Philip Harvey
[Morning
Tea in the 21st Century at the Carmelite Library]
Even though the Portuguese were the first Europeans to
import tea from Asia, in the 16th century, it is unlikely that Saint John
of the Cross would ever have drunk tea. Nor would he have had the pleasure of
coffee, which doesn’t start entering Europe from the Middle East until about a
century after his death.
John of the Cross would have known about biscuits, which
were already a common food in the Middle Ages. Cake is at least as old as the
Romans, and Shakespeare, who is a generation after John of the Cross, has Sir
Toby Belch ask the Puritan Malvolio in ‘Twelfth Night’, “Dost thou think,
because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”
Sugar may have been known to John of the Cross, but it was a
luxury item even after Christopher Columbus had brought it back from the
Americas in the previous generation. The first record of chocolate being shipped
from America is 1585, Veracruz to Seville, six years before John’s death, so he
may just may have consumed chocolate.
In other words, morning tea would not only have been a
cultural curiosity to John and all other Spaniards, and the English too actually,
it would have been an impossibility.
This is not just a glib way of opening a morning tea
discussion about Saint John of the Cross. Our ways of eating and drinking are
qualitatively different and more sophisticated than those of people in the 16th
century. We can take that for granted. We live at the other end of the
globalisation era that erupted during the lifetime of John of the Cross, that
period when the nations of Europe first started competing for claims over the
lands they were discovering worldwide. The Spanish Armada disaster occurred in
1588, three years before his death, though we can assume from what we know of
John that this event was not at the front of his mind at the time.
The culinary world of John of the Cross was Mediterranean. He
did not experience tea or coffee. The three main liquids drunk by Spaniards at
that time were the same they had been for centuries: water, wine, and milk.
These three beverages, but water and wine in particular, are central in the
poetic imagery of John of the Cross. Similarly, although biscuits and cake
would have been nice, the staple food of Spain was bread. Everyone ate bread
and it is a main element in his poetry, as well. Bread, wine and water were the
poor and absolute essentials of a Mediterranean meal, which is why Christ used
them in the formalising of the Last Supper. He didn’t use rich foodstuffs but
the basics, the food anyone could get their hands on. And so it was still in
John’s time, and so today. They are eucharistic because they are the
essentials.
I also mentioned Columbus just before. One of the seminal
dates in Spanish history is, of course, 1492 when, simultaneously, Spain bumped
into America, and at home engaged in a full-scale program of “religious
cleansing”. All Muslims, or moriscos, were driven out of the new united
kingdom of Spain, and the Jews had the choice of conversion to Christianity, or
leaving. This unhappy situation led to the forced conversion of many Spanish
Jews, or Sephardim, soon known as conversos. This is extremely important
to our appreciation of the first and second generation of new Christians in
Spain, because so many of them took to the new religion with all the
over-the-top enthusiasm of the recent convert. Many of the great Carmelite
mystics like John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, as well as many of the
first men in the upstart order known by the bizarre name of the Society of
Jesus, came from families that were conversos. They were Jews, they were
Jewish Christians. They were kosher, according to the Spanish Rule, and they
were mad keen to missionize the entire world opening up before the imperial
power of Spain.
Before we turn to some poems, I will also draw your
attention to the fact that we are surrounded by hundreds of printed books. When
the poet John was born the printed books had been in existence for under one
hundred years, which is about the period of time for us today since the
introduction of radio. The printed book was the marvellous invention that had
helped transform European cultural life and was one of the crucial media forms
that brought on the Reformation of the Western Church. John himself would have
lived in a world in which manuscripts and the spoken word were still very much
the norm and this is worth keeping in mind when we listen to his poems because
they are only secondarily being composed for general distribution, if at all.
Most of the poems John wrote were composed as educational lessons for spiritual
direction. Their message was emotional and intellectual at once, and there to
be memorised. The last thing on John’s mind was that these poems be submitted
to a learned periodical or loaded on his website. Indeed, essential to an
appreciation of this handful of lyrical poems is that they were composed for a
particular religious purpose. They were composed to be recited and repeated.
When we read John we are in rooms and cloisters and gardens where human voices
are communicating these marvellous experiences and possibilities.
[En
una noche oscura]
One of the first things we notice about the words of ‘En una
noche oscura’ is that they seem to be about a secret assignation at night
between two lovers. Assuming that John is the speaker and the lover is male, a
modern reader readily concludes that we have here an early example of Spanish
gay verse. We read the poem this way because of our own readerly habits. We
live in a post-Romantic and post-Freudian world, post-Wildean in fact, which
means we read the poem as an erotic love poem directed at one individual, the
object of human desire. Some would even say, how else are we meant to read the
poem?
Whether or not John was gay, and this is a question that
today vexes some scholars and readers, is actually beside the point. The poet
is using a convention of the first person subject, that is when he says ‘I’ he
means you and me, whoever the person is reading the poem. We identify with the
‘I’ of the poem. Our assumption that it has to be John is a mere assumption of
modern reading practice, where we wish to believe that the poem is autobiographical,
an insight into this person’s personal experience of passionate love, a
confession of erotic desire and fulfilment. When we listen to Patti Smith’s
version of ‘Because the Night’, for example, which I happen to believe is
inspired by the poetry of John of the Cross, we know that we are hearing a
piece of profane not sacred song lyric. But in the poem of the ‘dark night’ (‘noche
oscura’) John has taken an established form of love poetry and converted it
into a poem about the individual’s relationship to God.
This desire for God is what John is concerned about. He is
offering the possibility of a place we can be when we have overcome earthly
desire, which is not a denial of that earthly desire or its reality, only that
for him true love is with God.
This upturning of our own readerly expectations is further
confronted when we must consider that John wrote these poems for the use of
female novices in the convent, young women preparing to enter into profession.
In other words the reader (‘I’ in the poem) is a woman seeking our her lover in
the night. Furthermore, the lover is the epitome of all love, the God of her
pure desire and wonder.
[Oh
llama de amor viva]
The surviving poems of John of the Cross amount to about
twenty or so individual works. This is a minimal number of poems for someone
regarded as one of the greatest Spanish poets and formative for Spanish
literature and Spanish sensibility. Shakespeare, for example wrote at least 37
plays, 154 sonnets, several long poems and who knows what else. Twenty poems?
Everything comes into perspective however when we start
reading all the words that he put together as commentary to these poems. Here,
to start with, are some of his words of explanation for the single line that
goes ‘Las profundas cavernas del sentido’:
The caverns are the powers of the soul, memory,
understanding, and will, and their depth is commensurate with their capacity
for great good, because nothing less than the infinite can fill them. What they
suffer when they are empty, shows in some measure the greatness of their
delight when they are full of God; for contraries are known by contraries. In
the first place, it is to be remembered that these caverns are not conscious of
their extreme emptiness when they are not purified and cleansed from all
affection for created things. In this life every trifle that enters them is
enough to perplex them, to render them insensible to their loss, and unable to
recognise the infinite good which is wanting, or their own capacity for it. It
is assuredly a most wonderful thing how, notwithstanding their capacity for
infinite good, a mere trifle perplexes them, so that they cannot become the
recipients of that for which they are intended, till they are completely
emptied. [III, 20]
And a little way along these words on the same the line:
Great, then, is the capacity of these caverns, because that
which they are capable of containing is great and infinite, that is, God. Thus
their capacity is in a certain sense infinite, their hunger and thirst infinite
also, and their languishing and their pain, in their way, infinite. So when the
soul is suffering this pain, though the pain be not so keen as in the other
world, it seems to be a vivid image of that pain, because the soul is in a
measure prepared to receive that which fills it, the privation of which is the
greatest pain. Nevertheless the suffering belongs to another condition, for it
abides in the depth of the will’s love; but in this life love does not
alleviate the pain, because the greater it is the greater the soul’s impatience
for the fruition of God, for which it hopes continually with intense desire.
[III, 23]
When we find that this simple poem of four stanzas has an
entire book of meanings attached to it, we start to comprehend that John is
working at a level of spiritual involvement (and literary focus) that is
remarkable and fully formed and like something from another place. His longest
poem, The Spiritual Canticle, a reading of the Song of Songs in which the
Beloved is Christ, likewise has a full-scale commentary which the nuns (and we
today) have to read in order to understand what John is actually wanting to
say. There is nothing remotely like this in English literature. English poets
do not spend entire books giving us an explanation of each line of their poems,
nor would we expect them to. We are used to literary criticism, the excessive
effort of interpreting what the poet might mean and why, but that is simply
addenda to the real stuff, much of it at odds with the possible intentions of
the poet.
So what is going on here?
The poems were composed when John was thrown into prison by
the Carmelites in Toledo. After his escape he went to live with the sisters in
a town some distance from Toledo and it was they who requested of their spiritual
director John an elucidation of the beautiful poems he recited. He then started
writing out the background thinking, if you like, that made these poems
possible. He wished to train them to be spiritual directors, in turn. Our
English words are hopelessly unsatisfactory in trying to explain what John’s
poetry is actually doing, so I try to describe them in these different ways:
- The poems are keys to his mystical thinking, as expressed in the long texts that are really the full expression of his way of living life and of coming closer to God.
- The poems are a shorthand for the big messages there in the process of change he identifies in the commentaries. They live dependent on one another, each enriching the other through repeated reading.
- The poems are mnemonics, memory games that the nuns would have used to remind themselves of the deeper spiritual significance. Each line triggers its own associations, so they could memorise the poems and thus recall each step in the process of ascetic improvement and growth.
- The poems are abstracts of the thesis that follows at much greater length.
- The poems are the wound or trauma out of which then comes the analysis, spread out over years.
- The poems are a matrix out of which derive the whole mass of networked practices, that may be used as a manual for spiritual directors, or as elucidation for anyone of the affective spiritual life.
- The poems are the mustard seed that turns into the most practical, health-giving and beautiful tree.
In the first poem we heard about the ‘dark night’. When I
was younger and first heard of John of the Cross, this ‘dark night of the soul’
was something of a turn-off. It sounded like the journey of some gothic
gloomster intent on making everything as awful as possible. I was young, for it
is only by reading John that we find that his ‘dark night’ is actually the
place of creative growth. The word ‘oscura’, from which we get obscure
and obscured, suggests instantly to a Spanish reader not only the dark but also
something that, though hidden, is available and is there; it does not really
mean as his translator Roy Campbell would have it, gloomy. It is only by going
through the ‘dark night’, only by leaving everything open to faith, that other
and miraculous things start happening. So that, just as the lover seeks out the
lover in the ‘dark night’ and is not happy until completely at one, ‘face to
face with Love’s own grace’, so in this next poem it is in the night that the
mystery of being is revealed.
[Que
bien se yo la fonte]
The conclusion of this poem reminds us of the elemental
world of John of the Cross that we met at the start: water, bread, wine. Seamus
Heaney, in his version of the poem in his collection ‘Station Island’
translates the critical word ‘fonte’ as ‘fountain’, reminding us of splashing
sounds in the nights of Spanish gardens. ‘Fonte’ reminds us of font, the pool
or basin where we are baptised, baptism being the single first sign of being a
Christian. For any reader of Romance languages, however, ‘fonte’ also means the
place of origin of the spring water, the first source of being. In other words,
what we mean by the word God. There is no doubt that all of these meanings are
at work in John’s single word ‘fonte’. This meaning deepens when we hear the
translator Kathleen Jones’s background briefing to this poem.
“In sixteenth-century Spain, fountains were usually to be
found in palaces, and it is not likely that there was a fountain within earshot
of St John’s miserable cell in the priory of the Calced Carmelites in Toledo.
“The priory was built into the walls of the city, which
stands on a rock, all but encircled by the River Tagus. St John’s cell had a
small window on to a walkway with a bigger one, and a sheer drop to the rushing
waters below. The sound of the water was a constant reminder of the eternal
grace of God, and the consciousness of God’s presence made a terrible situation
not only bearable, but inspiring.
“He must have spent many hours alone in the dark, listening
to the sound of the river, and the repeated refrain tells its own story. The
water flows freely, he is a captive; yet he has his own source of freedom. The
River of Life comes from God. It is the origin of all origins. The currents are
the activities of the Church; and the two combine in the Sacrament, the Bread
of Life. At least his captors did not deny him that.”
The Dark Night itself is the time of reaching to meet God
coming to the lover. It is a creative place, the place where the overcoming or
living through of desires and temptations and failures will, with persistence
and intention, be the opening up to God and union with God. This is the
ultimate desire of the person involved in living through the Dark Night. The
Dark Night is not a place of hostility and evil, though these things may have to
be dealt with. Peter Tyler talks about the late nights in Avila and elsewhere
in Spain being the time when clarity and awareness are found in peace and
silence. The darkest hour is just before sunrise, but is also the softest,
quietest, most tranquil time of the night. I liken the Dark Night of John to
the stifling warm nights in Melbourne that are followed by the cool change when
we open all the windows of our house: God is like the cool change, that which
comes after waiting and hoping and living in faith.
This is another way of describing God, but neither is God
the cool change nor the cool change, God. God is the cool change blowing
through us and transforming us, but if we say he is the cool change we have
already missed the message. All of these things, words, images, music,
artworks, ideas, are helpful in coming to union with God, but once they get in
the way or become the object itself, they are unhelpful and must be put aside.
This is the meaning of John’s description of the way to the summit of Mount
Carmel being nada, nada, nada. Nothing must get in the way of the
ecstatic union with God, not the role of the spiritual director, not useful
analogies like the cool change, not any analogy or dogma, nothing, nothing,
nothing.
[Paper
given at a morning tea in the Carmelite Library by the librarian Philip Harvey
on the feast day of St John of the Cross, Friday the 14th of
December, as part of the program of the Carmelite Centre, Middle Park]
Some sources:
The Living Flame of Love,
by St. John of the Cross, translated by David Lewis, 1912.
A New Companion to Hispanic
Mysticism, edited by Hilaire Kallendorf, 2010
The Poems of St John of
the Cross, translated by Roy Campbell, 1951
The Poems of Saint John of
the Cross, translated by Willis Barnstone, 1968
The Poems of St John of the
Cross, translated by Kathleen Jones, 1993
St John of the Cross, by
Peter Tyler, 2010
Station Island, by Seamus
Heaney, 1984
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