John of the Cross

Juan de Yepes y Álvarez was born in 1542 at Fontiveros, a village near Ávila in Castile. His father came from a family of silk merchants, married beneath his class, and was disinherited for it; he died while Juan was small, and the family fell into real poverty. One of his brothers died of hunger. He grew up in a poorhouse school at Medina del Campo, worked as an orderly in a hospital for the poor and the diseased, and studied with the Jesuits at night. In 1563 he joined the Carmelites, and went on to the University of Salamanca. In 1567, newly ordained and thinking of leaving for the stricter Carthusians, he met Teresa of Ávila. Teresa was reforming the Carmelite order back toward its original rule — discalced, enclosed, poor, given to prayer — and had permission to start houses for men. She talked him into it. He took the name John of the Cross and, at twenty-five, helped open the first house of the reform at Duruelo, in a farmhouse so cold and bare that visitors were shocked. The reform split the order, and the unreformed Carmelites fought back. In December 1577 they seized John at Ávila, took him to Toledo, and shut him in a closet off a monastery hall — about six feet by ten, with a slit of light high in the wall. He was flogged before the assembled community once a week. He was there nine months. In that cell, without writing materials for most of it, he composed in his head the stanzas of the Spiritual Canticle, some of the greatest poetry in the Spanish language. A sympathetic guard eventually smuggled him paper. In August 1578 he worked the hinges loose on the door, let himself down the wall with a rope of torn blankets, and got away in the dark. He spent the rest of his life in the south of Spain — Baeza, Granada, Segovia — as prior, novice master, and spiritual director, mostly to nuns of the reform, and it was for them that he wrote the prose commentaries on his own poems: The Ascent of Mount Carmel, The Dark Night, The Spiritual Canticle, and The Living Flame of Love. What he described in them is the "dark night" — the phrase everyone borrows and almost everyone misuses. John did not mean depression or hard circumstances. He meant God deliberately withdrawing the felt sweetness of prayer, so that the soul stops loving the gifts and begins to love the Giver; the darkness is not God's absence but light too strong for the eye. He worked it out through Scripture, especially the Song of Songs, the Psalms, and Paul. He fell out of favor with the leadership of his own reform in his last year, was stripped of office, and sent to a remote house. An infection in his leg turned septic. He died at Úbeda on the night of December 14, 1591, at forty-nine, with the Song of Songs being read aloud beside him. He was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church in 1726 and named a Doctor of the Church in 1926. Sources: John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, The Dark Night, and The Spiritual Canticle; Teresa of Ávila, The Book of the Foundations; the Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), "St. John of the Cross"; Gerald Brenan, St. John of the Cross: His Life and Poetry.