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a cache of usenet and other text files pertaining
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a cache of usenet and other text files pertaining
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Subject: ASCENT OF MOUNT CARMEL
by
Saint John of the Cross
DOCTOR OF THE CHURCH
THIRD REVISED EDITION
Translated and edited,
with a General Introduction, by
E. ALLISON PEERS
from the critical edition of
P. SILVERIO DE SANTA TERESA, C.D.
NIHIL OBSTAT: CEORGIVS SMITH, S.T.D., PH.D.
CENSOR DEPVTATVS
IMPRIMATVR: E. MORROGH BERNARD
VICARIVS GENERALIS
WESTMONASTERII: DIE XXIV SEPTEMBRIS MCMLII
TO THE
DISCALCED CARMELITES OF CASTILE,
WITH ABIDING MEMORIES OF THEIR HOSPITALITY AND KINDNESS
IN MADRID, AVILA AND BURGOS,
BUT ABOVE ALL OF THEIR DEVOTION TO
SAINT JOHN OF THE CROSS,
I DEDICATE THIS TRANSLATION
CONTENTS
PREFACE TO THE ELECTONIC EDITION
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
PRINCIPAL ABBREVIATIONS
AN OUTLINE OF THE LIFE OF ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS
GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE WORKS OF ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS
ASCENT OF MOUNT CARMEL
INTRODUCTION
ARGUMENT
PROLOGUE
BOOK I
CHAPTER I.--Sets down the first stanza. Describes two
different nights through which spiritual persons pass, according
to the two parts of man, the lower and the higher. Expounds the
stanza which follows
CHAPTER II.--Explains the nature of this dark night through
which the soul says that it has passed on the road to union
CHAPTER III.--Speaks of the first cause of this night, which
is that of the privation of the desire in all things, and gives
the reason for which it is called night
CHAPTER IV.--Wherein is declared how necessary it is for the
soul truly to pass through this dark night of sense, which is
mortification of desire, in order that it may journey to union
with God
CHAPTER V.--Wherein the aforementioned subject is treated and
continued, and it is shown by passages and figures from Holy
Scripture how necessary it is for the soul to journey to God
through this dark night of the mortification of desire in all
things
CHAPTER VI.--Wherein are treated two serious evils caused in
the soul by the desires, the one evil being privative and the
other positive
CHAPTER VII.--Wherein is shown how the desires torment the
soul. This is proved likewise by comparisons and quotations
CHAPTER VIII.--Wherein is shown how the desires darken and
blind the soul
CHAPTER IX.--Wherein is described how the desires defile the
soul. This is proved by comparisons and quotations from Holy
Scripture
CHAPTER X.--Wherein is described how the desires weaken the
soul in virtue and make it lukewarm
CHAPTER XI.--Wherein it is proved necessary that the soul that
would attain to Divine union should be free from desires, however
slight they be
CHAPTER XII.--Which treats of the answer to another question,
explaining what the desires are that suffice to cause the evils
aforementioned in the soul
CHAPTER XIII.--Wherein is described the manner and way which
the soul must follow in order to enter this night of sense
CHAPTER XIV.--Wherein is expounded the second line of the
stanza
CHAPTER XV.--Wherein are expounded the remaining lines of the
aforementioned stanza
BOOK II
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II.--Which begins to treat of the second part of cause
of this night, which is faith. Proves by two arguments how it is
darker than the first and then the third
CHAPTER III.--How faith is dark night to the soul. This is
proved with arguments and quotations and figures from Scripture
CHAPTER IV.--Treats in general of how the soul likewise must
be in darkness, in so far as this rests with itself, to the end
that it may be effectively guided by faith to the highest
contemplation
CHAPTER V.--Wherein is described what is meant by union of the
soul with God. A comparison is given
CHAPTER VI.--Wherein is described how it is the three
theological virtues that perfect the three faculties of the soul,
and how the said virtues produce emptiness and darkness within
them
CHAPTER VII.--Wherein is described how strait is the way that
leads to eternal life and how completely detached and
disencumbered must be those that will walk in it. We begin to
speak of the detachment of the understanding
CHAPTER VIII.--Which describes in a general way how no
creature and no knowledge that can be comprehended by the
understanding can serve as a proximate means of Divine union with
God
CHAPTER IX.--How faith is the proximate and proportionate
means of the understanding whereby the soul may attain to the
Divine union of love. This is proved by passages and figures from
Divine Scripture
CHAPTER X.--Wherein distinction is made between all
apprehensions and types of knowledge which can be comprehended by
the understanding
CHAPTER XI.--Of the hindrance and harm that may be caused by
apprehensions of the understanding which proceed from that which
is supernaturally represented to the outward bodily senses; and
how the soul is to conduct itself therein
CHAPTER XII.--Which treats of natural imaginary apprehensions.
Describes their nature and proves that they cannot be a
proportionate means of attainment to union with God. Shows the
harm which results from inability to detach one self from them
CHAPTER XIII.--Wherein are set down the signs which the
spiritual person will find in himself whereby he may know at what
season it behoves him to leave meditation and reasoning and pass
to the state of contemplation
CHAPTER XIV.--Wherein is proved the fitness of these signs,
and the reason is given why that which has been said in speaking
of them is necessary to progress
CHAPTER XV.--Wherein is explained how it is sometimes well for
progressives who are beginning to enter upon this general
knowledge of contemplation to make use of natural reasoning and
the work of the natural faculties
CHAPTER XVI.--Which treats of the imaginary apprehensions that
are supernaturally represented in the fancy. Describes how they
cannot serve the soul as a proximate means to union with God
CHAPTER XVII.--Wherein is described the purpose and manner of
God in His communication of spiritual blessings to the soul by
means of the senses. Herein is answered the question which has
been referred to
CHAPTER XVIII.--Which treats of the harm that certain
spiritual masters may do to souls when they direct them not by a
good method with respect to the visions aforementioned. Describes
also how these visions may cause deception even though they be of
God.
CHAPTER XIX.--Wherein is expounded and proved how, although
visions and locutions which come from God are true, we may be
deceived about them. This is proved by quotations from Divine
Scripture
CHAPTER XX.--Wherein is proved by passages from Scripture how
the sayings and words of God, though always true, do not always
rest upon stable causes.
CHAPTER XXI.--Wherein is explained how at times, although God
answers the prayers that are addressed to Him, He is not pleased
that we should use such methods. It is also shown how, although He
condescend to us and answer us, He is oftentimes wroth
CHAPTER XXII.--Wherein is solved a difficulty -- namely, why
it is not lawful, under the law of grace, to ask anything of God
by supernatural means, as it was under the old law. This solution
is proved by a passage from Saint Paul
CHAPTER XXIII.--Which begins to treat of the apprehensions of
the understanding that come in a purely spiritual way, and
describes their nature
CHAPTER XXIV.--Which treats of two kinds of spiritual vision
that come supernaturally
CHAPTER XXV.--Which treats of revelations, describing their
nature and making a distinction between them
CHAPTER XXVI.--Which treats of the intuition of naked truths
in the understanding, explaining how they are of two kinds and how
the soul is to conduct itself with respect to them
CHAPTER XXVII.--Which treats of the second kind of revelation,
namely, the disclosure of hidden secrets. Describes the way in
which these may assist the soul toward union with God, and the way
in which they may be a hindrance; and how the devil may deceive
the soul greatly in this matter
CHAPTER XXVIII.--Which treats of interior locutions that may
come to the spirit supernaturally. Says of what kinds they are
CHAPTER XXIX.--Which treats of the first kind of words that
the recollected spirit sometimes forms within itself. Describes
the cause of these and the profit and the harm which there may be
in them
CHAPTER XXX.--Which treats of the interior words that come to
the spirit formally by supernatural means. Warns the reader of the
harm which they may do and of the caution that is necessary in
order that the soul may not be deceived by them
CHAPTER XXXI.--Which treats of the substantial words that come
interiorly to the spirit. Describes the difference between them
and formal words, and the profit which they bring and the
resignation and respect which the soul must observe with regard to
them
CHAPTER XXXII.--Which treats of the apprehensions received by
the understanding from interior feelings which come supernaturally
to the soul. Describes their cause, and the manner wherein the
soul must conduct itself so that they may not obstruct its road to
union with God
BOOK III
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II.--Which treats of the natural apprehensions of the
memory and describes how the soul must be voided of them in order
to be able to attain to union with God according to this faculty
CHAPTER III.--Wherein are described three kinds of evil which
come to the soul when it enters not into darkness with respect to
knowledge and reflections in the memory. Herein is described the
first
CHAPTER IV.--Which treats of the second kind of evil that may
come to the soul from the devil by way of the natural
apprehensions of the memory
CHAPTER V.--Of the third evil which comes to the soul by way
of the distinct natural knowledge of the memory
CHAPTER VI.-Of the benefits which come to the soul from
forgetfulness and emptiness of all thoughts and knowledge which it
may have in a natural way with respect to the memory
CHAPTER VII.--Which treats of the second kind of apprehension
of the memory -- namely, imaginary apprehensions -- and of
supernatural knowledge
CHAPTER VIII.--Of the evils which may be caused in the soul by
the knowledge of supernatural things, if it reflect upon them.
Says how many these evils are
CHAPTER IX.--Of the second kind of evil, which is the peril of
falling into self-esteem and vain presumption
CHAPTER X.--Of the third evil that may come to the soul from
the devil, through the imaginary apprehensions of the memory
CHAPTER XI.--Of the fourth evil that comes to the soul from
the distinct supernatural apprehensions of the memory, which is
the hindrance that it interposes to union
CHAPTER XII.--Of the fifth evil that may come to the soul in
supernatural imaginary forms and apprehensions, which is a low and
unseemingly judgment of God
CHAPTER XIII.--Of the benefits which the soul receives through
banishing from itself the apprehensions of the imagination. This
chapter answers a certain objection and describes a difference
which exists between apprehensions that are imaginary, natural and
supernatural
CHAPTER XIV.--Which treats of spiritual knowledge in so far as
it may concern the memory
CHAPTER XV.--Which sets down the general method whereby the
spiritual person must govern himself with respect to this sense
CHAPTER XVI.--Which begins to treat of the dark night of the
will. Makes a division between the affections of the will
CHAPTER XVII.--Which begins to treat of the first affection of
the will. Describes the nature of joy and makes a distinction
between the things in which the will can rejoice
CHAPTER XVIII.--Which treats of joy with respect to temporal
blessings. Describes how joy in them must be directed to God
CHAPTER XIX.--Of the evils that may befall the soul when it
sets its rejoicing upon temporal blessings
CHAPTER XX.--Of the benefits that come to the soul from its
withdrawal of joy from temporal things
CHAPTER XXI.--Which describes how it is vanity to set the
rejoicing of the will upon the good things of nature, and how the
soul must direct itself, by means of them, to God
CHAPTER XXII.--Of the evils which come to the soul when it
sets the rejoicing of its will upon the good things of nature
CHAPTER XXIII.--Of the benefits which the soul receives from
not setting its rejoicing upon the good things of nature
CHAPTER XXIV.--Which treats of the third kind of good thing
whereon the will may set the affection of rejoicing, which kind
pertains to sense. Indicates what these good things are and of how
many kinds, and how the will has to be directed to God and purged
of this rejoicing
CHAPTER XXV.--Which treats of the evils that afflict the soul
when it desires to set the rejoicing of its will upon the good
things of sense
CHAPTER XXVI.--Of the benefits that come to the soul from
self-denial in rejoicing as to things of sense, which benefits are
spiritual and temporal
CHAPTER XXVII.--Which begins to treat of the fourth kind of
good -- namely, the moral. Describes wherein this consists, and in
what manner joy of the will therein is lawful
CHAPTER XXVIII.--Of seven evils into which a man may fall if
he set the rejoicing of his will upon moral good
CHAPTER XXIX.--Of the benefits which come to the soul through
the withdrawal of its rejoicing from moral good
CHAPTER XXX.--Which begins to treat of the fifth kind of good
thing wherein the will may rejoice, which is the super natural.
Describes the nature of these supernatural good things, and how
they are distinguished from the spiritual, and how joy in them is
to be directed to God
CHAPTER XXXI.--Of the evils which come to the soul when it
sets the rejoicing of the will upon this kind of good
CHAPTER XXXII.--Of two benefits which are derived from the
renunciation of rejoicing in the matter of the supernatural graces
CHAPTER XXXIII.--Which begins to treat of the sixth kind of
good wherein the soul may rejoice, Describes its nature and makes
the first division under this head
CHAPTER XXXIV.--Of those good things of the spirit which can
be distinctly apprehended by the understanding and the memory.
Describes how the will is to behave in the matter of rejoicing in
them
CHAPTER XXXV.--Of the delectable spiritual good things which
can be distinctly apprehended by the will. Describes the kinds of
these
CHAPTER XXXVI.--Which continues to treat of images, and
describes the ignorance which certain persons have with respect to
them
CHAPTER XXXVII.--Of how the rejoicing of the will must be
directed, by way of the images, to God, so that the soul may not
go astray because of them or be hindered by them
CHAPTER XXXVIII.--Continues to describe motive good. Speaks of
oratories and places dedicated to prayer
CHAPTER XXXIX.--Of the way in which oratories and churches
should be used, in order to direct the spirit to God.
CHAPTER XL.--Which continues to direct the spirit to interior
recollection with reference to what has been said
CHAPTER XLI.--Of certain evils into which those persons fall
who give themselves to pleasure in sensible objects and who
frequent places of devotion in the way that has been described
CHAPTER XLII.--Of three different kinds of places of devotion
and of how the will should conduct itself with regard to them
CHAPTER XLIII.--Which treats of other motives for prayer that
many persons use -- namely, a great variety of ceremonies
CHAPTER XLIV.--Of the manner wherein the rejoicing and
strength of the will must be directed to God through these
devotions
CHAPTER XLV.--Which treats of the second kind of distinct
good, wherein the will may rejoice vainly
PREFACE TO THE ELECTONIC EDITION
This electronic edition (v 0.9) has been scanned from an
uncopyrighted 1962 Image Books third edition of the Ascent and is
therefore in the public domain. The entire text and some of the
footnotes have been reproduced. Nearly 1000 footnotes (and parts
of footnotes) describing variations among manuscripts have been
omitted. Page number references in the footnotes have been
changed to chapter and section where possible. This edition has
been proofread once, but additional errors may remain.
Harry Plantinga
University of Pittsburgh
whp@wheaton.edu
July 1, 1994.
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
TO THE FIRST EDITION
FOR at least twenty years, a new translation of the works of
St. John of the Cross has been an urgent necessity. The
translations of the individual prose works now in general use go
back in their original form to the eighteen-sixties, and, though
the later editions of some of them have been submitted to a
certain degree of revision, nothing but a complete retranslation
of the works from their original Spanish could be satisfactory.
For this there are two reasons.
First, the existing translations were never very exact
renderings of the original Spanish text even in the form which
held the field when they were first published. Their great merit
was extreme readableness: many a disciple of the Spanish mystics,
who is unacquainted with the language in which they wrote, owes to
these translations the comparative ease with which he has mastered
the main lines of St. John of the Cross's teaching. Thus for the
general reader they were of great utility; for the student, on the
other hand, they have never been entirely adequate. They
paraphrase difficult expressions, omit or add to parts of
individual sentences in order (as it seems) to facilitate
comprehension of the general drift of the passages in which these
occur, and frequently retranslate from the Vulgate the Saint's
Spanish quotations from Holy Scripture instead of turning into
English the quotations themselves, using the text actually before
them.
A second and more important reason for a new translation,
however, is the discovery of fresh manuscripts and the consequent
improvements which have been made in the Spanish text of the works
of St. John of the Cross, during the present century. Seventy
years ago, the text chiefly used was that of the collection known
as the Biblioteca de Autores Espanoles (1853), which itself was
based, as we shall later see, upon an edition going back as far as
1703, published before modern methods of editing were so much as
imagined. Both the text of the B.A.E. edition and the unimportant
commentary which accompanied it were highly unsatisfactory, yet
until the beginning of the present century nothing appreciably
better was attempted.
In the last twenty years, however, we have had two new
editions, each based upon a close study of the extant manuscripts
and each representing a great advance upon the editions preceding
it. The three-volume Toledo edition of P. Gerardo de San Juan de
la Cruz, C.D. (1912-14), was the first attempt made to produce an
accurate text by modern critical methods. Its execution was
perhaps less laudable than its conception, and faults were pointed
out in it from the time of its appearance, but it served as a new
starting-point for Spanish scholars and stimulated them to a new
interest in St. John of the Cross's writings. Then, seventeen
years later, came the magnificent five-volume edition of P.
Silverio de Santa Teresa, C.D. (Burgos, 1929-31), which forms the
basis of this present translation. So superior is it, even on the
most casual examination, to all its predecessors that to eulogize
it in detail is superfluous. It is founded upon a larger number of
texts than has previously been known and it collates them with
greater skill than that of any earlier editor. It can hardly fail
to be the standard edition of the works of St. John of the Cross
for generations.
Thanks to the labours of these Carmelite scholars and of
others whose findings they have incorporated in their editions,
Spanish students can now approach the work of the great Doctor
with the reasonable belief that they are reading, as nearly as may
be, what he actually wrote. English-reading students, however, who
are unable to master sixteenth-century Spanish, have hitherto had
no grounds for such a belief. They cannot tell whether, in any
particular passage, they are face to face with the Saint's own
words, with a translator's free paraphrase of them or with a gloss
made by some later copyist or early editor in the supposed
interests of orthodoxy. Indeed, they cannot be sure that some
whole paragraph is not one of the numerous interpolations which
has its rise in an early printed edition -- i.e., the timorous
qualifications of statements which have seemed to the interpolator
over-bold. Even some of the most distinguished writers in English
on St. John of the Cross have been misled in this way and it has
been impossible for any but those who read Spanish with ease to
make a systematic and reliable study of such an important question
as the alleged dependence of Spanish quietists upon the Saint,
while his teaching on the mystical life has quite unwittingly been
distorted by persons who would least wish to misrepresent it in
any particular.
It was when writing the chapter on St. John of the Cross in
the first volume of my Studies of the Spanish Mystics (in which,
as it was published in 1927, I had not the advantage of using P.
Silverio's edition) that I first realized the extent of the harm
caused by the lack of an accurate and modern translation. Making
my own versions of all the passages quoted, I had sometimes
occasion to compare them with those of other translators, which at
their worst were almost unrecognizable as versions of the same
originals. Then and there I resolved that, when time allowed, I
would make a fresh translation of the works of a saint to whom I
have long had great devotion -- to whom, indeed, I owe more than
to any other writer outside the Scriptures. Just at that time I
happened to visit the Discalced Carmelites at Burgos, where I
first met P. Silverio, and found, to my gratification, that his
edition of St. John of the Cross was much nearer publication than
I had imagined. Arrangements for sole permission to translate the
new edition were quickly made and work on the early volumes was
begun even before the last volume was published.
II
These preliminary notes will explain why my chief
preoccupation throughout the performance of this task has been to
present as accurate and reliable a version of St. John of the
Cross's works as it is possible to obtain. To keep the
translation, line by line, au pied de la lettre, is, of course,
impracticable: and such constantly occurring Spanish habits as the
use of abstract nouns in the plural and the verbal construction
'ir + present participle' introduce shades of meaning which cannot
always be reproduced. Yet wherever, for stylistic or other
reasons, I have departed from the Spanish in any way that could
conceivably cause a misunderstanding, I have scrupulously
indicated this in a footnote. Further, I have translated, not only
the text, but the variant readings as given by P. Silverio,[1]
except where they are due merely to slips of the copyist's pen or
where they differ so slightly from the readings of the text that
it is impossible to render the differences in English. I beg
students not to think that some of the smaller changes noted are
of no importance; closer examination will often show that, however
slight they may seem, they are, in relation to their context, or
to some particular aspect of the Saint's teaching, of real
interest; in other places they help to give the reader an idea,
which may be useful to him in some crucial passage, of the general
characteristics of the manuscript or edition in question. The
editor's notes on the manuscripts and early editions which he has
collated will also be found, for the same reason, to be summarized
in the introduction to each work; in consulting the variants, the
English-reading student has the maximum aid to a judgment of the
reliability of his authorities.
Concentration upon the aim of obtaining the most precise
possible rendering of the text has led me to sacrifice stylistic
elegance to exactness where the two have been in conflict; it has
sometimes been difficult to bring oneself to reproduce the Saint's
often ungainly, though often forceful, repetitions of words or his
long, cumbrous parentheses, but the temptation to take refuge in
graceful paraphrases has been steadily resisted. In the same
interest, and also in that of space, I have made certain omissions
from, and abbreviations of, other parts of the edition than the
text. Two of P. Silverio's five volumes are entirely filled with
commentaries and documents. I have selected from the documents
those of outstanding interest to readers with no detailed
knowledge of Spanish religious history and have been content to
summarize the editor's introductions to the individual works, as
well as his longer footnotes to the text, and to omit such parts
as would interest only specialists, who are able, or at least
should be obliged, to study them in the original Spanish.
The decision to summarize in these places has been made the
less reluctantly because of the frequent unsuitability of P.
Silverio's style to English readers. Like that of many Spaniards,
it is so discursive, and at times so baroque in its wealth of
epithet and its profusion of imagery, that a literal translation,
for many pages together, would seldom have been acceptable. The
same criticism would have been applicable to any literal
translation of P. Silverio's biography of St. John of the Cross
which stands at the head of his edition (Vol. I, pp. 7-130). There
was a further reason for omitting these biographical chapters. The
long and fully documented biography by the French Carmelite, P.
Bruno de Jesus-Marie, C.D., written from the same standpoint as P.
Silverio's, has recently been translated into English, and any
attempt to rival this in so short a space would be foredoomed to
failure. I have thought, however, that a brief outline of the
principal events in St. John of the Cross's life would be a useful
preliminary to this edition; this has therefore been substituted
for the biographical sketch referred to.
In language, I have tried to reproduce the atmosphere of a
sixteenth-century text as far as is consistent with clarity.
Though following the paragraph divisions of my original, I have
not scrupled, where this has seemed to facilitate understanding,
to divide into shorter sentences the long and sometimes straggling
periods in which the Saint so frequently indulged. Some attempt
has been made to show the contrast between the highly adorned,
poetical language of much of the commentary on the 'Spiritual
Canticle' and the more closely shorn and eminently practical,
though always somewhat discursive style of the Ascent and Dark
Night. That the Living Flame occupies an intermediate position in
this respect should also be clear from the style of the
translation.
Quotations, whether from the Scriptures or from other
sources, have been left strictly as St. John of the Cross made
them. Where he quotes in Latin, the Latin has been reproduced;
only his quotations in Spanish have been turned into English. The
footnote references are to the Vulgate, of which the Douai Version
is a direct translation; if the Authorized Version differs, as in
the Psalms, the variation has been shown in square brackets for
the convenience of those who use it.
A word may not be out of place regarding the translations of
the poems as they appear in the prose commentaries. Obviously, it
would have been impossible to use the comparatively free verse
renderings which appear in Volume II of this translation, since
the commentaries discuss each line and often each word of the
poems. A literal version of the poems in their original verse-
lines, however, struck me as being inartistic, if not repellent,
and as inviting continual comparison with the more polished verse
renderings which, in spirit, come far nearer to the poet's aim. My
first intention was to translate the poems, for the purpose of the
commentaries, into prose. But later I hit upon the long and
metrically unfettered verse-line, suggestive of Biblical poetry in
its English dress, which I have employed throughout. I believe
that, although the renderings often suffer artistically from their
necessary literalness, they are from the artistic standpoint at
least tolerable.
III
The debts I have to acknowledge, though few, are very large
ones. My gratitude to P. Silverio de Santa Teresa for telling me
so much about his edition before its publication, granting my
publishers the sole translation rights and discussing with me a
number of crucial passages cannot be disjoined from the many
kindnesses I have received during my work on the Spanish mystics,
which is still proceeding, from himself and from his fellow-
Carmelites in the province of Castile. In dedicating this
translation to them, I think particularly of P. Silverio in
Burgos, of P. Florencio del Nino Jesus in Madrid, and of P.
Crisogono de Jesus Sacramentado, together with the Fathers of the
'Convento de la Santa' in Avila.
The long and weary process of revising the manuscript and
proofs of this translation has been greatly lightened by the co-
operation and companionship of P. Edmund Gurdon, Prior of the
Cartuja de Miraflores, near Burgos, with whom I have freely
discussed all kinds of difficulties, both of substance and style,
and who has been good enough to read part of my proofs. From the
quiet library of his monastery, as well as from his gracious
companionship, I have drawn not only knowledge, but strength,
patience and perseverance. And when at length, after each of my
visits, we have had to part, we have continued our labours by
correspondence, shaking hands, as it were, 'over a vast' and
embracing 'from the ends of opposed winds.'
Finally, I owe a real debt to my publishers for allowing me
to do this work without imposing any such limitations of time as
often accompany literary undertakings. This and other
considerations which I have received from them have made that part
of the work which has been done outside the study unusually
pleasant and I am correspondingly grateful.
E. ALLISON PEERS.
University of Liverpool.
Feast of St. John of the Cross,
November 24, 1933.
NOTE. -- Wherever a commentary by St. John of the Cross is
referred to, its title is given in italics (e.g. Spiritual
Canticle); where the corresponding poem is meant, it is placed
between quotation marks (e.g. 'Spiritual Canticle'). The
abbreviation 'e.p.' stands for editio princeps throughout.
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
TO THE SECOND EDITION
DURING the sixteen years which have elapsed since the
publication of the first edition, several reprints have been
issued, and the demand is now such as to justify a complete
resetting. I have taken advantage of this opportunity to revise
the text throughout, and hope that in some of the more difficult
passages I may have come nearer than before to the Saint's mind.
Recent researches have necessitated a considerable amplification
of introductions and footnotes and greatly increased the length of
the bibliography.
The only modification which has been made consistently
throughout the three volumes relates to St. John of the Cross's
quotations from Scripture. In translating these I still follow him
exactly, even where he himself is inexact, but I have used the
Douia Version (instead of the Authorized, as in the first edition)
as a basis for all Scriptural quotations, as well as in the
footnote references and the Scriptural index in Vol. III.
Far more is now known of the life and times of St. John of
the Cross than when this translation of the Complete Works was
first published, thanks principally to the Historia del Carmen
Descalzo of P. Silverio de Santa Teresa, C.D, now General of his
Order, and to the admirably documented Life of the Saint written
by P. Crisogono de Jesus Sacramentado, C.D., and published (in
Vida y Obras de San Juan de la Cruz) in the year after his
untimely death. This increased knowledge is reflected in many
additional notes, and also in the 'Outline of the Life of St. John
of the Cross' (Vol. I, pp. xxv-xxviii), which, for this edition,
has been entirely recast. References are given to my Handbook to
the Life and Times of St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross, which
provides much background too full to be reproduced in footnotes
and too complicated to be compressed. The Handbook also contains
numerous references to contemporary events, omitted from the
'Outline' as being too remote from the main theme to justify
inclusion in a summary necessarily so condensed.
My thanks for help in revision are due to kindly
correspondents, too numerous to name, from many parts of the
world, who have made suggestions for the improvement of the first
edition; to the Rev. Professor David Knowles, of Cambridge
University, for whose continuous practical interest in this
translation I cannot be too grateful; to Miss I.L. McClelland, of
Glasgow University, who has read a large part of this edition in
proof; to Dom Philippe Chevallier, for material which I have been
able to incorporate in it; to P. Jose Antonio de Sobrino, S.J.,
for allowing me to quote freely from his recently published
Estudios; and, most of all, to M.R.P. Silverio de Santa Teresa,
C.D., and the Fathers of the International Carmelite College at
Rome, whose learning and experience, are, I hope, faintly
reflected in this new edition.
E.A.P.
June 30, 1941.
PRINCIPAL ABBREVIATIONS
A.V.--Authorized Version of the Bible (1611).
D.V.--Douai Version of the Bible (1609).
C.W.S.T.J.--The Complete Works of Saint Teresa of Jesus,
translated and edited by E. Allison Peers from the critical
edition of P. Silverio de Santa Teresa, C.D. London, Sheed and
Ward, 1946. 3 vols.
H.-E. Allison Peers: Handbook to the Life and Times of St.
Teresa and St. John of the Cross. London, Burns Oates and
Washbourne, 1953.
LL.--The Letters of Saint Teresa of Jesus, translated and
edited by E. Allison Peers from the critical edition of P.
Silverio de Santa Teresa, C.D. London, Burns Oates and Washburne,
1951. 2 vols.
N.L.M.--National Library of Spain (Biblioteca Nacional),
Madrid.
Obras (P. Silv.)--Obras de San Juan de la Cruz, Doctor de la
Iglesia, editadas y anotadas pot el P. Silverio de Santa Teresa,
C.D. Burgos, 1929-31. 5 vols.
S.S.M.--E. Allison Peers: Studies of the Spanish Mystics.
Vol. I, London, Sheldon Press, 1927; 2nd ed., London, S.P.C.K.,
1951. Vol. II, London, Sheldon Press, 1930.
Sobrino.-Jose Antonio de Sobrino, S.J.: Estudios sobre San
Juan de la Cruz y nuevos textos de su obra. Madrid, 1950.
AN OUTLINE OF THE LIFE OF ST. JOHN
OF THE CROSS[2]
1542. Birth of Juan de Yepes at Fontiveros (Hontiveros), near
Avila.
The day generally ascribed to this event is June 24 (St.
John Baptist's Day). No documentary evidence for it, however,
exists, the parish registers having been destroyed by a fire in
1544. The chief evidence is an inscription, dated 1689, on the
font of the parish church at Fontiveros.
? c. 1543. Death of Juan's father. 'After some years' the
mother removes, with her family, to Arevalo, and later to Medina
del Campo.
? c. 1552-6. Juan goes to school at the Colegio de los Ninos
de la Doctrina, Medina.
c. 1556-7. Don Antonio Alvarez de Toledo takes him into a
Hospital to which he has retired, with the idea of his (Juan's)
training for Holy Orders under his patronage.
? c. 1559-63. Juan attends the College of the Society of
Jesus at Medina.
c. 1562. Leaves the Hospital and the patronage of Alvarez de
Toledo.
1563. Takes the Carmelite habit at St. Anne's, Medina del
Campo, as Juan de San Matias (Santo Matia).
The day is frequently assumed (without any foundation)
to have been the feast of St. Matthias (February 24), but P.
Silverio postulates a day in August or September and P. Crisogono
thinks February definitely improbable.
1564. Makes his profession in the same priory -- probably in
August or September and certainly not earlier than May 21 and not
later than October.
1564 (November). Enters the University of Salamanca as an
artista. Takes a three-year course in Arts (1564-7).
1565 (January 6). Matriculates at the University of
Salamanca.
1567. Receives priest's orders (probably in the summer).
1567 (? September). Meets St. Teresa at Medina del Campo.
Juan is thinking of transferring to the Carthusian Order. St.
Teresa asks him to join her Discalced Reform and the projected
first foundation for friars. He agrees to do so, provided the
foundation is soon made.
1567 (November). Returns to the University of Salamanca,
where he takes a year's course in theology.
1568. Spends part of the Long Vacation at Medina del Campo.
On August 10, accompanies St. Teresa to Valladolid. In September,
returns to Medina and later goes to Avila and Duruelo.
1568 (November 28). Takes the vows of the Reform Duruelo as
St. John of the Cross, together with Antonio de Heredia (Antonio
de Jesus), Prior of the Calced Carmelites at Medina, and Jose de
Cristo, another Carmelite from Medina.
1570 (June 11). Moves, with the Duruelo community, to Mancera
de Abajo.
1570 (October, or possibly February 1571). Stays for about a
month at Pastrana, returning thence to Mancera.
1571 (? January 25). Visits Alba de Tormes for the
inauguration of a new convent there.
1571 (? April). Goes to Alcala de Henares as Rector of the
College of the Reform and directs the Carmelite nuns.
1572 (shortly after April 23). Recalled to Pastrana to
correct the rigours of the new novice-master, Angel de San
Gabriel.
1572 (between May and September). Goes to Avila as confessor
to the Convent of the Incarnation. Remains there till 1577.
1574 (March). Accompanies St. Teresa from Avila to Segovia,
arriving on March 18. Returns to Avila about the end of the month.
1575-6 (Winter of: before February 1576). Kidnapped by the
Calced and imprisoned at Medina del Campo. Freed by the
intervention of the Papal Nuncio, Ormaneto.
1577 (December 2 or 3). Kidnapped by the Calced and carried
off to the Calced Carmelite priory at Toledo as a prisoner.
1577-8. Composes in prison 17 (or perhaps 30) stanzas of the
'Spiritual Canticle' (i.e., as far as the stanza: 'Daughters of
Jewry'); the poem with the refrain 'Although 'tis night'; and the
stanzas beginning 'In principio erat verbum.' He may also have
composed the paraphrase of the psalm Super flumina and the poem
'Dark Night.' (Note: All these poems, in verse form, will be found
in Vol. II of this edition.)
1578 (August 16 or shortly afterwards). Escapes to the
convent of the Carmelite nuns in Toledo, and is thence taken to
his house by D. Pedro Gonzalez de Mendoza, Canon of Toledo.
1578 (October 9). Attends a meeting of the Discalced
superiors at Almodovar. Is sent to El Calvario as Vicar, in the
absence in Rome of the Prior.
1578 (end of October). Stays for 'a few days' at Beas de
Segura, near El Calvario. Confesses the nuns at the Carmelite
Convent of Beas.
1578 (November). Arrives at El Calvario.
1578-9 (November-June). Remains at El Calvario as Vicar. For
a part of this time (probably from the beginning of 1579), goes
weekly to the convent of Beas to hear confessions. During this
period, begins his commentaries entitled The Ascent of Mount
Carmel (cf. pp. 9-314, below) and Spiritual Canticle (translated
in Vol. II).
1579 (June 14). Founds a college of the Reform at Baeza.
1579-82. Resides at Baeza as Rector of the Carmelite college.
Visits the Beas convent occasionally. Writes more of the prose
works begun at El Calvario and the rest of the stanzas of the
'Spiritual Canticle' except the last five, possibly with the
commentaries to the stanzas.
1580. Death of his mother.
1581 (March 3). Attends the Alcala Chapter of the Reform.
Appointed Third Definitor and Prior of the Granada house of Los
Martires. Takes up the latter office only on or about the time of
his election by the community in March 1582.
1581 (November 28). Last meeting with St. Teresa, at Avila.
On the next day, sets out with two nuns for Beas (December 8-
January 15) and Granada.
1582 (January 20). Arrives at Los Martires.
1582-8. Mainly at Granada. Re-elected (or confirmed) as Prior
of Los Martires by the Chapter of Almodovar, 1583. Resides at Los
Martires more or less continuously till 1584 and intermittently
afterwards. Visits the Beas convent occasionally. Writes the last
five stanzas of the 'Spiritual Canticle' during one of these
visits. At Los Martires, finishes the Ascent of Mount Carmel and
composes his remaining prose treatises. Writes Living Flame of
Love about 1585, in fifteen days, at the request of Dona Ana de
Penalosa.
1585 (May). Lisbon Chapter appoints him Second Definitor and
(till 1587) Vicar-Provincial of Andalusia. Makes the following
foundations: Malaga, February 17, 1585; Cordoba, May 18, 1586; La
Manchuela (de Jaen), October 12, 1586; Caravaca, December 18,
1586; Bujalance, June 24, 1587.
1587 (April). Chapter of Valladolid re-appoints him Prior of
Los Martires. He ceases to be Definitor and Vicar-Provincial.
1588 (June 19). Attends the first Chapter-General of the
Reform in Madrid. Is elected First Definitor and a consiliario.
1588 (August 10). Becomes Prior of Segovia, the central house
of the Reform and the headquarters of the Consulta. Acts as deputy
for the Vicar-General, P. Doria, during the latter's absences.
1590 (June 10). Re-elected First Definitor and a consiliario
at the Chapter-General Extraordinary, Madrid.
1591 (June 1). The Madrid Chapter-General deprives him of his
offices and resolves to send him to Mexico. (This latter decision
was later revoked.)
1591 (August 10). Arrives at La Penuela.
1591 (September 12). Attacked by fever. (September Leaves La
Penuela for Ubeda. (December 14) Dies at Ubeda.
January 25, 1675. Beatified by Clement X.
December 26, 1726. Canonized by Benedict XIII.
August 24, 1926. Declared Doctor of the Church Universal by
Pius XI.
GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE WORKS OF ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS
I
DATES AND METHODS OF COMPOSITION.
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS
WITH regard to the times and places at which the works of St.
John of the Cross were written, and also with regard to the number
of these works, there have existed, from a very early date,
considerable differences of opinion. Of internal evidence from the
Saint's own writings there is practically none, and such external
testimony as can be found in contemporary documents needs very
careful examination.
There was no period in the life of St. John of the Cross in
which he devoted himself entirely to writing. He does not, in
fact, appear to have felt any inclination to do so: his books were
written in response to the insistent and repeated demands of his
spiritual children. He was very much addicted, on the other hand,
to the composition of apothegms or maxims for the use of his
penitents and this custom he probably began as early as the days
in which he was confessor to the Convent of the Incarnation at
Avila, though his biographers have no record of any maxims but
those written at Beas. One of his best beloved daughters however,
Ana Maria de Jesus, of the Convent of the Incarnation, declared in
her deposition, during the process of the Saint's canonization,
that he was accustomed to 'comfort those with whom he had to do,
both by his words and by his letters, of which this witness
received a number, and also by certain papers concerning holy
things which this witness would greatly value if she still had
them.' Considering, the number of nuns to whom the Saint was
director at Avila, it is to be presumed that M. Ana Maria was not
the only person whom he favoured. We may safely conclude, indeed,
that there were many others who shared the same privileges, and
that, had we all these 'papers,' they would comprise a large
volume, instead of the few pages reproduced elsewhere in this
translation.
There is a well-known story, preserved in the documents of
the canonization process, of how, on a December night of 1577, St.
John, of the Cross was kidnapped by the Calced Carmelites of Avila
and carried off from the Incarnation to their priory.[3] Realizing
that he had left behind him some important papers, he contrived,
on the next morning, to escape, and returned to the Incarnation to
destroy them while there was time to do so. He was missed almost
immediately and he had hardly gained his cell when his pursuers
were on his heels. In the few moments that remained to him he had
time to tear up these papers and swallow some of the most
compromising. As the original assault had not been unexpected,
though the time of it was uncertain, they would not have been very
numerous. It is generally supposed that they concerned the
business of the infant Reform, of which the survival was at that
time in grave doubt. But it seems at least equally likely that
some of them might have been these spiritual maxims, or some more
extensive instructions which might be misinterpreted by any who
found them. It is remarkable, at any rate, that we have none of
the Saint's writings belonging to this period whatever.
All his biographers tell us that he wrote some of the stanzas
of the 'Spiritual Canticle,' together with a few other poems,
while he was imprisoned at Toledo. 'When he left the prison,' says
M. Magdalena del Espiritu Santo, 'he took with him a little book
in which he had written, while there, some verses based upon the
Gospel In principio erat Verbum, together with some couplets which
begin: "How well I know the fount that freely flows, Although 'tis
night," and the stanzas or liras that begin "Whither has
vanished?" as far as the stanzas beginning "Daughters of Jewry."
The remainder of them the Saint composed later when he was Rector
of the College at Baeza. Some of the expositions were written at
Beas, as answers to questions put to him by the nuns; others at
Granada. This little book, in which the Saint wrote while in
prison, he left in the Convent of Beas and on various occasions I
was commanded to copy it. Then someone took it from my cell --
who, I never knew. The freshness of the words in this book,
together with their beauty and subtlety, caused me great wonder,
and one day I asked the Saint if God gave him those words which
were so comprehensive and so lovely. And he answered: "Daughter,
sometimes God gave them to me and at other times I sought them."'[4]
M. Isabel de Jesus Maria, who was a novice at Toledo when the
Saint escaped from his imprisonment there, wrote thus from Cuerva
on November 2, 1614. 'I remember, too, that, at the time we had
him hidden in the church, he recited to us some lines which he had
composed and kept in his mind, and that one of the nuns wrote them
down as he repeated them. There were three poems -- all of them
upon the Most Holy Trinity, and so sublime and devout that they
seem to enkindle the reader. In this house at Cuerva we have some
which begin:
"Far away in the beginning,
Dwelt the Word in God Most High."'[5]
The frequent references to keeping his verses in his head and
the popular exaggeration of the hardships (great though these
were) which the Saint had to endure in Toledo have led some
writers to affirm that he did not in fact write these poems in
prison but committed them to memory and transferred them to paper
at some later date. The evidence of M. Magdalena, however, would
appear to be decisive. We know, too, that the second of St. John
of the Cross's gaolers, Fray Juan de Santa Maria, was a kindly man
who did all he could to lighten his captive's sufferings; and his
superiors would probably not have forbidden him writing materials
provided he wrote no letters.[6]
It seems, then, that the Saint wrote in Toledo the first
seventeen (or perhaps thirty) stanzas of the 'Spiritual Canticle,'
the nine parts of the poem 'Far away in the beginning . . .,' the
paraphrase of the psalm Super flumina Babylonis and the poem 'How
well I know the fount . . .' This was really a considerable output
of work, for, except perhaps when his gaoler allowed him to go
into another room, he had no light but that of a small oil-lamp or
occasionally the infiltration of daylight that penetrated a small
interior window.
Apart from the statement of M. Magdalena already quoted,
little more is known of what the Saint wrote in El Calvario than
of what he wrote in Toledo. From an amplification made by herself
of the sentences to which we have referred it appears that almost
the whole of what she had copied was taken from her; as the short
extracts transcribed by her are very similar to passages from the
Saint's writings we may perhaps conclude that much of the other
material was also incorporated in them. In that case he may well
have completed a fair proportion of the Ascent of Mount Carmel
before leaving Beas.
It was in El Calvario, too, and for the nuns of Beas, that
the Saint drew the plan called the 'Mount of Perfection' (referred
to by M. Magdalena[7] and in the Ascent of Mount Carmel and
reproduced as the frontispiece to this volume) of which copies
were afterwards multiplied and distributed among Discalced houses.
Its author wished it to figure at the head of all his treatises,
for it is a graphical representation of the entire mystic way,
from the starting-point of the beginner to the very summit of
perfection. His first sketch, which still survives, is a
rudimentary and imperfect one; before long, however, as M.
Magdalena tells us, he evolved another that was fuller and more
comprehensive.
Just as we owe to PP. Gracian and Salazar many precious
relics of St. Teresa, so we owe others of St. John of the Cross to
M. Magdalena. Among the most valuable of these is her own copy of
the 'Mount,' which, after her death, went to the 'Desert'[8] of Our
Lady of the Snows established by the Discalced province of Upper
Andalusia in the diocese of Granada. It was found there by P.
Andres de la Encarnacion, of whom we shall presently speak, and
who immediately made a copy of it, legally certified as an exact
one and now in the National Library of Spain (MS. 6,296).
The superiority of the second plan over the first is very
evident. The first consists simply of three parallel lines
corresponding to three different paths -- one on either side of
the Mount, marked 'Road of the spirit of imperfection' and one in
the centre marked 'Path of Mount Carmel. Spirit of perfection.' In
the spaces between the paths are written the celebrated maxims
which appear in Book I, Chapter xiii, of the Ascent of Mount
Carmel, in a somewhat different form, together with certain
others. At the top of the drawing are the words 'Mount Carmel,'
which are not found in the second plan, and below them is the
legend: 'There is no road here, for there is no law for the
righteous man,' together with other texts from Scripture.
The second plan represents a number of graded heights, the
loftiest of which is planted with trees. Three paths, as in the
first sketch, lead from the base of the mount, but they are traced
more artistically and have a more detailed ascetic and mystical
application. Those on either side, which denote the roads of
imperfection, are broad and somewhat tortuous and come to an end
before the higher stages of the mount are reached. The centre
road, that of perfection, is at first very narrow but gradually
broadens and leads right up to the summit of the mountain, which
only the perfect attain and where they enjoy the iuge convivium --
the heavenly feast. The different zones of religious perfection,
from which spring various virtues, are portrayed with much greater
detail than in the first plan. As we have reproduced the second
plan in this volume, it need not be described more fully.
We know that St. John of the Cross used the 'Mount' very,
frequently for all kinds of religious instruction. 'By means of
this drawing,' testified one of his disciples, 'he used to teach
us that, in order to attain to perfection, we must not desire the
good things of earth, nor those of Heaven; but that we must desire
naught save to seek and strive after the glory and honour of God
our Lord in all things . . . and this "Mount of Perfection" the
said holy father himself expounded to this Witness when he was his
superior in the said priory of Granada.'[9]
It seems not improbable that the Saint continued writing
chapters of the Ascent and the Spiritual Canticle while he was
Rector at Baeza,[10] whether in the College itself, or in El
Castellar, where he was accustomed often to go into retreat. It
was certainly here that he wrote the remaining stanzas of the
Canticle (as M. Magdalena explicitly tells us in words already
quoted), except the last five, which he composed rather later, at
Granada. One likes to think that these loveliest of his verses
were penned by the banks of the Guadalimar, in the woods of the
Granja de Santa Ann, where he was in the habit of passing long
hours in communion with God. At all events the stanzas seem more
in harmony with such an atmosphere than with that of the College.
With regard to the last five stanzas, we have definite
evidence from a Beas nun, M. Francisca de la Madre de Dios, who
testifies in the Beatification process (April 2, 1618) as follows:
And so, when the said holy friar John of the Cross was in
this convent one Lent (for his great love for it brought him here
from the said city of Granada, where he was prior, to confess the
nuns and preach to them) he was preaching to them one day in the
parlour, and this witness observed that on two separate occasions
he was rapt and lifted up from the ground; and when he came to
himself he dissembled and said: 'You saw how sleep overcame me!'
And one day he asked this witness in what her prayer consisted,
and she replied: 'In considering the beauty of God and in
rejoicing that He has such beauty.' And the Saint was so pleased
with this that for some days he said the most sublime things
concerning the beauty of God, at which all marvelled. And thus,
under the influence of this love, he composed five stanzas,
beginning 'Beloved, let us sing, And in thy beauty see ourselves
portray'd.' And in all this he showed that there was in his breast
a great love of God.
From a letter which this nun wrote from Beas in 1629 to P.
Jeronimo de San Jose, we gather that the stanzas were actually
written at Granada and brought to Beas, where
. . . with every word that we spoke to him we seemed to be
opening a door to the fruition of the great treasures and riches
which God had stored up in his soul.
If there is a discrepancy here, however, it is of small
importance; there is no doubt as to the approximate date of the
composition of these stanzas and of their close connection with
Beas.
The most fruitful literary years for St. John of the Cross
were those which he spent at Granada. Here he completed the Ascent
and wrote all his remaining treatises. Both M. Magdalena and the
Saint's closest disciple, P. Juan Evangelista, bear witness to
this. The latter writes from Granada to P. Jeronimo de San Jose,
the historian of the Reform:
With regard to having seen our venerable father write the
books, I saw him write them all; for, as I have said, I was ever
at his side. The Ascent of Mount Carmel and the Dark Night he
wrote here at Granada, little by little, continuing them only with
many breaks. The Living Flame of Love he also wrote in this house,
when he was Vicar-Provincial, at the request of Dona Ana de
Penalosa, and he wrote it in fifteen days when he was very busy
here with an abundance of occupations. The first thing that he
wrote was Whither hast vanished? and that too he wrote here; the
stanzas he had written in the prison at Toledo.[11]
In another letter (February 18, 1630), he wrote to the same
correspondent:
With regard to our holy father's having written his books in
this home, I will say what is undoubtedly true -- namely, that he
wrote here the commentary on the stanzas Whither hast vanished?
and the Living Flame of Love, for he began and ended them in my
time. The Ascent of Mount Carmel I found had been begun when I
came here to take the habit, which was a year and a half after the
foundation of this house; he may have brought it from yonder
already begun. But the Dark Night he certainly wrote here, for I
saw him writing a part of it, and this is certain, because I saw
it.[12]
These and other testimonies might with advantage be fuller
and more concrete, but at least they place beyond doubt the facts
that we have already set down. Summarizing our total findings, we
may assert that part of the 'Spiritual Canticle,' with perhaps the
'Dark Night,' and the other poems enumerated, were written in the
Toledo prison; that at the request of some nuns he wrote at El
Calvario (1578-79) a few chapters of the Ascent and commentaries
on some of the stanzas of the 'Canticle'; that he composed further
stanzas at Baeza (1579-81), perhaps with their respective
commentaries; and that, finally, he completed the Canticle and the
Ascent at Granada and wrote the whole of the Dark Night and of the
Living Flame -- the latter in a fortnight. All these last works he
wrote before the end of 1585, the first year in which he was
Vicar-Provincial.
Other writings, most of them brief, are attributed to St.
John of the Cross; they will be discussed in the third volume of
this edition, in which we shall publish the minor works which we
accept as genuine. The authorship of his four major prose works --
the Ascent, Dark Night, Spiritual Canticle and Living Flame -- no
one has ever attempted to question, even though the lack of extant
autographs and the large number of copies have made it difficult
to establish correct texts. To this question we shall return
later.
The characteristics of the writings of St. John of the Cross
are so striking that it would be difficult to confuse them with
those of any other writer. His literary personality stands out
clearly from that of his Spanish contemporaries who wrote on
similar subjects. Both his style and his methods of exposition
bear the marks of a strong individuality.
If some of these derive from his native genius and
temperament, others are undoubtedly reflections of his education
and experience. The Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy, then at the
height of its splendour, which he learned so thoroughly in the
classrooms of Salamanca University, characterizes the whole of his
writings, giving them a granite-like solidity even when their
theme is such as to defy human speculation. Though the precise
extent of his debt to this Salamancan training in philosophy has
not yet been definitely assessed, the fact of its influence is
evident to every reader. It gives massiveness, harmony and unity
to both the ascetic and the mystical work of St. John of the Cross
-- that is to say, to all his scientific writing.
Deeply, however, as St. John of the Cross drew from the
Schoolmen, he was also profoundly indebted to many other writers.
He was distinctly eclectic in his reading and quotes freely
(though less than some of his Spanish contemporaries) from the
Fathers and from the mediaeval mystics, especially from St.
Thomas, St. Bonaventura, Hugh of St. Victor and the pseudo-
Areopagite. All that he quotes, however, he makes his own, with
the result that his chapters are never a mass of citations loosely
strung together, as are those of many other Spanish mystics of his
time.
When we study his treatises -- principally that great
composite work known as the Ascent of Mount Carmel and the Dark
Night -- we have the impression of a master-mind that has scaled
the heights of mystical science and from their summit looks down
upon and dominates the plain below and the paths leading upward.
We may well wonder what a vast contribution to the subject he
would have made had he been able to expound all the eight stanzas
of his poem since he covered so much ground in expounding no more
than two. Observe with what assurance and what mastery of subject
and method he defines his themes and divides his arguments, even
when treating the most abstruse and controversial questions. The
most obscure phenomena he appears to illumine, as it were, with
one lightning flash of understanding, as though the explanation of
them were perfectly natural and easy. His solutions of difficult
problems are not timid, questioning and loaded with exceptions,
but clear, definite and virile like the man who proposes them. No
scientific field, perhaps, has so many zones which are apt to
become vague and obscure as has that of mystical theology; and
there are those among the Saint's predecessors who seem to have
made their permanent abode in them. They give the impression of
attempting to cloak vagueness in verbosity, in order to avoid
being forced into giving solutions of problems which they find
insoluble. Not so St. John of the Cross. A scientific dictator, if
such a person were conceivable, could hardly express himself with
greater clarity. His phrases have a decisive, almost a chiselled
quality; where he errs on the side of redundance, it is not with
the intention of cloaking uncertainty, but in order that he may
drive home with double force the truths which he desires to
impress.
No less admirable are, on the one hand, his synthetic skill
and the logic of his arguments, and, on the other, his subtle and
discriminating analyses, which weigh the finest shades of thought
and dissect each subject with all the accuracy of science. To his
analytical genius we owe those finely balanced statements,
orthodox yet bold and fearless, which have caused clumsier
intellects to misunderstand him. It is not remarkable that this
should have occurred. The ease with which the unskilled can
misinterpret genius is shown in the history of many a heresy.
How much of all this St. John of the Cross owed to his
studies of scholastic philosophy in the University of Salamanca,
it is difficult to say. If we examine the history of that
University and read of its severe discipline we shall be in no
danger of under-estimating the effect which it must have produced
upon so agile and alert an intellect. Further, we note the
constant parallelisms and the comparatively infrequent (though
occasionally important) divergences between the doctrines of St.
John of the Cross and St. Thomas, to say nothing of the close
agreement between the views of St. John of the Cross and those of
the Schoolmen on such subjects as the passions and appetites, the
nature of the soul, the relations between soul and body. Yet we
must not forget the student tag: Quod natura non dat, Salamtica
non praestat. Nothing but natural genius could impart the vigour
and the clarity which enhance all St. John of the Cross's
arguments and nothing but his own deep and varied experience could
have made him what he may well be termed -- the greatest
psychologist in the history of mysticism.
Eminent, too, was St. John of the Cross in sacred theology.
The close natural connection that exists between dogmatic and
mystical theology and their continual interdependence in practice
make it impossible for a Christian teacher to excel in the latter
alone. Indeed, more than one of the heresies that have had their
beginnings in mysticism would never have developed had those who
fell into them been well grounded in dogmatic theology. The one
is, as it were, the lantern that lights the path of the other, as
St. Teresa realized when she began to feel the continual necessity
of consulting theological teachers. If St. John of the Cross is
able to climb the greatest heights of mysticism and remain upon
them without stumbling or dizziness it is because his feet are
invariably well shod with the truths of dogmatic theology. The
great mysteries -- those of the Trinity, the Creation, the
Incarnation and the Redemption -- and such dogmas as those
concerning grace, the gifts of the Spirit, the theological
virtues, etc., were to him guide-posts for those who attempted to
scale, and to lead others to scale, the symbolic mount of
sanctity.
It will be remembered that the Saint spent but one year upon
his theological course at the University of Salamanca, for which
reason many have been surprised at the evident solidity of his
attainments. But, apart from the fact that a mind so keen and
retentive as that of Fray Juan de San Matias could absorb in a
year what others would have failed to imbibe in the more usual two
or three, we must of necessity assume a far longer time spent in
private study. For in one year he could not have studied all the
treatises of which he clearly demonstrates his knowledge -- to say
nothing of many others which he must have known. His own works,
apart from any external evidence, prove him to have been a
theologian of distinction.
In both fields, the dogmatic and the mystical he was greatly
aided by his knowledge of Holy Scripture, which he studied
continually, in the last years of his life, to the exclusion, as
it would seem, of all else. Much of it he knew by heart; the
simple devotional talks that he was accustomed to give were
invariably studded with texts, and he made use of passages from
the Bible both to justify and to illustrate his teaching. In the
mystical interpretation of Holy Scripture, as every student of
mysticism knows, he has had few equals even among his fellow
Doctors of the Church Universal.
Testimonies to his mastery of the Scriptures can be found in
abundance. P. Alonso de la Madre de Dios, el Asturicense, for
example, who was personally acquainted with him, stated in 1603
that 'he had a great gift and facility for the exposition of the
Sacred Scripture, principally of the Song of Songs,
Ecclesiasticus, Ecclesiastes, the Proverbs and the Psalms of
David.'[13] His spiritual daughter, that same Magdalena del
Espiritus Santo to whom we have several times referred, affirms
that St. John of the Cross would frequently read the Gospels to
the nuns of Beas and expound the letter and the spirit to them.[14]
Fray Juan Evangelista says in a well-known passage:
He was very fond of reading in the Scriptures, and I never
once saw him read any other books than the Bible,[15] almost all of
which he knew by heart, St. Augustine Contra Haereses and the Flos
Sanctorum. When occasionally he preached (which was seldom) or
gave informal addresses [platicas], as he more commonly did, he
never read from any book save the Bible. His conversation, whether
at recreation or at other times, was continually of God, and he
spoke so delightfully that, when he discoursed upon sacred things
at recreation, he would make us all laugh and we used greatly to
enjoy going out. On occasions when we held chapters, he would
usually give devotional addresses (platicas divinas) after supper,
and he never failed to give an address every night.[16]
Fray Pablo de Santa Maria, who had also heard the Saint's
addresses, wrote thus:
He was a man of the most enkindled spirituality and of great
insight into all that concerns mystical theology and matters of
prayer; I consider it impossible that he could have spoken so well
about all the virtues if he had not been most proficient in the
spiritual life, and I really think he knew the whole Bible by
heart, so far as one could judge from the various Biblical
passages which he would quote at chapters and in the refectory,
without any great effort, but as one who goes where the Spirit
leads him.[17]
Nor was this admiration for the expository ability of St.
John of the Cross confined to his fellow-friars, who might easily
enough have been led into hero-worship. We know that he was
thought highly of in this respect by the University of Alcala de
Henares, where he was consulted as an authority. A Dr. Villegas,
Canon of Segovia Cathedral, has left on record his respect for
him. And Fray Jeronimo de San Jose relates the esteem in which he
was held at the University of Baeza, which in his day enjoyed a
considerable reputation for Biblical studies:
There were at that time at the University of Baeza many
learned and spiritually minded persons, disciples of that great
father and apostle Juan de Avila.[18] . . . All these doctors . . .
would repair to our venerable father as to an oracle from heaven
and would discuss with him both their own spiritual progress and
that of souls committed to their charge, with the result that they
were both edified and astonished at his skill. They would also
bring him difficulties and delicate points connected with Divine
letters, and on these, too, he spoke with extraordinary energy and
illumination. One of these doctors, who had consulted him and
listened to him on various occasions, said that, although he had
read deeply in St. Augustine and St. John Chrysostom and other
saints, and had found in them greater heights and depths, he had
found in none of them that particular kind of spirituality in
exposition which this great father applied to Scriptural
passages.[19]
The Scriptural knowledge of St. John of the Cross was, as
this passage makes clear, in no way merely academic. Both in his
literal and his mystical interpretations of the Bible, he has what
we may call a 'Biblical sense,' which saves him from such
exaggerations as we find in other expositors, both earlier and
contemporary. One would not claim, of course, that among the many
hundreds of applications of Holy Scripture made by the Carmelite
Doctor there are none that can be objected to in this respect; but
the same can be said of St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, St. Gregory or
St. Bernard, and no one would assert that, either with them or
with him, such instances are other than most exceptional.
To the three sources already mentioned in which St. John of
the Cross found inspiration we must add a fourth -- the works of
ascetic and mystical writers. It is not yet possible to assert
with any exactness how far the Saint made use of these; for,
though partial studies of this question have been attempted, a
complete and unbiased treatment of it has still to be undertaken.
Here we can do no more than give a few indications of what remains
to be done and summarize the present content of our knowledge.[20]
We may suppose that, during his novitiate in Medina, the
Saint read a number of devotional books, one of which would almost
certainly have been the Imitation of Christ, and others would have
included works which were translated into Spanish by order of
Cardinal Cisneros. The demands of a University course would not
keep him from pursuing such studies at Salamanca; the friar who
chose a cell from the window of which he could see the Blessed
Sacrament, so that he might spend hours in its company, would
hardly be likely to neglect his devotional reading. But we have
not a syllable of direct external evidence as to the titles of any
of the books known to him.
Nor, for that matter, have we much more evidence of this kind
for any other part of his life. Both his early Carmelite
biographers and the numerous witnesses who gave evidence during
the canonization process describe at great length his
extraordinary penances, his love for places of retreat beautified
by Nature, the long hours that he spent in prayer and the tongue
of angels with which he spoke on things spiritual. But of his
reading they say nothing except to describe his attachment to the
Bible, nor have we any record of the books contained in the
libraries of the religious houses that he visited. Yet if, as we
gather from the process, he spent little more than three hours
nightly in sleep, he must have read deeply of spiritual things by
night as well as by day.
Some clues to the nature of his reading may be gained from
his own writings. It is true that the clues are slender. He cites
few works apart from the Bible and these are generally liturgical
books, such as the Breviary. Some of his quotations from St.
Augustine, St. Gregory and other of the Fathers are traceable to
these sources. Nevertheless, we have not read St. John of the
Cross for long before we find ourselves in the full current of
mystical tradition. It is not by means of more or less literal
quotations that the Saint produces this impression; he has studied
his precursors so thoroughly that he absorbs the substance of
their doctrine and incorporates it so intimately in his own that
it becomes flesh of his flesh. Everything in his writings is fully
matured: he has no juvenilia. The mediaeval mystics whom he uses
are too often vague and undisciplined; they need someone to select
from them and unify them, to give them clarity and order, so that
their treatment of mystical theology may have the solidity and
substance of scholastic theology. To have done this is one of the
achievements of St. John of the Cross.
We are convinced, then, by an internal evidence which is
chiefly of a kind in which no chapter and verse can be given, that
St. John of the Cross read widely in mediaeval mystical theology
and assimilated a great part of what he read. The influence of
foreign writers upon Spanish mysticism, though it was once denied,
is to-day generally recognized. It was inevitable that it should
have been considerable in a country which in the sixteenth century
had such a high degree of culture as Spain. Plotinus, in a diluted
form, made his way into Spanish mysticism as naturally as did
Seneca into Spanish asceticism. Plato and Aristotle entered it
through the two greatest minds that Christianity has known -- St.
Augustine and St. Thomas. The influence of the Platonic theories
of love and beauty and of such basic Aristotelian theories as the
origin of knowledge is to be found in most of the Spanish mystics,
St. John of the Cross among them.
The pseudo-Dionysius was another writer who was considered a
great authority by the Spanish mystics. The importance attributed
to his works arose partly from the fact that he was supposed to
have been one of the first disciples of the Apostles; many
chapters from mystical works of those days all over Europe are no
more than glosses of the pseudo-Areopagite. He is followed less,
however, by St. John of the Cross than by many of the latter's
contemporaries.
Other influences upon the Carmelite Saint were St. Gregory,
St. Bernard and Hugh and Richard of St. Victor, many of whose
maxims were in the mouths of the mystics in the sixteenth century.
More important, probably, than any of these was the Fleming,
Ruysbroeck, between whom and St. John of the Cross there were
certainly many points of contact. The Saint would have read him,
not in the original, but in Surius' Latin translation of 1552,
copies of which are known to have been current in Spain.[21]
Together with Ruysbroeck may be classed Suso, Denis the
Carthusian, Herp, Kempis and various other writers.
Many of the ideas and phrases which we find in St. John of
the Cross, as in other writers, are, of course, traceable to the
common mystical tradition rather than to any definite individual
influence. The striking metaphor of the ray of light penetrating
the room, for example, which occurs in the first chapter of the
pseudo-Areopagite's De Mystica Theologia, has been used
continually by mystical writers ever since his time. The figures
of the wood consumed by fire, of the ladder, the mirror, the flame
of love and the nights of sense and spirit had long since become
naturalized in mystical literature. There are many more such
examples.
The originality of St. John of the Cross is in no way
impaired by his employment of this current mystical language: such
an idea might once have been commonly held, but has long ceased to
be put forward seriously. His originality, indeed, lies precisely
in the use which he made of language that he found near to hand.
It is not going too far to liken the place taken by St. John of
the Cross in mystical theology to that of St. Thomas in dogmatic;
St. Thomas laid hold upon the immense store of material which had
accumulated in the domain of dogmatic theology and subjected it to
the iron discipline of reason. That St. John of the Cross did the
same for mystical theology is his great claim upon our admiration.
Through St. Thomas speaks the ecclesiastical tradition of many
ages on questions of religious belief; through St. John speaks an
equally venerable tradition on questions of Divine love. Both
writers combined sainthood with genius. Both opened broad channels
to be followed of necessity by Catholic writers through the ages
to come till theology shall lose itself in that vast ocean of
truth and love which is God. Both created instruments adequate to
the greatness of their task: St. Thomas' clear, decisive reasoning
processes give us the formula appropriate to each and every need
of the understanding; St. John clothes his teaching in mellower
and more appealing language, as befits the exponent of the science
of love. We may describe the treatises of St. John of the Cross as
the true Summa Angelica of mystical theology.
II
OUTSTANDING QUALITIES AND DEFECTS OF THE SAINT'S STYLE
THE profound and original thought which St. John of the Cross
bestowed upon so abstruse a subject, and upon one on which there
was so little classical literature in Spanish when he wrote, led
him to clothe his ideas in a language at once energetic, precise
and of a high degree of individuality. His style reflects his
thought, but it reflects the style of no school and of no other
writer whatsoever.
This is natural enough, for thought and feeling were always
uppermost in the Saint: style and language take a place entirely
subordinate to them. Never did he sacrifice any idea to artistic
combinations of words; never blur over any delicate shade of
thought to enhance some rhythmic cadence of musical prose.
Literary form (to use a figure which he himself might have coined)
is only present at all in his works in the sense in which the
industrious and deferential servant is present in the ducal
apartment, for the purpose of rendering faithful service to his
lord and master. This subordination of style to content in the
Saint's work is one of its most eminent qualities. He is a great
writer, but not a great stylist. The strength and robustness of
his intellect everywhere predominate.
This to a large extent explains the negligences which we find
in his style, the frequency with which it is marred by repetitions
and its occasional degeneration into diffuseness. The long,
unwieldy sentences, one of which will sometimes run to the length
of a reasonably sized paragraph, are certainly a trial to many a
reader. So intent is the Saint upon explaining, underlining and
developing his points so that they shall be apprehended as
perfectly as may be, that he continually recurs to what he has
already said, and repeats words, phrases and even passages of
considerable length without scruple. It is only fair to remind the
reader that such things were far commoner in the Golden Age than
they are to-day; most didactic Spanish prose of that period would
be notably improved, from a modern standpoint, if its volume were
cut down by about one-third.
Be that as it may, these defects in the prose of St. John of
the Cross are amply compensated by the fullness of his
phraseology, the wealth and profusion of his imagery, the force
and the energy of his argument. He has only to be compared with
the didactic writers who were his contemporaries for this to
become apparent. Together with Luis de Granada, Luis de Leon, Juan
de los Angeles and Luis de la Puente,[22] he created a genuinely
native language, purged of Latinisms, precise and eloquent, which
Spanish writers have used ever since in writing of mystical
theology.
The most sublime of all the Spanish mystics, he soars aloft
on the wings of Divine love to heights known to hardly any of
them. Though no words can express the loftiest of the experiences
which he describes, we are never left with the impression that
word, phrase or image has failed him. If it does not exist, he
appears to invent it, rather than pause in his description in
order to search for an expression of the idea that is in his mind
or be satisfied with a prolix paraphrase. True to the character of
his thought, his style is always forceful and energetic, even to a
fault.
We have said nothing of his poems, for indeed they call for
no purely literary commentary. How full of life the greatest of
them are, how rich in meaning, how unforgettable and how
inimitable, the individual reader may see at a glance or may learn
from his own experience. Many of their exquisite figures their
author owes, directly or indirectly, to his reading and
assimilation of the Bible. Some of them, however, have acquired a
new life in the form which he has given them. A line here, a
phrase there, has taken root in the mind of some later poet or
essayist and has given rise to a new work of art, to many lovers
of which the Saint who lies behind it is unknown.
It is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that the verse and
prose works combined of St. John of the Cross form at once the
most grandiose and the most melodious spiritual canticle to which
any one man has ever given utterance. It is impossible, in the
space at our disposal, to quote at any length from the Spanish
critics who have paid tribute to its comprehensiveness and
profundity. We must content ourselves with a short quotation
characterizing the Saint's poems, taken from the greatest of these
critics, Marcelino Menendez Pelayo, who, besides referring
frequently to St. John of the Cross in such of his mature works as
the Heterodoxos, Ideas Esteticas and Ciencia Espanola, devoted to
him a great part of the address which he delivered as a young man
at his official reception into the Spanish Academy under the title
of 'Mystical Poetry.'
'So sublime,' wrote Menendez Pelayo, 'is this poetry [of St.
John of the Cross] that it scarcely seems to belong to this world
at all; it is hardly capable of being assessed by literary
criteria. More ardent in its passion than any profane poetry, its
form is as elegant and exquisite, as plastic and as highly figured
as any of the finest works of the Renaissance. The spirit of God
has passed through these poems every one, beautifying and
sanctifying them on its way.'
III
DIFFUSION OF THE WRITINGS OF ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS -- LOSS OF
THE AUTOGRAPHS -- GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MANUSCRIPTS
The outstanding qualities of St. John of the Cross's writings
were soon recognized by the earliest of their few and privileged
readers. All such persons, of course, belonged to a small circle
composed of the Saint's intimate friends and disciples. As time
went on, the circle widened repeatedly; now it embraces the entire
Church, and countless individual souls who are filled with the
spirit of Christianity.
First of all, the works were read and discussed in those loci
of evangelical zeal which the Saint had himself enkindled, by his
word and example, at Beas, El Calvario, Baeza and Granada. They
could not have come more opportunely. St. Teresa's Reform had
engendered a spiritual alertness and energy reminiscent of the
earliest days of Christianity. Before this could in any way
diminish, her first friar presented the followers of them both
with spiritual food to nourish and re-create their souls and so to
sustain the high degree of zeal for Our Lord which He had bestowed
upon them.
In one sense, St. John of the Cross took up his pen in order
to supplement the writings of St. Teresa; on several subjects, for
example, he abstained from writing at length because she had
already treated of them.[23] Much of the work of the two Saints,
however, of necessity covers the same ground, and thus the great
mystical school of the Spanish Carmelites is reinforced at its
very beginnings in a way which must be unique in the history of
mysticism. The writings of St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross,
though of equal value and identical aim, are in many respects very
different in their nature; together they cover almost the entire
ground of orthodox mysticism, both speculative and experimental.
The Carmelite mystics who came after them were able to build upon
a broad and sure foundation.
The writings of St. John of the Cross soon became known
outside the narrow circle of his sons and daughters in religion.
In a few years they had gone all over Spain and reached Portugal,
France and Italy. They were read by persons of every social class,
from the Empress Maria of Austria, sister of Philip II, to the
most unlettered nuns of St. Teresa's most remote foundations. One
of the witnesses at the process for the beatification declared
that he knew of no works of which there existed so many copies,
with the exception of the Bible.
We may fairly suppose (and the supposition is confirmed by
the nature of the extant manuscripts) that the majority of the
early copies were made by friars and nuns of the Discalced Reform.
Most Discalced houses must have had copies and others were
probably in the possession of members of other Orders. We gather,
too, from various sources, that even lay persons managed to make
or obtain copies of the manuscripts.
How many of these copies, it will be asked, were made
directly from the autographs? So vague is the available evidence
on this question that it is difficult to attempt any calculation
of even approximate reliability. All we can say is that the copies
made by, or for, the Discalced friars and nuns themselves are the
earliest and most trustworthy, while those intended for the laity
were frequently made at third or fourth hand. The Saint himself
seems to have written out only one manuscript of each treatise and
none of these has come down to us. Some think that he destroyed
the manuscripts copied with his own hand, fearing that they might
come to be venerated for other reasons than that of the value of
their teaching. He was, of course, perfectly capable of such an
act of abnegation; once, as we know, in accordance with his own
principles, he burned some letters of St. Teresa, which he had
carried with him for years, for no other reason than that he
realized that he was becoming attached to them.[24]
The only manuscript of his that we possess consists of a few
pages of maxims, some letters and one or two documents which he
wrote when he was Vicar-Provincial of Andalusia.[25] So numerous
and so thorough have been the searches made for further autographs
during the last three centuries that further discoveries of any
importance seem most unlikely. We have, therefore, to console
ourselves with manuscripts, such as the Sanlucar de Barrameda
Codex of the Spiritual Canticle, which bear the Saint's autograph
corrections as warrants of their integrity.
The vagueness of much of the evidence concerning the
manuscripts to which we have referred extends to the farthest
possible limit -- that of using the word 'original' to indicate
'autograph' and 'copy' indifferently. Even in the earliest
documents we can never be sure which sense is intended.
Furthermore, there was a passion in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries for describing all kinds of old manuscripts as
autographs, and thus we find copies so described in which the hand
bears not the slightest resemblance to that of the Saint, as the
most superficial collation with a genuine specimen of his hand
would have made evident. We shall give instances of this in
describing the extant copies of individual treatises. One example
of a general kind, however, may be quoted here to show the extent
to which the practice spread. In a statement made, with reference
to one of the processes, at the convent of Discalced Carmelite
nuns of Valladolid, a certain M. Maria de la Trinidad deposed
'that a servant of God, a Franciscan tertiary named Ana Maria,
possesses the originals of the books of our holy father, and has
heard that he sent them to the Order.' Great importance was
attached to this deposition and every possible measure was taken
to find the autographs -- needless to say, without result.[26]
With the multiplication of the number of copies of St. John
of the Cross's writings, the number of variants naturally
multiplied also. The early copies having all been made for
devotional purposes, by persons with little or no palaeographical
knowledge, many of whom did not even exercise common care, it is
not surprising that there is not a single one which can compare in
punctiliousness with certain extant eighteenth-century copies of
documents connected with St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa.
These were made by a painstaking friar called Manuel de Santa
Maria, whose scrupulousness went so far that he reproduced
imperfectly formed letters exactly as they were written, adding
the parts that were lacking (e.g., the tilde over the letter n)
with ink of another colour.
We may lament that this good father had no predecessor like
himself to copy the Saint's treatises, but it is only right to say
that the copies we possess are sufficiently faithful and numerous
to give us reasonably accurate versions of their originals. The
important point about them is that they bear no signs of bad
faith, nor even of the desire (understandable enough in those
unscientific days) to clarify the sense of their original, or even
to improve upon its teaching. Their errors are often gross ones,
but the large majority of them are quite easy to detect and put
right. The impression to this effect which one obtains from a
casual perusal of almost any of these copies is quite definitely
confirmed by a comparison of them with copies corrected by the
Saint or written by the closest and most trusted of his disciples.
It may be added that some of the variants may, for aught we know
to the contrary, be the Saint's own work, since it is not
improbable that he may have corrected more than one copy of some
of his writings, and not been entirely consistent.
There are, broadly speaking, two classes into which the
copies (more particularly those of the Ascent and the Dark Night)
may be divided. One class aims at a more or less exact
transcription; the other definitely sets out to abbreviate. Even
if the latter class be credited with a number of copies which
hardly merit the name, the former is by far the larger, and, of
course, the more important, though it must not be supposed that
the latter is unworthy of notice. The abbreviators generally omit
whole chapters, or passages, at a time, and, where they are not
for the moment doing this, or writing the connecting phrases
necessary to repair their mischief, they are often quite faithful
to their originals. Since they do not, in general, attribute
anything to their author that is not his, no objection can be
taken, on moral grounds, to their proceeding, though, in actual
fact, the results are not always happy. Their ends were purely
practical and devotional and they made no attempt to pass their
compendia as full-length transcriptions.
With regard to the Spiritual Canticle and the Living Flame of
Love, of each of which there are two redactions bearing
indisputable marks of the author's own hand, the classification of
the copies will naturally depend upon which redaction each copy
the more nearly follows. This question will be discussed in the
necessary detail in the introduction to each of these works, and
to the individual introductions to the four major treatises we
must refer the reader for other details of the manuscripts. In the
present pages we have attempted only a general account of these
matters. It remains to add that our divisions of each chapter into
paragraphs follow the manuscripts throughout except where
indicated. The printed editions, as we shall see, suppressed these
divisions, but, apart from their value to the modern reader, they
are sufficiently nearly identical in the various copies to form
one further testimony to their general high standard of
reliability.
IV
INTEGRITY OF THE SAINT'S WORK -- INCOMPLETE CONDITION OF THE
'ASCENT' AND THE 'NIGHT' -- DISPUTED QUESTIONS
THE principal lacuna in St. John of the Cross's writings, and,
from the literary standpoint, the most interesting, is the lack of
any commentary to the last five stanzas[27] of the poem 'Dark
Night.' Such a commentary is essential to the completion of the
plan which the Saint had already traced for himself in what was to
be, and, in spite of its unfinished condition, is in fact, his
most rigorously scientific treatise. 'All the doctrine,' he wrote
in the Argument of the Ascent, 'whereof I intend to treat in this
Ascent of Mount Carmel is included in the following stanzas, and
in them is also described the manner of ascending to the summit of
the Mount, which is the high estate of perfection which we here
call union of the soul with God.' This leaves no doubt but that
the Saint intended to treat the mystical life as one whole, and to
deal in turn with each stage of the road to perfection, from the
beginnings of the Purgative Way to the crown and summit of the
life of Union. After showing the need for such a treatise as he
proposes to write, he divides the chapters on Purgation into four
parts corresponding to the Active and Passive nights of Sense and
of Spirit. These, however, correspond only to the first two
stanzas of his poem; they are not, as we shall shortly see,
complete, but their incompleteness is slight compared with that of
the work as a whole.
Did St. John of the Cross, we may ask, ever write a
commentary on those last five stanzas, which begin with a
description of the state of Illumination:
'Twas that light guided me,
More surely than the noonday's brightest glare --
and end with that of the life of Union:
All things for me that day
Ceas'd, as I slumber'd there,
Amid the lilies drowning all my care?
If we suppose that he did, we are faced with the question of
its fate and with the strange fact that none of his contemporaries
makes any mention of such a commentary, though they are all
prolific in details of far less importance.
Conjectures have been ventured on this question ever since
critical methods first began to be applied to St. John of the
Cross's writings. A great deal was written about it by P. Andres
de la Encarnacion, to whom his superiors entrusted the task of
collecting and editing the Saint's writings, and whose findings,
though they suffer from the defects of an age which from a modern
standpoint must be called unscientific, and need therefore to be
read with the greatest caution, are often surprisingly just and
accurate. P. Andres begins by referring to various places where
St. John of the Cross states that he has treated certain subjects
and proposes to treat others, about which nothing can be found in
his writings. This, he says, may often be due to an oversight on
the writer's part or to changes which new experiences might have
brought to his mode of thinking. On the other hand, there are
sometimes signs that these promises have been fulfilled: the sharp
truncation of the argument, for example, at the end of Book III of
the Ascent suggests that at least a few pages are missing, in
which case the original manuscript must have been mutilated,[28] for
almost all the extant copies break off at the same word. It is
unthinkable, as P. Andres says, that the Saint 'should have gone
on to write the Night without completing the Ascent, for all these
five books[29] are integral parts of one whole, since they all treat
of different stages of one spiritual path.'[30]
It may be argued in the same way that St. John of the Cross
would not have gone on to write the commentaries on the 'Spiritual
Canticle' and the 'Living Flame of Love' without first completing
the Dark Night. P. Andres goes so far as to say that the very
unwillingness which the Saint displayed towards writing
commentaries on the two latter poems indicates that he had already
completed the others; otherwise, he could easily have excused
himself from the later task on the plea that he had still to
finish the earlier.
Again, St. John of the Cross declares very definitely, in the
prologue to the Dark Night, that, after describing in the
commentary on the first two stanzas the effects of the two passive
purgations of the sensual and the spiritual part of man, he will
devote the six remaining stanzas to expounding 'various and
wondrous effects of the spiritual illumination and union of love
with God.' Nothing could be clearer than this. Now, in the
commentary on the 'Living Flame,' argues P. Andres, he treats at
considerable length of simple contemplation and adds that he has
written fully of it in several chapters of the Ascent and the
Night, which he names; but not only do we not find the references
in two of the chapters enumerated by him, but he makes no mention
of several other chapters in which the references are of
considerable fullness. The proper deductions from these facts
would seem to be, first, that we do not possess the Ascent and the
Night in the form in which the Saint wrote them, and, second, that
in the missing chapters he referred to the subject under
discussion at much greater length than in the chapters we have.
Further, the practice of St. John of the Cross was not to
omit any part of his commentaries when for any reason he was
unable or unwilling to write them at length, but rather to
abbreviate them. Thus, he runs rapidly through the third stanza of
the Night and through the fourth stanza of the Living Flame: we
should expect him in the same way to treat the last three stanzas
of the Night with similar brevity and rapidity, but not to omit
them altogether.
Such are the principal arguments used by P. Andres which have
inclined many critics to the belief that St. John of the Cross
completed these treatises. Other of his arguments, which to
himself were even more convincing, have now lost much weight. The
chief of these are the contention that, because a certain Fray
Agustin Antolinez (b. 1554), in expounding these same poems, makes
no mention of the Saint's having failed to expound five stanzas of
the Night, he did therefore write an exposition of them;[31] and the
supposition that the Living Flame was written before the Spiritual
Canticle, and that therefore, when the prologue to the Living
Flame says that the author has already described the highest state
of perfection attainable in this life, it cannot be referring to
the Canticle and must necessarily allude to passages, now lost,
from the Dark Night.[32]
Our own judgment upon this much debated question is not
easily delivered. On the one hand, the reasons why St. John of the
Cross should have completed his work are perfectly sound ones and
his own words in the Ascent and the Dark Night are a clear
statement of his intentions. Furthermore, he had ample time to
complete it, for he wrote other treatises at a later date and he
certainly considered the latter part of the Dark Night to be more
important than the former. On the other hand, it is disconcerting
to find not even the briefest clear reference to this latter part
in any of his subsequent writings, when both the Living Flame and
the Spiritual Canticle offered so many occasions for such a
reference to an author accustomed to refer his readers to his
other treatises. Again, his contemporaries, who were keenly
interested in his work, and mention such insignificant things as
the Cautions, the Maxims and the 'Mount of Perfection,' say
nothing whatever of the missing chapters. None of his biographers
speaks of them, nor does P. Alonso de la Madre de Dios, who
examined the Saint's writings in detail immediately after his
death and was in touch with his closest friends and companions. We
are inclined, therefore, to think that the chapters in question
were never written.[33] Is not the following sequence of probable
facts the most tenable? We know from P. Juan Evangelista that the
Ascent and the Dark Night were written at different times, with
many intervals of short or long duration. The Saint may well have
entered upon the Spiritual Canticle, which was a concession to the
affectionate importunity of M. Ann de Jesus, with every intention
of returning later to finish his earlier treatise. But, having
completed the Canticle, he may equally well have been struck with
the similarity between a part of it and the unwritten commentary
on the earlier stanzas, and this may have decided him that the
Dark Night needed no completion, especially as the Living Flame
also described the life of Union. This hypothesis will explain all
the facts, and seems completely in harmony with all we know of St.
John of the Cross, who was in no sense, as we have already said, a
writer by profession. If we accept it, we need not necessarily
share the views which we here assume to have been his. Not only
would the completion of the Dark Night have given us new ways of
approach to so sublime and intricate a theme, but this would have
been treated in a way more closely connected with the earlier
stages of the mystical life than was possible in either the Living
Flame or the Canticle.
We ought perhaps to notice one further supposition of P.
Andres, which has been taken up by a number of later critics: that
St. John of the Cross completed the commentary which we know as
the Dark Night, but that on account of the distinctive nature of
the contents of the part now lost he gave it a separate title.[34]
The only advantage of this theory seems to be that it makes the
hypothesis of the loss of the commentary less improbable. In other
respects it is as unsatisfactory as the theory of P. Andres,[35] of
which we find a variant in M. Baruzi,[36] that the Saint thought the
commentary too bold, and too sublime, to be perpetuated, and
therefore destroyed it, or, at least, forbade its being copied. It
is surely unlikely that the sublimity of these missing chapters
would exceed that of the Canticle or the Living Flame.
This seems the most suitable place to discuss a feature of
the works of St. John of the Cross to which allusion is often made
-- the little interest which he took in their division into books
and chapters and his lack of consistency in observing such
divisions when he had once made them. A number of examples may be
cited. In the first chapter of the Ascent of Mount Carmel, using
the words 'part' and 'book' as synonyms, he makes it clear that
the Ascent and the Dark Night are to him one single treatise. 'The
first night or purgation,' he writes, 'is of the sensual part of
the soul, which is treated in the present stanza, and will be
treated in the first part of this book. And the second is of the
spiritual part; of this speaks the second stanza, which follows;
and of this we shall treat likewise, in the second and the third
part, with respect to the activity of the soul; and in the fourth
part, with respect to its passivity.'[37] The author's intention
here is evident. Purgation may be sensual or spiritual, and each
of these kinds may be either active or passive. The most logical
proceeding would be to divide the whole of the material into four
parts or books: two to be devoted to active purgation and two to
passive.[38] St. John of the Cross, however, devotes two parts to
active spiritual purgation -- one to that of the understanding and
the other to that of the memory and the will. In the Night, on the
other hand, where it would seem essential to devote one book to
the passive purgation of sense and another to that of spirit, he
includes both in one part, the fourth. In the Ascent, he divides
the content of each of his books into various chapters; in the
Night, where the argument is developed like that of the Ascent, he
makes a division into paragraphs only, and a very irregular
division at that, if we may judge by the copies that have reached
us. In the Spiritual Canticle and the Living Flame he dispenses
with both chapters and paragraphs. The commentary on each stanza
here corresponds to a chapter.
Another example is to be found in the arrangement of his
expositions. As a rule, he first writes down the stanzas as a
whole, then repeats each in turn before expounding it, and repeats
each line also in its proper place in the same way. At the
beginning of each treatise he makes some general observations --
in the form either of an argument and prologue, as in the Ascent;
of a prologue and general exposition, as in the Night; of a
prologue alone, as in the first redaction of the Canticle and in
the Living Flame; or of a prologue and argument, as in the second
redaction of the Canticle. In the Ascent and the Night, the first
chapter of each book contains the 'exposition of the stanzas,'
though some copies describe this, in Book III of the Ascent, as an
'argument.' In the Night, the book dealing with the Night of Sense
begins with the usual 'exposition'; that of the Night of the
Spirit, however, has nothing to correspond with it.
In the first redaction of the Spiritual Canticle, St. John of
the Cross first sets down the poem, then a few lines of
'exposition' giving the argument of the stanza, and finally the
commentary upon each line. Sometimes he comments upon two or three
lines at once. In the second redaction, he prefaces almost every
stanza with an 'annotation,' of which there is none in the first
redaction except before the commentary on the thirteenth and
fourteenth stanzas. The chief purpose of the 'annotation' is to
link the argument of each stanza with that of the stanza preceding
it; occasionally the annotation and the exposition are combined.
It is clear from all this that, in spite of his orderly mind,
St. John of the Cross was no believer in strict uniformity in
matters of arrangement which would seem to demand such uniformity
once they had been decided upon. They are, of course, of secondary
importance, but the fact that the inconsistencies are the work of
St. John of the Cross himself, and not merely of careless
copyists, who have enough else to account for, is of real moment
in the discussion of critical questions which turn on the Saint's
accuracy.
Another characteristic of these commentaries is the
inequality of length as between the exposition of certain lines
and stanzas. While some of these are dealt with fully, the
exposition of others is brought to a close with surprising
rapidity, even though it sometimes seems that much more needs to
be said: we get the impression that the author was anxious to push
his work forward or was pressed for time. He devotes fourteen long
chapters of the Ascent to glossing the first two lines of the
first stanza and dismisses the three remaining lines in a few
sentences. In both the Ascent and the Night, indeed, the stanzas
appear to serve only as a pretext for introducing the great wealth
of ascetic and mystical teaching which the Saint has gathered
together. In the Canticle and the Living Flame, on the other hand,
he keeps much closer to his stanzas, though here, too, there is a
considerable inequality. One result of the difference in nature
between these two pairs of treatises is that the Ascent and the
Night are more solidly built and more rigidly doctrinal, whereas
in the Canticle and the Flame there is more movement and more
poetry.
V
HISTORY OF THE PUBLICATION OF ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS'S
WRITINGS -- THE FIRST EDITION
IT seems strange that mystical works of such surpassing value
should not have been published till twenty-seven years after their
author's death, for not only were the manuscript copies
insufficient to propagate them as widely as those who made them
would have desired, but the multiplication of these copies led to
an ever greater number of variants in the text. Had it but been
possible for the first edition of them to have been published
while their author still lived, we might to-day have a perfect
text. But the probability is that, if such an idea had occurred to
St. John of the Cross, he would have set it aside as presumptuous.
In allowing copies to be made he doubtless never envisaged their
going beyond the limited circle of his Order.
We have found no documentary trace of any project for an
edition of these works during their author's lifetime. The most
natural time for a discussion of the matter would have been in
September 1586, when the Definitors of the Order, among whom was
St. John of the Cross, met in Madrid and decided to publish the
works of St. Teresa.[39] Two years earlier, when he was writing the
Spiritual Canticle, St. John of the Cross had expressed a desire
for the publication of St. Teresa's writings and assumed that this
would not be long delayed.[40] As we have seen, he considered his
own works as complementary to those of St. Teresa,[41] and one would
have thought that the simultaneous publication of the writings of
the two Reformers would have seemed to the Definitors an excellent
idea.
After his death, it is probable that there was no one at
first who was both able and willing to undertake the work of
editor; for, as is well known, towards the end of his life the
Saint had powerful enemies within his Order who might well have
opposed the project, though, to do the Discalced Reform justice,
it was brought up as early as ten years after his death. A
resolution was passed at the Chapter-General of the Reform held in
September 1601, to the effect 'that the works of Fr. Juan de la
Cruz be printed and that the Definitors, Fr. Juan de Jesus Maria
and Fr. Tomas [de Jesus], be instructed to examine and approve
them.'[42] Two years later (July 4, 1603), the same Chapter, also
meeting in Madrid, 'gave leave to the Definitor, Fr. Tomas [de
Jesus], for the printing of the works of Fr. Juan de la Cruz,
first friar of the Discalced Reform.'[43]
It is not known (since the Chapter Book is no longer extant)
why the matter lapsed for two years, but Fr. Tomas de Jesus, the
Definitor to whom alone it was entrusted on the second occasion,
was a most able man, well qualified to edit the works of his
predecessor.[44] Why, then, we may wonder, did he not do so? The
story of his life in the years following the commission may partly
answer this question. His definitorship came to an end in 1604,
when he was elected Prior of the 'desert' of San Jose de las
Batuecas. After completing the customary three years in this
office, during which time he could have done no work at all upon
the edition, he was elected Prior of the Discalced house at
Zaragoza. But at this point Paul V sent for him to Rome and from
that time onward his life followed other channels.
The next attempt to accomplish the project was successful.
The story begins with a meeting between the Definitors of the
Order and Fr. Jose de Jesus Maria, the General, at Velez-Malaga,
where a new decision to publish the works of St. John of the Cross
was taken and put into effect (as a later resolution has it)
'without any delay or condition whatsoever.'[45] The enterprise
suffered a setback, only a week after it had been planned, in the
death of the learned Jesuit P. Suarez, who was on terms of close
friendship with the Discalced and had been appointed one of the
censors. But P. Diego de Jesus (Salablanca), Prior of the
Discalced house at Toledo, to whom its execution was entrusted,
lost no time in accomplishing his task; indeed, one would suppose
that he had begun it long before, since early in the next year it
was completed and published in Alcala. The volume, entitled
Spiritual Works which lead a soul to perfect union with God, has
720 pages and bears the date 1618. The works are preceded by a
preface addressed to the reader and a brief summary of the
author's 'life and virtues.' An engraving of the 'Mount of
Perfection' is included.[46]
There are several peculiarities about this editio princeps.
In the first place, although the pagination is continuous, it was
the work of two different printers; the reason for this is quite
unknown, though various reasons might be suggested. The greatest
care was evidently taken so that the work should be well and truly
approved: it is recommended, in terms of the highest praise, by
the authorities of the University of Alcala, who, at the request
of the General of the Discalced Carmelites, had submitted it for
examination to four of the professors of that University. No doubt
for reasons of safety, the Spiritual Canticle was not included in
that edition: it was too much like a commentary on the Song of
Songs for such a proceeding to be just then advisable.
We have now to enquire into the merits of the edition of P.
Salablanca, which met with such warm approval on its publication,
yet very soon afterwards began to be recognized as defective and
is little esteemed for its intrinsic qualities to-day.
It must, of course, be realized that critical standards in
the early seventeenth century were low and that the first editor
of St. John of the Cross had neither the method nor the available
material of the twentieth century. Nor were the times favourable
for the publication of the works of a great mystic who attempted
fearlessly and fully to describe the highest stages of perfection
on the road to God. These two facts are responsible for most of
the defects of the edition.
For nearly a century, the great peril associated with the
mystical life had been that of Illuminism, a gross form of pseudo-
mysticism which had claimed many victims among the holiest and
most learned, and of which there was such fear that excessive,
almost unbelievable, precautions had been taken against it. These
precautions, together with the frequency and audacity with which
Illuminists invoked the authority and protection of well-known
contemporary ascetic and mystical writers, give reality to P.
Salablanca's fear lest the leaders of the sect might shelter
themselves behind the doctrines of St. John of the Cross and so
call forth the censure of the Inquisition upon passages which
seemed to him to bear close relation to their erroneous teaching.
It was for this definite reason, and not because of an arbitrary
meticulousness, that P. Salablanca omitted or adapted such
passages as those noted in Book I, Chapter viii of the Ascent of
Mount Carmel and in a number of chapters in Book II. A study of
these, all of which are indicated in the footnotes to our text, is
of great interest.
Less important are a large number of minor corrections made
with the intention of giving greater precision to some theological
concept; the omission of lines and even paragraphs which the
editor considered redundant, as in fact they frequently are; and
corrections made with the aim of lending greater clearness to the
argument or improving the style. A few changes were made out of
prudery: such are the use of sensitivo for sensual, the
suppression of phrases dealing with carnal vice and the omission
of several paragraphs from that chapter of the Dark Night -- which
speaks of the third deadly sin of beginners. There was little
enough reason for these changes: St. John of the Cross is
particularly inoffensive in his diction and may, from that point
of view, be read by a child.
The sum total of P. Salablanca's mutilations is very
considerable. There are more in the Ascent and the Living Flame
than in the Dark Night; but hardly a page of the editio princeps
is free from them and on most pages they abound. It need not be
said that they are regrettable. They belong to an age when the
garments of dead saints were cut up into small fragments and
distributed among the devout and when their cells were decked out
with indifferent taste and converted into oratories. It would not
have been considered sufficient had the editor printed the text of
St. John of the Cross as he found it and glossed it to his liking
in footnotes; another editor would have put opposite
interpretations upon it, thus cancelling out the work of his
predecessor. Even the radical mutilations of P. Salablanca did not
suffice, as will now be seen, to protect the works of the Saint
from the Inquisition.
VI
DENUNCIATION OF THE 'WORKS' TO THE INQUISITION -- DEFENCE OF
THEM MADE BY FR. BASILO PONCE DE LEON -- EDITIONS OF THE
SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
NEITHER the commendations of University professors nor the
scissors of a meticulous editor could save the treatises of St.
John of the Cross from that particular form of attack which, more
than all others, was feared in the seventeenth century. We shall
say nothing here of the history, nature and procedure of the
Spanish Inquisition, which has had its outspoken antagonists and
its unreasoning defenders but has not yet been studied with
impartiality. It must suffice to set down the facts as they here
affect our subject.
Forty propositions, then, were extracted from the edition of
1618 and presented to the Holy Office for condemnation with the
object of causing the withdrawal of the edition from circulation.
The attempt would probably have succeeded but for the warm,
vigorous and learned defence put up by the Augustinian Fray
Basilio Ponce de Leon, a theological professor in the University
of Salamanca and a nephew of the Luis de Leon who wrote the Names
of Christ and took so great an interest in the works of St.
Teresa.[47]
It was in the very convent of San Felipe in Madrid where
thirty-five years earlier Fray Luis had written his immortal
eulogy of St. Teresa[48] that Fray Basilio, on July 11, 1622, signed
a most interesting 'Reply' to the objections which had been raised
to the Alcala edition of St. John of the Cross. Although we
propose, in our third volume, to reproduce Fray Basilio's defence,
it is necessary to our narrative to say something of it here, for
it is the most important of all extant documents which reveal the
vicissitudes in the history of the Saint's teaching.
Before entering upon an examination of the censured
propositions, the learned Augustinian makes some general
observations, which must have carried great weight as coming from
so high a theological authority. He recalls the commendations of
the edition by the professors of the University of Alcala 'where
the faculty of theology is so famous,' and by many others,
including several ministers of the Holy Office and two Dominicans
who 'without dispute are among the most learned of their Order.'
Secondly, he refers to the eminently saintly character of the
first friar of the Discalced Reform: 'it is not to be presumed
that God would set a man whose teaching is so evil . . . as is
alleged, to be the comer-stone of so great a building.' Thirdly,
he notes how close a follower was St. John of the Cross of St.
Teresa, a person who was singularly free from any taint of
unorthodoxy. And finally he recalls a number of similar attacks on
works of this kind, notably that on Laredo's Ascent of Mount
Sion,[49] which have proved to be devoid of foundation, and points
out that isolated 'propositions' need to be set in their context
before they can be fairly judged.
Fray Basilio next refutes the charges brought against the
works of St. John of the Cross, nearly all of which relate to his
teaching on the passivity of the faculties in certain degrees of
contemplation. Each proposition he copies and afterwards defends,
both by argument and by quotations from the Fathers, from the
medieval mystics and from his own contemporaries. It is noteworthy
that among these authorities he invariably includes St. Teresa,
who had been beatified in 1614, and enjoyed an undisputed
reputation. This inclusion, as well as being an enhancement of his
defence, affords a striking demonstration of the unity of thought
existing between the two great Carmelites.
Having expounded the orthodox Catholic teaching in regard to
these matters, and shown that the teaching of St. John of the
Cross is in agreement with it, Fray Basilio goes on to make clear
the true attitude of the Illuminists and thus to reinforce his
contentions by showing how far removed from this is the Saint's
doctrine.
Fray Basilio's magnificent defence of St. John of the Cross
appears to have had the unusual effect of quashing the attack
entirely: the excellence of his arguments, backed by his great
authority, was evidently unanswerable. So far as we know, the
Inquisition took no proceedings against the Alcala edition
whatsoever. Had this at any time been prohibited, we may be sure
that Llorente would have revealed the fact, and, though he refers
to the persecution of St. John of the Cross during his lifetime,[50]
he is quite silent about any posthumous condemnation of his
writings.
The editio princeps was reprinted in 1619, with a different
pagination and a few corrections, in Barcelona.[51] Before these two
editions were out of print, the General of the Discalced
Carmelites had entrusted an able historian of the Reform, Fray
Jeronimo de San Jose, with the preparation of a new one. This was
published at Madrid, in 1630. It has a short introduction
describing its scope and general nature, a number of new and
influential commendations and an admirable fifty-page 'sketch' of
St. John of the Cross by the editor which has been reproduced in
most subsequent editions and has probably done more than any other
single work to make known the facts of the Saint's biography. The
great feature of this edition, however, is the inclusion of the
Spiritual Canticle, placed (by an error, as a printer's note
explains) at the end of the volume, instead of before the Living
Flame, which is, of course, its proper position.
The inclusion of the Canticle is one of the two merits that
the editor claims for his new edition. The other is that he
'prints both the Canticle and the other works according to their
original manuscripts, written in the hand of the same venerable
author.' This claim is, of course, greatly exaggerated, as what
has been said above with regard to the manuscripts will indicate.
Not only does Fray Jeronimo appear to have had no genuine original
manuscript at all, but of the omissions of the editio princeps it
is doubtful if he makes good many more than one in a hundred. In
fact, with very occasional exceptions, he merely reproduces the
princeps -- omissions, interpolations, well-meant improvements and
all.[52]
In Fray Jeronimo's defence it must be said that the reasons
which moved his predecessor to mutilate his edition were still
potent, and the times had not changed. It is more surprising that
for nearly three centuries the edition of 1630 should have been
followed by later editors. The numerous versions of the works
which saw the light in the later seventeenth and the eighteenth
century added a few poems, letters and maxims to the corpus of
work which he presented and which assumed great importance as the
Saint became better known and more deeply venerated. But they did
no more. It suffices, therefore, to enumerate the chief of them.
The Barcelona publisher of the 1619 edition produced a new
edition in 1635, which is a mere reproduction of that of 1630. A
Madrid edition of 1649, which adds nine letters, a hundred maxims
and a small collection of poems, was reproduced in 1672 (Madrid),
1679 (Madrid), 1693 (Barcelona) and 1694 (Madrid), the last
reproduction being in two volumes. An edition was also published
in Barcelona in 1700.
If we disregard a 'compendium' of the Saint's writings
published in Seville in 1701, the first eighteenth-century edition
was published in Seville in 1703 -- the most interesting of those
that had seen the light since 1630. It is well printed on good
paper in a folio volume and its editor, Fr. Andres de Jesus Maria,
claims it, on several grounds, as an advance on preceding
editions. First, he says, 'innumerable errors of great importance'
have been corrected in it; then, the Spiritual Canticle has been
amended according to its original manuscript 'in the hand of the
same holy doctor, our father, kept and venerated in our convent of
Discalced Carmelite nuns at Jaen'; next, he adds two new poems and
increases the number of maxims from 100 to 365; and lastly, the
letters are increased from nine to seventeen, all of which are
found in P. Jeronimo de San Jose's history. The first of these
claims is as great an exaggeration as was P. Jeronimo's; to the
second we shall refer in our introduction to the Spiritual
Canticle. The third and fourth, however, are justified, and for
these, as for a few minor improvements, the editor deserves every
commendation.
The remaining years of the eighteenth century produced few
editions; apart from a reprint (1724) of the compendium of 1701,
the only one known to us is that published at Pamplona in 1774,
after which nearly eighty years were to pass before any earlier
edition was so much as reprinted. Before we resume this
bibliographical narrative, however, we must go back over some
earlier history.
VII
NEW DENUNCIATIONS AND DEFENCES -- FRAY NICOLAS DE JESUS MARIA
-- THE CARMELITE SCHOOL AND THE INQUISITION
WE remarked, apropos of the edition of 1630, that the reasons
which led Fray Diego de Jesus to mutilate his texts were still in
existence when Fray Jeronimo de San Jose prepared his edition some
twelve years later. If any independent proof of this statement is
needed, it may be found in the numerous apologias that were
published during the seventeenth century, not only in Spain, but
in Italy, France, Germany and other countries of Europe. If
doctrines are not attacked, there is no occasion to write vigorous
defences of them.
Following the example of Fray Basilio Ponce de Leon, a
professor of theology in the College of the Reform at Salamanca,
Fray Nicholas de Jesus Maria, wrote a learned Latin defence of St.
John of the Cross in 1631, often referred to briefly as the
Elucidatio.[53] It is divided into two parts, the first defending
the Saint against charges of a general kind that were brought
against his writings, and the second upholding censured
propositions taken from them. On the general ground, P. Nicholas
reminds his readers that many writers who now enjoy the highest
possible reputation were in their time denounced and unjustly
persecuted. St. Jerome was attacked for his translation of the
Bible from Hebrew into Latin; St. Augustine, for his teaching
about grace and free-will. The