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Reviewed by:
  • St. John of the Cross
  • John R. Francis
Peter M. Tyler . St. John of the Cross. London: Continuum, 2010. Pp. 174. Paper, US$21.95. ISBN 978-0-826-47561-9.

It has often been noted that John of the Cross is perhaps one of the most misunderstood saint of all Christian writers. And to this day, protests Peter Tyler, the popular image of John of the Cross as the “gloomy saint” remains, despite recent research. Given this perception, Tyler sets out to re-present John as an important guide for contemporary practical theology in hope that the reader will gain “a renewed awe and respect for the ‘wild man of Castille’” (8). His main claims are that John’s theology embraces the whole self and gives clear steps on how to deepen one’s spiritual life (151). After reviewing the fascinating biography of this “odd person in an odd country at an odd time,” Tyler proceeds to systematically present John as a distinctively Christian theologian, mystic, psychologist, artist, pastoral theologian, and spiritual director, and he does this in a way that retains “some of the wildness and flame of John’s spirit” (7).

Tyler argues that John of the Cross is a practical theologian (rather than a systematic or dogmatic one) whose theological journey begins with the spiritual wound of God’s hiddenness, out from which one seeks God in a “dark night,” and into which the inflow of God as love transforms the self. Here, Tyler draws mainly from Ian Matthew. Against Rahner, Tyler sees John as particularly Christocentric, and the Holy Spirit is the bringer of delight and love, and grace, which re-orders our natural faculties.

As mystic, John uses a form of writing (affective Dionysianism), says Tyler, inherited from the Victorines through Jean Gerson and Francisco de Osuna. John uses a “performative discourse to work on the reader’s affect as much as their intellect” (64). Drawing mainly from Bernard McGinn, the Dionysian “unknowing-embodied strategy” is explained as involving erotic union (a union by eros through the affectus and the libido). Tyler contends that John deliberately employed the same strategy in his own writing. Thus, for John, mystical theology involves knowing and experiencing God through love.

On John as psychologist, Tyler sees that John’s spiritual anthropology challenges present-day psychology. John has a “sympathetic understanding of human nature” (98) and considers the passions and desires integral to spirit through which God may act. Thus, Tyler argues that the passions and desires can be reordered and redirected to God, and in this way can become good (89). On this point, although there is helpful discussion on the dark night, I would like to have seen more discussion on it and the need for one to be weaned from spiritual pleasure.

In his discussion of John as aesthetician, artist, and poet, Tyler presents John as one for whom art and music were important, and the tension between the kataphatic and apophatic ways is left throughout his work. The Cántico and its influence are discussed with Colin Thompson and Gerald Brenan as main sources. Tyler suggests that John’s theology of Christian art and his use of theologia mystica provide the sources of his groundbreaking poetic art (121).

Tyler provides a convincing argument that John’s theology is particularly Christian and neither influenced by Sufism or similar to Buddhism. In his view, John is a pastoral theologian and spiritual director par excellence, whose theology is to be practised for the purpose of bringing oneself and the world to a love of God (144).

In several sections Tyler argues thoroughly and in depth, yet the quality of scholarship in other sections unfortunately does not compare to that of those from whom Tyler draws. At times large quotations follow one another with very little intervening commentary. Where the argumentation is less convincing, Tyler may be reading his own experience into John without an objective examination of the text and its meaning. Citations of primary source material do not always directly support the author’s claims, and further development is needed to make the argument more compelling. The citations [End Page 121] provided show the source...

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