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Continuation of Commentaries
on the Maxims on Love of St. John of the Cross
by Fr. Bruno Cocuzzi, ocd
Maxim 48 - Part II
The purest suffering
produces the purest understanding.
We
go now to complete the fourfold task we set for ourselves at the beginning of
Part I of this commentary on Maxim 48.
We've considered the meaning of the word suffering at some
length, now we will try to get as complete a meaning as possible for the word
understanding.
One
obvious meaning of the verb to understand is associated with
language. We are able to understand
a language when we know the meaning, or better the ideas associated with
and conveyed by the individual words or group of words spoken in that
language. But because we ordinarily
think of the ability to understand as a function of our power of reasoning, we
can exclude this first meaning as not relevant to this particular Maxim. That
is, it seems evident that St. John of the Cross did not have this meaning of
“understanding” in mind when he wrote it.
Another meaning of the verb to understand is
found in the context of giving instructions or giving explanations. Here a person not only knows the meaning
of individual words or phrases in the instruction or explanation, but, in virtue
of his power of reasoning, is able to perceive how they fit together: (1) to yield a future desired result or
state of affairs, or (2) to reveal the cause or causes of an accomplished result
or state of affairs. (1) above
refers to instructions, (2) to explanations. But they are related in that the
perception of HOW the steps in the instruction work together to yield a
desired result or state of affairs, produces a perception of the CAUSE or CAUSES
of the accomplished result or state of affairs..
In
our commentary on Maxim 30, part I, we had occasion to reflect upon Wisdom. There we saw that it is a knowledge of
all things in their deepest relationships.
There, too, we spoke of Wisdom in terms of technology, namely, how to use
knowledge of things in their deepest relationships to produce desired
results. Therefore, what we have
said in the previous paragraph tells us how Understanding differs from
Wisdom, and at the same time shows that understanding generates
Wisdom.
In
the example of understanding instructions, the person who gives
the instructions has the Wisdom required to know how to achieve a
given result or state of affairs.
The person who has the understanding to follow the instructions
successfully then perceives how the various steps fit together to become the
cause of the desired result or state of affairs.
From that we see that Wisdom and Understanding are
alike in that each are concerned with cause and effect. At the same time, we see that Wisdom and
Understanding are different, in that Wisdom has to do with knowing how to
achieve future results, whereas Understanding has to do with knowing how an
existing result or state of affairs came to be. Wisdom is forward looking, or,
prospective. Understanding
is backward looking, or retrospective.
And
yet there remains one more meanings of the verb to understand which
occurs quite often. It has to do
with motivation or with purpose. In this situation understanding
serves to answer the question why?
Here, the connection between cause and effect may be apparent, and most
often the agent who caused the effect is apparent, that is, known. What is not known is the reason
why the result, or now existing state of
affairs, was brought about. When the answer to the question why? is
known, then we have this other meaning of the word,
understanding.
When we compare the former meaning of understanding,
which we said is concerned with the relationship between cause and effect, with
this latter meaning concerning purpose and motivation, we see that the latter is
concerned with an even more primitive cause than the former, immediate cause,
and is also concerned with a result beyond the direct effect of the immediate
cause. In other words, the
understanding of motive or purpose has the effect of seeing a particular result
or state of affairs as located in a larger and wider scheme or view of
things. One way of grasping the
difference between these two meanings of the word understanding is to think of a
mosaic. Understanding how a
particular little piece of the mosaic was chosen, shaped and set in place in a
mosaic is analogous to the knowledge of how the immediate cause produced
its direct effect. But, stepping
back and looking at the whole mosaic and understanding why that
particular color of tile was chosen, why it was given the shape it has and why
it was placed in that particular spot in the mosaic is analogous to
understanding the direct result in terms of its place or value in the over-all
scheme or view of things.
But
I think there is a better example that illustrates the meaning of those two
types of understanding. It is a
story which our own Dianna called to our attention. It is the story of the man who was
watching a butterfly struggling to emerge from its cocoon. As you recall, the hole through which it
was trying to emerge was so small that at one point the butterfly seemed to be
stuck, and no further progress was made.
So to help the poor thing the man enlarged the hole with a pair of
scissors, and the butterfly emerged quite easily and appeared with a swollen
body and shriveled wings. He then
expected to see the wings expand and unfold, to see the swollen body shrink and
finally to see the butterfly take flight.
But that never happened. It
spent the rest of its life walking around with a swollen body and shriveled
wings. Now here is the most
important and relevant sentence in the story: "What the man in his kindness and haste
did not understand was that the restricting cocoon and the struggle
required for the butterfly to get through the tiny opening were God's way of
forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly into its wings, so that they
would fully expand and the butterfly would be ready for flight once it achieved
its freedom from the cocoon." Now I
don't have to tell you where the two kinds of understanding are present in this
story. The first: squeezing through a tiny opening
caused an emerging butterfly to have a slender body and fully extended
wings. The second: having the slender body and fully
extended wings enables it to fly.
That was God's motivation, that was His purpose in having designed this
way of bringing butterflies out of their cocoons. The answer to the question Why? is
known, and that locates the result in God's overall scheme of
things.
That completes the second part of the fourfold
task. Now we have to inquire into
what St. John of the Cross means by purest suffering and purest
understanding.
We
begin by asking the question: When
is something said to be pure? If
that substance happens to be air, water, salt, sugar, fruit juice or any common
household commodity, then we say that the substance is pure when it
contains no foreign matter, no substances different from itself. Pure means free of
contamination. That surely is a
true and proper meaning of the word pure.
But
we have also heard expressions like pure genius or pure
logic. A thought or a work of
art proceeds from pure
genius when it seems to come directly into the mind and operation of the
thinker or the artist from a source outside himself. A deduction based upon pure logic
would proceed entirely from previous intellectual knowledge and reason,
without the reasoning process being contaminated by feelings or emotions. That is, the reasoning person is free of
prejudice or bias.
Again, we are very familiar with the expression
purity of intention, or pure in heart. When one's motives for acting,
whether they be religious in nature or not, are completely free of all self
seeking and desire for personal benefit or gain, they are said to be
pure.
Now
we run into a difficulty. Once
having decided that the word pure means free of contamination, can we
really properly use the adjective forms purer and purest? A thing is either pure or not
pure. One pure substance is not
any more free of contamination than any other pure substance. Adding a tiny speck of foreign matter to
a pure substance doesn't, strictly speaking, make that substance less
pure. It causes it to be
impure. Thus, we have to
admit that we always use the word pure in an improper sense. Perhaps it is because it is practically
impossible to find any substance or to produce any substance that is completely
free of foreign matter. Therefore,
we can and do use the word pure in a relative sense. If we had three samples of the same
substance, and it turns out that one sample has very little, that is, a
negligible amount of foreign matter, we say it is pure. If each of the others had less foreign
matter than the first, each would be purer than the first. And if one contained less foreign matter
than the other two, it would be the purest. It is in this sense that we apply the
word purest to both suffering and understanding in this Maxim
48.
With regard to suffering, we must apply the term to the
three kinds of suffering we identified in Part I of the Commentary on this Maxim
48. For a particular kind of pain
or sorrow to be pure, it would have to be devoid of any co-existing comfort,
pleasure, or joy. When we consider
the body and the various ways it can suffer, we have to acknowledge that certain
of the senses can be experiencing delight while others experience the equivalent
of pain. So, for the body and
physical suffering, that would be purest in which most of the senses are
experiencing pain, and perhaps one or another of the senses experiences only a
very little bit of comfort or delight.
Practically speaking, in regard to physical suffering, severe pain in any
one of the senses or combination of senses usually overcomes and obliterates any
comfort and delight another sense
may be enjoying. We could then call
that purest, physical suffering.
Pretty much the same would be true of emotional suffering and
supernatural/spiritual suffering.
That is to say, one may be experiencing emotions that cause grief and joy
at the same time. One may be
experiencing certain spiritual/supernatural sorrows along with certain
spiritual/supernatural joys. When
the sorrows are so grievous that they all but obliterate their respective
emotional joys or supernatural/spiritual joys, then, too, we can speak of
purest suffering in their regard as well.
Nevertheless, we must say, too, that a lower form of
suffering can be rendered bearable, at least, or negligible, at most, by joys of
a higher order. For example, we
know that parents very often must suffer greatly from physical discomfort or
fatigue in the process of doing all those things that bring well-being and
happiness to their children.
Nevertheless, the emotional joy they experience in knowing that they
really love their children can and does render the suffering negligible in their
estimation.
Another example, which we have already had occasion to
mention, is that of Jesus Himself on the Cross. His physical and emotional sufferings
could not have been greater. Yet
real and painful as they were, they were still very little when
compared to the spiritual joy in His human soul that sprang from His knowing
He
Now
then, what would be the meaning of the phrase purest
understanding? As we
have described it above, understanding has to do with knowledge of the
relationship between immediate cause and direct effect, on the one hand, and
with knowledge of motivation or purpose, on the other. In the one, how things came about
or could come about; in the other, why the agent caused something to come
about. The more completely one
knows the intimate details of the process by which a cause produces its effect,
the purer is the understanding. The
more completely one knows the purpose for which the agent produces a certain
effect, again, the purer the understanding. In other words, lack of complete
knowledge as to how things happen and lack of complete knowledge as to
motivation and purpose are both the things that contaminate
understanding.
After all that, we can finally consider this Maxim 48 in
its entirety. We have to decide
whether all three kinds of purest sufferings are included by this Maxim, and if
not, which one or ones does St. John of the Cross have in mind? We have to ask the same thing about
purest understanding.
It
seems to me that we must say that all three kinds of suffering are embraced by
this Maxim and it seems to me, likewise, that both forms of understanding are
included in this Maxim. I think,
too, that in this Maxim we can restrict the application to one Agent alone, Who
is God Himself. In fact, the
question Why? that we ask is itself restricted to one subject alone, and that
subject is itself a part of the Maxim.
In my opinion St. John of the Cross is concerned about the problem of
suffering itself. In other words,
purest suffering produces purest understanding of the HOW and WHY of suffering.
But here we no longer consider God as the agent or cause, but as one who permits
suffering. For ages the human race
has been asking the question (that is, those who believe in a GOOD GOD): Why does God permit suffering? By this Maxim, St. John of the Cross is,
I believe, telling us three things.
1. the answer to why God
permits suffering is found in the experience of suffering itself. 2.
the purest and most complete answer to why God permits
suffering is found in purest suffering. and 3. Purest suffering gives us the purest and
most complete understanding of how sin is the root cause of all suffering.
To
help us find a way to make the truth of this Maxim bear fruit in our own
personal lives, we will reflect upon the experience of St. John of the Cross
himself, which experience enabled him to write his poetry and all his other
works. As Doctor of Mystical
Theology he is a most reliable guide to union with God in Love through the
practice of prayer and relentless self-denial. He himself personally is proof of the
truth of this Maxim because of his own experience of purest suffering, i.e, in view of his experience, as a
child, of abject poverty, and later
because of the sufferings he endured while a prisoner in Toledo. I think we must say that he considered
himself so tremendously blessed by the understanding he gained from his
sufferings, that, when asked what reward he desired for his extraordinary labors
for God and souls, he asked for more suffering, as if he were asking for the joy
of greater understanding.
When St. John of the Cross began to write for his
spiritual sons and daughters, he had already endured most of his purest
sufferings. So when we look at his
Ascent of Mt. Carmel, we see that he has an extraordinarily clear and
complete knowledge of the effects of un-resisted appetites in the soul. In that work St. John does not speak of
the appetites as sinful, though it is evident from his works that allowing
appetites to gain control eventually plunges a person into mortal sin, driving
God's life, charity, out of the soul completely. Thus we can see that St. John of the
Cross' purest suffering must have given him the purest understanding of how sin
is the root cause of all suffering, too, which is #3 of the three
teachings of this Maxim, as listed above.
After showing how the voluntary appetites cause so much
damage in the soul, St. John of the Cross then begins to teach us the
means by which that damage can be repaired. The means consist of those things which
rid the soul of voluntary appetites completely. He does not have to talk about how to
avoid sin, the deeper cause of that damage, because his spiritual daughters and
sons, for whom he writes, have already made a definitive break with deliberate
sin. How interesting that the very
means that St. John of the Cross teaches are themselves a form of
suffering. That is because the
voluntary appetites are only destroyed by a profound and thorough program of
self-denial, which of course, is experienced by body and soul as suffering. Because voluntary appetites exist in the
senses, in the emotions and in the supernatural realm of the spirit, we see that
sufferings of all three kinds is, and must be, produced by a program of
self-denial if it is to be effective.
This Maxim tells us, then, that as we inflict suffering upon ourselves by
self-denial, the more pure the suffering is, the better we understand how
the suffering of self denial produces its effect of destroying the voluntary
appetites. Of course, we know the
reason why the suffering of self-denial is imposed: It is to prepare us for complete Union
with God in Love by ridding the soul of the obstacles that stand in its
way..
Thus far we have been speaking of what the individual
soul can do by self-imposed suffering, which is what the Ascent of Mt
Carmel is all about. St. John's
suffering must have been very, very pure, since it enabled him to understand
very clearly and completely that the personal, active, self-imposed self denial
does not suffice, but that God Himself must place us upon a path of suffering
imposed from without in order to complete the work. That is why St. John of the Cross wrote
the Dark Night, which deals with the passive purification or passive
repair of the damage done by sin and the voluntary appetites. It is here that we can locate Maxim 48
in our own personal journey toward union with God. The purer our sufferings are, the purer
our understanding of both how it works to unite us more closely with God,
and the better our understanding of where we and our suffering fit into God's
overall plan for the good of the Church and the Salvation of
souls.
That was supposed to be the end of this commentary. Later it occurred to me that we can try
to list in order, the ascending order of purity in sufferings. This is just speculation on my
part, beginning with the least
pure:
(1) sufferings caused by our own personal
sins.
(2) sufferings caused by the sins of
others.
(3) self-imposed sufferings as part of
active purification.
(4) inevitable sufferings due to trying to
serve God in a fallen world (passive purification)
(5) suffering caused by love of God and
neighbor (purer as holiness increases).
(6) sufferings of Jesus & Mary, who were
totally sin-less.
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This web site was created for the purpose of completing the work of Fr. Bruno
Cocuzzi, O.C.D These conferences may be reproduced for private use only. Publication
of this material is forbidden without permission of the Father Provincial
for the Discalced Carmelites, Holy Hill, 1525 Carmel Rd., Hubertus, WI 53033-9770.
Texts for the Maxims on Love were taken from The Collected Works of St. John
of the Cross, by Fr. Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D. and Fr. Otilo Rodriguez, O.C.D.
1979 Edition. Copies of the book are available at ICS Publications, 2131 Lincoln
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