The Essential Writings: Selections from The Dark Night, The Spiritual Canticle, and The Living Flame of Love

by St. John of the Cross

Overview

Part of the HarperCollins Spiritual Classics series, The Essential Writings includes selections from The Dark Night, The Spiritual Canticle, and The Living Flame of Love, the most profoundly beautiful and insightful works of St. John of the Cross, the 16th century Spanish Carmelite monk and one of Christianity’s foremost spiritual teachers. The stirring words and thoughts of a courageous Christian reformer, The Essential Writings includes a foreword by Ron Hansen, author of Atticus and Mariette in Ecstasy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060576486
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	09/01/2009
Series:	HarperCollins Spiritual Classics
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.36(d)

About the Author

The HarperCollins Spiritual Classics series presents short, accessible introductions to the foundational works that shaped Western religious thought and culture. This series seeks to find new readers for these dynamic spiritual voices -- voices that have changed lives throughout the centuries and still can today.

Read an Excerpt

John of the Cross
Selections from The Dark Night and Other Writings

Chapter Four

The first stanza and its commentary.
One dark night,
Fired with love's urgent longings
-- Ah, the sheer grace! --
I went out unseen,
My house being now all stilled.

Understanding this stanza now to refer to contemplative purgation or nakedness and poverty of spirit (which are all about the same), we can thus explain it, as though the soul says:

"Poor, abandoned, and unsupported by any of the apprehensions of my soul (in the darkness of my intellect, the distress of my will, and in the affliction and anguish of my memory), left to darkness in pure faith, which is a dark night for these natural faculties, and with only my will touched by the sorrows, afflictions, and longings of love of God, I went out from myself. That is, I departed from my low manner of understanding, and my feeble way of loving, and my poor and limited method of finding satisfaction in God. I did this unhindered by either the flesh or the devil.

"This was great happiness and a sheer grace for me, because through the annihilation and calming of my faculties, passions, appetites, and affections, by which my experience and satisfaction in God were base, I went out from my human operation and way of acting to God's operation and way of acting. That is, my intellect departed from itself, changing from human and natural to divine. For, united with God through this purgation, it no longer understands by means of its natural vigor and light, but by means of the divine wisdom to which it was united.

"And my will departed from itself and became divine. United with the divine love, it no longer loves in a lowly manner, with its natural strength, but with the strength and purity of the Holy Spirit; and thus the will does not operate humanly in relation to God."

And finally, all the strength and affections of the soul, by means of this night and purgation of the old man, are renewed with divine qualities and delights.

John of the Cross
Selections from The Dark Night and Other Writings. Copyright © by Mercer HarperCollins Spiritual Classics. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.