St John of the Cross: Songs in the Night

Spiritual Life, Fall 2004 by Kavanaugh, Kieran

St John of the Cross: Songs in the Night. By Colin Thompson. The Catholic University Press: 620 Michigan Ave., NE, Washington, DC 20064, 2003. Pp. 307. Hardcover. $49.95.

Colin Thompson, a minister of the United Reformed Church, has been Faculty Lecturer in England at the University of Oxford. Specializing in the literature of the Golden Age of Spain (the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), he has among his many writings an earlier study of St. John of the Cross. Now, Thompson thinks, it is time for a new study because of all that has been written on the subject since his first book twenty-five years ago.

This new book has three main objectives: to familiarize readers with the work of St. John of the Cross; to assist them to interpret what they read; and to hold together John as a poet, spiritual teacher, biblical exegete, and theologian. Thompson attains the latter objective by finding the point of union between these tasks, and this through John's use of language, which is quite unlike that of any of his contemporaries, whether in poetry or prose.

Beginning with a sketch of John's early life up to the time of the imprisonment in Toledo, Thompson shows that John's life itself was the raw material of the art he created and the theology and spirituality he taught. Because John's poems were the first word about his journey to union with God and because they had their beginnings in a dark prison cell, Thompson turns initially to the poems. Here the author uses his skill as a student of Spanish literature to gauge for us the full measure of the saint's achievement as a poet. Building his case part by part, Thompson persuasively guides us to the point where we can agree that no other Golden Age poet embraces so many different poetic traditions, rich and complex. We are made aware of how St. John of the Cross's poetry fuses the distinctive voices of biblical language and imagery, classical and Renaissance style, popular love song, and devotional literature. Readers will be grateful, then, to have Colin Thompson guide them through John's poems where they will discover a world of fresh insights.

The language of the Spiritual Canticle, Thompson expounds, witnesses to the way in which love (divine love embracing humanity) creates likeness between otherwise separate entities, so that the one is transformed into the other. The word "likeness" is essential to understanding both the language and the teaching of St. John of the Cross and acts as a point of connection between his poetry and his prose.

If the first response to his own experience expressed itself in poetry, John began to see that his verses provided the opportunity for him to give a reasoned account of the journey he believed they depicted. He uses the words they offered and the questions they provoked in their hearers to offer a novel picture of the soul's journey to God. Thompson correctly points out that literary critics have often ignored John's commentaries, just as theologians have ignored the poetry. Relatively little attention has therefore been paid to the connections between them. Setting out to supply for this omission, Colin Thompson makes the important point here that we should never overlook the daily round of lectio divina when assessing the place of the Bible in John's work. We should also bear in mind that the small discalced friar's teaching was the fruit not only of his own experience but also of his interaction with friars, nuns, and lay people over whom he exercised authority or who sought his advice. Spiritual guidance, in addition to his many administrative tasks, was John's main ministry after his perilous escape from prison.

Thompson points out that the genre of John's treatises is difficult to fix. Each being cast in the form of a commentary on a poem, though less so in the case of the Ascent, they are part poetic gloss, part biblical commentary, part ascetic and moral treatise, and part devotional text with numerous digressions. The balance between these elements is a shifting one. Nonetheless, John carried out his ministry within a living tradition, and Thompson as one would expect, illuminates the contribution that John made to this tradition especially through his doctrine on the dark nights of the soul.

One easily loses the orientation of John's Ascent of Mount Carmel and Dark Night treatise (or treatises), so Thompson offers much needed help as he assists readers to grasp some fundamental principles that are characteristically woven into the dense texture of John's writing. These principles need to be established, since they govern the saint's analysis and are not evident in a first reading. The reader of this study will learn how John analyzes the human personality-its constitution, its conflicts, and its potential. This analysis finds its fullest and most systematic expression in the Ascent-Dark Night.

Another striking feature of St. John of the Cross's prose works is the centrality of the Bible. He showed a mastery of scriptural sources as he moved from prophecies that come true but in unexpected ways, through those that are changed because of human response, to those that find their true fulfillment in Christ. John of the Cross's insistence on the way of the cross and on measuring everything by the final revelation of Christ and the community of believers who interpret and live the Gospel answers powerfully, Thompson points out, all those critics who have supposed that Christian mystics are engaged in some kind of private fantasy that has nothing to do with the beliefs of the Church. In the Song of Songs Christians have found a full biblical picture of the journey to union, and the use St. John makes of biblical archetypes indicates that it is praiseworthy to check the individual's experience against episodes from the lives of the great figures of both Testaments. These are some of the points Thompson makes as he considers John's use of Scripture.