By Leon Bent –
John does speak of the dark night of the senses and the dark night of the spirit (not of the soul), in his treatise titled simply The Dark Night. But he is centrally concerned not to identify those purifying processes with what we would call clinical depression (or what he would have called melancholy, which he does discuss and carefully distinguishes from the dark night) or world-weariness or monastic acedia (spiritual torpor).
Nor is it true that John was a reclusive hermit with little experience of the world. His biographers have estimated that after his ordination, he travelled nearly 18,000 miles all over Spain, mainly on foot.
It is merely a cliché to call him simply a mystic of the night, an apophatic mystic, since his final work ends in light, as is clear from its title, The Living Flame of Love.
In 1567, after studies at the University of Salamanca, which at the time flourished as a centre for learning, John was ordained as a priest of the Carmelite order. His instinct was to retire to a Carthusian monastery, but a chance meeting with Teresa of Avila allowed him to be persuaded to work for the reform of the Carmelite order to bring it back to its primitive roots. John would learn that the task of reform was not easy.
It would cost him a period in a monastic prison, where he wrote some of his most beautiful poetry. Until his death John served as a confessor, spiritual director, superior and administrator for Carmelite men and as a spiritual teacher and confessor for the reformed Carmelites being established by St. Teresa. She and John were collaborators, and he was probably the only man she held in awe. It is a common misconception that the two were close friends.
At the various friaries in which he lived, John taught catechism to local children, dispensed alms, heard confessions, led his friars out on picnics in the countryside on occasion, and generally did what was necessary for the good order of the house while observing the life of a Carmelite mendicant.
He was not a person given to sympathy for locutions, visions, stigmatizations and the like. In The Ascent of Mount Carmel (11:22.19), he urges confessors and spiritual guides to tell people that one act done in charity is more precious in God’s sight than all the visions and communications possible…and how it is that many individuals who have never received these experiences are incomparably more advanced than others who have received many.
John, in addition to his estimable body of poetry, composed four substantive prose works: the unfinished Ascent of Mount Carmel, The Dark Night, The Spiritual Canticle and The Living Flame of Love. John’s method was to comment on his poetry in prose, stanza by stanza and line by line.
His writings echo his knowledge of the psalter, his participation at Mass and the ordinary devotional life of a 16th-century Spanish friar (who loved to dance with an image of the infant Christ in his arms).
John’s God is not some abstract divinity but rather a Trinitarian God: the One who from all eternity pours forth the Word both in eternity and in history. In one of his most striking sayings John says that the Father spoke one Word, which was his Son, and this Word he speaks always in eternal silence, and in silence must it be heard by the soul.
There is an immense theology in that brief, almost aphoristic, observation. God’s silence is broken by the Word (in the inner life of the Trinity, in creation and in the incarnation), but we must live in such a way as to hear that silence. That hearing of the silence that is the Word is, in the deepest sense, prayer.
Now, this gold nugget! As agony leads to ecstasy, so John had his Ascent to Mt. Carmel, as he named it in his prose masterpiece. As man-Christian-Carmelite, he experienced in himself this purifying ascent; as spiritual director, he sensed it in others; as psychologist-theologian, he described and analyzed it in his prose writings.
His prose works are outstanding in underscoring the cost of discipleship, the path of union with God: rigorous discipline, abandonment, purification. Uniquely and strongly John underlines the gospel paradox: The cross leads to resurrection, agony to ecstasy, darkness to light, abandonment to possession, denial to self to union with God. If you want to save your life, you must lose it. John is truly “of the Cross.” He died at 49—a life short, but full.
And, this final flourish! John is a saint because his life was a heroic effort to live up to his name: “of the Cross.” The folly of the cross came to full realization in time. “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me” (Mark 8:34b) is the story of John’s life. The Paschal Mystery—through death to life—strongly marks John as reformer, mystic-poet, and theologian-priest.