John of the Cross

The two short rules — nine cautions, and four counsels

1542–15919 cautions · 4 counselsBoth completeFree to copy

…never set your eyes upon the sweetness of them so as to cling to it, but embrace rather that in them which is unpleasant and troublesome.

The third caution against the flesh

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The Rules

John of the Cross is read for four long works — the Ascent of Mount Carmel, the Dark Night, the Spiritual Canticle, the Living Flame of Love. Beside them sit two very short pieces of practical direction, written not to be expounded but to be obeyed: a page or two of flat, exact instruction for a friar who asked how to live.

They are the least literary things he wrote and among the most useful. What destroys peace in a small community, on this account, is not persecution or hardship but gossip, comparison, attachment to one’s own family, opinions about the superior, and the pursuit of pleasant feelings in prayer. The remedy is the stripping of the Ascent brought down to the twenty feet around a man.

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The Texts

The CautionsNine cautions against the three enemies of the soul — the world, the devil and the flesh — entire, in David Lewis’s 1864 translation, with the 1864 printing’s marginal glosses restored to the margin the printer set them in.

The Four CounselsResignation, mortification, the exercise of the virtues, solitude — entire. No free English of this one existed, so the English here was made from the Spanish for this edition and dedicated to the public domain, with John’s Spanish printed beside it.

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The Commentary

The Rules Behind the AscentToledo and the Carmelite reform, the prison and the escape, where these two pieces sit against the four great treatises, and why one of the pair had to be translated here rather than reprinted.

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This Edition

The Cautions

The Complete Works of Saint John of the Cross, of the Order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, vol. II, translated by David Lewis (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1864), pp. 307-313. Public domain. Published 1864; the translation's copyright expired long ago.

The Counsels

English made for this edition from the Spanish of the 1912 critical edition and dedicated to the public domain under CC0. The Spanish is printed beside it.

Not used

E. Allison Peers (1934, rev. 1953) and Kavanaugh & Rodriguez (ICS, 1964 onward) are the standard modern English versions. Both remain in copyright. Neither was consulted or reproduced.

Generated

Both pages are generated from JSON by build_john_of_the_cross.py and are never hand-edited.