John of the Cross

JOHN of the CROSS
(1542-1591)
Summary of his Doctrine

Adapted from Urban Holmes,
A History of Christian Spirituality, An Analytical Introduction (Seabury, 1981)

1. purgation, which includes illumination within what he calls the dark night;

As with other sixteenth-century masters the so-called bridal-mysticism (Brautmystik) is very strong. Union with God is a union of likeness, which harks back to the second-century distinction of Irenaeus between the image of God, which we never lose, and the likeness of God, which we must acquire. The spiritual life is a clearing of the smeared window of our soul.

Memory and understanding are for him cognitive, and they must eventually pass.
Like Gerson before him, he says that the will is appetitive, but in a supernatural manner. The dark night abolishes both inordinate appetities and cognition, but our union with God comes about through the appetite of the will.

The fundamental principle of St. John’s theology is that God is All and the creature is nothing. Therefore, in order to arrive at perfect union with God, in which sanctity consists, it is necessary to undergo an intense and profound purification of all the faculties and powers of soul and body. The Ascent--Dark Night traces the entire process of purgation, from the active purification of the external senses to the passive purification of the highest faculties; The Living Flame and The Spiritual Canticle describe the perfection of the spiritual life in the transforming union. The entire path to union is “night” because the soul travels by faith. St. John of the Cross presents his teaching in a systematic manner, with the result that it is spiritual theology in the best sense of the word; not because it is systematic, but because it uses as its sources Sacred Scripture, theology and personal experience.

In speaking of the union of the soul with God, St. John states that he is speaking of supernatural union, and not the general union by which God is present to the soul simply by preserving it in existence. The supernatural union of the mystical life is a “union of likeness” which is produced by grace and charity. But in order that this union of love be as perfect as possible and as intimate as possible, the soul must rid itself of all that is not God and of every obstacle to the love of God so that it can love God with all its heart and soul and mind and strength.

Since any deficiency in the union of love is due to the soul and not to God, St. John concludes that the soul must be completely purified in all of its faculties and powers -¬those of the sensory order and those that are spiritual -- before it can be fully illuminated by the light of divine union. This results in the “dark night,” which is so called because the point of departure is a denial and deprivation of one’s appetite or desire for created things; the means or the road along which the soul travels to union is the obscurity of faith; and the goal is God, who is also a dark night to man in this life.(44)

The necessity of passing through this dark night is due to the fact that from God’s point of view, man’s attachments to created things are pure darkness, while God is pure light, and darkness cannot receive light (Jn. 1:5). Stated in philosophical terms, two contraries cannot coexist in the same subject. The darkness which is attachment to creatures and the light which is God are contraries; they cannot both be present in the soul at the same time.

St. John then proceeds to explain how the soul must mortify its appetites or concupiscence and must journey by faith through the active purgation of the senses and spirit. And although the treatment may sound negative and severely ascetical, he never tires of insisting that this purgation or nudity of spirit is not a question of the lack of created things, but the denial and uprooting of one’s desire for them or attachment to them.(45) St. John gives a simple method for effecting the purgation: have a habitual desire to imitate Christ; and to do this, study Christ’s life and works and then do as Christ did.(46)

In Book 2 of The Ascent, St. John discusses the active night of the spirit. He states that the purgation of intellect, memory and will is effected through the operation of the virtues of faith, hope and charity, and then explains why faith is the dark night through which the soul must pass to union with God. Turning then to the practice of prayer, he gives three signs by which the soul may know that it is passing from the practice of meditation to contemplative prayer. First, it is impossible to meditate as one was accustomed to do; secondly, there is no desire to concentrate on anything in particular; thirdly, there is a longing for God and for solitude. What the individual experiences is a “loving awareness of God,” and this is a type of contemplative prayer.(47)

The passive purgations are explained in The Dark Night and at this stage God brings to completion the efforts of the soul to pure itself on the sensory level and in its spiritual faculties. The soul is gradually led into the dark contemplation that pseudo-Dionysius described as a “ray of darkness” and St. John calls “mystical theology.”(48) And although one would expect that mystical contemplation would be delightful, St. John explains that the reason it causes pain is that when the divine light of contemplation strikes a soul that is not yet entirely purified, it causes spiritual darkness, for it not only transcends human understanding, but it deprives the soul of its intellectual operation.

Nevertheless, even during this dark and painful contemplation the soul can see the streaks of light which announce the coming of the dawn. In The Spiritual Canticle St. John describes the soul’s anxious search for God and the ultimate encounter of love, using the symbol of a bride seeking the bridegroom and finally attaining to the perfect union of mutual love. God draws the soul to himself as a powerful magnet draws the metal particles, and the journey of the soul to God is increasingly more swift until, having left all else behind, it enjoys the most intimate union with God that is possible in this life: the mystical marriage of the transforming union.

Then, in The Living Flame of Love St. John describes the sublime perfection of love in the state of transforming union. The union between the soul and God is so intimate that it is singularly close to the beatific vision, so close that “only a thin veil separates it.” The soul asks the Holy Spirit to tear now the veil of mortal life so that the soul may enter complete and perfect glory. The soul is so close to God that it is transformed into a flame of love wherein the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are communicated to it. It enjoys a foretaste of eternal life.(49)

And it should not be held as incredible in a soul now examined, purged, and tried in the fire of tribulations, trials, and many kinds of temptations, and found faithful in love, that the promise of the Son of God be fulfilled, the promise that the Most Blessed Trinity will come and dwell with anyone who loves him (Jn. 14:23). The Blessed Trinity inhabits the soul by divinely illumining its intellect with the wisdom of the Son, delighting its will in the Holy Spirit, and by absorbing it powerfully and mightily in the delightful embrace of the Father’s sweetness.(50)

“Divine Darkness and The Dark Night”, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition From Plato to Denys Andrew Louth, 2^nd ed. (Oxford University Press 2007)175-183

The problem of the origins of the theme of the Dark Night in St. John’s sense is indeed very difficult. Whatever its roots in Patristic mysticism, what we find in St. John of the Cross has been influenced by a medieval development which provided a different context for Denys’ apophaticism. For Denys, as we have seen, in ecstasy the soul transcends the intellect, and in that way negates it: but the intellect is only rejected because it is no longer useful, not because it is of no use at all. On the contrary, the stage of intellectual purification can only be accomplished by means of the intellect. During the Middle Ages there develops the idea that the mystical organ in the soul is not intellectual at all but affective: it is in virtue of the principalis affectio, which is the apex mentis, the summit of the mind, that the soul has contact with the divine.

For the Victorine Thomas Gallus at the ninth and seraphic rank, only the “principal affection” (principalis affectio) is able to proceed, which alone is able to be united to God. Here, finally, are the “embraces of the Bridegroom” (sponsi amplexibus) and “Mary’s portion” (Marie portionem), which “will not be taken away” (que non auferetur, Lk. 10:42). Gallus influenced Bonaventure

In the context of such a tradition, the teaching of Denys's Mystical Theology takes on a different light: the insistence that the intellect must be transcended is interpreted as a rejection of the intellect in favour of the will or feeling.

So we find in the Cloud of Unknowing, which is a good example of the influence of Denys on medieval mysticism, the dictum:

‘by love he can be gotten and holden, but by thought never’.⁷ See E. von Ivánka, Plato Christianus, 309–85.

St. John is in contact with this tradition and it must have influenced his understanding of the Dark Night of the Soul.⁸ See Medieval Mystical Tradition and St. John of the Cross, by a Benedictine of Stanbrook Abbey (London, 1954).

Part of this influence can be seen in the way such ^[f.p.178] a development of affective mysticism serves to emphasize the contrast between the theoretical character of Patristic mysticism and the dramatic and affective character of later Western mysticism which we have already noticed. But the question is really, what is the significance of this difference? Is it simply a matter of style, or does it go deeper? It is worth mentioning in this context that,

in contrast with much medieval mysticism, St. John does not work with a contrast between

the knowledge of God
(which cannot lead to union with Him) and

the love of God
(which can effect such union):

the Dark Night is the dark night of faith when images and concepts are stripped from the intellect as part of its preparation for union.⁹ A point made by J. P. H. Clark, ‘The “Cloud of Unknowing”, Walter Hilton and St. John of the Cross: A Comparison’, Downside Review (Oct. 1978), 285.]

One way of posing the question is to take the central point being made by the Patristic theology of the Divine Darkness, namely, that this is a symbol of the radical distance between the created soul and the Uncreated God, and ask how far this is central to the theology of the Dark Night of St. John of the Cross. If we try and transpose this into the language of Western mysticism, it might be taken to mean that the Dark Night is the soul's experience of the absolute transcendence of God; in other words, that in the Dark Night the soul is learning to know the infinite God, and the pain and distress of this learning is because the soul, naturally finite, is being prepared for an experience that is beyond its natural powers.

Is this what the Dark Night of the Soul means for St. John of the Cross? In the Dark Night (Book II, chapter v) St. John explains that

‘this dark night is an inflow of God into the soul, which purges it of its habitual ignorances and imperfections, natural and spiritual, and which contemplatives call infused contemplation or mystical theology’ (Dark Night, II.v.1).^[All quotations from St. John of the Cross are taken from The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, translated by K. Kavanaugh and O. Rodriguez (Nelson, 1966).]]

It is an inflow of divine light into the soul which purifies it and prepares it for union with God. But, St. John of the Cross goes on to ask, why is it called a dark night, if it is in fact the illuminating and purifying presence of divine light? He replies thus:^[f.p.179]

In answer to this, there are two reasons why this divine wisdom is not only night and darkness for the soul, but also affliction and torment.

First, because of the height of the divine wisdom which exceeds the capacity of the soul.

Second, because of the soul's baseness and impurity; and on this account it is painful, afflictive, and also dark for the soul. (Dark Night, II.v.2)

The first reason does correspond to the basic motif behind the Patristic theme of the Divine Darkness, but not the second. Not that the Fathers lack any sense of the seriousness of sin, but it is not involved in their understanding of the Divine Darkness in which the soul finds itself close to God. For Gregory of Nyssa, for example, the soul begins in a kind of darkness, the darkness of ignorance and sin, but as it responds to God it experiences illumination. The entry into the Divine Darkness is a further stage, beyond that of purification from sin.

There is clearly a contrast here between St. John of the Cross and the Fathers, but this contrast is misunderstood if we simply say that for the Fathers the Divine Darkness is due to human finitude, whereas for St. John the Dark Night is due not just to human finitude, but also to sin. For the doctrine of St. John of the Cross is more radical than such a summary suggests: it is not that sin causes the Dark Night, but rather that the Dark Night discloses the soul's sinfulness. In reality we do not begin the search for God with a genuine sense of sin; often enough what we take for a sense of sin is only a sense of failure, or wounded pride. Rather it is as we draw close to God that we begin to realize the depths of our sinfulness. And for St. John of the Cross we draw close to God in being called upon to relinquish ways of prayer and devotion that give satisfaction in themselves and, out of love for God in Himself, to enter on the night of contemplation. So John says:

The first and chief benefit of this dry and dark night of contemplation is the knowledge of self and of one's own misery. Besides the fact that all the favours God imparts to the soul are ordinarily enwrapped in this knowledge, the aridities and voids of the faculties in relation to the abundance previously experienced, and the difficulty encountered in the practice of virtue, make the soul recognize its own lowliness and misery, which was not apparent in the time of its prosperity. (Dark Night I.xii.2)

Nor is it adequate to say of the Fathers' understanding of the Divine Darkness that it is simply the finite soul's experience of the infinite ^[f.p.180] transcendence of God. For with all the Fathers we have seen that the mystic ascent is a result of the soul's longing for God as He is in Himself. The love that the soul has for God cannot be satisfied with anything less than God and the soul passes into the Divine Darkness as it relinquishes the comfort of anything less than God, and seeks God alone. For the Fathers such a pure love is only possible when the soul has relinquished sin and freed itself from the attraction of sin to devote itself to God alone. It is a purified love that enters into the Divine Darkness, whereas for St. John of the Cross it is in the Dark Night that the soul experiences purifying love: is this then the contrast between St. John of the Cross and the Fathers?

Perhaps it is, but if so, what we have here is, it seems to me, a difference of perspective rather than anything more fundamental. It is the contrast we have noted already between St. John's more introspective, experiential approach and the objective, theoretical character of Patristic theology. St. John of the Cross is discussing the soul's experience as it seeks God in love; St. Gregory of Nyssa, for example, is discussing what is involved, at an ‘objective’, theological level, in the soul's loving pursuit of God. It is only a purified love that can attain God — so Gregory; it is only in being purified that the loving soul is prepared for union with God — so St. John of the Cross. It is a difference of perspective, and once this difference is granted it is not difficult to find the characteristic emphases of each in the other. Thus, Gregory knows that the closer the soul comes to God, the more it is aware of sinfulness and the necessity for purification (though he does not dwell on it):

Even after that complete stripping of herself she still finds something further to remove. So it is with our ascent towards God: each stage that we reach always reveals something heavy weighing on the soul. Thus in comparison with her new-found purity, that very stripping of her tunic now becomes a kind of garment which those who find her must once again remove. (Comm. on the Song XII: 1029)

And he goes on to explain this in terms of the ‘beating and wounding’ of the bride spoken of in the Song of Songs. For St. John the greatest suffering the soul experiences in the Night is just before it is united to God, and in his explanation of this he seems to dwell on the soul's experience of an intolerable emptiness — an emptiness experienced ^[f.p.181] because it has now been totally purified and is ready to experience the infinite unfathomableness of God. St. John speaks of the ‘deep caverns of feeling’ within the soul, and says:

It is an amazing thing that the least of these goods is enough so to encumber these faculties, capable of infinite goods, that they cannot receive these infinite goods until they are completely empty, as we shall see. Yet when these caverns are empty and pure [namely, when the soul is in complete detachment] the thirst, hunger, and yearning of the spiritual feeling is intolerable. Since they have deep cavities they suffer profoundly, for the food they lack, which as I say is God, is also profound. (Living Flame of Love, Stanza III.18)

This is the experience of darkness and emptiness of purified love. In the Dark Night the soul is purified and prepared for union with God, and the fundamental nature of this Night is perhaps most clearly revealed when its purpose is on the verge of being achieved — the subject of the Living Flame.

It is, however, the case that many Eastern Orthodox writers find in St. John of the Cross something quite foreign to their own tradition — which for them is a tradition stretching back to that of the Fathers. It may be, then, that we are touching here on an area where there is a fundamental contrast between the ways of East and West. So Vladimir Lossky writes that ‘both the heroic attitude of the great saints of Western Christendom, a prey to the sorrow of a tragic separation from God, and the dark night of the soul considered as a way, as a spiritual necessity, are unknown in the spirituality of the Eastern Church.’¹¹ The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (London, 1957), 226; though cf. his modifying remarks, 227 n.

In a series of articles, now published as a book,¹²Mme Myrrha Lot-Borodine finds very much the same contrast between Eastern and Western spirituality that Lossky indicates. It is a contrast between a passionate, tortured devotion to the sufferings of our Lord's sacred humanity in the West and a more austere, serene devotion to the royal Victor in the Byzantine East¹³ Ibid. 61–6.] — the contrast between the crucified Christ in Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece and the figures in an icon by Andrei Rublyov. ^{[f.p.182]
[12} La Déification de l'homme (Paris, 1970).]

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