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John of the Cross

For another saint who lived around the same time and area, see John of Avila.

Saint John of the Cross (San Juan de la Cruz) (24 June 1542 – 14 December 1591), born Juan de Yepes Alvarez, was a major figure of the Counter-Reformation, a Spanish mystic, and Carmelite friar and priest, born at Fontiveros, a small village near Ávila.

Saint John of the Cross was a reformer of the Carmelite Order and is considered, along with Saint Teresa of Ávila, as a founder of the Discalced Carmelites. He is also known for his writings. Both his poetry and his studies on the growth of the soul are considered the summit of mystical Spanish literature and one of the peaks of all Spanish literature. He was canonized as a saint in 1762 by Pope Benedict XIII. He is one of the thirty-three Doctors of the Church. When his feast day was inserted into the General Roman Calendar in 1738, it was assigned at first to 24 November, since his date of death was impeded by the then existing octave of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. This obstacle was removed in 1955 and in 1969 his feast day was moved to his date of death, 14 December.

Life

Early life and education

He was born by the name of Juan de Yepes y Álvarez into a Jewish converso family of silk weavers in a small village called Fontiveros in the province of Ávila. His father, of wealthy origins, was disinherited by his family because of marriage to a woman below his rank, and died just the year after his birth. As a consequence, John, his two older brothers and his widowed mother struggled with poverty, moving around and living in various Castilian villages, with the last being Medina del Campo, to which he moved in 1551. There he worked at a hospital and studied the humanities at a Society of Jesus (Jesuit) school from 1559 to 1563. The Society of Jesus was a new organization at the time, having been founded a few years earlier by the Spanish St. Ignatius Loyola. On 24 February 1563 he entered the Carmelite order, adopting the name Fr. Juan de Santo Matías.

The following year (1564) he professed as a Carmelite (was promoted from novice status) and moved to Salamanca, where he studied theology and philosophy at the University of Salamanca and at the Colegio de San Andrés. This stay would influence all his later writings, as Fray Luis de León taught biblical studies (Exegesis, Hebrew and Aramaic) at the University. Fray Luis de León was one of the foremost experts in Biblical Studies then and had written an important and controversial translation of the Song of Songs into Spanish. (Translation of the Bible into the vernacular was not allowed then in Spain).

Priesthood and association with Saint Teresa de Jesús

John was ordained a priest in 1567, and then indicated his intent to join the strict Carthusian order, which appealed to him because of its encouragement of solitary and silent contemplation. Before this, however, he travelled to Medina del Campo, where he met the charismatic Saint Teresa de Jesús. She immediately talked to him about her reformation projects for the Carmelite order, and asked him to delay his entry into the Carthusians. The following year, on 28 November in Duruelo, he renounced to the rule of St. Albert, changed his name to Juan de la Cruz (John of the Cross) and effectively entered upon the reform of the Order. He started this reformation at Duruelo together with Fr. Antonio de Jesús de Heredia, and the originally small and impoverished town of Duruelo became a center of religion.

John, still in his 20s, continued to work as a helper of Saint Teresa until 1577, founding monasteries around Spain and taking active part in their government. These foundations and the reformation process were resisted by a great number of Carmelite friars, some of whom felt that Teresa's version of the order was too strict. Some of these opponents would even try to bar Teresa from entering their convents.

The followers of St. John and St. Teresa differentiated themselves from the non-reformed communities by calling themselves the "discalced", i.e., barefoot, and the others the "calced" Carmelites.

Imprisonment, writings, torture, death and recognition

On the night of 3 to 4 December 1577, following his refusal to relocate after his superior's orders and allegedly because of his attempts to reform life within the Carmelite order, he was taken prisoner by his superiors, and jailed in Toledo, where he was kept under a brutal regimen that included public lashing before the community at least weekly, and severe isolation in a tiny stifling cell barely large enough for his body. Six months into his imprisonment, St. John was assigned a new jailer, Fr. Juan de Santa María, who was much more kindly disposed toward John than his previous incarcerator. He appears to have allowed him oil and a lamp, and more importantly, paper and ink upon which to write. It is during this time when he composed some of his most famous works, among them the first 21 verses of his Spiritual Canticle, the Romances, Qué bien sé yo and probably he began to write on the Dark Night of the Soul as well. The darkness and loneliness of his imprisonment, his harsh sufferings and spiritual endeavours are reflected in all of his subsequent writings. He managed to escape after nine months, on 15 August 1578, by escaping through a small window in a room adjoining his cell. (He had managed to prise the cell door off its hinges earlier that day).

After returning to a normal life, he went on with the reformation and the founding of monasteries for the new Discalced Carmelite order, which he had helped found along with his fellow St. Teresa de Ávila and got finally approbation by Pope Gregor XIII in 1580.

John, in the years ensuing, was extremely active within the newly reformed order. He hold a variety of positions as confessor, vicar, Prior, Second Definitor, Vicar-Provincial, Definitor and Consiliar, and Deputy-Vicar General. He continued to be target for accusations and resentments by the carmelite Order. Finally, he was deprived of every office within the Reform, and in failing health, he retreated to the monastery of La Peñuela in Jaén in 1591, only to learn that efforts were already under way to expel him from the Reform itself which he had founded. John was a person of very weak health, and short and faint corpulence (Teresa de Ávila used to call him affectively “my half friar”). The adversities that he had to fight during his life were beginning to wear him out. While his health continued to decline, and still under the vow of obedience, he was ordered to seek medical assistance which was available both at Báez and Úbeda, and when presented with the choice, he opts for Úbeda, where he got as well a cold reception and was assigned one of the poorest cells. About to be banished to America, John died there on 14 December 1591, of erisipelis (cellulitis), at the age of only forty-nine. His writings were first published in 1618, he was beatified by Pope Clement X in 1675, and canonized by Benedict XIII in 1726. In 1926, he was declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Pius XI. When inserted into the Roman Catholic calendar of saints in 1738, his feast day was assigned to 24 November. Pope Paul VI moved it to the dies natalis (birthday to heaven) of the saint, 14 December.

The Church of England commemorates him as a "Teacher of the Faith" on the same date.

Literary Works

St. John of the Cross is considered one of the foremost poets in the Spanish language. Although his complete poems add up to less than 2500 verses, among them the Spiritual Canticle and Dark Night of the Soul, they are considered to be among the most beautiful, preeminent and evocative works ever written in Spanish language, both for their formal stylistic point of view and their rich symbolism and imagery. His poetrical style is very diverse, ranging from intelectual rigour, naked sobriety, exuberance of colours and senses to glowing passion, depending on the poem. His poetrical style is one of extreme precision, with a very dense intelectual architecture and coupled with a beauty of sensual and flowery expressions. The effect on the reader is one of emotional dramaturgy and extreme lyric density, difficult to reveal in any tranlastion away from its original Spanish language. His literature remains humble, and his drive shares his own love for beauty of the written word and the wish for mission and didactic exposure of his mysticism. As with most mysticists, his poetry is full of allegories, metaphors, paradoxons and suggestive symbolism.

The Spiritual Canticle is an eclogue in which the bride (representing the soul) searches for the bridegroom (representing Jesus Christ), and is anxious at not finding him; both are filled with joy upon reuniting. It can be seen as a free-form Spanish version of the Song of songs at a time when translations of the Bible into the vernacular were forbidden.

Dark Night of the Soul (from which the spiritual term Dark Night of the Soul takes its name) narrates the journey of the soul from her bodily home to her union with God. It happens during the night, which represents the hardships and difficulties she meets in detachment from the world and reaching the light of the union with the Creator. There are several steps in this night, which are related in successive stanzas. The main idea of the poem can be seen as the painful experience that people endure as they seek to grow in spiritual maturity and union with God. Canadian world music artist Loreena McKennitt composed the music for and recorded a "song" version of the poem on her 1994 album The Mask and Mirror.

St. John also wrote four treatises on mystical theology, two of them concerning the two poems above, and supposedly explaining the meaning of the poems verse by verse and even word by word. He actually proves unable to follow this scheme consistently and writes often freely on the subject he is treating at each time. His treatises and "Commentaries" in prose contrast sharply in style with his poetry, being dense and austere, more practical guide-like and often plagued with redundancies between the chapters and inconsistent through contradictions resulting from scarce or no revision. This would prove his own conviction that the mystical experience is incommunicable with objective words. His mysticism is fully revealed only in his poetry.

The third work, Ascent of Mount Carmel is a more systematic study of the ascetical endeavour of a soul looking for perfect union, God, and the mystical events happening along the way, and forms with his Commentary on the "Dark Night" the core of his Mystical Theology. A four commentary work about Living Flame of Love describes a greater intimacy, as the soul responds to God's love. These, together with his Dichos de Luz y Amor, or "Sayings of Light and Love," and St. Teresa's writings, are the most important mystical works in Spanish, and have deeply influenced later spiritual writers all around the world. Among these can be named T. S. Eliot, Thérèse de Lisieux, Edith Stein (Teresa Benedicta of the Cross), and Thomas Merton. John has also influenced philosophers (Jacques Maritain), theologians (Hans Urs von Balthasar), and pacifists (Dorothy Day, Daniel Berrigan, and Philip Berrigan). He is also mentioned in Allen Ginsberg's groundbreaking poem "Howl, "

Books

Dark Night of the Soul: A Masterpiece in the Literature of Mysticism (Translated and Edited by E. Allison Peers), Doubleday, 1959. ISBN 978-0385-02930-8
Dark Night Of The Soul, Saint John of The Cross (Translated by Mirabai Starr), Riverhead Books, New York, 2002, ISBN 1-57322-974-1