The Spiritual Canticle of St John of the Cross STANZA 15

 

The Spiritual Canticle of St John of the Cross

Carmelite Conversations

Philip Harvey

Wednesday the 7^th of December 2022

STANZA 15

 … la noche sosegada

en par de los levantes del aurora,

la mùsica callada,

la soledad sonora,

la cena que recrea y enamora.

 

The night serene

The time of rising dawn

The silent music

The sounding solitude

The supper which refreshes and increases love.

(Venard xx)

 

The opening of the Canticle describes the challenges and vicissitudes of the soul (the lover) in finding access to God (the Beloved). But then, through persistence and faith the soul plateaus towards an opening awareness of the beloved. The poet lists ways of perceiving God in relationship that are inspirational and consolatory. We are at a new stage in the relationship. The soul perceives God as mountains, lonely valleys, strange islands and resounding rivers, and declares the beauty and grandeur of her beloved accordingly. In this next stanza, praise continues, God being understood as the tranquil night and the early morning, then as being found in silence, and also in a supper that refreshes, a supper that gives love freely.

 Lockdowns were a good time to spend on prayer. During lockdowns at home I also discovered Spotify. This made available music I had never heard for years and much music I had never heard. Amongst the many new musicians discovered was the Catalan composer Federico Mompou (1893-1987). In the past three years I have listened over and again to different versions of Mompou’s piano work called Mùsica Callada, only to find during preparation of this paper that the expression ‘mùsica callada’ comes from Stanza 15 of this poem. Each line is elucidated in detail by the poet in his commentary. Here are his words of elucidation for his own expression ‘mùsica callada’.

 “In tranquillity and silence the soul becomes aware of Wisdom’s wonderful harmony and sequence in the variety of his creatures and works. Each of them is endowed with a certain likeness of God and in its own way gives voice to what God is in it. So creatures will be to the soul a harmonious symphony of music surpassing all concerts and melodies of the world. She calls this music ‘silent’ because it is tranquil and quiet knowledge, without the sound of voices. And thus there is in it the sweetness of music and the quietude of silence. Accordingly, she says that her Beloved is silent music because in him she knows and enjoys this symphony of spiritual music … [The praise of the blessed] is like music, for as each one possesses God’s gifts differently, each one sings his praises differently, and all of them together form a symphony of love, as of music.” (Nubecula 83)

 To read each stanza in this way, we find that the spirituality of St John is fully expressed in his commentary, which is essential to any deeper understanding of the poem. The commentary is essential to understanding St John himself, it provides broad access, but the commentary wouldn’t exist without the poem, as it’s the poem that came first. Like the reading of so much poetry, meaning develops and deepens through familiarisation, through continual re-reading. What makes St. John of the Cross different is that he later gave instruction sessions to the Carmelites in community, intimate explanations of the experiences that are not apparent in the poem. At least, not on first reading. This teaches us that prayer life is personal and therefore different for each of us. As Rowan Williams puts it, “For John, it was fundamentally important to be able to interpret his mental anguish as itself ‘grace’, the mark of God’s intimacy. The Canticle becomes more startling than ever if read in such a light.” (Williams 161) This stanza is filled with consolation, with gifts in time that come from working through extremes of experience. He enacts here places where prayer, increased relationship with God, bring him peace, connection, and refreshment. We must keep in mind though that this state of ‘silent music’ and ‘sounding solitude’ comes at some cost. Williams “warns us against supposing that what is in question is a dramatic interior ‘mystical’ thing … what he is talking about [is] the bitter and costly self-knowledge that comes through fear, inadequacy and failure, internal and external, the evaporation of ‘spiritual life’, the sense of the impossibility of pleasing God, or even of believing in God enough to want to please him: the reduction of spirituality to nothing. The illuminative way; nothing else can serve as a preparation for the authentic union of the self with God.” (Williams 175), “