John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila E-Book

Edward Howells

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 544

Beschreibung

Half a millennium after they lived and wrote, Teresa and John continue to inspire and confound readers: How can the turn inward to solitude and quiet also bring a person closer to creation? Howell's shows how, for Teresa and John, the dynamic life of the Trinitarian God unites the mind within and the world outside.

Leseprobe

JOHN OF THE CROSS AND TERESA OF AVILA

John of the CrossandTeresa of Avila

Mystical Knowing and Selfhood

EDWARD HOWELLS

A Herder and Herder Book

The Crossroad Publishing Company

New York

The Crossroad Publishing Company

www.crossroadpublishing.com

Copyright © 2002 by Edward Howells

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of The Crossroad Publishing Company.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Howells, Edward.

John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila : mystical knowing and selfhood / Edward Howells.

      p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8245-1943-4 (alk. paper)

1. Mysticism–Catholic Church–History–16th century. 2. John of the Cross, Saint, 1542-1591. 3. Teresa, of Avila, Saint, 1515-1582. I.

Title.

BX4700.J7 .H69 2002

248.2'2'0922—dc21

2002001695

Contents

Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Mystical Experience According to John of the Cross

2. The Structure of the Soul According to John of the Cross

The Sources of John’s Epistemology

The Dichotomy of “Sense” and “Spirit”

The Natural Operation of the Soul

The Supernatural and Spiritual Operation of the Soul

The Role of the Memory, Intellect, and Will in Spiritual Knowing and Their Relation to “the Substance of the Soul”

The Role of the Corporeal Senses in Spiritual Knowing

3. The Dynamism and Unity of the Soul According to John of the Cross

The Transobjective Subject

Mystical Transformation: From “Ordinary” Faith to Union

The Depth of the Soul (el fondo del alma)

The Trinitarian Argument

The Center of the Soul (el centro del alma)

4. The Context of an Intellectual Comparison Between John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila

The Historical Connection Between Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross

5. The Structure of the Soul According to Teresa of Avila

The Dichotomy in the Structure of the Soul: The Interior and Exterior Parts

The Interior and Exterior Faculties and Senses

The Division of the Soul: The Nature of the Problem

Elements of Division and Continuity in Teresa’s Anthropology in the Vida

Overcoming the Division in the Soul: The “Mary and Martha” Passages in the Vida, the Camino de perfección and the Meditaciones sobre los Cantares

The Final Unity of the Soul in the Moradas del castillo interior

6. The Dynamism and Unity of the Soul According to Teresa of Avila

Teresa of Avila’s Understanding of “Experience”

The Process of Transformation: The Image of God in the Soul

The Beginning of Mystical Union

The Expansion of the Soul

The Beginning of Mystical Knowing

The Role of Christ

Visions and the Trinity

The Center of the Soul

7. Conclusion: Mystical Knowing and the Mystical Self in John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila

1. The Division in the Soul

2. The Trinitarian Image and Center of the Soul

3. The Christological Union of Human and Divine in the Center of the Soul

4. The Overflowing Nature of Union, Which Includes the Exterior Part of the Soul and the Body in Union, Producing Virtuous Works

5. Mystical Knowing and the Mystical Self

Epilogue: Some Important Differences Between John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila

Appendix: The Order of the Stages of Transformation According to John of the Cross: Reconciling the Main Accounts

Notes

Bibliography

Index

List of Tables

2.1. Two Parallel Epistemologies in John of the Cross’s Anthropology

5.1. Spiritual Sensation and Knowing According to Teresa of Avila

5.2. The Two Sides of Teresa of Avila’s Division in the Soul

5.3. The Solution to the Division in the Soul in the Meditaciones sobre los Cantares

A.1. The Fourfold Scheme of the Process of Transformation in the Subida-Noche

A.2. Comparison of the Threefold Scheme with the Fourfold Scheme in the Subida–Noche

A.3. Reconciliation of the Stages of Union in the Subida–Noche, the Cántico, and the Llama

Abbreviations

Works of John of the Cross

S

Subida del Monte Carmelo

(Ascent of Mount Carmel)

N

Noche oscura

(Dark Night)

C

Cántico espiritual

(Spiritual Canticle) (B redaction)

L

Llama de amor viva

(Living Flame of Love) (B redaction)

R

Romances

(Romances)

For the redactions of C and L used, see note 1 to the appendix, p. 198.

Works of Teresa of Avila

CC

Cuentas de conciencia

(in some other editions called the

Relaciones;

often translated as the

Spiritual Testimonies)

CV

Camino de perfección

, Valladolid manuscript (Way of Perfection) Cta

Carta(s)

(Letters)

E

Exclamaciones

(often called the

Soliloquies)

F

Fundaciones

(Foundations)

M

Moradas del castillo interior

(Interior Castle)

MC

Meditaciones sobre los Cantares

(Meditations on the Song of Songs)

V

Vida

(Life)

Vej

Vejamen

(often called

A Satirical Critique)

Citations are given in the following order:

(i) title of work; (ii) chapter; (iii) paragraph; (iv) page number in the English edition; (v) page number in the Spanish edition.

E.g., “L 3:30 (621/989)” means: Llama de amor viva, chapter 3, paragraph 30, page 621 in the English edition and page 989 in the Spanish edition.

The English editions used are those published by the Institute of Carmelite Studies: The Collected Works of John of the Cross, trans. and intro. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington D.C.: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1979), and The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, trans. and intro. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez, 3 vols (vol. 1: 2nd ed.; vols. 2 & 3: 1st ed.) (Washington D.C.: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1980-87).

The Spanish editions used are those in the Biblioteca de Autores Cris-tianos series: Obras Completas de San Juan de la Cruz, ed. Lucinio Ruano (14th ed.; Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1994), and Obras Complétas de Santa Teresa de Jesús, ed. Efrén de la Madre de Dios and Otger Steggink (9th ed.; Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1997).

In the case of Teresa of Avila’s Letters, the translation by E. Allison Peers is used, as these do not appear in the Institute of Carmelite Studies edition: The Letters of St Teresa of Jesus, trans. E. Allison Peers, 2 vols. (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1951).

Where the work is divided into a number of books (in addition to chapters and paragraphs) the number of the book precedes the title: e.g. “1S” means Subida, book 1; and “3M” means Moradas, 3rd Dwelling Place.

Occasionally, the chapter or paragraph numbering in the English edition differs from the Spanish edition, in which case the numbering in the English edition is given first and that in the Spanish edition second, in brackets: e.g., “CC 25(26)” means Cuentas de conciencia, number 25 in the English edition and number 26 in the Spanish edition.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the following for their help on this book: first, the Fulbright Commission, the Abbot of Elmore Abbey in England, and the Carmelites in Washington, D.C. (the Louis Herman and Susan Hamilton Rogge Endowment Fund), for generous grants; second, David Tracy and Susan Schreiner, my readers for the first incarnation of this book, as a University of Chicago Ph.D. dissertation, and also Denys Turner, Mark McIntosh, Iain Matthew, Steven Payne, Gillian Ahlgren, Rowan Williams, and Alois Haas, for informative conversations; third, my fellow students at the University of Chicago, Gordon Rudy, Patricia Beckman, and Constance Furey, for their advice and companionship; fourth, my Ph.D. adviser, Bernard McGinn, for his immense knowledge and close attention; and finally, Philippa, my wife, for too many other things to mention.

Introduction

IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY SPAIN,two Carmelites, Teresa of Avila (1515–1582) and John of the Cross (1542–1591), working in the inauspicious circumstances of internal strife within the Carmelite Order and inquisitorial censure in the society at large, produced writings that have since been hailed as some of the greatest in Christian mystical theology. Their writings are important both historically, coming at the end of the rich medieval development of mystical theology in the West, and theologically, as statements of mystical experience and transformation. In this book, I ask a question of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross that we might bring to any mystic: What is the “experience” that is called “mystical,” and what makes this experience different from “ordinary experience”? Teresa and John turn the question around and ask, What kind of experience, if any, is possible when the mystical relation to God is attained—given how different this relation is from anything in our ordinary experience? The mystical is not primarily an experience but a relation: it is a change from our natural relation to God to a wholly graced, supernatural relation, which affects our very selfhood. They characterize the mystical relation in two ways. First, it is a purely “spiritual” and “supernatural” relation with God, in which all created intermediaries are bypassed, rather than a relation through creatures, as in our natural state. Second, it is “experienced” or felt, and becomes known, in the “interior” of soul, that is, in our own selfrelation and in the act by which our “selves” are constituted, rather than in the “subject–object” relations to creatures which characterize our ordinary experience and knowledge. Such a relation requires considerable “transformation” and “deepening” of the self in order to be known. This book is about the type of self and the anthropological transformation required for mystical experience to become known, according to Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross.

The unusual feature of Teresa and John’s mysticism, in the context of the late medieval mystical tradition, is the degree to which they “interior-ize” the entire mystical journey and transpose it into anthropological categories. The final union occurs in the “center of the soul,” a center that is reached after passing through other “centers” and interior regions on the path to union. God is found in the final center, in an infinite “capacity” in the soul, which has some similarities to the “ground of the soul” in the Rhineland “essentialist” tradition of Meister Eckhart and the Beguine mystics, except that Teresa and John take great care to differentiate the soul from God in this center, rather than simply pointing to their unity.1 Combined with this attention to the “deep interior” relationship between the soul and God is a concern with epistemology, and particularly with the transformed epistemology attained in union.2 Teresa is less systematic than John in her epistemology, as we would expect given their differences of education, but she too organizes the “interior” of the soul in terms of faculties and senses with which we feel and know God in “mystical theology,” setting up a parallel epistemology to that of the natural faculties and senses in the “exterior” part of the soul.3 The combination of these two elements from the tradition results in a highly developed mystical anthropology: on top of the relational “depth” between the soul and God in the interior of the soul is placed the epistemological detail of a faculty psychology, producing a complete theory of mystical experience and knowing.

This turn to the interior, added to the parceling out of different powers of the soul to different epistemological functions, is theoretically problematic. If the soul can feel and know God mystically in the interior part, in a distinct set of operations from those of ordinary experience and knowledge, while the ordinary operations are retained in the exterior part, can it be said to remain a single soul? Why would such a mystical interior continue to need the exterior part or wish to remain connected to it? The problem does not go unnoticed by either Teresa or John. Teresa says that, having progressed some way into the stage of mystical union, she feels divided like Mary and Martha, between the interior part which is “always enjoying quietude” in the presence of God, and the exterior part which is left “in trials, so she could not keep it [the interior part] company.” She calls this a feeling of “division in her soul” (división en su alma).4 Similarly, John says that in the deepest part of the “dark night,” where the soul is closest to God, one part of the soul “seemingly has no relation to the other.”5 The problem for both Carmelites is that the creature–creator distinction has been broken down to some extent in the interior of the soul, while in the exterior of the soul it remains the same as before. Even though they are clear that both parts of the soul remain human, in establishing this immediate relation with God as uncreated in the interior, the soul finds itself closer to God in the interior part than this interior part is to its own exterior part. Thus, the ontological division between the soul and God enters into the soul, dividing the two parts—not to the same degree that the soul and God are naturally divided, but enough to dislocate the soul severely. The division in the soul is based on the traditional distinction between the spirit and the flesh in Christian anthropology, introduced by St. Paul, but goes further: the soul is not simply oriented to God as opposed to the flesh in the interior part, but has also lost all created intermediaries between itself and God, so that it is divided between two ontologically different types of relation to God.

In response to this problem of the division in the soul, commentators on Teresa and John have striven hard to show that there is not actually an ontological division in the soul. Henri Sanson, Georges Morel, and André Bord, in detailed treatments of John’s anthropology, argue that it is merely a “psychological,” as opposed to an ontological, division.6 They correctly point out that, for John, the “darkness” and “annihilation” that the soul feels when it comes into immediate contact with God is a psychological response to the ontological difference between God and the soul rather than the reification of this ontological difference in the two parts of the soul. Also, “annihilation” has a positive ultimate goal, to renew the soul rather than to destroy it. Similarly, Teresa’s “suspensions,” which signify the separation of the interior part of the soul from the exterior part, are the effect on the soul of the ontological difference between God and creatures, and they are superseded in her later treatments of union, where she says that the two parts of the soul come to “work together.” I do not, however, find this explanation of the division as merely psychological to be adequate: unless there were something of an ontological separation between the two parts of the soul, “mystical theology” would lose the unique status that Teresa and John fully intend to give it. The two Carmelites are careful not to go as far as to divide the soul into separate “divine” and “human” parts—both parts are relations between the human soul and God—but they intentionally develop a position where the immediate relation in the interior part is so different in kind and operation from the mediated relation in the exterior part as to threaten the unity of the single human person. Teresa and John cannot be accused of failing to demonstrate the unique nature of the mystical relation with God, but a question mark hangs over the ontological status of the interior part of the soul as a result of their strong distinction between the “mystical” and the “natural.”

Commentators have pointed to Teresa and John’s Christology as the means by which they reach a unity between the human and the divine in their anthropology. Rowan Williams says that we must not lose sight of the christological framework within which Teresa places her descriptions of “mystical experience.” The “suspensions” and so on that she describes are part of the traditional difficulty faced by Christians “to be ‘natural,’ to live in the world as creatures bearing God’s image.”7 In other words, the problem of the division in the soul is analogous to the relation of the divine and human natures of Christ in the incarnation. In an excellent study of John’s Christology, Iain Matthew argues a similar case for John, saying that the division in John’s anthropology is an attempt to understand Jesus “from the inside,” reflecting the distinction in the hypostatic union between the human and divine natures.8 As John says, the final union of the soul with God is a union “corresponding” to the hypostatic union.9 To jump ahead to my conclusion to this study, my own finding is that Teresa and John arrive at this christological unity only through their understanding of the Trinity. They appeal to the christological analogy both on the journey to union and in union itself to make sense of the division in the soul, but they develop their anthropologyprimarily in terms of the Trinity. Teresa maintains a more “bodily” devotion to images of the humanity of Christ on the journey to union than John, but both Carmelites approach Christ, and their anthropology, first of all through the “interior” transformation of the soul into the form of the Trinity.10

In this book, I develop the view that it is the dynamism of the Trinity in its internal relations that solves the problem of the division in the soul and becomes the central feature of Teresa and John’s anthropology. Indeed, the arrival at the “center of the soul,” by which both authors characterize the final union, is the full appropriation by the soul of the dynamism of the Trinity in its internal relations, which then “overflows” into virtuous exterior acts. My analysis of this trinitarian view of the soul in union begins by making a distinction between the structural and dynamic aspects of the soul.11 Structurally, the soul is divided into “interior” and “exterior” parts, and then into the various powers of a faculty psychology within these parts. Dynamically, the soul is the subject of transformation, being progressively drawn into the inner relations of the Trinity, such that in the final union the soul is positioned at the source of the divine “overflow” of the Trinity into creation, including the whole soul in both its “parts” in this divine dynamism. This distinction between structure and dynamism is used to organize the chapters of the book: there are two main chapters on each figure, the first on the structure of the soul, and the second on the dynamics of transformation. In each case, the division in the soul is considered first as the structural “problem,” and then the dynamism of the soul in its participation in the Trinity is introduced as the “solution.” This organization is not merely artificial but seeks to reproduce the order of events in the process of transformation, according to the two Carmelites. Teresa and John are treated separately until chap. 7, where they are compared closely and final conclusions are drawn, with some further comparisons in the epilogue.

Part of the difficulty in understanding the soul or “self” according to Teresa and John is that it is so different from the self of modernity. The aim in this book is to interpret Teresa and John’s view in a way that is historically accurate. First, the self is “dynamic” in their view even before mystical transformation begins, in that it exists in a dynamic relation with God as its creator. Teresa describes how the soul attains self-knowledge by realizing that its “fount” is God rather than itself alone, and she contrasts the dynamism of this relationship with God to the stagnation of getting stuck in our own autonomous “misery.”12 She is describing an Augustinian idea of introspection, by which the soul sees its fundamental being as rooted in God, in the “image” of God in the soul. For John, this image of God in the soul is explicitly related to the Trinity from the beginning of the spiritual journey, in the “spiritual faculties” of memory, intellect, and will, as in Augustine’s original treatment—though there are also some differences from Augustine’s faculty psychology.13 For Teresa too, the natural “image” is seen as the forebear of the supernatural center of the soul in union, but she does not link the dynamism of this interior relation with God to the Trinity until she starts to have visions of the Trinity in union. This idea of selfhood has been usefully contrasted with post-Cartesian ideas of the self by Jacques Maritain, in hisDegrees of Knowledge. He calls it the “transobjective self,” in that the soul requires relationships with others, and ultimately with God, in order to be a self.14 There is no autonomous entity of selfhood, as in the Cartesian view, but only the relational ability or intentionality, rooted in the soul–God relation, by which our selfhood is continuously being constituted “on the move.”

Second, in Teresa and John’s understanding of the self, mystical transformation builds on the activity of this naturally dynamic self. In the natural state, the soul relates to God through creatures—through objects of beauty in the world and through its own interior beauty, when these things are seen as having their source in God—whereas in union, the soul’s relation to God is known first, before creatures. As John says, in union the soul “knows things better in God’s being than in themselves”—it knows its own relation to God from God’s perspective, rather than through itself or through the world; it knows created things through their cause, a priori, rather than knowing the cause through the effects, a posteriori.15 Here the soul’s relation with God is truly intersubjective, in that it is not mediated through any created objects, and not even through ourselves as creatures. This is the relation that Teresa and John describe as the spiritual marriage. The spiritual marriage is given from God’s side rather than from the side of creatures, introducing the soul to a relationship with God whichis the mutual relation of the Son with the Father in the Trinity. The degree to which the soul must be transformed to reach this position is vast, but Teresa and John’s dynamic view of the self means that they can regard it as a reordering of the soul rather than as a complete change of self. The thread of continuity between the divided parts of the soul is maintained through this fundamentally dynamic and theological view of the self.

The dynamism of the soul is used by Teresa and John to show how the soul can be raised to the level of the uncreated Trinity in union, while also retaining its individual identity and humanity. The soul shares in the inner life of the Trinity without losing certain key aspects of its created structure. First, the soul’s created humanity is included in the Trinity through attaining a self-understanding within the mutuality of the relations of the Trinity: the soul not only knows God in the immediate relationship of union, but knows itself through this relationship, so that it attains a way of knowing which is at once both divine and human. Second, divinity is mediated to the full humanity of the soul through the Trinity’s self-diffusion into creation: the Trinity “overflows” to all parts of the soul through the soul’s center. “Overflow” is understood by Teresa and John as uniting the two parts of the soul in this trinitarian act of creation. Thus, the two parts of the soul attain the likeness of Christ’s two natures in the hypostatic union: in the center, the soul’s humanity is immediately united with divinity, while in the exterior part, the dynamism of the Trinity is mediated to the lower levels of the soul. The humanity of Christ is attained, with Christ, at the point of origin of all creation in the Trinity.16 Third, the soul’s humanity remains distinct from divinity within this union, without being divided as in the earlier stages of transformation. The difference from the earlier division in the soul is that the dynamism of the Trinity is no longer in excess of the soul’s “capacity,” sending it into “suspensions” and deep darkness, but through transformation the soul has been “expanded” and deepened to “contain” the overflow. The same dynamism that gives the soul “clear knowledge” of both God and itself within the Trinity is the motivation for its exterior actions in the world. John neatly summarizes this final unity in the soul by saying that now “the power to look at God is, for the soul, the power to do works in the grace of God.”17

Teresa and John’s final understanding of the soul is one in which the soul’s perfected human structure is transparent to the dynamism of the Trinity. There is no longer a succession of acts by which the dynamism of the Trinity is mediated to the soul, as in the natural soul, but rather one continuous trinitarian act of “gazing” between the soul and God which produces concomitant “divine” activity in the world. The very act in which the soul looks at God is the act by which it does God’s will in the world, in a single process of overflow. The final aim of this book is to provide an interpretation of mystical knowing and action that makes sense of this view. It should be noted that when the soul is united in all its parts in the final union, it is no longer the case that mystical knowing is merely an analogy drawn from ordinary knowing, by which a separate interior part of the soul is carved out and likened to ordinary knowing, but rather it is the fully incarnated human knowing and awareness with which the soul lives at all times. Teresa and John say that there are various degrees of “clarity” in the soul’s perception of the divine, but it retains the mystical relation with God in the center permanently, performing all its acts without leaving union.18

One major question remains: On what basis can Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross be compared? The above represents my conclusions on one central aspect of their thought—their mystical anthropology—on which there is considerable agreement between them. Even here, there are differences, which are further explored in the epilogue. In particular, John is more negative in his theology than Teresa, being influenced by Dionysius and emphasizing the suffering and “darkness” of the mystical relation to God much more than Teresa, which leads to differences in their understanding of anthropology. But more widely, there is obviously the difference of gender, and as recent scholarship has shown, gender affected Teresa’s life and thought in almost every detail. Alison Weber’s thesis in Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity ,19 that Teresa used—and had to use—various forms of literary deceit to make her writings acceptable to the censor, clearly challenges the validity of any straightforward comparison between her writings and those of John of the Cross, who was not subject to the same restrictions. But rather than concluding that the writings of a man and a woman at this time simply cannot be compared, my view is that the recent studies of Teresa allow us to compare her thought with John more accurately than before, and no such detailed theological comparisons have been made in recent years.20

As Gillian Ahlgren has shown in Teresa of Avila and the Politics of Sanctity,21 Teresa managed to overcome many of the disadvantages imposed on women at the time by teaching herself theology through her voracious reading, and entering the male world of spiritual writing through her careful use of language (following Weber) and her skillful handling of her opponents. Thus, in spite of her differences from John, we can regard their writings as belonging to the same intellectual context. John wrote in the same “vernacular spiritual” tradition of writing entered by Teresa. Indeed, our improved understanding of this tradition enables us to challenge some of the old stereotypes of both John and Teresa. John was not primarily the scholastic, university-trained theologian beloved of neo-Thomists early in the twentieth century but a vernacular writer in the “spiritual” tradition;22 and Teresa was not the ill-educated woman with “experience” to supplement John’s “learning,” but a theologically literate writer in her own right.23 In these circumstances, it is no surprise that there are close intellectual connections between the thought of Teresa and John, as expounded in this book. At the same time, it must be remembered that though John was Teresa’s follower in the Carmelite Reform, the period for which they worked together was not more than two years, and otherwise their contacts appear to have been very few. To assert that there is a complete unity in their doctrine is clearly mistaken.24

CHAPTER ONE

Mystical Experience According to John of the Cross

JOHN OF THE CROSS uses a number of terms that come under the general heading of mystical “experience”: “spiritual apprehensions,” “mystical theology,” “knowledge,” and less often, “experience” itself. His aim is to give a detailed account of the epistemological transformation that the soul undergoes when it attains mystical union. The difficulty for readers today is that his understanding of experience is based on a different view of the self and the human relationship with God from that held in the modern period. At the outset it is therefore wise to look carefully at how he uses these experiential terms, before moving on to a deeper analysis of his epistemology.

John of the Cross’s introduction of the term “experience” (experiencia) in the prologue of the Subida del Monte Carmelo contrasts both experience and human science with sacred scripture. on the way to perfection, John says that human science “cannot understand” the darknesses and trials that are encountered, and “nor does experience of them equip one to explain them.”1 The contrast of experience and human science with sacred scripture is indicative of the fact that here he is talking of the realm of faith. He concludes:

I shall not rely on experience or science, for these can fail and deceive us. Although I shall not neglect whatever use I can make of them, my help in all that, with God’s favor, I shall say, will be Sacred Scripture.2

John’s negative assessment of experience as a means to knowledge of God within faith is very much that of Thomas Aquinas: human science, or philosophy, and human experience fail equally in the realm of faith, as faith is beyond human knowledge. There is some overlap between what can be known by reason and what is given by revelation, but for such knowledge to be reliable as a means to salvation, one must turn to sacra doctrina, as Aquinas calls it, or sacra Scriptura.3

John’s mysticism is famously negative, but his treatment of experience is not nearly as negative as some commentators have supposed.4 This is clear when one considers some of his positive statements about experience on the journey to union with God. John is adamant that there is a need for people who “have experience” (tomar experiencia, tener experiencia, hay expe-riencia) or who “are experienced” (ser experimentado).5 This is the main criterion for spiritual directors, and indeed it is the prime qualification required—better even than learning, though that is an advantage too.6 It is no use to be well versed in scripture, without having such experience. But what does this experience mean? The other phrase John uses for such people is to call them those who “are spiritual.”7 He is not referring to particular experiences but to a state of progress that has been achieved in which the person has been transformed spiritually. The culmination of this process, John says, is to receive an interior “habit” (Latin habitus; Spanish hábito), that is, a developed change in one’s soul and knowing ability— the habit of divine union.8

But John also gives great importance to particular experiences in the mystical life which go to make up this state of spiritual experience. They become increasingly important as one enters the stage of union with God. The first, which he treats positively, is the “touch of union”:

A certain touch (toque) of divinity [is] produced in the soul, and thus it is God himself who is felt (sentido) and tasted (gustado) here. . . . I do not affirm that a person should be negative about this knowledge as he should be with the other apprehensions, because this knowledge is an aspect of the union toward which we are directing the soul.9

While many such apprehensions can be discounted as a distraction from the progress the soul is making toward union, at this point these “touches” begin to communicate God directly and reliably, and can therefore be received positively. John calls them “purely spiritual” (puramente espirituales) apprehensions, which fall into four categories—visions, revelations, locutions, and spiritual feelings—and he avers that they yield knowledge of God. They are purely spiritual in that they “are not communicated to the intellect through the corporeal senses,”10 as all the previous apprehensions were; and further, some do not have any intelligible form but arise from the immediate contact of God with the “substance of the soul,” and John says that these ones are “exceptionally advantageous and good.”11 These latter purely spiritual apprehensions build up to what John describes as a “science of love”:

[A man will] feel he has been led into a remarkably deep and vast wilderness, . . . the more delightful, savorous, and loving (deleitoso, sabroso y amoroso), the deeper, vaster, and more solitary it is. . . . A man is so elevated and exalted by this abyss of wisdom, which leads him into the veins of the science of love (la ciencia de amor), that he realizes that all the conditions of creatures in relation to this supreme knowing and divine feeling (supremo saber y sentir divino) are very base. . . . He will also note the impossibility, without the illumination of this mystical theology (mística teología), of a knowledge (conocer) or feeling (sentir) of these divine things as they are in themselves through any natural means.12

“Mystical theology” is the criterion for John of this kind of feeling which is also knowledge: it is both the knowledge (conocer) and the feeling (sentir) of “divine things as they are in themselves”—a type of knowing that is formed in the soul through the reception of these apprehensions. Having entered the “abyss of wisdom,” the soul is able to receive these apprehensions positively, finding them “delightful, savorous, and loving” and productive of “knowledge or feeling of divine things.” At this point John could not indicate the positive value of this feeling more strongly, as well as of science— though it is not “human” but divine science, the “science of love” (ciencia de amor), which is science of “divine things as they are in themselves.”

It is noteworthy, however, that here John does not actually use the word “experience” (experiencia) but rather the word which, literally translated, means “feeling” (sentir, sentimiento). He eschews experience (experiencia) in this sense, preferring sentir and its derivatives, and the words for the five senses (touch, taste, sight, hearing and smell). Often these sentir words are translated as “experience” in English translations because, as Trueman Dicken points out, the translators are trying to avoid the emotional sense that would be implied by using the word “feeling.”13 Trueman Dicken says, “the root meaning of the verb sentir is the perception of a tactile sensation caused by physical contact with the body.”14 To translate it as “feeling” would lead us away from this hard epistemological sense to the idea of an emotional feeling. As it happens, there is also an emotional sense included in this apprehension, as it is “delightful, savorous” and so on, but by using sentir John intends to convey not the emotional sense but the epistemological value of the apprehension for knowledge of God. As it is a spiritual feeling, it is also to be contrasted with physical sensation, but still John regards it as “feeling” in an analogous sense.15

We therefore have three possible meanings of the word “experience,” the third of which arises only through a difficulty of translation—it is not to be found in the Spanish.

(1) experience, negatively evaluated by John, which is the merely human attempt to reach knowledge of God, short of mystical transformation;

(2) experience as a developing spiritual habitus in the soul—the result of specific events like the “touch of union” and other spiritual apprehensions, referring to the effect on the soul of such events, rather than the events themselves, as they change the soul inwardly—which is crucial for spiritual directors and for mystical union;

(3) apprehensions of God themselves, such as the “touch of union” and “spiritual feelings,” which may be positively welcomed, termed “experience(s)” in translation, but which are in fact described by John as “feelings.”

We must reject (3) as “experience,” therefore, even though this is the meaning most familiar to us today, because it is not used by John and introduces confusion with the different senses used in (1) and (2). (1) and (2) may appear to be contradictory, but in fact they have the same sense: experience is not an individual apprehension but the way of knowing possessed by a person in that state. The difference is—and the reason for John’s different verdict on each of them—that one is experience prior to union with God, and the other is part of union. John rejects all experience prior to “touches of union,” because it requires a very advanced state of the soul before spiritual apprehensions yield the interior habitus of union described in (2). It must be admitted that John’s negativity on this score is far more prominent—which is not to say more important—than his positive evaluation of the soul’s capability. The reason is that he starts with a view of human nature as severely fallen, especially in the ability to know God, so that at this stage he says that “however impressive may be one’s knowledge or feeling of God, [it] will have no resemblance to God and amount to very little.”16 Even when the soul begins to have “supernatural apprehensions” later on, he says that they must be rejected, as there is still the possibility that they are mixed with human error or may have their source outside God.17 It is only when the soul enters the stage of union that it is deemed capable of receiving divine communications positively. This is not to say that true touches of union are not sometimes given to beginners, but that union with God must properly be understood as a state of transformation of the soul; union is not an exterior apprehension but a substantial change in the soul’s very being. The soul is purified, transformed, and given a new likeness to God, and therefore the capability for apprehending God directly in the renovated “spiritual faculties.” At this point, the apprehensions encountered by the soul change from having no value to being worthy of positive recognition. John’s attention remains focused not on the apprehensions themselves, however, but on the inner development of the soul, and it is to this that he refers in speaking about experience. To “have experience” is not the same as having certain “feelings,” but to be inwardly transformed and capable of knowing these feelings. Similarly, the experience that John rejected at the outset was not any particular apprehension but the way of knowing possessed by an ordinary human being, prior to mystical transformation. Therefore, there is only one sense of experience, referring to the interior capability of the soul for knowledge of God. When the soul has not developed this capability, it does not “have experience,” but when it attains the interior habitus of union or is nearing it, it does “have experience.” Apprehensions or feelings given to the soul have a distinct and different sense which, confusingly, is often translated as “experience” but in fact exists independently of the all-important interior development of the habitus of union in the soul.

What is the connection, then, between experience in this sense, as something possessed interiorly by the soul, and the important, but transitory, spiritual apprehensions? John here relates spiritual apprehensions to the interior structure of the soul, using a Neoplatonic/Aristotelian understanding of epistemology, which will be considered more fully in the next chapter. Briefly, the theory is that in ordinary knowing, to reach knowledge of an object, the soul becomes what it knows through understanding the form of the object; and John exploits this idea to the full to show how mystical knowing works. Ordinary knowing is based on sensory experience, providing the data, which is then abstracted into forms by the illumination of the intellect. Knowledge of an object is reached when the intellect is united with the object via the object’s form (intentionally rather than really): then the object exists in the soul, as a form or mental likeness of the object’s essence, uniting the intellect with the object. In mystical knowing—which John, and Teresa of Avila, often call “mystical theology”—the spiritual parallel of sensory perception occurs. In an analogous manner to the phantasms that pass from the ordinary senses to the interior of the soul, the soul receives “purely spiritual apprehensions,” which in their “substantial” form are already in the form of God through an immediate “touch” with God’s substance; they bring the soul into “substantial contact” with God, thus transforming the soul interiorly and finally achieving union.18 The soul is then united with God by a participation in God’s nature.19 Purely spiritual, substantial apprehensions thus lead to a union of the subject with its object, setting up two parallel epistemological processes, the ordinary and the mystical, providing ordinary and mystical knowledge respectively. While mystical knowing may occur instantaneously, however, the difference from ordinary knowing is that it requires the gift of a new interior organization and orientation of the soul toward the objects it perceives. The soul must turn from the objects of the senses to those of the spirit. Consequently, the type of knowledge gained, though received by an epistemology related to that of ordinary knowing, is different from ordinary knowledge and indeed is recognized at first only by its contrast to ordinary knowledge. The word “mystical,” as in the term “mystical theology,” is used by John to refer to this contrast: “mystical” knowledge is “secret” knowledge, given within the darkness of faith, beyond ordinary knowledge—a knowledge given in grace, “infused,” and part of the gift of love: it is “knowledge through love.”20 Furthermore, mystical knowledge has the character of breaking into the soul, so that for instance when “touches of union in the memory” occur, John says, “a sudden jolt is experienced in the brain . . . so sensible that it seems the whole head swoons and that judgment and sensibility are lost.”21 But these violent effects lessen as the soul advances toward union.22 Still, even in union, mystical knowledge is very different from ordinary knowledge. First, while the relation of subject and object is clear in the case of physical objects presented to the body, in the case of divine contact with the soul, it is much less clear where the boundaries of subject and object lie. John says that the point of contact between God and the soul in mystical knowledge is in the substance or abyss or center of the soul, which breaks down the subject–object relation of ordinary knowledge. Second, there is the difference, alluded to already, that the “spiritual communication” to the soul that produces knowledge of God is the same communication that transforms the soul. The soul is constantly being changed by this grace, so that it is in a dynamic relation to the object of its knowledge, which again breaks down the subject–object relation of ordinary knowledge.

Thus, mystical “experience” is a complex term for John, with two main aspects to its meaning. First, the particular “spiritual apprehensions” felt by the soul in union, though important, are to be distinguished from the developed capacity for knowledge of God to which John gives the name “experience.” Spiritual apprehensions are not knowledge in themselves but only the first moment of sensation, following which further cognitive acts are required to make them known. “Experience” is the overall cognitive process or awareness by which we know these apprehensions. Second, the difference between mystical experience and ordinary experience is that the ordinary relationship between subject and object no longer pertains, but there is a new kind of intersubjective relationship between the soul and God. Exactly what is meant by this and how the two kinds of experience and knowing are reconciled in John’s epistemology remain to be considered in the next two chapters. Our central problem is how John maintains that there is both a strong difference and a deeper unity in the soul between these two kinds of experience and knowing.

CHAPTER TWO

The Structure of the Soul According to John of the Cross

JOHN OF THE CROSS seeks to understand mystical experience by developing an epistemology and anthropology within which mystical knowing is first strongly contrasted with ordinary knowing and then reconciled with it, by appealing to a deeper unity in the soul. John divides the soul into two “parts,” the spiritual and sensory, or interior and exterior, which are used to differentiate the type of knowing attained in mystical experience. The purpose of this chapter is to examine exactly how he draws this contrast between the two parts of the soul. The focus is on the problematic separation between ordinary and mystical knowing in his anthropology, leaving the solution—his understanding of the deeper unity between the two parts of the soul—for the next chapter.

For John of the Cross, the components of the human person—body, soul, and spirit—operate differently in mystical knowing and ordinary knowing, and relate differently to one another. John uses this fact to explain the distinction between the two kinds of knowing. There are two epistemologies: one by which the soul knows “natural” objects, in the ordinary process of knowing, the other by which it comes to know “supernatural” objects, in mystical knowing. The soul is the same in each case, having the same components, but with these components in a different configuration and oriented to different objects. Most importantly, whereas ordinary knowing begins with the bodily senses, mystical knowing bypasses the bodily senses and is received in the spirit. This division of sense and spirit is the basis of John’s separation of natural knowing from spiritual or mystical knowing.1 But John is also keen to point out that mystical knowing, though not natural, becomes as integral to the soul as ordinary knowing: the soul develops capabilities within its structure that make it suited to mystical knowing. The soul is “deepened” into “an infinite capacity” through mystical transformation, so that “anything less than the infinite fails to fill [it].”2

The Sources of John’s Epistemology

The sources of John of the Cross’s epistemology are not at all clear. One thing that can be said is that attempts early in this century to match his view to that of Thomas Aquinas were misconceived.3 John of the Cross differs from Aquinas on some key points, and it is likely that he is well aware that he is doing so. For instance, John does not leave our knowledge of God as a posteriori knowledge: he wants to go further toward an a priori knowledge of God.4 Theories about which scholastic thinkers had most influence on John are based on the ideas he is likely to have come into contact with at the University of Salamanca, where he studied for four years (1564–1568).5 Aquinas would certainly have been among these,6 and it is likely that he studied the Carmelites’ own John Baconthorpe and Michael of Bologna as part of the requirements of the order. Baconthorpe is the closer of these two to John’s epistemology, using the same Aristotelian starting point as John—also used by Aquinas—that “nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses”(nihil est in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensu). But other differences are more pronounced, such as Baconthorpe’s view that knowledge of God is possible without any supernatural light, which was not the view of John of the Cross.7

Another important feature of John’s epistemology which cannot be explained by reference to Aquinas is his view that there are three spiritual faculties, memory, intellect, and will, against Aquinas’s two (intellect and will). Augustine is the obvious source for this, but the similarity is only superficial. André Bord has shown that John and Augustine use memory very differently—most of all in the respect that memory for John is a power of recall but not a storehouse for images and forms as for Augustine.8 In regard to scholastic thought, the best conclusion remains that of John’s great biographer, Crisógono de Jesús Sacramentado, who suggests that John did not use Aquinas nor any other single scholastic authority for his epistemology but formed an original theory out of the various ideas he had learned, applying them to his thought in a pragmatic more than a technical or very systematic way. Crisógono points out that there was no single “line” taken in the theology faculty at Salamanca: the faculty had an eclectic make-up, with chairs in the thought of Aquinas, Scotus, and Durandus, and masters whose views covered a wide variety of positions from Thomist to anti-Thomist, Avicennian, Averroist, and Nominalist. In spite of the Inquisition, there was remarkable freedom of thought within the university.9 We can only assume John made an original combination of those ideas he found most useful. He seldom cites his authorities, apart from the Bible, but his scholastic learning is clear and he appears to have taken a number of ideas freely from different scholastic sources.10

What about John’s nonscholastic sources? Unfortunately, these are equally unclear but perhaps offer a more promising avenue of inquiry for explaining some of the sharp differences between John and the typical scholasticism of his day. A few studies in the 1920s and 1930s sought to liken John of the Cross to the Rhineland mystics, particularly John Ruus-broec,11 but this line of thought was not taken up in any detail until the 1960s:12 André Bord avers that this is the source, for instance, of John’s idea of the center or substance of the soul, which relates to the three spiritual faculties not in the scholastic sense of substance but in the essentialist sense of the depth and root of the soul.13 This indeed is one of the most prominent features of John’s epistemology and one that I will be focusing on in understanding his view of mystical union, in that he places the transforming penetration of the soul into the “depth” of relationship with God ahead of the fine scholastic distinctions of his faculty psychology. But it is very hard to draw any clear connection to specific sources in Ruusbroec or other essentialist Rhineland mystics. It can only be affirmed that the works of John Tauler and Ruusbroec were commonly available in Spain at this time, particularly before they were banned in the Valdés Index in 1559— and even after then they seem to have been available—and it is quite probable that John read them and was influenced by them.14 Again, the problem is that John seldom cites his sources, except in a few cases such as Gregory the Great, Dionysius, and Bernard of Clairvaux.15 The prayer method ofrecogimiento taught by John’s Spanish predecessor, Francisco de Osuna, is certainly assumed;16 and Bernardino de Laredo’s Subida del Monte Sion may be an influence.17 William of St. Thierry is an obvious source one might look to for John’s view of the spiration of the Holy Spirit and immediate presence of the Trinity within the soul.18 But how much John actually knew of these mystical writers or drew on them remains unclear.

Henri Sanson, in his study of John of the Cross in 1953, made the important move of giving attention to John’s style and genre as a key feature of his mysticism, describing it as “scriptural mysticism” (mysticisme scripturaire).19 Colin P. Thompson’s study of the Cántico espiritual takes a similar line in relation to the literary sources of John’s poetry, showing that unlike his literary contemporaries John’s sensibility and means of expression are formed almost exclusively from the Bible and from the Song of Songs in particular.20 This is no surprise. Scripture, most of all the Song, was always a central model for mystical poetry and commentaries.But where John’s use of the scriptural model is unusual is in his adoption of the genre of scriptural commentary for his own reflections on his poetry. The poetry is set up as a quasi-scriptural text, on which John then comments.21 Here he seems to internalize the world of the Song into his own language and experience to such an extent that some scholars, such as Michel de Certeau, suggest that he has raised personal experience to a level which competes with and actually destroys the theological tradition on which it is based.22 My own view, however, is that of Max Huot de Longchamp, that John’s placing of his own poetry in place of the biblical text is certainly an interesting reversal of the traditional order of monastic contemplation, but that it remains firmly within this tradition. It is not an attempt to put scripture below personal experience but to inhabit the scripture more deeply.23 This use of scripture is indeed a mystical use in that it parallels John’s attempt to enter into the interior relationship with God as far as is possible.24

The statements concerning epistemology that I shall be concentrating on in the remainder of this chapter are a part of John’s thought which relates closely to his scholastic training, but the purpose of emphasizing his nonscholastic approach here is to show that his scholasticism is subordinate to a wider mystical context and formation. In particular, the mystical dynamic of immediate relationship with God is placed by John ahead of the scholastic distinctions that he seeks to make. Nevertheless, he works to integrate these two types of approach rather than to leave us with a simple contradiction between the scholastic and mystical aspects of his epistemology.

The Dichotomy of “Sense” and “Spirit”

The most problematic aspect of John of the Cross’s epistemology, with which one must begin, is his stark opposition of sense and spirit. Early on in the Subida del Monte Carmelo, he states that the soul is a tabula rasa, which learns all knowledge through the bodily senses: the bodily senses are the only natural means to knowledge.25 He follows this with a common scholastic principle, that quidquid accipitur, accipitur secundum modum accipientis, or as he puts it, “attachment to a creature makes a person equal to that creature” and “love effects a likeness between the lover and the object loved.”26 The soul, in order to know something, must become like the object of its knowledge. The consequence of this is that ordinary knowing, which must begin with the senses and with an orientation to creatures, renders mystical knowledge of God impossible: it makes the knower equal to creatures, while it obscures a mystical relation to God through the presence of creatures, as objects of sense, which are needed for knowing itself. John’s next move is more unusual, however, as he asserts the principle that “two contraries cannot coexist in the same subject,”27 meaning that spiritual and sensory forms are mutually exclusive, and mystical knowledge of God is wholly prevented by the presence of anything sensory in coming to know.28 Later on, he admits that a “remote” knowledge of God through creatures is possible,29 but this is no use from the perspective of the goal he sets out, union with God, because “the means must be proportioned to the end” (quoting Aristotle) while God’s difference from creatures “is infinite,” and neither the intellect nor any creature can provide a “proportionate” means to God.30 In union with God, which must be understood as a “union of likeness” (uniún de semejanza) of the soul with God,31 the soul will achieve a purely spiritual knowledge of God—in contrast with which even the beauty of creatures is ugliness.32 Therefore, John sets up an extremely strong contrast between sense and spirit, and between creatures and God, because of the exclusive relation he sees between the two and in anticipation of the great height of the achievement to be reached in union with God.

It is the distance that the soul must travel to reach union with God which John is seeking to emphasize with these hyperbolic statements in the early stages of the journey to union with God; when the soul starts to approach union, he tones down the exclusive nature of the relation between sense and spirit. At the end of the Subida, for instance, he reiterates that “the sensory part of man can have knowledge of God through neither the senses nor the spirit,”33 but goes on to say that if sensory joy, such as hearing music, seeing agreeable objects, or feeling the delight of certain tastes and delicate touches, is “immediately at the first movement” directed to God, then the soul “is doing something very good.”34 This, after all, he says, is the purpose for which the senses were created. The fact is that John does not believe that this is possible before the intense purgation of the “nights” in the Subida and the Noche oscura have done their work. He concludes:

I deduce the following doctrine from all that was said: Until a man is so habituated to the purgation of sensible joy that at the first movement of this joy he procures the benefit spoken of (that these goods turn him immediately to God), he must necessarily deny his joy and satisfaction in sensible goods in order to draw the soul away from the sensory life. Since he is not spiritual, he should be fearful lest through the use of these goods he may perhaps get more satisfaction and strength for the senses than for the spirit.35

Until union with God is reached, the soul is not “spiritual,” and hence must deny its joy in sensory goods entirely. But then, in union, it is possible “at the first movement” of such joy for the soul to elevate itself to God, rather than pause in its sensory satisfaction, which was its usual course, and so these sensory goods can be received positively rather than denied as was necessary in the earlier stages.

John therefore goes back on the position that there is no part for the senses to play in knowledge of God, which he maintains throughout the nights of purgation, to one in which the senses have a secondary role. He sees this as a matter of orientation of the soul to the spirit, rather than complete denial of the senses, and says that his distinction is the same as St. Paul’s: the sensual man is the one who “occupies his will with sensory things,” whereas “the other who raises his will to God he [St. Paul] calls the spiritual man.”36 Such a spiritual orientation of the will is what gives the soul true detachment from the senses and created things. The things that the senses are attached to are not in themselves an “encumbrance or harm” to the soul.37 In other words, it cannot be said that John is a spirit/matter dualist; there is only a strong dichotomy between sense and spirit in his thought, like that between pneuma and sarx in St. Paul.38