John of the Cross
Spanish Carmelite friar, mystic and poet (1542–1591), born Juan de Yepes in Fontiveros, Ávila, into an impoverished converso family that knew hunger and hardship after the early death of his father, and, together with Teresa of Ávila, the towering figure of Carmelite mysticism and one of the three or four greatest poets in the entire Spanish language. Educated by the Jesuits and later at the University of Salamanca, he was persuaded by Teresa to join her reform of the Discalced Carmelites, and for this cause suffered brutal persecution at the hands of the unreformed Carmelites, who regarded him as a traitor: they abducted him and imprisoned him for nine months in a tiny, dark cell in the Toledo convent, subjecting him to regular public corporal punishment and near-total isolation; he escaped that prison spectacularly in 1578 by climbing down a wall on a rope made of knotted clothing, and it was there, or shortly afterward, that he composed much of his most celebrated poetry from memory. His three great poems —Dark Night of the Soul, Spiritual Canticle and Living Flame of Love— written in stanzas of extraordinary sensory and erotic beauty which he himself later glossed in dense theological prose commentaries, narrate the soul's journey towards union with God as a loving itinerary between the Beloved (the soul) and the Lover (God), passing through the 'dark night of the senses' and the 'dark night of the spirit', progressive and necessary strippings-away of everything that is not God himself, including even the subtlest spiritual consolations. His doctrine of 'nada' —nothingness as a purgative path toward the divine All— and his language, which naturally and strikingly fuses the biblical tradition of the Song of Songs with the secular love lyric of his time, make him, alongside Teresa, one of the absolute pinnacles of universal mysticism and of poetry in the Spanish language, declared a Doctor of the Church in 1926.