St. John of the Cross

St. John of the Cross was a Spanish Carmelite friar and poet, born Juan de Yepes at Fontiveros near Ávila in 1542 and dead at Úbeda on 14 December 1591. With St. Teresa of Ávila he founded the Discalced Carmelite reform, and he wrote four prose treatises and a small body of poetry that are the standard Catholic account of the soul's journey to union with God. Pope Pius XI declared him a Doctor of the Church in 1926, with the title Doctor of Mystical Theology.

His four major works are commentaries on his own poems: The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night, which expound the poem beginning "On a dark night", then The Spiritual Canticle and The Living Flame of Love. Spanish literature counts the poems among the finest written in the language.

1. Prison Break

The Carmelite reform John joined split the order into two parties, the Discalced who followed the stricter observance and the Calced who kept the mitigated rule, and the dispute was about jurisdiction as much as about sandals. In December 1577 a party of Calced friars and their agents seized John at Ávila and took him to the Carmelite priory at Toledo. He was held there for about nine months in a room roughly six feet by ten, a converted closet with one high slit of a window, on bread, water and scraps, scourged before the community on a regular schedule.

During those months he composed poetry in his head, including the greater part of the Spiritual Canticle, and a friendly jailer eventually gave him paper. In August 1578 he loosened the bolts on the door of his cell, let himself out of a window on a rope made from strips of blankets, dropped onto the wall above the Tagus, and got away to a Discalced house. Nothing in his later writing complains about the men who held him.

The imprisonment matters for reading him. The doctrine of the dark night was written by a man who had been in an actual dark cell and had come out of it, and who declined to treat the experience as an injustice to be litigated.

2. Purifying the Senses

John's starting claim is that the soul is made for union with God and that its attachments are what prevent that union. His image is a bird tied by a thread. It makes no difference whether the cord is a rope or a fine thread, since the bird is held on the ground either way, and the small habitual attachment does the same work as the large one.

Hence the counsel usually quoted as nada, nothing. In the sketch of Mount Carmel he drew for his penitents, the direct path up the mountain is marked with the word nothing repeated, and at the summit he wrote that on this mount there dwells only the honour and glory of God. His famous set of maxims in the Ascent works the same way: to reach what you do not enjoy, go by a way in which you do not enjoy; to come to the knowledge you have not, go by a way in which you know nothing.

Two safeguards keep this from becoming contempt for creation. John holds that created things are good and that God is known through them; what he attacks is the appetite that fastens the soul to them as ends. And he insists on the ordinary means throughout: the sacraments, the Church's teaching, obedience to a director, and Scripture, which he treats as the one place where God has spoken publicly and definitively.

3. The Dark Night of the Soul

In John's usage the dark night names a purification that God works in a soul that is already praying and living the sacraments. He divides it two ways. The night of sense removes the felt sweetness that beginners get in prayer, so that the person stops loving the consolation and starts loving God. The night of the spirit, which is rarer and harder, reaches down to the deeper self-love and the natural way of understanding, so that faith replaces the soul's own light.

The word dark carries two meanings for him. The night is dark to us because faith exceeds what the senses and reason can hold, in the way that strong light blinds a weak eye. And it is dark because it hurts: the soul feels abandoned, prayer goes dry, and the person often concludes he has lost God or ruined everything by his own fault.

John gives working signs for telling this passage from mere laziness or from a fault. In the Ascent he sets out three: the person finds no satisfaction in prayer and none in created things either; he is anxious that he is failing God rather than indifferent to it; and he cannot meditate discursively as he used to, while he can rest quietly in a general loving attention to God. Where those three appear together, John says, the soul should stop forcing the old method and stay quietly present.

4. The Life: Poverty, Salamanca and the Reform

John was born in 1542 at Fontiveros in Old Castile. His father Gonzalo de Yepes came from a family of silk merchants and was cut off by them for marrying Catalina Álvarez, a poor weaver. He died while John was small, and the family lived in real destitution; one of John's brothers died young, probably of malnutrition. John worked as a boy at a hospital for the poor in Medina del Campo, where he also studied at the Jesuit college.

He entered the Carmelites at Medina in 1563 and studied at Salamanca, then the leading university in Spain, from 1564 to 1568. He was ordained in 1567 and was considering leaving for the Carthusians in search of greater solitude when Teresa of Ávila met him at Medina and persuaded him into her reform. He was twenty-five; she was in her fifties.

In 1568 he helped open the first house of Discalced friars in a farmhouse at Duruelo, and took the name John of the Cross. He served afterwards as confessor to Teresa's nuns at the Incarnation in Ávila, as rector of the college at Baeza, as prior at Granada, and as vicar provincial of Andalusia. In 1591 he lost his offices after opposing the policies of the Discalced leadership under Nicolás Doria, was sent to a remote house at La Peñuela, fell ill with an infection in the leg, and was moved to Úbeda, where the prior treated him harshly. He died there on 14 December 1591 at forty-nine.

5. The Four Books and the Poems

The poems came first and the prose exists to explain them, usually because a nun or a friar asked what a stanza meant.

The Ascent of Mount Carmel

The longest and most systematic work, and unfinished. It covers the active night, the part the person does: the disciplining of the appetites, and then the purification of memory, understanding and will by faith, hope and charity. It contains John's severe treatment of visions, locutions and revelations, which he tells directors and penitents to set aside rather than pursue, on the ground that faith is the proper road and extraordinary experiences are easily counterfeited by the imagination or the devil.

The Dark Night

Takes up the passive night, the part God does. Book one treats the night of sense and gives the three signs; book two treats the night of the spirit.

The Spiritual Canticle

A commentary on the poem of the bride searching for the Beloved, modelled on the Song of Songs, most of it composed in the Toledo cell. It is the most lyrical of the four and ends in the language of spiritual marriage.

The Living Flame of Love

The shortest, written quickly, on the state of union itself, addressed to a laywoman, Ana de Peñalosa.

6. What the Dark Night Is Not About

Popular usage has widened the phrase to mean any long stretch of misery, and that broad sense has almost nothing to do with John's book. Two distinctions are worth stating clearly.

Clinical depression is a medical condition. It calls for a doctor, and treatment for it is compatible with any state of prayer. Experienced spiritual directors are trained to distinguish depressive illness from the purification John describes, and the signs he gives are one of the tools they use: in the night of sense the person still wants God and still carries out his duties, while depression flattens desire and function across the whole of life. Anyone reading this page in a dark stretch should treat medical help and spiritual direction as complementary.

Sin is the other thing to rule out. Dryness in prayer that follows on a habit of grave sin, on abandoned practice or on a life arranged to avoid God is not the passive night. The remedy there is confession, which is available in every parish and costs nothing.

John himself refuses to let anyone claim the state as a status. His treatment is written for directors so that they will stop pushing souls to keep meditating when God has moved them on, and so that they will not flatter a beginner into thinking he is further along than he is.

7. Why the Church Holds Him Up

He is a Doctor of the Church because his account of the stages of prayer became the Church's common reference for the subject. The Catechism draws on the Carmelite tradition in its treatment of prayer, and it quotes him directly at the article on the particular judgment: at the evening of life, we shall be judged on love (CCC 1022, citing his Sayings of Light and Love). That one line is a fair compression of his whole system, because everything he strips away is stripped for the sake of charity.

He is held up, second, for how he behaved toward the men who wronged him. His writings and letters from after Toledo contain no campaign against his captors, and the counsel he gave in his letters was to keep silent, keep praying and let God act. Where the soul finds no love, he wrote in a letter of his last year, it should put love, and it will find love.

Third, for the union of poetry and theology. The doctrine is delivered in verse of the highest quality, which is why he is read outside Catholic circles and taught in secular literature courses. The theology loses nothing by being beautiful.

8. Feast Day, Patronage and Devotion

His feast is 14 December, the day he died, an obligatory memorial in the Roman calendar. Benedict XIII canonized him in 1726 and Pius XI declared him a Doctor of the Church in 1926.

He is invoked as a patron of contemplatives and of mystics, and as a patron of Spanish poets. His body was taken from Úbeda to Segovia in the years after his death, and the two towns disputed the relics; Segovia holds the greater part in the Carmelite convent there, and Úbeda retains a portion at the friary where he died.

The devotion attached to him is a practice rather than an object: mental prayer kept daily whether it is consoling or dry, spiritual reading, regular confession, and a director who knows the tradition. Discalced Carmelite houses and the Secular Order of Discalced Carmelites are where lay people usually take this up formally.

9. What to Take From John of the Cross

Keep the hour when nothing happens. His whole doctrine assumes prayer continued past the point where it stops feeling productive.

Cut the small threads. The bird is held by the thread as surely as by the rope. Look at the ordinary habits you defend rather than the dramatic sins you confess.

Do not chase experiences. John tells directors to give no weight to visions and consolations. The road is faith, and the sacraments, and charity.

Where there is no love, put love. The line comes from a letter he wrote in his last year to a Carmelite living in a difficult community, and it is the most portable sentence he wrote, meant for offices and families as much as for monasteries.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was St. John of the Cross?

St. John of the Cross was a Spanish Carmelite friar, poet and mystical theologian who lived from 1542 to 1591. With St. Teresa of Ávila he founded the Discalced Carmelite reform, and he wrote The Ascent of Mount Carmel, The Dark Night, The Spiritual Canticle and The Living Flame of Love. He was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1926.

What is the dark night of the soul?

In John's writing the dark night is a purification God works in a soul that is already praying and living the sacraments. The night of sense removes the felt sweetness of prayer so the person loves God rather than the consolation, and the rarer night of the spirit reaches the deeper self-love so that faith replaces the soul's own light.

Is the dark night of the soul the same as depression?

No. Depression is a medical condition and calls for medical care, which is compatible with any state of prayer. John gives three signs for the night of sense: no satisfaction in prayer or in created things, anxiety about failing God rather than indifference, and an inability to meditate as before combined with the ability to rest in a quiet loving attention to God. Dryness caused by grave sin or abandoned practice is a third thing again, and its remedy is confession.

Why was St. John of the Cross imprisoned?

He was seized in December 1577 by Carmelite friars of the unreformed observance during the jurisdictional conflict over the Discalced reform, and held for about nine months in a small cell in the priory at Toledo, on poor food and scourged regularly. He composed much of the Spiritual Canticle there and escaped through a window in August 1578 using a rope of blanket strips.

What did St. John of the Cross mean by nada?

Nada, nothing, is his shorthand for detachment from every appetite that fastens the soul to created things as ends. On his sketch of Mount Carmel the direct path is marked with the word repeated, and at the summit he wrote that only the honour and glory of God dwells there. He held that created things are good and that the appetite for them as ends is what blocks union.

When is the feast of St. John of the Cross?

His feast is 14 December, the day he died at Úbeda in 1591. He is invoked as a patron of contemplatives, of mystics and of Spanish poets.

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