Truth is not ‘obvious’ from the outside. There is no formula for understanding. Truth is an adventure we individually embark upon with God, a ‘sublime mystery of God and human beings’ (SC 37:2)[1]. When Jesus says, ‘I am the Way’, he offers us a riddle to fathom in our being, not an instruction to copy. What is it truly to live, an inspired life?
St John of the Cross reads the Pauline corpus through a transformative, mystical lens that bypasses rigid cultural formulas to strike at the experiential core of Christian existence. This is a reading that offers us a dynamic map of the soul’s interior transformation into Christ, practical descriptions of the ‘dark night’ — the real, active stripping away of ego and worldly attachment, with a focus on the unitive goal of divine love. This approach treats scripture as an invitation to a direct, living encounter with God rather than an ideological weapon, with implications for the Church. It frees contemporary faith communities from literalistic dogmatism, redirecting energy toward spiritual maturity, interior liberty, and radical love.
St John of the Cross is a creative genius, modelling for us a discipleship of profound intellectual clarity. In his discipleship of St Paul, St John of the Cross persistently digs in with an intellect ‘baptised’ by Grace that mirrors and expands upon the mystical writings of Paul, ‘entering this thicket of God’s wisdom’ (SC 37.2) without compromise. We follow like prospectors into the ‘high caverns’, finding ‘new veins with new riches everywhere’ (SC 37.4), anchoring a path to greater depths and heights. Human genius is the breath of the Spirit, knowing no bounds because God is its only boundary. God binds us in a beautiful dance, an unrestricted flowing ensemble, an act of togetherness that is held in God’s hands. A cumulative deepening is effected when we read Paul in the light of St John of the Cross, and vice-versa, modelling what it is to co-create the intellectual heart of the Church. We walk together.
Human genius is a dance which comes from pure intellect inspired by God. The Eastern Orthodox have a concept of the nous, the ‘intellect of the heart’. Nous is the highest spiritual faculty of the human soul, used for direct perception of divine truth and spiritual realities. If the natural world brings beauty, humanity brings the sublime. Genius is a human faculty that goes beyond the beautiful. It cuts a line into the future, into the eternal, into a time when everything is past, a place where we may feel not only uncomfortable, unqualified and unable to follow, but that defies comprehension. We go there with God. Let us not underestimate the terror to be found ‘away from the common’ (SC 29): ‘You will say that I am lost’.
Can I really drink this cup?
We must risk everything for this Word. Discernment takes us on a perilous adventure for which none of us are equipped. We must leave our ‘equipment’ behind.
Philosopher Immanuel Kant distinguishes natural ‘free formations’ such as snowflakes from works of genius, noting that genius is a creative capacity found only in human beings, and he argues that ‘genius’ evidences our divine nature.[2] All humans are endowed with creative power, and to live in full union with each other is to live in full union with God. Unlike a snowflake or an AI, human beings, through Grace, have the potential to open their mouths and speak what is completely new and it won’t be a re-hash of anything previous. This is the mystery of the Incarnation. Earthbound though we are, God communicates of himself ‘divine light and love […] to the soul […] inform[ing] these two faculties (intellect and will) with knowledge and love’ (LF 3.49)[3].
Paul ‘doesn’t simply transmit the tradition, he actively takes it up, and works it into deeper thought, seeking out its implications’.[4] Building upon the mystical writings of St Paul, St John of the Cross teaches us about discipleship and its lessons for Church, i.e., how we are to inhabit and to live out our God-given genius and freedom in an ever-deepening way, down the generations.
We see in St John of the Cross a way to truly follow Paul, not to be bogged down in his specific, contextual dogmatism. Such a reading carries profound implications for the Church. An intellectually fearless reading of St John of the Cross leads us to see Paul as a ‘radical and creative thinker’. In its radical logical unfolding, reading Paul through the eyes of St John of the Cross will fill us with horror in places, like the rich man who cannot follow Christ. Complacency and pragmatism may make us recoil and question ‘can he really mean this?’ But ‘Who is this who darkens counsel with words of ignorance?’ (Job 38.2). ‘Common’ sense reacts to the unknown and to difference with repulsion and can lead us to look carelessly and without reverence. ‘No form, figure, image, or idea (whether heavenly or earthly, natural or supernatural) that can be grasped by the memory is God or like to him’ (A 3.11.1)[5]. If blessed to see what is inconceivable to us, we must be careful that we don’t exclude the things we do not know and thereby exclude God (in others and in ourselves).
Genius is the natural human capacity to open ourselves beyond the ‘common’ (John’s conception of what it is to live within the constraints of ordinary daily life), and receive God, by the breath of the Spirit. To live, as Jesus Christ taught us by his Incarnation, in the Way, the Truth and the Life. Ultimately, we are following Christ as he breaks open the way before us. The Christic — that is, the reality of human life shaped by and oriented toward Christ — is revealed afresh to a new age, and we can witness humanity’s path of Theosis, its becoming-unification with God, an unfolding maturation and deepening collective comprehension.
St John of the Cross’ reading of Paul has profound implications for the Church because we see that a truly uncensored intellectual reading of St John of the Cross takes us ‘away from the common’[6], to some shocking places where pragmatism fears to proceed.
Paul, drawing out the consequences of his faith in Christ, takes himself and us to places that might be unthinkable except when we realise that we are taken there by the premises which, as baptised Christians, we already agree with. The reality is, our divine nature explodes us into the infinite unfathomable realm of our Father in Heaven, and to live in denial of this is to live away from Christ.
- ‘It was for freedom that we were set free’ (Galatians 5:1)
- ‘We no longer see each other in our former state: there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free person, male or female; for we are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Galatians 3:28)
- ‘God chose those whom the world considers foolish to shame those who think they are wise, and God chose the weak and powerless to shame the high and mighty, he chose the lowly and laughable in the world’s eyes — nobodies — to reduce to nothing those who are something’ (1 Corinthians 1:27-28)
- ‘I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints, for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong’ (2 Corinthians 12:10)
St John of the Cross insists we listen to Paul and follow his genius, not to our own ‘common sense’ understanding. A new understanding of discipleship emerges. The Way, for St John of the Cross, is always to embark on a universal, yet individual, adventure where humanity co-creates ‘Church’ from a place of Freedom in Christ.
In discipleship, each human soul ‘with an authentic desire for divine wisdom’ (SC 36.12) has the opportunity to take steps toward their divine nature and to become reconciled with God, though ‘few desire to enter’ (SC 36.13). Genius accesses a doorway to the divine, offering a glimpse of the divine, that which exists beyond the interpretations of time and ‘the common’.
As much as we have to open our hearts to follow Christ, we have to open our hearts to follow each other. Christ gives us our brothers and sisters in faith, Church, for each of us to journey together, not only for our individual discernment, but for the collective good: ‘Holy Father, each one that you have given me, keep them in your name, that they may be united as one just as we are’ (John 17.11).
Care is necessary when we follow the words of human followers of Jesus because our vision is imperfect, discernment is imperfect. Even so, as Jesus suggests, we can approach our fellows with a similar attitude of reverence to our approach to Christ because we all speak from the same place when we follow Jesus, even if we do so imperfectly. Jesus taught us that we can still listen to the glimpses of the divine in each other, even in the obscurity of our earthly imperfection.
It takes perspicacity to see through apparent obscurity to the treasure in the dark caverns. Prospectors for gold toss out a lot of dross in their quest to greater glory. The seam of thought for men like Paul and St John of the Cross may seem obscure, because it comes out of the unknown. Our job is to be fully present, and to meet with the divine in ourselves in our discipleship which inevitably breaks through our limits.
Church can be defined this way: ‘…Where two or three are gathered to consider what is for the greater honour and glory of my name, there I am in the midst of them— that is, clarifying and confirming truths in their hearts’ (A 2:11); it is ‘in the hypostatic union of the human nature with the divine Word’ (SC 37:3), in other words, it is in the genius of the intellect of each of our hearts, our hearts in alignment with God, that we co-create Church.
We do this as a collective over time, breaking through layer upon layer of obfuscation of pure intelligence. Like miners at the coal face, we chip away to reach the jewel of God’s love for us. Stage by stage, we collectively grow in faith. ‘Don’t let us in our ignorance turn back from following you’ (Ps 85:8), because, if we continue, we will not fail. God promises us, ‘righteousness goes before us, preparing a path for our steps’ (Ps 85:13).
They appear to be the essential structure, but common sense and tradition are obstacles.
‘Listen! The Book of God is worth more than all these ye cite, and I stand upon it. And I tell ye there are things in that Book that not one among ye can read, with all your learning!’[7]
The sublime may never even be seen — even standing beside Jesus Himself, we may fail to recognise it. From Paul, St John of the Cross demands that we think with our intellects, deep into our hearts, and not with our common sense or pragmatism; seeing and hearing directly into the divine. With our intellect, in the nous, we are taken to a place of knowing that is deeper, and freer, than anything we have learned or been taught.
[1] SC = Spiritual Canticle in The Collected Works of St John of the Cross. Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD and Otilio Rodriguez, OCD. (Washington DC: ICS Publications, 1991).
[2] See Immanuel Kant, Critique Judgment, Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. (Indianapolis, In: Hackett, 1997), pp. 210-211, 228, 313-314, 346-351, 363-365, 370-371, 374-375, 377, 384; and Opus Postumum, Translated by Eckart Förster and Michael Rosen. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 21:522, 525. See also Ruth Baigent, Free Formations of Nature in Kant – a Critical Study, 1997. (Available: https://elrupiria.weebly.com/blog/free-formations-of-nature-in-kant-a-critical-study )
[3] LF = Living Flame in The Collected Works of St John of the Cross. Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD and Otilio Rodriguez, OCD. (Washington DC: ICS Publications, 1991).
[4] My thanks to Luke Timothy Johnson, whose insights have informed this understanding of Paul. See Luke Timothy Johnson, The Apostle Paul, The Great Courses (Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company), video course, available at https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/apostle-paul, accessed 9 February 2023.
[5] A = Ascent of Mount Carmel in The Collected Works of St John of the Cross. Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD and Otilio Rodriguez, OCD. (Washington DC: ICS Publications, 1991).
[6] See St John of the Cross’ discussion of the ‘common’ and ‘natural capacity’ in Living Flame 3:31 and Spiritual Canticle 29:6, 8. Cf. The Collected Works of St John of the Cross. Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD and Otilio Rodriguez, OCD. (Washington DC: ICS Publications, 1991), pp. 589-590 & 685.
[7] Mark Twain, Joan of Arc, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,1989), Ignatius Press eBook, p110 (Chapter 8).
