John of the Cross

• 1. Introduction

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  John of the Cross was born Juan de Yepes y Álvarez on the 24th of June 1542, in Fontiveros, a small Castilian town of around 2,000 people, into a family of Converso origins, descendants of Jewish converts to Catholicism. His father Gonzalo had been cast out by wealthier silk-merchant relatives for marrying Catalina, an orphan of humble origins. Forced to work as a weaver, Gonzalo died in 1545 when Juan was barely three years old. Two years later, Juan's older brother Luis also died, probably from malnourishment. From these beginnings of poverty, loss, and displacement, a man would emerge who wrote what many consider the greatest mystical poetry in the Spanish language, and who endured imprisonment and torture rather than abandon a reform movement he believed in. How did a weaver's orphaned son reach the heights of Catholic spiritual life? What drove him to take the name John of the Cross on the 28th of November 1568, the very day a new monastery was born? And how did his suffering in a tiny cell in Toledo produce verses that still move readers more than four centuries later?

• 2. The Making of a Mystic

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  Catalina, John's mother, moved her two surviving sons first to Arévalo in 1548 and then to Medina del Campo in 1551, where work was available. In Medina, John entered a school for 160 poor children, mostly orphans, receiving basic Christian education along with food, clothing, and lodging. He served as an altar boy at a nearby convent of Augustinian nuns, and later worked at a hospital while studying the humanities at a Jesuit school from 1559 to 1563. The Society of Jesus was then a young institution, founded only a few years earlier by the Spaniard St. Ignatius of Loyola.

  In 1563 John entered the Carmelite Order under the name John of St. Matthias. The following year he made his first vows and enrolled at Salamanca University, where he studied theology and philosophy. There he encountered Fray Luis de León, who taught biblical studies including Exegesis, Hebrew, and Aramaic. After his ordination as a priest in 1567, John seriously considered joining the Carthusian Order, drawn by its tradition of solitary and silent contemplation. That contemplative pull would never leave him. What changed was the direction it took him.

• 3. Teresa and the Primitive Rule

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  John's journey from Salamanca to Medina del Campo, probably in September 1567, changed the course of his life. In Medina he met Teresa of Ávila, a Carmelite nun who was there to found the second of her new convents. She spoke to him about restoring the Carmelite Order to the observance of its Primitive Rule of 1209, which had been relaxed by Pope Eugene IV in 1432.

  Under that original rule, the day and night were structured around the Liturgy of the Hours, study, Mass, and solitude. Friars were expected to evangelize the surrounding population. Total abstinence from meat was required, along with a lengthy fast from the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross on the 14th of September until Easter. Shoes were also forbidden; the word for this observance, "discalced," meaning barefoot, became the name by which Teresa's followers would be formally recognized as a separate order in 1580.

  Teresa asked John to delay his Carthusian plans. After one final year of study in Salamanca, he traveled with her in August 1568 to Valladolid, where she intended to found another convent. By October 1568 John left Valladolid with a friar called Fray, heading to a derelict donated house at Duruelo to establish the first monastery for friars to follow Teresa's principles. On the 28th of November 1568, the day the monastery opened, John changed his name to John of the Cross.

• 4. The Prisoner of Toledo

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  On the night of the 2nd of December 1577, a group of Carmelites opposed to reform broke into John's dwelling in Ávila and seized him. John had refused a direct order to return to his original house, arguing that his work had been approved by the papal nuncio, a higher authority. The Carmelites transported him to the Carmelite monastery in Toledo, then the order's leading monastery in Castile, with a community of 40 friars.

  Brought before a court of friars and accused of disobeying the Piacenza ordinances, John was sentenced to imprisonment. His cell was barely large enough to stand in. He was subjected to public lashings before the community at least weekly, given no change of clothing, and kept on a diet of water, bread, and scraps of salt fish. To read his breviary he had to stand on a bench and hold the text up to a small hole of light from an adjoining room, except on the rare occasions when he was allowed an oil lamp. The friar who guarded him occasionally passed him paper.

  On that paper, John composed a great part of the Spiritual Canticle, along with shorter poems. He escaped eight months into his imprisonment, on the 15th of August 1578, by prising open the hinges of his cell door and slipping out through a small window in an adjoining room. Teresa's nuns in Toledo nursed him back to health, followed by six weeks at the Hospital of Santa Cruz. That the greatest flowering of his poetry came from within the prison walls is a fact the work itself makes clear: the first 31 stanzas of the Spiritual Canticle were composed during his captivity.

• 5. The Architecture of the Soul

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  All of John's works were written between 1578 and his death in 1591. Although his complete poems add up to fewer than 2,500 verses, two of them, the Spiritual Canticle and the Dark Night of the Soul, are considered masterpieces of Spanish poetry for both their formal style and their symbolic richness.

  The Spiritual Canticle is an eclogue in which a bride, representing the soul, searches for her bridegroom, representing Jesus Christ. Scholars have noted it can be read as a vernacular reworking of the Song of Songs, at a time when vernacular translations of the Bible were forbidden. After John's escape the stanzas were read and copied by the nuns at Beas. He continued adding lines over the following years; today two versions exist, one with 39 stanzas and one with 40. The first commentary on the poem was written in 1584 at the request of Madre Ana de Jesús, when she was prioress of the Discalced Carmelite nuns in Granada.

  The Dark Night, from which the phrase Dark Night of the Soul takes its name, narrates the soul's journey from its bodily existence toward union with God, moving through stages of hardship that represent detachment from the world. The poem was likely written in 1578 or 1579. John's commentary on its first two stanzas and the opening line of the third was written in 1584-5.

  A four-stanza work called Living Flame of Love describes a still deeper intimacy between the soul and God. John apparently wrote the first version at Granada between 1585 and 1586, in approximately two weeks. A nearly identical second version followed at La Peñuela in 1591, the year of his death. His formulation of spiritual progress through purgative, illuminative, and unitive stages, separated by the dark nights of sense and soul, became a lasting framework for Catholic spiritual thought.

• 6. Sources and Controversies

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  In John's works, there are 1,583 explicit and 115 implicit quotations from the Bible, a density that shows just how thoroughly scripture shaped his imagination. The influence of the Song of Songs on the Spiritual Canticle is especially pronounced: the dialogue between two lovers, the account of their difficulties in finding each other, the offstage chorus, and imagery such as pomegranates, the wine cellar, turtle doves, and lilies all echo the biblical text.

  Scholars have debated the range of other influences on John's writing. At Salamanca the intellectual landscape included the thought of Thomas Aquinas, Scotus, and Durandus. However, the scholar Bezares has challenged even the basic assumption that John completed his theology studies there, arguing instead that he left in 1568 to join Teresa without graduating. The first biography of John, published in 1628, reports on the basis of fellow students' testimony that in 1567 he made a special study of the mystical writers Pseudo-Dionysius and Pope Gregory I.

  A more contentious debate concerns possible Islamic influences. The Puerto Rican scholar Luce López-Baralt has traced Islamic antecedents for images including the "dark night," the "solitary bird" of the Spiritual Canticle, wine and mystical intoxication, and the lamps of fire in the Living Flame. The scholar Peter Tyler has countered that sufficient Christian medieval antecedents exist for many of these metaphors. José Nieto has suggested that both Christian and Islamic mysticism drew from a shared Neo-Platonic tradition, making direct influence hard to isolate. The question remains open, a productive fault line in the scholarship.

• 7. Aftermath and Legacy

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  The morning after John died in Úbeda on the 14th of December 1591, huge numbers of townspeople entered the monastery to see his body. In the crush, many cut away pieces of his habit to keep as relics. His initial burial at Úbeda gave way to a dispute: the monastery in Segovia had his body secretly moved there in 1593. The people of Úbeda petitioned the Pope directly. Pope Clement VIII, moved by the petition, issued a Brief on the 15th of October 1596 ordering the body returned to Úbeda. The eventual compromise was anatomical: Úbeda received one leg and one arm from Segovia. A hand and a leg remain visible today in a reliquary at the Oratory of San Juan de la Cruz in Úbeda, built in 1627.

  Proceedings toward beatification began between 1614 and 1616. He was beatified in 1675 by Pope Clement X and canonized by Pope Benedict XIII in 1726. His feast day, originally set to the 24th of November when added to the General Roman Calendar in 1738, was moved by Pope Paul VI in 1969 to the 14th of December, the actual date of his death.

  His writings were first published in 1618 by Diego de Salablanca, whose edition introduced numerical divisions still used by modern editors, though it omitted the Spiritual Canticle, possibly out of caution toward the Inquisition. That poem first appeared in print in the 1630 edition produced by Fray Jeronimo de San José in Madrid. A critical English edition by E. Allison Peers followed in 1935.

  The reach of his influence extended far beyond the Catholic tradition. T. S. Eliot, Thérèse de Lisieux, Edith Stein, and Thomas Merton all drew on his work. Pope John Paul II wrote his doctoral dissertation on John's mystical theology. And Salvador Dalí, inspired by a drawing John made of the crucified Christ after a vision in Ávila, produced the 1951 painting Christ of Saint John of the Cross, bringing that interior image into the wider world of modern art.