DOI: 10.7274/29551133
title: Breath of the Beloved: The Pneumatology of St. John of the Cross

description: In this dissertation, I argue that across his corpus, John of the Cross develops an integrated theology of the Holy Spirit’s identity in the Trinity and activity in the economy of salvation. Recently, systematic theological interest in John’s pneumatology has begun to increase. However, the literature on John’s theology of the Spirit itself has largely dealt with individual texts and distinct aspects of his thought. I examine how John formulates his pneumatology throughout his oeuvre, from his poetry to his four prose commentaries. I also attend to the previously unstudied relationship between his pneumatology and the pneumatology of the alumbrados, thereby offering new insights into John’s interactions with the mystical movements that defined his historical context. This dissertation thus provides the comprehensive and systematic analysis of John’s pneumatology that fills in these missing dimensions of the literature on John, and supplies resources for historical, systematic, and spiritual theologians to make greater use of his thought.

My thesis is that John develops his own systematic pneumatology that combines a theology of the Spirit’s procession and possession of the divine nature with a developed articulation of how the Spirit acts throughout the spiritual journey. Three central discoveries form the backbone of my argument. The first is that for John, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and Son as the movement of love by which the Son as the beloved indwells the Father as the lover and vice versa. Adopting Aquinas’s psychological analogy for the Spirit’s procession, John thinks that, in an act of love, the will forms into a movement of love that conforms the will of the lover to her beloved. He employs this psychology to propose a triad of love wherein the Spirit represents the love by which the Son as beloved indwells the Father as lover (and vice versa). I show that John then structures the whole arc of the Christian’s volitional transformation according to this understanding of the Spirit’s procession. Therefore, this first discovery invites scholars to rethink volitional transformation, a core aspect of John’s spirituality, in pneumatological terms.

My second discovery is that John uses novel theories of trinitarian re-surrender and appropriation to explain another triad of love, in which the Spirit is lover and beloved, just as much as he is love. I propose that John develops a nuptial form of appropriation, such that everything that belongs to one spouse also belongs to the other, including whatever is different from a given spouse by nature or custom. He applies this to the Trinity, so that the roles of the lover and beloved now belong to the Spirit by way of alterity as much as they belong to the Father and Son by way of similarity. Based on this exchange of roles, John posits that all three Persons re-surrender the divine nature to each other in a circulating pattern. Therefore, the three Persons are by turns lover, love, and beloved in relation to each other Person. I go on to demonstrate that for John, the Spirit’s operative gift of love to the ecclesial bride makes her love equal to the Trinity’s by cooperation. She thereby relates to the Spirit as lover, love, and beloved, in the circulation of the divine nature.

My third discovery is that John utilizes his trinitarian principles to articulate a theory of mediation that integrates the work of Son and Spirit across the spiritual life. He sets up a rhythm wherein the Spirit conforms created being to the Son, and the Son uses created being so conformed to pour out the Spirit anew upon creation. By means of this rhythm, John ties together the operations of Son and Spirit throughout the spiritual journey, from its origins in word and sacrament to its full flourishing in the bride’s conformity to the hypostatic union. In addition, this dissertation shows that John uses his pneumatology in general, and his theology of mediation in particular, to carefully adjudicate between the benefits and liabilities of alumbrado spirituality. This insight challenges scholars to reevaluate John’s relationship with the mystical movements of his own milieu.