The Poetry of John of the Cross: Love in the Language of Paradox

“The Healing of Tobit,” 1640, by Bernardo Strozzi. The poems of St. John of the Cross express how God may wound in order to heal. Public Domain

In the Victorian language of flowers, eglantine has two meanings: “poetry” and “I wound to heal.” At a glance, the two meanings have nothing to do with one another, except that the latter is a paradox, a rhetorical device frequently used in poetry. The poetry of St. John of the Cross particularly employs this figure of speech, but he does so with the intention of demonstrating a particular theological reality. For St. John, the most perfect, divine love is that love which wounds to heal.

The 16th-century Carmelite and mystic, known for his work Dark Night of the Soul, knew the truth of the words from the Bible that God loves his children by discipline. In fact, St. John wrote many of his poems during his nine-month imprisonment by a group of Carmelites opposed to the reforms established by him and Teresa of Avila. He shouldered both bodily and spiritual suffering gladly, saying that the endurance of darkness is a preparation for light.

“John of the Cross,” 1656, by Zurbarán. Public Domain

In his poetry, St. John employs a language of paradox to illustrate the nature of divine love. Only through seeming impossibility can he bring language to approach the intensity of the spiritual experience; only through language of sensuality can he describe what is far beyond the senses.

Perfect Rest and Union

In the book “Dark Night of the Soul,” St. John explains each line of his poem of the same name and details why God allows the soul to experience periods of desolation. In its journey to sanctity, there are two types of darkness the soul will experience: the dark night of the senses and the dark night of the soul.

The dark night of the senses, the first of these nights and the more commonly experienced, is a period of aridity and darkness for a purgation of the senses. Within it, God withdraws the consolations the soul previously relied on for encouragement in its spiritual journey, such that it may come to rely only on him. In the dark night of the soul, the soul feels completely abandoned by God and everything falls away—all sense of self is lost in what seems a vast emptiness. Only in this perfect absence can the soul welcome the perfect Presence, a complete unity with God.

"The Prodigal Son, Abandoned," 1660, by Murillo. Public Domain

St. John illustrates this unity in “Dark Night of the Soul,” also dwelling on the calm that comes from resting in the beloved. The speaker rises in the dark when the night is calm, “My house being now at rest.” He moves through the gloom with only an interior guide: “Without light or guide, / Save that which burned in my heart.”

In the third stanza of the poem then, it sounds as though his yearning guides him through the dark. However, while the speaker moves through the dark, the poem moves to a new perception of the night itself as his guide, as in the fifth stanza he writes, “Oh, night that guided me / Oh night more lovely than the dawn.” The night itself is what leads him to union with the beloved, expressed through the chiasmus: “Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover, / Lover transformed in the Beloved!” (amado con amada / amada en el amado transformada!) By use of the chiasmus (words or poetic phrases repeated in reverse order), lover and beloved are intertwined both verbally and metaphorically.

As the two meet in the garden, St. John writes that his beloved “caused all my senses to be suspended.” In the last stanza, as he reclines against the beloved, the speaker says “all ceased”; he abandons himself and his cares in serene oblivion to all but the one he loves.

In the section of the poem describing this meeting, the language is no longer of movement but of sleep and stillness. Both lover and beloved are at rest in one another. All worries and anxieties are left among the lilies in the field, the beautifully arrayed flowers that don’t work—They just live and grow. Yet they have no doubt their heavenly father will clothe them. Darkness is the guide to light, the oblivion of the senses is described in language engaging sight and touch.

Perfect Wholeness

Even while describing the rest in the divine love, in another poem “Living Flame of Love,” St. John expresses the dynamism of this love in its fierce burning. He addresses love itself, saying: “Oh living flame of love / that tenderly wounds / the deepest centre of my soul!” Striking at the speaker’s innermost self, however, love does not bring death but rather new life. The speaker continues, “Oh gentle burning! /  Oh delicate wound!” once more using paradoxes to express the healing that comes from intense suffering.

St. John of the Cross describes God's love as a burning flame. Shutterstock

What seems the loss of self in the dark night, the destruction of identity, forms the speaker more completely. Love asks him to die to self, but only because, as the speaker writes, “Killing me, you have turned death into life.” Love calls him to a new life, one in which he does not exist apart from the beloved.

Purifying and preparing the senses for spiritual delight, the living flame restores his sight as his senses had formerly been dark and blind. The lover acts as a “gentle hand whose touch is a caress, / foretaste of heaven conveying.” By mixing the senses in synesthesia (using one sense to describe another), St. John shows that the senses are one just as lover and beloved are one. In the closing stanza, the speaker says, “You wake up upon my breast, / where secretly you alone dwell,” and St. John’s use of the image of waking rather than restful sleep illustrates the speaker’s rising to a new existence in the beloved.

Falling to New Heights

The spiritual journey does not continuously go forward, but rather is characterized in the dark night by the soul feeling as though it is backsliding. In his poem “Of Falconry,” St. John articulates this experience through the metaphor of a falcon in quest of its prey, like the soul on a “quest of love.” The chorus at the end of each line reassures us, “I caught the prey at last,” and yet the speaker will rise at one moment only to fall a few lines later:

In this divine affair, to triumph—if I might— I had to soar so high I vanished out of sight. Yet in the same ascent my wings were failing fast.

“Hawk Attacking Partridges and Rabbit,” by Jean-Baptiste Oudrey. St. John describes the soul's search for love as a falcon in quest of prey. Public Domain

In the fourth stanza, both light and dark are intermingled. The speaker’s eyes are “dazzled” as though by radiant light, and yet he “conquered in the dark,” soaring ever higher towards splendor and yet flying blindly.

He reaches new heights in his quest, and yet, “The higher up I went / there, in this dizzy game, / the lower I appeared.” The soul fears it is backsliding in its journey, and yet as it grows in humility and becomes more aware of its weakness, it grows closer to God: “And sinking fast oh fast / yet went so high, so high, / I caught the prey at last.”

Language of Paradox

In his preface to his translations of the poems, John Frederick Nims writes that the poet “is a professor of the five bodily senses. As poet, San Juan had to put into sensuous terms what was non-sensuous—and to most of us even non-sense. He had to see the unimaginable love between his Ineffable Someone and a human being in terms of the imaginable love between one person and another, between lover and lover, between bridegroom and bride.” The love St. John describes is spiritual, but paradoxically, St. John is able to most perfectly describe it in terms of sensible realities.

Drawing together two seemingly furious opposites in a paradox, St. John illustrates realities beyond ordinary experience. The truth from the union of the two contraries startles the soul, just as the spiritual realities St. John describes invoke a sense of awe. The dark in the world is easily observable, but the language of the poems prompts us to realize there are realities beyond it which, though less easily comprehended, make it worthwhile to endure the dark.

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