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WorkJohn of the Cross

The Living Flame of Love

Four short stanzas on a soul set alight like a log in a fire, explained for a widow in Granada.

by John of the Cross118 passages held

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Original title
Llama de amor viva
First published
(published posthumously)
Original language
Spanish

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Overview

Ana de Peñalosa, a noblewoman from Segovia, lost her husband in 1579 and went to live in Granada with her brother Luis de Mercado, a judge of the royal court there. John of the Cross was prior of the Discalced Carmelite friars in Granada, and she put herself under his direction. For her he wrote four stanzas of six lines each and then, at her request, a commentary on them, apparently in about two weeks, around 1585–86. He opens the prose by admitting that he had put the task off, because the matter is so interior that words fail it. The book's claim is that a soul can be so taken up into God in this life that it no longer merely receives his love but burns with it, as a log that has caught fire turns into fire itself. The flame is the Holy Spirit. In the prologue John sets the book against his earlier stanzas, those of the Spiritual Canticle: they had already described the highest state possible before death, and these describe a more perfect love within that same state. In 1591 John was stripped of his offices and sent to the remote friary of La Peñuela; months later he died at Úbeda. The text was printed at Alcalá in 1618, in the first edition of his works. Ana de Peñalosa had his body moved in 1593 to Segovia, to the church of the Discalced friary she had founded there, and she was buried in the same church in 1608.

Key concepts

How can this book go beyond the highest state the Canticle described?

By describing a hotter love within the same state, not a new state. The Spiritual Canticle had already reached transformation in God, the most that is possible in this life. The Living Flame stays there and looks at what deepens inside it. A log already on fire, John explains, glows more and throws off more sparks the longer it burns, though it was fire all along.

What are the lamps of fire in the Living Flame?

God's attributes, as the soul comes to know them from within: his power, wisdom, goodness, mercy, justice and the rest. Each one gives the soul its own light and warmth of love, so God is to it like many lamps. Yet all of them are one God, so the many lamps are one lamp. John takes the image of a single God known in many ways from Moses on the mountain.

What are the deep caverns of sense?

The soul's three powers: understanding, memory and will. John calls them caverns because their depth matches their capacity, and only the infinite can fill them. While they are crowded with attachments to created things, they never feel how empty they are. Once cleared, they suffer a hunger and thirst for God that is almost unbearable, and that very pain shows how great their fullness will be.

What does the awakening of God in the soul mean, if God never moves?

It is the soul that moves; God only seems to wake. God has dwelt in the depth of the soul all along, in secret and silence. In the awakening the soul is stirred and renewed, and suddenly perceives him there, together with the order of all creation in him. Because the change is so sudden, it feels as if God had woken up, though in himself he never stirs.

Themes of the book

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

A log become fire

What would it be like to be so taken into God's love that one no longer just receives it but burns with it? Like a log that has caught, and now is flame.

The flame is the Holy Spirit, and the fire that once purged the soul now delights it. A log set alight first hisses and smokes as the damp is driven out; then it glows and throws off flames of its own. So the soul in this state burns with the love it used to receive. The burn is sweet, the wound delicious, and the soul asks only that God tear the thin web of this life. For such souls, John writes, death is sweeter than their whole life.

  • divine union
  • divine love
  • spiritual transformation
  • mystical union
  • mystical experience
  • love
  • holy spirit
  • divine action
  • divine grace
  • purification
  • spiritual purification
  • suffering
  • death
  • eternal life
  • embodiment

Enter a dialogue

Lamps in the deep caverns

What does a person see of God when the light comes from inside? His qualities one by one, John answers, burning like lamps in caverns that were dark before.

God's attributes, his power, wisdom, goodness and mercy, are many lamps and yet one lamp, each giving its own warmth and light. They shine into the deep caverns of sense, the soul's powers of understanding, memory and will, so deep that nothing less than the infinite can fill them. Cluttered with trifles, they never notice their emptiness; cleared, they suffer an unbearable hunger. The last stanza ends with God waking in the soul's depth, where he has lived all along, and breathing love into it.

  • divine attributes
  • divine presence
  • spiritual knowledge
  • soul
  • contemplation
  • contemplative prayer
  • self-knowledge
  • desire
  • spiritual experience

Enter a dialogue

Three blind guides

Who can harm a soul that God himself is leading by the hand? Three blind guides, John warns: a director who does not understand, the devil, and the soul itself.

When God begins to lead someone into quiet contemplation, a director who knows only the coarser work calls it idleness and sends them back to meditating, like a hand daubing coarse paint over a fine picture. Some directors, jealous as husbands, will not let their penitents look for help elsewhere. The devil offers the soul sweetness to pull it back to the senses. And the soul itself, feeling it does nothing, forces old acts of prayer, though God is carrying it in his arms.

  • spiritual direction
  • meditation
  • spiritual growth
  • detachment
  • religious experience

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
118
distinct concepts
159
by passages held, corpus-wide
#473

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: “divine love” and “spiritual transformation”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 19 pairings. 88 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
divine lovespiritual transformation9
divine unionspiritual transformation9
divine unionlove8
divine lovedivine union6
divine lovemysticism5
divine unionmysticism5
divine gracespiritual direction4
mysticismspiritual transformation4
contemplationdivine union3
contemplationspiritual direction3
contemplationdivine love2
lovespiritual transformation2
contemplationdivine grace1
contemplationmysticism1
divine gracedivine love1
divine gracedivine union1
divine gracelove1
divine gracemysticism1
divine unionspiritual direction1

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) you are here 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

    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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