John of the Cross' Path to perfect union with God based on his own experience

Summary:

Juan de Yepes Alvarez was born into a noble family in Fontiveros, Spain (Old Castile), near Ávila. His father was a knight and an accountant who was rejected by his family for marrying below his station and forced to work with his wife as a weaver. He died when Juan (John) was three, and since the family was already poor, and, at the age of nine, John was sent to a school for poor children, many of whom were orphans. It was at this time that the Virgin Mary saved him from drowning. He had an excellent education at the Jesuit school in Medina del Campo (Spain, Castilla y León). After considering becoming a hermit and a Carthusian, he took the religious habit with the Carmelites of Medina. His superiors sent him to the University of Salamanca, one of the most prestigious in Europe at the time, to continue his studies. In three years, he acquired an in-depth knowledge of philosophical currents and an impressive theological background. During that perod, he wrote a text stating that the search for mystical experiences leads to enlightenment, but not to union with Jesus.

He began the reform of Spanish Carmel in 1568, after Saint Teresa of Avila asked him to follow her. He founded the so-called "Discalced Carmelites", wishing to restore the Order to the observance of its "Primitive Rule" of 1209, which had been relaxed. It was in this context that the saint undertook a vast administrative, material, spiritual and psychological reform.

In the process, he wrote his major works over the years. His plan was to be of service to his Carmelite sisters and brothers in the field of contemplative life. To do this, he drew up a general framework, a spiritual backdrop, within which he described and dissected the soul's journey towards God. His teachings stress a  path of radical surrender to God through what he calls “nothing” (nada). This requires that we empty ourselves from attachments, desires, and even the need for spiritual experience. For John, contemplative life is not about seeing or understanding more; rather, it is about letting go. This idea was developped in a plan her drew for the nuns of Béas (Huelva, Spain), called the ‘Mount of Perfection’.

Like any journey, there are stages and obstacles that the saint explains - and some that need to be removed. And among the dangers faced by Christians on their journey to Jesus is the desire to mentally represent the Saviour, because these representations - however respectful and meticulous they may be - remain alien to biblical revelation: a God that can be apprehended by the senses, a God-image, endowed with forms, corporeality, localisable in Euclidean space. For the author of The Ascent of Mount Carmel, the God of Jesus Christ is never a figment of the imagination (of which we should be wary). In his transcendence, the Lord is beyond space and time, but also beyond the sensible, beyond all forms. This position is of decisive importance, because if the imagination substitutes an anthropomorphic perception for the God of Christians, the believer runs the danger of worshipping not the Lord himself, but an idol.

(Evangelical) prudence makes it possible to discern what comes from God from what comes from elsewhere, from man or from the devil. The sensitive manifestations of the mystical life (visions, ecstasies, etc.) can be of diabolical or psychological origin, or both. Consequently, we must not give credence to people - even good religious - who favour the sensory dimension of the spiritual life. Taking up the Augustinian classification of visions into three unequal categories (from bottom to top: corporeal, imaginative and spiritual visions), he denies any real value to the "corporeal" facts, which he certainly considers possible, but always secondary and superfluous, and which can even, in certain circumstances, lead us astray.

Faith in Jesus Christ is not credulity or a search for tangible signs, but trust in the Word of God made flesh. He writes: "He [the credulous believer] may receive detriment in himself touching the merit of faith, because by making great mention of these miracles [such as bodily apparitions or others], he departs much from the substantial habit of faith, which is an obscure habit; whence comes that where there are more signs and testimonies, there is less merit in believing" (The Ascent of Mount Carmel 3, 33).

The sole object of faith is Jesus Christ, continued by the Church throughout history. In essence, it is above the contingencies of the world and beyond all the representations we can make of God. It is an "obscure night", not in the sense of a kind of unthinkable nothingness, but because it surpasses human reason. "Faith [...] is obscure because it makes us believe truths revealed by God himself, which are above all natural light." (The Ascent of Mount Carmel 2). Faith is like a staircase penetrating "to the depths of God" (The Dark Night, 17). Only such faith can stop the devil's attacks and religious lukewarmness.

How can we rise above material circumstances? John of the Cross, as an experienced director of dozens of Carmelite nuns, knew the length and difficulty of the soul's path towards God. In a note to one of his directees in the convent of Avila (Spain), he wrote: "He who does not know how to extinguish his appetites travels towards God like a man pulling a cart painfully to the top of a hill." How do you climb Mount Carmel? John establishes a spiritual base camp that he considers decisive: God is spirit and, as such, can be known neither by the senses nor by any of the natural faculties. Reason, for its part, reaches general ideas, but the God of the Bible is beyond these ideas. To set out on our journey towards him, we need to be available, to set our lives apart from things (from worldly life, from the noise of human society), and then to pray, fast, read and meditate. In a word: to live as a contemplative.

Nor is it a question of accumulating knowledge and diverse skills, including in theology. It's about gradually opening up your being to God, who is "nothing" compared to the ideas and images we have of him. He notes: "To come to know everything, make sure you possess nothing [...] To come to be everything, make sure you are nothing of nothing."(The Ascent of Carmel). Even at the top of the mountain, there is nothing (The Mountain of the Honour and Glory of God), that is, nothing human, nothing alien to the spiritual.

If the intellect rejects this "nothing", if it is incapable of thinking, if it multiplies reasoning like so many pitfalls on the way, the believer must take care not to evade it - Saint John of the Cross never falls into fideism - but to purify it by leaving it available to grace.

John's quest is full of realism. The whole human being must be placed under God's gaze: understanding, will, memory, sensitivity, imagination... This is what he called the "night of the soul". If this is not the case, there is a risk that the journey will be interrupted, because the mystic walks as if groping his way through the night of faith, in a state of evangelical poverty where nothing counts but God.

In fact, the soul progresses through successive purifications: a pattern similar to that of the "seven dwellings" of Saint Teresa of Avila. On the whole, the two reforming saints share a similar point of view: the mystical life, which consists of going through the stages leading to the God of revelation, is progressive, like all human development. Three of these stages are essential: the beginner must pass a first purifying test, which all too often discourages him, because it involves overcoming spiritual dryness and letting go of the representations he has of God. In short, it is a question of divesting oneself of everything that comes from nature, through which the devil can interfere.

Then there is the "illuminative" path, or the passage from prayer to contemplation and knowledge of God: a mystical absorption that is at the same time a dilation of the intelligence and the heart - a form of knowledge given without any mediation whatsoever.

Finally, the "unitive" path is that of the union of the soul with its Creator: the high point of the life of every baptised person. We reach this summit by doing God's will, by submitting our intelligence and will to the teaching of the Church, but first by letting go of our own ego.

In conclusion, we wish to point out the great coherence of John of the Cross' writings. The saint recapitulates and goes beyond what his predecessors had said on these questions. He does not content himself with describing the work of grace in the human heart, but analyses the conditions and consequences (psychological and anthropological) of the encounter between the soul and God in a remarkable way.

As we have seen, the "mystical doctor" explains how the passion for sensitive signs (ecstasies, visions...) is the tree that hides the forest of faith, which leads the spiritual pilgrim astray into credulity. But for all that, he never systematically rejects the authentic signs of God. Indeed, how could he, who had so many mystical experiences? He does not hesitate to note a prodigy whose reality and authenticity must always be recognised by the Church, and he describes with a breathtaking sense of observation and perfect theological mastery the transverberation with which he was graced, like Saint Teresa of Avila (The Living Flame of Love 2, 9). In his eyes, a rapture, always outside the realm of faith, can be classified as a somatic phenomenon expressing a particular state or stage in the ascent towards God.

The ultimate goal of John of the Cross - the summit of the mystical path - can be summed up in one word, which is a Spanish neologism: deification ("endiosamiento"), that is, the spiritual situation where God and the soul become one.

Beyond reasons to believe:

The masterful depth of his books and the beauty of his poetry do not mean that John of the Cross was an intellectual cut off from the world's realities. He was both an exceptional mystic and a very active man: a spiritual director, reformer of the Carmelite order of his time, adviser to dozens of nuns and religious, and, of course, a first-rank mystic.

Going further:

The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross by Saint John of the Cross, Kieran Kavanaugh, et al.,  ICS Publications; Rev ed. edition (January 1, 1991)

More information:

• The Science of the Cross(Collected Works of Edith Stein) Part of: The Collected Works of Edith Stein (11 books)  by L Gelber, Romaeus Leuven, et al.‎, ICS Publications (January 1, 2003)

• John of the Cross: Man and Mystic by Richard P Hardy, ‎ ICS Publications; Illustrated edition (January 1, 2015)