John of the Cross

died 1591Modern

Wrote his greatest poem about the dark night of the soul while locked in a monastery cell by his own order.

Summary

John of the Cross lived died 1591. This wing places John of the Cross in The Reformation, 1500–1600.

Lived died 1591.
Stood in The Reformation (1500–1600).
Hangs on The Fathers.
Tradition: Modern.

The life

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.

What was happening while he lived8 moments · 1500–1600

1516Erasmus prints the Greek New TestamentThe Dutch scholar Erasmus published the New Testament in its original Greek, with his own fresh Latin beside it, at Basel. For the first time a parish priest could check the church's Latin Bible against the words the apostles wrote. Luther and Tyndale both worked from it.
1521–1522The Wartburg: a New Testament in GermanFriends staged a kidnapping and hid Luther in the Wartburg castle, where he grew a beard, called himself Knight George, and translated the New Testament from Erasmus's Greek in about eleven weeks. It was printed in September 1522 and sold out almost at once. He wrote that he wanted the mother in the house and the common man in the market to hear it in their own speech.
1525–1526Tyndale's English New TestamentRefused permission to translate in England, William Tyndale printed abroad. The Cologne run was raided mid-printing in 1525; he escaped upriver with the sheets and finished the job at Worms, and copies reached England in 1526 hidden in bales of cloth and sacks of flour. By the account Edward Hall's chronicle and then Foxe preserved, bishops bought up the stock to burn it, and the money the bishops paid financed the next edition.
Oct 1529Marburg: the reformers fail to agreePhilip of Hesse brought Luther and Zwingli together to unite the movement. They agreed on fourteen of fifteen articles and broke on the fifteenth, what happens in the Lord's Supper. Luther chalked "This is my body" on the table and would not be moved; Zwingli reportedly offered his hand in fellowship and Luther declined it. The Protestant world stayed divided.
1534Luther's complete German BibleWith a team of Hebrew and Greek scholars, Luther finished the whole Bible in German, printed at Wittenberg by Hans Lufft. He hunted words in butcher shops and marketplaces to get the sound right. His Bible carried the Saxon chancery German he wrote in into every corner of the language, one of the strongest single forces in the making of standard written German, though not its sole origin.
March 1536Calvin's *Institutes*, first editionA twenty-six-year-old French exile published a small six-chapter handbook at Basel explaining the faith to a hostile king. He kept enlarging it for the next twenty-three years; the 1559 edition runs to four books and eighty chapters. That same year he was pressed into staying in Geneva against his own wishes.
1555–1556The Oxford firesUnder Queen Mary I, roughly 280 Protestants were burned in under four years. Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley died together at Oxford on October 16, 1555; Foxe records Latimer telling Ridley they would that day light such a candle in England as would never be put out. Thomas Cranmer, who had signed recantations under pressure, took them back at the stake on March 21, 1556, and held his right hand in the fire first.
1560The Geneva BibleEnglish exiles who had fled Mary produced a pocket-sized Bible in readable Roman type, with every verse numbered and study notes in the margins. It was the Bible of Shakespeare, of the Puritans, and of the Mayflower passengers, and it outsold the King James Version for decades after 1611.

The Reformation: the whole era→

Go further

Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.

Search John of the Cross at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites

Why this one hangs here

Hangs on The Fathers: The men who carried the faith out of the apostles' hands, and wrote down what they had received.

Standing beside himThe Reformation · 19 on this stretch of wall

John Wycliffe1330–1384

Argued that Scripture belonged to the people in their own tongue, and set in motion the English Bible that carries his name, made by his Oxford circle a century and a half before Tyndale. They burned his bones, and the river carried the ashes to the sea.

Jan Hus1372–1415

Preached Christ as head of the church in Prague's own language, and sang at the stake in 1415.

Martin Luther1483–1546

Sent ninety-five theses against indulgences to his archbishop, and later, before the emperor, would not take back a word of what he had written.

Miles Coverdale1488–1569

Finished what Tyndale could not and printed the first complete English Bible from a press, and four years later put the Great Bible in every parish church.

Thomas Cranmer1489–1556

Put the church's prayers into plain English, then took back his own recantation and burned for it.

William Tyndale1494–1536

Translated the New Testament from the Greek so a plough-boy could read it, and paid for it at a stake in 1536.