The Feast of St. John of the Cross

Today the Church celebrates the feast of St. John of the Cross, priest and Doctor of the Church. A Spanish Carmelite from the 16th century, he was a mystic—and mystical theologian—and a close collaborator of St. Teresa of Avila. Together they launched a reformed within the Carmelite order (their followers calling themselves “discalced”—barefoot.)

Partly due to his reformist tendencies, partly due to his radical theology, and partly due to his disagreements with superiors, John and his writings came under suspicion, he was jailed, and publicly beaten. But suspicion eventually faded, and in the 18th century he was canonized a saint, and in the 20th century was declared a Doctor of the Church.

I’ve always found his mystical theology to be captivating, partly, no doubt, because he is so solidly a Thomist—his entire framework of anthropology, epistemology, and mystical theology comes straight from Thomas; and, in a certain sense, many of his developments discussing spiritual union are present in the Summa in root form.

Of course John is most famous for his work describing The Dark Night of the Soul , that purgative stage believers go through in which it appears that God has withdrawn his presence. (John’s theory was catapulted into the news most recently because of the release of Mother Teresa’s personal letters.)

For John, the dark night was God’s way of repairing the soul. Our faculties and desires have become so corrupted and attached to sin that we need to have them liberated, reoriented, redirected toward their true final end: God himself. This process is one of darkness and negation: The first dark night, the night of the senses, where the senses cease to find enjoyment (or sense God’s presence), and a second dark night, the night of the spirit, where we come to know the extent of our sinfulness and God’s glory.

But the dark night isn’t the last word. While The Dark Night of the Soul might be described as the soul’s passiveness before God, and a description of what God does to reconstruct the soul, The Ascent of Mount Carmel is John’s discussion of the active path that believer’s take in approaching God. (The two works go hand in hand, attempting to describe the same phenomenon from different perspectives—God’s and ours—and may be seen as a discussion of cooperative grace.) The final goal is union with God.

And it’s the way John describes this final union that has always appealed to me. As John sees it, God breaks us down, not only to repair us, but to elevate us. Not only are our sinful desires rechanneled toward God, but our faculties are actually lifted up to levels they could never achieve on their own. Nature is elevated to supernature. John talks about the active intellect and what it can achieve both as far as knowledge of God goes and as far as prayer goes (for John, both vocal and meditative prayer are “active” prayers—with the believer doing the work, so to speak). But once in the spiritual union that John describes, God takes the active role. The intellect is silent, the faculties are passive. God himself impresses images and phantasms as we reach true contemplation.

Steven Payne describes this process in his book, John of the Cross and the Cognitive Value of Mysticism :

God takes on the role played by the active intellect in ordinary knowledge, directly, and “informs” the possible intellect directly, producing an obscure apprehension or “knowledge” of the Divine. And just as a piece of clay cannot be molded into a new shape until the old shape is destroyed, so too the possible intellect cannot receive the divine “form” conveyed in mystical experience until the “forms and intelligible species” of creatures are expelled. [Note the Thomistic jargon.]

The dark night frees up the space to allow God to act.

But it’s not just a supernatural knowledge of God that is attained. A real union is achieved; and not just union, but a transformation, a participatory deification. And it starts here and now, not just in the life to come. In The Living Flame of Love , John describes it this way:

Having been made one with God, the soul is somehow God through participation. Although it is not God as perfectly as it will be in the next life, it is like the shadow of God. Being the shadow of God through this substantial transformation, it performs in this measure in God and through God what he through himself does in it. For the will of the two is one will, and thus God’s operations and the soul’s are one. Since God gives himself with a free and gracious will, so too the soul gives to God, God himself in God; and this is a true and complete gift of the soul to God.

How does this all work out conceptually? John argues that we become divinized (in a limited, but real sense) in a manner similar to the hypostatic union. Just as Christ was the union of the divine and human in a single person, so too something similar will happen to us as we become more fully united to Christ. Once united to Christ, we’re elevated to participate in the divine life of the trinity. Edward Howells, in his book John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila: A Trinitarian Mystical Psychology , explains it like this:

The soul has had its means of knowing and its relationship with God raised from the human to the divine level. The culmination of John’s Trinitarian argument is to conclude that “the soul’s center is God.” The center of the soul is both God’s “own” and the soul’s “own,” where God dwells “alone, not only as in your [God’s] house, not only in your bed, but also in my own heart, intimately and closely united to it.” In saying that the center is the soul’s “own,” John means that it has full freedom in union, as God has raised the soul to the level of God’s own active Trinitarian mutuality. Thus, in the case of the will, “the soul reflects the divine light in a more excellent way because of the active intervention of its will.” There is an active cooperation between the soul and God, with no loss of the soul’s freedom but rather its perfection. The soul can take full possession of its faculties while also remaining in union. This corresponds to the union of the divine Word with human flesh in Christ.

It’s a beautiful vision, and another reason to return to the works of St. John of the Cross on this his feast.