Romances on the Gospel 'In principio erat Verbum'

A sequence of nine ballads in the plain octosyllabic assonant meter of Spanish popular song, composed by John of the Cross during or immediately after his nine months of confinement in the Carmelite priory at Toledo, where he was held from December 1577 until his escape in August 1578 as a captive of friars opposed to the Teresian reform. He had no library, little light, and for much of that time no paper. What he made there he made from memory: the opening stanzas of the Spiritual Canticle, and this cycle, which takes the first verse of John's Gospel as its text and turns it into narrative verse a lay brother or an unlettered nun could carry in the head. Unlike the Canticle, the Ascent, and the Living Flame, the Romances carry no commentary from their author. The poetry is the whole of the teaching.

The cycle begins before creation, inside God. The Father and the Son love one another, and their loving is a third who is one love with them; John states the Trinity not as doctrine to be defended but as a conversation overheard. Out of that conversation comes a decision: the Father will give the Son a bride, and creation is made for the wedding. The middle romances give voice to the long ache of the ancients waiting for the promise, the Father and Son deliberating over how the marriage can be consummated across the gulf between divinity and flesh, and the answer — that the Son will take the bride's own nature so that the two may share one table, one life, one lot. The final romance arrives at the manger and states the great reversal flatly: what had always belonged to one now belongs to the other, so that God weeps and humanity rejoices, and each has taken up what was formerly foreign to it. The whole cycle is an argument that the Incarnation is not a rescue operation appended to a failed creation but the reason creation was undertaken at all, and that the exchange of goods between God and the soul begins in Bethlehem rather than in the soul's effort.

Who should read this: anyone who wants John of the Cross before the ladders and negations — the doctrine of union stated as gift and betrothal rather than as ascent — and anyone looking for Trinitarian and Incarnational theology that can be read aloud in Advent without commentary. Especially useful for readers who have found the prose treatises forbidding. Not the place to go for practical direction in prayer or for the psychology of the dark night; there is no method here, and readers hoping for the dense symbolic ambiguity of the Canticle will find instead something deliberately clear and catechetical.