Preface
To the men and women he was guiding along a spiritual path John of the Cross occasionally gave apophthegmata (wisdom sayings) for them to ponder prayerfully and make their own. The practice had a long history in the monastic tradition, inspired by the sayings of the desert fathers. At some point he gathered together about eighty of his apophthegms, and wrote them out in a manuscript (el manuscrito de Andújar) that survives to this day.
He also penned a short prologue to explain his purpose. Many people, he observed, wished to follow in the footsteps of Christ and thought they were doing so, when in fact they were stumbling on the path and going astray.
They lacked discretion, a proper understanding of what it means to become like Jesus ‘in one’s life, conditions and virtues and in the form of nakedness and purity of one’s spirit’. He prayed that his sayings might help them: ‘You, Lord, love discretion, you love light, you love love more than the other operations of the soul; these sayings, therefore, will provide discretion for the journey, light for the road journeyed, and love in the journeying’.
In addition to the sayings in the Andújar manuscript, we possess others collected by the Carmelite nuns and friars who knew St John, bringing the total number that have survived to just under two hundred. They demand to be read, like Scripture, in a contemplative way: devoutly, thoughtfully and repeatedly, with a view to discerning God’s will. Many were composed for women, notably the Carmelite sisters in Beas, near Granada, whom he knew well. These and others take for granted a communal life in which continuous prayer is prized, along with solitude, silence and seclusion, the conditions that enable it. But though they were written for enclosed religious, the practical wisdom they convey may be lived, with due allowance, outside the cloister too, for it is an ix
expression of love. In his prologue St John describes them as, 'sayings of light and love' (dichos de luz y amor). He disclaims any pretension to human wisdom or eloquence: ‘let worldly rhetoric’, he writes, ‘stand far off’; instead, ‘let us speak to the heart words bathed in sweetness and love’. Implicit in the sayings, and voiced powerfully in some, is love of Christ, in whom, St John affirms, he has received ‘everything I desire’ (Saying 26).
Translating the sayings of St John is no easy task because of the skill with which he fashioned them. They are designed to catch the reader’s attention, and to provoke thought. They take various forms, including plain statement, exclamation, admonition and prayer, and they are usually arresting, sometimes disturbing, and often puzzling or moving too. I have tried to reproduce in my versions the features of imagery, cadence and tone by which their effects are achieved, and in order to encourage a meditative reading of the kind St John desired, I have adapted the way Scripture was presented in the bibles of his time (per cola et commata) and have divided the text throughout into the semantic units that compose it.
My thanks are due to Nicholas Madden O.C.D. and Anne Walshe, who read earlier versions of the text, and to Tom O’Reilly for his advice and assistance at every stage.
Terence O’Reilly