and CB12, John proceeds to show how this account of the soul’s transformation within this christologically grounded interpretation of beauty is entirely in accord with his previ­ ously preferred terminology of ‘faith’ and ‘love’.11 In the wake of the dark night, the soul lives in the ‘obscurity and darkness’ of faith (CB12.2). But having already had certain ‘deep glimpses’ of the fullness of God that will be revealed in the beatific vision, the soul yearns deeply for God to ‘show her his beauty, his divine essence, and to kill her with this revela­ tion and thereby free her from the flesh, since she cannot see him and 10 Sanson, L’esprit humain, 90–1; Longchamp, Lectures, 156–8. 11  The account given in these stanzas is an especially significant aspect of John’s thought for two reasons. First, CB11 and CB12 occupy a pivotal position in the Canticle, marking the moment of the Bride’s rediscovery of her Bridegroom, and hence the transition to the state of spiritual betrothal. Second, CB11 is an entirely new stanza and commentary that John inserts into the second redaction of the Canticle, with its emphasis on beauty reflecting a much broader expansion of this theme in the reworked and increasingly systematized second version of this commentary.

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Union in the Canticle and Flame  169 enjoy him as she wants’ (CB11.1–2). Similarly, the commentary on CB12 states that the soul’s faith is now ‘so enlightened that it gives her a glimpse of some clear divine reflections of the height of her God’ and therefore the first glimpses of ‘the image and the beauty of her Beloved’ (CB12.1). Yet while faith continues to be ‘dark’ even in these higher stages of the ascent (perhaps explaining why, when the Bride does at last see her Beloved’s eyes, she cannot bear the sight of them), John describes a ‘sketch of love’ that is at this point drawn in the will of the lover ‘over’ the intellect. This ‘sketch’ of love most ‘intimately and vividly’ marks the union of the soul with God, such that ‘in the union and transformation of love’ both God and the soul give ‘possession of self to the other and each leaves and exchanges self for the other’ (CB12.7; cf. also CB1.11; CB2.6–7). In short, in these opening stanzas of John’s commentary on the Canticle John increasingly uses the imagery of the soul’s yearning for a vision of divine beauty—which he understands to be in accord with his previous terminology of ‘faith’ and ‘love’—as a means to represent the amplified role that he accords to love in propelling the soul towards its divine object.

II.  Pneumatological incorporation in spiritual ‘betrothal’ and ‘marriage’ Spiritual betrothal The Bride’s exclamation at the opening of the thirteenth stanza— ‘Withdraw them, Beloved, / I am taking flight!’—marks, however, a sig­ nificant transition in John’s account of the ascent, since it denotes the entry into what John terms the state of ‘spiritual betrothal’. This, John explains, is a ‘high state and union of love’ (CB14–15.2) in which the higher, spiritual, part of the soul ‘enjoys complete tranquillity and receives the most abundant communication possible in this life’. Yet the sensory part of the soul retains its ‘dross left from bad habits’, and has not yet brought ‘all its energies into subjection’ (CB14–15.30). Accordingly, it is during this time that the spiritual faculties need to be

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170  John of the Cross perfected, and the irascible and concupiscible powers, and the four passions, brought under the control of reason (CB20–21.4), in order that the soul may subsequently enter into the unitive state of ‘spiritual marriage’. In the stanzas that depict these states of spiritual betrothal and mar­ riage, repeated allusions to divine beauty continue.12 Yet John’s use of sensory metaphors to depict the soul’s desire for God increasingly extends beyond a narrow focus on ‘beauty’. Instead, in coming to describe the states of spiritual betrothal and marriage, John draws extensively on the imagery of the Song of Songs as he depicts the love of the Bride and Bridegroom through images such as roaring rivers, touch, breathing, drinking, and fragrant perfumes. In the first place, these metaphors point to a consonance between the created order and the divine, just as the fourteenth and fifteenth stanzas of the Cántico poem, beginning ‘My Beloved, the mountains’, strikingly identify the Beloved with the created order. Yet John’s explanation of these metaphors also distinguishes the state of spiritual betrothal from earlier stages on the ascent in recognizing the greater mutuality of action and enjoyment that now exists between the soul and God. No longer does the soul simply seek to be able to ‘see’ God’s beauty. Instead, these images of audition, olfaction, and touch (especially through metaphors of ‘breath’ and ‘wind’) emphasize the participation of both parties. The Bride speaks of ‘the whistling of love-stirring breezes’, which represent ‘the attributes and graces of the Beloved that by means of this union assail the soul and lovingly touch her in her substance’ (CB14–15.12). The two sensory responses of the Bride—feeling the breeze on her skin and hearing the whistling of the breeze—point to the twofold effect on the soul of God’s action, communicating both ‘knowledge and a feeling of delight’ (CB14–15.13), with John increasingly emphasizing the significance of the soul’s ‘delight’ in this state. With the soul’s entry into the state of spiritual betrothal, John uses these sensory metaphors to describe the relationship of the soul and 12  For instance, the scriptural account in Exodus 33 of God’s revelation of himself to Moses on Mount Sinai, having already been cited twice in the Canticle by John (CB 1.10; CB11.5), proceeds to be mentioned a further four times (CB17.7; CB19.4; CB33.7; CB37.4), as John emphasizes the extent to which the Bride’s satisfaction rests on her vision of her Beloved.

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Union in the Canticle and Flame  171 God in increasingly explicit pneumatological language, using the meta­phors to point to the Spirit’s progressive incorporation of the soul into the inner life of the Trinity. The Spirit is the ‘breeze’ that blows from the breathing of the mutual contemplation of the Father and the Son, a light wind that ‘cools’ the soul and thus arouses the soul’s love for God (CB13.11). Accordingly, God’s communication of himself through the soul’s contemplation of God is not of knowledge but of his love. To use the poetic imagery deployed by John, the ‘breeze of love’ stokes the soul already burning gently with the ‘fire of love’ (CB13.14). Shortly after, the Bride exclaims, ‘Be still, deadening north wind; / south wind come, you that waken love’ (CB17). In calling for the ‘south wind’, the soul calls for the Spirit. It is the Spirit’s breeze that ‘awakens love’: it ‘wholly enkindles and refreshes’ the soul, ‘quickens and awakens the will, and elevates the previous fallen appetites that were asleep to the love of God’ (CB17.4). It is the Spirit that moves the soul to exercise the virtues, and whose actions enable the soul and God to ‘enjoy’ one another. No longer is the soul simply seeking the vision of God’s beauty, as if the goal were the contemplation of an innate object. Rather, in the higher stages of the ascent the soul comes to recognize and cooperate with the loving action of the Spirit that continues to purify the soul, preparing it for union with God.

Spiritual marriage Eventually, with the spiritual faculties perfected and the irascible and concupiscible powers brought under reason’s control, the soul ascends to the state of spiritual marriage, which equates to entry into the state of union. Spiritual marriage, John advises, is ‘incomparably greater than the spiritual betrothal, for it is a total transformation in the Beloved, in which each surrenders the entire possession of self to the other with a certain consummation of the union of love. The soul thereby becomes divine, God through participation’ (CB22.3).13 13  John’s depiction of union in the Canticle and Flame is similar both to the account given in the Ascent and Night (cf. A2.5; A1.11.2; N2.24–5), and to Aquinas’s understanding of union.

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172  John of the Cross In his account of spiritual marriage, John reprises and extends his use of the sensory metaphors of betrothal. He gives an even more explicit pneumatological meaning to each image, and lets the poetic seep even further into the commentary in a manner that is redolent of the impossibility of language to describe the extent of love of the Bride and  Bridegroom, or of the soul and God. No longer do the Bride and Bridegroom simply address one another: instead, they rest in one another’s arms in an ‘intimate spiritual embrace’ (CB22.5), with God later giving the soul his ‘breast’ of ‘love and friendship’ (CB27.4). The soul’s virtues, which have through God’s grace already developed and been infused into the soul, now flower at will, with their pleasant fragrance causing delight and peace to the soul (CB24.6). God’s ‘visits’ of love occasionally ‘inflame’ the soul in love. Frequently, John speaks of how the Bride and Bridegroom drink ‘spiced wine’ together, and so ‘mutually communicate their goods and delights with a wine of savoury love in the Holy Spirit’ (CB30.1), to the extent that souls become inebriated ‘in the Holy Spirit’ with this wine of ‘sweet, delightful, and fortified love’ (CB25.7). Closing this circle of mutual offering between the Spirit, Christ, and the soul, ‘the soul directs towards God sweet and delightful outpourings’ (CB25.11). Extending these metaphors, John then proceeds to rework the trad­ ition­al Augustinian account of the Spirit as the ‘bond of love’ into a depiction of the Spirit as the ‘thread of love’ that unites God and the soul in the state of spiritual marriage ‘so strongly that it unites and trans­ forms them’ (CB31.1). The soul’s love for God, in other words, is now of the same nature as God’s own love for the soul, and the soul’s recogni­ tion that it is loved by God is at the same time a recognition that it is itself being divinized. John pursues the point further in his commentary on the thirty-third stanza: the Bride states that, in gazing on her, the Bridegroom ‘left in me grace and beauty’. This means, explains John, John’s account of ‘union’ (A2.5.3; cf. CB26.11, CB39.5) follows Aquinas (ST I–II.28.1) in distin­ guishing between the ‘union of substance’ (also known as essential union), which exists in all creatures, and the ‘union of likeness’, which is gradually developed through the soul’s trans­ form­ation in God and is the focus of the ascent. Drawing on terminology used by Aquinas, John also occasionally speaks of the state of union as ‘habitual’ union (A3.2.8; CB36.4; F1.3–4), although this is not a significant aspect of his definition of union. Helpful further comparison of Aquinas and John on ‘union’ is contained in Karol Wojtyla, Faith according to St. John of the Cross, trans. Jordan Aumann, OP (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1981), 49–50, 249–50.

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Union in the Canticle and Flame  173 that God has now ‘arrayed her [the soul] in his grace and clothed her in his beauty’, and so God’s ‘gazes’ upon the soul increase in frequency, causing grace and beauty to grow even more in the soul (CB33.3). God’s love for the soul, as expressed in his gaze, draws the soul into the love enjoyed by God in himself: the bond of God and the soul is akin to a bond within God, as the soul increasingly participates in God’s own life.

III.  Union and the beatific vision Union in the Canticle The commentary on the final stanzas of the Canticle continues to draw on the poem’s allegorical reworking of the Song of Songs, as it takes the consummation of the love of Bride and Bridegroom to represent the soul’s incorporation into God through the bond of love that eternally exists between Father and Son (cf. CB37.3; CB38.1; CB39.5). Interestingly, in the second redaction of the Canticle, John adds a number of phrases to emphasize that these images relate only to the beatific vision, not to the state of the perfect in this life (as is stated in the first redaction).14 The motive may have been unrecorded ecclesial pressure, or perhaps John’s own pragmatic caution to avoid Inquisitorial suspicion, or a change of mind on John’s part. Even in this more cautious second redaction, though, John envisages a striking continuity between union in this life and the next.15 And this continuity is in large part en­abled by the confidence with which John speaks about the nature of the beatific vision—in part, as Chapter  2 noted, a result of the influence of the pseudo-Thomist De Beatitudine. While John’s account of ‘union’ is in 14  For instance, John adds qualifying phrases in: CB1.4; CB36.2; CB38.3–5; CB38.9; CB39.4; CB39.6; cf. also F1.14. Conversely, it should be said, his editing of CA38.3 makes its later redaction (CB39.3) if anything more daring. For an informative discussion of these changes made by John in the revision of CA38 to form CB39, see José Mario Faraone, La inhabitación trinitaria según San Juan de la Cruz (Rome: Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 2002), 362–73. 15  John is of course being perfectly orthodox in not envisaging an unbridgeable rupture between the structure of human experience and existence in this life and salvific consumma­ tion in the next: even if Aquinas, for example, was emphatic on the impossibility of the posses­ sion of the beatific vision in this life, he too predicted a certain continuity in the operation of the bodily senses in the life to come (cf. ST I–II.3.3).

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174  John of the Cross many respects indebted to Aquinas, John’s emphasis in this respect is distinctive: in contrast to Aquinas’s caution concerning the nature of union and the divine life, John is radically hopeful that it is possible to depict union in the next life. And, to do so, the form and imagery of John’s own prose draws increasing inspiration from his poetry. The incorporation of soul and God is most extensively and vividly expressed through the same sensory metaphors of beauty, taste, breathing, and audition, which now depict the soul’s total loving conformity with God. Through such means, John experiments extensively with the poten­ tial of language to express the paradoxicality inherent in union. Metaphorical language, especially once pushed to and beyond the bounds of meaning, can be maximally affirmative about the nature and experi­ ence of the state of union while not being reducible to the literal. It would be possible to examine at length these various sensory meta­phors by which John describes this state of union, whether the Bride and Bridegroom’s mutual enjoyment of the ‘juice of the pomegranates’, which is the ‘drink of the Holy Spirit’ (CB37.7–8), or the soul’s enjoyment of a final ‘transformation of glory’ (CB38.1–5), or the ‘new and jubilant song’ that the Bride and Bridegroom sing together (CB39.8–10).16 The most striking metaphor John develops is, however, the Bride’s request in CB36 that she and the Bridegroom ‘go forth to behold our­ selves in your beauty’. To explain this verse, John produces a striking and renowned passage which uses the word ‘hermosura’ (‘beauty’) twenty-five times in one paragraph.17 The passage’s depiction of the mutual enjoyment of the lovers’ beauty becomes increasingly feverish, with the Bride stating in the culminating sentences of the paragraph: This means: Let us so act that by means of this loving activity we may attain to the vision of ourselves in your beauty in eternal life. That is: 16  Since his earliest exposition of ‘beauty’ in the second redaction of the Canticle, John has been clear that the soul’s contemplation of the beauty of God in this life is not equivalent to the vision of God’s glory that the soul will enjoy in the beatific vision (CB11.5, 9). In this highest state of union, however, John uses the image of ‘glory’ to depict the soul’s vision of the full beauty of God. A helpful overview of the role of ‘glory’ in John’s theology is provided by Pierre Gourard, La gloire et la glorification de l’univers chez Saint Jean de la Croix (Paris: Beauchesne, 1998). 17  This is the total for the second redaction, with John using ‘hermosura’ even more than in the first redaction.

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Union in the Canticle and Flame  175 That I be so transformed in your beauty that we may be alike in beauty, and both behold ourselves in your beauty, possessing then your very beauty; this, in such a way that each looking at the other may see in the other their own beauty, since both are you beauty alone. I being absorbed in your beauty; hence, I shall see you in your beauty, and you will see me in your beauty, and I shall see myself in you in your beauty, and you will see yourself in me in your beauty; that I may resemble you in your beauty, and you resemble me in your beauty, and my beauty be your beauty and your beauty my beauty; wherefore I shall be you in your beauty, and you will be me in your beauty, because your very beauty will be my beauty; and thus we shall behold each other in your beauty.  (CB36.5; cf. CB11.10)

The mutual offering of self in the state of union is best depicted through language that can represent the mutual enjoyment of God and the soul. The soul’s desires now no longer terminate in the beauty of the created thing, as they did in the state of beginners, but are now drawn through the created order to the beauty of God, and so to greater love of God and to greater knowledge of God’s wisdom. With the soul now transformed in God, John exclaims that the lovers’ contemplation of one another’s beauty will be so deep that it will not be going too far to sug­ gest that in some hyperbolic sense (‘you will be me in your beauty’), God and the soul will be identical (CB36.5). To contemplate God’s beauty in this manner is not just to love God, but to acknowledge the value of the suffering of the soul on the ascent in order to be ‘trans­ formed into the beauty of divine Wisdom’ (CB36.7). The beauty of the created world now draws the individual to desire a contemplation that is identical with faith and with love, a contemplation that will accordingly transform the soul into the likeness of Christ (CB36.7; CB37.1–6). John’s culminating metaphor, the image to which he also gives the most explicit pneumatological rendition, comes in the penultimate stanza’s depiction of God’s bestowal on the soul of ‘the breath or spira­ tion of the Holy Spirit from God to her and from her to God’ (CB39.2). What had previously been the warm breeze of the Holy Spirit, awaken­ ing the virtues that lay dormant within the soul, is now a breathing in the depths of the soul:

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176  John of the Cross By his divine breath-like spiration, the Holy Spirit elevates the soul sublimely and informs her and makes her capable of breathing in God the same spiration of love that the Father breathes in the Son and the Son in the Father. This spiration of love is the Holy Spirit himself, who in the Father and the Son breathes out to her in this transformation in order to unite her to himself.  (CB39.3)

It is not possible to speak of what is communicated to the soul in this breath, since ‘the soul united and transformed in God breathes out in God to God the very divine spiration that God—she being transformed in him—breathes out in himself to her’ (CB39.3). It is, John concludes, a spiration that ‘passes from God to the soul and from the soul to God with notable frequency and blissful love’, in which the soul ‘becomes deiform and God through participation’ (CB39.4). Through the action of the Holy Spirit, the transformed soul is taken up into the life of the Trinity. The divine nature and attributes are, as such, most emphatically marked by the love that both constitutes the inner life of the Trinity and is concomitantly God’s most visible expression in the created order.18 John’s daringly elevated account of the state of union draws, in short, on many of the same sensory metaphors that he has repeatedly and prom­ in­ent­ly deployed in his account of spiritual betrothal and marriage. Now, however, they point not just towards the soul’s total conformity with God in the state of union, but also to its incorporation into the life of God himself.

Union in the Flame Like the Canticle, the Flame commentary is consistently centred on the poem’s central image of the Spirit as the ‘flame of love’ that unitively consumes the entire soul.19 The metaphor of the Spirit as a ‘flame’ was 18  On the striking role played by love in uniting the divine attributes, and hence as a dis­ tinct­ive rendition of divine simplicity, see Williams, ‘Doctrine of God’, 520–1. 19 The Flame was first written in 1585–6, with a second redaction (of undisputed au­then­ti­ city) produced shortly before John’s death in 1591. The very limited edits that John made to the second redaction of the Flame probably indicate John’s satisfaction with the commentary as

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Union in the Canticle and Flame  177 briefly used by John at the end of the Canticle (CB39.14). Now, however, it is used to depict the culminating state of union in a manner that is more intense in imagery, while drawing on a more explicit pneumato­ logical and trinitarian framework than in the Canticle.20 To this end, the flame is variously depicted as a purifying fire, a cauterizing flame, a flame that transforms and unites, a flame that illuminates as a lamp, a flame that delights, and a consuming flame. These images are developed within what is at the same time a highly scriptural work, with the Flame drawing on a wide variety of biblical texts that speak of the Spirit of God as it develops its account of the diverse transforming actions of the ‘flame’ and divine ‘light’ more generally.21 To an even greater extent than in the Canticle, the poetry of the Flame undergirds John’s articulation of union. This is immediately apparent in John’s exposition of the poem’s first stanza: ‘O living flame of love / that tenderly wounds my soul / in its deepest centre! Since / now you are not oppressive, / now consummate! if it be your will: / tear through the veil of this sweet encounter!’ The soul, explains John, ‘now feels that it is all inflamed in the divine union, its palate is all bathed in glory and love, that in the intimate part of its substance it is flooded with no less than rivers of glory, abounding in delights, and from its depths flow rivers of living water’. It feels that the ‘delicate flame of love, burning within, assails it, [and] it does so though glorifying it with gentle and powerful

originally written. For a side-by-side translation of the two redactions, see John of the Cross, The Living Flame of Love: Versions A and B, trans. Jane Ackerman (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995). The greatest difference from the Ascent, Night, and Canticle is that the Flame describes a state that John expects few will reach in this life. Whereas previous commentaries dedicated much attention to the various feelings that might accom­ pany each stage, to aid spiritual directors and readers in discerning their own spiritual state, the Flame functions more as a vision of the highest state of union. It is, in this sense, a picture painted by John of the state towards which all souls should be aspiring. 20  John’s commentary on the second and fourth stanzas of the poem are the most explicitly trinitarian passages. These passages, however, undergird an account of pneumatological in­corp­or­ation of the soul and creation that emphasizes the trinitarian shape of this trans­for­ma­ tion more thoroughgoingly than does the Canticle. See Raúl Gutiérrez, Wille und Subjekt bei Juan de la Cruz (Tübingen: Francke, 1999), 136. 21  Significant texts for this purpose include Exodus 33.22 (F1.27; F4.12), Ezekiel 36.25–6 (F1.8), John 14.23 (F.Prol.2; F1.15), Acts 2 (F2.3; F3.8); James 1.17 (F1.14; F3.47; F4.9). See Gabriel Castro, ‘Llama de Amor Viva’, in Introducción a la lectura de San Juan de la Cruz, ed. Salvador Ros García and Agustiń García Simón (Salamanca: Junta de Castilla y León, 1991), 525–6.

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178  John of the Cross glory’ (F1.1). This flame is the Holy Spirit, and the soul experiences it ‘not only as a fire that has consumed and transformed it but as a fire that burns and flares within it’ (F1.3). Indeed, ‘since this flame is a flame of divine life, it wounds the soul with the tenderness of God’s life, and it wounds and stirs it so deeply as to make it dissolve in love’ (F1.7). John’s commentary relates the metaphors of the poem to the soul’s desire for God and elucidates their meaning on occasion; his main aim is not, however, to attempt to explain the metaphor of the flame’s action in the scholastic language of the Ascent and Night. John’s language, striking in these opening comments in the first stanza, becomes even more daring as his explanation continues: in this state of union, he continues, ‘the divine substance . . . absorbs (absorbe) the soul in itself with its divine flame’ (F1.17). Through the ‘inner assault of the Spirit’, God ‘penetrates and deifies the substance of the soul, absorbing it above all being into his own being’ (F1.35; cf. F2.17; F4.17). Such language of ‘absorption’ is hardly ‘safe’ language, and John would surely have been aware of the personal risks involved in being under­ stood to speak of a ‘union of indistinction’ of the soul and God, even if almost certainly not aware of the various earlier disputes surrounding Porete, Eckhart, and Ruusbroec that informed later ecclesial authorities’ wariness of such exuberant language. Yet John does not seem to be con­ cerned about the literal meaning of these specific terms, and in this respect he seems to share the willingness of these other late medieval figures to adopt paradoxical turns of phrase. His aim in this may well be, as for other writers of the period, precisely in order to emphasize the ontological paradoxicality that exists in talk of the state of union.22 It is, for John, the sexual language and imagery of the Llama that can articu­ late the heights of union in a manner that depicts the union of the soul 22 The point is excellently put by Denys Turner, ‘Dionysius and Some Late Medieval Mystical Theologians of Northern Europe’, Modern Theology 24, no. 4 (2008): 662–3. In or­din­ ary language, to assert the truth of one statement will typically entail the denial of certain other statements. But this is not true of talk of the relationship between God and creatures, a relation­ ship not subject to the comparative language of ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’. Accordingly, Turner argues, ‘statements of the soul’s “oneness” with God, such as those of Marguerite, Meister Eckhart, and Ruusbroec, can be maximally emphatic—not merely rhetorically hyperbolic— without imperilling the created soul’s created identity’. The criticisms and condemnations of these three figures simply reveal, Turner concludes, the extent to which other late medieval thinkers had lost their grip on ‘Dionysian dialectical mystical theology’.

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Union in the Canticle and Flame  179 and God through a series of metaphors that ac­know­ledge the depth of feeling and desire of this state. This emphasis on the realization of the soul’s desire for God is depicted with especial intensity in the second stanza in John’s descrip­ tion of the Spirit’s purifying ‘touch’ (toque) on the soul. John explains that the first verse of the stanza, ‘O sweet cautery’, describes the work of the Holy Spirit, a ‘fire of love’ (F2.2). The Spirit is a fire of love ‘that, being of infinite power, can inestimably consume and transform into itself the soul it touches’. The soul that is touched in this manner will be ‘entirely transformed by the divine flame’, to the extent that it no longer simply feels the Spirit as a cautery, but itself becomes a ‘cautery of blaz­ ing fire’ (F2.2). No longer, in short, is the soul simply the passive vessel for divine action. Rather, at its height the Spirit’s action transforms the whole soul; it ‘divinizes and delights it’ (F2.3), causing the entire soul to be transformed in divine action. Just as the sexual intensity of the poem seems to peak in the four repeated moans of ‘¡Oh!’ in the second stanza, before developing in the final two stanzas into a more gently contented expression of love to the Beloved, John’s commentary on the poem arguably peaks in intensity in the second stanza. Much of the commentary on the third stanza of the Llama consists in a digression (F3.24–67) that revisits the more com­ monly undertaken lower stages of the ascent, warning repeatedly about spiritual directors who give bad advice to souls (F3.30–1, 54–62; cf. Letter 11). This recap of topics previously explored serves as a helpful precursor to John’s depiction, in his commentary on the fourth stanza, of the final effects of state of union. In this final stanza, as in the final stanzas of the Canticle, John uses numerous sensory metaphors to depict the deep intimacy that results from the Spirit’s action on the soul. The soul exclaims, ‘How gently and lovingly / you wake in my heart, / where in secret you dwell alone; / and in your sweet breathing, / filled with good and glory, / how tenderly you swell my heart with love.’ There are, John explains in his prose commen­ tary, two effects of the union of the soul with God: first, ‘an awakening of God in the soul’, and second, ‘the breathing of God within it’. Through these two effects, the soul is ‘tenderly and delicately inspired with love’ (F4.2). The Word awakens in the soul, and it ‘seems that all the virtues

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180  John of the Cross and substances and perfections of every created thing glow and make the same movement all at once’ (F4.4). As in the Canticle, the soul’s engagement with the created order, having passed through the dark night, is not simply a deeper recognition of the divine origin and end of all creatures. Rather, the soul now comes to recognize the created order as existing in God: to acknowledge the graced nature of the creation is not simply to contemplate God’s effects, but even God himself. Accordingly, the soul finally comes to recognize and enjoy the true depth of its union with God. In the soul in which ‘neither any appetite nor other image or forms nor any affections for created things dwell’, John continues, ‘the Beloved dwells secretly with an embrace so much closer, more intimate and interior, the purer and more alone the soul is to everything other than God’ (F4.14). This final depth of union is not the intense eruptions of the cauterizing flame. Rather, it is a state in which God dwells ‘secretly’, deep within the soul. The soul may feel this ‘intimate embrace’, but much of the time the Bridegroom may remain deep within the soul, as if asleep. God ‘is usually there, in this embrace with his Bride, as though asleep in the substance of the soul. And it is very well aware of him and ordinarily enjoys him. Were he always awake within it, communicating knowledge and love, it would already be in glory’ (F4.15). Only on occasion may God ‘awake’, and ‘in this awaken­ ing of the Bridegroom in the perfect soul . . . the soul feels a strange delight in the breathing of the Holy Spirit in God, in which it is sover­ eignly glorified and taken with love’ (F4.16). Such a moment is barely articulable. It is ‘a spiration that God produces in the soul, in which, by that awakening of lofty knowledge of the Godhead, he breathes the Holy Spirit in it in the same proportion as its knowledge and understanding of him, absorbing it most profoundly in the Holy Spirit, rousing its love with a divine exquisite quality’. In turn, by breathing in the soul, the Spirit fills the soul with the ‘good and glory in which he enkindled it in love of himself, indescribably and incomprehensibly, in the depths of God’ (F4.17). The potential anthropological implications of John’s daring account of the trinitarian relations are well captured by Rowan Williams’s analysis of the endless ‘deflections of desire’ that John depicts among the persons of the Trinity. John, writes Williams, ‘challenges us to imagine a love that

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Union in the Canticle and Flame  181 is certainly more “like” desire than anything else we can conceive, and yet it wholly other-directed’, pointing with his account of the Trinity towards a love ‘which is always focused on the sheer otherness of the other as object of desire, a love of pure gift or bestowal’.23 John’s under­ standing of desire itself, so central to his account of the ascent, therefore recognizes that even to speak of desire within the Trinity is to risk a ‘crude analogy’ with human interpersonal love, and yet it is to adopt a form of language that, in all its inappropriateness, points towards some­ thing of the eschatological possibilities of human love.24 The desire of the soul is consequently, as in the Canticle, finally sat­ isfied as the Spirit lovingly draws the soul into union with God. John made clear in the opening stanzas of the Canticle that God may seem to be hidden but is in fact always present within the soul (CB1.6; F2.17). Only in the state of union as it is depicted in the Canticle and Flame, however, does the flourishing of the soul’s desire culminate in the revelation that this desire is reflective not simply of God’s own desire for union with the soul, but of the very desire that unites the persons of the Trinity in love for one another. The love that has been propelling the soul towards God is, as such, revealed to be the same love by which God has all along been drawing the soul into God’s own self.

IV.  The anthropology of the transformed soul It is the strikingly poetic representation of the transformed desire in the soul that helps to explain, finally, two notable developments in the anthropology of the soul presented in the Canticle and Flame. When John describes the progressively higher stages of the ascent, the an­thropo­logic­al framework derived from Aquinas’s framework which underpinned the Ascent and Night, with its various distinctions of sense and spirit, of the appetites and passions, of the internal and external 23  Rowan Williams, ‘The Deflections of Desire: Negative Theology in Trinitarian Disclosure’, in Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation, ed. Oliver Davies and Denys Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 126–7. 24  Williams, ‘The Deflections of Desire’, 127.

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182  John of the Cross senses, and of the multiple spiritual faculties, gradually becomes less important to him. Eventually, in the Flame, it is mainly invoked in the sections where John digressively revisits the transformations that occurred in previous stages of the ascent (F2.33–6; F3.24–67). Instead, John turns to a slightly altered anthropology that emphasizes the desir­ ing nature of the soul itself, and that turns to metaphors that gesture to the total incorporation of the soul into the divine life. This is evident, in particular, in two developments.

Memory First, the memory is far less prominent in the anthropology of the soul that is laid out in the Canticle and Flame, in a manner that decreases John’s prior emphasis on the temporality of the soul and instead stresses the ongoing incorporation of the entire soul into God. In Chapter 4, I examined how John’s account of the active night of spirit in the Ascent, in a move that appears closer to Augustine than to Aquinas, accords the memory the status of a spiritual faculty. John emphasizes the need for the soul to look in hope to its future glorification in the beatific vision rather than to continue to recollect its past attachments to the created order. He is thereby able to emphasize the extent to which not just cur­ rent attention to the created order (as cognized through the intellect) but also reflection on past events (as recollected by the memory) needs to be transformed as part of the spiritual ascent. Yet in John’s account of the higher stages of the ascent in the Canticle and Flame John increasingly refers only to intellect and will as spiritual faculties: there occurs, in Doyle’s felicitous phrase, a strange instance of ‘memory loss’.25 Elements of this instability are evident towards the end of the Night. John continues to consider memory primarily as one of three spiritual faculties (N1.9.7; N2.3.3; N2.4.2; N2.9.3–5; N2.13.11; N2.16.1; N2.21). Yet, especially as he comes to describe the contemplation 25  Dominic Doyle, ‘From Triadic to Dyadic Soul: A Genetic Study of John of the Cross on the Anthropological Basis of Hope’, Studies in Spirituality 21 (2011): 233. The following analysis of the changes in John’s understanding of memory draws extensively on this thoughtful ana­lysis of a point of recurrent controversy in John’s thought.

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Union in the Canticle and Flame  183 infused during the passive night of spirit, he comes to speak in dyadic terms, describing it simply as ‘loving wisdom’, with implicit reference only to the transformed intellect and will (N2.5.1; N2.12.2, 6).26 It is in the Canticle, and above all in the Flame, however, that this change becomes most evident. The poetry on which John’s commentar­ ies are written is important here: the emphasis on the soul as located and extended in time is provided not by the spiritual faculty of the memory but rather by the narrative of the Canticle, holding together in one story the Bride’s yearning and her eventual union with the Bridegroom. In the Bride’s yearning that marks the Canticle’s commentary on the opening stanzas of the poem, her hope for her vision of the Bridegroom is a pervasive feature: the Bride’s moaning, John says at one point, is the sign of the soul’s ‘hoping for what it lacks’ (CB1.14). Yet, as Doyle points out, hope is not here equated with the transformed memory, but is instead presented as something closer to the ‘attendant quality of the whole person’s movement to God’.27 Shortly after, in commenting on the verse ‘tell him I am sick, I suffer, and I die’, John might seem to invoke the memory in claiming that these three afflictions correspond to the three spiritual faculties. Yet as he comes to explain the manner in which the third affliction, death, corresponds with the spiritual faculty of memory, John does not carry through on his promise. Instead, he states that the Bride ‘says she dies because she suffers a distress that resembles death on remembering that she lacks all the goods of the intellect (the vision of God) and the delights of the will (the possession of God)’ (CB2.6). Memory is not equated with any specific virtue in this passage, and unquestionably no relation to hope is mentioned. Rather, to cite Doyle again, memory is in these passages and others tak­ ing on ‘a pervasive role that describes the whole person, and does not simply demarcate a distinct faculty’.28

26 I suggest that Doyle somewhat overstates (‘From Triadic to Dyadic Soul’, 225–7) the extent to which John speaks in dyadic terms in the Night: John’s anthropology remains most typically tripartite in this work. 27  Doyle, ‘From Triadic to Dyadic Soul’, 229. 28  Doyle, ‘From Triadic to Dyadic Soul’, 230, a point that Doyle rightly extends on pp. 231–3 with three apt examples (CB28.3, CB26.5, CB35.5) of John’s ‘unconvincing’ portrayals of the memory in the states of spiritual betrothal and marriage.

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184  John of the Cross The lower visibility accorded to the memory is even more pronounced in the Flame. Most notably, it is almost a commonplace in scholarly literature that the one place where John makes the explicit, typically Augustinian, identification of the three spiritual faculties and the Trinity is in F1.15. Yet, as Doyle points out, this is simply not the case: John’s promise is that ‘The Blessed Trinity inhabits the soul by divinely illu­ mining its intellect with the wisdom of the Son, delighting its will in the Holy Spirit, and absorbing it powerfully and mightily in the unfathomed embrace of the Father’s sweetness’ (F1.15). Memory is not correlated with the Father in any Augustinian pattern: rather, as Doyle argues, this passage (which itself is an addition to the second redaction of the Flame) depicts the correlation of ‘the two human operations (knowing and lov­ ing) and the two divine processions (Word and Spirit)’.29 Here, and else­ where in the Flame (F1.9; F1.12; F3.21; F3.78), the soul in the state of union is characterized by its heightened capacity for knowing and lov­ ing. The transformation of the memory is simply not mentioned. Instead, the soul’s delight in its beatific glorification stretches across all the faculties and powers of the soul. Two reasons, as Doyle rightly suggests, are most probable for this shift in the role played by the memory. In the first place, this change is taking place in John’s later writing, and may represent the steady coming apart of his earlier neat correlations under the pressure of a growing awareness of the complexity of the soul. In the early stages of the Canticle, for example, John is still describing a lower state, yet uses more dyadic language (CB1.14; CB2.6–7), presumably because the process of writing about union causes him to alter his account of the lower stages. Most importantly, however, John’s later works describe states closer to union with the eternal God, into which it is harder to incorporate the intrinsic temporality of memory and hope. Accordingly, the temporality of the soul’s yearning for God comes not to be represented by means of the spiritual faculty of memory, but rather through the depiction of the whole soul as a temporal entity, progressively divinized. The trans­for­ ma­tion of the soul’s desires involves, too, its progressive incorporation into the eternal divine life. 29  Doyle, ‘From Triadic to Dyadic Soul’, 234.

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Union in the Canticle and Flame  185

The unity of the soul This shift in the understanding of memory is not, however, the only change in John’s account of the anthropology of the soul in the state of union. In addition, John makes increased use of certain phrases that no longer seek to describe the soul with the scholastic rigour that marked the Ascent and Night. Instead, these phrases gesture graphically to the unity of the soul, and to the totality of its transformation brought about by the spiritual ascent. John refers, for instance, to the ‘centre’ (centro: CB12.1; F1.8–14; F2.8–10), ‘root’ (raíz: CB38.8), ‘depth’ (fondo: F1.9; F3.68; F4.14) and ‘interior’ (interior: CB39.9) of the soul, to the ‘intimate part of its substance’ (lo íntimo de su sustancia: F1.1) to the ‘heart of the spirit’ (el corazón del espíritu: F2.9–11), and to the ‘deep caverns’ of the spiritual faculties of the soul (las profundas cavernas: F3.17–29, 68–78).30 Yet John’s preferred phrase, most of all in the Flame but also in his other prose works, is the ‘substance of the soul’ (sustancia del alma). Accordingly, I turn primarily to this phrase in examining the meaning that John attaches to these various terms. Just as many have sought to understand the shifts in John’s articula­ tion of the temporality of the soul evident in the changing status of the memory as reflective of a systematic anthropology, there exists a long scholarly tradition of attempting to understand ‘substance’ as serving a precise, technical purpose within the anthropology of sense and spirit that John expounded most fully in the Ascent and Night.31 Such sugges­ tions have taken a number of forms. It has been mooted, for instance, that substance represents a third level (above sense and spirit) of John’s anthropology,32 that it is to be equated with the will,33 or that it constitutes 30 Gutiérrez, Wille und Subjekt, 106. 31  For a helpful survey distinguishing this use of substance from other meanings that John gives to the word, see Sanson, L’esprit humain, 71–2 and Longchamp, Lectures, 51–5, 59–62. Longchamp tentatively suggests that the more concrete implications of ‘substance’ may help explain why John tends to prefer this word to ‘essence’, a word he uses almost synonymously but far less frequently. 32  Ysabel de Andía, ‘San Juan de la Cruz y la “Teología Mística” de “San Dionisio” ’, in Actas del congreso internacional sanjuanista, ed. A. García Simón, vol. 3 (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 1993), 124. 33  This is the proposal of Wolfgang Göbel, Der Wille zu Gott und das Handeln in der Welt: M.  Luther, Johannes v. Kreuz, I.  Kant (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1993), which is heavily criticized by Gutiérrez, Wille und Subjekt, 94–109.

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186  John of the Cross (drawing on Garrigou-Lagrange and Maritain) a ‘psychological’ language for describing what in ‘ontological’ terms remains a fundamentally Thomist anthropology. On occasion, John’s talk of the ‘substance of the soul’, of the ‘feeling of the soul’ (F3.68–9), of the ‘soul itself ’, and of the ‘substantial touches’ (CB14–15.14; CB25.6, F2.8–21) also seems to point to a spiritual anthropology that John envisages to receive divine communications in a structure parallel to the operation of the natural sensory and spiritual faculties.34 Yet while John does indeed on specific occasions use the terminology of ‘substance’ in these ways, his use of the term most commonly has a rather broader meaning, serving to point to what Eric Trueman Dicken helpfully terms ‘the totality of the higher faculties of the soul’.35 In other words, the term most fundamentally serves to represent the unity, once the faculties have been brought into union with God, of the soul’s knowing, loving, and at times also remembering. That John envisages such a role for the substance of the soul is evident from many of the times that he uses the term (e.g. A2.5.2; A2.24.4; A2.32.2–4; N2.23.11–12; CB22.5; CB26.11). For example, in his ex­plan­ ation in the Canticle of the poem’s reference to the ‘whistling of lovestirring breezes’, John explains that this metaphor describes God’s communication of divine truths into the soul, the ‘contemplation’ that is described by Dionysius as a ‘ray of darkness’ (CB14–15.12–16). Yet while John explicitly states that this contemplation is ‘knowledge’ that is bestowed on the ‘passive or possible intellect’ (briefly drawing on the Thomist theory of cognition), he also describes contemplation as ‘the attributes and graces of the Beloved that . . . assail the soul and lovingly touch her in her substance’, a knowledge that ‘penetrates with wonderful savoriness into the innermost part of the substance of the soul’. Similarly, the contemplation that John elsewhere describes as a ‘loving knowledge’ 34  This suggestion has a long history, dating back to Augustin Poulain, The Graces of Interior Prayer, trans. Leonora  L.  Yorke Smith (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1910), 88–113, being advocated by André Bord, Mémoire et espérance chez Jean de la Croix (Paris: Beauchesne, 1971), 90–1, and which has most recently found sustained expression in Edward Howells, John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila: Mystical Knowing and Selfhood (New York: Crossroad, 2002), 25–34. 35  Trueman Dicken, Crucible of Love, 33. For further justification of this interpretation, see also Payne, Cognitive Value of Mysticism, 41–4; Gutiérrez, Wille und Subjekt, 108–13.

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Union in the Canticle and Flame  187 that purifies the spiritual faculties (e.g. N2.5.1) is here alternatively depicted as ‘touching’ the soul’s substance. John’s use of ‘substance’ helps him to depict the unity of the soul’s knowing and loving—to speak, in other words, of the divine infusion of contemplation as affecting the totality of the soul’s powers, causing the entire soul to turn towards God. On occasion in the Flame, moreover, it is the substance of the soul that comes to play the role of representing the unity of the soul across time, coming to replace the role that was in the lower stages of the ascent performed by the spiritual faculty of the memory, and therefore serving to emphasize the temporal constitution of the entire soul. In F1.26, for instance, John speaks of the intellect, will, and substance (whereas in the Ascent and Night the memory would have been mentioned) of the soul, describing the effect of the latter’s transformation as being that God is no longer ‘heavy and constraining to the substance of my soul but rather its glory and delight and amplitude’ (F1.26). As Doyle rightly points out, this equation of the substance with the temporal unity of the soul places John’s account rather closer to Augustine’s account of the whole person as a ‘temporal unity . . . spread out across time yet still unified by the remembrance of the past and expectation of the future’.36 Yet John’s account of the ‘substance of the soul’ is not always used in these debates in a technical manner. Rather, as the foregoing examples have made apparent, John’s discussion of the substance makes use of the same vivid sensory metaphors, most notably that of ‘touch’, that the first half of this chapter showed to be so important to John’s exposition of the higher stages of the ascent. In the second stanza of the Flame, the Son of God is compared to a ‘delicate touch’ that will ‘subtly penetrate the substance of my soul and, lightly touching it all, absorb it entirely in yourself ’ (F2.17; cf. F4.14). It is, John insists, a touch that will ‘detach and withdraw the soul from all the other touches of created things’, since it is ‘a touch of substances, that is, of the substance of God in the substance of the soul’ (F2.18, 21). Yet John proceeds to argue that it is only the substance of the soul that cannot be entirely divinized in this life (F2.34). While alluding to the venerable heritage of the term in

36  Doyle, ‘From Triadic to Dyadic Soul’, 240.

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188  John of the Cross philosophical discussion, the image of the ‘touch’ of substances alludes to the in­corp­or­ation of the soul into God. The idea of the soul’s ‘substance’ accordingly needs to be understood alongside a range of other terms, without such an extended philo­soph­ ic­al heritage, that John puts to similar use to express the intensity of the soul’s desire for God. John’s regular references in the Canticle and Flame to the ‘centre’ of the soul are emblematic of his use of similar terms such as ‘interior’, ‘root’, and ‘depth’. At times within the Canticle John uses the term ‘centre’ to compare, in the Aristotelian physics of his day, the soul’s transformation to the movement of a stone towards its own centre, namely the centre of the earth (CB11.4; CB12.1; CB17.1). Yet the ‘centre’ of the soul is the subject of more extensive discussion in the Flame, in large part because of John’s use of the term in the first stanza of the poem, in which the soul exclaims that the flame ‘tenderly wounds my soul / in its deepest centre!’37 There are, John indicates, other centres to the soul, and so the account of the ‘deepest centre’ intends to point to that which is deepest within the soul (F1.11) and which unites the soul with God: ‘The soul’s centre is God. When it has reached God with all the capacity of its being and the strength of its operation and in­clin­ ation, it will have attained its final and deepest centre in God, it will know, love and enjoy God with all its might’ (F1.12). The notion of the ‘centre’ or ‘substance’ of the soul points to the unity and directionality of the soul: the entire soul, its very ‘substance’, is now oriented towards God. Searching within itself, where God is ‘hidden’, it seeks its total in­corp­or­ation into God. Both the changing role played by the memory and the development of a range of new terminology to describe the unity of the soul serve in their different ways to emphasize the desiring nature of the entire soul. This is, on the one hand, to recognize that the transformation of the memory in hope is ultimately a process by which all these memories of past events will be transfigured into a longing desire for the future bea­ tific vision. Yet it is also to acknowledge that the yearning of the soul towards union with the divine is at the same time a yearning within itself, in which the soul discovers previously unknown depths of unity 37  Cf. Sanson, L’esprit humain, 74–6; Gutiérrez, Wille und Subjekt, 114–15.

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Union in the Canticle and Flame  189 within itself. Such language of the ‘touch’ in the ‘deepest centre’ of the soul serves to emphasize the fundamental unity of the soul, a unity that only comes to be realized as the soul itself nears union with its divine lover. To speak of the soul’s anthropology as it is brought into union with God, in other words, requires language that is consciously aware of its metaphorical nature. The terminological distinctions that apply at the lower stages of the ascent must, to some extent, be superseded as the transformed soul approaches union with God.

V. Conclusions John’s account in the Canticle and Flame of the relationship with God of the transformed soul draws on a subtle conception of the possibilities of language and of the soul’s sensory capabilities. In Chapter 3 I demon­ strated the importance of John’s poetry as a means for him to explore the various stages of the spiritual ascent through metaphors and al­le­gor­ ies of desire. In the last two chapters, I have shown the centrality of this poetry to John’s prose commentaries, especially in the depiction of the higher stages of the ascent: it is through commentary on the language, form, and imagery of his own poetry that John delivers his account of the realization of the soul’s desires. Once purified and redirected through the dark night, the soul may wholeheartedly direct its love towards God, recognizing the whole cre­ ated order as already charged with this graced love. The poetic basis of John’s account of these higher stages of the ascent enables him to pro­ vide a rendition of what is widely known as the ‘spiritual senses’ trad­ ition, which, while relying extensively on these metaphors of sensation, is at the same time consistently and explicitly aware of the non-literal nature of this language.38 At times John begins to use these metaphors to depict a series of faculties describing the soul’s engagement with God, 38  Talk of the ‘spiritual senses’ tradition (a term that has in modern debate been extensively shaped by an early essay by Karl Rahner) refers to a highly polymorphous series of uses of the language of sense perception to describe the divine–human encounter. For the contemporary possibilities of this tradition, see Paul L. Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley, eds, The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

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190  John of the Cross parallel to the anthropology of external, bodily sensation. Yet this is not a model that John consistently develops. Rather, instead of the possible alternative scholastic language of ‘nature’ and ‘grace’, he chiefly uses these sensory metaphors to emphasize the strength of the desire that propels the progressive incorporation of the soul into God. The soul’s increasing awareness and enjoyment of God’s ‘beauty’ is gradually sup­ plemented by the sound, smell, touch, and taste of God, as the soul enters into the state of union. In daring fashion, John presents the transformation of the soul as its progressive opening to the divine love that is manifested in the work of the Spirit, the bond of love. The Spirit, accordingly, draws the soul into transfiguring divine love in a manner that does not obliterate human freedom but which enables its fullest realization in total conformity with the divine will. The soul that has reached this state can no longer be solely described with the careful precision of ordinary anthropological terminology; by contrast, the transformative incorporation of the state of union may only be depicted through terms and images that gesture to the temporal and ontological unity of the soul. And the soul that has passed through the dark night of the purification of its own desires may, accordingly, at last come to recognize that it was all along the object of divine desire, a desire that is rooted in the same love that unites the persons of the Trinity.

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Conclusion Desire retrieved

Having examined John’s extraordinarily confident depiction of union, it is finally time to take stock. This book has aimed to retrieve John of the Cross’s rich, distinctive, and neglected understanding of desire, one delivered within his account of the spiritual ascent. In order for the centrality of desire to John’s thought to emerge, unconstrained by ana­ chron­is­tic conceptual categories, close scrutiny has been needed—not only of his texts, but also of his writing’s context and its subsequent reception. Intricate attention to the conditions out of which John’s thought emerged—his intellectual inheritance as well as his cultural, social, literary, ecclesial, and political circumstances—has proved indis­ pensable in this regard. Careful consideration was also required of the context of John’s subsequent reception, both to demonstrate how the modern categories of mysticism, spirituality, and religious experience came to constrain interpretation of John, and so as to identify the full range of reasons why his portrayal of desire has been neglected. The ana­ lysis of John’s writing that followed has offered a way beyond the tensions that some have perceived in John’s writing, such as between the ‘dark night’ and the high account of union. This approach enables his depic­ tions of desire and divine union to appear with greater freshness and accuracy than otherwise possible. Ultimately, this historically attentive retrieval of John on desire can both critique and contribute to con­tem­por­ ary scholarship on desire; exactly how is the concern of this final chapter. En route to this goal, Chapter  1 surveyed the various strands of twentieth-century interpretation of John’s writings, suggesting that they have all consistently underplayed the importance of desire as a theme. In response, the following four chapters have carefully con­ sidered the overall shape of John’s thought, each tracing the complexly John of the Cross: Desire, Transformation, and Selfhood. Sam Hole, Oxford University Press (2020). © Sam Hole. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198863069.003.0007

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192  John of the Cross conceptualized notion of desire that animates his account of the ­trans­form­ation of the soul in the course of the spiritual ascent. Accordingly, Chapter  2 examined the multiple theological traditions that seem to have influenced John’s conception of desire. These, while typically ori­gin­ at­ing in Platonic thought, are far more diverse than is often ac­know­ledged. Chapter 3 focused on John’s poetry, his original choice of genre. Language and form are constitutive parts of John’s theology, I suggested, and demand close attention. Thus I explored John’s fascination with the limi­ tations of language during the spiritual ascent, and especially how he revelled in the use of sexual language and imagery to describe the union of the soul with God. It is particularly evident in John’s poetry that desire shapes John’s language. Exploration of John’s prose works in Chapters 4 and 5 then revealed the full significance of desire for the friar’s account of the soul’s trans­ form­ation. John begins his account with the state of the untransformed human soul and a series of stark condemnations on the depths of human sin. This is succeeded by a strikingly confident and hopeful vision for the transformation of these sinful desires. The period in which sinful desires are purified and stilled is sometimes experienced as a ‘dark night’. It may also, however, resemble an ascent that may be cartographically depicted as a straight and narrow path pressing relentlessly towards God, as in John’s sketched drawing. Graced desire ‘propels’ the soul through the debilitating experiences of the dark night towards this goal; and having travelled on this journey, the purified soul becomes entirely open to the loving inflow of God. At this point, the soul will be united with God and find its desires animated by the loving life of the Trinity—a moment that John describes as a culmination of sensual desires in the created order. The soul will finally recognize that it has all along been drawn up this path by the imperceptible pull of the Spirit. At this climax, the soul will at last perceive that its yearning, its desire, for a vision of God is drawn from and more than matched by God’s own yearning for union with his whole creation. Retrieval of John’s magnificent understanding of desire is valuable in its own right, and further, I predict it will bear more fruit besides. This project has been animated by detailed historical scholarship and the fur­ ther conviction that such scholarship may yield constructive outcomes

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Conclusion  193 for modern theological research. John’s writings offer a valuable and neglected theorization of desire, one oddly absent from recent theo­ logic­al discussions. In this brief closing chapter I present (highly pro­ grammatically) what I see as John’s modern significance. Briefly stated, there are four interconnected aspects of John’s thought (first outlined in my Introduction) with incisive modern significance. These are: first, John offers a holistic account of the erotic and general human desire, rather than conflating or disuniting the two; second, instead of treating desires as static elements to be satisfied or denied, he astutely describes the transformation of desire; third, John does not portray desire as an exclusively human or personal phenomenon, but rather sees desire infused throughout creation and perfected in God, who desires without lack or limit; fourth, John’s work demonstrates the merits of reconciling divided theological disciplines, and further both models and instructs its readers in the method. As I suggested at the outset of this study and will elaborate here, these aspects are particularly pertinent for current theological discussion of desire. Turning to John’s first prescient critique of and contribution to con­ tem­por­ary discussions of desire, let us examine John’s holistic account of erotic desire and human desire in general. In contrast to both modern accounts that narrowly define the erotic, divorcing it from other desires and love and ones that see all desire through a narrowly erotic lens, John offers a creative and integrated vision. In his view, sexual desire is not separable from other human desires; neither are these other desires reducible to, or in essence identical with, sexual desire. At the start of the dark night, John warns of the need to still and purify the misdirected sensory appetites that give rise to the purely physical expression of desire that he calls lust (N1.4). In the subsequent stages of the dark night, John describes by turns the discomfort of vulnerability and emo­ tional engagement, the possibility of an initially unnoticed yet gradual increase in self-awareness and self-acceptance, and the excitement of growing disclosure of one self to another. Appropriately traversed, this series of ‘dark nights’ of desire accordingly gives rise to new and deeper forms of intimacy, trust, and communication between the soul and God. When union is finally attained, it is a union of the entire soul with God, characterized by such great intimacy, equality, delight, passion,

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194  John of the Cross abandonment, and mutual self-giving that the state is for John best depicted in the language of sexual desire. This is a powerful counterpoint both to the remaining theological influence of Anders Nygren’s influential critique of desire and to the theological accounts which draw on Freud and his successors. On the one hand, Nygren’s account of desire makes a clean distinction between good (agape) and bad (eros) human desires, with sexual desire firmly placed within the latter category. The two are seen as categorically differ­ ent and diametrically opposed. On the other hand, those models that (informed by Freud and his successors) understand desire through the narrow lens of sexuality have conflated all desires. This latter model has tended to comprehend all kinds of human desire within the same para­ digm: sexual desire has been taken as the model for all forms of desire, sometimes to the point of forgetting there are others. In the face of these two tendencies, John’s holistic articulation of desire offers two pertinent insights. First, sexual desire cannot be described in purely physical terms and thereby separated from those qualities (such as personal intimacy, vulnerability, and trust) that John rightly under­ stands as some of the defining characteristics of such desire. Such an understanding rebuffs the restricted understanding of sexual desire widespread in modern theology. Nygren’s account of sexual desire as eros describes something far closer to John’s understanding of lust, and refuses to allow any overlap with the agapeic, self-giving virtues that are essential to John’s understanding of sexual desire. Theological models that follow the legacy of Freud, while discarding Nygren’s negative appraisal of sexual desire, typically continue to understand such desire in physical terms: it is a basic desire akin to eating or drinking, and accordingly capable of being considered without reference to the qual­ ities John emphasizes. The second insight is John’s recognition that when sexual desire is appropriately exercised it serves a unifyingly holistic role in relation to all other dimensions of human desire, whether physical, spiritual, intel­ lectual, affective, or anything else. This is, of course, a far cry from the dichotomous understanding of desire offered by Nygren, and it bears fruit when compared with those models that draw on Freud’s thought. John certainly recognizes what in modern psychological terminology,

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Conclusion  195 following Freud, is called displacement—that souls will frequently focus on a desire for particular objects (for instance, food, friends, or success) in order to avoid acknowledging their true desire. Yet John would resist any naïve characterization within this model of all desires as simple forms of sexual desire. The soul’s union with God may be signified by the flourishing of the entirety of the self ’s desires in a manner that resembles true sexual desire, yet this does not mean that sexual desire should determine how all human desire is understood. John accordingly offers a distinctive rendition of desire in its fullest erotic sense without letting that sense overpower desire’s other inflec­ tions. (This study, recognizing the highly sexual modern associations of the erotic, has chosen not to press hard for a modern recovery of the original meaning of the term, instead arguing in favour of a richer sanjuanist sense of desire that includes but is not identical with the erotic.) He delivers a much thicker account of flourishing human sexuality than is found in some reductive post-Freudian efforts, while simultaneously undermining any shallow dichotomy of agapeic and erotic desire. This is a much fuller account of the whole self, understood through the lens of desire, than is available in much current theological writing. John’s second significant contribution to contemporary desire debates is the potential of desire to be transformed, and his depiction of the pro­ cess by which such transformation may occur. Unlike many today, he does not treat desire as a static urge either to be satisfied or denied; he recognizes its potential for transformation. His description of the spirit­ ual ascent provides a narrative for the discernment of good and bad desires, for the purification of the latter and the cultivation of the former. The spiritual ascent is, for John, a time of growing discernment of the soul’s deepest desires. At its heart is a shift from a self-centred desire for self to a self-giving desire for God. That much of it will be experienced as a ‘dark night’ is integral to the purification and redirection of these desires, and John astutely diagnoses various reasons for the soul’s sense of darkness. (It is also worth repeating that responsibility for this pro­ cess, John maintains, cannot rest solely on the individual, hence the importance of the skilled spiritual director to guide the spiritual ascent.) John describes how when individuals open themselves up—in allowing themselves to be vulnerable and to be open to the ‘loving inflow’ of

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196  John of the Cross God—they become aware of their own confusions and self-deceptions. That individuals will feel an increased sense of conflict between various desires is no surprise, but rather a result of heightened sensitivity to their truest desire for God, and its tension with the daily temptations to more self-centred behaviour. Yet it is also a period that demands a grow­ ing love of self, since John recognizes (like Aquinas and many others) that love of self, love of others, and love of God all at root involve the same kind of love. For souls that pass from meditation to contemplation, or even into the state of union, John envisages a deep alignment of human and divine desire. In contemplation, souls engage in a prayerful, non-possessive desire for God that is open to God’s graced transformation. In union, John speaks in strikingly pneumatological terms of the touch of God in the soul’s centre. Yet this experience is far from being self-centred— indeed, it is in this recognition of the soul’s deepest desires that John anticipates a renewed and revitalized engagement by the soul with the entire created order. The self-centredness of the untransformed soul becomes a soul that is attuned to its deepest reality, and in so doing acquires the loving quality of divine desire. John’s account raises two issues of significance for modern theological discussion: first, because it offers numerous positive approaches to transform desire, not merely satisfy it; and, second, because it accounts for the prominent role of sin in all human desires. To the first point, many twentieth-century accounts of the self, following in the footsteps of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, have often provided a fine analysis of particular desires deep-seated within the self. Much can be gained from their fruitful categorizations of the various ways in which such desires may be satisfied (through denial, displacement, sublimation, and so on), as well as their fine-grained phenomenological accounts of the experi­ ence of desire. Few have proceeded, however, to give a complete account as John does of the disciplines and practices that turn these desires pro­ gressively towards that which is truly good and real. John describes how desires are not static; they may be developed, cultivated, purified, stilled, and transformed. He counsels against any simplistic modern hope that the soul can universally ‘still’ or undo its desires: conflict between apparently opposing desires is likely to continue throughout life, and

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Conclusion  197 expressions of deep commitment (such as vows of any kind) by no means prevent contrary desires from continuing to arise. At the same time John speaks of experiencing desire’s transformation, rightly emphasizing more than most modern descriptions that this process will likely be difficult, at times painful, and take time.1 He thereby offers a comprehensive vision of the transformation of the desires of the self. The process laid out by John is also of particular value because it simultaneously acknowledges the grave significance of sin while retain­ ing a highly optimistic vision of the extent of possible transformation in this life. Such integration of sin’s gravity and grace’s promise is arguably unparalleled in recent discussion of desire. As was discussed in greater detail in the Introduction, sin is notably downplayed in current theo­ logic­al discussion of desire. At times, this is traceable to the influence of much recent philosophical writing upon traditional theological notions. At worst, it risks affirming the tendency in modern culture, a culture astutely described by R.R.  Reno as an ‘Empire of Desire’, to view ‘the highest good’ as ‘the unmediated satisfaction of unique personal desires’.2 Many theological circles may not use such explicit language, but a deter­ mination to avoid any hint of ‘puritanical’ views (e.g. that desire must always be avoided because it inevitably leads to sin) can result in func­ tionally the same position. By contrast, John insists that sin is pervasive and results from the fact that many human desires do not lead people towards God. Yet he is not interested in follow-up questions of blame, shame, or guilt; rather, he means to highlight human sin so that he may follow up with forthright and pastorally sensitive insights on how souls may turn away from it and towards God. At the cul­min­ation of this pro­ cess, John is hopeful that souls may be transformed, and find their own desires united with God’s desire. At root, attending to John’s doctrine of sin and his associated commit­ ment to the transformation of human desires is important because it

1  As Philip Sheldrake comments in this respect, the ‘sharpening and deepening of true desire’ will always be painful, since it involves ‘a stripping away of unreal expectations and selfish demands’ (Philip Sheldrake, Befriending Our Desires, 3rd ed. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2016), 69). 2  R.R.  Reno, ‘The Empire of Desire’, a paper presented at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture Consultation on Desire and Human Flourishing, 2010, 2.

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198  John of the Cross exposes a crucial dividing line running through much recent theological discussion of desire. R.R. Reno puts the distinction well: For Aristotle or Augustine, our present unhappiness stems from our insufficient participation in the hierarchical potency of what is real, and therefore we must enter into the appropriate disciplines that order our souls to accord more fully and reliably with our final end. In the Empire of Desire, unhappiness stems from unsatisfied desires, and the proper therapy involves shedding the “hang ups” that prevent us from descending into the immediacy, ubiquity, and serendipity of desire.3

It is in the approach taken by Aristotle, Augustine, and many others besides, this study suggests, that the theological resources for a fruitful vision of desire and human transformation are to be found. John of the Cross is profoundly rooted in this way of thinking. His masterful account of the diverse forms of human desire and their progressive transformation is an outstanding instantiation of this tradition of thought. John’s thought is worthy of attention for this reason alone, yet all the more so because it is delivered as a guide for this process, in a manner that resonates with the modern vogue for therapeutic selfimprovement. John offers a sensitive account of discernment necessary for the transformation of desire, ‘a schema that is finally no schema’,4 that is worthy of renewed contemporary theological attention. For his third contribution, John differs from the contemporary pre­ sumption that desire is, in the main, a human phenomenon. He holds that desire is not limited to humans or persons, but rather, desire infuses all of the created order and even Godself. In some of the great images of the Canticle and Flame poems, for instance—the taste of the pomegran­ ates, the breathing of the air, and the flame of love burning in the soul’s centre—the beauty of the created order points to the mutual desire of lovers that is itself a sign of the mutual desire of the soul and God. Moreover, as John enigmatically suggests at the climax of the Canticle

3  Reno, ‘The Empire of Desire’, 21. 4 Michael  J.  Buckley, SJ, ‘Atheism and Contemplation’, Theological Studies 40, no. 4 (1979): 697.

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Conclusion  199 and Flame commentaries, such desire has the same quality as the loving desire that unites the three persons of the Trinity. Three interesting implications of this nuanced insight into the created and divine dimensions of desire may be observed in John’s work. First, John offers a formula that may address a point of contention in recent theology: How can God be self-sufficient or complete and yet desire, when human desire clearly comes from lack? The issue at stake is ageold, and may be well summarized through Plato’s contribution. For Plato, desire (erōs) must necessarily arise from a state of lack, since one does not desire that which one already has. Yet this entails that desire is only a demi-god, since God is perfect and accordingly cannot lack.5 Plato’s concern highlights the important question of how desire may be defined in a manner that acknowledges both its human and divine aspects; John’s account offers two elements of an answer. John suggests, first, that there is indeed a difference between human and divine desire. Ordinary human desires, such as may be observed in the untransformed soul, are in general animated by perceived or genuine lack. Divine desire is, however, not rooted in lack but in the qualities of overabundance and self-giving. It is accordingly God’s perfect divine desire that, precisely because of its absence of lack, cannot be straightforwardly identified with created desire. Second, John insists that souls are not condemned to remain animated by lack-based desire. The spiritual ascent lays out the means by which souls, when prayerfully grounded in God, may come to be infused with the abundant, self-sacrificial and joyful qual­ ities of divine desire. John’s proposal is a valuable theological contribution in its own right. It is perhaps this fear of implying lack in God that might in part explain why Christian theology, despite its commitment to the principle that God is Love, has only intermittently given a full-blooded account of what it might mean to speak of desire in God. In particular, John is highly distinctive in uniting his account of divine desire with an account of the progressive transformation required for the soul to be participa­ tively united with these desires. Yet his contribution is especially signifi­ cant for recent theological discussion of desire. The question of whether 5 Plato, Symposium 200a–204d.

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200  John of the Cross desire requires lack emerged with fresh intensity in the second half of the twentieth century in continental philosophical circles informed by Freud and his successors, and the diverse responses arising in this debate have found their way into theological debate.6 Yet, as noted above, there are deep divisions between the manner in which theology has tradition­ ally considered desire, and these more recent philosophical contributions. Lacan and others consider desire as a purely human phenomenon, and accordingly raise the question of lack with little interest in the associated question of divine desire. It is highly questionable whether theo­logic­al discussion of desire may effectively draw on these forms of thought. The relationship between human and divine desire offered by John of the Cross offers a more theologically fruitful means of engaging these questions. Second, the suffusion of desire throughout the created order has fas­ cinating implications for theological use of language, an issue that has been almost entirely absent from recent theological discussion of desire. This was especially explored in Chapters 3 and 5, which examined John’s creative use of the possibilities of prose and poetry to represent this aspect of the created order. John’s poetry (especially in the Night, Canticle, and Flame) tells a story of desire that sustains the soul through the darkness and caesurae of the spiritual ascent. His prose explores how this poetic language may relate to the various stages of the spiritual ascent, while itself drawing (such as in his repeated use of ‘beauty’ in CB36) on various linguistic devices to represent the soul’s desire for union with God. John recognizes, in short, that successful communica­ tion with both other individuals and God involves the recurrent need to recognize the imperfection of all that has been said previously, tied to an ongoing search for understanding and connection with others. Any lan­ guage that claims to have captured God in his entirety will miss its mark, since it is attempting to bind God to an aspect of the created order. And this is to acknowledge that individuals’ attempts to speak of God will perennially have the quality of desire, as they point to but never fully

6  For instance, Jacques Lacan insists that lack (manque) is an essential feature of desire, whereas Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari contend that desire is a productive force that need not involve lack.

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Conclusion  201 capture God’s reality. These two features—both images of the beauty of the created order and explorations of the desiring quality of language itself—serve John’s broader purpose of delivering an account of the desiring soul in the context of a created order in which desire plays a key role. Finally, John’s connection of divine desire and transformed human desire offers a powerful counterpoint to influential recent secular accounts of desire. For twentieth-century theorists in the tradition of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud (all of whom draw more distantly on Feuerbach), desire is a human phenomenon. The desire for God, in par­ ticular, is a projection—a sign of deeper desires such as a desire for satis­ faction, or moral reassurance. What we call ‘God’ is, accordingly, for Feuerbach, purely an infinitized version of our finite desires. Long before Feuerbach, John also observes how easily souls turn their own thoughts into projections of God. Unlike many of the most influen­ tial modern thinkers, however, John’s conclusion is not atheism. The soul’s projection of particular images of God (which will occur in diverse forms throughout the spiritual ascent) does not raise any question concerning the existence of God for him because his understanding of God’s desire is not infinitized versions of finite human desires; it is per­ fect desire that lacks nothing and overflows in abundance. Thus, pro­ jecting human desires onto God does not indicate our God-conception is exhaustively explained by our own psyches; rather, such projections indicate the continued need for the graced transformation of the soul, and for the soul to turn to God in ‘dark faith’. In union, through the infusion of divine desire, the soul may at last recognize God without the projections that typify untransformed human thought. John thereby offers a powerful response to Feuerbach’s critique. More broadly, as all these three points in this subsection have emphasized, a robust under­ standing of the relationship between divine and human desire is essen­ tial for good theology. John’s thought is rooted in a particularly subtle version of such an account. Fourth and finally, the retrieval of John’s integrated portrayal of desire undertaken in this study may reinvigorate the ongoing but sluggish reconciliation between the theological approaches that have in recent decades been separated under the labels of systematic theology, pastoral

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202  John of the Cross theology, and Christian spirituality. There are two points of significance here: first, study of the reception history of John indicates that the divide between these disciplines is more recent (and hence less deeply entrenched) than many others have suggested; second, John’s theo­logic­al method offers elements that may aid this reconciliation. While influential genealogies locate the division between spirituality and theology as early as the seventeenth century,7 analysis in Chapter 1 of John’s twentieth-century reception suggested that the fundamental division between so-called ‘theology’ and ‘spirituality’ approaches to John emerged primarily in the 1960s, prompted by a turn within Catholic spiritual theology towards both the insights of Eastern religions and the resources offered by modern-day psychology. Attentive study of early twentieth-century neo-scholastic interpretation of John—a moment in reception history unfortunately neglected in recent scholarship— observed how theological commitments were until recently inextricably intertwined with the various assessments provided in that period of John’s significance for the spiritual life. The relatively recent moment of separation noted here offers grounds for optimism on the prospect of reconciliation between these disciplines. To turn to the second point, there are two aspects of John’s method that will be particularly important for modern theology (in its broadest sense) to note if this reconciliation is to be wholeheartedly effected. First, John’s work shows the importance of a theological style that pro­ duces work in different forms and genres, drawing on the resources that are today commonly distributed among diverse theological disciplines— scriptural exegesis, theological study, intricate philosophical analysis, pastoral insight, and attention to human experience. Second, John insists that prayer and the self-knowledge that comes from the right ordering of desire is essential to good theology. John’s account of the spiritual ascent begins from the presupposition that understanding of oneself is a necessary counterpart to understanding of God; prayer is the means by which the soul’s desires are transformed, and the soul’s projections of God are progressively laid aside. The prayerful spiritual ascent is the 7  Notably those genealogies provided by James Arraj and Michel de Certeau that were discussed at the start of Chapter 1.

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Conclusion  203 means by which the yearning self is transformed to discover that for which it most deeply yearns. Prayer brings fresh attentiveness and awareness of the self. Prayer involves address, a yearning to communicate beyond the self at ever deeper levels of intimacy and self-giving. Prayer, whether undertaken as an individual or as part of a community, seeks unity. Eventually, it is in the heights of prayer—what John calls contemplation— that the soul’s desires are pneumatologically reanimated with a fresh intensity, now in graced alignment with divine desire. In diverse ways, theological enquiry seeks better to understand God, and thereby better to understand the created order. John’s work may serve as a reminder that such enquiry, if it is to approach the God who is known in ‘dark faith’, needs to be rooted in practices of prayer that themselves depend on the progressive transformation of souls and their desires. Through meticulous historical investigation, this study has suggested that John’s work may best be understood as a powerful articulation of the theological significance of desire. Moreover, what has been un­covered in fact critiques the modern frameworks of desire that have tended to obscure the fullness of John’s vision. These frameworks, it has been suggested, are not merely limited in their inability to accurately interpret (at least this one) premodern theological account of desire. More concerningly, they also have deficiencies in their ability to deliver a holistic account of desire, especially for those with Christian theo­ logic­al commitments. This final chapter has laid out four significant implications for modern thought of John’s magnificent vision. First, John possesses a holistic understanding of human desires, and in particular articulates a highly rounded account of sexual desire. Second, John lays out a process for the transformation of human desires, clear-sightedly acknowledging the pervasion of sin and wisely advising on the dis­cip­ lines required for the soul to turn towards God. Third, John ar­ticu­lates the relationship between human and divine desire. Fourth, John’s account of desire offers possibilities for the reconciliation of recent theo­ logic­al disciplinary divisions. Theological discourses that make use of desire have, it would seem, hit a number of impasses. This turn to the past is a way into the future. The historicity of this study of John frees scholarship from the danger of being determined by the most immediate theological and intellectual

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204  John of the Cross trends; in the process, it hopefully allows for individuals to approach God more truly and more nearly. There exists today a pressing need for theological work that can treat desire with the ascetic seriousness that it warrants, mindful of the dangerous potential for abuse lurking in this arena, while doing so in the context of a conviction of the positive cre­ative, redemptive, and unitive value of sexuality. John’s frank yet optimistic assessment of desire as a model for union with God offers resources for this task. Shortly before his death, John wrote the following words: ‘Outside of God, everything is narrow.’8 His confident vision of the extent to which transformation in this life is possible is his response, a prayer for indi­ viduals to open themselves so that they may delight in God. The spiritual ascent will at times be a deeply painful process. John pulls no punches in his stark warnings of the depth and pervasiveness of human sin. Yet the journey is, for John, the way of life in which a seemingly insatiable hunger for morsels of brief pleasure is supplanted by a deep satisfaction in God. It is a hopeful vision of the transformation of the soul’s desires that continues to offer promise for human flourishing today.

8  Letter 13, in Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD, and Otilio Rodriguez, eds, The Collected Works of Saint John of the Cross, rev. ed. (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1991), 748.

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References A full survey of past scholarship on John of the Cross is provided by Manuel Diego Sánchez, Bibliografía sistemática de San Juan de la Cruz (Madrid: Editorial de Espiritualidad, 2000). For more recent publications, see the section on John of the Cross in the Bibliographia Carmelitana Annualis, issued by the journal Carmelus: Commentarii ab Instituto Carmelitano editi. A Benedictine of Stanbrook Abbey. Mediaeval Mystical Tradition and John of the Cross. London: Burns & Oates, 1954. Albanese, Catherine. A Republic of Mind and Spirit. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Alonso, Dámaso. La poesía de San Juan de la Cruz (desde esta ladera). Madrid: CSIC, 1942. Alvarez-Suárez, Aniano. ‘Fe teologal.’ In Diccionario de San Juan de la Cruz, edited by Eulogio Pacho, 620–8. Burgos: Monte Carmelo, 2000. Andrés Martín, Melquíades. ‘Common Denominators of Alumbrados, Erasmians, Lutherans and Mystics: The Risk of a More Spiritual “Intimate Spirituality.” ’ In The Spanish Inquisition and the Inquisitorial Mind, edited by Angel Alcalá, translated by Esther da Costa-Frankel, 457–94. Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 1987. Andrés Martín, Melquíades. Historia de la mística en la Edad de Oro en España y América. Madrid: BAC, 1994. Andrés Martín, Melquíades. Los recogidos: nueva visión de la mística española (1500–1700). Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1976. Arintero, J.G. Cuestiones místicas. 2nd ed. Salamanca: Calatrava, 1920. Aróstegui, Luis. ‘Experiencia Mística.’ In Diccionario de San Juan de la Cruz, edited by Eulogio Pacho, 591–612. Burgos: Monte Carmelo, 2000. Arraj, James. From St. John of the Cross to Us: The Story of a 400 Year Long Misunderstanding and What It Means for the Future of Christian Mysticism. Chiloquin, OR: Inner Growth Books, 1999. Babcock, William S. ‘Augustine and the Spirituality of Desire.’ Augustinian Studies 25 (1994): 179–99. Bainvel, J.V. ‘Introduction to the Tenth Edition.’ In The Graces of Interior Prayer, translated by Leonora L. Yorke Smith, xxxii–cxii. London: Butler and Tanner, 1950. Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics IV.2: The Doctrine of Reconciliation. Translated by G.W. Bromiley. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958. Baruzi, Jean. Saint Jean de la Croix et le problème de l’expérience mystique. 2nd ed. Paris: F. Alcan, 1931. Begović, Tomislav. Gott, der Weg des Menschen zu sich selbst: zur theologischen Anthropologie in der mystischen Lehre des heiligen Johannes vom Kreuz. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1990.

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206 References Boon, Jessica A. ‘Mother Juana de La Cruz: Marian Visions and Female Preaching.’ In A New Companion to Hispanic Mysticism, edited by Hilaire Kallendorf, 127–48. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2010. Boon, Jessica A. The Mystical Science of the Soul: Medieval Cognition in Bernardino de Laredo’s Recollection Method. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Bord, André. Jean de la Croix en France. Paris: Beauchesne, 1993. Bord, André. Mémoire et espérance chez Jean de la Croix. Paris: Beauchesne, 1971. Boyle, Marjorie O’Rourke. ‘A Beautiful Ending: Juan de la Cruz’s “Cántico Espiritual.” ’ Journal of Theological Studies 54, no. 2 (2003): 530–69. Brenan, Gerald. St John of the Cross: His Life and Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Buckley, SJ, Michael  J. ‘Atheism and Contemplation.’ Theological Studies 40, no. 4 (1979): 680–99. Buckley, Michael  J. What Do You Seek? The Questions of Jesus as Challenge and Promise. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016. Burrows, Ruth. Ascent to Love: The Spiritual Teaching of St. John of the Cross. London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1987. Burrows, Ruth. Guidelines for Mystical Prayer. London: Sheed & Ward, 1976. Burrus, Virginia, Mark D. Jordan, and Karmen MacKendrick. Seducing Augustine: Bodies, Desires, Confessions. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. Burrus, Virginia, and Catherine Keller, eds. Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discipline. New York: Fordham University Press, 2006. Butler, Cuthbert. Western Mysticism: The Teachings of SS Augustine, Gregory, and Bernard on Contemplation and the Contemplative Life; Neglected Chapters in the History of Religion. 2nd ed. London: Constable & Company, 1927. Castro, Gabriel. ‘Llama de Amor Viva.’ In Introducción a la lectura de San Juan de la Cruz, edited by Salvador Ros García and Agustiń García Simón, 493–529. Salamanca: Junta de Castilla y León, 1991. Cavadini, John  C. ‘Feeling Right: Augustine on the Passions and Sexual Desire.’ Augustinian Studies 36, no. 1 (2005): 195–217. Chapman, OSB, Dom John. The Spiritual Letters of Dom John Chapman O.S.B., 4th Abbot of Downside. London: Sheed & Ward, 1935. Chevallier, Dom Philippe. ‘Le Cantique spirituel interpolé.’ La Vie SpirituelleSupplément 14 (1926): 109–62. Chevallier, Dom Philippe. ‘Le Cantique Spirituel de Saint Jean de la Croix a-t-il été interpolé?’ Bulletin Hispanique 24 (1922): 307–22. Coakley, Sarah, ed. Re-Thinking Gregory of Nyssa. Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Coakley, Sarah, and Charles  M.  Stang, eds. Re-Thinking Dionysius the Areopagite. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Costa, Mario. ‘For the Love of God: The Death of Desire and the Gift of Life.’ In Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discipline, edited by Virginia Burrus and Catherine Keller, 38–62. New York: Fordham University Press, 2006.

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References  207 Cugno, Alain. Saint John of the Cross: The Life and Thought of a Christian Mystic. London: Burns & Oates, 1982. D’Arcy, M.C. The Mind and Heart of Love, Lion and Unicorn: A Study in Eros and Agape. London: Faber and Faber, 1954. de Andía, Ysabel. ‘Eros and Agape: The Divine Passion of Love.’ Communio 24 (1997): 29–50. de Andía, Ysabel. ‘San Juan de la Cruz y la “Teología Mística” de “San Dionisio.” ’ In Actas del congreso internacional sanjuanista, edited by A.  García Simón, 3:97–125. Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 1993 de Certeau, Michel. The Mystic Fable: Volume One: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Translated by Michael B. Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. de Jesus Sacramentado, Crisógono. The Life of St John of the Cross. Translated by Kathleen Pond. London; New York: Longmans; Harper, 1958. de Jesus Sacramentado, Crisógono. San Juan de la Cruz: su obra científica y su obra literaria. Madrid: Editorial Mensajero de Santa Teresa y de San Juan de la Cruz, 1929. de Laredo, Bernardino. The Ascent of Mount Sion: Being the Third Book of the Treatise of That Name. London: Faber and Faber, 1952. de Lubac, Henri. Exegese médiévale: les quatre sens de l’écriture. 4 vols. Paris: Aubier, 1959. de Ros, Fidèle. Un inspirateur de Sainte Thérèse: le frère Bernardin de Laredo. Paris: J Vrin, 1948. de Ros, Fidèle. Le pére François d’Osuna. (Un maître de Sainte Thérèse.) Sa vie, son œuvre, sa doctrine spirituelle. Paris: Beauchesne, 1936. de Surgy, P. ‘La source de l’échelle d’amour de Saint Jean de la Croix.’ Revue d’Ascétique et de Mystique 27 (1951): 18–40; 237–59; 327–46. Delacroix, Henri. Études d’histoire et de psychologie du mysticisme; les grands mystiques chrétiens. Paris: F Alcan, 1908. Diego, Gerardo. ‘Música y ritmo en la poesía de San Juan de la Cruz.’ Escorial 9 (1942): 163–86. Diego Sánchez, Manuel. ‘La herencia patrística de San Juan de la Cruz.’ In Experiencia y pensamiento en San Juan de la Cruz, edited by Federico Ruiz, 83–111. Madrid: Editorial de Espiritualidad, 1990. Diez González, Miguel Angel. ‘La “Reentrega” de amor asi en la tierra como en el cielo: influjo de un opúsculo pseudo-Tomista en San Juan de la Cruz.’ Ephemerides Carmeliticae 13 (1962): 299–352. Doyle, Dominic. ‘Changing Hopes: The Theological Virtue of Hope in Thomas Aquinas, John of the Cross, and Karl Rahner.’ Irish Theological Quarterly 77, no. 1 (2012): 18–36. Doyle, Dominic. ‘From Triadic to Dyadic Soul: A Genetic Study of John of the Cross on the Anthropological Basis of Hope.’ Studies in Spirituality 21 (2011): 219–41. Egan, Keith J. ‘The Spirituality of the Carmelites.’ In Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation, edited by Jill Raitt, Bernard McGinn, and John Meyendorff, 50–62. London: SCM, 1989.

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208 References Faraone, José Mario. La inhabitación trinitaria según San Juan de la Cruz. Rome: Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 2002. Farley, Matthew David. ‘Jean-Yves Lacoste on John of the Cross: Theological Thinker Par Excellence.’ Modern Theology 32, no. 1 (2016): 3–19. Francis, John R. ‘Evelyn Underhill’s Developing Spiritual Theology: A Discovery of Authentic Spiritual Life and the Place of Contemplation.’ Anglican Theological Review 93, no. 2 (2011): 283–300. Gaitán, José Damián. ‘Conocimiento de Dios y sabiduria de la fe en San Juan de la Cruz.’ In Actas del congreso internacional sanjuanista (Avila 23–28 Sept 1991), edited by A. García Simón, 3:251–69. Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 1993. Garcia, Laura L. ‘St John of the Cross and the Necessity of Divine Hiddenness.’ In Divine Hiddenness: New Essays, edited by Daniel Howard-Snyder and Paul K. Moser, 83–97. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Garrigou-Lagrange, OP, Reginald. Christian Perfection and Contemplation, according to St. Thomas Aquinas and St. John of the Cross. Translated by Sr M Timothea Doyle, OP. St Louise, MO; London: B Herder Book Co., 1937. Gaudreau, Marie M. Mysticism and Image in St John of the Cross. Bern; Frankfurt am Main: Herbert Lang; Peter Lang, 1976. Gavrilyuk, Paul L., and Sarah Coakley, eds. The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Gilbert, Paul. ‘Une anthropologie à partir de Saint Jean de la Croix: à propos d’un ouvrage récent.’ Nouvelle Revue Theologique 103 (1981): 551–62. Girón-Negrón, Luis M. ‘Dionysian Thought in Sixteenth-Century Spanish Mystical Theology.’ Modern Theology 24, no. 4 (2008): 693–706. Göbel, Wolfgang. Der Wille zu Gott und das Handeln in der Welt: M. Luther, Johannes v. Kreuz, I. Kant. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1993. Gómez, Jesús. ‘El soliloquio de tradición Agustiniana como límite del diálogo.’ Revista de Literatura 66 (2004): 23–47. Gourard, Pierre. La gloire et la glorification de l’univers chez Saint Jean de la Croix. Paris: Beauchesne, 1998. Grace Aaron, N. Thought and Poetic Structure in San Juan de la Cruz’s Symbol of Night. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Griffin, Nigel, Clive Griffin, Eric Southworth, and Colin Thompson. ‘Preface.’ In The Spanish Ballad in the Golden Age, edited by Nigel Griffin, Clive Griffin, Eric Southworth, and Colin Thompson. Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2008. Guillén, Jorge. ‘The Ineffable Language of Mysticism: San Juan de la Cruz.’ In Language and Poetry: Some Poets of Spain, edited by Jorge Guillén, 79–121. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961. Gutiérrez, Raúl. Wille und Subjekt bei Juan de la Cruz. Tübingen: Francke, 1999. Haas, Alois. ‘Die dunkle Nacht der Sinne und des Geistes: mystische Leiderfahrung nach Johannes vom Kreuz.’ In Mystik als Aussage: Erfahrungs-, Denk- and Redeformen Christlicher Mystik, 446–64. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996. Hamilton, Alastair. ‘The Alumbrados: Dejamiento and Its Practitioners.’ In A New Companion to Hispanic Mysticism, edited by Hilaire Kallendorf, 103–24. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2010.

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References  209 Hamilton, Alastair. Heresy and Mysticism in Sixteenth-Century Spain: The Alumbrados. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 1992. Hatzfeld, Helmut. Estudios literarios sobre mística española. Madrid: Gredos, 1955. Hirshfield, Jane. Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Howells, Edward. ‘Early Modern Reformations.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, edited by Amy Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman, 114–34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Howells, Edward. ‘John of the Cross (1542–91).’ In The Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine, edited by Otten Willemien, 3:1230–2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Howells, Edward. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila: Mystical Knowing and Selfhood. New York: Crossroad, 2002. Hügel, Friedrich von. The Mystical Element of Religion as Studied in Catherine of Genoa and Her Friends. 2nd ed. London, 1923. Hughes, Carl S. Kierkegaard and the Staging of Desire: Rhetoric and Performance in a Theology of Eros. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Inge, William Ralph. ‘The Mystical Revival.’ The Times Literary Supplement, March 20, 1913. Irvine, William Braxton. On Desire: Why We Want What We Want. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901–1902. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1902. Jeanrond, Werner G. A Theology of Love. T&T Clark, 2010. John of the Cross. The Living Flame of Love: Versions A and B. Translated by Jane Ackerman. Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995. Jones, R.O. A Literary History of Spain. The Golden Age: Prose and Poetry: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1971. Joseph, Lucien-Marie de Saint. ‘S. Jean de la Croix.’ In Dictionnaire de Spiritualité. Vol. VIII. Paris: Beauchesne, 1974. Kallendorf, Hilaire, ed. The New Companion to Hispanic Mysticism. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2010. Kamitsuka, Margaret  D., ed. The Embrace of Eros: Bodies, Desires and Sexuality in Christianity. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010. Katz, Steven T., ed. Mysticism and Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Katz, Steven  T., ed. Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis. London: Sheldon Press, 1978. Katz, Steven T., ed. Mysticism and Religious Traditions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. Kavanaugh, OCD, Kieran. ‘I.C.S.  Introduction.’ In Edith Stein, The Science of the Cross: A Study of St. John of the Cross, xi–xxxvii. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2003. Kavanaugh, OCD, Kieran, and Otilio Rodriguez, eds. The Collected Works of Saint John of the Cross. Rev. ed. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1991.

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210 References Kavanaugh, OCD, Kieran, and Otilio Rodriguez, eds. The Collected Works of St Teresa of Avila. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1976-85. Kearney, Richard. ‘Desire of God.’ In God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, edited by John  D.  Caputo and Michael  J.  Scanlon, 112–45. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999. Keating, Thomas. ‘Contemplative Prayer in Christian Tradition.’ In Finding Grace at the Center: The Beginning of Centering Prayer, edited by M.  Basil Pennington, Thomas Keating, and Thomas E Clarke. London: SPCK, 2002. Keating, Thomas. Invitation to Love: The Way of Christian Contemplation. Rockport, MA; Shaftesbury: Element, 1992. Keating, Thomas. ‘The Method of Centering Prayer.’ In The Diversity of Centering Prayer, edited by Gustave Reininger, 129–35. New York: Continuum, 1999. Keating, Thomas. ‘Practicing Centering Prayer.’ In The Diversity of Centering Prayer, edited by Gustave Reininger, 16–26. New York: Continuum, 1999. King, Peter. ‘Late Scholastic Theories of the Passions: Controversies in the Thomist Tradition.’ In Emotions and Choice from Boethius to Descartes, edited by Henrik Lagerlund and Mikko Yrjönsuuri, 229–51. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002. Lacoste, Jean-Yves. Encyclopedia of Christian Theology. 3 vols. New York; London: Routledge, 2005. Lacoste, Jean-Yves, ed. Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man. Translated by Mark Raftery-Skehan. New York: Fordham University Press, 1994. Larkin, Ernest E. ‘Contemplative Prayer Forms Today: Are They Contemplation?’ In The Diversity of Centering Prayer, edited by Gustave Reininger, 27–38. New York: Continuum, 1999. L.M.F.G., trans. The Soliloquies of Saint Augustine. A Manual of Contemplative Prayer. A New and Exact Translation. Edinburgh: Sands & Co, 1912. Lombardo, Nicholas E. The Logic of Desire: Aquinas on Emotion. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011. Longchamp, Max Huot de. Lectures de Jean de la Croix: essai d’anthropologie mystique. Paris: Beauchesne, 1981. López-Baralt, Luce. ‘Poesía sanjuanista.’ In Diccionario de San Juan de la Cruz, edited by Eulogio Pacho, 1179–90. Burgos: Monte Carmelo, 2000. Louth, Andrew. The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Maréchal, Joseph. ‘Sur les cimes de l’oraison: quelques opinions récentes de théologiens.’ Nouvelle Revue Théologique 56 (1929): 107–27; 177–206. María, José de Jesús. Historia de la vida y virtudes del venerable padre fray Juan de la Cruz. Edited by Fortunato Antolín. Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 1992. María, Juan de Jesús. ‘El díptico Subida-Noche.’ Sanjuanistica (1943): 25–83. Marion, Jean-Luc. The Erotic Phenomenon. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Maritain, Jacques. The Degrees of Knowledge. Translated by Bernard Wall and Margot R. Adamson. London: Geoffrey Bles, The Centenary Press, 1937.

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References  211 Marks, Herbert. ‘On Prophetic Stammering.’ In The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory, edited by Regina M Schwartz, 60–80. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990. Marsh, Harry C. Cosmic Structure and the Knowledge of God: Thomas Aquinas’ In Librum Beati Dionysii De Divinis Nominibus Expositio. PhD, Vanderbilt University, 1994. Martín Velasco, Juan. ‘Experiencia de Dios desde la situación y la conciencia de la ausencia.’ In Actas del congreso internacional sanjuanista, edited by A.  García Simon, 3:213–47. Salamanca: Junta de Castilla y León, 1993. Mascall, E.L. A Guide to Mount Carmel: Being a Summary and an Analysis of The Ascent of Mount Carmel by St. John of the Cross, with Some Introductory Notes. Westminster: Dacre Press, 1939. Matter, E.  Ann. The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity. Philadelphia, PA: University of Philadelphia Press, 1990. Matthew, Iain. ‘The Knowledge and Consciousness of Christ in the Light of the Writings of St John of the Cross.’ PhD, Oxford University, 1991. May, Gerald G. The Dark Night of the Soul: A Psychiatrist Explores the Connection Between Darkness and Spiritual Growth. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 2005. McGinn, Bernard. ‘God as Eros: Metaphysical Foundations of Christian Mysticism.’ In New Perspectives on Historical Theology: Essays in Memory of John Meyendorff, edited by Bradley Nassif, 189–209. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996. McGinn, Bernard. ‘The Role of the Carmelites in the History of Western Mysticism.’ In Carmelite Studies VIII: Carmel and Contemplation, edited by Kevin Culligan, OCD, and Regis Jordan, OCD, 25–52. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, Institute of Carmelite Studies, 2000. Menéndez Pelayo, Marcelino. Estudios y discursos de crítica histórica y literaria. Vol. 2. Santander: Aldus, 1941. Merton, Thomas. The Ascent to Truth. London: Hollis & Carter, 1951. Merton, Thomas. Contemplative Prayer. New York: Herder, 1969. Merton, Thomas. The Seven Storey Mountain. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1948. Mialdea Baena, Antonio José. La recepción de la obra literaria de San Juan de la Cruz en España: siglos XVII, XVIII y XIX. Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 2004. Miles, Margaret  R. Desire and Delight: A New Reading of Augustine’s Confessions. New York: Crossroad, 1992. Miner, Robert C. Thomas Aquinas on the Passions: A Study of Summa Theologiae 1a2ae 22–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Montemaggi, Vittorio. ‘In Unknowability as Love: The Theology of Dante’s Commedia.’ In Dante’s Commedia: Theology as Poetry, edited by Vittorio Montemaggi and Matthew Treherne, 60–94. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Moore, Sebastian. Jesus the Liberator of Desire. New York: Crossroad, 1989. Morel, Georges. Le sens de l’existence selon Saint Jean de la Croix. 3 vols. Paris: Aubier, 1961.

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212 References Morel-Fatio, Alfred. ‘Les lectures de Sainte Thérèse.’ Bulletin Hispanique 10 (1908): 17–67. Navarrete, Ignacio. Orphans of Petrarch: Poetry and Theory in the Spanish Renaissance. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994. Nemeck, Francis Kelly, and Marie Theresa Coombs. O Blessed Night: Recovering from Addiction, Codependency and Attachment Based on the Insights of St. John of the Cross and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Staten Island, NY: Alba House, 1991. Nieto, José C. San Juan de la Cruz: poeta del amor profano. Madrid: Swan, 1988. Norris, Richard A. The Song of Songs: Interpreted by Early Christian and Medieval Commentators. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003. Nubiola, Jaime, and Izaskun Martínez. ‘The Reception of William James in Spain and Unamuno’s Reading of the Varieties.’ Streams of William James 5, no. 2 (2003): 7–9. Nugent, Christopher. ‘Born “On the Borders of Spain”: Thomas Merton and John of the Cross.’ Mystics Quarterly 21, no. 3 (1995): 91–100. Núñez Rivera, Valentín. ‘Del Cantar al Cántico de Juan de la Cruz.’ In Poesía y biblia en el Siglo de Oro: estudios sobre los Salmos y el Cantar de los Cantares, 229–44. Madrid; Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana; Vervuert, 2010. Núñez Rivera, Valentín. Poesía y biblia en el Siglo de Oro: estudios sobre los Salmos y el Cantar de los Cantares. Madrid; Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana; Vervuert, 2010. Nygren, Anders. Agape and Eros. Translated by Philip  S.  Watson. London: SPCK, 1953. O’Reilly, Terence. ‘The Cántico Espiritual of Saint John of the Cross and the Mystical Interpretation of the Song of Songs.’ Hallel: A Review of Monastic Spirituality and Liturgy 19 (1994): 5–16. O’Reilly, Terence. From Ignatius Loyola to John of the Cross: Spirituality and Literature in Sixteenth-Century Spain. Aldershot: Variorum, 1995. Orcibal, Jean. Saint Jean de la Croix et les mystiques rheno-flamands. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1966. Orozco Díaz, Emilio. Poesía y mística: introducción a la lírica de San Juan de la Cruz. Madrid: Ediciones Guadarrama, 1959. Osuna, Francisco de. Tercer abecedario espiritual. Edited by Melquíades Andrés Martín. Madrid: BAC, 1972. Osuna, Francisco de. The Third Spiritual Alphabet. Translated by Mary E. Giles. New York: Paulist Press, 1981. Pacho, Eulogio. Apogeo de la mística cristiana: historia de la espiritualidad clásica española, 1450–1650. Burgos: Monte Carmelo, 2008. Pacho, Eulogio. San Juan de la Cruz y sus escritos. Madrid: Ediciones Cristiandad, 1969. Pacho, Eulogio. ‘Subida del Monte Carmelo (obra).’ In Diccionario de San Juan de la Cruz, edited by Eulogio Pacho, 1360–76. Burgos: Monte Carmelo, 2000. Paredes Núñez, Juan. ‘La poesía de San Juan de la Cruz: música, plástica y mística.’ In Presencia de San Juan de la Cruz: Baeza 1991, edited by Juan Paredes Núñez, 167–82. Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1993.

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References  213 Payne, Steven L. John of the Cross and the Cognitive Value of Mysticism: An Analysis of Sanjuanist Teaching and Its Philosophical Implications for Contemporary Discussions of Mystical Experience. Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990. Pennington, M.  Basil. ‘Centering Prayer.’ In Finding Grace at the Center: The Beginning of Centering Prayer, edited by M. Basil Pennington, Thomas Keating, and Thomas E. Clarke, 19–44. London: SPCK, 2002. Pennington, M. Basil. Centering Prayer: Renewing an Ancient Christian Prayer Form. Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1980. Pieper, Josef. Faith, Hope, Love. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1997. Pike, Nelson. ‘John of the Cross on the Epistemic Value of Mystic Visions.’ In Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment: New Essays in the Philosophy of Religion, edited by Robert Audi and William Wainwright. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986. Poulain, Augustin. The Graces of Interior Prayer. Translated by Leonora  L.  Yorke Smith. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co, 1910. Proudfoot, Wayne. Religious Experience. Berkeley; London: University of California Press, 1985. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. On the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology. Translated by C.E. Rolt. London: SPCK, 1920. Rahner, Karl. ‘The Eternal Significance of the Humanity of Jesus for Our Relationship with God.’ In Theological Investigations 3, 35–46. London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1967. Rahner, Karl. ‘Reflections on the Problem of the Gradual Ascent to Christian Perfection.’ In Theological Investigations 3, 3–23. London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1967. Reno, R.R. ‘The Empire of Desire.’ A Paper Presented at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture Consultation on Desire and Human Flourishing, 2010. Richardson, Robert D. William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism: A Biography. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Rodríguez, José Vicente. San Juan de la Cruz: la biografía. Madrid: Ediciones San Pablo, 2012. Rodríguez-San Pedro Bezares, Luis Enrique. La formación universitaria de Juan de la Cruz. Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 1992. Ruiz, Federico. ‘Síntesis doctrinal.’ In Introducción a la lectura de San Juan de la Cruz, edited by Salvador Ros García and A.  Garcíá Simon, 203–80. Salamanca: Junta de Castilla y León, 1991. Ruiz Salvador, Federico. Introducción a San Juan de la Cruz: el escritor, los escritos, el sistema. Madrid: BAC, 1968. San Juan de la Cruz. Cántico espiritual y poesía completa. Edited by Paolo Elia and María Jesús Mancho. Barcelona: Crítica, 2002. San Juan de la Cruz. Obras completas. Edited by Lucinio Ruano. Madrid: BAC, 2002. Sanson, Henri. L’esprit humain selon Saint Jean de la Croix. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953.

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214 References Saudreau, Auguste. L’état mystique, sa nature, ses phases. Paris: Librarie Vic & Amat, 1903. Schmidt, Leigh Eric. ‘The Making of “Mysticism” in the Anglo-American World: From Henry Coventry to William James.’ In The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism, edited by Julia A. Lamm, 452–72. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005. Shannon, William  H., Christine  M.  Bochen, and Patrick  F.  O’Connell, eds. The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002. Shaw, Jane. The Mystical Turn: Religious Experience in the Modern World (The Twenty-Third Eric Symes Abbott Memorial Lecture). King’s College London, 2008, www.kcl.ac.uk/aboutkings/principal/dean/thedean/23rd%20esa%20lecture%20 2008.pdf. Sheldrake, Philip. Befriending Our Desires. 3rd ed. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2016. Sherman, Jacob  H. Partakers of the Divine: Contemplation and the Practice of Philosophy. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014. Skinner, Quentin. ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas.’ History and Theory 8 (1969): 3–53. Sullivan OCD, John. ‘Night and Light: The Poet John of the Cross and the Exultet of the Easter Liturgy.’ Ephemerides Carmeliticae 30, no. 1 (1979): 52–68. The Summa Theologica of St Thomas Aquinas. 2nd ed. London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1920–4. Taylor, Eugene. ‘The Spiritual Roots of James’s Varieties of Religious Experience.’ In Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Centenary Edition. London; New York: Routledge, 2002. Thiel, John E. ‘Augustine on Eros, Desire, and Sexuality.’ In The Embrace of Eros: Bodies, Desires and Sexuality in Christianity, edited by Margaret  D.  Kamitsuka, 67–82. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010. Thompson, Colin P. The Poet and the Mystic: A Study of the Cántico Espiritual of San Juan de la Cruz. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Thompson, Colin P. St John of the Cross: Songs in the Night. London: SPCK, 2002. Torres, Isabel. Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age: Eros, Eris and Empire. Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2013. Trueman Dicken, E.W. The Crucible of Love: A Study of the Mysticism of St Teresa of Jesus and St John of the Cross. London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1963. Turner, Denys. ‘Dionysius and Some Late Medieval Mystical Theologians of Northern Europe.’ Modern Theology 24, no. 4 (2008): 651–65. Turner, Denys. Eros and Allegory: Medieval Exegesis of the Song of Songs. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1995. Tyler, Peter. St John of the Cross. New York: Continuum, 2010. Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness. London: Methuen & Co, 1911. Underhill, Evelyn. ‘Preface.’ In Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness. 12th ed. London: Methuen & Co, 1930.

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References  215 Valente, José Ángel, and José Lara Garrido, eds. Hermenéutica y mística: San Juan de la Cruz. Madrid: Tecnos, 1995. Varo Zafra, Juan. ‘Jean Baruzi y el problema del símbolo sanjuanista.’ Revue Romane 43, no. 1 (2008): 137–51. Vilnet, Jean. Bible et Mystique chez Saint Jean de la Croix. Bruges: Desclée de Brouwer, 1949. von Balthasar, Hans Urs. The Glory of the Lord, Volume I: Seeing the Form. Translated by Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982. von Balthasar, Hans Urs. ‘John of the Cross.’ In The Glory of the Lord, Volume III: Studies in Theological Style: Lay Styles, edited by John Riches, translated by Andrew Louth, 105–71. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1986. von Balthasar, Hans Urs. Prayer. Translated by A.V.  Littledale. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1961. Waugh, Evelyn. ‘Foreword.’ In Thomas Merton, Elected Silence. London: Hollis & Carter, 1949. Weber, Alison. ‘Religious Literature in Early Modern Spain.’ In The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature, edited by David  T.  Gies, 149–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Weiss, Daniel. ‘Renaissance Poetry.’ In The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature, edited by David T. Gies, 159–77. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Westberg, Daniel. Right Practical Reason: Aristotle, Action and Prudence in Aquinas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Wilhelmsen, Elizabeth. Cognition and Communication in John of the Cross. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1985. Wilhelmsen, Elizabeth. ‘La memoria como potencia del alma en San Juan de la Cruz.’ Carmelus 37 (1990): 88–145. Williams, A.N. ‘The Doctrine of God in San Juan de la Cruz.’ Modern Theology 30, no. 4 (2014): 500–24. Williams, Rowan. ‘Butler’s Western Mysticism: Towards an Assessment.’ Downside Review 102 (1984): 197–215. Williams, Rowan. ‘The Deflections of Desire: Negative Theology in Trinitarian Disclosure.’ In Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation, edited by Oliver Davies and Denys Turner, 115–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Williams, Rowan. The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Williams, Rowan. ‘Theological Integrity.’ New Blackfriars 72, no. 847 (1991): 140–51. Williams, Thomas. ‘Human Freedom and Agency.’ In The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas, edited by Brian Davies and Eleonore Stump, 199–208. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Winklhofer, Alois. Die Gnadenlehre in der Mystik des heiligen Johannes vom Kreuz. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1936. Wojtyla, Karol. Faith according to St. John of the Cross. Translated by Jordan Aumann, OP. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1981.

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Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Absence  37, 115, 125–7, 129–30, 161–2, 167, 199 Absorption  18, 79n.35, 178–9 Affective Dionysianism  59–60, 62–3, 82–6 Affective states/affectivity  5, 8, 14–16, 18, 20–3, 31–5, 45, 51, 59–60, 62–3, 85–9, 91–3, 98, 121–2, 135, 152–5, 160, 180, 194–5 Affliction  158–9, 161–2, 183 Agape  9–10, 16n.26, 194–5 Alcalá de Henares  66–7, 100 Alonso, Dámaso  54–6 Alumbradismo  80–1, 91–2 Andalucia 67–8 Angels  68, 110–11 Annihilation  40–1, 132–3, 138, 149–50 Appetite  1–3, 21–3, 28–9, 62–3, 68–73, 78, 82–6, 132, 136–40, 143–4, 143n.11, 146–7, 149, 152–8, 160–1, 170–1, 180, 193–4 Aquinas, Thomas  2n.1, 10, 12–13, 21–2, 33–5, 62–3, 68–74, 78–9, 82–4, 87–90, 95, 134, 136–8, 144–5, 148–58, 160, 167n.9, 171n.13, 173–4, 182, 195–6 Pseudo-Thomist writings  68, 87–9, 93, 160, 173–4 Aristotle  10, 69, 72n.15, 82, 188, 198 Ascent, spiritual  1–3, 6, 14–18, 45–6, 57–8, 62, 74, 87–8, 90–1, 101–2, 131, 140–3, 147–8, 161–2, 165, 179, 195–7, 199 Asceticism  4, 16–17, 22–3, 32, 139–40, 143–4, 161, 203–4

Attachments  5, 136–8, 154, 182 Augustine of Hippo  12–13, 21–2, 62–3, 73, 76–81, 86–7, 153–4, 166, 182, 184, 187 Augustinianism  21–2, 62, 73, 78–81, 86–8, 101–2, 109–10, 126, 136–7, 143–4, 151–2, 172–3, 184 Pseudo-Augustinian writings  28n.7, 86–8, 126 Baeza  67–8, 122–3 Baker, Augustine  28n.7 Balthasar, Hans Urs von  55–7 Bañez, Domingo  70n.13 Baruzi, Jean  28n.7, 35–6, 39–45, 52–60, 100n.91, 123–4 Beatific vision  71–2, 89, 148–9, 151, 168–9, 173–82, 184, 188–9 Beauty  4–5, 9–10, 23, 63n.2, 87, 166–70, 172–5, 189–90, 198–201 Beginners, state of  91, 134, 136–7, 144, 147–8, 175 Beloved  87, 109–10, 118–19, 125–8, 161–2, 166–71, 179–80, 186–7 Bernard of Clairvaux  78–9, 87–8, 101–2, 154 Bible see Scripture Body  2n.1, 11–14, 16–17, 28–9, 48–9, 69 Breath  170–1, 174–6, 179–80, 198–9 Breeze  118–20, 170–1, 175, 184 Bride  87, 101–2, 110–11, 125–30, 163 Bridegroom  101–2, 125–30, 163 Burrows, Ruth  49–52 Butler, Cuthbert  32–3

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218 Index Carmelite Order Breviary  73–4, 100 John’s formation within  65–6, 70–1 Origins 74n.19 Reform of Order  66–8 Writings  73–4, 78–9, 95–6, 99, 101–3, 124n.20 Carthusian Order  85 Cautery  121–2, 179 ‘Centering Prayer’  47–51, 51n.79 Centre of the soul  92–3, 121–2, 164–5, 185, 188, 198–9 Chapman, John  32–3, 35, 147 Charity (see also love)  2–3, 72, 82–3, 154–8 Charles V, king of Spain  64–5 Christ  90–1, 93, 100–1, 111, 139, 148–9, 160–1, 167–9, 172–3, 179–80, 184 Cisneros, Cardinal Jiménez de  75–6, 90 Cisneros, García de  75–6 Community  38–9, 51–2, 111–12, 202–3 Contemplation  5–6, 8, 27–9, 31, 33–4, 47–51, 59–60, 72, 77–8, 84–5, 144–7, 157–60, 163, 175, 182–3, 186–7, 202–3 Created order  4–5, 87, 118–19, 127–8, 132, 136–8, 140–3, 153–4, 156, 162, 166–7, 170, 175, 179–80, 189–90, 198–201 Darkness  22–3, 25, 113–20, 132–3, 161–2, 168–9, 192–4 de Ávila, Juan  80–1 de Bérulle, Pierre  27–8 de Córdoba, Sebastián  97 de Granada, Luis  80–1 de Jesús, Diego  27, 81 de Laredo, Bernardino  78–9, 90, 92–3 de la Cruz, Juana  91–2 de la Vega, Garcilaso  96–8 de Léon, Luis  100n.91, 102–3 de Lubac, Henri  10, 99, 165–6 de Madrid, Alonso  90 de Medina, Bartolomé  70n.13

de Osuna, Franscico  78–81, 90–1, 92n.67, 93 de Palma, Bernabé  90, 92–3 Death  64–5, 159, 183 Deification 176 Dejamiento  28–9, 80–1, 91–2 Delight  72, 82–3, 121–2, 139, 147, 156–7, 162, 166–7, 170, 172, 176–80, 183–4, 187, 193–4, 204 Devotio moderna 89 Dionysius see Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite Discalced Carmelite Order  26–9, 34–5, 67–8, 73–4, 77–8, 102n.100, 165n.3 Divine hiddenness  56–7 Dryness  31, 159–60 Duruelo 66 Eckhart, Meister  85, 178–9 Emotion  63n.1, 154–5 Emptiness  148–50, 153–4 Envy 136–7 Eros/erotic  1–3, 9–16, 22, 28–9, 59–60, 63–4, 82–6, 101–2, 192–5, 199 Eucharist 114–15 Experience  5–6, 8, 25, 31, 49–58 Exsultet 118 Faith  19, 132–3, 148–51, 153–4, 157–8, 168–9, 201 Feeling  4, 9, 47–8, 51–3, 56–7, 74–6, 98–9, 112–13, 120–2, 145–6, 159–62, 164n.2, 167, 170, 176n.19, 178–9, 185–6 Feuerbach, Ludwig  5, 19, 201 Fire  41, 160, 170–1, 176–9 Flame  120–2, 160, 176–81, 198–9 Fontiveros 64–5 Foucault, Michel  10–11, 13–14 Franciscans  76, 80–1, 90 Freedom  17–18, 137–8, 146–7, 166–9, 190 Freudianism  8–9, 13–14, 16, 19, 194–7, 199–201 Friendship  82–3, 172

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Index  219 Garrigou-Lagrange, Réginald  33–4, 42n.48, 50–1, 185–6 Gaze  111, 125, 167–8, 172–3 Gift  129, 167n.8, 180–1 Glory  109, 139, 142, 174, 177–80, 187 Grace  18, 32, 134, 143–6, 161, 163, 167n.8, 179–80, 189–90 Granada  67–8, 122–4 Gregory of Nyssa  12–13, 14n.24, 63–4, 84–5 Gregory the Great  73–9 Healing 126 Heart  77, 83, 91, 117, 125n.22, 179–80, 185 Holy Spirit  4, 22, 33–4, 89, 105–6, 109–10, 164, 169–73, 175–81, 184, 190, 192, 202–3 Hope  17–18, 32, 48–9, 97–8, 126, 132–3, 138–9, 148–9, 151–5, 160–1, 182–4, 188–9, 192, 196–7 Ignatius of Loyola  3, 7, 76–8 Illumination  37–8, 160, 176–7, 184 Illumination, state of  49–50, 84–5, 164n.2 Imagination  69–70, 137, 144, 145n.16, 147–8, 152n.28 Incarnation  105–8, 110–11, 159n.44, 167–8 Inquisition  80–1, 91–2, 173–4 Interiority  25, 51–2, 62, 73–8, 80–1, 90–3, 97–8, 101–3, 147, 180, 185, 188 Intellect  1–3, 68–72, 85–6, 94, 137, 144–5, 149, 157–9, 186–7 James, William  35–7, 42–5 Jesus, see Christ Job  101, 159 John Paul II, Pope  33–4 John of the Cross As Spanish national hero  8 Biographical details  64–8, 143, 154, 165

Doctor of the Church  34–5 Friendship with Teresa of Avila  66–7 John of the Cross, works by Ascent of Mount Carmel (prose work)  22–3, 132, 185 Cántico espiritual (poem)  106, 122–30 Dark night of the soul (prose work),  22–3, 37, 88, 132, 182–3, 185 Fonte (poem)  113–15 Glosa and copla poetry  22, 96–7, 106, 112–15 Letters  25, 165, 179, 204 Lira poetry  22, 92–3, 97–8, 106, 163–4 Living Flame of Love (prose work)  23, 97, 163 Llama de amor viva (poem)  106, 120–2 Noche oscura (poem)  40–1, 106, 116–20, 132, 135–6, 160–1 Romances (poem)  22, 60, 105–12, 130–1 Sayings 145–6 Spiritual Canticle (prose work)  23, 86–8, 122–30, 163 Joy  15–16, 85, 89–91, 121–2, 127, 138–9, 142–3, 155–7, 167–75, 180, 188–90, 199 Kierkegaard, Søren  12–13 Ladder  88, 117, 160 Language  2–3, 7, 21–2, 43, 63, 94–103, 108–16, 126, 130–1, 140, 149–50, 165, 167n.7, 172, 174, 178–9, 189–92, 200–1 Leo XIII, Pope  29 Light  6, 84–5, 94, 108–9, 113–14, 117, 132–3, 176–7 Longing  2–3, 15–16, 21–2, 73, 86–7, 135n.3, 140, 146–8, 160, 188–9 Love  2–5, 16, 48, 58–9, 62–3, 80–2, 85, 90–3, 104, 107–12, 115–33, 146–9, 154, 159–60, 162–3, 167–9, 171–3, 176–81, 186–7, 189–90, 195–6

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220 Index ‘Loving knowledge’  32–3, 144–5, 160, 186–7 Ludolf of Saxony  75–8 Lust  137, 193–4 Marion, Jean-Luc  11–12, 16–17 Maritain, Jacques  33–4, 38–9, 42, 46–7, 140n.9, 143n.11, 158–9, 185–6 Marx, Karl  19, 196–7, 201 Medina del Campo  65–6, 77–8, 86n.50 Meditation  5–6, 22–3, 47–51, 73–4, 90, 93, 100, 144–6, 153–4, 196 Memory  1–3, 69–70, 78–80, 137, 151, 182–5 Mercy  159, 167n.8 Merton, Thomas  46–52, 151 Metaphysical Poets  27–8 Moaning  120–1, 125–6, 167, 179, 183 Morel, Georges  53–4, 60 Mount Carmel, sketch of  3, 140–3 Music  95–6, 127 Mystical theology  30–5, 42, 49–51, 53–4, 84–5, 94–5, 144–5, 158 Mysticism  8, 20–1, 35–45, 191 Natural  10, 18, 134, 136nn.5–6, 163 Negative theology  60, 94 Nietzsche, Friedrich  19, 196–7, 201 Night  40–1, 55–7, 113–20, 132 Active night  72, 138–58 ‘Dark night’ (see also John of the Cross, works by)  4, 19, 56–7, 84–5, 132, 192–6 Night of sense  48–50, 143–7 Night of spirit  48–50, 100–1, 158–61 Passive night  72, 101, 143–7, 158–61 Relationship between the ‘nights’ 133–6 Nygren, Anders  9–10, 13–14, 16, 194–5

Passions  2–3, 11–12, 68, 74–5, 82, 132, 138, 144, 154–6, 159–61, 169–70, 181–2 Passion of Christ  93, 101, 159n.44 Pastrana 66–7 Peace  14–15, 145–6, 172 Phantasy  69–70, 137, 152n.28, 153–4 Plato  9–15, 63–4, 87, 166, 191–2, 199 Plotinus  41, 58–9, 98 Poetry, Golden Age verse forms of Glosa and copla poetry  22, 96–7, 106, 112–15, 117 Lira poetry  22, 96–8, 113, 115–30 Pomegranates  129, 174, 198–9 Poulain, Auguste  29–34, 45–6, 51, 145n.16, 186n.34 Prayer  5–6, 31, 38–9, 45–52, 64, 76–7, 80–1, 91, 144–8, 202–3 Proficients, stage of  91, 134, 144 Projection  31, 45–6, 132–3, 162, 201–3 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite  12–13, 21–2, 59–60, 62–3, 82–6, 94–5, 98–9, 101–3, 112–14, 118–19, 131–3, 144–5, 150, 161–2, 166–7, 186–7 Pseudo-Thomist writings, see Aquinas, Thomas Purgation  132–4, 148, 153–61, 165–6 Purgative stage  49–50, 84–5, 164n.2 Quiet  31, 90–1, 146, 151 Quietism  28–9, 81 Quiroga  64n.3, 84–5

Obedience 143n.11

Rahner, Karl  50–1, 161 Raptures 147–8 Recogimiento writings  76, 78–9, 86, 90–4 Recollection  47, 76, 90–4, 153–4, 165 Ruusbroec, Jan van  85, 178–9

Pain  138–9, 147–8, 159, 196–7, 204 Participation  4–5, 18, 89, 171–3, 176, 199–200

Salamanca  63n.2, 65–6, 70–1, 77–9, 84–5, 100, 155n.39 Sanson, Henri  58–9, 167n.7, 185n.31

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Index  221 Saudreau, Auguste  29–34, 45–8, 50–1 Scripture  12–13, 45, 47, 54–5, 70–1, 73–4, 80–1, 94–6, 99–103, 108–9, 116, 120, 124–5, 142, 159–61, 165–7, 170n.12, 176–7 Secret  117, 146, 158–9, 179–80 Self-denial 140 Self-giving  193–6, 199, 202–3 Self-improvement  4, 16–17 Self-knowledge  20, 90–1, 202–3 Sexuality  2–3, 10–14, 16, 194–5, 203–4 Silence  47–8, 94, 111–12, 119–20, 130–1, 162 Simplicity 150n.26 Sin  4, 16–18, 28–9, 77, 125, 136–8, 145–7, 150n.26, 158–9, 161, 197–8, 204 Song of Songs  11–13, 14n.24, 21–2, 59–60, 99–104, 124–5, 127–8, 130, 160–1, 165–6, 170, 173–4 Soul  1–4, 22–3, 69–70 Spiritual betrothal  110–11, 123, 126, 164n.2, 168n.11, 169–72, 176, 183n.28 Spiritual direction  19, 38–9, 45, 66–8, 144n.15, 145–6, 159, 176n.19, 179, 195–6 Spiritual marriage  123, 126, 164n.2, 169–73, 176, 183n.28 Spirituality  8, 20, 26–7, 29–30, 45–52, 57–8, 61, 74–5, 93, 191, 201–3 Stammering  126, 130–1 Stein, Edith  42 Substance  23, 92–3, 136n.6, 164–5, 170, 171n.13, 177–80, 185–9 ‘Substance of the soul’  23, 136n.6, 164–5, 178–80, 185–9 Suffering  88, 90–1, 96–7, 101, 125–6, 158–9, 175, 183 Supernatural  10, 136n.6, 144–5, 149–51, 153–4, 156, 163–4, 167–8

Taste  23, 69–70, 118–21, 144, 146, 174, 189–90, 198–9 Teresa of Avila  7, 31–3, 45–6, 49, 65n.5, 66–7, 70–1, 77–8, 81, 86n.50, 92n.67, 102–3 Thomas à Kempis  75–8 Todo y nada 139–43 Toledo  40–1, 67, 95–6, 122–3, 154 Touch  23, 37, 69–70, 92–3, 98, 118–22, 125, 163–4, 170, 179, 185–90, 196 Transfiguration 18 Trinity  4–5, 22–3, 62–3, 79–80, 107–12, 116, 162, 164, 170–1, 175–6, 177n.20, 180–1, 184, 190, 192, 198–9 Trueman Dicken, Eric  45–6, 185–6 Truth  36–7, 72, 85, 165–6 Ubeda 68 Underhill, Evelyn  35–9, 42–5 Union  4, 6, 17–18, 25, 32, 74, 81, 84–5, 90–2, 101–2, 106–7, 116–30, 137–8, 143–4, 148–51, 162–3, 193–4, 196, 201 Unitive Way  32, 37–8, 49–50 Virtues  32–4, 51, 82–3, 135n.3, 146–55, 159–61, 170–2, 175, 179–80, 183, 194 Will  1–3, 68–72, 78, 137, 144–5, 154, 169 Wisdom  95, 175, 182–4 Wound  118–22, 125–6, 167–8, 177–8 Yearning  2–3, 22–3, 27–8, 31, 58–9, 78, 83, 87, 96–8, 106–7, 110–11, 115, 124, 126, 132, 135–6, 138, 152–4, 157–8, 159n.44, 161–9, 183–4, 188–9, 192, 202–3