uffered to cast gleams of light upon
the saint's gloomy and thorn-strewn path. But nevertheless the text of
which we are most often reminded in reading his pages is the verse of
Amos: "Shall not the day of the Lord be darkness and not light? even
very dark, and no brightness in it?" It is a terrible view of life and
duty--that we are to denude ourselves of everything that makes us
citizens of the world--that _nothing_ which is natural is capable of
entering into relations with God--that all which is human must die,
and have its place taken by supernatural infusion. St. Juan follows to
the end the "negative road" of Dionysius, without troubling himself at
all with the transcendental metaphysics of Neoplatonism. His nihilism
or acosmism is not the result of abstracting from the notion of Being
or of unity; its basis is psychological. It is "subjective" religion
carried _almost_ to its logical conclusion. The Neoplatonists were led
on by the hope of finding a reconciliation between philosophy and
positive religion; but no such problems ever presented themselves to
the Spaniards. We hear nothing of the relation of the creation to God,
or _why_ the contemplation of it should only hinder instead of helping
us to know its Maker. The world simply does not exist for St. Juan;
nothing exists save God and human souls. The great human society has
no interest for him; he would have us cut ourselves completely adrift
from the aims and aspirations of civilised humanity, and, "since
nothing but the Infinite can satisfy us," to accept nothing until our
nothingness is filled with the Infinite. He does not escape from the
quietistic attitude of passive expectancy which belongs to this view
of life; and it is only by a glaring inconsistency that he attaches
any value to the ecclesiastical symbolism, which rests on a very
different basis from that of his teaching. But St. Juan's Mysticism
brought him no intellectual emancipation, either for good or evil.
Faith with him was the antithesis, not to _sight_, as in the Bible,
but to reason. The sacrifice of reason was part of the crucifixion of
the old man. And so he remained in an attitude of complete
subservience to Church tradition and authority, and even to his
"director," an intermediary who is constantly mentioned by these
post-Reformation mystics. Even this unqualified submissiveness did not
preserve him from persecution during his lifetime, and suspicion
afterwards. His books were only au