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ST JOHN OF THE CROSS

by Hans Urs von Balthasar

A drawing based on the Crucifix painted by John of the Cross

Introduction: "Then one summer, on the beach at Ocean Grove, New Jersey, I read St. John of the Cross. I did not understand much of it, but I knew, with undeniable certainty, that here was reality, something as massive and positive as a mountain range.

I felt as if I had just come out of a small, comfortable cave, in which I had lived all my life, and found that there was an unexpected world outside of incredible dimensions.

Above all, the dimensions were those of holiness, goodness, purity of heart, obedience to the first and greatest commandment, willing God's will, the one absolute I had discovered, at the age of eight. I was very far from saintly, but that did not prevent me from fascinated admiration from afar; the valley dweller appreciates the height of the mountain more than the dweller on the foothills.

I read some other Catholic saints and mystics, and discovered the same reality there, however different the style (even St. Therese 'The Little Flower'!). I felt sure it was the same reality I had learned to love from my parents and teachers, only a far deeper version of it. It did not seem alien and other. It was not another religion but the adult version of my own." (Peter Kreeft, recounting his experience as a young Protestant college student)

I present this essay on St John of the Cross by Hans Urs von Balthasar to invite others to explore the great doctrine of a saint larger than life itself, and to perhaps glimpse something of the magnificence of the Catholic mystical tradition. St John of the Cross is a true "artist" of the Gospel, whose poems are considered by many the high point of Spanish lyrical poetry, and who is a Doctor/Teacher of the Universal Church precisely as Poet-Saint-Mystic. His influence is incalculable even today!

1. THE PERFECT ADVENTURE

Between Dante and St John of the Cross come Luther and the Reformation. But also in between come Columbus and the new experience of a spherical earth, and Copernicus and the opening up of space, which was to render the old theological image of the cosmos obsolete. The Carmelite reform is a conscious response to the first of these revolutions and reflects the second in passing, the third will not be confronted until Pascal. The Reformers banished aesthetics from theology, John of the Cross, the uncompromising ascetic, and Pascal, the man influenced by Jansenism, respond to that banishment with a new aesthetic theology that stands in sharp confrontation with the German Reformation.

The effect of both the new sense of the earth's spherical nature and of the new science of the cosmos was to destroy the myth of the 'perspicuity' of the analogia entis as presupposed and developed in Dante's cosmos -- the analogy between earth and Heaven, the former age and the new age, the world of the body and the world of the spirit, nature and grace, knowledge and faith, man and God. And the destruction of the analogia entis prepares the way for the Lutheran dialectic between the kingdoms and for the principle of sola fide. The latter was not only a declaration of war against the philosophizing of the Middle Ages but also an act of defiance against the approaching new era. The two authors we are now to consider resist sola fide but daringly combine its Christian radicalism with a new form of perspicuity, a profound aesthetic experience. Christian tradition makes its contribution to this new aesthetic. John of the Cross reforms an old contemplative order with its roots in Palestine; he responds, fundamentally, with the theology of the Christian East. If we are to see St John in his right setting, we must never forget that as a young theological student in Salamanca he sketched out a programmatic treatise on the nature of Christian mysticism.

In this evidently to find firm ground from which to combat Illuminism and everything for which it had been condemned by the Church -- he draws upon Patristic tradition, 'especially on Dionysius and Gregory the Great'. It is precisely in these two theologians that he finds his justification for representing the mystical way as absolutely the way to God: it is the Christian way that contains within itself the truth of Platonism, even the whole Far Eastern quest for God, including Buddha and Lao-tse.

And, although mysticism is a way taken by only a very few, it is nonetheless the model for every way of faith, precisely because it is the way of the one and only faith. The challenge and the scandal of the Carmelite response to Luther lie in the fact that it incorporates the whole of monastic tradition from the Greeks up to and including the Middle Ages into the new Christian radicalism; indeed, with its modern orientation toward personal, experiential and psychological categories, the Carmelite response makes the new radicalism more radical than ever.

In contrast, Pascal responds to the Reformation from the perspective of Luther's own Augustinian, Western tradition, which he combines (this had never been done before) with the outlook of modern science to form something unique and remarkable. However, both John of the Cross and Pascal stress, albeit in different ways, the aspect of the experience of faith over the Reformers' assurance of faith. This experience of faith is a verification, at once both subjective and objective, of the Christian mystery in the believing person and, for both authors, stands in outright opposition to the light of reason.

The illuminatio of Plato and Augustine is no longer a mediating link between philosophy and theology; the distinction has clearly become a division, and only from above, from the point of view of faith, can the two orders be understood as a unity. Natural theology may be possible 'in itself', but it no longer has any existential force. 'The truth is that one must ever adhere to Christ's teaching, and that everything else is nothing' (Ascent,ii,22,8). The shadowy notion of God that natural reason can gain from its own resources does not interest John. He desires God as he is in himself, and this God can be known only through God. Pascal, likewise, does not deny the 'God of the Philosophers', but concerns himself only with the God of Abraham and of Christ.

God alone suffices. Man is created, called, endowed with grace, for the sake of the vision of God, for participation in the inner, triune life of eternal love. Man, who is relative, is what he is for the sake of the Absolute, and inasmuch as the Absolute outweighs the relative, so in human desire God must outweigh all created things. God for his part is pure, radiant love, a love that is open to the creature and desires its participation in the absolute and ontological unity of the Godhead.

Such participation is possible when divine love becomes the loving action of the creature itself. 'So great a union between God and the soul is caused that all the things of both God and the soul become one in participant transformation (unas en transformacion participante), and the soul appears (parece) to be God more than a soul. Indeed, it is God by participation (y aun es Dios por participacion). Yet in truth its being (even though transformed) is naturally as distinct from God's as it was before. This, this alone, is 'man in truth' (Ascent,ii,5,7). Compared with this idea of God as man's origin and destiny, all other representations of human nature are lifeless abstractions. Man is the 'image and likeness of God', but compared with the truth, he remains an image and a likeness.

What does it matter if only a few recognize and respond here on earth to this natural vocation, which everyone else will attain one day after terrible purification and retraining in the fire of Purgatory? Since when has the 'little flock', the 'strait gate', the 'narrow way' been any kind of objection or counterargument in a Christian context? There are only a few, but 'not because God wishes that there be only a few of these spirits so elevated; he would rather that all would be perfect, but he finds few vessels that will endure so lofty and sublime a work' (Living Flame,ii,27).

And yet this work is also a commitment to the unrelenting imitation of Christ, the vida apostolica, by which the world is crucified to me, and I to the world, and here John is faithful to tradition, which sees such imitation as transcending the opposition between contemplation and action.

Elsewhere John acknowledges that God selects specific individuals to share in this ultimate 'truth about man', those namely who in turn are destined to be imitated themselves, men who must be, like Moses, Elijah, Paul, 'sources of the spirit in the church', spiritual 'founding fathers', whose 'virtue and spirit are to be diffused among their children'' (Ascent,ii,24,3).

The challenge of St John of the Cross is that he flings the old slogan, 'God alone suffices', in the face of a world increasingly convinced of its own importance, and he does this with an exclusiveness that effectively makes the realization of 'man in truth' the preserve of a few. It is certainly the case that throughout all his works there is an unrelenting reductionism that knocks down everything in its way. All truths, every good and worthy object, anything that is not 'God in himself' is relativized and set in motion, and must be abandoned and transcended for the love of God.

That the good things of creation should be in this category is not especially surprising from a Christian point of view, but it is surprising that in this he includes no less emphatically, even more emphatically, all that is supernaturally valuable and good, everything that is in any sense God's 'operation' in the world or in man yet which, as such, can be distinguished from God himself: virtues, charisms, illuminations, consolations, visions, and so on. Indeed, in this respect the reformer of Carmel seems to want to be more radical than Luther, because he too, without any suggestion of scepticism, interprets everything with objective form in the historical relevation utterly and completely in terms of the making present of God's interiority.

Such a devastating and sweeping programme was unheard of in the Church since the days of Evagrius Ponticus. And we may reasonably ask whether such an attempt to pierce through the historical form to the Absolute does not already bring us close to the spirit of the Enlightenment; certainly the comparison with Hegel becomes unavoidable. And yet, for all that, John of the Cross has been raised up to be a Doctor of the Church, not least because of his remorseless power of discrimination.

John goes along, and points us toward, the essential way to God, and so he too, like Dante, brings the 'hereafter' into existence in this world, or rather, since in Christ the hereafter has entered the here and now, he shows us the depths of eternity within life itself. He too, like Dante, must enter the night of Hell, for only in the absolute distinction between the sinful creature and the absolute God in his total purity can the divine in its truth be perceived.

But it is a demythologized night; there is no Virgil for a guide, no conversations with the damned; I myself am Hell. 'Sometimes this experience is so vivid that it seems to the soul that it sees Hell and perdition open before it. These are the ones who go down into Hell alive.' Placed before the naked reality of the Absolute, which presents itself to her in the mode of privation and dispossession, the soul endures an 'infinite death' in her languishing and suffering, 'a living image of that infinite privation'.

This experience clarifies for John the meaning of the Old Testament, and he quotes in long passages from Job, Jeremiah and Jonah, whose lot it was to experience the wrath of God, total abandonment by God. "'Your wrath weighs upon me, and all your waves you have let loose"... for in truth the soul experiences the sorrows of Hell, all of which reflect the feeling of God's absence, of being chastised and rejected by him.... The soul experiences all this and even more, for now it seems that this affliction will last for ever.'

The soul 'feels terrible annihilation as an event in its very substance', her hope in God vanishes, and with it any prospect of an end to the night, she 'resembles one who is imprisoned in a dark dungeon, bound hands and feet, and able neither to move, nor see, nor feel any favor from heaven or earth'. 'She must feel a withdrawal, deprivation, emptiness, and poverty regarding these blessings. And a person must be brought to think that he is far removed from them, and become so convinced that no one can persuade him otherwise or make him believe anything but that his blessings have come to an end.'

Prayer becomes impossible for the soul; it cannot be that God hears. We must have great compassion for a soul such as this, pursued in such a manner by the fire of God, for what happens to her remains beyond her understanding until the end: the darknesses cannot comprehend the light.

Abandonment is experienced subjectively as the fire of Hell, but from God's perspective it is the fire of Purgatory. For St Thomas Aquinas the two fires were but one. And John says that the agonies of the soul abandoned by God are 'almost like the agonies of Purgatory'. The trials, which the soul on the way to total union with God has to undergo here on earth, correspond to the fire that the rest will face in Purgatory. Souls in both cases suffer great doubts about whether they will ever be released from these afflictions (an idea that Pascal will defend).

Thus we are invited to 'form an idea of the sufferings of Purgatory' from this experience of night. We should not see all this as mere simile; no, as regards the suffering, there is an identity between the two states, even if objectively the 'dark fire' that purifies here below is a 'dark, loving spiritual fire'. This love penetrates and purifies the soul.

Its effect is like that of fire on wood. First, the fire blackens and dries the wood, causes it to sweat and this envelops it with smoke, but then, when it has been purified in this way, the wood is burnt through from within and transformed into fire. So too, when the living flame of love in which the soul burns has reached its goal, heaven is anticipated. It is, first of all, an 'earthly paradise' resulting from the purgation of the senses and of the spirit in which the soul attains baptismal innocence and complete subjection to God.

But later it becomes an anticipation of eternal blessedness itself, from the final perfection of which the soul is separated by only a thin veil, while at the same time she is already bathed in its glory. St John's work reaches its peak in the description of these explosions of glory (gloria) from the fire of unifying love. This flaring up of divine sunlight, this 'flashing of sparks and flames', this eruption of the habit of love in the act of love promotes 'love full of divine sweetness and power' in the soul; 'it is as if [the soul] were being given eternal life to taste, since it raises her up to the activity of God in God'.

It is a direct touch (toque) of the soul by God, and she would be bound to die, were it not for the fact that the hand that wounds her very being at the same time preserves her life. 'And thus this soul will be a soul of heaven, truly heavenly and more divine than human.' Her life consists in being transported to glory, and 'God is constantly on the point of finally giving her eternal life'.

Here is a Dante deprived of all images and concentrated in a single interior experience. Instead of ditches, cornices and spheres there is nothing except God: the purifying God of the night, who transfigures the soul, raising her higher and higher. And this is the message: it really exists, this way out of the somber prison of human nature, this flight that the first stanza of the poem of the Dark Night describes:

En una noche oscura
Con ansias en amores inflamada'
Oh dicliosa ventura!
Sali sin ser notada,
Estando ya mi casa sosegada.

A oscuras, y segura
Por la secreta escala, disfrazada,
Oh dichosa ventura!
A oscuras y en celada
Estando ya mi casa sosegada.

("One dark night, / Fired with love's urgent longings / -Ah, blessed adventure-- / I went out unseen, / My house being now all stilled; / In darkness, and secure, / By the secret ladder, disguised, / -Ah, blessed adventure / In darkness and concealment, / My house being now all stilled.")

Yes, this is the night, this is love's venture in darkness and disguise, by a secret stair, leaving everything behind and passing over to attain another, divine and unlimited world. John's whole work is a summons to this unique and necessary adventure. In place of Dante's images there are images of world discovery with all the pathos of the age of the Conquistadores.

The Bridegroom is asked to look at the companions of the Bride, who go 'with her through strange islands' (de la que vapor insulas extranas), which are interpreted as 'modes and ways that are foreign to all the senses and to common natural knowledge'.

Elsewhere the Bridegroom is compared to 'lonely wooded valleys' and 'wonderfully strange islands'. This is explained as follows: 'The wonderfully strange islands are surrounded by water and situated across the sea, far withdrawn and cut off from communication with other men. Many things very different from what we have here are born and nurtured in these islands; they are of many strange kinds and powers never before seen by men, and they cause surprise and wonder in anyone who sees them. Thus, because of the wonderful new things and the wonderful strange knowledge (far removed from common knowledge) that the soul sees in God, she refers to him as "wonderfully strange islands".

A man is called strange for either of two reasons: he is withdrawn from people, or, compared with other men, he is singular and superior in his deeds and works. The soul calls God "strange" for these two reasons.... It is no wonder then that God is strange to men who have not seen him, since he is also strange to the holy angels and to the blessed. For the angels and the blessed are incapable of seeing him fully, nor will they ever be capable of doing so.'

Thus the image of the strangely seductive island is lost in the image of the all-engulfing ocean: 'to assert that the way and the road to God by which the soul travels toward him is in the sea and her footsteps in many waters and the way thereby is unknowable is to say that the way to God is as hidden and secret to the sensory part of the soul as are the footsteps of one walking on water imperceptible to the bodily senses'; the joy that she finds in God 'is like the sea, which does not diminish for all the water that is drawn of it or for the rivers that run into it'.

And the image of the sea in turn blends with that of darkness (esta agua tenebrosa), and of the unending wilderness (un immense desierto). The existentially interpreted images of the Old Testament are also taken up here: the exodus from Egypt, the drowning of the foe in the sea of contemplation so that the soul may be brought 'into the freedom and holy rest of the children of God, into the wilderness' and likewise the rocky mountain of Carmel, upon which 'our holy father Elijah' found his God.

Whatever its diversity, the only function of the imagery is to point to the conquista that leads the soul, which feels its way through the darkness, per caminos nuevos nunca sabidos to a sabiduria oscura. The notion of secrecy is central to the thought of St John of the Cross, although his doctrine betrays no trace of any kind of 'secret knowledge', is infinitely far removed from all Cabbalism, from Bohme and Swedenborg, for it makes no claim to anything particular or definite by way of experience and encounter; all it offers is the imageless, limitless expanse of the incomprehensible God.

What is secret here is precisely what is proclaimed and taken for granted in all public places and (especially) in every part of the Church. And yet no one knows the secret, no one can make it his own. Of its very nature it can be recognized only as a mystery, and an eternal mystery it remains and becomes so more and more for one who encounters it once and eternally. John retains the traditional term 'mystical theology', used from Denys onward; indeed, there are several explicit references to the Areopagite.

For John 'mystical theology' is not primarily a subjective, secret learning, but rather, knowledge about the objective mystery of God. The skotous aktis, the 'ray of darkness', is dark precisely because the soul is not adapted to the extreme light, but the adaptation, so far as it is possible, consists in being caught up in the essential mystery. But the soul's adaptation and initiation can be only secondary reasons for this learning being secret, ('La sciencia sabrosa ... es la teologia mistica que es sciencia secrete de Dios, que llaman los espirituales contemplacion'), and the distinction from ordinary knowledge consists not in the knowledge as such, but in the love that it alone mediates and in which it selectively operates.

What God communicates directly to the soul of himself 'always remains secret and ineffable ... the soul is like a man who beholds an object never before seen in itself or in its likeness: he understands, he finds satisfaction in it, and yet he cannot give it a name. The language of God has that trait' -- the discovery of the 'incomparable newness of God', of his absolute vivacity (he is 'more mobile than all mobile things' [according to Wisd 7.24], more active than all active things), and the contemplation of all creatures within this eternal newness.

His wealth is all the greater, because it is 'concealed in his infinite unity and simplicity'. It is an 'absolute secret between the spirit and God' a haven and hiding place in the face of God: 'You dwell permanently hidden within them.... As a result "you hide them in the secret of your face", which is the Word, "from the disturbance of men"' (cf. Ps 30:21). The soul then understands the meaning of the text from the Apocalypse: 'To him who conquers ... I will give ... a precious stone, with a new name written on the stone that no one can read except him who receives it' (2:17).

This secret alone is the absolute 'refuge' (refugio) beyond all worldly danger and the soul's own acts and habits, the 'concealment' (escondrijo), where she remains in great security (seguridad), surrounded by the 'wall' (muro) and 'enclosure of peace' (vallado de paz), and thus in 'great solitude away from all things' (gran soledad de todas las cosas).

It is the solitude into which God led his people to speak to them and to marry them (Hos 2:16), the silence in which the words of infinite wisdom are heard. What is hidden is also secure: 'If the soul possesses these things in secret (a solas), she also understands them in secret; her desire is that her secret may be very hidden, very deep, as far as possible from any external communication. In this she is like the merchant with the pearl, or even better, like the man who found a treasure hidden in a field, covered it up and then went off in joy to buy that field.' This is not secrecy for its own sake; no, it is of the nature of love that she 'reveals her mysteries only to her friends'. So the soul presses for permission to go deeper and deeper into the 'thicket' (espesura) of God, 'which is so deep and immense that no matter how much the soul knows she can always enter it further'.

This fact must always be taken into account and considered whenever one is dealing with the revelation of God in Christ and the interpretation that in the course of the Church's history the revelation has been given; God's triune wisdom is 'so well concealed that however numerous are the mysteries and marvels that holy doctors have discovered and saintly souls have contemplated in this earthly life, far more is yet to be said and understood. There is much to fathom in Christ, for he is like an abundant mine with uncounted recesses of treasures, so that however deep men go they never reach the end or bottom, but rather in every recess find new veins with new riches everywhere'.

Medieval ways to God were, for the most part, 'ascents', ladders that were meant to lead the soul closer to God by means of an ingenious series of spiritual acts and habits (active renunciations and contemplative dispositions). St John of the Cross lived within this tradition and even availed himself of entire sections of these schemes of ascent in his works (such as the decem gradus amoris sec. S. Bernardum of pseudo-Thomas Aquinas).

Nonetheless, his criticism of all acts and habits places him far beyond these ways of ascent. His approach is no matter of cleverly dovetailing the via negativa and the via positiva into the via eminentiae. No, John is much closer to the original rhythms of Denys, although he is much more consistent and relentless in his logic: everything is gained when everything is abandoned, the ship lands when it is wrecked, you leap on to firm ground when all the rungs of your ladder break.

El Greco's View of Toledo

It is like St John of the Cross's own leap when he escaped by night from the Toledo convent after nine terrible months in the custody of the Calced Carmelites. He improvised a rope by knotting together his sheets, but it did not reach far enough, and so he had to jump down onto the ramparts, narrowly missing the chasm of rocks by the banks of the Tajo, where he would have been dashed to pieces. It is true that the 'night' is a way through, a purifying emergence into an exceedingly great light (this notion of a 'way through' is most clearly emphasized in Living Flame ii, 28-31), and yet it is the permanent means of making the decisive spiritual jump, and it remains absolutely identical with contemplation.

If the commentaries pay more attention to the first aspect, the poems concentrate more on the second, and the poems, as we shall see, are decisive. This is true of the powerful poem, composed in the Toledo prison, with its refrain about the night:

Que bien se yo la fonte que mana y corre
Aunque es de noche--

('For I know well the spring that flows and runs, / Although it is night.')

- the spring known well only through faith (although it is night), whose origin is unknown, because it has none, and yet from it, it derives its whole being (although it is night), and there is nothing so beautiful, Heaven and earth drink refreshment there (although it is night); it is a bottomless abyss and no ford to cross it can be found (although it is night), 'its clarity is never darkened, and from it proceeds all light (although it is night): -- 'Rich are the streams and full -- this know I well; / They water nations, heav'ns and depths of Hell, / Although 'tis night.'

With this we should take the other poem from the time of John's imprisonment, perhaps the most daring he wrote, a transposition of the psalm 'By the waters of Babylon'. Babylon here is the world (including the earthly Church in her external aspect), Sion is God, the soul's true homeland, for which she longs. 'The strangers (outsiders, extranos) among whom I was captive rejoiced; they asked me to sing what I sang in Sion: "Sing us a song from Sion, let's hear how it sounds." I said: "How can I sing in a strange land where I weep for Sion, sing of the happiness that I had there?" I would be forgetting her if rejoiced in a strange land. May the tongue I speak with cling to my palate ... if I celebrate one feastday or feast at all without you.'

In place of the original Jewish conclusion ('O daughter of Babylon, you devastator, . . . happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!'), there is a profound allegory:

Oh hija de Babilonia,
Misera y desventurada!
Bienaventurada era
Aquel en quien confiaba,
Que te ha de dar el castigo
Que de tu mano llevaba.
Y juntara sus pequenos,
Y a mi, porque en ti lloriba,
A la piedra que era Cristo,
Por el cual yo te dejaba.

('O Daughter of Babylon, / Miserable and wretched! / Blessed is he / In whom I have trusted, / For he will punish you / As you have me; / And he will gather your little ones / And me, who wept because of you / At the rock who is Christ / For whom I abandoned you.')

Accursed Babylon must be dashed, with her children, on the rock of Christ; that is all that can be sung when deprived of Sion. But the singer's revenge, the punishment he wants to inflict on his tormentress, is the revenge of eternal love, and the singer himself wants to suffer that with her -- indeed, he is already in the midst of suffering, for he too has been dashed.

This is an adventure in the atmosphere of extreme secrecy -- escaping to Sion from captivity in Babylon, by night, disguised, on a secret stair, not approaching by degrees, but dancing to the rhythm of nada-todo.

'To reach satisfaction in all
Desire its possession in nothing.
To come to the knowledge of all,
Desire the knowledge of nothing.

To arrive at being all,
Desire to be nothing.
To come to the pleasure you have not,
You must go by a way in which you know not.

To come to the possession you have not,
You must go by a way in which you possess not.
To come to be what you are not,
You must go by a way in which you are not.'

This has a dramatic force beyond that of any human drama. The soul goes into the night of the All. First she enters the night, then she is swallowed up in it. Thus she learns that the All that she walks toward is not a Something. God is not only the 'wholly other'; he transcends the most extreme opposition as the non-Aliud.

The soul has herself to realize something that transcends the distinction between subject and object, and yet which, of her very nature, she can realize only by means of that distinction. But if she is to do this, the soul is required to come out from all the confines of life, and such emergence is possible only through a love stronger than Hell, a life stronger than death.

This love does not attain the beloved by its own powers, but jumps and is caught by the open arms of the love of God, who transforms the soul from being a lover into a beloved. But this happens only when love of itself goes to the outer limit, like the love of Mary Magdalene who sought the beloved alive among the dead. Beatrice lives, and Dante, by practicing penance and renunciation, can live and approach her. But Christ has died and withdrawn himself from the Bride, and she must seek him in real death by dying with him. What Mary Magdalene does at Simon the Pharisee's banquet is bold and shows the enthusiasm of her love, but what she does by the tomb flies in the face of reason, 'yet it is of the nature of love to regard everything as possible'.

That is why the Bride in the Canticle likewise goes out into the streets to ask about her lover when he disappears. She is like 'the lioness or she-bear that goes in search of her cubs when they are taken away and cannot be found. So the soul in her loss goes out in search of her God. Since she is immersed in darkness, she feels his absence and that she is dying with love of him. She is like Rachel in her longing to bear children when she says to Jacob, "Give me children, otherwise I will die"' (Gen 30.1). The nights she spends going hither and thither serve not only to purify her but, above all, also to give her that breadth of vision required of her if she is to see that 'he is nothing of all that I know and am, and only if all becomes nothing for me can he become my All'. 'Whoever refuses to go out at night in search of the Beloved ... but rather seeks him in his own ... comfort ... will not succeed in finding him.'

2. THE PARADOX OF MYSTICAL POETRY

The love that survives every death but which also has to undergo every death in order to survive: this is the solution of the agonizing paradox of how supreme poetic beauty can blossom forth from such negation. For there is no doubt about it: the reformer of Carmel responds to the negation of the Protestant reformers with beauty; to the destructive dialectical Word with the constructive poetic Word.

The poems are the decisive statement in St John of the Cross's work. Compared with the poems, the commentaries are of a lower level; by his own admission they are quite inadequate and incapable of doing justice to the content of the inspired words in all their simplicity. The commentaries refer the reader to the more compact, more pregnant figuras, comparaciones y semejanzas. These disclose their meaning, says the poet, only if read 'in the simplicity of the spirit of love'; otherwise they 'seem to be absurdities rather than reasonable utterances', as is true of the poetic parts of the Bible.

'Since these stanzas, then, were composed in a love flowing from abundant mystical understanding, I cannot explain them adequately. Though we give some explanation of these stanzas, there is no reason to be bound to this explanation. For mystical wisdom, which is the subject of these stanzas, is understood through love and need not be understood distinctly in order to cause love and affection in the soul, for it is given according to the mode of faith, through which we love God without understanding him.'

And lest we be tempted to think that this poetry is the mere product of a heart tormented by overflowing love, John brings it all back to the revelation of God, to the Word in scripture: he 'submits himself in advance ... unconditionally to the Judgment of our holy Mother the Church'. 'I do not intend to affirm anything of myself nor trust in any of my own experiences nor in those of other spiritual persons whom I have known or heard of. Although I plan to make use of these experiences, I want to explain and confirm at least the more difficult matters through passages from sacred Scripture.'

And this can be seen not only in the prose commentary, which seeks to safeguard, as it were, the boldness of the verse by means of scriptural quotations, but also in the poetry itself. The poems consist of a paraphrase, in the case of the Spiritual Canticle, of the Song of Songs (although precisely how much of it is paraphrase, it is impossible to say), an adaptation of one of the psalms and the transposition of themes from the gospels, especially St John's prologue (as in the case of the great romance on the Trinity and the Incarnation). But scriptural influence is particularly evident in the most characteristic creations of St John of the Cross's genius: the poems of the Dark Night, the poems of the Living Flame, the verses about the ecstatic hunt for divine game.

Here the literary problem presents itself, although as yet we are only on the threshold of St John's work. St John's poems are praised by many as the crown of Spanish lyric poetry: consequently, they have a certain affinity with other poetry of the period. Ramon Lull, in his most interior work (The Book of the Lover and the Beloved), consciously imitated the forms of the Sufi mystic poets. Similarly, St John explicitly refers to the great lyric poet Garcilaso, who died young (+1536. It is true that John speaks of Garcilaso's friend, Boscan, who died in 1542, but the poetry of both writers appeared together, and both are founders of the Italian style in Spain). We find in Garcilaso's work the pastoral motifs familiar to us from St John: springs and thickets, nymphs, sirens and nightingales, shepherds and shepherdesses; indeed we even find themes that we tend to think of as being peculiar to the mystic. In Garcilaso we find the stanza:

'Finally on the fifth night my cruel fate departed,
to lead me to where the thick texture of life
was to be broken up and my little house was to leave me
in the silence of the dark night.'

Alonso, however, has shown that there was an intermediate link, the work of a certain Sebastiin of Cordoba, Las Obras de Boschn y Garcilaso trasladadas en materias cristianas y religiosas (Ubeda, 1757), in which, for example, the lament of two shepherds is transformed into the allegorical lament of the divine shepherd Christ, which, like St John's magnificent pastoral poem, even speaks of 'a shepherd, lifted up upon that tree, his face and forehead wounded and crowned with thorns'.

But it was not only in these naive, complicated allegories that the synthesis of classical/worldly and biblical/spiritual poetry was already established and taken for granted. It was also an accepted part of the late-humanist, early Baroque milieu Juan de Yepes encountered in the Jesuit College at Medina del Campo and, above all, in the 'Castilian Athens', the University of Salamanca. The great Fray Luis de Leon, who in the most difficult periods of the Inquisition and the Index sought to translate the Bible (especially the poetic books) into Castilian, at the same time translated the Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil, Pindar, Horace and Tibullus, and wrote the sublime, neo-Platonic Ode to Salina (who had published a work on music) on the subject of the harmony of God in the world.

Other elements that contribute to this synthesis in St John's work are the old folk songs with their coplas (stanzas with refrains) and romances (epic poems on themes of national history). The latter too had undergone spiritual transposition (glosas a lo divino) and echo throughout nearly all of John's poetry. Like Theresa of Avila, John was a great lover of song. 'He used to sing as he walked', testifies a brother who often accompanied him on the stony path from Beas to the hermitage of Calvario. Folk poetry spoke directly to the heart and had none of the affectation of the theological travesties of Garcilaso. John's refrains -- 'I know not what', 'Dying because I do not die'--have their origin in simple love songs, now transposed into the highest sphere.

It is precisely against this background of a synthesis of biblical/theological, classical/humanist and popular/national elements that the Song of Songs emerges in all its original, pastoral freshness. This was the imperishable jewel for which the Christian tradition had forged an inestimably precious monstrance of spiritual commentaries in mystic filigree. And the Song of Songs, in its turn, does not stand alone, but is a treasury of images and symbols, whose effectiveness depends on their place within the total meaning of divine revelation.

Thus they require no 'strange speech' (allegoria) to make them religiously comprehensible and tolerable. No, their authenticity derives from the conubium between God and mankind. The word of the old covenant has, ultimately, a rigidity and narrowness from which it is set free when the new and everlasting covenant, the totality of revelation dawns, in which the Logos of scripture is expounded in the freedom of the Holy Spirit. This whole free treatment of the biblical Canticum in the Spanish mystic's Cantico (for which he claims divine inspiration) is a reflection of what is certainly an unprecedented and audacious achievement: the 'appropriation' of the entire sphere of the Logos by the Holy Spirit of the Church.

All manner of creatures come into this new poem, although they are inconspicuous in the commentary and do not even receive any particular emphasis: 'the nymphs of Judaea' (St. 3 1), the 'singing sirens' (St. 30), the 'sweet nightingale' (St. 38). Likewise, completely unemphasized (as so often with great poets), the whole worldly/spiritual atmosphere of folk song comes into the work.

It would be absurd to deny these influences, as would be the attempt to exclude specific literary names in favour of a merely indefinite atmospheric influence in order to prove that St John's inspiration was not profane but purely spiritual, purely mystical. To resist such attempts is not to deny the fact now to be considered; namely, that all these influences do not, do not in any way, place in doubt the creative power of St John's genius. He soars like an eagle up to the lofty solitude of his experience of God, and thence alone is born the language that will be the vehicle for his equally solitary artistic works.

Eckhart describes the divine birth of the eternal Son in the soul. It is the same Word of God, encountering and dwelling in the soul together with his Spirit, which constitutes the only sphere from which, in the final analysis, Eckhart's word and John's poetry originate. But how are the spheres within this larger sphere of influence to be distinguished? There is, first of all, the direct perception of 'substantial locutions' from substance to substance, the evocations of man's most primitive symbols -- night, light, water, ringing sounds -- flowing almost directly from the same profoundly interior source.

Then there is the recalling of the hallowed words and images of the Bible, which are theologically interwoven and caught up to the heights of interior inspiration. Finally, there is the whole range of expressive material formed by natural images and the beloved and long-cherished symbols familiar from literature. Who can confirm this and neatly separate the various levels? Who can divide the spheres of supernatural and natural inspiration? Why shouldn't the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit at the same time awaken all of the powers of artistic enthusiasm and creative inventiveness where such powers exist?

And who would want to maintain that such elevation of man's creative ability to the service, both passive and active, of the divine Word is impossible or inadmissible from a Christian point of view or incompatible with supreme holiness? On the contrary, this poetry claims to be a direct expression and incontrovertible testimony to such engraced holiness, a reflection of its splendor. The expression as such, of course, is not 'necessary', because the holiness could occur without poetry, but the two originate from the same sphere of loving freedom in the soul's relationship with God; both are the overwhelming splendor of grace, an 'inundation with glory' (toda la sustancia del alma banada en gloria; aquella llama, acada vez que llamea, bana al alma en gloria).

Baruzi tried to insert a clearly defined series of stages between the symbolism, in the strict sense, of the poems of the Dark Night and the allegorical imagery of the Canticle and the Living Flame; only the former spring from the highest and most interior sphere. But the transition (which in several places is noticeable) is much smoother; it is precisely the Canticle that contains stanzas or at least lines of supreme symbolic inventiveness, such as the incomparable eleventh:

O cristalina fuente
Si en esos tus semblantes plateados
formases de repente
Los ojos deseados
que tengo en mis entranas dibujados.

('O spring like crystal! / If only, on your silvered-over face, / You would suddenly form / The eyes I have desired, / Which I bear sketched deep within my heart!')

It is entirely logical that the prose commentary should interpret the flowing spring as faith (we must, of course, recall what this word means for St John) and the 'silvered-over face', the 'external appearance', as the individual 'propositions of the faith', which here on earth are 'silver' and only in the life to come will reveal the gold that lies beneath. Equally logically, the 'eyes I have desired' are interpreted as 'divine rays' and 'divine truths', which here below enlighten us through the articles of faith, though still obscurely. The fact that these eyes are 'hinted at', 'sketched', within the heart of man means certainly that in the infused virtues the heart possesses these truths, albeit obscurely and imperfectly.

Besides this, says the commentary, there is another sketch, the sketch of love. The lover carries the image of the beloved in his heart, and 'transforming love produces such likeness in the lovers that one can say that each is the other and both are one'. All this is beautiful and true, but how hopelessly it limps behind the vision!

How wonderful is that unresolved, ardent 'yes': if only it could happen, if only on that smoothly flowing, simmering surface (and yet it is the surface of the spring itself, which is crystalline and transparent to the depths and for that very reason is unfathomable) you would suddenly (exaiphnes) let the real vision, the unfathomable depths of the eye, burst open -- videntem videre! -- those depths, whose shadow, outline, intimation lies in the eye and spring of my own soul; if only you would stand in front of me and yet be in me, if only before my eyes and yet in my eyes you would open up your own eye.

The commentary does well here to point, by restricting and defining, to the Credo in all its objectivity. For it is only when the objective dimension of the revelation of the triune God in the incarnate Son is opened up that this mutual regard of God and the soul in the Holy Spirit can be understood in all its true breadth and depth and can be preserved from all misleading identification.

This is but one example among very many of the qualitative superiority of the poetic statement over the prose restatement, although the poet is always aware that even the most accomplished poetic statement, together with its inspiration, is only ever an echo, an ardent pointer toward the original divine spiratio. The center of the mystic act is beyond the center of the poetic act. The center of the latter is on the periphery of the former, even though the poem is conceived in the more secret womb of mystical experience; the poem is the echo of the experience, testifying and referring and pressing back to it.

In no way does the mystic's poetry go beyond the word of revelation itself; his activity is confined to the sphere of imitation, the sphere of the Holy Spirit who infuses his existential interpretation into the soul and so sets it down deep inside the womb of Christ's Bride, the Church.

This means, then, that poetry at this high level must not be considered in separation from holiness. But holiness in this qualitatively distinctive sense has no other origin except the imitation of Christ, the total stripping away of everything, the following of the evangelical counsels, the affirmation of everything that the man of this world experiences as a renunciation of the aesthetic, dissatisfaction with all this-worldly, creaturely delights, and with all enjoyment of them, whether intentional or unintentional, sinful or lawful.

It is precisely to the renunciation of the 'aesthetic' that this poetry must bear witness, if it is to be an authentic witness, in the Holy Spirit, to the bridal love of Christ and the Church, of God and the world on the Cross. We are now a long way from Bonaventure and the whole neo-Platonic ascent by stages from type to archetype. We are closer to Francis, but closer still to the remorseless sword of the Gospel word, which for the love of the One demands the hatred of everything else. And the sword must pierce to the division of the joints and marrow of the soul, to the division of the soul from itself, before the promise of the hundredfold can be fulfilled on earth.

To bear witness to this, poetry must therefore begin inside the division, as the scream of the vivisected soul in the middle of the night, in order to end in the song of praise of the soul, even more fully alive at a deeper level, wounded in the fire of glory. It is the fiery arrow of the seraph (John explicitly quotes this) that pierces the souls of Francis and Theresa -- beyond pain and pleasure, wound and health, life and death: 'Oh cauterio suave! Oh regalada llaga!' ('O sweet cautery, 0 delightful wound!') The very same cautery that touches the wound also heals it, but it heals only by penetrating deeper within it.'

It is only in this context that we see the full paradox of this 'mystical aesthetics'. John's whole work strives to isolate the individual components of this paradox with extreme clarity so that no doubt is left as to the point, the height, at which these diverse factors are reconciled and indissolubly merged. We must now consider these factors one by one.

I. Throughout all of St John's works there runs a massive negation, or more precisely, reduction. No created thing is God, and because every created thing has form, all forms must be surmounted and abandoned if the vision of God is to be possible. It is self-evident that the senses do not comprehend God. But, for John, it is no less self-evident that the intellect (entendimento) can only think something by means of the senses (solo lo que alcanza por los sentidos), and so it needs the 'figures and forms of objects, which are present either in themselves or in their likenesses.'

And so 'nothing which could possibly be imagined or comprehended in this life can be a proximate means (medio proximo) of union with God. (it would not be surprising if the Scholastic proximo, which one finds frequently but is also on occasion absent, turned out to be a prudent addition made by the editor). In our natural way of knowing, the intellect can only grasp an object through the forms and phantasms of things perceived by the bodily senses. Since these objects cannot serve as a means, the intellect cannot profit from its natural knowing. As for the supernatural way of knowing, the intellect, according to the possibilities of its ordinary power and while in the prison of the body, is neither capable nor prepared for the reception of the clear knowledge of God. Such knowledge does not belong to this state, since death is a necessary condition for possessing it.'

Thus faith takes the place of the intellect and acts, like a guide for the blind, to lead us to things 'we have never seen or known, either in themselves or in their likenesses; in fact nothing like them exists'. We know them, literally, only by 'hearsay', 'for as St Paul says. "faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes from the preaching of Christ"'.

This has all the appearance of a Nominalist/Lutheran/Kantian starting point, which now leads directly to the sweeping critique of all means and ways to God that are not those of 'pure faith'. This is a 'mystagogical', not a philosophical, critique, which therefore begins by drawing a line between relative and absolute being, an opposition to be instilled into the soul like the ABC.

If God is being, the creature is nothing; if God is beauty, the creature is ugliness; if God is pleasure, the creature is aversion; if God is goodness, the creature is evil; if God is wisdom, the creature is folly; if God is freedom, the creature is slavery. God has one kind of taste, the creature has another, and the palate of the soul cannot experience two tastes at a time. "The animal man does not perceive the things of God; they are foolishness to him and he cannot understand them" (1 Cor 2.14). By the animal man he means here the man who still lives with natural appetites and gratifications.

The fragrance of God is lost in a soul not wholly concentrated on him, just as the fragrance of a salve is lost when it is exposed to the open air. 'Creature' here always has the meaning of that which is radically other than God, which for that very reason must transcend itself, if it is to attain that participation in the Godhead that God bestows upon it. From its tasting of the finite it must draw no 'conclusions' about how the Absolute may taste; what it must do is taste it at first hand. It must, by whatever means possible by its own utmost exertions, though knowing all the time that ultimately what it seeks must be experienced passively -- give God noetically and existentially the predominance in its own self that he always has ontically.

This can be only a work of love, for in terms of being, the creature remains eternally the 'other than God'. But in transfiguring, nuptial love, the mutual otherness of God and man makes possible exchange and reciprocal indwelling. Thus the idea of flight, of rapture, plays a decisive role, although ecstasy must be thoroughly purified and transformed from its present imperfection as a bodily or physiological state of rapture into a substantial, habitual state of being borne off.

This results when the soul -- me hice perdidiza y fui ganada -- makes itself lose its very self and its way and so makes itself found by God. This hice is a reflection of the harsh anti-Reformation element in St John's life and work, although he is very much aware that the effort involved in what the soul does depends entirely on God's prevenient grace, the grace that flows from the crucified Son of God.

Despite the negativity of what it undertakes, the achievement of human Eros in causing itself to be overwhelmed by the divine Eros is something very positive, though it is from the outset always a response to God's creative and elective word of grace. Man, with all his intellectual capabilities, who 'cannot know, of himself, what God is like, must necessarily approach him like a vanquished man'.

The work of demolition, of world critique, is thus, through the transcendent power that sustains it, something quite positive, the work of a love that has been chosen by God and that, for its part, responds by making a choice of its own (and thus excludes everything else from its love). The others, who seek their gratification and glorification in this world together with God, have their reward here below. To many, of course, 'observing how we annihilate the faculties in their operations, it will perhaps seem that we are tearing down rather than building up the way of spiritual exercise'.

In reality, though, it means for the 'beginner' that his faculties are to be 'drawn away from their natural props and capacities and raised above themselves'.' And if it seems to be 'the destruction of the natural activity and use of the faculties so that man becomes like the beasts then we must not forget that this work is undertaken at God's initiative and for his sake, and that 'God does not destroy, but perfects nature'. 'The image of the peel and the core is constantly repeated; the divine fruit of the core must be extracted from the creaturely peel.'

The attack, then, is against attachment to creaturely values, the attempt to quench man's essential 'thirst' at the murky waters of human transience. The whole abstract ontology of the God-world opposition, the law, formulated time and again, of their mutual exclusiveness, 'subserves the purpose of educating the particular, fallen man with his disordered appetites.' The fault of this attachment does not depend on quantity: one grain of sand is sufficient to obstruct the vision of the eye, one thread to prevent a bird from flying.

Yahweh trained his people in the exclusiveness of love: St John cites many a passage that reveals the pointlessness of trying to find pleasure in something other than God. In so doing he succeeds in satisfying the aspirations of the great Asian mystics to free men from their 'thirst', a thirst that is tragically intensified by the experience of human transience.

Thus, at first sight, John's demands that the soul be detached from all 'forms' and 'images' can seem like the unquestioning adoption of the Platonizing mysticism of the Desert Fathers, especially that of Evagrius Ponticus. The notions of nous katharos, the gnosis aneides, haple, aulos, recur freely, and many of St John's dicta, if translated into Greek, could be incorporated directly into the Gnostic Centuries of Evagrius.

And since John, like Evagrius, writes for contemplatives, the struggle is above all against the higher, spiritually disguised forms of the capital vices. And in connection with these concealed attachments and desires for possession, the conflict is also about the renunciation and abandonment of all supernaturally imparted 'forms', be they visions of the phantasy, or definite, clearly delineated insights of the intellect, or consolations and gratifications of the will, or reminiscences for the memory to store up and hark back to.

In so far as peel and core are here taken together, there is always danger of confusing the peel with the core. But even in the most exalted visions, consolations and insights, the peel remains creaturely for that very reason, unless discerned by some higher and criterion, can harbor a good or an evil or at least an ambiguous spirit. St John's intention is to train the soul away from all these treasures to complete poverty and destitution, to prevent love from resting content with and clinging to the enjoyment of the form in which the divine manifests itself, so as to hurl it in complete nakedness into the naked reality of God.

For the beginner, representative images may be helpful, indeed indispensable, for meditation; even the proficient, whom God is already beginning to wean away from images, may have to return to them from time to time, to receive further help (there are later interpolations that try to argue thus; cf. the interpolation at the end of N i, 10 Theatine edition, 47). But the means toward the transcendence of love that are useful at the beginning later on become harmful when God himself causes essence to outweigh sign, the core to outweigh the peel.

Thus John lays down the following inexorable, broad rule of practical conduct with regard to 'forms and figures', all the supernatural ones as well as the natural: they must all, without exception, be rejected, be they from God or the devil or soul's own powers, so that the soul may hold exclusively to the formlessness of the theological virtues.

If the forms come from God, then they produce their effect in actu primo even before the soul has given her assent. From the high vantage point of divine absoluteness John does not tire in his attempts to throw light on the relative nature of those gifts of God that have a definite, perceptible form. For example, he points to the relativity of the charisms, which can be bestowed even on the unworthy; of prophecy, the content of which is so often thought out hypothetically and can depend for its fulfillment on unknown factors; of spiritual apprehensions, which can be in part the product of man's secret desires; of spiritual admonitions, which would have to be passed on to the Church, and their apparently quite definite wording which would have to be understood in an extensive, heavenly sense.

The trouble here is that the better a man thinks he has understood his mission the more incapable he is of understanding these gifts in their higher senses. To penetrate this supernatural universe seems to ordinary Christians a supreme honor, but John teaches the God-seeking soul to emigrate from it. All privileges with definite form that may come her way must be treated as if they were nothing; when confronted with them, the soul must remain uncommitted and indifferent, so that always and everywhere she can distinguish the Giver from the gift and seek and see only him in it.

On this point John is not in perfect accord with St Teresa, who was preoccupied with the configurations of visions and experiences for much longer and more deliberately than he was. Her ardent Eros was enkindled and purified precisely by the abundance of these particular graces, and in this connection she labeled John, whom she loved and treasured so much, as a spiritualist: 'God deliver us from people who are so spiritual that they want to turn everything into perfect contemplation, come what may.' She compares St John's method with the Spiritual of St Ignatius (apparently with regard to their fundamental agreement). 'It would be a bad business for us if we could not seek God until we were dead to the world. Neither the Magdalene, nor the woman of Samaria, nor the Canaanite woman was dead to the world when she found him.'

This high-spirited statement suggests a possible starting point for an anti-critique of St John's critique of all worldly forms. Whether it is justified or not, we shall see only at the end when we have gained an overall view of the way in which different aspects of John's system balance each other out.

2. The critique of forms and states in its full context is connected with the positive element of transcendence; it is for this that John makes his critique, and it is this that John, in one of his great architectonic simplifications (H. Delacroix calls him one of the 'grands simplificateurs du monde'), identifies with the theological virtues. For him these are fundamentally a single reality (only differentiated by the three powers of the soul), the reality of participation in God.

Faith is the transfer of all criteria for truth from the I that understands to the eternal Thou. Hope is the renunciation of all memories of humanly consoling subjects and themes. Love is the surrender of the whole of our being to the God we love. This triune attitude of a faith that loves and hopes and of a love that believes and hopes is however, now defined by John at both the experience of God (beyond all actual psychological experience) and as the state of contemplation.

In making this assertion John refers especially to Denys and to Denys's identification of theoria and theologia mystike, which is fulfilled beyond all gnosis in pistis. Pistis here has the (biblical) double emphasis of a total, trusting surrender of all personal security, and of a final certainty (pistsis) beyond all finite reason in the divine. Together, this pistis--theoria is night and cloud (gnophos), again with the double emphasis of genuine darkness for the finite subject and supereminent brightness in the infinite Godhead.

All this follows the rhythm of God's ever-greatness already established by Denys and taken up by Bonaventure: 'Faith, manifestly, is a dark night for man, but in this very way it gives him light. The more darkness it brings upon him, the more light it sheds. For the night by blinding illumines him.' The reason for this lies ultimately in the nature of God: 'The loftier and clearer the things of God are in themselves, the more unknown and obscure they are to us.' To this John applies the image so dear to him of the sun's ray and its shining upon the speck of dust that stands in its way. 'The more it is purified of these specks of dust, the more obscure and impalpable it seems to the material eye.'

It is in terms of this image that John explains the Areopagite's angelic hierarchies: they transmit the light of God to one another rather like totally pure panes of glass placed in a line, through which a single ray streams uninterruptedly. Loving faith makes the world transparent to God, makes it disappear in its objectivity and configurated character. But because its light no longer strikes against anything, and because God himself is not an object, God can be experienced by the soul only as dark night. In loving and hoping faith the soul looks out into openness, indeed she becomes that openness, the open mouth that God alone can fill.

Faith is an 'infused virtue', that is, a 'divine, flowing spring,' so much something from God that the substance of faith will be preserved even in the vision of eternal life. Faith is the 'secret stair' that leads from this closed world into the divine openness -- darkness and certainty at the same time. All finite and individualistic 'wanting-to-see-for-myself' and 'wanting-to-make-sure-for-myself' would only disturb this infinite, dark and open light.

For John, intellectus fidei does not consist in such finite assurances; to want to understand too much deprives faith of its meritorious character, robs the adventurous quest for God in the Absolute of its 'force', which grows only in the night; it weakens courage, boldness, which bestows upon faith all its nobility. (Thus God works miracles for the strengthening of faith only 'out of necessity' [A iii, 31, 9].'When the soul detaches her will from sensory testimonies and signs, she is exalted in a purer faith' [A iii, 32, 4]).

It is precisely from worldly emptiness that security and stability in the absolute sense grow. The successors of Denys called this hidrysis and bebaiotes; John, for his part, called it seguridad (being secure), sosiego (relaxed repose). (Numerous passages: Concordancias 997-978. The soul is protected against possible deception by the devil, but also protected against herself -- amparada se si misma).

But in so far as faith is one with contemplation, John extolled it as 'loving obscure knowledge' (noticia oscura amorosa). This is the interiorization of the ecclesial fides ex auditu, as in the young Augustine; it becomes an attentive forgetting of all exterior impressions, so that 'in silence only the ear of the spirit is open to listen to God'. It no longer utters words with definite form, but 'substantial' words, which God communicates to the substance of the soul, and these far transcend any possibility of illusion.

For this reason the fulness of open faith/contemplation is again and again characterized, in contrast to the particular form, as general. 'The more spiritual [the soul] is, the more she discontinues trying to make particular acts with her faculties, for she becomes engrossed in one general, pure act.' This gives a noticia general y confusa, a luz espiritual tan sencilla, pura y general, no afectada ni particularizada a ningun particular inteligibile, natural ni divino. And to 'such great poverty of spirit' the words of St Paul can be applied: Nihil habentes et omnia possidentes / having nothing, yet possessing all things.

Particular knowledge can be inserted into this universal knowledge or experienced without danger, as in a cognitio matutina placed in the background. At the end of his final work, John gives a magnificent illustration of this possibility. The reality that truly attains to this universality is the 'love' that has set the soul free from all particular knowledge, as it soars upward to God this love is given the privilege of experiencing the downward sweep of the Three-in-One, the light of the Trinity.

Nevertheless, this dark universality remains, for one who is only an aspirant, the experience of pure night: privation, annihilation, crucifixion; the experience of that process which John, with St Paul, describes as the stripping and dispossession of the old man and the putting on of the new man conformed to Christ (Eph 4.24); elsewhere he uses the bold phrase, 'the inner resurrection of the spirit'. At first the night is subjectively death, although objectively it is already resurrection; but as the way of the soul's dying, it has its twilight, midnight and dawn that ushers in eternal life, when the veil that separates her from the vision of God is stretched to the breaking point.

And yet the midnight is already objectively the brightest of light, just as the shekina of the wilderness was a dazzling darkness above the temple. 'The darknesses and evils the soul experiences when this light strikes are not darknesses and evils of the light but of the soul itself. And it is this light that illumines it so it may see these evils. From the beginning the divine light illumines the soul.'

All the time John stresses that God's light shines unchangingly and constantly, that it is only the unpurified state of those who approach that makes them experience it as darkness and purgatorial torment. This idea must not be interpreted in a weaker, neo-Platonic sense, as if the bonum diffusivum sui / goodness diffusing itself was shining in eternal serenity high above all the suffering destinies of man. One must rather consider that in this affirmation John has entirely in view the living, elective God of the Bible, who 'descends into Hell and leads back out again'; even the Cross, upon which the Son is abandoned by the Father, as seen by the Father, is purest light, the light that is glorified even in extremis.

Thus the following two statements can be reconciled: that God himself is prepared to open the way of perfection (contemplation) to all; but in fact, only the elect, as we saw, who for their part must be springs of life within the Church, attain it. If the qualifications given to the light ('hell fire', 'purgatorial fire', 'heavenly flame') arise from the state of the soul, nevertheless at every stage the divine light is the active principle that produces true illumination by means of the night. And it matters little at what moment the soul begins to understand 'what sort of work is being accomplished within her'.

Equally unimportant is how many psychological factors (perceptible 'stages') are to be discerned in this entry into the night of God; this is primarily because leaving the night (the 'dawn') constitutes no kind of counterpart to entering it (the 'twilight of evening'). Perhaps in this respect John is asking a little too much when he gives the course of his own life a universal application (thus inducing his imitators to construct simplistic schemata). Nevertheless there are other factors that correct the picture and restore the balance. The 'active night' (to which the Ascent of mount Carmel introduces us) and the 'passive night' (as described in the Dark Night) are not successive phenomena, but impinge extensively on one another; indeed, they are only two aspects of a single process

Moreover, the 'night of the senses' and the 'night of the spirit' (which may on occasion be separated by many years), though distinguished with the same systematic lucidity, are nonetheless so thoroughly intertwined that 'the purgation of the sensory part is never adequately accomplished without the spiritual ... and is not in earnest until the night of the spirit has at least begun'. In the same way it is not possible to distinguish between the via purgativa and illuminativa. The illuminating light is in the first instance predominantly purificatory. The loss of taste for the things of the senses and the finite is as such already the beginning of a casting of God as he is in himself.

The relevance of this to the project of a theological aesthetics is as follows. Bathed in an obscure light, this present world is darkened as if at twilight and grows pale in an incurable state of disillusionment. But when the time comes, it will be in that same obscure light that the world rises anew, to go forward to the vision of God, to meet the God of the new Heaven and the new earth. However, this 'generality', the negation of the particular, of that which has specific form, is not in any sense an abstract universal, however much, to begin with, it exercises its power of reduction and abstraction on the particular.

We must take special note here of the fact that St John of the Cross is not proposing a philosophical mysticism; he wants only to open up the experience of the living God of the Bible, the God of love, a dimension in which the theological virtues emerge into consciousness, in so far as they are infused, Trinitarian life, the realm of the Holy Spirit. At most one can ask whether the beata nox that he describes implies more a theologia crucis than a theologia gloriae. It is not easy to answer this.

Following the tripartite division given at the beginning of the Ascent, a process is unfolded that passes through the glory of the Cross to the dawn of eternal life and eternal vision. And John stresses the gulf between the highest earthly experience of God and eternal, heavenly vision with great vigor, simply because a certain systematic logic (not just love's absolute longing for ultimate embrace) tends to suppress the lines of distinction. (John expresses himself in very cautious terms even about something that was almost universally taken for granted by Scholastic theology; namely, the direct vision of God of Moses and Paul).

At the highest stages of spiritual progress, it essentially expresses something like the beginnings of eternal life, when the face of God becomes transparent, a shadow made of pure light (resplandores), for which the poet, stammeringly, finds the name obumbraciones. 'Finally, [the soul] enjoys God's glory in the shadow of his glory, which gives knowledge of the measure and property of God's glory.'

The 'night' is like a great curve. It begins with the asceticism of radical and active renunciation of the world and continues with the passive deprivation of all delight in things and even in God himself. Then it curves round the midnight of pure sightless faith until it reaches the dawn of a new substantial delight in the ways of God, the beginning of transparent vision.

If this, then, is the 'curve' of the night, we must now ask what common features such different phases and experiences have. The answer of the poems is clear: it is love ---without love John cannot for a moment even conceive what he calls faith. It is a love that has chosen her one and only beloved and therefore in a single flight soars audaciously above all created things, but also sinks humbled beneath them.

Cuanto mas alto Ilegaba
De este lance tan subido
Tanto mas bajo y rendido
Y abatido mi hallaba.

It is love whose intrepidity withstands everything, even God himself, who takes her seriously and transfers her from All to Nothing so that she might find there the one whom alone she loves. Finally, it is a love as much robbed as ravished, whose only longing is to do the will of the beloved, whether that means Hell or Heaven -- 'she has no more worldly hopes, no more spiritual longings'. This love, which seeks in the void and is found 'in the hunt', is union; it is also the vehicle of contemplation and of what one must call vision in nonvision.

Here John identifies himself with the teaching of the schools of Bernard and Bonaventure. As love, the will surpasses the intellect and leaves it behind. One must remember that in ancient psychology the will/love occupies to a large extent the place of the biblical 'heart' and thus denotes what we mean today by 'person' and the 'center of a person'. That is why, according to John, this transcendent will of love is quieted by God by means of what John calls 'substantial touches', by means of an immediate (amesos) contact that surpasses all the particular acts of knowledge, feeling and desire, a contact between substance and substance, between person and person.

God alone can enter into such substantial communion with his creatures, not only in the natural ontological sphere of the universal analogia entis (which to some degree can also be realized by mystics outside the Christian tradition), but also -- and John quite explicitly distinguishes the two -- in the supernatural sphere, in the reality (which emerges in the personal experience of love) of the loving grace of the triune God, who reveals himself to man, a reality that, in the theological virtues, is infused into the soul.

That this touch of substance by substance does not in any way tend toward the pantheistic union esencial o sustancial John says with as much clarity as one could wish. John in no sense remains at an abstract level in his conception of substance, everything is set in the sphere of spiritual and personal actualizations. But these do not emanate just accidentally from the soul's obscure and undisturbed substance; no, they inflame and wound the soul at its very center. The toques, the touches of substance by substance, that make present the heart of Thou in the heart of I are an experience, time and again described, that surpasses all delight and is almost mortal in its effect.

It is to be compared with the kiss at the beginning of the Canticle, with fiery arrows, with a wound, a 'death', which is at the same time 'a very deep knowledge of the Godhead, sometimes descending as if from the serene heights of heaven, or, like a wind sent from God, stirring up all God's gifts in the soul. The very substance of the soul is wounded: hiere en la sustancia del alma este ... amor. Love brings the soul that ultimate, substantial openness that is beyond pain and pleasure, and it tunes her to the key of divine love and wisdom. At first the wound seems like a severe and mortal attack on the soul's creatureliness, but when it has become her second nature, it becomes almost a game. 'The wounds imparted to the Soul are the games of divine Wisdom.'

Now it becomes clear why St John's mysticism achieves its complete form only in a Trinitarian context. His entire system struggles energetically against two opposed and false solutions: the pantheistic solution, which would be an unimaginable horror to him, and that other inadequate solution, which would limit loving union with the God of revelation to merely accidental acts. From work to work John's ship, sighting its destination ever more clearly, sails between and past these two rocks. He sets off from an idea that is still philosophical; namely, that God is the center of the creature's sphere, into which God draws him in the deepest secrecy of night (at the end of the Dark Night).

Then he encounters the blissful amazement of the Bride in the Canticle, when the wind of the Holy Spirit blows into her all the perfumes and treasures of the Beloved, so that here already the mystery of the Holy Spirit shared by Bride and Bridegroom is glimpsed as the mystery of the infusing of the Spirit common to Father and Son, and creaturely love, through grace, becomes a participation in the divine spiratio itself; then finally he arrives at the sovereign exposition of this doctrine in the Living Flame.

From now on, at the level of the triune life, in which the creature through grace may participate actively and passively, we have passed beyond separating distance and the identification that threatens personal existence. Now the breathtaking miracles, the substantial touches of I and Thou, the awakening of Thou within I and of I within Thou, which only a miracle of grace can prevent from being mortal -- now all this becomes the content of the life of love.

The end of the Living Flame describes the disconcerting experience of Christ awakening in the heart and center of the soul: 'Thou wakest, 0 Word, 0 Spouse, in the center and depth of my soul, in its pure and most intimate substance." Christ awakes as Thou, as 'the only master' of my substance, in a movimiento de tanta grandeza y seniorio y gloria y di tan intima suavidad, in a movement de tangran Emperador, so that with this awakening of the absolute in the heart, with this absolute awakening of the heart, everything, the entire creation, must awaken also.

It is of crucial significance that the word identity is discarded as being abstract and much too weak. The one who awakens in the innermost part of the soul's substance is the Master, the sublime prince and emperor, and it is only as master that he is beloved. His awakening, therefore, raises up the soul in this ineffable way to her beloved and divine overlord only because at the same time it plunges her into the abyss, into the absolute distance of nothingness.

Only now can we understand why disillusionment with the world, absolute distance, in which the descent of night teaches and immerses the soul, can already be the hidden glory of love. The distance of person in God in the womb of substantial unity is the presupposition of all love, both eternal and created. And so not only in the purifying night but also in the night of bliss we can say: 'He obtains more joy and recreation in creatures through the dispossession of them. . . . In detachment from things he acquires a clearer knowledge of them so that he has a better understanding of both natural and supernatural truths concerning them. He then whose joy is unpossessive of things rejoices in them all as though he possessed them all. He possesses them, as St Paul states, with great liberty (2 Cor 6.10).'

We are a long way here from seeing man's relation to God as either one of opposition or immersion. Within the formless itself we can see once more something like a form emerging out of the Trinitarian distance of the persons. But this form is one with the formless glory of substantial union in love. The Son is 'the splendor of the eternal light, the unspotted mirror and image of the goodness of the Father.'

And so as 'touch', he makes the touching 'hand' of the Father perceptible. But the 'cautery applied with force' is again neither the hand nor the touch, but the third person, the Holy Spirit. Thus God as set against man now takes on Trinitarian 'form' in so far as this relation is transcended by a pure indwelling in the fire and the wound.

Similarly, when the soul is thrust into an (objective) encounter with God, she discovers the fundamental attributes of divinity, which she experiences as 'lamps of fire' (lamparas de fuego), burning torches. They make their appearance as much in their actual, clear and distinct form as in their reciprocal circumincession and mutual intensification, as much in their sovereign state of being per se as in their loving disposition of being pro me. 'Since (God) is the virtue of supreme humility, he loves you with supreme humility and esteem and makes you his equal, gladly revealing himself to you in these ways of knowledge, in this his countenance filled with graces. . . . (He says to you:) "I am yours and for you and delighted to be what I am so as to be yours and give myself to you."'

John searches for images to illuminate the unity of confrontation and indwelling, which seems to him here to be particularly 'indescribable'. The 'splendors' of the lamps are the 'loving knowledge' that the divine attributes communicate to the soul by their radiance and by which the soul too is resplendent, transformed in such 'loving knowledge'.

The illumination of the splendors is, for this reason, 'not like that produced by material lamps, which through their flames shed light round about them, but like the illumination that is within the very flames, for the soul is within these splendors.... More than that, it is itself transformed in them. It is like the air within the flames, enkindled and transformed in the flame, for the flame is nothing but enkindled air. The movements and splendors of the flame are not from the air alone, nor from the fire of which the flame is composed, but from both the air and the fire. And the fire causes the air, which it has enkindled, to produce these same movements and splendors. We can consequently understand how the soul with its faculties is illumined within the splendors of God.'

For St John it is never a case of the creature being engulfed by God; it is rather the incorporation of the creature in the whole of his being, with all his powers (and thus with his merit), into the depths of grace. 'The movements of these divine flames ... are not alone produced by the soul that is transformed in the flames of the Holy Spirit, nor does the Holy Spirit produce them alone, but they are the work of both the soul and him, since he moves it in the manner that fire moves the enkindled air. Thus these movements of both God and the soul are not only splendors, but also glorification (glorificaciones). This activity of the flames and these flares are the happy festivals and games which ... the Holy Spirit inspires in the soul.'

In this 'game' the only purpose of what may seem like identity is to render possible the reciprocity of giving, so that for the soul its supreme bliss is to be able to give back God (whom she has received and whom she bears within her) to God. 'Having him for her own, she can give him and communicate him to whomever she wishes. Thus she gives him to her Beloved, who is the very God who gave himself to her.'

3. If we can now see clearly to what extent St John's faith is the experience of love, we should also understand, as a consequence, the justification of what at first sight seems surprising -- the identification of his faith with contemplation. For faith is depicted as nonvision and noncomprehension, whereas contemplation means vision. Where the two are identified, then the act of 'mystical theology', with all its nonvision, dispossession, privation and night, must nevertheless involve vision: vision in the mode of nonvision, vision of someone present in the mode of absence or as through a veil or a quest, which is so absolute, tends so much towards the Absolute itself, that it cannot do other than ultimately find, 'hunt down', the Absolute; then again, the vision is love, which is set so much on the ultimate that it discovers the ultimate being itself as the mystery of love.

One cannot say that it is the power of searching love that creates or forces out its object into the emptiness of the Absolute (like Rilke's idea that 'we ... plan the gods' and grant the prayer of him who at the end hears ours). For though love may throw herself into an encounter with the unknown, she knows that she has been taken hold of and carried further; rather than emptying herself, she is emptied; it is less a matter of her acting than of God's acting upon her.

For this reason the basis of the soul's contemplation is the experience of being contemplated, as we saw in the stanza quoted earlier where the eyes of God are only 'sketched' in the soul, and she waits impatiently for the divine eye to make its appearance in the fluidity of faith. And yet what the soul desires is at the same time what she cannot endure, and so she has to implore her Beloved:

Apartalos, amado,
Que voy de vuelo.

'Withdraw your eyes, Beloved, I am taking flight'; 'what she longs for so ardently ... she cannot receive at the desired moment, save almost at the cost of her life'. She implores her Beloved not to look at her while she takes flight; that is, while she hastens towards God with her love, and while she keeps her (unseeing) eyes of love fixed on him.

This prayer of hers combines two thoughts: the soul knows by anticipation the unbearable beauty of God's eyes, and also acknowledges her incapacity for vision on account of her lack of strength. Nevertheless, she knows that at the heart of the mystery of the night lies the generous, creative eye of God himself:

Cuando tu me mirabas,
Tu gracia en mi tus ojos imprimean,
Por en eso me adamabas
Y en eso merecian
Los mios adorar lo que en ti vian.

Cant. 23, stanz 2. ('When you looked at me / Your eyes imprinted your grace in me; / For this you loved me ardently; And thus my eyes deserved/ To adore what they beheld in you.')

'When you looked at me', your contemplation rested upon me, 'your eyes imprinted your grace in me', for the esse of grace, sequitur agere, is produced by the divine gaze, divine love, and 'thus my eyes deserved to adore what they beheld in you'; the contemplative gaze is thus only made possible by the preliminary gaze of grace. Elsewhere this looking at God is called the 'unique eye' and is identified with faith. Nonetheless, this unseeing faith is suspended between the gaze of the love of God, who by grace makes the soul beautiful (que la hermosea), and the gaze of the engraced soul at God, whom she adores as nothing less than the source of beauty.

The word and concept 'beauty' inevitably come in at this point. The 'general' (general) nature of the night of faith is in no sense a nothingness; it reflects the radiance of the invisible stars of love. It is itself the fluidity of love that passes all finite understanding, the fluidity that is in itself already the glory of God, so that it is only a question of time, of patient, expectant vision, before this obscure glory is transformed into a manifest, self-glorifying splendor. If the night is the flight of love, then it is the opposite of immobility.

In the twilight gloom of this world we may still plot love's mobility by reference to the disappearing features of the earth's landscape. In the midnight of faith, however, love no longer has any such markers and can appear as pure soledad and pura y oscura contemplacion. Nevertheless, the greater the privations, the more the flight presses on toward the beloved, as the first part of the Canticle shows.

The same night transfigures the experience of God from reprobation in Hell, through the severe torments of Purgatory, to the liberation of love's desire. This fact shows that the night is a drama, the most intense kind of activity in the darkness. This fullness of the night, which is at once both pure faith and contemplation, is in itself a vision, inchoatio visionis. It is the nonvision that comes between initial vision -- when we hear the gospel preached and recognize that this is the truth and that God died on the Cross for us -- and terminal vision, to which unseeing faith directly flies, and it is the anticipation of such terminal vision that enables us to withstand the darkest dereliction by God.

Only thus is the beauty of this night comprehensible; only thus do we discover the transcendent spring from which the tremendous power of this lyricism flows. The spring is 'beyond all beauty (sobre toda hermosura) of what is, was or will be'. And for the sake of this 'beyond', which remains an 'I-don't-know-what', the poet knows that he will never be able to lose himself in the beauty of the world. No worldly magic can ensnare one whose 'noble heart' (corazon generoso) finds the Only One in pure faith outside of all law and necessity. Yes, as if by luck or chance (por ventura), he finds the Only One, the formless One, solo ... sin forma y figura, 'without prop or stay'.

It is the fact that St John of the Cross is given an anticipation of eternal vision (while remaining crucified to this world) that explains the paradox that, for him, the world, definitively abandoned and lost in God, is regained. In the Spiritual Canticle, which contains more Augustinian motifs than the other works, this idea emerges clearly for the first time.

It is not a question of raising oneself to God by means of the ancient and mediaeval anagogical contemplation of creatures; no, it is the rediscovery of the creature in God, in the vision of God alone, in a sort of anticipation of the cognitio matutina. The only anagogical method in John is love; he even explicitly gives it that name. According to P. Eliseus of the Martyrs, 'he used to say that one could resist the vices in a manner at once more simple, more fruitful and more perfect' than direct attack. 'The soul combats and destroys in this way all the temptations of the enemy ... by using only anagogical acts inspired by love without any other alien practices.'

Thus one must 'instantly resist by means of an act or movement of anagogical love, as one raises the heart to union with God. Then the soul is no longer where the enemy wanted to strike and wound it; it has slipped away.'

But this anagogical love finds Trinitarian love, and in it God's decision to create the world. One of the Romances recounts this, and the Canticle draws certain conclusions from it:

Mil gracias derramatido
Paso por estos sotos coti presura
Y yendolos mirando
Con sola su figura
Vistidos los dejo hermosura.

IC 5, stanza. ('Pouring out a thousand graces, / He passed these graces in haste; / And having looked at them, / With his image alone, / Clothed them in beauty.')

'Pouring out a thousand graces', 'passing by' as if 'in haste', God has created the natures and elements. God gives his real attention to 'what comes second which he regards as first.' God surveys (mirar) what he has created, and 'with his countenance (figura) alone [he] clothed them in beauty'. 'St Paul says, "The Son of God is the splendor of his glory and the form [or countenance: figura] of his substance"'. It should be known that only with this figure [countenance], his Son, did God look at all things; that is, he communicated to them their natural being and many natural graces and gifts and made them complete and perfect.'

But not only that: 'with this countenance of his Son alone, he clothed them in beauty by imparting to them supernatural being. This he did when he became man and raised human nature, and with it all creatures, to the beauty of God, since in human nature he was united with them all. Accordingly the Son of God proclaimed: "I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself."' . . . 'In addition to all this, from the viewpoint of contemplative experience, it should be known that in the living contemplation and knowledge of creatures, the soul sees such fullness of graces, powers and beauty with which God has endowed them that seemingly all are arrayed in wonderful beauty and natural virtue. This beauty and virtue is derived from above and imparted by that infinite supernatural beauty of the countenance (figura) of God; his look clothes the world and all the heavens with beauty and gladness, just as he also, upon opening his hand, fills every living thing with blessing, as David says (Ps 144, 16).'

Is the Son the face of the Father turned towards the world? Or is he the Father's facial expression, whom the Father contemplates? Is it in the Son, because of his love for the Son, for the sake of his love for the Son, that the Father loves all the creatures he has made in the Son? Is it because of the grace and beauty of the Son that he sees creatures as beautiful and full of grace?

The two senses of figura come into play together: the sense that dominates the text of the Bible expression, figure), and the other sense, which John brings to the fore (countenance, vision). But whichever aspect we emphasize, for this lover of contemplation the world gains its beauty from above: from divine love, which for its part, through the reflection of the persons, one in the other, is the archetype of all beauty.

The contemplative sees not only the beauty of God and in it the beauty of the world; he also sees in the moment of vision, as it were, the analogia entis: 'Although the soul in this state is indeed aware that all things are distinct from God in so far as they have created being, and sees them in him with their power, their root and their tension, nonetheless, she knows precisely that God, by his being all these things with infinite eminence (eminencia), is such that she knows these things better in God's being than in themselves.'

This statement does not come from the Spiritual Canticle, but from the last stanza of the Living Flame; with regard to what it says about the experience of God and the world, this is the supreme gift among everything we have received from St John. As if all the flights of the soul, all the love and knowledge up till now had been nothing, he describes this final experience as the awakening of God in him.

Cuan manso y amoroso
Recuerdas en mi seno!

But if the absolute being opens his eyes in the heart of the creature, how then should the creatures, who depend on him for life, keep their eyes shut? The world awakens in the soul at the same time as God. When the divine Word awakens within her, 'it seems to the soul that all the balsams and fragrant spices and flowers of the world are commingled, stirred and shaken so as to yield their sweet odor, and that all the kingdoms and dominions of the world and all the powers and virtues of heaven are moved; and not only this, but it also seems that all the virtues and substances and perfections and graces of every created thing glow and make the same movement all at once. Since, as St John sav\ys, "all things in him are life", and "in him we I've and move and have our being", as Paul declares, it follows that when, within the soul, this greatest of monarchs moves (whose principality -- which consists of the three spheres, celestial, terrestrial and infernal, and the things contained in them -- as Isaiah says, he bears upon his shoulders, upholding them all, as St Paul says, with the word of his power), all things seem to move in unison. This happens in the same manner as when at the movement of the earth all material things in it move as though they were nothing.'

The description goes further. The soul sees not only how all creatures move in unison with God, but also how they too reveal themselves in unison with him when he reveals his glory, when he reveals his heart. God is the source of their being and duration, their power and perfection; it is also from God and together with God that all the value of creatures is revealed. 'Here lies the remarkable delight of this awakening: the soul knows creatures through God, and not God through creatures. This amounts to knowing the effects through their cause, and not the cause through its effects. The latter is knowledge a posteriori, and the former is essential knowledge.'

And further: as God opens his eyes in the soul, it seems to her that God does indeed move 'in an incomparable newness', a newness that creatures also now share: 'The being and harmony of every creature ... with its movements in God, is revealed to her with such newness, it seems to the soul that it is God who moves and that the cause assumes the name of the effect it produces.' Does not the book of Wisdom say: 'Wisdom is more mobile than any motion'? And rightly so, for 'it is the principle and root of all movement. "While remaining in herself ", the wise man goes on to say, "she renews all things" (Wisd 7.24, 27). Thus what he wishes to say in this passage is that Wisdom is more active than all active things.'

In all this vision the soul contemplates the face of God as if through a transparency, for not all the veils have been withdrawn. She sees how, by his power, he himself moves all creatures. His effects appear to the soul together with God and inseparable from him; he himself seems to be in motion in them, and they in him, perpetually.

This is a contemplation of the analogia entis in the terms fixed by Denys but with that Augustinian sense of a transparent cognitio matutina bestowed on earthly faith. From here until the end of the stanza everything is increasingly dominated by the kabod of the Old Testament; the visionary, like Job, is afraid of being 'crushed by the weight of glory', unless he too be transformed into that same glory -- porque la gloria oprime al que la mira, cuando no le glorifica -- the overwhelming glory is incomprehensibly 'gentle and full of love' and sustains all living creatures in their meekness; this glory is at the same time the gentle blowing of the Holy Spirit, whom the soul breathes in and out, that little breeze in which Elijah discovered God on the mountain -- how else could a Carmelite conclude his work?

Thus the paradox is clarified and we can see how this most radical renunciation of the world, this systematic weaning away of the soul from all created form and figure, even in the deepest recesses of the heart and its attachments, even in the heights of the most exalted visions and locutions -- how all of this can be compatible with a spirituality that can truly be called aesthetic. For this spirituality, hermosura signifies the supreme affirmation about God.

'Beauty' for John is an obsession; it is not only the end, it is also the means. He may have rediscovered the beauty of the world through the beauty of God, but he could never have done this had he not known about beauty from the beginning; otherwise he would not even have been able to renounce it. Aesthetic sensitivity is part of his nature and accompanies him on the whole of his spiritual journey no less than it does his spiritual sister, the great Theresa.

We know the love that both of them had for nature. For Theresa open country, running water, flowers are a 'book' in which she reads God. She wants convents to be, where possible, by the side of rivers. On one occasion she writes: 'The position of a convent is so important that it would be madness to worry about the cost. For a river and view I would be very glad elsewhere to give far more than this convent cost.' And again: 'I have a hermitage from which one can see the river, and a cell in which even from my bed I can observe what for me is such an agreeable sight.'

John fills his spiritual songs with all the detailed images of the open country, which are not just the requisites of bucolic verse but stem from direct and affectionate observation. Above all, he had, by nature, a love for the night, as is witnessed by the very large number of accounts that have been handed down. 'In the peace of the night he spent [according to the testimony of P. Alonso] many hours in solitary prayer. When he had finished, he fetched his companion, sat down on the green meadow and, with his eyes on the river flowing by, conversed with him about the beauty of the heavens, of the moon, of the stars. At other times he spoke about the gentle harmony of the moving spheres of Heaven and raised himself up to the Heaven of the blest, whose beauty and glory he praised in lofty words.'

Others describe him 'praying all night long beneath the trees with arms outstretched'. Wherever he stayed, and right to the end of his life, he always sought out the open country to pray and instructed his confreres above all to pray outside in nature, in gardens, in fields, on cliffs and in forests; he knew the plants, the animals, he observed them and described their characteristics in his works.

In the pastoral Spiritual Canticle his observation of nature is revealed in mystical form: 'My Beloved is the mountains [says the Bride] and lonely wooded valleys, strange islands and resounding rivers, the whispering of love-stirring breezes, the tranquil night at the time of the rising dawn, silent music, sound solitude, the supper that refreshes and deepens love' (St. 13-I4). The imperceptible transition from simple natural imagery to mystical paradoxes (la musica callada, la soledad sonora) shows that we are not dealing here with conventional anagogic contemplation of the world, but that John contemplates his God really, directly, in nature, and that he sees the natural images as only a function and elucidation of the divine attributes.

Mi amado las montahas: the mountains are my Beloved, and of course precisely not in the pantheistic sense, but in that other sense given clear verbal expression in the fourth stanza of the Living Flame. In itself, nature is only a dibujo, a sketch or outline; the completed picture is seen only in God, for only in him do the individual notes sound together in that symphony that only the substances of things, not their exterior 'dents, can join together to perform.

It is significant that the verse from the book of Wisdom is quoted: Spiritus Domini replevit orbem terrarum, et hoc quod continet omnia, scientiam habet vocis (Wisd I .7). Only in the Spirit of God does 'the testimony to God that, in themselves, all things give' ring forth in the music that harmonizes the individual voices. This is why the rigorous ascetical demand is made of the beginner not to submit to any illusions and not to desire to ascend immediately from the symphony of the accidents to the symphony of the substances: 'No one who has not yet mortified his pleasure in sensory things should dare to look for notable benefit from the vigor and activity of his senses regarding these goods in the belief that they are a help to the spirit. For the forces of the soul will increase more without these sensible things.'

The first movement of the soul must be to raise up all sensory things immediately to God. This will yield 'a truly extraordinary increase of joy and bliss'. For when the soul herself is purified, 'she experiences a totally spiritual delight in turning directly (luego) toward God the joy she has in everything she sees'. For as long as she is incapable of doing that, she must renounce all gratification, for one is not meant to 'celebrate oneself more than God.'

St John of the Cross not only had the soul and perception of an artist, but, as is proved by the hastily sketched little drawing of the posture of the crucified Lord, whom he saw in a vision, he also possessed the technique of a master. In early youth, between six and eight years of age, he learnt different crafts, one after the other. He was apprenticed first to a carpenter, then to a tailor, a woodcarver and a painter. As a novice he spent his periods of recreation carving wooden crucifixes, and he continued this custom until the last years of his life.

In his writings he used numerous images drawn from the different arts and crafts to illustrate the art of spiritual direction. He loved music, sang a great deal and himself played at least one instrument. It is very clear that when he forsook the values of art, he was making a very hard decision, for him perhaps the hardest decision of all, and was performing a work of love, that can be justified neither by contempt for the world nor ascetical discipline, but which was solely in response to the call of Christ and out of love for him.

His attitude to ecclesiastical art, to its legitimacy and utility and to its dangers, can be understood only on the basis of this fundamental decision of his. It is a radical decision and yet profoundly different from the iconoclasm of Protestantism. He fought on two fronts: against the Reformation's depreciation of all religious images, of all church ornament, he defends the spiritual utility of these icons and refers to the mind and practice of the Church; against the development of a more passionate style of art in the Renaissance and early Baroque he advocates a rather medieval view of religious art. It is not, he argues, the enhancement of and submission to aesthetic values that in a work of art guarantees the communication of religious experience; no, that can be achieved only by a certain indeterminate transparency and, above all, simplicity. For the work is not meant to tie the soul down to itself but should point away from itself to God.

This dialectic is authentic despite the doubts that can be raised about the authenticity of certain passages in the Ascent. Its powerful critique of devotional objects is played down at the end of each chapter by words whose unctuousness and feebleness seem to reveal that they are a later addition. But even if these additions are authentic or contain a core of authenticity, they nonetheless do no more than temper the force of what is said in the third book of the Ascent, which critically examines artistic and other devotional aids.

(Examples of this are, in particular, the conclusion of A iii, 15, 2, where it is said that 'images will always help a person towards union with God' [which is precisely what John does not say]; the conclusion of A iii, 42, 5-6, where it is said of holy places, such as Monte Gargano, the site of the miracle of snow at Sta Maria Maggiore, etc, that 'there is much greater chance of being heard by God in those places consecrated to his cult, since the Church has so marked and dedicated them'; and especially the conclusion of A iii, 44, 5, where the later interpolation is quite obvious: 'I do not condemn -- but rather approve -- the custom of setting aside certain days for devotions, such as novenas [alternative reading: 'fasts'] and other similar practices....' These texts appear to be, at the very least, retouched. Of course, we have no originals and know that the text has been frequently mangled and interpolated).

The whole book, pressing toward its conclusion like a rapidly flowing stream, proclaims unequivocally: Don't stand still! Climb higher! Seek God alone! Images? Certainly, the Church authorizes them and makes use of them, 'and yet there are many who pay more attention to the painting and decorating of the image than to what is represented'. Miraculous statues? Perhaps, but how outrageous to dress and undress them like dolls, so that for many they have become 'idols'. 'They are as attached to these images as were Michas and Laban to their idols'. The genuinely devout man 'has little need for many statues and uses those that conform more to the divine traits than to human ones'. 'Indeed, since some statues are truer likenesses than others and excite more devotion, it is fit to be attached more to some than to others.' But if the senses cling to this higher art, 'then what should be a help to the soul becomes a hindrance'. What 'stupidity' to place one's trust more in this statue than another! God 'looks only upon the faith and purity of the prayerful heart. If God sometimes bestows more favors through one statue than through another, he does not do so because of its greater ability to produce this effect ... but because the devotion of individuals is awakened more by means of one statue than the other.'

According to John's explicit statement, this also applies to 'images of extraordinary grace'. The image in itself 'is no more than a painting'. God 'works miracles only because of the faith and devotion shown toward the saint represented'. Moreoever, 'experience teaches that if God grants some favors and works miracles, he does so usually through statues that are not very well carved or carefully painted or that are poor representations (imagines non muy bien talladas ni curiosamente pintadas o figuradas), so that the faithful will not attribute any of these wonders to the statue or painting'.

Images of special grace may now and then seem to move, to change their expression, give signs or communicate words: all of this may be good and genuine, but it may just as well come from the devil.

Rich decoration of oratories and churches is indeed fitting, but not if the beauty of churches is loved in place of the beauty of God. People who treat the objects of worship without respect ought, of course, to be 'reproved very sharply', but so should those who 'carve so inexpertly that the finished statue subtracts from devotion rather than adds to it. Some artists, so unskilled and unpolished in the art of carving, should be forbidden to practice their art'. 'Still, what pertinence has this to the possessiveness, attachment and appetite you have in these exterior decorations?'

Ought one not to think of the wrath of Yahweh, the wrath with which he looked down upon so many of the religious festivals of the people? They were celebrated in his honor, 'yet men sought only their own ends in them'. Christ told the Samaritan woman that genuine prayer does not depend on the temple and the holy mountain. He himself used to pray in the still of the night, in lonely and barren places, 'which raise souls to God such as the mountains that are raised above the earth and usually barren of the objects that would provide recreation for the senses'. God places little value 'on your oratories and other places consecrated for prayer'; what he desires is 'the living temple', the interior recollection of the heart, spiritual poverty. Likewise, no one should tie himself down inwardly to a place in which he once received a grace from God. God is free of all that, and man too is meant to be free.

The final criticisms of the Ascent, at which point it breaks off uncompleted (unless the conclusion has been lost), are directed against preaching. It shows best where John wants to place his affirmative and negative emphases. Without doubt the preacher is a means that God employs to bring his Word home to men. But 'the force and efficacy of preaching depend entirely on the interior spirit'.

No matter how well chosen his words or how sublime his thoughts, the preacher usually only obtains an effect 'proportionate to his own interior spirit. God's word is indeed efficacious of itself ... yet fire also has power to burn but will not burn if the material is not disposed. And so a twofold disposition is required if a sermon is to achieve its effect: that of the preacher, and that of his hearer. And usually the effect is commensurate with the interior preparedness of the preacher.' 'The holier the life of the preacher, in so far as we on earth can judge, the more abundant the fruit, no matter how lowly his style, poor his rhetoric, and plain the doctrine.' The eloquence of a preacher sounds in the ears como una musica concertada o sonido de campanas, but 'it does not possess the power to raise a dead man from