Exploring the mystical depth of St John of the Cross

John Of The Cross, Carmel, Desire And Transformation
Edited by Edward Howells and Peter Tyler
Routledge
April 2024
290 pages
ISBN: 978-0198863069

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This compilation of twenty-one scholarly essays on St John of the Cross, edited by two English academics in the field of spirituality, covers a wide swathe of academic research and reflection. The contributors are all living, established scholars of John, Carmelite mysticism and related subjects. They include members of the discalced order around the globe and a surprisingly high number of non-Catholic Christian theologians.

For the general reader, the most familiar name on the list of contributors is the popular Jesuit author and columnist, Ronald Rolheiser, whose well loved Forgotten Among The Lilies, takes its title from John’s mystical poem, “Dark Night”. His weekly columns are syndicated widely in religious magazines including The Irish Catholic.

As the sub title suggests, the essays focus on the themes of Carmel, Desire and Transformation. Within those broad terms, there is a very wide range of approaches. A number of contributors look at John through the lens of other mystics, biblical characters, philosophers and even modern psychiatry, ranging from Job to Catherine of Siena to Edith Stein to Henri de Lubac to more recent philosophers like Emmanuel Lévinas and Jacques Lacan.

A number of essays also deal with the various influences on John’s thought, particularly Thomas Aquinas and John’s much younger mentor and inspiration, Teresa of Avila. Each approach opens up a fresh way of understanding and interpreting the mystic. While the insights that emerge give food for thought and reflection, the book, as an academic reflection on a great poet and mystic, is itself a sober, comprehensive overview that offers little in the way of direct spiritual guidance. This is not a criticism of the book but more a health warning for the general reader who might hope to find in it a key to integrating the faith and prayer life of John in their personal spirituality. That is something the authors leave to personal engagement, directed or otherwise, with the beautiful texts themselves.

Ronald Rolheiser is the sole contributor who expresses how the mystical inner journey to union with God may find expression in everyday life among ordinary people. John’s dark night of encounter follows a path of double purgation. The spiritual purgation follows the sensory purgation because the vices that our sensory appetites succumb to are rooted in a spirit that is also disordered. John was no dualist and expresses the rootedness of sin in Dark Night Of The Soul in terms of “roots and branches” and the “dried in stains” that need attention after the surface stains are washed off.

Rolheiser uses the relationship between husband and wife to illustrate how love deepens and becomes more authentic through a twofold process which begins with the shedding of selfish, unregulated desires, a process which aligns with John’s “night of sense”. However, more is needed to meet the demands of a truly loving union. The more deep rooted inner selfishness that lingers in the desire to possess and control the other, which corresponds to John’s “night of spirit”, is more painful to confront and entails an acceptance of the separateness, the dignity and inscrutable otherness of the beloved.

Not unsurprisingly, many of the contributors explore how John’s dark night can map onto contemporary experiences of atomisation, alienation and “impasse”, including ecclesial impasse. Learning to wait in patience and trust, to adopt a mystic’s passivity, may sometimes be necessary if we are not to yield to despondency.

Contributor Mark Murphy, examines how the dark night of Covid lockdowns turned people to self-help strategies and an online, often monetised, therapeutic culture that promoted unrealistic and often illusory expectations. This unexpected, fallow period in human affairs was an opportunity to look both inside and beyond self, to come to terms with our common dependency and limitations and seek answers to the big questions outside the self-serving offerings of digital platforms. It was largely a wasted opportunity for Murphy.

For contributor, Steven Payne, mystical union which allows us share in “the inner life of the Trinity” calls us also to “radiate outwards in active compassion and concern for others”. We are not called to “a state of frozen ecstasy”. John was said to be convivial and his religious life had an active dimension as well as a contemplative one.

The active dimension of Christian life, in the light of the Gospel mandate to love others with the love of Christ, is well understood. John of the Cross, however, like Teresa of Avila, draws attention to the value of passivity, its potential to be fruitful even when we feel utterly helpless and abandoned. In Dark Night Of The Soul, John observed that Christ’s greatest accomplishment, the salvation of humankind, was brought about through passive submission in the darkest and most desolate hours of his life on earth. This is a key insight that neither this essay nor any of the others draws out sufficiently.

Contributor, Robert D. Flanagan, writes that, for John, the cross signified more than readiness to suffer for the sake of Christ and his Gospel. It also signified a staff to lean against on the pilgrim journey, something that supports and encourages rather than overwhelms us. Indeed, the cross, like the staff, both signify “movement” and progress towards the glory that Christ has already opened up for those who accept his invitation to follow his steps.

Contributors, Chloe Lynch and Christopher Cook consider how John’s insights can offer guidance to contemporary practitioners in spiritual accompaniment and clinical therapy in the field of mental health. Lynch offers an interesting distinction between acedia or spiritual sloth, which can be fatal for the life of faith, and something that may present in the same way but which stems from the subject’s “dark night” experience as a stage of their spiritual journey and letting go towards union with divine love.

Christopher Cook also examines the way spiritual and psychological or psychiatric states may overlap or be mistaken for one another in mental health therapy. The key difference is that the spiritual dark night is “growthful”. He argues for a more holistic approach in therapy, where spiritual and mental health are “understood together”. He also believes that “spiritual growth is not incompatible with scientific treatment”.

In his essay, that examines John’s mysticism through the lens of Henri de Lubac’s thought, referencing the language of philosophy rather than psychology, Christof Betschart, focuses on the fundamental juanist idea of integrated being. Spirit, mind and body are one single whole, though there is a hierarchy of faculties. Deepening our spiritual life, our loving relationship with God, overcoming sin and sinful inclination is a process that permeates every level of being and does not make us less human in any sense. We are to quote Betschart “not less but more fully human for being infused with God’s love”.

In his book, Dark Night Of The Soul, John understands self-knowledge as a necessary portal to knowledge of God. Quoting St Augustine, he writes, “Let me know myself Lord, so that I may know thee”. Knowing oneself as one comes to know oneself through the purgation of the dark night is a reckoning with our essential selves. It also clears the way for divine encounter in the purest, highest form possible for mortal beings, a “sketch” of the beatific vision that can only be effected in heaven.

John’s exploration of the soul’s capacity to experience God directly and his popularity among the heretical Illuminati or Alumbrados who believed that salvation was possible without clergy or sacraments, attracted the scrutiny of the Inquisitors in Spain. John’s orthodoxy was not established without bitter opposition from some inquisitors and this deep wariness of the spiritual interiority explored in John’s prose and poetry explains the long wait for formal Church recognition and canonisation as discussed by contributors Bernard McGinn and Jodi Bilinkoff. 

Perhaps, it is this focus on interiority that explains John’s following among Christians of all stripes. Yet, it must not be forgotten that it was in the context of cloistered life, centred around community prayer, the Mass and a busy calendar of rich liturgical ritual and prayer that this great flowering of the Church’s mystical tradition was nurtured. 

This book is a symposium of highly erudite, relatively short essays by leading scholars of John of the Cross. They tend to be highly, in some cases perhaps, excessively allusive and read like compressed versions of more expansive earlier drafts. In addition, they also name check each other. It is a book for those who already have a degree of familiarity with John’s work. In fact, the more immersed one is in John, the more one will engage with this compilation. 

If there is fault to this book, it is that it does not reflect on the luminous and liminal poetic imagery of John. The dark night of his compelling poem is suggestive of something that those of us who dwell in northern lands in particular don’t normally associate with arid blackness. It is a night charged with hopeful expectation. It holds the scent of lilies; it is still and serene. This is a summer night destined to yield to resplendent dawn. The “faith, hope and love” that, however fragile, accompany the pilgrim resonate quietly in such evocations of beauty and balmy stillness. 

Pola Pavel, a Czech Carmelite and juanist scholar like his fellow contributors, alone opens an imaginative window onto John’s poetic vision by suggesting a comparison between the soul’s dark night and the dazzling blindness of a white-out on the Himalayas. Such an image is very far from the experience of a sixteenth century Spanish monk. Yet, it expresses well the spiritual occlusion that John described as akin to the experience of the apostles on Mount Tabor in Dark Night Of The Soul when he wrote “ … the brighter are supernatural things, the darker they are to our understanding.” His night is the dazzling brightness of divinity that is at first blinding for mortal gaze.

Only John himself through his crystalline commentary and poetry can open us to something of the mystical vision that suffused his life. Without a prayerful, thoughtful engagement with his work, academic dissertation and analysis can’t be appreciated as it deserves.