“The Dark Night” and Other Poems
“The Dark Night” and Other Poems
by Saint John of the Cross
THE LITERARY WORK
Four poems set in Spain in the late 1500s; published in Spanish (as “El Ascenso al Monte Carmelo,” “Noche osctira,” Cántico Espiritual,” and “¡Oh Llama de amor viva!”) in 1618; in English in 1864.
SYNOPSIS
The four poems—“The Ascent of Mount Carmel,” “The Dark Night” “The Spiritual Canticle” and “Oh Living Flame of Love!”—are a religious allegory of love through the mystical union between the soul of the poet and God.
Events in History at the Time the Poems Take Place
Events in History at the Time the Poems Were Written
Juan de Yepes y Alvarez, Saint John of the Cross’s original name, was born in 1542 in Fontiveros, a village in the heartland of Castile, between Avila and Salamanca. A few years after his birth, his father, Gonzalo de Yepes, who barely made a living as a weaver, died of a lingering illness, leaving a widow and three sons in deeper poverty. For many years to come, Juan’s mother, Catalina Alvarez, worked at the loom to support her family. During his adolescence the family moved in 1551 to Medina del Campo, a larger, somewhat prosperous town nearby. Juan was apprenticed, in turns, to a painter, carpenter, and tailor, and was soon returned as useless by all of them. He then volunteered his services at a hospital—el Hospital de las Bubas—where advanced cases of syphilis were treated free of charge. Most of his days were spent under rigorous schedules, but he got time off to pursue his first real education at a newly founded Jesuit school. Evidently an exceptionally good student, he learned Latin well, and remained at the school until he reached 21. Upon leaving, he was offered the chaplaincy of the hospital, but instead chose to take vows and lead a solitary life as a Carmelite friar under the name Fray Juan de San Matías. In 1564 Fray Juan went to the University of Salamanca, where he remained for four years, during which he had a momentous meeting. In 1567 Juan de San Matías met Teresa de Jesus (1515-82), then beginning her mission to reform the Carmelite order. Teresa asked the young friar for his help and Juan took vows in 1568, changing his name to Juan de la Cruz. During his career in the order, Juan wrote three poems considered matchless in mystical literature—“The Dark Night,” “The Spiritual Canticle,” and “Oh Living Flame of Love!” He penned prose as well, including commentaries on these three poems, and adapted songs into religious verse. In terms of quantity, Juan’s output was limited; altogether he is thought to have composed fewer than 1,000 lines. All his works, moreover, concern one topic—the soul’s journey toward perfect union with God. The poems, however, remains open to more mundane interpretations too. This artfulness lies in their wording, a product of both an extraordinary imagination and a tumultuous spiritual epoch.
Events in History at the Time the Poems Take Place
The Reformation
By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Catholic Church, modeled on the bureaucratic structure of the Holy Roman Empire, had become extremely powerful but internally corrupt. From early in the twelfth century onward there were calls for reform. Between 1215 and 1545 nine Church councils were held devoted primarily to Church reform. The councils, despite their conciliatory intent, all failed to reach significant accord. Members of the clergy found themselves unable to live in keeping with Church doctrine because of an overemphasis on ceremonies and ritual.
In the first half of the sixteenth century, western Europe experienced a wide range of social, artistic, and geopolitical changes that can be traced back to a conflict within the Catholic Church. The basic conflict became known as the Protestant Reformation, and the Catholic response as the Counter Reformation. Igniting the conflict, in 1517 a German Augustinian friar named Martin Luther (1483-1546) posted on the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, Germany, a list of grievances, called the Ninety-five Theses, against the Roman Catholic Church. So began the Reformation movement.
The Ninety-Five Theses were centered around a call to eliminate the sale of indulgences, absolution of part of the temporal penalty for a sin in exchange for money. Fulfilling the penalty was part of a sacrament—the sacrament of penance. Indulgences would be granted on the authority of the pope and made accessible to the people through his agents. Outraged, the Church demanded that Luther retract a number of his protests. He refused, whereupon the authorities summoned him to an imperial diet, or general assembly, in Augsburg in 1518. There normally would have been swift retribution for his crime, but the election of a new emperor, Charles V (1500-58), slowed the justice system. In the interim, Luther used his time to plan a complete reform program for the church. His proposals included:
- National, rather than Roman, control of church finances
- Permission for the clergy to marry
- A series of sacramental reforms that would reduce the sacraments to Baptism, a reformed Mass, and the Holy Eucharist
Within the Roman Catholic Church, a series of powerful popes, including Leo X and Paul III, responded to the demand for reforms in various ways. Mendicant orders, such as the Jesuits, sprang into existence to reinforce the basic Catholic doctrine, while the Church, as it then existed, continued to receive support from major European monarchies, though England, for one, balked at the control and broke from it. Ultimately the Reformation created a mostly north-south split in Europe. In general, countries in the northern part of different regions became Protestant while those in the southern part remained Catholic.
The Reformation and art
Protestant reformers rejected the use of visual arts in the church, unleashing a wave of iconoclastic demonstrations in the North. Stained glass windows were broken, images of the saints were destroyed, and pipe organs removed from churches. In response to the iconoclasm, the Catholic churches promoted an exuberant style of art and architecture known as the baroque, which flowered in ideological opposition to Protestant severity. Not until the Neoclassical movement of the eighteenth century would there be an effective attempt to resolve this dichotomy. The theatrical designs of Saint Peter’s in Rome became a triumphant symbol of the Roman Catholic Church’s belief in itself and its history. In contrast, the plain churches of the north stood as staunch reminders of Protestant beliefs.
Due to the recent invention of the printing press (credited to Johannes Gutenberg around 1450), Luther’s reforms spread quickly through Europe, attracting much support. Luther, however, was condemned as a heretic by Pope Leo X in the Edict of Worms (1521). Forced to escape, he had to live for a year in hiding, but his reforms nevertheless took root. The split in the Roman Church proved irreconcilable.
Europe divided
The Low Countries, which are today called Belgium and the Netherlands, had long been under the rule of the Spanish Habsburgs. In 1517 Luther’s reforms would split the Low Countries. The southern part, Belgium, would remain strongly Catholic while the northern part, the Netherlands, adopted Protestant reforms, with the region’s Dutch Calvinists rebelling against the Catholic Habsburg rule.
Although the Catholic’s Holy Roman Empire would not dissolve until 1806, German states (Bradenburg, Prussia, Silesia, Saxony) were irrevocably separated from the influence of Rome. The princes in the northern German states protected Luther from both the pope and the Holy Roman emperor, meanwhile gaining political power by assuming many of the privileges once reserved for the church. In 1555, the Peace of Augsburg temporarily reconciled the Protestant north and the Catholic south in the German states, and the conflict moved west into the monarchies of Spain and France.
The Spanish Habsburgs and the French Valois came to an uneasy truce in 1559. The two monarchies were strongly Catholic, and both realized that only together could they hope to quell any Protestant uprisings. Their accord interrupted a string of Protestant-related threats to the hegemony of the Catholic monarchs. Once the Reformation was underway, the common people perceived it as a means of social empowerment. The peasant class sensed the potential for gaining secular freedoms through the movement. Raging through Germany, the Peasants War (1524-25) was a response to Luther’s urgings for democratic reform in the Church and a reaction to an unbalanced social system in which nobles and the Church did not pay taxes while others did. Luther, initially sympathetic to the peasants, grew appalled by the war and angrily addressed the warring faction in his pamphlet, Against the Thieving and Murderous Gangs of Peasants. To Luther the sectarian groups represented an attempt not at spiritual elevation, but at an easy redemption, that is, absolution without punishment. The social revolt had unfortunate consequences for Luther’s reformation. The reformers objected to the humanist view that human beings might be brought to higher spirituality through education and innate ability. Instead the Reformers subscribed to the concept of man’s embodiment of original sin and his incontestable need for redemption and the Grace of God.
Luther’s Protestantism by and large cleaned up the Church of the decadent accouterments that had characterized Christianity in western and central Europe, but as time passed the uglier specter of an ill-tempered iconoclasm began to emerge. Reformers more extreme than Luther started to make further demands for change. Among these reformers was the scholar Ulrich Zwingli in Switzerland. Moving beyond the usual objections to the discrepancies between biblical teachings and Church practice, Zwingli wanted all ritual abolished from the Catholic Church. No imagery was acceptable to him, not the crucifix, the bishop’s crozier, the chalice of the holy wine, clerical vestments, nor organ music.
Counter Reformation
The response of the Roman Catholic Church to the reformers’ demands was the Counter Reformation. Founded by Ignatius of Loyola in 1534, the Jesuits aggressively led a campaign to support Catholic doctrine. Members of the order acted behind the scenes in the Catholic monarchies, exercising a strong influence in political spheres. Jesuit priests often served as confessors to major political leaders, for instance. Such Counter Reformation forces generally upheld papal authority and ensured that canonization and veneration of saints remained a cornerstone of celebratory ritual. Though they objected to overemphasis on ceremony and ritual, they also encouraged the visual grandeur of churches, and generously financed it to the end.
Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1500-58) prompted the papal curia, or central administration governing the Church, to convene to resolve internal disputes, and after many delays a council did convene in Trent in December of 1545. The council addressed three basic issues. First, they clarified doctrinal points of discussion in order to quiet internal disputes. Second, they decided to definitively solve the problem of ecclesiastical abuses among the clergy. The third issue concerned the initiation of a crusade against the infidels. Pope Paul III (1468-1549) hoped to get widespread approval to condemn the Protestant heresy, and thereby gain support for a suppression of the reformers by force. In the end, the Council of Trent withheld this support, instead reasserting papal authority and simply presenting a united front against the Protestants. The Church had at last proved itself capable of action, and of reinforcing its version of the orthodox faith.
In the second half of the sixteenth century the theological conflict became a political power struggle. By the death of Martin Luther in 1546 and of John Calvin in 1564, the major developments of the Reformation were over. The Protestant movement had split into a number of sectarian churches, and no more great Protestant reformers would come to the fore. Ignatius of Loyola died in 1556 and the Council of Trent ended in 1563, events that brought the Counter Reformation to a theological halt. But all the tumult stirred responses in clergy and lay people alike. In response to the religious fervor, there was in Spain an explosion of spiritual writers, among them the greatest mystical poets of the Western tradition. Spanish mysticism peaked during the spread of the Renaissance (the sixteenth century in Spain). Evidence of this mysticism can be found in the masterpieces of Saint John’s contemporaries: Fray Luis de Granada, Beato Orozco, Juan de Avila, Malon de Echaide, Fray Luis de León, and Santa Teresa (see The Interior Castle , also in WLAIT 5: Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and Their Times).
CARMELITE REFORM
St. Teresa strove to restore the austerity and contemplative character of basic life in the Carmelite order, that is the order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. A major element of Teresa’s reform was her emphasis on internal devotion as opposed to external ritual. In 1562 she founded a small convent in Avila, where a strict discipline of prayers, solitude, poverty, and contemplation were to be observed. In spite of difficulties of all kinds, she succeeded in establishing not only nunneries but also a number of friaries of this stricter observance. Observers of her reforms wore sandals in place of shoes and stockings, which led to their being called the Discalced or Barefoot Carmelites, a label that distinguished them from the older branch of the order.
Spanish mysticism
The word “mystical” derives from Greek mystery religions, which were characterized by initiation rites at the threshold to the inner knowledge of the divine. Through these rites, the adherent sought admission to a secret.
I understand it [mysticism] to be the expression of the innate tendency of the human spirit towards complete harmony with the transcendental order; whatever be the theological formula under which that order is understood. This tendency, in great mystics, gradually captures the whole field of consciousness; it dominates their life and, in the experience called “mystic union,” attains its end.
(Underhill, p. xxi)
Saint John was a mystical poet in that his poems were written as a result of mystical knowledge.
To summarize briefly, according to Catholic theology, the soul may reach union with God when an individual goes through three basic stages: 1.vía purgativa; 2. vía iluminativa; and 3. vía unitiva. In the first, purgative stage, the body is regarded as the prison of the soul, and the individual escapes the limitation of human senses through discipline and will. Through the annihilation of the self, the soul attempts to reach the place of origin, which is next to God. In the second, illuminative stage, the soul sees and feels the presence of God. Finally, in the third stage, union, the soul becomes one with God—it moves towards God as God move towards it. Conceived of as the esposa, or bride, the soul is consumed in perfect love as it joins in spiritual matrimony with the Beloved-esposo, or husband. Searching as well as physical and emotional pain characterize these three steps, until by journeying through the great light of faith, the soul rises into ecstasy, union, and oblivion. A fourth stage is sometimes added, consisting of the peace and beatitude that follow the union.
In the Iberian Peninsula, the best-known ascetics/mystics were important writers as well as religious figures. A tradition of mystical poetry in Spain harks back to the Middle Ages, when the most prominent and influential poet was Raimundo Lulio (1233-1315), known as the “Illuminated Doctor.” He penned a famous poem, “Cantico del amigo y del amado” (Canticle of Friend and Lover), which parallels Saint John’s work in both diction and thought. Lulio was a missionary among the Moors of Spain and North Africa, to whom he preached in Arabic. His Spanish verse and prose show the rich sensual imagery of Arabic poetry, which also surfaces in the writing of Saint John. An example of the Arab influence is the absence of the verb in a series of images:
My Beloved the mountains,
The valleys’ solitary groves,
Strange islands
The resounding rivers
The wind whistling love’s songs,
The calm night,
At the time of the rising dawn
Silent music,
Sounding solitude
The supper that kindles love and warms
(“Spiritual Canticle,” stanzas 13-14, trans. J. Aladro)
Lulio was one of the main ties between Islamic and Christian mysticism in the Iberian Peninsula. In her study of Spanish mystic poetry entitled San Juan de la Cruz y el Islam, Luce López-Baralt maintains that, beyond Lulio, there were strong affinities between Spanish and Arabic mystics, in the invocation of colors in their poems, for instance, and of sensuality.
The Poems in Focus
Contents summary
The corpus of Saint John of the Cross’s poetry is relatively modest, yet with only a few poems he reaches the zenith of poetic possibility and expression. The four poems “The Ascent of Mount Carmel,” “The Dark Night,” “The Spiritual Canticle,” and “The Living Flame of Love” are a religious allegory of love achieved through mystical experience between the soul of the poet and God. Saint John’s poetry describes his personal journey and the union leading to this mystical experience. In his poetry he does not engage in intellectual attempts to define the nature of God; rather, he addresses God as a person, loved and loving. By humanizing God, Saint John seeks to teach and demonstrate the reality of his presence on earth and to bring about the divinization of the human individual. The final result is transformation, marriage, in which the human becomes divine insofar as possible in this life, a height that requires faith and contemplation. Saint John’s poetry and spiritual practice are inseparable.
The Ascent of Mount Carmel. The stanzas of this poem describe the way to climb to the top of this mountain. The mountain itself is the highest state of perfection, the place where the union between the soul and God transpires. Saint John of the Cross used the metaphor of the climber to represent the poet’s journey to the top of the mountain in pursuit of the divine light of perfect union with the love of God.
The Dark Night. In these stanzas, Saint John of the Cross deals with the exchange of love between the soul and its bridegroom God, treating certain aspects and effects of prayer. Saint John wrote the poem in response to a request from Mother Ana de Jesus, prioress of the Discalced Carmelite nuns of St. Joseph’s in Granada, 1584. In the poem, the dark night is a metaphor for sufferings and trials, as much spiritual as temporal, and for those who through this experience may reach the high state of perfection. The poem teaches the individual how to journey through the dark night.
The Spiritual Canticle. Also dedicated to Ana de Jesus, this poem has as its subtext the Old Testament’s book Song of Songs, which centers on the mystical wisdom that comes from love. The point is that the songs need not be understood clearly in order to produce positive results and sharpen the soul. The process works in the manner of faith, through which the poet loves God without understanding Him. In other words, one of the fundamental steps in the soul’s attaining the height of perfection is to believe the state exists without verifiable evidence, to rely instead on love and faith.
The Living Flame of Love. Written by Saint John of the Cross at the request of Doña Ana de Peñalosa, the stanzas deal with the most intimate and select union and transformation of the soul in God. The speaker in the poem is the soul, already transformed into God’s bride and consumed in perfect love with him. She now shares the inner quality of the fire of love. Not only is she joined to Him in this fire, but this fire makes a living flame in her.
THE LIVING FLAME OF LOVE; SONGS OF THE SOUL IN INTIMATE UNION WITH GOD’S LOVE
Oliving flame of love
That tenderly wounds my soul
In its deepest center! Since
Now you are not oppressive,
Now Consummate! If it be your will:
Tear through the veil of this sweet encounter!
O cautery that heals!
O consummating wound!
O soothing hand! O touch so fine and light
That savours of eternity
And satisfies all dues
Slaying, you have converted death to life
O lamps of fire, whose light
Streams in the cavernous soul:
Through mighty hollows, dazzled from above
Once blind in a blank night
Visiting splendor rolls
Lavishing warmth and brilliance on their love
How tame and loving
Your memory rises in my breast
Where secretly only you live
And in your fragrant breathing
Full of goodness and grace
How delicately in love you make me feel!
(trans. J. Aladro)
Generalizing the personal mystical experience
Saint John’s poetry brought the mystical experience to his Spanish readers in keeping with the general stages characteristic of Catholic theology. His poetry, however, always departs from this second stage in the process (via iluminativa). Also it never talks directly about the suffering and pain that one endures.
On a dark night,
Anxious, by love inflamed,
—O joyous chance!—
I left not seen or discovered,
My house at last completely quiet.
(“Dark Night,” stanza 1, trans. J. Aladro)
In “The Dark Night,” we can identify the confinements of the “house” with the incarceration of the soul in the human body. Searching and pain characterize te steps, as well as travel through the great light of faith and rising into ecstasy, union, and oblivion.
In the next stage (via unitiva), the soul becomes one with God; the poet’s soul, or “Lover,” is consumed in perfect love as it joins in spiritual matrimony with the “Beloved”:
O night! O guide!
O night more loving than dawn!
O night that joined
Lover with beloved,
Beloved in the lover transformed!
(“Dark Night,” stanza 5, trans. J. Aladro)
In the fourth stage, peace and beatitude follow the union:
l lose myself and remain,
With my face on the beloved inclined;
All has come to rest,
I abandon all my cares
There, among the lilies, to die.
(“Dark Night” stanza 8, trans. J. Aladro)
Few other poets in Western thought traveled so thoroughly through the bright and nocturnal spaces, or shared in this way the profoundly metaphysical labyrinths of their experience of love.
Sources and literary context
Formally, Saint John’s poetry derives from four poetic traditions: the Italian, the Spanish, the biblical, and Arabic. Dámaso Alonso is the major critic of Saint John’s poetry, and he is the one who brought out most clearly the important aspects of the four traditions as sources. In his La poesía de San Juan de la Cruz (The Poetry of Saint John de la Cruz), Damaso Alonso traces in detail the origin of many of Saint John’s poems.
The Italian influence in Saint John’s work came to him through Garcilaso de la Vega (1501?-36), who, with Juan Boscán (1487?-1542), was the first known poet to write Castilian poetry in a variety of Italian forms. The Lira, which Saint John uses in his three central poems “Noche oscura,” “Cántico Espiritual,” and “jOh Llama de amor viva!” first appeared in Spanish in Garcilaso’s poem “A la flor de Gnido” (To the Flower of Gnido). But Dámaso Alonso convincingly demonstrates that, while Saint John knew the work of Garcilaso, his immediate source was another Spanish poet, an intermediary by the name of Sebastián de Córdoba. In 1575 Sebastián de Córdoba published a volume entitled “Obras de Boscán y Garcilaso trasladadas a materias cris-tianas y religiosas” (Works of Boscan and Garcilaso Transformed into Christian and Religious Materials). In the volume, the author attempts to recast the poetry of Garcilaso and Boscan and link them to the concept “a lo divino” (the divine).
Spanish precedents for Saint John’s poems can be found in relation to form and theme. Their most obvious popular Castilian quality is in the use of romance (ballad) meters and estribillos (refrains). The Romances, composed in a fixed meter of octosyllables with assonance in alternate lines, are short simple poems, usually by unknown poets for an unlearned audience. They were publicly recited or sung to provide entertainment or disseminate news of recent events. Like other contemporary poets, such as Lope de Vega, Gόngora, and Gil Vicente, Saint John wrote verse that diverged from that of popular poems and thus made them his own.
The third major influence on the poetry of Saint John is the Old Testament. The biblical poetry depicted in the Vulgate appears in the form of pastoral images throughout Saint John’s work, not only in his poems, and prose, but also in letters. Cántico Espiritual is an imitation and interpretation in Spanish of the Song of Songs or Songs of Solomon. This text from the Old Testament, a fragmentary collection of songs in the form of dialogue, has enough cohesion to be called a wedding idyll or ceremonial drama. From a very early period, this dramatic love poem was being interpreted in terms of the love between God and man. Saint John also uses it this way, adding to his version an allegorical meaning while retaining the original freshness. “Spiritual Canticle” has a paradoxical quality about it, of overall aesthetic coherence yet arbitrariness in the sequence of events. Saint John’s version resembles the biblical Song of Songs in this respect. So completely does Saint John sustain unity of tone that no stanza jars. Concurrently the degree of diversity and number of gaps in the poem suggest that it may derive from this biblical folk song.
Another important source for Saint John’s mystical-literary writing was León Hebreo’s extraordinarily popular book Dialoghi d’amore, 1535, published first in Italian and then in Spanish. In his book, León Hebreo, a Spanish Jew who was exiled to Naples, proposes a philosophy of love as a means of obtaining union with God. The book is Neo-Platonic in nature, and reflects, in addition to biblical language, the thoughts and lexicon of Ben Gabirol, Maimonides, and the Jewish mystical writings known as the Cabala.
OUT OF DOCTRINAL ORDER
In terms of logical sequence, “Spiritual Canticle” is one of the poorest examples of order. Saint John himself appears to have perceived this, and so to have written the poem in at least two versions, one in the manuscript of Sanlúcar de Barrameda and another in that of jaén. In the second, Jaén version. Saint John strives to correct the incoherence in order to achieve doctrinal order and also adds an extra stanza. The consensus of his critics is that the first version is superior. Be that as it may, in both the first and second redactions, the poet has succeeded in reproducing a unified yet fragmentary song, and in doing so has remained faithful to the biblical Song of Songs. Saint John states in the prologue of his poem that he wrote it “under the influence of abundant mystical intelligence [knowledge].” One can assume that it was not a similar “mystical intelligence” in the author or authors of the Song of Songs that led to its present fragmentary state. The artistic effect is the same. It should be remembered, though, that early Christian writers could justify the inclusion of this collection of impassioned Jewish folk songs only as an allegory of the love of Christ for his Church, or in Saint John’s poetry of the esposo (husband-Christ) for his esposa (bride-Church-soul).
Events in History at the Time the Poems Were Written
Church career and imprisonment
Because Saint John’s poetry is intimately connected with his personal experience, it is important to have a grounding in events of his life connected to his writing of the poems. During his first assignment as a Carmelite friar, Juan de la Cruz lived in a small, poor farmhouse converted into a hermitage. This humble home, which he shared with a few monks, was situated in Duruelo, only a few miles from Fontiveros and Juan’s birthplace. Next he moved to Pastrama, near Alcalá de Henares, becoming a master of novices and then to Alcala, where he worked as a teacher in a Carmelite college.
In 1572 Teresa brought Juan to the unreformed Carmelite convent of Encarnación at Avila. During her stay there, she and Juan de la Cruz, who served as confessor and spiritual director, won over the majority of the nuns to the reform movement. An election among the nuns was held to determine the new prioress, and Teresa, who a few years before had held this office, was certain to be re-elected. The Provincial of the Carmelite order, there to supervise the election, threatened to excommunicate those who supported Teresa. In her letters, Teresa describes the subsequent course of events: the defiant nuns elected Teresa, whereupon the Provincial intervened, excommunicating and cursing the nuns who had voted for the reform candidate. He quickly burned their ballots, declared the election void, and appointed his own candidate. The sequel to the election occurred on the night of December 3, 1577, when an anti-reform group broke into the house where Fray Juan de la Cruz was living and hauled him off to a dark prison in the Carmelite Priory in Toledo. Fray Juan was Teresa’s spiritual accomplice, reasoned the Carmelite authorities in Spain, and they intended, at any price, to stop the spread of the reform movement.
Juan de la Cruz’s unlit cell was actually a small cupboard, not high enough for him to stand erect. He was taken each day to the refectory, where he received bread, water, and sardine scraps that he had to eat on the floor, like a dog. Then he was subjected to the circular discipline: while he knelt on the ground, the monks walked around him, singeing his bare back with their leather whips. At first a daily occurrence, the whippings were later restricted to Fridays, but with such zeal was he tortured that his shoulders remained crippled for the rest of his life. Saint John suffered other torments, too. For most of the six months of his incarceration, he received no change of clothing and remained infested with lice. He had dysentery from the food and suspected he was being poisoned.
At one point, a new jailer was appointed who proved to be far more generous than his predecessor. During this time of greater kindness, Juan wrote from 17 to 30 stanzas of “Cántico Espiritual” (“Spiritual Canticle”) and completed “La Fonte” (“The Fountain”) and probably “Noche Oscura” (“The Dark Night”), which, with its refrain aunque es de noche (although it is night), speaks of his faith amid darkness. The poem “Noche Oscura” is a love poem, an allegory of mystical union, despite and perhaps nurtured by his abysmal situation.
A key experience during this time of affliction and suffering finally made him resolve to escape. In August 1578 he had a vision:
On the eve of the Assumption of the Virgin the Prior of the Convent entered his cell, and after kicking him brutally and [be] rating him for his disobedience, promised to release him if he would abandon the Reform and return to the mitigated rule. Juan replied that he could not break his vows, but asked if he might be allowed to say mass on the following day, as it was the feast of the Virgin. The Prior angrily refused and went out. But that night Our Lady appeared to Juan in a dream. Filling his cell with light, she commanded him to escape, promising her assistance.
(Brenan, p. 266)
A few days after this incident, Saint John prepared himself for this venture, which takes on legendary, almost romantic proportions in biographical studies. After prying loose the hinges of his cell door in the middle of the night, he stepped over the bodies of some sleeping friars without notice. Then he lowered himself from a balcony to the city wall by means of a rope made from strips of his own blankets and clothing. From the wall, he jumped into a courtyard, which was enclosed by other high walls. The miracle recounts that he managed to scale these walls with the Virgin’s help, to at last find himself free in the streets of Toledo.
Poetic beginnings
Saint John took refuge in a convent of the Discalced Carmelites. Already on this first day of his escape, while still recovering from his trials, Juan rushed to give poetic voice to his most recent experience. He dictated part of his poetry, which he had not been able to write down in his cell and so had committed to memory. It was too dangerous, however, for him to remain in Toledo so he left for a small hermitage in Andalusia, called El Calvario, by the upper waters of the Guadalquivir River. Saint John spent six months in El Calvario, and they would prove the happiest time in his life. From the darkest pit he had risen to the clear beauty of the Andalusian landscape. Here in the solitude of open land, his career as a poet became fixed. During this grand, creative period he appears to have completed the corpus of his poetry, except for the last stanzas of “The Spiritual Canticle” (which he finished in Baeza and revised later in Granada), and “Oh Living Flame of Love!” (also written in Granada). He was then 37.
Following this brief period of recovery at El Calvario, Saint John was sent to the city of Baeza in 1579 to direct a newly formed Carmelite college. These were less happy years, filled with new responsibilities and struggles. In his letters he records that he felt uneasy among the city crowds, so different from his desert retreat. He consoled himself by making frequent trips to nearby Beas de Segura, a convent of Castilian nuns founded a few years before by Teresa.
From Baeza, Saint John was sent in 1582 to Granada, where he became Prior of a new monastery, El Convento de los Mártires. The monastery sat on the hill of the Alhambra and looked out over the white Sierra Nevada Mountains, thus offering one of the most extraordinary views in Spain. Saint John speaks of the land’s beauty in commentaries and poems. Subsequently, after 1585, his life became much more complex and demanding due to further political appointments. Saint John was named Vicar Provincial for Andalusia, in which position he had to journey all over southern Spain. A few years later, in 1588 he was made Prior in Segovia. It was during this time that he gave himself to meditation, arriving at the summit of his spiritual life. By his own testimony, found in both commentaries and poetry, he experienced mystical union with God during his stay in Granada and in Segovia.
Adversity renewed
Meanwhile, the Carmelite reformers had triumphed, at least insofar as Pope Gregory XIII recognized them as a separate organization entitled to elect their own Provincial. Renewed trouble and internal disorder erupted with the election of Nicolás Doria as the Provincial, in lieu of Teresa’s and Saint John’s protector, Gracián. After Teresa died in 1582, Ana de Jesôs, her successor and a close friend to Saint John, was imprisoned. Other followers of Teresa and Saint John were exiled to remote convents. As for Saint John himself, he attempted to intervene in a controversial dispute in Ana de Jesus’s convent in Madrid. He supported the rights of the nuns to use the secret ballot and govern themselves democratically, in accord with a recent brief from the Pope in 1580. The debate on behalf of the liberty to vote led to Juan’s mistreatment much like his earlier struggle in Avila, which had led to his imprisonment in Toledo. As a consequence of his involvement in the present affair, Juan was stripped of all office and exiled to La Peñuela, a desert house in Andalusia. Evidence was collected against him, some of it ridiculous, such as a false accusation by a nun in Málaga claiming that she had been kissed by Saint John through the grille of her window. At Beas de Segura, which used to be his favorite convent to visit, the nuns destroyed all papers and letters from him, for fear of being implicated along with the heretic monk. There was a move to expel him from the Carmelite order, and only his sickness spared him this last ignominy. Suffering fever and ulcers on the legs, he went to nearby Ubeda for medical care, where the Prior refused to give him the barest necessities. Treated with vengeful hostility, he suffered insults and humiliation. As the ulcers spread, his health declined and his body literally rotted away. Saint John died at midnight on December 14, 1591.
Juan’s death set the town of Ubeda in a panic because of a popular belief that he was a saint. Though it was cold and raining, crowds entered the convent that night to tear off parts of his clothing, bandages, and even ulcerous flesh. He was buried in Ubeda, but Segovia claimed the corpse of its native son and finally, after nine months, a royal warrant was obtained and his corpse dug up at night. According to accepted legend, his body had not decayed and gave off a sweet aroma, which many cite as proof of his saintliness. So strong was the desire to possess something of the saint that parts of his body were cut off, embalmed, and kept as relics. He was deprived of a leg, which was left behind at Ubeda, an arm in Madrid, and fingers in various holy places. After his body reached Segovia, a counter-appeal came to Rome from Ubeda and his remaining limbs were cut off and sent back there. It was the ultimate paradox of a life marked by torture and misery, a pitiful bodily death marked by scorn and exile and finally macabre disfigurement as eager admirers fought over his remains. During his lifetime, Saint John had sought, within the confines of a small cell, to see through the darkness and become entranced by beauty, to give himself entirely to the individual quest for light and love. Pope Clement X blessed him almost a hundred years after his death in 1675. A half century later, in 1726, Pope Benedict XIII canonized Saint John and exactly two centuries after that, in 1926, Pius XI declared him a Doctor of the Catholic Church.
Reception
The first editions of Saint John of the Cross’s poetry were published in Alcala, 1618 (without “The Spiritual Canticle”); in Barcelona, 1619 (without “The Spiritual Canticle”); in Paris, 1622; in Brussels, 1627; and in Madrid, 1627. The second edition was not published until 1703 in Seville. Never intended for popular consumption, Saint John’s writings did not receive a popularly enthusiastic reception. Saint John’s poetry has rather been fare for subsequent poets. He influenced French Symbolists, such as Arthur Rimbaud and Stephane Mallarmé, as well as the Spanish poets Juan Ramon Jimenez, Jorge Guillen, and Pedro Salinas, and the Mexican Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz. His influence has extended to English poets as well, including T.S. Eliot, whose verse “East Coker” is a tribute to Saint John of the Cross’s “The Ascent of Mount Carmel.” In contrast to many of these poets, who searched for the ineffable essence of poetry, Saint John fixated his talents on finding the essence of God.
—Jorge Aladro
For More Information
Allison Peers, E. Studies of The Spanish Mystics. London: Macmillan, 1951.
Alonso, Dámaso. La Poesía de San Juan de La Cruz. Madrid: Aguilar, 1966.
Brenan, Gerald. “Studies in Genius-II: St. John of the Cross, His Life and Poetry.” Horizon (May 1947).
Guillén, Jorge. Language and Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961.
John of the Cross, Saint. The Poems of Saint John of the Cross. Trans. Willis Barnstone. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972.
López-Baralt, Luce. San Juan de la Cruz y el Islam. Madrid: Hiperión, 1990.
Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism. New York: Doubleday, 1990.
Wilson, Margaret. San Juan de la Cruz. A Critical Guide. London: Grant and Cutler, 1975.