The Spiritual Force of Unleashed Love: Echoes of Saint John of the Cross in Federico García Lorca's Sonnets of the Dark Love

It is no secret that John of the Cross, Spain's most influential mystical poet, had a profound impact on Federico García Lorca, Spain's most universal poet and playwright. Lorca himself expressed his admiration for the sixteenth-century mystic on several occasions. In a lecture delivered in New York in 1930, he acknowledged the influence of John of the Cross with these words: "Luis de Góngora is the perfect imaginative, the verbal equilibrium, and the concrete drawing; whereas St. John of the Cross is the complete opposite. He is flight and longing, desire for perspective and unleashed love."¹ From a reading of Lorca's works, it is evident that he identified himself with the latter rather than the former. As we will see in the following pages, the notions of desire and unleashed love in both Lorca and Saint John have a profound spiritual quality. For the two poets, unleashed love is expressed through an erotic imagery that, at times points beyond itself (to the divine), and at other times points to itself, to sexual intimacy as the most fitting vehicle to channel spiritual longings. This interplay between sexuality, spirituality, and poetry is therefore central to both poets. On another occasion, in 1933, according to his friend Alberto Rivas, Lorca affirmed:

Once I was asked "what is poetry?", and I remembered a friend of mine and said: "Poetry? Well, it is the union of two words that no-one ever thought of putting together, and that become a sort of mystery; and the more you say them, the more images they suggest; for instance, recalling my friend, poetry is: wounded stag."²

The "friend" Lorca recalled was San Juan de la Cruz, or Saint John of the Cross. The definition of poetry he offered, with the words "wounded stag," came directly from John's "Spiritual Canticle." In addition, for Lorca, the inspiration behind his creative spirit was the same duende, or muse, that inspired San Juan. In another lecture, Lorca declared that his duende was "the same one that makes St. John of the Cross groan."³ And, in that same lecture, he affirmed:

The paths to seek God are well known, from the barbaric way of the hermit to the subtle way of the mystic. By means of a tower, like Saint Teresa, or with three paths, like Saint John of the Cross. And although we may have to cry with Isaiah's voice: "Truly you are a hidden God," at the end of the day it is God who gives those who search after him their first fiery thorns.⁴

These references to the great sixteenth-century Spanish mystics show Lorca's familiarity with their works and thoughts. They also reveal a theological awareness which points to God as the source of creative inspiration and touches on two significant elements of John's spirituality. First, his allusion to "the God who hides" and who is ultimately Mystery, present in the symbolic images of the dark night, in the notion of "unknowing" and in the opening stanzas of "Spiritual Canticle" ("Where did you hide Beloved, and left me crying?"), among others. Second, the reference to the "fiery thorns" is a direct allusion to the God who self-revealed to Moses in a burning bush. The fiery thorns, as a symbol for divine communication/inspiration, also evoke pain and suffering; a reference to the passion of Christ himself. The image, in addition, contains echoes of John's "living flame of love," the mystic's preferred metaphor to portray the Holy Spirit as God's creative persona. Lorca, in few words, summarizes the paradox at the heart of God in John's writings, and in the Christian tradition; namely, that God is both immanent and transcendent, hiding and revealing. Furthermore, in the process of discovery, encounter, and intimacy with God, both absence and presence are experienced at different times in different ways.

Saint John's Echoes in Lorca's Sonnets

Nowhere is the influence of John...