Juan de Yepes Álvarez was born into a Jewish family in a small town near Ávila, Spain in 1542. He became a Carmelite priest after attending a Jesuit school and is famous today as reformer, theologian, mystic, poet and saint. St. John of the Cross, in his writings on the progress of the soul, stressed that one cannot approach God except through darkness and confusion. He wrote movingly of the ineffability of God’s love.

To celebrate the new scanner that I hooked up to my computer today, which will make what was ineffable effable, I am quoting this passage from his The Dark Night, which is addressed to his fellow contemplatives:

Contemplation is called “secret” not only because of one’s inability to understand but also because of the effects it produces in the soul. The wisdom of love is not secret merely in the darknesses and straits of the soul’s purgation (for the soul does not know how to describe it) but also afterward in the illumination, when it is communicated more clearly. Even then it is so secret that it is ineffable. Not only does a person feel unwilling to give expression to this wisdom, but one finds no adequate means or simile to signify so sublime an understanding and delicate a spiritual feeling. Even if the soul should desire to convey this experience in words and think up many similes the wisdom would always remain secret and still to be expressed.

Since this interior wisdom is so simple, general, and spiritual that in entering the intellect it is not clothed in any sensory species or image, the imaginative faculty cannot form an idea or picture of it. This wisdom did not enter through these faculties nor did they behold any of its apparel or color. Yet the soul is clearly aware that it understands and tastes that delightful and wondrous wisdom. On beholding an object never before seen in itself or in its likeness, one would be unable to describe it or give it a name no matter how much one tried even though understanding and satisfaction were found in it. And if people find it so difficult to describe what they perceive through the senses, how much more difficult is it to express what does not enter  through the senses. The language of God has this trait: Since it is very spiritual and intimate to the soul, transcending everything sensory, it immediately silences the entire ability and harmonious composite of the exterior and interior senses.

We have examples of this ineffability of divine language in Sacred Scripture. Jeremiah manifested his incapacity to describe it when, after God had spoken to him, he knew of nothing more to say than ah, ah, ah!. Moses also declared before God, present in the burning bush, his interior inability (the inability of both his imagination and his exterior senses) [Ex. 4: 10] . He asserted that not only was he unable to speak of this conversation but that he did not even dare consider it in his imagination, as is said in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 7:32). He believed that his imagination was not only unable to speak, as it were, in the matter of forming some image what he understood in God, but also incapable of receiving this knowledge.

Since the wisdom of this contemplation is the language of God to the soul, of Pure Spirit to pure spirit, all that is less than spirit, such as the Senses, fails to perceive it. Consequently this wisdom is secret to the senses; they have neither the knowledge nor the ability to speak of it, nor do they even desire to do so because it is beyond words.

[The Dark Night, Book Two, Chapt. 17, Sect. 3 and 4; Transl. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez; ICS Publications]

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