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WorkJohn of the Cross

Precautions, Letters, Maxims and Poems

Rules for community life, a verdict on one nun's prayer, sayings, letters and poems: John of the Cross in his shortest pieces.

by John of the Cross128 passages held

  • English, a translation held here, and your language
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First published
(published posthumously)
Original language
Spanish

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Overview

An editor made this book, not its author. When David Lewis, John of the Cross's Victorian English translator, published the Complete Works in London in 1864, the shorter pieces went into the second volume, after the two last commentaries: instructions and precautions, letters, spiritual maxims and poems. The precautions, written around 1579 for members of his order, come in three sets of three: against the world, the devil and the flesh. Their rules are blunt: love everyone equally, relatives included; own nothing; never discuss what another member of the community says or does. A single page, his judgement on the way one nun prayed, finds five faults in it and advises her superiors to stop her writing about her experiences and to test her in humility instead. The maxims open with a short prayer offering them as sayings of light and love. The letters are few. Most of his correspondence was destroyed, some of it by John himself. In 1591 a chapter of the order in Madrid stripped him of his offices, and, as the eighteenth-century hagiographer Alban Butler tells it, the friar Diego Evangelista went round the province collecting charges against him, while people who held letters from John burned them rather than be linked to him. The letters that survive run from Baeza in 1581 to the autumn of 1591 and go mostly to Discalced Carmelite nuns, with a few to friars and lay people. The last in the collection, dated 21 September 1591 at La Peñuela, tells Ana de Peñalosa, the widow for whom he wrote The Living Flame of Love, that a fever has hung on for more than a week and that he is leaving next day for Úbeda to have it treated. He died there on 14 December.

Key concepts

What are the three enemies the Precautions are written against?

The world, the devil and the flesh, the three traditional sources of temptation, each answered by three rules. The world means attachment to people, to possessions and to the doings of the community. The devil means deception, above all the kind that looks holy. The flesh means one's own self-love and wish for comfort. The rules are written for members of his order who wanted to reach perfection quickly.

How does the devil deceive devout people, according to the Precautions?

By an appearance of good rather than by evil. People who are going on to perfection, John observes, would refuse anything they knew to be wrong, so the devil offers them holy-looking projects of their own choosing instead. His safeguard is obedience: undertake nothing, however good or charitable it seems, unless a superior asks it or the rule requires it, and look on the superior as standing in God's place.

What does poverty of spirit mean in the maxims?

Being emptied of everything except God, not merely owning little. One maxim recalls that God ordered the altar of sacrifice to be hollow inside, to teach that the soul must be emptied of all things to become an altar worthy of him. Only one desire may stay in his presence: to keep his law perfectly and carry the cross of Christ.

Why does John call his maxims sayings of light and love?

Because he meant them to do three jobs for a traveller toward God: give discretion, light up the road, and supply motives for love. The prayer that opens them says that God loves discretion and light, but love more than any other act of the soul. So the maxims set aside fine rhetoric and aim to move the will, not to impress the mind.

Themes of the book

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

Living among others

How does someone stay free for God while living at close quarters with people they did not choose? By taking every irritation as a craftsman's tool and leaving other people's affairs alone.

The precautions arm a member of the order against three enemies, three rules each. Against the world: love everyone equally, relatives included, own nothing, and never discuss what goes on in the community, for Lot's wife turned back to look and became salt. Against the devil, who tempts the devout with things that look good: do nothing good outside obedience. Against the flesh: let each brother who tries you work on you as the polisher, the painter and the gilder work on a statue.

  • detachment
  • humility
  • obedience
  • community
  • solitude
  • silence
  • temptation
  • mortification
  • self-denial
  • spiritual discipline
  • discernment
  • spiritual direction

Enter a dialogue

Sayings of light and love

What can a single sentence do that a treatise cannot? Give a traveller, the maxims' opening prayer hopes, discretion, light on the road and reasons to love.

The maxims press the treatises into single sentences, and the letters apply them to particular nuns, friars and lay people. Some are severe: one human thought is worth more than the whole world, so it is owed to God alone. Some console: better to carry a burden with the strong than walk unburdened with the weak, since in affliction God is near. To a prioress troubled by what is being done to him, John writes that God orders all things, and that she should love where there is no love.

  • divine love
  • love
  • charity
  • suffering
  • prayer
  • trust
  • devotion
  • attention
  • will
  • virtue
  • desire

Enter a dialogue

Though it be night

Can a person know where God is while seeing nothing of him? The shorter poems keep answering yes: by faith, and in the dark.

Beside the poems on which he wrote his long commentaries, John left shorter ones. In one, a soul lives without living in itself and dies because it is not dead, since its real life is still to come. In another, it enters it knows not where and stands there knowing nothing, beyond all learning. In a third, it knows the fountain that flows and runs, though it be night: hidden, without a source, the beginning of all things, the spring from which heaven and earth drink.

  • longing
  • faith
  • hope
  • divine union
  • mysticism
  • contemplation
  • creation

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
128
distinct concepts
232
by passages held, corpus-wide
#455

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: “desire” and “detachment”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 23 pairings. 85 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
desiredetachment6
detachmentsuffering5
contemplationprayer4
detachmentdivine love4
contemplationdetachment3
detachmentfaith3
detachmenthumility3
divine loveprayer3
contemplationsuffering2
detachmentprayer2
divine lovefaith2
divine lovehumility2
faithprayer2
faithsuffering2
humilityprayer2
contemplationdivine love1
contemplationfaith1
desiredivine love1
desirefaith1
desiresuffering1
divine lovesuffering1
faithhumility1
humilitysuffering1

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)

    A love poem in the manner of the Song of Songs, with a commentary written for the nuns of Granada; it was the one major work left out of the first edition of his writings.

     EN
  5. 1864 Precautions, Letters, Maxims and Poems you are here EN
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