Language and Mysticism in the ‘Spiritual Canticle’ by St John of the Cross

Abstract

St John of the Cross, along with Santa Teresa, represents a major philosophical tradition in Western mysticism. Unlike Santa Teresa, he is usually included in the broad tradition of negative theology. He is also one of Spain’s major poets, who has been co-opted into an orthodox Catholic canon by Spanish and foreign scholars alike. Despite the force of this orthodox tradition in Hispanic studies, both of these writers on mysticism have more recently been (re)claimed by those who want to highlight the ‘other’ Spain, imbued with heterodox Jewish and/or Islamic cultural elements.¹ Michel de Certeau’s observations in his essay on mystical writing regarding the ‘strange alliance [that] linked “mystic” speech and “impure” blood’² can be applied to St John of the Cross as a cultural outsider, given his Jewish converso background. His cultural context, and the ‘strange alliance’ involved, is indeed important for an understanding of St John of the Cross’s treatment of texts, his particular approach to mysticism, and his status as an outsider in the Spanish Golden Age. In several ways St John of the Cross represents the ‘other’, marginal Spain and his otherness has often been overlooked for cultural and historical reasons. I will argue here that this is a determining element in his particular approach to communication and language. In his texts, from which I have selected for this discussion the most well known one, the ‘Spiritual Canticle’, we can see a variety of features which are inexplicable from an orthodox Catholic perspective and which suggest both theological and stylistic heterodoxy. Amongst these are a sense of ontological uncertainty and an attitude to textuality which prefigures more contemporary theory, and post-structuralist approaches to transcendence.³ St John of the Cross’s writing will then be analysed with reference to processes of signification that are openended and question textual authority and interpretation.