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SAINT JOHN OF THE CROSS,
CONFESSOR, DOCTOR OF
THE CHURCH
... the culmination of
every Christian life
A Biography of St.
John of the Cross
The
culmination of every Christian life is the attainment of holiness.
Sanctity, I think, is
often so compelling that we are loath to subject it to any
association with error. We are inclined, in effect, to extrapolate
from sanctity to inerrancy, as the though a defect in the latter
vitiates the former, which is not at all the case. Christ’s stinging
rebuke to Peter is a sober reminder of this. 1 But the
fact remains that it is likely in some to attenuate the genuine and
unsparing critical impulse necessary to the objective analysis of a
Saint’s
work – and as a consequence to forfeit truth; a defection no less
antagonistic to good philosophy than to religion. Truth itself, it
has been suggested, must be esteemed as holy – and any defection
from it a defection from the very holiness toward which we strive.
And this is simply another way of saying that we cannot hope to
attain to a consistent end through inconsistent means. And while we
must be careful of a susceptibility to this type of critical
latitude in dealing with the Saints, we must, on the other hand, and
quite obviously, recognize that sanctity and critical acumen, while
not allied of necessity,
have quite often found common ground in the lives of the Saints.
Even the most cursory perusal of the voluminous Patrolgiae
Latinae Cursus Completus or the Patrologiae Graecae – to
mention nothing of the great multiplicity of philosophical and
theological works within
the Church that extends to the present day – clearly attests to
this. And this is simply to say, on the other hand, that sanctity no
more precludes critical acumen that critical insight precludes
sanctity.
Nevertheless, it
remains a common, even a persistent misconception that a Saint’s
commitment to doctrine – which, from the Catholic perspective, is at
least an integral aspect of the imputation of sanctity – precludes,
or at least impedes, hampers, confines, even compromises the
disinterested dedication to
truth. But the fact of the matter is that the sanctions incorporated
into that very body of doctrine are more far-reaching, and far more
stringent, relative to a commitment to truth than those which are
selectively and subjectively appropriated outside of it
according to the individual inclination of the skeptic. This is not
to disparage the moral integrity of the skeptic, but merely to place
it within existential perspective. The historical and often heroic
commitment to truth on the part of many Catholic philosophers is, I
suggest, exemplified in a way seldom encountered by their skeptical
counterparts in a given culture– whether we consider the ancient
martyrology beginning with the early Christian philosopher St.
Justin Martyr who, rather than equivocate the truth, was scourged
and beheaded in 165 AD; or in our own times, and within the great
Carmelite tradition itself, in the case of St. Teresa Benedicta of
the Cross, who as Edith Stein, the German philosopher and colleague
of the twentieth century phenomenologist Husserl, perished at the
Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in 1942, both as a Jew and a Nun,
renouncing neither and suffering for both – despised by the Nazis as
a Jew and forsaken by her family as a Catholic Nun. Both, I
maintain, are paradigms in the sense that each had clear existential
alternatives, the extreme consequences of which turned exclusively
upon their uncompromising relation to truth. These, and the many
examples to which we can appeal,
evidence a commitment to truth often supremely enacted; and that
commitment, I suggest, which does not blench before the prospect of
death is much less likely to be compromised in matters decidedly
less final in nature.
Of course, such commitment can be, and frequently is, dismissed, or
worse yet, trivialized as ‘fanaticism’, but I think, by and large,
that this explanation is much too convenient, for we invariably see
little of this trait, and much more in the way of balanced reason
evidenced in the lives of the Saints. We are all familiar with one
account or another in which the personality, or more specifically,
perceived defects in the personality, are held to be explanatory of
the doctrine. Interpreted psychologically in terms of a symptomatic,
rather than philosophically in terms of its intrinsic coherence, the
focus shifts altogether from philosophy (the doctrine as logical) to
pathology (the doctrine as pathological). At times this would appear
to be explanatory of at least some aspects of a given doctrine – but
seldom the entire doctrine. Nietzsche, I think stands as one example
of this, and so does Schopenauer. But one will be hard pressed to
detail this type of psychological association between St. John of
the Cross and his doctrine; in effect, to see his doctrine emerging
from his personality, and not out of his experiences. Those who
would seek such an explanatory are bound to be disappointed in the
life of St. John.
Beginnings
Born Juan de Yepes y Alvarez on what is likely the 24th of June 1542
in Fontiveros, Spain, St. John of the Cross was the youngest of
three sons born to Gonzalo de Yepes and Catalina Alvarez. John’s
father, from a proud Toledo family which had accumulated some
considerable wealth, had a bright future before him in the silk
trade from which the family fortune had been amassed, but his
marriage to Catalina, who was of humble origin, was considered by
his family an unpardonable misalliance, and Gonzalo was effectively
disowned and subsequently disinherited by his family, leaving
Gonzalo with his wife and three children in great hardship. The
callous disregard of Gonzalo and his family, now reduced to poverty,
is stunning, especially in light of the untimely death of Gonzalo in
1543, two short years after the birth of John, subsequent to which
the family turned a resolutely deaf ear to the pleas of the now
destitute widow on behalf of her small children, one of whom, the
second eldest, died within a few years of Gonzalo, leaving Catalina
with John and his eldest brother Francisco. The poverty that John
was later to embrace as a religious, was cruelly thrust upon him in
childhood. Catalina’s meager earnings from silk -weaving were not
enough to feed and clothe her children who in large measure, and out
of necessity, relied upon the beneficence of a catechetical
orphanage in Medina del Campo to provide not simply the education,
but the substance as well necessary to her children. During this
period, John had acquired some instruction, but no great
proficiency, in several trades with an eye toward some practical
vocation, but it was really in his youthful office as acolyte at the
Convent of Augustinian Nuns, where he served in the sacristy each
morning, and not infrequently elsewhere among other duties in the
afternoon,
that John’s lifelong love of the Church very likely began. The often
long and solitary hours spent in obligations within the sacristy
undoubtedly imbued the young John with a keen sense of the sacred
and an early formative acquaintance with an atmosphere of
introspective contemplation.
The Divine Summons
At sixteen, and now working at the nearby Plague Hospital de la
Concepcion, he had matriculated at the Jesuit College at Medino del
Campo where after four years of a liberal arts education, he entered
the Novitiate of the Carmelite Order in 1563 and, as was the custom,
assumed a new name, that of Juan de Santo Matia, or John of St.
Matthias. Upon professing solemn vows he undertook further study at
the Carmelite College at San Andrés
which, rather auspiciously, was located at Salamanca. Here Fray John
had the opportunity to study under some of the finest minds of late
medieval Europe at the great University of Salamanca whose
reputation as a center of learning equaled, and in some respects
surpassed, the renowned medieval Universities of Paris and Oxford.
Both at the College of San Andrés and at the University of
Salamanca, John had acquired an apparently outstanding grasp of both
Scholastic philosophy and theology, and in general excelled in his
studies to such a remarkable extent that, while yet a student, he
was appointed to the post of Prefect of Studies at San Andrés. In
1567 Fray Juan de la Cruz took Holy Orders and entered the
priesthood. On the auspicious occasion of the celebration of his
first Mass, which brought him to back his hometown of Medina del
Campo, he met Madre Teresa de Jesus – better known as St. Teresa of
Avila.
This acquaintance – not entirely fortuitous, for St. Teresa had
sought out the young priest who had been recommended to her as a
likely candidate to assist her in her efforts to reform the
Carmelite Order at large, friars as well as nuns – evolved into a
lifelong friendship and alliance, and was to prove momentous to both
the 52 year old Carmelite Nun, and the young 25 year old priest
whose deepening spirituality and strong sense of interiority had
compelled him at this point to consider transferring from the
Carmelites to the more austere and reclusive Carthusians. But St.
Teresa in short order succeeded in
persuading the diminutive but intense young friar that his vocation
lay in the white mantle that presently stood upon his shoulders, and
not elsewhere; the Order of Our Lady, she insisted, must not be
abandoned, but reformed. And she had quite definite plans for
effecting the reform which the Mitigated Rule stood in such
desperate need of, and John would be instrumental in restoring the
venerable Order to its Primitive Rule among the friars in the way
that St. Teresa had tirelessly labored to effect it among her nuns
at Valladolid. In 1568, in the company of three other Carmelite
friars, St. John changed his name at Duruelo from Juan de Santo
Matia to Juan de la Cruz – and effectively entered upon the reform
of the Order. The mutual vision and reciprocal commitment, coupled
with the deep and holy affection that bound the younger John to the
older Teresa, would sustain this collaborative effort for many years
and through much hardship.
It was not long before the exemplary lives of the small community of
reformed friars and nuns that had gathered around St. John and St.
Teresa respectively began attracting vocations, and with the
burgeoning reform, in which St. Teresa had been indefatigable, it
was inevitable that the friars and nuns of the Mitigated Rule who
wished to retain the individual latitude to which they had grown
accustomed should respond sometimes acrimoniously, even violently,
to the vigorous threat which the zeal of the reform had posed. From
a larger perspective, however, the ensuing turmoil – and it was
considerable – cannot be laid entirely at the feet of St. Teresa and
St. John, though neither were loath to come to terms with the
consequences of their zeal, for the call to a general reform of all
Religious Orders had been issued by the Council of Trent a year
earlier in 1568, and was already in the process of being implemented
by King Philip II in that same year – a reform, we must remember,
itself precipitated by the Counter-Reformation which had begun a
mere 8 years earlier in 1560 under the Papacy of Pius IV.
Reformatio in Capite et in
Membris:
The Counter-Reformation
Some brief overview of this period is necessary, I think, to
understanding the historical context from which the reform efforts
of both Saints took their impetus. The lax and reproachable state of
affairs, especially concerning discipline and morals, into which
highly profiled segments of the Church had fallen, had, of course,
precipitated the Reformation some years earlier, and what had been
experienced by the Church on a much larger scale had no less been
the occasion of the lapse in discipline in the religious orders in
Spain as well. The formation and training of the clergy at large had
been seriously neglected in favor of the decidedly more immediate
and provincial interests of higher ecclesiastical dignitaries and
this regrettable state of affairs was often not
unaccompanied by moral turpitude. Members of the Papal Curia, no
less than local bishops and abbots, had come to understand and so
exercise their authority in increasingly secular terms, to the
neglect and detriment of the primary spiritual offices with which
they were entrusted; offices which, at least as often as not, were
as instrumental to augmenting their income as to their acquiring the
perquisites of secular power. Entire cathedral
chapters, whose ecclesiastics were beneficed through endowments
established to maintain the clergy, would often spuriously combine
prebends – salaries intended to be distributed among the clergy
attached to the Cathedral – within one individual, increasing his
leverage in both power and wealth. And conditions, regrettably,
fared no better with the Religious Orders themselves. Not
infrequently, monasteries of religious women were largely
congregations of the unmarried daughters of the nobility, and for
many Orders, the original charism upon which the community had been
founded, and which had provided its raison d‘être, had been
entirely lost in this lapse of orientation, or the rule so seriously
mitigated as to be unrecognizable.
A recognition of the
impendence of this sorry state of affairs had existed for some time
and in fact dated at least as far back as the
14th century where the call pro reformatio in capite et in
membris 2 had begun slowly gathering the initial
momentum that would culminate in the Counter-Reformation in 1560.
St. John and St. Teresa, while confining their efforts at reform to
the Carmelite order in particular, may in fact be seen not simply as
the product of the Counter-Reformation, but as two of the most
brilliant, articulate, energetic and successful figures that the
Counter-Reformation had produced. The influence of their efforts
extended well beyond the cloisters of Carmel; indeed, well beyond
the border of Spain and continues to exert itself to the present day
within the whole of Catholicism at large. In any event, the reform
which the two Saints had collaborated in effecting resulted in some
particularly bitter
consequences for St. John who, taken captive by the Calced
Carmelites – the friars of the mitigated rule, who, unlike the newly
reformed Discalced Carmelites, wore sandals, the latter going
barefooted, or discalced – and refusing to renounce the reform, was
subsequently imprisoned at the Carmelite Priory in Toledo in 1577
for the better part of a year.
The room – a closet
actually – that served as his cell, was a meager 6 foot by 10 foot
area, unheated, unventilated, and effectively unilluminated except
for a small crevice in one wall well above the head of the spare and
diminutive friar who, standing erectly, barely attained to five
feet. Subsisting only on bread and water and an occasional sardine,
he was routinely scourged, not by one, but by every present member
of the Calced community following their evening refection and
returned to the darkness and cold – or stifling heat – of his cell.
Having nothing but the tattered clothes on his wounded and unhealing
back, no breviary, and probably most painfully, nothing with which
to confect the species through which he could celebrate Mass, St.
John was left with the outer darkness – and the gathering inner
light, a combination which crystallized in the sublime poetry that
has made the works of St. John of the Cross not just classic in
Spanish literature, but among the most beautiful poetic works ever
written.
Chronology of St.
John’s Writings
After six months closely confined and in great privation, St. John
was providentially assigned a new jailer, Fray Juan de Santa Maria,
who was much more kindly disposed toward the gentle St. than his
previous incarcerator. He appears to have allowed him oil and a
lamp, and more importantly, paper and ink upon which to write, and
in general seems to have made every effort to alleviate the
condition of the straitened friar as much as was within his power to
do so, despite the severe sanctions, under provisions of the Order’s
constitution, that would have been applied against him, and with the
same severity and
exactitude with which St. John himself had become intimately
acquainted. At this time, St. John composed the first thirty-one
verses of his magnificent Spiritual Canticle, and several less
well-known poems. Two months later, in August of 1578, and under
circumstances deemed by some to have been miraculous, St. John
managed to escape his captors and found refuge in Toledo with the
reformed Carmelite nuns who sheltered him from
his pursuers, bringing him south to the greater safety of El
Calvario in Andalusia where he began composing the Dark Night of the
Soul and the Ascent of Mount Carmel upon which he worked
sporadically until their completion in 1585.
St. John’s poetry, the magnificent and inimitable style of which
contrasts so sharply with his dense and often redundant literary
treatises, is widely considered among the most beautiful and
preeminent in all of Spanish literature to date. In fact, it is
among the most beautiful, most evocative of poetic literature in any
language. As Fr. Kieran
Kavanaugh, O.C.D. correctly observes,
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“St. John of
the Cross has received the title, “the loftiest poet of
Spain”, not on
account of his books of poetry, but with some ten or
twelve compositions. These
compositions, however, display such variety that it can
almost be affirmed that each of
them represents a completely distinct poetic vision and
technique, a singular
accomplishment in Spanish literature.” 3
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There are ten poems of
indubitable authenticity, all composed within a 14 year period
preceding St. John’s death in 1591. Regrettably, none of the
original copies are extant. The copies which do exist are
incorporated into what is known as the Codex of Sanlucar, which,
while not in the hand of the Saint himself, were nevertheless
unquestionably reviewed and revised by St. John as attested to by
glosses and additions to the text which appear in the handwriting of
St. John. The authenticity of four other poems is also very likely.
It is, I find, an extreme irony – even a paradox – that one is more
likely to arrive at a much clearer intuition (not understanding) of
something verging upon the experience of unio mystica through
any of these 14 poems, than through all the protracted, carefully
nuanced, and often involuted explications which St. John offers us
through the treatises we have examined in this work. Here we have
attained to consistency. In his poetry we attain to sublimity. The
poems of unquestionable authenticity are as follows:
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The Spiritual Canticle (Cantico Espiritual)
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The Dark Night (Noche Oscura)
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The Living Flame of Love (Llama De Amor Via)
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I Entered in Unknowing (Yo No Supe Dόnde Entraba)
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I Live, but Not in Myself (Vivo sin Vivir en Mi)
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I Went Out Seeking Love (Tras de un Amoroso Lance)
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A Lone Young Shepherd (Un Pastorcico Solo Esta Penado)
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For I Know Well the Spring (Que Bien Sé Yo la Fuente)
-
The Romances (Romances 1-9)
-
On the Psalm: “By the Waters of Babylon” (Romance Que Va Por
“Super flumina Babylonis” (Ps. 136)
The remaining four poems, the authenticity of which cannot be
definitively established but which very likely were composed by St.
John are:
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Without Support and With Support (Sin Arrimo y con Arrimo)
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Not for All of Beauty (Por Toda la Hermosura)
-
Del Verbo Divino (Del Verbo Divino)
-
The Sum of Perfection (Suma De Perfeccion)
These poems are faithfully reproduced in Spanish and meticulously
translated into English by Fr. Kieran Kavanaugh O.C.D. and Fr.
Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D. in “The Collected Works of St. John of the
Cross” 4, which I highly recommend.
Death and
Canonization
St. John, in the years ensuing, was extremely active within the
newly reformed order, holding a variety of positions as confessor,
vicar, Prior, Second Definitor, Vicar- Provincial, Definitor and
Consiliario, and Deputy-Vicar General – to say nothing of the great
administrational skill he demonstrated as founder and rector of the
Carmelite College for the students of the Reform at Baeza. This
activity, however, was balanced by the contemplation he had
patiently and diligently acquired through spending long hours in
prayer. As is often the case with great saints no less than great
men, the end of his life would find him persecuted by the very cause
for which he gave of himself entirely, patiently enduring the spite
of lesser men resentful of his irrepressible sanctity.
Deprived, for his conviction, of every office within the Reform, and
in failing health, he repaired to La Peñuela in 1591 only to learn
that efforts were already under way to expel the holy friar from the
Reform itself which he had founded, and for whose sake he had
willingly suffered so much. This must have been a bitter
disappointment to St. John – not to find himself despised and put to
naught; indeed, it was his wish to die alone, without title, and in
obscurity – but to find his brothers in Christ at such a great
distance from the heart of God, the mind of Christ, in their enmity
not just to him – but to any man.
It has indeed been well
put that in the Church where the lights are brightest, the shadows
are also deepest. St. Teresa, who had died some nine years earlier
in 1582 would probably have come closest to understanding the heart
of St. John at this crucial and final point in his life, but was
providentially spared the pain of this ignominy. John, whose health
continued to decline, and still under the vow of obedience, was
ordered to seek medical assistance which was available both at Baez
and Ubeda, and when presented with the choice opted for Ubeda where,
he felt, he was unknown and would be accorded no more consideration
than any other friar in failing health. But even in Ubeda, St.
John’s reputation preceded him, and despite his ill health, those
both envious and suspicious of his sanctity received him coldly,
brusquely assigning him the poorest cell available while taking
pains to make clear to him the inconvenience and expense incurred of
necessity by his stay at the monastery. This must have troubled St.
John as much as the festering ulcerations that had by now progressed
from his legs to his back, and before long it became apparent that
the small friar in the most dismal cell was dying. Without reproach,
and in the most earnest humility, he begged pardon of those to whom
he had become such an unwelcome burden, and parting his lips
finally, uttered the words of Christ on the Cross: “Lord, into your
hands I commend my spirit”, and with this, died. He was forty-nine.
Within eighty-four years of his death on December 14, 1591 St. John
of the Cross was beatified by Pope Clement X on January 25, 1675,
subsequently canonized by Pope Benedict XIII on December 26, 1726,
and finally declared a Doctor of the Church Universal by Pope Pius
XI on August 24, 1926.
Something more must be said of this great luminary, something
vitally important to any adequate assessment of the life of St.
John. And it may be summed up simply in this: St. John was a good
man. For all the austerity to which he subjected himself willingly
and without murmur, his heart was singularly inaustere. Embracing
poverty, and the son of poverty from his earliest childhood, he was
nevertheless pained by the poverty he saw in others, even in the
sometimes desperately poor nuns of the Reformed and Primitive Rule
for whom he himself would beg alms as a father for his children.
Knowing the needs of others, he never humiliated those in want, but
anticipating their need, set about to secure what was necessary for
them, knowing that they would never ask it for themselves. His
concern, it is important to note, did not extend simply to the
spiritual welfare of those with whom he came in contact: he saw the
whole man, the entire woman, not just the imago Dei
sequestered behind the ephemerality of the flesh, but the Sacred
Humanity of Christ which
ennobled the humanity of every person.
His eyes, St. Teresa
tells us, were large and dark, and in St. John they were not merely
the portals to his own soul, but the lamps of compassion that burned
with a love that seemed to embrace the totality of the person who
stood before him. The hunger that gnawed at the stomachs of his
penitents was just as real
as the cancer of sin he sought to excise from their souls in the
holy tribunal of penance. The illness that racked the bodies of men
and women was every bit as real as the spiritual sickness that
plagued their souls, and he sought to remedy both as much as it was
in his power to do so. His life, in short, was conformed to the life
of Christ who not simply forgave sins, but healed the sinner, and
who, in the succinct words of the Apostle Peter, went about doing
good.5 St. John, in a word, was the faithful steward
whose will was to do the will of the Master. And these who gathered
around him, Carmelite and lay, would in the end be called home
through the same night to the same House by the same Father, in the
one same unquenchable light that, consuming all else in a holocaust
of love, ultimately reveals the face of God.
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1 Mk. 8.33
2 literally, a reform of the head and the members.
3 The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, p.709, Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D. and Otilio
Rodriguez, O.C.D., ICS Publications, Institute of Carmelite Studies,
Washington, D.C.,
1979
4 op. cit.
5 Acts 10.38
Feast day formerly November 24, now celebrated on14th
December
Reprinted with
permission by the author from:
http://johnofthecross.com/a-biography-of-st.-john-of-the-cross.htm
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