Counsels to a Religious on How to Attain Perfection
A brief letter of spiritual direction, written by John of the Cross for an unnamed friar who had asked him how to reach perfection. It survives among the short counsels that circulated in manuscript among the Discalced Carmelites alongside the Cautelas, and it belongs to the years in which John — novice master, rector, prior, confessor to friars and nuns of the Teresian reform — was answering that question constantly. His response is not a devotional program but a compression: four counsels, which he claims cover everything, so that whoever keeps them needs nothing further.
The first is resignation. Live in the house as though no one else were in it, John says; take no more notice of the affairs of the others, good or bad, than if they did not exist. Then the image that gives the letter its force: consider yourself a rough stone brought into the monastery to be carved, and the brethren craftsmen whom God has commissioned to work on you — some planing you with words, some with deeds, some by holding you in low regard. Refuse this and you will not overcome your own weakness or come to peace. The second counsel is mortification, set against three enemies: the world, which is the easiest to defeat; the devil, harder because his workings are obscure; and the flesh, most tenacious of all because it is bound up with self-will, which must be crossed rather than negotiated with. The third is the practice of virtue for God alone — hidden, unnoticed, without regard for whether anyone sees or esteems it, choosing by preference the harder and less agreeable thing and refusing to skip a work because it looks small. The fourth is solitude, bodily and interior: a forgetting of creatures so that God alone remains as companion. Nothing here is asceticism for its own sake. Each counsel clears ground for union, and John offers no consolations along the way, assuming a reader who wants God more than comfort.
The letter has lasted because it is the Ascent of Mount Carmel without the architecture — John's doctrine in a form that can be read in ten minutes and worked at for years. Its diagnosis of communal life, where the chief mortification is other people, has kept it in use in formation houses for four centuries.
Who should read this: those living under a rule or in close quarters with others — religious, ministry teams, shared households — who want John's teaching before undertaking his longer works. Not for readers looking for gentleness or permission to tend themselves, and not a safe text for anyone in a coercive or abusive situation, where "consider yourself a stone to be struck" is counsel that will wound rather than free.