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WorkJohn of the Cross

A Spiritual Canticle of the Soul and the Bridegroom Christ

A bride searches the woods and meadows for the lover who has left her: John's love poem to God, with his own commentary.

by John of the Cross275 passages held

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Original title
Cántico espiritual
First published
(published posthumously)
Original language
Spanish

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Overview

Friars from the unreformed branch of the Carmelites seized John of the Cross in December 1577 and took him to their priory in Toledo. For the better part of a year they kept him in a cell roughly three metres by two and flogged him before the community, because he had sided with Teresa of Ávila's reform of the order. With nothing to write on at first, he composed a long love poem in his head and memorised some thirty stanzas of it; later the friar guarding him passed him paper. When he escaped in August 1578, a notebook of poems went with him. The poem takes its plot from the Song of Songs. A bride, wounded by love, calls after a lover who has gone, asks the woods and fields whether he passed that way, and finds him at last in a garden; John meant the bride as the soul and the lover as Christ. He added stanzas in Andalusia, and in 1584, at the request of Ana de Jesús, prioress of the Discalced Carmelite nuns in Granada, he wrote a commentary and dedicated it to her. Its prologue makes an unusual admission for a commentary: words born of love cannot be fully explained, and each reader should take from the stanzas what their own spirit allows, rather than be held to his reading. John later reworked the poem into forty stanzas, reordering them and adding one; twentieth-century scholars disputed whether that revision is his, and most now accept it. The first edition of his works, printed at Alcalá in 1618, left the Canticle out. The poem travelled north with the Discalced nuns who left Spain to found convents in France and the Low Countries, Ana de Jesús among them in 1604. It appeared first in French, at Paris in 1622, then in Spanish at Brussels in 1627, and in Spain only in 1630.

Key concepts

Why does John let readers find their own meaning in the stanzas?

Because words born of love say more than any explanation can hold. In the prologue John admits the stanzas were written in a fervour of love that no commentary can exhaust. Better, he says, to leave them in their fullness, so that each reader takes what their own spirit can, than to pin them to one sense that will not suit every taste. His commentary is a reading, not the reading.

What is the difference between spiritual betrothal and spiritual marriage?

Betrothal is a promise kept alive by visits; marriage is a lasting union. In the betrothal God gives himself in visits that come and go, bringing great joy and also the pain of his withdrawals, and the soul is not yet free of every disturbance. In the marriage the soul is transformed into God as far as this life allows, each gives itself wholly to the other, and the union no longer comes and goes.

What does John mean by the wound of love?

The pain of a soul that knows enough of God to need more. John names three degrees. A light wound comes from knowing God through his creatures and heals quickly. A deeper sore comes from knowing his greater works, such as the incarnation. The third is a kind of dying, caused by a brief touch of God himself: the 'I know not what' that creatures can only stammer about.

Why is the Beloved called silent music in the Canticle?

Because the soul hears God's harmony without any sound. In this state, John explains, the soul sees how every creature, each in its own way, answers to God and proclaims him, so that together they sound like a concert finer than any on earth. Yet this knowledge arrives quietly, without voice or noise, so the soul enjoys the sweetness of music and the rest of silence at once.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The search for the hidden lover

Why does a soul that loves God feel his absence more sharply than one that does not? Because love, once wounded, cannot rest in anything less than the one who wounded it.

The poem opens in the middle of a loss: the lover has fled like a stag and left a wound. The bride sends shepherds with her message and asks the woods and meadows whether he passed; they answer that he went by in haste and clothed them with beauty at a glance. Every report of him wounds her further. John's surprise for the seeker is that the one she hunts across mountains is within her, a treasure hidden in the field of her own soul.

  • spiritual longing
  • desire
  • suffering
  • love
  • divine love
  • creation
  • knowledge of god
  • divine knowledge
  • faith

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Betrothal and marriage

How close can a human being come to God before death? Close enough, John answers, to be married: one in love while remaining two.

John reads the stanzas as stages of a courtship: a first wounding, a betrothal in which God gives himself in visits that come and go, and a marriage in which the soul is transformed into its Beloved as far as this life allows. In the inner wine cellar the bride drinks and comes out knowing nothing of what she knew. Love is perfect only between equals, so God teaches the soul to love him as he loves her. The last stanzas look beyond death, to seeing both in his beauty.

  • divine union
  • mystical union
  • spiritual union
  • spiritual transformation
  • beatific vision
  • holy spirit
  • grace
  • divine grace
  • divine wisdom
  • mystical theology
  • contemplation
  • knowledge

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My sole occupation is love

What does a life given over to God look like from outside? Idle and lost, the bride admits, and she counts that loss as her finding.

Once the bride has drunk in the cellar she guards no flock and has no other work: her one occupation is love. People will say she is lost, and she agrees that, enamoured, she lost herself and was found. John defends her against the charge of idleness, holding that an instant of pure love is worth more to the Church than all other good works together. Her virtues are flowers woven into a garland, and the thread that binds them is a single hair, the love of her will.

  • virtue
  • humility
  • detachment
  • will
  • prayer
  • self-surrender
  • spiritual development

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Within this work

passages held
275
distinct concepts
278
by passages held, corpus-wide
#270

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “contemplation” and “divine love”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 25 pairings. 80 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
contemplationdivine love12
divine lovegrace12
contemplationmysticism11
divine lovevirtue11
contemplationdetachment10
divine lovemysticism10
divine unionmysticism10
divine unionvirtue10
detachmentdivine love8
divine lovedivine union8
contemplationvirtue7
divine gracevirtue7
contemplationdivine union6
detachmentdivine union5
divine gracedivine love5
detachmentvirtue4
divine gracemysticism4
contemplationdivine grace3
detachmentmysticism3
divine uniongrace3
gracevirtue3
detachmentdivine grace2
divine gracedivine union2
gracemysticism2
mysticismvirtue1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1618 The Ascent of Mount Carmel (Subida del Monte Carmelo)

    The longest and most methodical of his prose works, written for the friars and nuns of his own reform and left unfinished in its third book.

     EN
  2. 1618 The Dark Night of the Soul (Noche oscura)

    The companion to The Ascent of Mount Carmel: it returns to the same poem and takes up the darkness that the soul suffers, where the earlier book described the darkness it chooses.

     EN
  3. 1618 The Living Flame of Love (Llama de amor viva)

    Written after the Spiritual Canticle and meant to go further: the shortest of his four commentaries, on the highest love he thought a person could reach in this life.

     EN
  4. 1627 A Spiritual Canticle of the Soul and the Bridegroom Christ (Cántico espiritual) you are here EN
  5. 1864 Precautions, Letters, Maxims and Poems

    The place to meet him outside the treatises: practical rules, sayings and poems, and letters to the nuns and lay people he guided.

     EN
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