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GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE WORKS OF ST. JOHN OF THE
CROSS
V
HISTORY OF THE PUBLICATION OF ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS'S
WRITINGS -- THE FIRST EDITION
IT seems strange that mystical works of such
surpassing value should not have been published till
twenty-seven years after their author's death, for
not only were the manuscript copies insufficient to
propagate them as widely as those who made them would
have desired, but the multiplication of these copies
led to an ever greater number of variants in the
text. Had it but been possible for the first edition
of them to have been published while their author
still lived, we might to-day have a perfect text. But
the probability is that, if such an idea had occurred
to St. John of the Cross, he would have set it aside
as presumptuous. In allowing copies to be made he
doubtless never envisaged their going beyond the
limited circle of his Order.
We have found no documentary trace of any project for
an edition of these works during their author's
lifetime. The most natural time for a discussion of
the matter would have been in September 1586, when
the Definitors of the Order, among whom was St. John
of the Cross, met in Madrid and decided to publish
the works of St. Teresa.[39] Two years earlier, when
he was writing the Spiritual Canticle, St. John of
the Cross had expressed a desire for the publication
of St. Teresa's writings and assumed that this would
not be long delayed.[40] As we have seen, he
considered his own works as complementary to those of
St. Teresa,[41] and one would have thought that the
simultaneous publication of the writings of the two
Reformers would have seemed to the Definitors an
excellent idea.
After his death, it is probable that there was no one
at first who was both able and willing to undertake
the work of editor; for, as is well known, towards
the end of his life the Saint had powerful enemies
within his Order who might well have opposed the
project, though, to do the Discalced Reform justice,
it was brought up as early as ten years after his
death. A resolution was passed at the Chapter-General
of the Reform held in September 1601, to the effect
'that the works of Fr. Juan de la Cruz be printed and
that the Definitors, Fr. Juan de Jes�s Mar�a and Fr.
Tom�s [de Jes�s], be instructed to examine and
approve them.'[42] Two years later (July 4, 1603),
the same Chapter, also meeting in Madrid, 'gave leave
to the Definitor, Fr. Tom�s [de Jes�s], for the
printing of the works of Fr. Juan de la Cruz, first
friar of the Discalced Reform.'[43]
It is not known (since the Chapter Book is no longer
extant) why the matter lapsed for two years, but Fr.
Tom�s de Jes�s, the Definitor to whom alone it was
entrusted on the second occasion, was a most able
man, well qualified to edit the works of his
predecessor.[44] Why, then, we may wonder, did he not
do so? The story of his life in the years following
the commission may partly answer this question. His
definitorship came to an end in 1604, when he was
elected Prior of the 'desert' of San Jos� de las
Batuecas. After completing the customary three years
in this office, during which time he could have done
no work at all upon the edition, he was elected Prior
of the Discalced house at Zaragoza. But at this point
Paul V sent for him to Rome and from that time onward
his life followed other channels.
The next attempt to accomplish the project was
successful. The story begins with a meeting between
the Definitors of the Order and Fr. Jos� de Jes�s
Mar�a, the General, at V�lez-M�laga, where a new
decision to publish the works of St. John of the
Cross was taken and put into effect (as a later
resolution has it) 'without any delay or condition
whatsoever.'[45] The enterprise suffered a setback,
only a week after it had been planned, in the death
of the learned Jesuit P. Su�rez, who was on terms of
close friendship with the Discalced and had been
appointed one of the censors. But P. Diego de Jes�s (Salablanca),
Prior of the Discalced house at Toledo, to whom its
execution was entrusted, lost no time in
accomplishing his task; indeed, one would suppose
that he had begun it long before, since early in the
next year it was completed and published in Alcal�.
The volume, entitled Spiritual Works which lead a
soul to perfect union with God, has 720 pages and
bears the date 1618. The works are preceded by a
preface addressed to the reader and a brief summary
of the author's 'life and virtues.' An engraving of
the 'Mount of Perfection' is included.[46]
There are several peculiarities about this editio
princeps. In the first place, although the pagination
is continuous, it was the work of two different
printers; the reason for this is quite unknown,
though various reasons might be suggested. The
greatest care was evidently taken so that the work
should be well and truly approved: it is recommended,
in terms of the highest praise, by the authorities of
the University of Alcal�, who, at the request of the
General of the Discalced Carmelites, had submitted it
for examination to four of the professors of that
University. No doubt for reasons of safety, the
Spiritual Canticle was not included in that edition:
it was too much like a commentary on the Song of
Songs for such a proceeding to be just then
advisable.
We have now to enquire into the merits of the edition
of P. Salablanca, which met with such warm approval
on its publication, yet very soon afterwards began to
be recognized as defective and is little esteemed for
its intrinsic qualities to-day.
It must, of course, be realized that critical
standards in the early seventeenth century were low
and that the first editor of St. John of the Cross
had neither the method nor the available material of
the twentieth century. Nor were the times favourable
for the publication of the works of a great mystic
who attempted fearlessly and fully to describe the
highest stages of perfection on the road to God.
These two facts are responsible for most of the
defects of the edition.
For nearly a century, the great peril associated with
the mystical life had been that of Illuminism, a
gross form of pseudo-mysticism which had claimed many
victims among the holiest and most learned, and of
which there was such fear that excessive, almost
unbelievable, precautions had been taken against it.
These precautions, together with the frequency and
audacity with which Illuminists invoked the authority
and protection of well-known contemporary ascetic and
mystical writers, give reality to P. Salablanca's
fear lest the leaders of the sect might shelter
themselves behind the doctrines of St. John of the
Cross and so call forth the censure of the
Inquisition upon passages which seemed to him to bear
close relation to their erroneous teaching. It was
for this definite reason, and not because of an
arbitrary meticulousness, that P. Salablanca omitted
or adapted such passages as those noted in Book I,
Chapter viii of the Ascent of Mount Carmel and in a
number of chapters in Book II. A study of these, all
of which are indicated in the footnotes to our text,
is of great interest.
Less important are a large number of minor
corrections made with the intention of giving greater
precision to some theological concept; the omission
of lines and even paragraphs which the editor
considered redundant, as in fact they frequently are;
and corrections made with the aim of lending greater
clearness to the argument or improving the style. A
few changes were made out of prudery: such are the
use of sensitivo for sensual, the suppression of
phrases dealing with carnal vice and the omission of
several paragraphs from that chapter of the Dark
Night -- which speaks of the third deadly sin of
beginners. There was little enough reason for these
changes: St. John of the Cross is particularly
inoffensive in his diction and may, from that point
of view, be read by a child.
The sum total of P. Salablanca's mutilations is very
considerable. There are more in the Ascent and the
Living Flame than in the Dark Night; but hardly a
page of the editio princeps is free from them and on
most pages they abound. It need not be said that they
are regrettable. They belong to an age when the
garments of dead saints were cut up into small
fragments and distributed among the devout and when
their cells were decked out with indifferent taste
and converted into oratories. It would not have been
considered sufficient had the editor printed the text
of St. John of the Cross as he found it and glossed
it to his liking in footnotes; another editor would
have put opposite interpretations upon it, thus
cancelling out the work of his predecessor. Even the
radical mutilations of P. Salablanca did not suffice,
as will now be seen, to protect the works of the
Saint from the Inquisition.
VI
DENUNCIATION OF THE 'WORKS' TO THE INQUISITION --
DEFENCE OF THEM MADE BY FR. BASILO PONCE DE LE�N --
EDITIONS OF THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
NEITHER the commendations of University professors
nor the scissors of a meticulous editor could save
the treatises of St. John of the Cross from that
particular form of attack which, more than all
others, was feared in the seventeenth century. We
shall say nothing here of the history, nature and
procedure of the Spanish Inquisition, which has had
its outspoken antagonists and its unreasoning
defenders but has not yet been studied with
impartiality. It must suffice to set down the facts
as they here affect our subject.
Forty propositions, then, were extracted from the
edition of 1618 and presented to the Holy Office for
condemnation with the object of causing the
withdrawal of the edition from circulation. The
attempt would probably have succeeded but for the
warm, vigorous and learned defence put up by the
Augustinian Fray Basilio Ponce de Le�n, a theological
professor in the University of Salamanca and a nephew
of the Luis de Le�n who wrote the Names of Christ and
took so great an interest in the works of St.
Teresa.[47]
It was in the very convent of San Felipe in Madrid
where thirty-five years earlier Fray Luis had written
his immortal eulogy of St. Teresa[48] that Fray
Basilio, on July 11, 1622, signed a most interesting
'Reply' to the objections which had been raised to
the Alcal� edition of St. John of the Cross. Although
we propose, in our third volume, to reproduce Fray
Basilio's defence, it is necessary to our narrative
to say something of it here, for it is the most
important of all extant documents which reveal the
vicissitudes in the history of the Saint's teaching.
Before entering upon an examination of the censured
propositions, the learned Augustinian makes some
general observations, which must have carried great
weight as coming from so high a theological
authority. He recalls the commendations of the
edition by the professors of the University of Alcal�
'where the faculty of theology is so famous,' and by
many others, including several ministers of the Holy
Office and two Dominicans who 'without dispute are
among the most learned of their Order.' Secondly, he
refers to the eminently saintly character of the
first friar of the Discalced Reform: 'it is not to be
presumed that God would set a man whose teaching is
so evil . . . as is alleged, to be the comer-stone of
so great a building.' Thirdly, he notes how close a
follower was St. John of the Cross of St. Teresa, a
person who was singularly free from any taint of
unorthodoxy. And finally he recalls a number of
similar attacks on works of this kind, notably that
on Laredo's Ascent of Mount Sion,49 which have proved
to be devoid of foundation, and points out that
isolated 'propositions' need to be set in their
context before they can be fairly judged.
Fray Basilio next refutes the charges brought against
the works of St. John of the Cross, nearly all of
which relate to his teaching on the passivity of the
faculties in certain degrees of contemplation. Each
proposition he copies and afterwards defends, both by
argument and by quotations from the Fathers, from the
medieval mystics and from his own contemporaries. It
is noteworthy that among these authorities he
invariably includes St. Teresa, who had been
beatified in 1614, and enjoyed an undisputed
reputation. This inclusion, as well as being an
enhancement of his defence, affords a striking
demonstration of the unity of thought existing
between the two great Carmelites.
Having expounded the orthodox Catholic teaching in
regard to these matters, and shown that the teaching
of St. John of the Cross is in agreement with it,
Fray Basilio goes on to make clear the true attitude
of the Illuminists and thus to reinforce his
contentions by showing how far removed from this is
the Saint's doctrine.
Fray Basilio's magnificent defence of St. John of the
Cross appears to have had the unusual effect of
quashing the attack entirely: the excellence of his
arguments, backed by his great authority, was
evidently unanswerable. So far as we know, the
Inquisition took no proceedings against the Alcal�
edition whatsoever. Had this at any time been
prohibited, we may be sure that Llorente would have
revealed the fact, and, though he refers to the
persecution of St. John of the Cross during his
lifetime,[50] he is quite silent about any posthumous
condemnation of his writings.
The editio princeps was reprinted in 1619, with a
different pagination and a few corrections, in
Barcelona.[51] Before these two editions were out of
print, the General of the Discalced Carmelites had
entrusted an able historian of the Reform, Fray
Jer�nimo de San Jos�, with the preparation of a new
one. This was published at Madrid, in 1630. It has a
short introduction describing its scope and general
nature, a number of new and influential commendations
and an admirable fifty-page 'sketch' of St. John of
the Cross by the editor which has been reproduced in
most subsequent editions and has probably done more
than any other single work to make known the facts of
the Saint's biography. The great feature of this
edition, however, is the inclusion of the Spiritual
Canticle, placed (by an error, as a printer's note
explains) at the end of the volume, instead of before
the Living Flame, which is, of course, its proper
position.
The inclusion of the Canticle is one of the two
merits that the editor claims for his new edition.
The other is that he 'prints both the Canticle and
the other works according to their original
manuscripts, written in the hand of the same
venerable author.' This claim is, of course, greatly
exaggerated, as what has been said above with regard
to the manuscripts will indicate. Not only does Fray
Jer�nimo appear to have had no genuine original
manuscript at all, but of the omissions of the editio
princeps it is doubtful if he makes good many more
than one in a hundred. In fact, with very occasional
exceptions, he merely reproduces the princeps --
omissions, interpolations, well-meant improvements
and all.[52]
In Fray Jer�nimo's defence it must be said that the
reasons which moved his predecessor to mutilate his
edition were still potent, and the times had not
changed. It is more surprising that for nearly three
centuries the edition of 1630 should have been
followed by later editors. The numerous versions of
the works which saw the light in the later
seventeenth and the eighteenth century added a few
poems, letters and maxims to the corpus of work which
he presented and which assumed great importance as
the Saint became better known and more deeply
venerated. But they did no more. It suffices,
therefore, to enumerate the chief of them.
The Barcelona publisher of the 1619 edition produced
a new edition in 1635, which is a mere reproduction
of that of 1630. A Madrid edition of 1649, which adds
nine letters, a hundred maxims and a small collection
of poems, was reproduced in 1672 (Madrid), 1679
(Madrid), 1693 (Barcelona) and 1694 (Madrid), the
last reproduction being in two volumes. An edition
was also published in Barcelona in 1700.
If we disregard a 'compendium' of the Saint's
writings published in Seville in 1701, the first
eighteenth-century edition was published in Seville
in 1703 -- the most interesting of those that had
seen the light since 1630. It is well printed on good
paper in a folio volume and its editor, Fr. Andr�s de
Jes�s Mar�a, claims it, on several grounds, as an
advance on preceding editions. First, he says,
'innumerable errors of great importance' have been
corrected in it; then, the Spiritual Canticle has
been amended according to its original manuscript 'in
the hand of the same holy doctor, our father, kept
and venerated in our convent of Discalced Carmelite
nuns at Ja�n'; next, he adds two new poems and
increases the number of maxims from 100 to 365; and
lastly, the letters are increased from nine to
seventeen, all of which are found in P. Jer�nimo de
San Jos�'s history. The first of these claims is as
great an exaggeration as was P. Jer�nimo's; to the
second we shall refer in our introduction to the
Spiritual Canticle. The third and fourth, however,
are justified, and for these, as for a few minor
improvements, the editor deserves every commendation.
The remaining years of the eighteenth century
produced few editions; apart from a reprint (1724) of
the compendium of 1701, the only one known to us is
that published at Pamplona in 1774, after which
nearly eighty years were to pass before any earlier
edition was so much as reprinted. Before we resume
this bibliographical narrative, however, we must go
back over some earlier history.
VII
NEW DENUNCIATIONS AND DEFENCES -- FRAY NICOL�S DE
JES�S MAR�A -- THE CARMELITE SCHOOL AND THE
INQUISITION
WE remarked, apropos of the edition of 1630, that the
reasons which led Fray Diego de Jes�s to mutilate his
texts were still in existence when Fray Jer�nimo de
San Jos� prepared his edition some twelve years
later. If any independent proof of this statement is
needed, it may be found in the numerous apologias
that were published during the seventeenth century,
not only in Spain, but in Italy, France, Germany and
other countries of Europe. If doctrines are not
attacked, there is no occasion to write vigorous
defences of them.
Following the example of Fray Basilio Ponce de Le�n,
a professor of theology in the College of the Reform
at Salamanca, Fray Nichol�s de Jes�s Mar�a, wrote a
learned Latin defence of St. John of the Cross in
1631, often referred to briefly as the Elucidatio.53
It is divided into two parts, the first defending the
Saint against charges of a general kind that were
brought against his writings, and the second
upholding censured propositions taken from them. On
the general ground, P. Nichol�s reminds his readers
that many writers who now enjoy the highest possible
reputation were in their time denounced and unjustly
persecuted. St. Jerome was attacked for his
translation of the Bible from Hebrew into Latin; St.
Augustine, for his teaching about grace and
free-will. The works of St. Gregory the Great were
burned at Rome; those of St. Thomas Aquinas at Paris.
Most mediaeval and modern mystics have been the
victims of persecution -- Ruysbroeck, Tauler and even
St. Teresa. Such happenings, he maintains, have done
nothing to lessen the eventual prestige of these
authors, but rather have added to it.
Nor, he continues, can the works of any author fairly
be censured, because misguided teachers make use of
them to propagate their false teaching. No book has
been more misused by heretics than Holy Scripture and
few books of value would escape if we were to condemn
all that had been so treated. Equally worthless is
the objection that mystical literature is full of
difficulties which may cause the ignorant and
pusillanimous to stumble. Apart from the fact that
St. John of the Cross is clearer and more lucid than
most of his contemporaries, and that therefore the
works of many of them would have to follow his own
into oblivion, the same argument might again be
applied to the Scriptures. Who can estimate the good
imparted by the sacred books to those who read them
in a spirit of uprightness and simplicity? Yet what
books are more pregnant with mystery and with truths
that are difficult and, humanly speaking, even
inaccessible?
But (continues P. Nicol�s), even if we allow that
parts of the work of St. John of the Cross, for all
the clarity of his exposition, are obscure to the
general reader, it must be remembered that much more
is of the greatest attraction and profit to all. On
the one hand, the writings of the Saint represent the
purest sublimation of Divine love in the pilgrim
soul, and are therefore food for the most advanced
upon the mystic way. On the other, every reader,
however slight his spiritual progress, can understand
the Saint's ascetic teaching: his chapters on the
purgation of the senses, mortification, detachment
from all that belongs to the earth, purity of
conscience, the practice of the virtues, and so on.
The Saint's greatest enemy is not the obscurity of
his teaching but the inflexible logic with which he
deduces, from the fundamental principles of
evangelical perfection, the consequences which must
be observed by those who would scale the Mount. So
straight and so hard is the road which he maps out
for the climber that the majority of those who see it
are at once dismayed.
These are the main lines of P. Nicol�s' argument,
which he develops at great length. We must refer
briefly to the chapter in which he makes a careful
synthesis of the teaching of the Illuminists, to show
how far it is removed from that of St. John of the
Cross. He divides these false contemplatives into
four classes. In the first class he places those who
suppress all their acts, both interior and exterior,
in prayer. In the second, those who give themselves
up to a state of pure quiet, with no loving attention
to God. In the third, those who allow their bodies to
indulge every craving and maintain that, in the state
of spiritual intoxication which they have reached,
they are unable to commit sin. In the fourth, those
who consider themselves to be instruments of God and
adopt an attitude of complete passivity, maintaining
also that they are unable to sin, because God alone
is working in them. The division is more subtle than
practical, for the devotees of this sect, with few
exceptions, professed the same erroneous beliefs and
tended to the same degree of licence in their
conduct. But, by isolating these tenets, P. Nicol�s
is the better able to show the antithesis between
them and those of St. John of the Cross.
In the second part of the Elucidatio, he analyses the
propositions already treated by Fray Basilio Ponce de
Le�n, reducing them to twenty and dealing faithfully
with them in the same number of chapters. His defence
is clear, methodical and convincing and follows
similar lines to those adopted by Fray Basilio, to
whom its author acknowledges his indebtedness.
Another of St. John of the Cross's apologists is Fray
Jos� de Jes�s Mar�a (Quiroga), who, in a number of
his works,[54] both defends and eulogizes him,
without going into any detailed examination of the
propositions. Fray Jos� is an outstanding example of
a very large class of writers, for, as Illuminism
gave place to Quietism, the teaching of St. John of
the Cross became more and more violently impugned and
almost all mystical writers of the time referred to
him. Perhaps we should single out, from among his
defenders outside the Carmelite Order, that
Augustinian father, P. Antol�nez, to whose commentary
on three of the Saint's works we have already made
reference.
As the school of mystical writers within the
Discalced Carmelite Reform gradually grew -- a school
which took St. John of the Cross as its leader and is
one of the most illustrious in the history of
mystical theology -- it began to share in the same
persecution as had befallen its founder. It is
impossible, in a few words, to describe this epoch of
purgation, and indeed it can only be properly studied
in its proper context -- the religious history of the
period as a whole. For our purpose, it suffices to
say that the works of St. John of the Cross were once
more denounced to the Inquisition, though, once more,
no notice appears to have been taken of the
denunciations, for there exists no record ordering
the expurgation or prohibition of the books referred
to. The Elucidatio was also denounced, together with
several of the works of P. Jos� de Jes�s Mar�a, at
various times in the seventeenth century, and these
attacks were of course equivalent to direct attacks
on St. John of the Cross. One of the most vehement
onslaughts made was levelled against P. Jos�'s Subida
del Alma a Dios ('Ascent of the Soul to God'), which
is in effect an elaborate commentary on St. John of
the Cross's teaching. The Spanish Inquisition
refusing to censure the book, an appeal against it
was made to the Inquisition at Rome. When no
satisfaction was obtained in this quarter, P. Jos�'s
opponents went to the Pope, who referred the matter
to the Sacred Congregation of the Index; but this
body issued a warm eulogy of the book and the matter
thereupon dropped.
In spite of such defeats, the opponents of the
Carmelite school continued their work into the
eighteenth century. In 1740, a new appeal was made to
the Spanish Inquisition to censure P. Jos�'s Subida.
A document of seventy-three folios denounced no less
than one hundred and sixty-five propositions which it
claimed to have taken direct from the work referred
to, and this time, after a conflict extending over
ten years, the book (described as 'falsely
attributed' to P. Jos�[55]) was condemned (July 4,
1750), as 'containing doctrine most perilous in
practice, and propositions similar and equivalent to
those condemned in Miguel de Molinos.'
We set down the salient facts of this controversy,
without commenting upon them, as an instance of the
attitude of the eighteenth century towards the
mystics in general, and, in particular, towards the
school of the Discalced Carmelites. In view of the
state and tendencies of thought in these times, the
fact of the persecution, and the degree of success
that it attained, is not surprising. The important
point to bear in mind is that it must be taken into
account continually by students of the editions of
the Saint's writings and of the history of his
teaching throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries.
VIII
FURTHER HISTORY OF THE EDITIONS -- P. ANDR�S DE LA
ENCARNACI�N -- EDITIONS OF THE NINETEENTH AND
TWENTIETH CENTURIES
WHAT has just been said will fully explain the
paucity of the editions of St. John of the Cross
which we find in the eighteenth century. This
century, however, was, scientifically speaking, one
of great progress. Critical methods of study
developed and became widespread; and there was a
great desire to obtain purer and more nearly perfect
texts and to discover the original sources of the
ideas of great thinkers. These tendencies made
themselves felt within the Discalced Carmelite Order,
and there also arose a great ambition to republish in
their original forms the works both of St. Teresa and
of St. John of the Cross. The need was greater in the
latter case than in the former; so urgent was it felt
to be as to admit of no delay. 'There have been
discovered in the works [of St. John of the Cross],'
says a document of about 1753, 'many errors,
mutilations and other defects the existence of which
cannot be denied.'[56] The religious who wrote thus
to the Chapter-General of the Reform set out definite
and practical schemes for a thorough revision of
these works, which were at once accepted. There thus
comes into our history that noteworthy friar, P.
Andr�s de la Encarnaci�n, to whom we owe so much of
what we know about the Saint to-day. P. Andr�s was no
great stylist, nor had he the usual Spanish fluency
of diction. But he was patient, modest and
industrious, and above all he was endowed with a
double portion of the critical spirit of the
eighteenth century. He was selected for the work of
investigation as being by far the fittest person who
could be found for it. A decree dated October 6, 1754
ordered him to set to work. As a necessary
preliminary to the task of preparing a corrected text
of the Saint's writings, he was to spare no effort in
searching for every extant manuscript; accordingly he
began long journeys through La Mancha and Andalusia,
going over all the ground covered by St. John of the
Cross in his travels and paying special attention to
the places where he had lived for any considerable
period. In those days, before the religious
persecutions of the nineteenth century had destroyed
and scattered books and manuscripts, the archives of
the various religious houses were intact. P. Andr�s
and his amanuensis were therefore able to copy and
collate valuable manuscripts now lost to us and they
at once began to restore the phrases and passages
omitted from the editions. Unhappily, their work has
disappeared and we can judge of it only at second
hand; but it appears to have been in every way
meritorious. So far as we can gather from the
documents which have come down to us, it failed to
pass the rigorous censorship of the Order. In other
words, the censors, who were professional
theologians, insisted upon making so many corrections
that the Superiors, who shared the enlightened
critical opinions of P. Andr�s, thought it better to
postpone the publication of the edition indefinitely.
The failure of the project, however, to which P.
Andr�s devoted so much patient labour, did not wholly
destroy the fruits of his skill and perseverance. He
was ordered to retire to his priory, where he spent
the rest of his long life under the burden of a trial
the magnitude of which any scholar or studiously
minded reader can estimate. He did what he could in
his seclusion to collect, arrange and recopy such
notes of his work as he could recover from those to
whom they had been submitted. His defence of this
action to the Chapter-General is at once admirable in
the tranquillity of its temper and pathetic in the
eagerness and affection which it displays for the
task that he has been forbidden to continue:
Inasmuch as I was ordered, some years ago . . . to
prepare an exact edition of the works of our holy
father, and afterwards was commanded to suspend my
labours for just reasons which presented themselves
to these our fathers and prevented its accomplishment
at the time, I obeyed forthwith with the greatest
submissiveness, but, as I found that I had a rich
store of information which at some future time might
contribute to the publication of a truly illustrious
and perfect edition, it seemed to me that I should
not be running counter to the spirit of the Order if
I gave it some serviceable form, so that I should not
be embarrassed by seeing it in a disorderly condition
if at some future date it should be proposed to carry
into effect the original decisions of the Order. With
humility and submissiveness, therefore, I send to
your Reverences these results of my private labours,
not because it is in my mind that the work should be
recommended, or that, if this is to be done, it
should be at any particular time, for that I leave to
the disposition of your Reverences and of God, but to
the end that I may return to the Order that which
belongs to it; for, since I was excused from
religious observances for nearly nine years so that I
might labour in this its own field, the Order cannot
but have a right to the fruits of my labours, nor can
I escape the obligation of delivering what I have
discovered into its hand. . . .[57]
We cannot examine the full text of the interesting
memorandum to the Censors which follows this humble
exordium. One of their allegations had been that the
credit of the Order would suffer if it became known
that passages of the Saint's works had been
suppressed by Carmelite editors. P. Andr�s makes the
sage reply: 'There is certainly the risk that this
will become known if the edition is made; but there
is also a risk that it will become known in any case.
We must weigh the risks against each other and decide
which proceeding will bring the Order into the
greater discredit if one of them materializes.' He
fortifies this argument with the declaration that the
defects of the existing editions were common
knowledge outside the Order as well as within it, and
that, as manuscript copies of the Saint's works were
also in the possession of many others than
Carmelites, there was nothing to prevent a correct
edition being made at any time. This must suffice as
a proof that P. Andr�s could be as acute as he was
submissive.
Besides collecting this material, and leaving on
record his opposition to the short-sighted decision
of the Censors, P. Andr�s prepared 'some
Disquisitions on the writings of the Saint, which, if
a more skilful hand should correct and improve their
style, cannot but be well received.' Closely
connected with the Disquisitions are the Preludes in
which he glosses the Saint's writings. These studies,
like the notes already described, have all been lost
-- no doubt, together with many other documents from
the archives of the Reform in Madrid, they
disappeared during the pillaging of the religious
houses in the early nineteenth century.
The little of P. Andr�s' work that remains to us
gives a clear picture of the efforts made by the
Reform to bring out a worthy edition of St. John of
the Cross's writings in the eighteenth century; it is
manifestly insufficient, however, to take a modern
editor far along the way. Nor, as we have seen, are
his judgments by any means to be followed otherwise
than with the greatest caution; he greatly
exaggerates, too, the effect of the mutilations of
earlier editors, no doubt in order to convince his
superiors of the necessity for a new edition. The
materials for a modern editor are to be found, not in
the documents left by P. Andr�s, but in such
Carmelite archives as still exist, and in the
National Library of Spain, to which many Carmelite
treasures found their way at the beginning of the
last century.
The work sent by P. Andr�s to his superiors was kept
in the archives of the Discalced Carmelites, but no
new edition was prepared till a hundred and fifty
years later. In the nineteenth century such a task
was made considerably more difficult by religious
persecution; which resulted in the loss of many
valuable manuscripts, some of which P. Andr�s must
certainly have examined. For a time, too, the Orders
were expelled from Spain, and, on their return, had
neither the necessary freedom, nor the time or
material means, for such undertakings. In the
twenty-seventh volume of the well-known series of
classics entitled Biblioteca de Autores Espa�oles
(1853) the works of St. John of the Cross were
reprinted according to the 1703 edition, without its
engravings, indices and commendations, and with a
'critical estimate' of the Saint by Pi y Margall,
which has some literary value but in other respects
fails entirely to do justice to its subject.
Neither the Madrid edition of 1872 nor the Barcelona
edition of 1883 adds anything to our knowledge and it
was not till the Toledo edition of 1912-14 that a new
advance was made. This edition was the work of a
young Carmelite friar, P. Gerardo de San Juan de la
Cruz, who died soon after its completion. It aims,
according to its title, which is certainly justified,
at being 'the most correct and complete edition of
all that have been published down to the present
date.' If it was not as successful as might have been
wished, this could perhaps hardly have been expected
of a comparatively inexperienced editor confronted
with so gigantic a task -- a man, too, who worked
almost alone and was by temperament and predilection
an investigator rather than a critic. Nevertheless,
its introductions, footnotes, appended documents, and
collection of apocryphal works of the Saint, as well
as its text, were all considered worthy of extended
study and the edition was rightly received with
enthusiasm. Its principal merit will always lie in
its having restored to their proper places, for the
first time in a printed edition, many passages which
had theretofore remained in manuscript.
We have been anxious that this new edition [Burgos,
1929-31] should represent a fresh advance in the task
of establishing a definitive text of St. John of the
Cross's writings. For this reason we have examined,
together with two devoted assistants, every
discoverable manuscript, with the result, as it seems
to us, that both the form and the content of our
author's works are as nearly as possible as he left
them.
In no case have we followed any one manuscript
exclusively, preferring to assess the value of each
by a careful preliminary study and to consider each
on its merits, which are described in the
introduction to each of the individual works. Since
our primary aim has been to present an accurate text,
our footnotes will be found to be almost exclusively
textual. The only edition which we cite, with the
occasional exception of that of 1630, is the
princeps, from which alone there is much to be
learned. The Latin quotations from the Vulgate are
not, of course, given except where they appear in the
manuscripts, and, save for the occasional correction
of a copyist's error, they are reproduced in exactly
the form in which we have found them. Orthography and
punctuation have had perforce to be modernized, since
the manuscripts differ widely and we have so few
autographs that nothing conclusive can be learned of
the Saint's own practice.[58] |