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Continuation of Commentaries

on the Maxims on Love of St. John of the Cross

by Fr. Bruno Cocuzzi, ocd

Maxim 76.

Take neither great nor little notice of who is with you or against you and try always to please God.  Ask Him that His Will be done in you.  Love Him intensely, as He deserves to be loved.

It seems to me that in order to take this maxim seriously and endeavor to put it into practice one would have to be engaged in working to achieve some objective.  The objective would have to be more than something purely personal, that is one that affects no other person, but one that has some kind of an impact upon the other people among whom one lives.  I say that because only if others are going to be affected in some way by objectives we are pursuing, would it be possible for some to be with us and others to be against us.  But if we remember that St. John of the Cross intended this maxim for Friars and Nuns he was teaching or directing, then it appears that it isn’t necessary to be engaged in the pursuit of any social objective, because otherwise most of those Friars and Nuns would be able to ignore it, and surely St. John would never have given it to them.  So it would seem that St. John is talking then about people with whom we find favor and those with whom we don’t find favor.  The former would be the ones for us, and the latter against us.  I think this observation is accurate because of what follows the admonition to take neither great or little notice of who is with and who is against.  What follows is the admonition to try always to please God.  I think it is typical of human nature for us to show our gratitude to those who favor us by trying to please them.  Also, we tend either to avoid doing anything that might offend those whom we sense are not favorable to us, or we tend to try to do what might obtain their favor from them in place of disfavor.  Both trying to please one who favors and trying to diminish disfavor is something that would be found in communities of people whose members are in daily contact with one another.  Such a community would be a house of Religious, Friars or Nuns.  So it does seem correct to say that, in this maxim, “to be with someone” means to favor someone, and “to be against someone” means to hold that someone in disfavor.

Now we can consider why St. John of the Cross asks, or rather, advises us to try always to please God rather than take any notice of those in our daily lives who favor or disfavor us.  Well, clearly, because otherwise, that is, by taking notice of favor or disfavor, one is bound to fail to please God all the time.  So a further question is, “By what mechanism does taking note of those who favor or disfavor cause us to fail to please God always?”  We can try to find the answer by considering some of the ways we act, in response to, or some of the consequences of, having someone in community either for or against us.

It seems to me that when someone is for us, which means kindly disposed toward us, such a person is going to be accepting of us, no matter what we do.  Again, with a person who is favorable to us, we can do pretty much as we please and that person is not going to criticize or find fault with what we say and how we conduct ourselves.  As a result it is not likely that we will feel a need to change, or even inquire whether we can improve, because those who are with us and favor us would rarely notice our faults and failings, and if they did, they would make excuses for them rather than point them out to us.

Now probably some of you are thinking, well, if those who favor me won’t point out my faults, surely those who are not kindly disposed toward me will point out my faults and insist that I change for the better.  That sounds very good in theory, but is it true in practice?  Well if a person is really and truly humble and therefore likely to put into practice the teaching of St. John in maxim 33, then yes, taking note of those not kindly disposed toward us could and would lead to our changing for the better.  That maxim says in part: “Allow yourself to be taught, allow yourself to receive orders, etc.. and you will be perfect.”  But most of us are not that humble and we react differently to those who hold us in disfavor and are against us.

It seems to me, in view of fallen human nature, that when people either don’t like us or don’t like the way we conduct ourselves, that we tend to get hardened into the very conduct that is deemed faulty and unacceptable by them.  We tend to find reasons to justify that conduct and to persevere in it.  We tend to say: “Who does he/she think he/she is that gives him/her a right to tell me what to do or not to do.”  That feeling of wounded pride that leads to hardening ourselves against acting differently also tends to blind reason and disrupts logical thinking so that we don’t see the elements of truth that are contained in the criticism of our conduct, and which justify another’s unfavorable attitude toward us.  Therefore, by not taking note of favor or disfavor toward him, a person is more likely to see and admit that he has faults and failings, and also more likely to undertake the necessary efforts to overcome them.  This results in a person being less attached to his own will, and less stubborn in resisting the “druthers” of other folks, and therefore less likely to try to impose his own will upon the situation in which he finds himself.  It should be clear to all that the more we try to make our own “druthers” prevail, the greater the risk of departing from God’s will for us.  No wonder St. John of the Cross concludes the first sentence of Maxim 76 by advising us always to try to please God.

Next in Maxim 76, St. John advises that we ask God that His Will be done in us.  I think that his use of the passive tense is significant.  When we are passive we are not acting upon what’s around us.  They are acting upon us.  They being those among whom we are living or working.  In effect, this second sentence of the maxim is saying, by implication, that the very people who act upon us are really agents for God Himself, through which agents God accomplishes His Will in us.  This same second sentence, then, is a reminder that God loves us so much that He is attentive to our needs at every moment of our existence.  And more than that, God Our Father not only wants to supply what we are lacking, He is ever desirous of conferring more and better gifts and favors upon us.  What a wonderful source of consolation and encouragement that truth can be for us, if we only advert to it from time to time.  If we can only form the habit of seeing God’s will and purposes in everything that happens to us, we ought also to find it easier to remain at peace and free of anxiety.

The final sentence of the maxim, “Love Him intensely, as He deserves to be loved,” gives us the opportunity to inquire into what is meant by “loving intensely” and into how that is to be done.

One way to interpret that phrase is to recall Maxim 36 which in part says:  “Love consists ..in suffering for the beloved.”  So if loving and suffering for the Beloved are identical, then “loving intensely” means “suffering intensely” for the Beloved.  Or, as we said in the reflections on that maxim, it is our love that is the cause of our suffering for our Beloved.  At that time we did not inquire into whether or not the suffering caused by love is an ongoing thing.  We know, of course, by instinct, that love is not genuine unless it is ongoing.  Love, being of God, necessarily shares in the attributes of God, one of the most essential being that He is eternal.  Therefore a true love, once it begins to exist in the heart and will of a human being, has to be forever, also.  Another thing we said in the reflections on Maxim 36 was that, because Jesus loved all of us at every moment of His mortal life on earth, pain and sorrow was a permanent feature also of that life. It derived from His seeing the great harm we humans inflict upon our own souls and the souls of others by our sins.  Because it was a hidden, interior suffering, we have no way of gauging its severity.  But surely it had to be commensurate with the atrocious physical suffering He endured, and which we can gauge to some extent, because of the scourging, crowning with thorns, way of the cross, and crucifixion. 

Thus, at least one way of loving God intensely, as this maxim advises, would be to beg earnestly and insistently for greater and greater love of God, and never cease asking until the suffering of mind and heart we endure from seeing how we humans hurt our own souls and the souls of others as a direct result of our sins, begins to become really quite intense.

In other reflections on one of these maxims we said that the only way we know whether we love someone or something is by examining our desires for that person or thing.  We pointed out that the most fundamental form of love is “benevolence.”  Hence, we know for sure we love someone or something only if we sincerely desire good for that person or thing.  we’ve also seen the other side of this coin, since we’ve mentioned that, because we desire good for a loved one, we cannot but experience pain and sorrow when evil, instead befalls that loved one.

Getting back to the third sentence of Maxim 76, it is safe to say that we can always keep trying to stir up our desires to see good things befall our loved ones to the highest degree of intensity.  If we succeed in doing that, then we surely have succeeded in “loving intensely.”

We said also somewhere in the reflections on these maxims that we cannot help loving what we perceive as good.  It follows, then, that in order to “love intensely”, we would have to have an “intense” experience or perception of the “goodness” of the person or thing loved.  With regard to “purely spiritual” persons and entities, that would translate into an “intense awareness” in the intellect of how extremely GOOD is the person or thing we love.

So in order to obey the admonition of St. John of the Cross in this 76th Maxim we would have to keep before our minds eye and fresh in our memory all the evidence of the infinite GOODNESS of God, as manifested in the proofs of how infinitely great is His love for us.  The more intensely we let ourselves be moved and touched by those proofs of how infinitely great is His love for us.  The more intensely we let ourselves be moved and touched by those proofs, the more intense our love for God would become.

Finally, we said, in commenting upon a previous maxim, that our benevolence is a joke if we fail to translate our desire for the good of another into doing what we can actually do to confer good upon the loved one.  To love a lot, we would have to do as much as we can to confer all the good it is within our power to confer.  Then we love intensely if we are intense in our efforts to do just that.  If it turns out that, in the course of making those intense efforts to confer good upon God, our Beloved, we have to endure intense suffering of mind or body or soul, then that would be perceptible evidence that we are loving God intensely.  All of which now brings us full circle back to where we started, when we said that “Love consists... in suffering for the Beloved.”  So that completes the reflections on Maxim 76, since there is no need to comment on the truth we all know so well, namely, that God deserves to be loved intensely.  But we would be remiss if we failed to acknowledge that, even if God were to receive all the love which all human beings and all angels were capable of giving, this would be far, far, from being enough.  Only the individual Divine Persons are capable to loving one another as fully as each deserves, because each of them is deserving of an INFINITE LOVE.

Maxim 77.

Twelve stars for reaching the highest perfection:  love of God, love of neighbor, obedience, chastity, poverty, attendance at choir, penance, humility, mortification, prayer, silence, peace.

It seems to me that this Maxim represents the only place in his writings that St. John of the Cross speaks of stars.  I find that surprising.  Because he was a great lover of nature, and saw in the beauty of nature evidence of the infinite beauty that is God.  Surely, the delight the beauty of nature gave to his senses in turn reminded St. John of the goodness of God which delighted his heart in an even greater measure and degree.  I think anyone who has looked up at a clear sky on a moonless night away from the artificial lights of a city has to agree that the beauty of the sky is breath taking.  I am sure I am not alone in wondering why mention of the stars is not found in St. John’s Spiritual Canticle.

And yet this Maxim suggests that St. John of the Cross was indeed familiar with the night sky because, since the dawn of mankind on earth, human beings saw groupings of stars in the sky that reminded them of things they were familiar within their daily lives.  The twelve signs of the zodiac are such groupings and we call them constellations.  Unfortunately, we do not see all the stars as well as did the ancients because the lights on earth nowadays are too bright and too numerous for us to become as familiar with the night sky as they were, and surely as was our Holy Father St. John of the Cross.

So it seems evident to me that the twelve stars mentioned here are to be understood as the components of “highest perfection” the way each of a grouping of stars is one of the components of a constellation.  Take one of the stars away from say, the Big Dipper, or Orion, and the figure is incomplete.  Take away one of the twelve stars of this Maxim, and ordinary perfection, not to speak of highest perfection, disappears.

It would be nice if we could say that the twelve stars of this maxim are listed in order of importance, with love of God as the brightest in the constellation and all the rest each less bright than the other proceeding.  But that wouldn’t be true to reality.  In any of the constellations in the night sky the stars are of varying degrees of brightness.  I myself have experienced that I can see one of the stars in the Big Dipper and one of the stars in Orion’s belt only if I look a little bit to one side of it.  Perhaps in the same way certain of the twelve stars in this maxim contribute less to highest perfection than certain others.  Still, all of them are needed or “highest perfection” is wanting.

But perhaps more helpful to us in our spiritual life than knowing the varying contribution of each of the “stars” of this Maxim 77 to “highest perfection” is knowing how each of them is related to the complete and total Will of God for each human being.  We can speak of a total, complete and “over-all” Will of God because there are various components of our human nature, and so there must be different things God wills for each of the different components of our humanity.  God has not created the heart, for example, to function in the same way as the intellect, nor to be concerned with the same things as the intellect.  Each has it’s own proper function and proper object.  Thus God’s Will for each of them and for each of the other distinct components of our human nature is that each be occupied with its proper object and activity. One of the maxims in this series, #38, touches on this fact.  It both teaches and admonishes: “Not all the faculties and senses [of human nature] have to be employed in things [all at the same time], but only those which are required [by God’s Will]; as for the others, leave them unoccupied for God.”

It seems fair to say, therefore, that when all components of our humanity (powers, faculties, senses) are occupied with all those things and only those things that God Wills, and to the exact extent and in the exact measure God wills, then highest perfection is reached.  So now, let us see if we can identify the things each of the stars in this maxim need to be occupied with in order to conform perfectly to the will of God.

The first star in the constellation is Love of God.  It is easy to identify which of the faculties must be at work in this star, as well as its object.  The faculty is the Will; also known as the “Heart” and the proper object of the Will is God Himself.  We have frequently said, in the course of these conferences on the Maxims, that the proper object of the Will is GOODNESS, so it is God, the Trinity, under the aspect of Goodness that the will must be occupied with in this star of the constellation.  But love of God here can also be interpreted to mean the Supernatural virtue of Charity, and therefore as something dynamic.  It seems then, that, perfection is not attained unless the human will of the believer is occupied with all the things that are manifestations of God’s Love, and God’s love is manifested by His Will.  So when we want, or will, all those things and only those things that God wants, then we have this star, or component of highest perfection.  Among those things are the first three commandments of the Ten, which three deal with God Himself and our duties toward Him. 

Since some of the other “stars” mentioned in this Maxim are virtues, it seems that this first star represents at least the virtue of Religion.  What this means is that not only our heart, or will, is occupied with God, but also other faculties of our human nature, all under the direction of the Will.  The reason for that is because the chief act of the virtue of Religion is Worship, an all-embracing term.  It includes acts of adoration, praise, love and thanksgiving, all of which are sometimes symbolized and expressed through “sacrifice.”  In the exercise of the virtue of Religion, therefore, not only the will, or heart, is occupied with God, but also the intellect, the powers of speech and song, the faculties of movement and bodily control and even the senses.  Not that the latter are concerned with God directly, since God is a pure spirit, but only the material things that lend themselves to acknowledging and embracing the Truth about God and His relationships with us His Human creatures.

The next star in the Constellation is Love of Neighbor.   In it we also have an explicit declaration of what the powers of our humanity need to be occupied with in order to have this in our lives as a component of “highest perfection.”  That object, or objects, are our fellow human beings.  Here again the human heart, or will, is one of the faculties that must be occupied with neighbor, and here again, other facilities of our humanity under the direction of the will.  As in the case of “love of God” the first star, we were able to associate with it the virtue of Religion, so also in the case of love of neighbor we have a virtue, really, virtues associated.  It is the virtue of Justice and its affiliated virtues.  We also have seven of the Ten Commandments which instruct us as to what justice and its allied virtues require of us in our relationship with our neighbor.  However, justice and its allied virtues have to do with duty and obligation, whereas love goes above and beyond duty and obligation.  So “highest perfection” requires more than justice.  It requires a love that resembles the love that Jesus has for His neighbors (all of us).  We are to use our faculties as He did in loving us, and we are to allow ourselves to be acted upon as He did in loving us, and we are to allow ourselves to be acted upon as He was acted upon, when that was necessary to give evidence of the truth that He (and His Father) love us.

A little while ago we said that it is by sacrifice that we render to God all that we owe Him, to the extent we are capable, by the exercise of the virtue of religion.  Sacrifice is also necessary in regard to this second star in the constellation of “highest perfection” though it is related to love rather than to justice.  Here we must sacrifice our own ease, talents, time and personal temporal interest to the greater spiritual good and interests of our neighbor in order to place this second of the twelve stars in position as a component of “highest perfection.”

We will treat of the other ten stars of Maxim 77 as the first part of the next conference in this series.

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MISSION STATEMENT: 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 Rd., N.E., Washington, D.C. 2002-1199, Phone: 1-800-832-8489.