Saint John of the Cross

• Born: June 24, 1542
• Birthplace: Fontiveros, Spain
• Died: December 14, 1591
• Place of death: Úbeda, Spain

Early Life

Juan de Yepes y Álvarez (Saint John of the Cross) was born on June 24, 1542, in Fontiveros, Spain, a town of five thousand inhabitants situated on the Castilian tableland. His father, Gonzalo de Yepes, was the son of a prosperous local silk merchant. Gonzalo was disinherited for marrying Catalina Álvarez, an impoverished and orphaned Toledan, apprenticed to a weaver in Fontiveros. John was the third son born to this union. The death of his father following a prolonged illness when John was only two left John, his mother, and his siblings in dire poverty. Seeking help, Catalina left Fontiveros, going initially to the province of Toledo but later settling in Medina del Campo, a city of thirty thousand. In Medina, there was a doctrine, or catechism, school. As much an orphanage as an educational institution for the poor, this school received John as a student. Children were fed, clothed, catechized, and given a rudimentary education. Apprenticeship in various trades was also part of the program of the doctrine school. Little is known of the four trades that John tried, except that his efforts were unsuccessful. Since in later life John was fond of painting and carving, his failure, perhaps, was one of premature exposure rather than of aptitude. John was next attached to the Hospital de la Concepción, where he worked as a male nurse, begged alms for the poor, and continued his studies. Academic success caused him to be enrolled at the Jesuit College, situated barely two hundred yards from the hospital. Founded in 1551, this school enrolled forty students at the time John was in attendance, probably from 1559 to 1563. John’s teachers recalled his passionate enthusiasm for books. With a good education in the humanities, John in 1563 found his life’s vocation, taking the dark brown habit and white cloak of the Carmelites.

Life’s Work

At the age of twenty-one, John entered the small community of the Carmelite brothers in Medina, then a fellowship of perhaps six members. The Order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel had been founded four centuries earlier, in 1156, in Palestine by Saint Berthold as one of extreme asceticism and of great devotion to Mary. By the sixteenth century, it admitted female as well as male members. The so-called Original or Primitive Rule of 1209 had been relaxed, the order following a Mitigated Observance. Why John selected this order is not known. Perhaps it was his love of contemplation, his devotion to the Virgin, or his practice of extreme asceticism that attracted him to the Carmelites. John of Yepes now took the name Fray Juan de Santo Matia (Brother John of Saint Mathias), though, five years later, when, on November 28, 1568, he professed the Carmelite Primitive Rule, he would change his name to Fray Juan de la Cruz (Brother John of the Cross). As a monastic reformer, John was to make a lasting contribution to Christianity.

Following his profession as a Carmelite, John continued his education at the College of San Andres, a school for sixteen years attached to the famed University of Salamanca. A good Latinist and an excellent grammarian, John took classes in the college of arts at Salamanca from 1564 to 1567. Perhaps seven thousand students were matriculated at the University of Salamanca at that time. Taught by a faculty known throughout Spain and the Habsburg lands, the young monk next turned his attention to theology, attending lectures in divinity in 1567-1568. At Salamanca, John was taught a clear-cut Thomism and was deeply immersed in the philosophy of Aristotle and the theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Concurrently, John was a master of students at San Andres.

Following his ordination as a priest in 1567, John met Saint Teresa de Jesús of Ávila. Daughter of a noble Spanish family, Teresa had entered the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation (Mitigated Observance) at Ávila in 1535. Teresa had become persuaded that discipline was too relaxed and that there ought to be a return to the Primitive Rule of the Carmelites. Her followers were called Discalced Carmelites, in opposition to the Calced Carmelites, who continued to follow the Mitigated rather than the Primitive Rule. Within a year of his meeting with the remarkable Mother Teresa, John was committed to the so-called Teresian Reforms of the Carmelite Order. For that reason, in November, 1568, John was made professor of the Primitive Rule of the Carmelites at Duruelo. Resolving “to separate himself from the world and hide himself in God,” John sought a strictly contemplative life. That wish was never granted, for John was often sought as a counselor and confessor (for the laity and the religious) and as a popular and persuasive preacher.

Soon John became subprior, then novice master, and finally rector of a new house of studies founded at Alcalá. This was a creative time for John, who was able to integrate the intellectual and the spiritual life and who could combine contemplation with active service, including becoming Teresa’s confessor after 1571. John found “the delights which God lets souls taste in contemplation,” but he was advised by Teresa that “a great storm of trials” was on the horizon.

Disputes between the Carmelites who followed the Primitive Rule and those who held to the Mitigated Observance caused John to become a focus of attention. Following an initial imprisonment in 1576, John was seized on December 2, 1577, by some of the Calced Carmelites and taken to Toledo, where he was commanded by superiors to repent of his reforms. This was yet another step in the antireformist policies that had prevailed in the Carmelite Order since a general chapter meeting in 1575. Because John refused to renounce the reforms, he was imprisoned for some nine months in a small cell. There was only one small opening for light and air. John’s jailers were motivated by “vindictiveness . . . mingled with religious zeal,” for they believed that his reforms of the order were a very great crime and revealed a stubborn pride and insubordination. John accepted his imprisonment, with its insults, slanders, calumnies, physical sufferings, and agonies of soul as a further labor by God to purify and refine his faith.

In August, 1578, John escaped from his captors and fled to southern Spain. The separation of the two branches of the Carmelite Order, the Calced and the Discalced, occurred in 1579-1580. John became the rector of a Discalced Carmelite college in Baeza in Andalusia, serving also as an administrator in the Reformed Carmelite Order, being Prior of Granada in 1582 and of Segovia in 1588. Vicar provincial of his order’s southern region, by 1588 John was major definitor and was a member of the governing body of the society.

John’s contemporary, Eliseo de los Martires, described him as “a man in body of medium size” and one of “grave and venerable countenance.” His complexion was “wheaty,” or “somewhat swarthy,” and his face was filled with “good features.” Normally John wore a mustache and was often fully bearded. Dressed in “an old, narrow, short, rough habit,” one so rough it was said that “the cloak seemed to be made of goat-hair,” John reminded many of a latter-day John the Baptist. John impressed those he met with his purity of character, his intensity of spirit, his austerity of life, his profound humility, his fondness for simplicity, and his honesty and directness in speech. Contemporary biographers also recalled his sense of humor, noting that he delighted in making his friars laugh, often sprinkling his spiritual conversation with amusing stories.

Perhaps John’s greatest legacy to the world community is his writing about the interior life. During his trials, tribulations, and travels, John wrote of his encounters with God. These extensive treatises on the mystical life are a unique combination of his poems and his commentaries on those poems. Cántico espiritual (1581; A Spiritual Canticle of the Soul, 1862), part of which was said to have been composed while John was on his knees in prayer, is such a synthesis of poetry and commentary. That poetry is both didactic and symbolic, practical and devotional. The ancient threefold route of the soul to God is described in A Spiritual Canticle of the Soul. One moves from purgation (or confession of sin, the emptying of the self) to illumination (or instruction, revelation of God, filling with the divine) and then to union or perfection (going beyond a sense of separation to one of complete integration with God). This ongoing colloquy of Christ and the soul draws on the rich imagery of courtship and love, starting with the soul’s search for the Beloved, continuing to an initial meeting, then describing the perfect union, and concluding with a discussion of the poignant desire for an everlasting intimacy with the Eternal, a longing that can only be fulfilled in eternity. La subida del Monte Carmelo (1578; The Ascent of Mount Carmel, 1862) is also a discussion of how the soul can attain mystical union with God. The journey to God contains a “Dark Night” because the spirit must quite literally mortify, or put to death, sensory experience and sensible knowledge and then maintain itself by pure faith. Following such purgations, as well as those that come from the faith experience itself, the soul enters into a transforming union with God. This is truly a passion, for it combines both intense suffering and ecstatic pleasure, the two components of overwhelming love. In Llama de amor viva (1581; Living Flame of Love, 1862), the spiritual marriage, or divine union, is further described.

Though he longed only for contemplation, John once more was caught up in controversy. In 1591, he found himself banished to Andalusia. After some time in solitary life, John became extremely ill, going to Úbeda for medical attention. Following extreme pain, John died at Úbeda on December 14, 1591. In his dying moments, John requested the reading of the “Canticle of Canticles,” the moving love poem of the Old Testament. Interpreting it as an allegory of the soul’s romance of God, John commented, “What precious pearls.”

Summary

While controversial during his lifetime, Saint John of the Cross was commended by the Catholic Church, following his death, as both a saint and teacher. Beatified by Pope Clement X in 1675, John was canonized in 1726 by Benedict XIII. In 1926, Pius XI declared him a doctor of the Church, one of perhaps thirty Catholics deemed a theologian of both outstanding intellectual merit and personal sanctity and to be received universally with appreciation.

John surely was a mighty doctor of the Church, embodying the profound spirituality of the Catholic Reformation in Spain, drawing on the same religious energies that inspired Teresa, Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus, and Francis Xavier, a missionary-evangelist of Asia. He will forever be one of the treasures of the Roman Catholic tradition.

As reformer, master, saint, doctor, poet, and seer, John transcended the limits of either one country or creed. His significance is greater even than that of enriching the piety of Roman Catholicism and of enhancing the literature of his native Spain. John’s profound mysticism causes him to be ranked alongside the great religious seekers of all human history—with the saints of Hinduism, the sages of Buddhism, the Sufis of Islam, the seekers of Taoism, the teachers of Confucianism, the visionaries of Protestantism, and the holy men and women of Orthodoxy and Oriental Christianity. As such, John of the Cross is one of the major figures of world religion, combining intellectual rigor with a vigorous work ethic, wrapping both in a profound and appealing spirituality.

Bibliography

Bruno de Jesus-Marie. St. John of the Cross. Edited by Benedict Zimmerman, with an introduction by Jacques Maritain. London: Sheed & Ward, 1936. This extensively documented 495-page study by a Roman Catholic priest attempts to do justice to John as a reformer, theologian, and mystic, drawing on the insights of philosophy, history, and biography. The central thesis is that John was not simply a “Quietistic Mystic” who had mastered the interior life, but that he was also an “Activistic Churchman” who had a powerful impact on the external world of sixteenth century Catholicism.

Crisógono de Jesús. The Life of St. John of the Cross. Translated by Kathleen Pond. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958. A thoroughly documented biography of John both as a person and as a monk. Illustrations, charts, notes, and references make this a useful starting point for further research.

Cugno, Alain. Saint John of the Cross: Reflections on Mystical Experience. Translated by Barbara Wall. New York: Seabury Press, 1979. This concise study in 153 pages contends that John was perhaps the greatest mystic produced by Christianity. Originally written for the University of Tours, this text attempts to understand John from a philosophical rather than a theological or mystical viewpoint. In six succinct and tightly written chapters, it explores such major themes in the philosophy of religion as the absence of God, the meaning of mysticism, the role of desire in religion, and the doctrine of the Kingdom of God.

Frost, Bede. Saint John of the Cross, 1542-1591, Doctor of Divine Love: An Introduction to His Philosophy, Theology, and Spirituality. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1937. This classic study of John’s thought attempts to do justice to the complexity and variety of the saint’s writings. The author admits the inherent twofold difficulty of exploring John’s thinking: mystical experiences in and of themselves are incommunicable and language proves inadequate to the description of such experiences, without the compounded problem of translation from Spanish to English.

John of the Cross, Saint. The Ascent of Mount Carmel. Translated by David Lewis, with a preface by Benedict Zimmerman. London: Thomas Baker, 1928. This indexed edition of John’s major mystical work is useful as an introduction to a primary source for his thought. Indexed both by topic and by Scriptural references, the volume facilitates both the study of selected topics in John’s piety and the identification of biblical sources for his themes.

Maio, Eugene A. St. John of the Cross: The Imagery of Eros. Madrid, Spain: Playor, 1973. In brief compass, the author introduces the reader to the mystical tradition of love, a theme central to John’s life and thought. Chapters relate John to the poetic and mystical traditions of Spain, examine the role of Neoplatonism in Christian thought, and then explore the dynamics of John’s spirituality. Contains an extensive bibliography.

Sencourt, Robert. Carmelite and Poet: A Framed Portrait of St. John of the Cross, with His Poems in Spanish. New York: Macmillan, 1944. This illustrated biography in 253 pages, with an appended anthology of John’s verse in Spanish, examines the man from the standpoint of literature, providing the reader with “both the soul of poetry and the poetry of the soul.” Extensive annotations compensate for the lack of a bibliography.