Historical commentary on the Cautions and the Four Counsels
Two very short pieces of practical direction by the poet of the dark night — what they are, when they were written, why they read so unlike the great treatises, and why only one of them can be printed here. — the text
Juan de Yepes — John of the Cross — is known for four long works: the Ascent of Mount Carmel, the Dark Night, the Spiritual Canticle, and the Living Flame of Love. They are commentaries on his own poems, and they are the reason he is read at all. Beside them sit a handful of very short prose pieces, of which two are rules for living in a religious house: the Cautelas, nine cautions against the world, the devil and the flesh, and the Cuatro avisos a un religioso, four counsels on resignation, mortification, the practice of the virtues, and solitude.
They are the least literary things he wrote and among the most useful. There is no poem behind them and nothing to expound. A friar asked how to live, and this is the answer: a page or two of flat, exact instruction, addressed to you, with the reasons given and the consequences of neglect stated without softening.
John was born in 1542 into real poverty, trained as a nurse in a hospital before he was a scholar, and studied at Salamanca. In 1567 he met Teresa of Ávila, who was then some years into her reform of the Carmelite order, and who wanted the reform extended to the friars. He was the first of them. The reformed houses were small, poor, and deliberately austere — the descalzos, the discalced or barefoot Carmelites.
The reform was not welcomed. In December 1577 friars of the unreformed observance seized John and imprisoned him in a cell in Toledo, about six feet by ten, where he was kept some nine months and flogged publicly. He escaped in August 1578 by a window, having composed a great part of the Spiritual Canticle in his head, with nothing to write on. Everything he is famous for was written after that, and much of it while he governed houses of the reform — at El Calvario, Baeza, Granada, Segovia.
The two little rules belong to that governing work rather than to the visionary one. They are the writing of a superior who has watched what actually destroys peace in a small community, and it is worth noticing what he thinks that is. Not persecution and not the hardships of the reform, but gossip, comparison, attachment to one's own family, opinions about the superior, and the pursuit of pleasant feelings in prayer.
The apparent gap between these rules and the great treatises is a gap in genre, not in doctrine. The Ascent and the Dark Night describe a soul being stripped of everything it can grasp — images, consolations, satisfactions, certainties — until it can be joined to a God who exceeds all of them. That is the negative way, and it is why John belongs on this shelf beside Dionysius.
The Cautions are the same stripping, applied to the twenty feet around a friar: do not hold property, do not hold opinions about your brothers, do not hold on to the sweetness of your own devotions. The last caution against the flesh is the whole apophatic programme in one sentence of practical advice — never fix your eyes on the sweetness of a spiritual exercise, but take hold of what is unpleasant in it instead. The Dark Night explains at length why consolation is withdrawn; the Cautions simply tell a man not to chase it in the first place.
This is also why they can sound harsh. The counsel to treat one's own kindred as strangers is not misanthropy but the same logic applied to the strongest natural attachment available to a young friar; John says plainly that the duties owed to family are discharged better, not worse, by a heart that has not been divided. The reader is free to find the medicine too strong. It is at least consistent.
The Cautions appear here in the translation David Lewis published in 1864, whose copyright expired long ago. The Four Counsels appear in an English made for this edition, because none was free to use.
That is worth explaining. There is no public-domain English of the Four Counsels. Lewis did not include the treatise in his 1864 volumes, and the two standard modern versions — E. Allison Peers’s, and the Kavanaugh and Rodriguez translation issued by ICS — are both still in copyright. Owning a copy of one of them, as it happens this desk does, confers the right to read it and no right at all to republish it: the copyright in a translation belongs to the translator and his publisher, not to whoever owns a copy.
The Spanish, on the other hand, is entirely free. John died in 1591, and the 1912 critical edition prints the treatise under the heading Cuatro avisos a un religioso. So the English here was made from that Spanish and dedicated to the public domain under CC0 — the same thing this library did for the four passages Gibson refused to put into English in his Cassian, and for Gregory’s Life of Moses.
The base text was the difficulty. The optical character recognition of those particular pages is badly damaged — the first counsel survives in it as fragments — and the rule here is that nothing is translated from unproofread OCR, because a translation is worth precisely what its base text is worth. The Spanish was therefore keyed from the page images of the four leaves, and it is printed beside the English so that the translation can be checked rather than taken on trust.
One further decision is recorded on that page and worth repeating. The method this library follows permits a legally obtained modern translation to be consulted at the very end, for catching misreadings only. It was not consulted. The hazard in translating a text whose famous English versions one has seen is not misreading the Spanish but reciting a remembered rendering and mistaking recall for work; and an edition that never opened the copyrighted translation cannot have borrowed from it. The cost is that no independent construal has been set beside this one, which is the honest reason for printing the Spanish alongside.
They are short enough to read in a sitting and severe enough to be worth re-reading slowly. The marginal notes on the facing page are the 1864 printer’s summaries, not John’s, and they are a fair guide to what a Victorian editor thought the point of each paragraph was — occasionally a narrower point than the paragraph makes.
Lewis’s English is Victorian and formal, and he renders the Spanish religioso as ‘Religious’, capitalised, meaning a member of a religious order rather than a devout person generally. Read Religious as friar and Community as the house you live in, and the prose becomes considerably more direct.
No verdict is offered here. The text is set out as it stands, with its provenance recorded and its missing half accounted for.