Juan de Yepes y Alvarez, later to be known as Juan de la Cruz (John of the Cross), was born to an impoverished but love-rich couple in the small town of Fontiveros, Spain on 24 June 1542. His father came from a wealthy family but—after being disowned when he married Catalina Alvarez, a humble weaver—took up his wife’s trade. Juan’s father died when Juan was only seven, and Catalina was left without even the bare necessities of life for herself and her two sons. Juan became an attendant at a smallpox hospital—whose director, impressed by the boy’s compassion, offered to pay for his religious education. Juan studied with the Jesuits and then entered the Carmelite order. He finished his education at the University of Salamanca, where he began teaching while still a student, and was ordained at twenty-five. Soon after, he met Teresa of Avila, a great mystic who took a liking to the young priest and enlisted him in her attempts to reform the Carmelite order. She believed that religious practitioners must embrace poverty, and therefore her branch of the Carmelites became known as “Discalced,” or shoeless. Juan first moved to a Discalced nunnery as its confessor, and in 1568 moved to a tiny farmhouse, where he established the first monastery of the reformed Carmelites.

In 1575, however, the traditional Carmelites virtually outlawed the Discalced sect, and two years later they seized Juan and took him to Toledo as their prisoner. When he refused to recant, he was imprisoned in a windowless cell. Three times a week they let him out to eat his daily meal of bread and water, after which he was whipped for his continuing obstinacy. He wrote some of his finest poetry during this imprisonment. After nine months, he broke out by scaling the walls and found refuge with nearby nuns.

His persecution ended in 1578 with the death of the superior general of the traditional Carmelites, and he wrote the majority of his works (most of which remained unfinished) during the next nine years. A few years after Teresa’s death (in 1582), the Discalced Carmelites were again troubled by dissension, and Juan was stripped of his offices and forbidden any kind of activity in the order. Juan received this as a blessing because it allowed him to return to a life of solitary contemplation. He died on 14 December 1591 in Ubeda, Spain, and was beatified in 1675, canonized in 1726, and named a doctor of the church in 1926.

Noche obscura del alma (The Dark Night of the Soul), which first appeared at Barcelona in 1619, is probably the best-known work of St. John of the Cross. This great work of Catholic mysticism is an exposition, line by line, of the eight brief stanzas of the poem “Dark Night of the Soul” that he wrote during his imprisonment at Toledo. (The Ascent of Mount Carmel is another exposition of the same poem.) The poem seems to have been inspired by the Song of Songs in the Bible, and presents the Christian as a lover passionately seeking divine union with Christ. In his explication of the poem, St. John of the Cross attempts to show that the soul must become emptied of self—purified of the last traces of earthly dross—before it can be filled with God. In this way, the earnest yearner after God may own nothing, but possess everything—the soul’s indescribably sublime union with God.

P. SILVERIO DE SANTA TERESA, the editor of the fine critical edition that we have used as the source for this book, wrote the Introduction and most of the footnotes in the text. Footnotes in brackets were added by the translator, E. Allison Peers.