Saint John of the Cross
Juan de Yepes was born at Fontiveros, near Avila, Spain, on June 24th, 1542. His father worked as a weaver, having been cast off by his family of prosperous merchants for marrying beneath him. His mother was a saintly woman; left a widow soon after John's birth, she settled in Medina del Campo, where John went to school and worked in a hospital. He entered the Carmelite order there in 1563 and the following year was sent to the university at Salamanca. In 1567 he was ordained and, at Medina, first met St. Teresa of Avila, who persuaded him to introduce her reform among the friars. This he did at the end of 1568. For several years he was engaged in this work and in acting as confessor to the nuns at Avila. The reform met with opposition and unreformed friars twice kidnapped him and locked him up, the second time for nearly nine months in Toledo, where he wrote some of his poetry. He escaped, and for several years ruled and founded reformed communities in the south of Spain. In 1588 he attended the first general chapter of the reformed friars in Madrid and was appointed prior of Segovia. Three years later he was deprived of his office and moved south to Ubeda, where he died shortly afterwards.
John
of the Cross is more renowned for his writings than for his life, which, apart
from the sufferings inflicted on him by his cantankerous brethren in religion,
and apart from his holiness and extraordinary sweetness of nature, is
unremarkable. His books, which all deal with the development of mystical
experience in the soul, have the peculiarity that they are written as prose
commentaries on his poems. He is a remarkable prose stylist: clear, simple,
acute, subtle, constantly illustrating his text with Scripture (a great part of
which he must have had by heart). He is one of the three or four greatest
lyrical poets of Spanish literature, though his output is small. His inspiration
may not have been entirely original (this is controversial), but the finished
product is unsurpassed. It is sometimes said that his poetry is merely the
poetry of human love, but close study of the text convinces that human love is
being used as the analogue of the action of the Holy Spirit on the soul truly
seeking God. The fundamental contribution of John of the Cross to the doctrine
of the spiritual life is, first, his exact treatment of the earliest stages of
infused ('mystical') contemplation and, second, his clear, coherent exposition
of the whole course of the interior life.
In The Ascent of Mount Carmel, he deals in detail with the ascetic purification of the soul which all who seek union with God must effect. By the use of his famous diagram of the ascent of Mount Carmel, he bids us always prefer 'not the thing which is easiest but that which is hardest, not the most pleasant but that which is least pleasant ... desiring to be stripped and emptied of everything the world can offer and to be poor for Christ's sake,' promising the soul which sincerely pursues this course great consolation soon, provided it is pursued with method and discretion. He prescribes rules for prayer in a section which is a treatise on faith, for the soul comes close to God by allowing faith to govern the imagination and the intellect in all its dealings with God. At first imagination and intellect must be worked to the full in what is called meditation; then comes a time, when the soul is habituated to this discipline, w hen it is enough to turn the attention serenely to some aspect of the matter of previous meditation (a scene from the life of Christ, a thought concerning God, a text or a few words which have, in some way, come to 'convey' God to us). Soon, the spiritual life may rest entirely on this second kind of prayer, called contemplation, sometimes 'acquired contemplation.' John, and other writers also, use the word to signify a closer union of the soul with God by passive or mystical prayer. St. John explains that during the first, acquired, contemplation, God may begin this mystical prayer in the soul, but his action on it will be unfelt, and there is no certainty that the soul will be led from there into high degrees of union with God. In the Ascent, II, XIII, three rules are given by which the soul may know when it is time to give up working hard with the mind at prayer and rest in this acquired contemplation, which corresponds to St. Teresa's 'recollection.'
In The Dark Night of the Soul, John of the Cross deals with mystical contemplation, a prayer which is passive, a direct action by God on the soul, and entirely without words, thoughts or mental imagery. He gives (I, IX) three signs by which the soul may know that this action has begun, before it becomes so strong as to be unmistakable and felt. The Spiritual Canticle and The Living Flame of Love trace the development of this prayer to its culmination when the soul is transformed, as much as in this life it can be, into God. It is sometimes thought that St. John's teaching is only accidentally Christian and could be reconstructed independently of the person of Christ; this is a mistake, as a close study of his writings from this point of view would show.
In the popular mind, John is perhaps best known for his austerity, his stress on nada ('nothing,' his catchword to drive home the principle that the soul that desires God must eliminate every other desire), not to be understood in any sense of annihilation of personality. There must be no question of diminishing the saint's insistence that God cannot enter the soul if its attention is on something else, but the terrifying aspect of it has been a little overdone. The saint himself could enjoy things of beauty and even has a place for them as incitements to the love of God, and he was gentle and affectionate in his personal relations. The positive aspect of nada is to be filled with God, and this is brought about by and brings about absolute submission to his will, an easier approach, perhaps, in our times, to John's ascetic teaching. He is specially penetrating and scathing about the religiosity that consists in emotional attachment to the externals of religion and about the subtle forms of self-love to be found even among the genuinely devout. John of the Cross has a special appeal to the twentieth century mind. Modern man, even without religion, understands the meaning of 'Love one another,' expects poverty in those who would win him to God, and, in a world of extraverted progress, is haunted by the longing for an interior life. John, in his life and in his doctrine, brings him just this.
John died at Ubeda on December 14th, 1591, was canonized in 1726 and was made a doctor of the church in 1926.
The Saints: A Concise Biographical Dictionary, ed. John Coulson
Courtesy
of
Catholic Information Network
(CIN)