The Letters of Saint John of the Cross

Thirty-three letters survive from John of the Cross, written between 1581 and 1591, the decade in which he governed houses of the Discalced Carmelite reform in Andalusia and Castile — the college at Baeza, the priories of Granada and Segovia. He wrote far more. He asked recipients to burn what he sent them, and in the months surrounding his death nuns did burn his letters, when Diego Evangelista was travelling from convent to convent collecting testimony to have him expelled from the order. What remains is a scattering: notes to the nuns of Beas and Córdoba, letters to the Granada laywoman Ana de Peñalosa, to prioresses, to individual friars, several of them only a paragraph long.

They are direction, not doctrine. The theology of the Ascent and the Dark Night is present but compressed and pressed against particular circumstances — a prioress anxious about her community, a nun who cannot pray, a benefactor. John tells correspondents not to measure prayer by what they feel, to prefer what is hidden, to loosen their grip even on good and spiritual attachments, to receive suffering without explaining it to anyone. The counsel is often blunt and always short. From a letter of 6 July 1591 to María de la Encarnación, written after the chapter that stripped him of every office, comes the line most often quoted from his whole corpus: where there is no love, put love, and you will draw out love. In the same letter he tells her not to grieve over what has been done to him, since it gives him no grief. From La Peñuela in September of that year he writes to Ana de Peñalosa about gathering chickpeas and about how well solitude suits him. He died at Úbeda three months later.

The letters matter because they are the only place John speaks in his own voice about his own situation, and because they show the doctrine of detachment being applied by a man to whom something was actually being done. They correct the picture of him as a remote metaphysician of the soul: here he is administrative, affectionate, sometimes tart, entirely unromantic about spiritual experience. They are also the shortest door into him.

Who should read this: anyone who has found the treatises forbidding and wants John at conversational range; spiritual directors looking for models of brevity; readers enduring institutional injustice inside a church. Not for those wanting sustained argument or a life story — the letters are fragmentary, occasional, and assume knowledge of situations the reader does not have.