This is an excerpt from what Lawrence S. Cunningham’s article in America (americamagazine.org), Vol. 194 No. 3, January 30, 2006:
There are so many mistaken notions about St. John of the Cross (1542-91) that we might do well to clarify some of them at the outset. He is, of course, most identified with the phrase “dark night of the soul,” but in fact he never uses the term. John does speak of the dark night of the senses and the dark night of the spirit in his treatise titled simply The Dark Night. But he is centrally concerned not to identify those purifying processes with what we would call clinical depression (or what he would have called melancholy, which he does discuss and carefully distinguishes from the dark night) or world-weariness or monastic acedia (spiritual torpor). Nor is it true that John was a reclusive hermit with little experience of the world. His biographers have estimated that after his ordination, he traveled nearly 18,000 miles all over Spain, mainly on foot.
We also know that John was a man of practical abilities. We have his famous painting of the crucifixion, which most know through the painting by Salvador Dali, which was inspired by John’s. Spain still has a functioning aqueduct that he designed and helped to build for a Carmelite monastery. Finally, he is not, despite the best efforts of some, to be classified with those mystics who are closer to Buddhism than to Christianity; in fact, his spiritual doctrine is both profoundly Christological and Trinitarian. It is merely a cliché to call him simply a mystic of the night, an apophatic mystic, since his final work ends in light, as is clear from its title, The Living Flame of Love.
John did not consider himself an academic or a professional writer. The body of writing that has come down to us shows rather clearly that John wrote either out of instinct (the poems) or to meet needs or in response to requests for spiritual elucidation. The wonderful collection of aphorisms now published under the title Sayings of Light and Love were short sentences written out on scraps of paper to give to people as a starting point for prayer and reflection. In that sense, they were not unlike those “good words” visitors would request of the desert solitaries of the fourth century. Some of these sayings are stunning in their brevity and depth. Centuries later, under the acknowledged influence of John, Thomas Merton composed such sayings for his Cistercian novices. Merton then expanded them into meditations, which, in turn, developed into some of his best and enduring works, like Seeds of Contemplation and Thoughts in Solitude.
At the St. Joseph Center for Spirituality you can delve into this famous spiritual man's life and thoughts more by taking nine classes from 4/7-6/9 (except 4/21) for $135, we will study The Spiritual Canticle, The Ascent of Mt. Carmel, and The Dark Night of the Soul using original texts of John of the Cross supplemented with contemporary scholarship. Please call St. Joseph Center for Spirituality to register 716-759-6893 x 408.