John of the Cross, Desire and Transformation

Happy Feast Day of St John of the Cross! To celebrate I attach below an extract from a new book on Buddhist-Christian dialogue around the body ('On the Body: Buddhist-Christian Dialogues' ed. E. Harris, A. Nehring, P. Schmidt-Leukel). As we approach the centenary of the St John being acclaimed a Doctor of the Church may I wish you all a wonderful year ahead full of much anticipated discussion of the importance of this key doctor of divinity. Watch this space for more details!

Peter

John’s Spiritual Anthropology: The Education of Desire

A 2022 conference on St John at St Mary’s University was subtitled: John of the Cross: Carmel, Desire and Transformation.[1] And, to a certain extent, you could say that John’s approach to the spiritual journey is encapsulated in these three words: ‘Carmel’, his home and ‘mother’ in the community of believers – in Buddhist terms his ‘saṅgha’; ‘Desire’, the dynamo and dynamic of all human interactions – and much bodily existence – as most Buddhists will agree; and ‘Transformation’, that necessary and restless movement of the soul which he charts so precisely in his ecstatic poems. The final goal of this transformation for him is its ability to transform the person:

What God seeks, he being himself God by nature, is to make us gods through participation, just as fire converts all things into fire.(Sayings 106, see also DN 2.13.9, CB 12.7, 28.1, 32.6)

By loving God, says John, the seeker is inevitably changed. Love for John effects a likeness between the lover and the object loved (A 1.4.3) so by loving God the Christian inevitably will become like God. As he put it in the Dark Night poem (DN 1): ‘Amada en el Amado Transformada’: ‘the lover is transformed into the loved one’. For the remainder of this paper let me briefly map how this happens through a psycho-spiritual analysis of the work.^[2]

To use an expression beloved by the French philosopher Michel Despland, John’s approach to Christianity is to model a spiritual transformation based on an ‘education of desire’. Desire, that most sensual and sensory (and bodily?) part of our selves, is slowly re-educated by encounter with the Beloved. In this respect, I think it is important to note at the onset that this is not a removal or destruction of desire (and the body). John’s spirituality is no ‘spiritual boot-camp’ – this is the misapprehension upon which many misguided commentators have constructed (in my view) a totally false image of John and his spirituality and part of the reason why it took centuries for his theology to be accepted by the Roman Church and indeed only be declared a ‘Doctor of the Church’ in 1926.  

            So, as we follow the soul’s progress in prayer and contemplation through John’s poems such as the Canticle and the Dark Night we are not engaged in the destruction or suppression of desire or the body but rather the (re-)education of desire. The redirection of those recalcitrant, obstructive desires (what Christian theology, starting with St Paul often calls the ‘old Adam’) which nonetheless contain within themselves the key, according to John, to spiritual transformation. Hence, my comment earlier that understanding ‘desire’ is so essential to understanding John (and through him, I would argue, the whole Christian spiritual path). In Verse 28 of the Spiritual Canticle John refers to these desires/passions/bodily appetites as the soul’s caudal:

Mi alma se ha empleadoy todo mi caudal en su servicio:ya no guardo Ganadoni ya tengo otro oficio,que ya solo en amar es mi ejercicio.

My soul has enrolled itself And all its abundance, in his service;I have no flock to tend,Nor any other office,For now love alone is my exercise.

As so often, John’s vocabulary here is quite unique (if not challenging and difficult to translate!). The interesting word here is ‘caudal’ which various translators translate as ‘possessions’ (Allison Peers), ‘goods’ (Brenan) and even ‘energy’ (Kavanaugh and Rodriguez). [3] I have gone for ‘abundance’ here to emphasise the completeness of devotion of the soul to its master at this stage. John’s explanation of the term (CB 28: 4) is as follows:

By all her ‘caudal’ she refers to all that pertains to the sensory part of the soul (la parte sensitiva del alma). In which sensory part includes the body with all its senses and faculties, interior and exterior, and all the natural ability, that is: the four passions, the natural appetites and other possessions of the soul. (CB 28: 4)

As the previous verse (‘There he gave me his breast’) had referred to the intellect and mind being employed in the service of the Divine, so what we may now call the unconscious and bodily elements follow suit. This is a total transformation, or reorientation of the self to the Divine, including the unconscious forces that had held the seeker captive up to this point.

            For, he suggests, the Christian seeker cannot achieve this redirection of the appetites on their own. They are always dependent on God, and especially in this case, the Holy Spirit or as Sr Constance Fitzgerald would put it, Holy Sophia. Therefore, the transformation being described in John’s works is total. The seeker at this point is not just observing the spirit but actually becoming the spirit (again the radicality of John which got him into such trouble with the religious authorities then and since). For ‘this divine breeze of the Holy Spirit should be greatly desired. Let each soul petition that He breathe through her garden so that the divine fragrance might flow’ (CB 17:9). John explains how this happens by means of a very specific spiritual anthropology to which I turn next, and which, in a way, is the heart of this paper.

[1] The proceedings are published as John of the Cross: Carmel, Desire and Transformation, ed. Peter M. Tyler and Edward Howells. London: Routledge 2024.

[2] Cf. CB 39.4: ‘In the transformation which the soul possesses in this life, the same breathing of God into the soul, and of the soul into God, is with notable frequency and blissful love, albeit not in the open and revealed fashion as in the life to come…She becomes deiform and God through participation… for He created her in his image and likeness that she might attain such resemblance.’

[3] See: Brenan, Gerald, St John of the Cross: His Life and Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1973 and Peers, E. Allison, transl., The Complete Works of Saint John of the Cross. Doctor of the Church. 3 Vols. London: Burns & Oates 1935.