JOHN
480
JOHN
anything contrary to St. Thomas. His humility and
his devotion to education caused him to refuse many
dignities offered him by the Cliuich and his order. In
1643 Philip IV offered him the office of royal confes-
sor, a position which only religious obedience could
induce him to accept. His writings comprise : ' ' Cursus
philosophicus Thomisticus " (9 vols.); "Cursus Theo-
logicus" (9 vols.) — a commentary on the "Summa
Theologica " of St. Thomas; "Tractatus de Approba-
tione, Auctoritate, et Puritate Doctrinae D. Thomae
Aquinatis"; a "Compendium of Christian Doctrine"
(in Spanish); and a "Treatise on a Happy Death" (in
Spanish), written at the command of Philip IV.
Qdetif and Echard, Scriplorex Or,l. Freed.. 11 (Paris, 1721), 5;i8; TouRoN, Hommes illustres de iordre de St. Dommique, V (Paris, 1749), 248; Hurter, Nomcnclator , I (2ud ed., Inns- bruck, 1892), 375; Annie Dominicaine . II June, 358-67.
ViCTOK F. O'Daniel.
John of the Cross, Saint, founder (with St. Teresa) of the Discaleed Carmelites, doctor of mystic theology, b. at Hontiveros, Old Castile, 24 June, 1542; d. at Ubeda, Andalusia, 14 Dec, 1591. John de Yepes, youngest child of Gonzalo de Yepes and Catharine Alvarez, poor silk weavers of Toledo, luiew from his earliest years the hardships of life. The father, originally of a good family but disinherited on account of his marriage below his rank, died in the prime of his youth; the widow, assisted by her eldest son, was scarcely able to provide the bare necessaries. John was sent to the poor scliool at Medina del Campo, whither the family had gone to live, and proved an attentive and diligent pupil ; but when apprenticed to an artisan, he seemed incapable of learning anything. Thereupon the governor of the hospital of Medina took him into his service, and for seven years John divided his time between waiting on the poorest of the poor, and frequenting a school estal>lished by the Jesuits. Already at that early age he treated his body with the utmost rigour; twice he was saved from certain death by the intervention of the Blessed Virgin. Anxious about his future life, he was told in prayer that he was to serve God in an order the ancient perfection of which he was to help to bring back again. The Carmelites having founded a house at Medina, he there received the habit on 24 February, 1563, and took the name of John of St. Matthias. After profes- sion he obtained leave from his superiors to follow to the letter the original Carmelite rule without the mitigations granted by various popes. He was sent to Salamanca for the higher studies, and was ordained priest in 1567; at his first Mass he received the assur- ance that he should preserve his baptismal innocence. But, shrinking from the responsibilities of the priest- hood, he determined to join the Carthusians.
However, before taking any further step he made the acquaintance of St. Teresa, who had come to Medina to foimd a convent of nuns, and who per- suaded him to remain in the Carmelite Order and to assist her in the establishment of a monastery of friars carrying out the primitive rule. He accompanied her to Valladolid in order to gain practical experience of the manner of life led by the reformed nuns. A small house having been offered, St. John resolved to try at once the new form of life, although St. Teresa did not think that anyone, however great his spirituality, could bear the discomforts of that hovel. He was joined by two comi)anions, an ex-prior and a lay brother, with whom he inaugurated the reform among friars, 28 Nov., 1568. St. Teresa has left a classical descrip- tion of the sort of life led by these first Discaleed Carmelites, in chaps, xiii and xiv of her " Book of Foun- dations". John of the Cross, as he now called him- self, became the first master of novices, and laid the foundation of the .spiritual edifice which soon was to assume majestic proportions. He filled various posts in different places until St. Teresa called him to Avila as director and confessor to the convent of the Incarna-
tion, of which she had been nominated prioress. He
remained there, with a few interruptions, for over five
years. Meanwhile the reform spread rapidly, and,
partly through the confusion caused by contradictory
orders issued by the general and the general chapter
on one hand, and the Apostolic nuncio on the other,
and partly through human passion which sometimes
ran high, its existence became seriously endangered.
St. John was ordered by his provincial to return to the house of his profession (Medina), and, on his re- fusing to do so, owing to the fact that he held his office not from the order but from the Apostolic delegate, he was taken prisoner in the night of 3 December, 1577, and carried off to Toledo, where he suffered for more than nine months close imprisonment in a nar- row, stifling cell, together with such additional punish- ments as might have been called for in the case of one guilty of the most serious crimes. In the midst of his sufferings he was visited with heavenly consolations, and some of his exquisite poetry dates from that period. He made good his escape in a miraculous manner, August, 1578. During the next years he was chiefly occupied with the foundation and government of monasteries at Baeza, Granada, Cordova, Segovia, and elsewhere, but took no prominent part in the negotiations which led to the establishment of a separate government for the Discaleed Carmelites. After the death of St. Teresa (4 Oct., 1582), when the two parties of the Moderates under Jerome Gratian, and the Zelanti under Nicholas Doria struggled for the upper hand. St. John supported the former and shared his fate. For some time he filled the post of vicar provincial of Andalusia, but when Doria changed the government of the order, concentrating all power in the hands of a permanent committee, St. John resisted and, supporting the nuns in their endeavour to secure the papal approbation of their constitutions, drew upon himself the displeasure of the superior, who deprived him of his offices and relegated him to one of the poorest monasteries, where he fell seriously ill. One of his opponents went so far as to go from monas- tery to monastery gathering materials in order to bring grave charges against him, hoping for his ex- pulsion from the order which he had helped to found.
As his illness increased he was removed to the mon- astery of Ubeda, where he at first was treated very unkindly, his constant prayer, "to suffer and to be despised", being thus literally fulfilled almost to the end of his life. But at last even his adversaries came to acknowledge his sanctity, and his funeral was the occasion of a great outburst of enthusiasm. The body, still incorrupt, as has been ascertained within the last few years, was removed to Segovia, only a small portion remaining at Ubeda; there was some litigation about its possession. A strange phenomenon, for which no satisfactory explanation has been given, has frequently been observed in connexion with the relics of St. John of the Cross: Francis de Yepes, the brother of the saint, and after him many other persons have noticed the appearance in his relics of images of Christ on the Cross, the Blessed Virgin, St. Elias, St. Francis Xavier, or other saints, according to the de- votion of the beholder. The beatification took place on 25 Jan., 1675, the translation of his body on 21 May of the same year, and the canonization on 27 Dec, 1726.
He left the following works, which for the first time appeared at Barcelona in 1619, but a critical edition of which is urgently needed: — 1. "The Ascent of Mount Carmel", an explanation of some verses beginning: "In a dark night with anxious love inflamed". This work was to have comprised four books, l^ut breaks off in the middle of the third. —2. "The Dark Night of the Soul", another expla- nation of the same verses, breaking off in the second book. Both these works were written soon after his
