Baroque and Mysticism. Apophasis and Synesthesia in the Poetics of Reversal of Vision in Saint John of the Cross’s Cántico Espiritual 

Di Alejandro Alvarez Herrera Lasso 

In: Semicerchio LVI (01/2017), “(Neo)Barocco. Poesia del Seicento nella teoria contemporanea”, pp. 20-30. 

Introduction 

Baroque and mysticism 

In his highly influential book from 1975 La cultura del Barroco J.A. Maravall makes the following assessment regarding Early Modern Spanish mysticism: 

Es frecuente […] unir Barroco y misticismo y ambas cosas ligarlas al carácter y a la espiritualidad españolas. Pero observamos que el misticismo es en España una forma de religiosidad importada que procede en ella de Flandes y Alemania, para pasar después a Alemania y Francia—aparte, en todo momento, del caso de Italia—. Ese misticismo español es un fenómeno muy delimitado y corto en el tiempo, y en el siglo XVII no queda nada de él, cuando, inversamente, la floración de la mística francesa y sobre todo alemana son espléndidas. […] Finalmente, los aspectos que caracterizan al misticismo, por lo menos tal como se dio en España—en Santa Teresa, en Juan de la Cruz […]—, son francamente diferentes a los del Barroco; son más bien antibarrocos, sin que obste a ello el fondo común de filosofía escolástica que en uno y otro lado se halla. (Maravall, 37) 

These few sentences comprise almost the entirety of La cultura del Barroco’s assertions about mysticism in its relationship with the baroque. Their inclusion in the introduction of the book serves the purpose of ‘clearing the field’ to be able to narrow down that work’s, by now, classical concept of baroque—a culture where the ascent of the absolute monarchy entailed a concerted effort by the elite to produce and circulate an array of cultural artifacts aimed at ‘directing’ the emerging ‘masses’ away from chaos and into a strictly stratified ethos determined by blood, morals, entertainment, and loyalty to a courtly monarchy at the head of a bureaucratic state. Leaving the national discussions hinted at aside, and the vagueness with which ‘scholastic philosophy’ is established as common background to both baroque and mysticism, I would call attention to the starkness of the judgement: mysticism, according to Maravall, is not only not-baroque, but decidedly anti-baroque. There is no support or further elaboration for this claim, other than the preemptive estimate that «Spanish mysticism is a very limited and short-lived phenomenon». While there is much to be said about the strategic move to side-line marginal cultural movements that deviate from the book’s explanatory framework, this is not the place to do so. 

All I will note is that, even following the argumentative logic of La cultura del Barroco the claim is baseless. Maravall goes to great lengths to prove that the ascent of absolute monarchy happened partly to the detriment of the religious establishment of the time, and thus, religious movements in and around the baroque need to be regarded as consequence, effect, or accommodation of the needs of political power. In many instances his analysis backs up this thesis, however, a bias emerges with regards to religious practices in general whereby they are treated as means to the end of reaffirming the new social and political structure. Insofar as mysticism has a tangential, and to a certain extent, conflictive relationship not only with the central political powers, but with Church orthodoxy, it is clearly a case, if we follow Maravall’s logic, of an anti-baroque movement. Yet, if this is so, how do we explain the appropriation of St. John of the Cross’s, St. Teresa’s or St. Ignatius Loyola’s hagiographic personae by the Catholic Church, three of the most prominent mystics of all time? How do we account for the impact their works had not only in grassroots religious movements, such as the reform of the Carmelites or the expansion of the role of Jesuits in higher education, but also in vernacular literature? And all within a Spanish context? 

What I propose is a modest contribution to the larger task of accounting for the historical process of emergence of the highly improbable social structure and accompanying semantics of what modern scholarship has shaped into the concept of ‘baroque’. More narrowly, I want to explore discrete semantic elements which, while clearly were the product of discursive innovation of Early Modern Spanish mysticism, were flexible enough to escape the confines of that movement and blend and morph into innovative practices of production of sense at a time when as Maravall notes, correctly, structural and semantic instability became acute focal points for semantics spread across a wide variety of discursive forms and a long span of time. 

More recently, scholarship in the baroque has come around to recognizing the entanglements between baroque and mysticism, and one of the principal keys to comprehend this pairing is apophasis. In her 1984 La Raison baroque Christine Buci-Glucksmann provocatively picks up the thread of a metaphor that Nietzsche harnesses to level criticism at Western philosophy’s obliviousness to its own blind spots. The metaphor associates woman and night: 

But this night is one of potential desire and pleasure [jouissance], the night of an abyss which makes things visible. It is a baroque night—mystical perhaps. For it concerns the non-representable nothing, which has perpetually haunted Western philosophy as its ‘oriental’ Other, its limit, its difference. (Buci-Glucksmann, 129) 

Of all possible contents one could unfold for either pole of the metaphor, Buci-Glucksmann stakes her argument with some very familiar to apophatic mysticism: the yearning for the limit of the possible (‘the non-representable nothing’); the abyss; the possibility of compounding night and abyss in a paradoxical darkness whose potential and function it is to ‘make things visible’; the pleasure derived from ‘blind’ immersion into the unknown; desire as motor, and so on. She posits the ilk of this ‘night’ as self-evidently ‘baroque’ and further details it explicitly with the adjective ‘mystical’. In true apophatic style, the ‘perhaps’ in her formulation serves the purpose of turning the ‘mystical’ element in her description into a hypothesis, something that can be un-said further along the way and whose instability conditions everything else affirmed theretofore. 

Admittedly, there is a certain distance between, on the one hand, establishing the ‘Other’ of Western philosophy as ‘woman’; ‘woman’ as ‘night’; ‘night’ as ‘baroque’ and perhaps ‘mystical’, and, on the other, affirming the irruption of mystical apophasis in the baroque via the fememine/nocturnal reason that negatively mirrors the Western canon. And yet, while the issue for Buci-Glucksmann is primarily ‘woman’, the elements that she stresses would doubtless legitimize the pursuit of just such a mystical-apophatic trend going into the baroque. And while one could retroactively brandish feminist approaches in the face of the school of criticism that arouse in the wake of Maravall’s work, it would do little to clarify the processes at stake. My attempt in this work will be, at least partly, to test out Buci-Gluckmann’s ‘perhaps’ against the evidence contained in Sain John of the Cross’s 1578 poem Cántico Espiritual to elucidate one possible specific way in which the doubtlessly baroque ‘woman-night’ (the Other of the West) found a footing in that time-period to unfold its ‘haunting’ potential. 

In specific, this work is concerned with operations of production of sense associated to the semantics of vision in the mystical poetry of St. John. I argue that, in the opening decades of what was later deemed ‘Siglo de Oro’, a blooming of mystical writing that found in Saint John and St. Teresa its two most notable authors, ushered in, from long-standing mystical tropes and modes, novel operations of production of sense by deploying ‘vision’ in an operational tension between apophasis and paradox. Furthermore, I will attempt to show that the condition of possibility for this deployment is a specific metaphorical mode that dislodges the semantics of vision from their optical/perceptual referents and places them as basal elements of ‘impossible’ operations; what I will heuristically and anachronistically call synesthesia1. Finally, I will attempt to show that what was at stake in this novel deployment of the semantics of the operations of vision in synesthetic mode was the problem of acquisition of identity at a time when the sources of ontological certainty are known to be undergoing a crisis of sense. These hypotheses will be tested against a close reading of certain stanzas of the Cántico Espiritual in which an operation of reversal of vision (reversal of sense, directionality, and function) brings into sharp focus theological issues of apophasis (the foundational mode of negative theology) and the reliance upon synesthetic linguistic resources to refer, accommodate, suffer, and productively deploy the paradoxes inherent to the issues of apophasis. Thus, I hope to show, paradox, one of the Baroque’s preferred discursive mechanisms, rhetorical preoccupations, and target of so much reflection amongst authors across the decades and genres of Siglo de Oro literature, finds possibility for its specifically baroque sophistication at least partly in mysticism. 

In order to better deploy the textual analysis, it might be pertinent to clarify from the start a few of the concepts that capture the stakes of the hypothesis. First I will summarize the tenets of mystical apophasis insofar as they entail operations that revolve around paradox. Then I will explore the entanglements between apophasis and the ‘synesthetic mode’. Then the close reading of the verses in Cántico Espiritual will trace the ‘reversal of vision’ which at once nods to apophasis and necessitates synesthetic mode in order to be deployed. By way of conclusion, I will show some instances in poetry and prose from the Baroque period, where the entanglement of apophasis and synesthetic mode, as analyzed in the Cántico Espiritual is prominently featured, albeit deprived of the initial theological context that conditioned Saint John’s writing. 

Apophasis and paradox 

In his 2006 The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism historian Bernard McGinn succinctly defines apophasis by its contrast with cataphasis in these terms: 

In Christian belief all things are manifestations, or teophaniae, of God their Creator. But God also is infinitely beyond his creatures since they are defined by their limited nature. The first truth founds the way of cataphasis, or positive speaking about God based on creation, while God’s infinite otherness founds the way of apophasis, or the negative speaking in which all statements must be unsaid in deference to God’s hidden reality. (McGinn 281) 

Whereas official Church doctrine is commonly based on cataphasis, the mystical tradition of the Christian West has tended to award apophasis a central role in the soul’s journey towards henôsis (which translates as ‘union’, but in the context of mysticism is referred to the mystical union whereby the soul and God momentarily and mysteriously become one). However, the binary code in which apophasis and cataphasis are frequently presented (McGinn 287, Leonard xiii, Green 11-12) may obscure the particularities of each term and the nature of their relationship. As stated above, I will try to see in mystical apophasis a basal element of the ascent of paradox as a poetic mode that speaks to problems of attribution and conferral of identity during the baroque. To be more precise: I will try to establish a link between the apophatic mode in mystical poetics in the period that precedes the baroque in Spain, and what would, well into the baroque, become a preferred rhetorical operation of deferral of definition in operations of conferral of identity. In light of this aim, I consider it important to show the elements of apophasis as indeed condition of possibility for paradox. 

Although these elements are best understood in terms of the contrast between apophasis and cataphasis, it is important to note that the binary structure itself is heuristic and that it, in turn, inaugurates a paradox: both modes simultaneously negate and absolutely concede the fundamentals of one-another. Cataphasis and apophasis are not opposites, nor are they antithetical. Insofar as cataphasis can be understood as the ‘positive’ way towards God, it is aimed primarily at salvation. With regards to apophasis, even referring to a ‘way towards’ is misleading, since it gives off the impression that the source of effort for movement is the soul that ‘seeks’ God, when rather, the nature of the semantics of movement in apophatic pronouncements, is anything but clear or unidirectional. Furthermore, the aim of apophasis is not primarily salvation or redemption but rather henôsis, a union so far removed from the limitations stemming from human finitude that it is impossible to say anything certain about its ultimate effect in the soul’s efforts for transcendence. This is not equivalent to affirming that mystical union precludes or catalyzes salvation, rather I only note that as an endpoint it is radically different from it. So the first obvious difference is a difference of direction, the vector that orients the discourse in each mode of approximation to God points to its own finality. Whereas cataphatic discourse supports doctrine (and we need not conflate ‘doctrine’ with ‘orthodoxy’ which is the result of mobilizing organized religion’s mechanisms of consensus), apophatic discourse is concerned with ‘un-knowing’ what cataphasis temporarily establishes as acceptable propositions about God. Though apparently conflictive, the relationship between the two modes is, rather, productive: cataphasis will never presume to do away with the radical mystery that accompanies any theophany and apophasis cannot subsist as an irreflexive, positively propositional mode of observation, it requires cataphatic pronouncements to initiate its contemplative journey. Symbiotic as it may be, the relationship between catapahsis and apophasis it is neither critical nor dialectical. The conditions of possibility of each mode are not to be found in one-another. The ‘sources’ of theophany that make it into the cataphatic mode come from various instances, from scripture to the Church Fathers, from prophetic mysticism to missionary accounts; and apophatic discourse needs not systematically target cataphatic interpretations of theophany in order to come about, rather, apophasis finds its own point of inception, recursively, in the extreme inherent improbability of theophany, regardless of where and how it is recorded. This recursive mode of operation is key to understanding apophasis. Thus, even for reasons beyond anachronism, cataphasis cannot be equated to a thesis and apophasis with its antithesis since there is no ‘higher’ state of resolution (synthesis) where both modes’ propositions meet. The relationship between cataphasis and apophasis is, rather, paradoxical: while each mode states, in its own way, that the other is impossible (apophasis would assume cataphatic statements to be ultimately impossible to prove, while cataphasis would depart from the undeniability of theophany regardless of its mysterious ilk); each mode absolutely concedes the other in order to found its own possibility: cataphasis knows that its pronouncements of and about theophany are radically uncertain and in that uncertainty recognizes the indicators of theophany, while apophasis finds no way of and no use in denying that theophany occurs and that it is pertinent upon those privy to the manifestation to do their best to communicate about it. 

Apophasis will question whether anything that is known about God can be known at all and it does so following a tactic of encirclement: on the one hand it presupposes by God an unrestricted capacity to be something other than what is said, that is, radically mysterious. On the other, it focuses on inherent human limitations to know at all. In fact, it goes further insofar as it focuses on limitation as the indication of the human («God also is infinitely beyond his creatures since they are defined by their limited nature», in McGinn’s formulation cited above), and the lack thereof as an indication of the divine. In this sense, apophasis’ focus reveals itself to be the distance that separates that which seeks to be entangled and the entanglement that it seeks, a distance that reveals itself to be coded in terms of yearn and desire. At once, the apophatic gesture raises and productively deploys the paradox: the knowledge of the unknowable (which by its orientation becomes ‘ignorance’, unknowing, nonknowing, and the like) makes the impossible possible. In other words, the irresistible yearn for access to God despite evidence of its impossibility, makes the possibility of God one that is impossible to negate. Insofar as apophasis is a practice and knowledge of ‘distance’, that is, not of elements but of a form of relationship; unknowing, nonknowing, unsaying, negating, and all related verbs in the semantics of apophasis, despite each term’s nuance, speak to the common theme of perspective. It is only in perspective that this practice can be sustained by its expectations. At the heart of apophasis there is the radical realization of finitude and limit, terms which no matter how irreducible, always call for relation to their counterparts, and in that relation, a point is founded: the point from where the relation is sustained. This is the foundation of «[…] negative theology—the way of negating in speech that which can be said of an excess, the infinity that escapes speech» (Keller 17). What is relevant about this nodal point for this particular work is that the poetics of the Cántico espiritual turned it into a mobile point, and a mobile point whereupon perspective is founded, is a promising breeding ground for paradox, since, while for defining and describing a point in a fixed context linear logic may suffice, whenever the point is revealed to be mobile, the temporal element of movement makes it impossible for linear logic to provide definition, thus, paradoxical logic needs to be called upon in order to account for the elusiveness of the point’s status as a foundation for relationality. In this sense the temporal nuance in the poetic rendering of the mobility of the founding point, is paramount to avoid communicative rejection, and the Cántico Espiritual is rife with it. From this a more general hypothesis may be formulated: over-complexity in the poetic management of temporality may be an indicator of an effort to avoid a paradox’s unproductiveness, since only time unfolds paradox (i.e. one problem of paradox with regards to sense is a problem of simultaneity: A cannot be A and not A at the same time)2. When that is the case, the stress of the analysis may legitimately fall back in the operations of relationality of the semantics rather than in its elements. 

Synesthesia and apophasis 

This brings us to the issue of the synesthetic mode. Nuance in the management of temporality is both sustained and complemented in St. John’s poetics with language that refers to bodies and the operations they perform. In many relations of the mystical path to henôsis the soul is traditionally dislodged from the body in order to perform certain operations that would not be possible for a physical, temporal, and limited being. In the Cántico Espiritual St. John adds a twist to this tradition, for he re-incarnates the soul and describes its kinetics using the language of sensory perception. Yet, as it quickly becomes evident, this is not a mere return to the physical and creaturely body that perceives the world through the senses, rather, sensory perception happens, throughout the poem, in ‘impossible’ ways. 

As I have argued, the decisive paradoxical twist of apophasis consists in founding the possible on the impossible. St John’s poetic innovation in the Cántico Espiritual for the depiction of this paradox consists on attempting to shift the stress away from elements and into relationality by deploying two gestures: first absence is invoked as the motive of the poetic action; second, the point of departure of the relation between presence and absence being explored is mobilized. The opening stanza in the Cántico Espiritual begins with a question: «¿Adonde te escondiste,/Amado, y me dejaste con gemido?» (San Juan, 77) The verses comprise a double gesture for remarking absence: the question marks invite doubt, and the language in the past tense, turns absence into a loss. This opening poetic strategy has the effect of instilling a familiar tone of mourning in the poem, one that spoke to the preceding mystical tradition of an ‘absent body’ (or ‘corpus mysticum’, see De Certeau, 79) however, for all its commonplaceness, it also has the effect of reversing the poetic ‘gravitational force fields’: the focus is not a positive presence, nor, in De Certeau’s formulation, ‘the site of a disappearance’ (De Certeau, 79-80), but the effect that a never-witnessed presence’s absence has on a mourning poetic voice. A specular poetic mode is thus introduced that will define the structure of the whole poem: the only way to get a glimpse at that which is lost is to observe the effects of the loss in the voice that owns the loss. 

Immediately after, the poem turns to narrative action where verbs occupy a prominent role: «Como el ciervo huiste/ aviéndome herido;/ salí tras ti clamando y eras ido» (San Juan, 77 my emphasis). Movement is invoked in the face of absence by loss. The base-line of identity attribution, the poetic voice, who did not linger on a lengthy and symbol-rich description of the object of her yearn, immediately goes into the unknown chasing after what is lost. By this point, the only referent of what is lost is an adjective, capitalized out of respect: ‘Amado’. One cannot overstate the significance of this double poetic strategy to the problem facing the mystical tradition in the seventeenth century. According to Michel De Certeau, the mystical (initially identified with ‘sacramental’), one of three bodies to stand in the stead of the never-found body of Christ (the other two being the ‘historical’ and the ‘church’) in the Christians’ pilgrimage through history from Resurrection to Parousia, shifted its theological function pressed by profound sociological as well as doctrinal/ discursive changes that took place over the course of three intense ecclesiastic reformation centuries: the fourteenth through the seventeenth (see De Certeau, 85-112). From sacramental (eschatological) mediator between the historical body of Christ (the living community of believers) and the Church (the vicarious institution that codified Christian behavior through doctrine), that is, as link between imperfect historicity and ideal finality; it turned into an open-ended operation of futurity, as De Certeau writes: «Little by little, with the growing awareness of the need for Church reform […], ‘mystic’ came to mean the body to be constructed […]» (De Certeau, 84), moreover: 

A different conception of time and presence was therefore entering upon the scene. Another indication of this was the new position given the term ‘mystic’. In the three-body scheme of things, the mystical occupied the last position (and often had, moreover, an eschatological value). It stood in opposition to the positive terms, as an invisible to a visible, a goal to creative functions, or the whole to motor organs. It revealed a different time, a different space. It beckoned toward the purpose of a productivity, or the direction of a journey to be undertaken ‘beyond’ all present points of reference. It would henceforth be with the help of the legible body of the origins, and/or the visible sign of the Eucharist, that a mystical Church body would have to be ‘invented’, in the same sense in which there was to be an invention of the New World. (De Certeau, 84) 

Having founded its poetic action in a receding absence by loss, the Cántico Espiritual seems to insert itself fully and frontally into this endeavor of inventing the mystical body. In the poem, the marks of the mystical will be the marks of the impossible, the marks of the invented will be the marks of the operations being impossibly performed, the marks of the body will be the referents of bodily operations being rendered plausible in synesthetic mode, a heuristic label by which I designate sensory operations that are deployed in an impossible mode. 

The synesthetic mode is but one of the poetic trends that accompanies the reconversion of apophasis in Saint John’s work. It is a symptom as well as an innovation, not so much for its content but for the tactical pervasiveness with which it is employed. However unstable the current conceptuality for literary synesthesia might be, I will take it up to address synesthesia in the following terms: a case of metaphoric semantics that draws from language related to the sensorium and preforms transfers of sense between distinct sensory semantic fields. So I will work within the narrow confines of the type of synesthesia here identified as, first, verbal; second, literary and, third, metaphorical. By making the senses operate in codes that are alien to them, the synesthetic mode will, in Saint John’s work, enable poetics to make an absence the seat of a mystical body, and the yearn for union with it (Amado) the kinetics that, contrary to prior mystical tradition, mobilize not the soul but the body that is the aim of her desire. This is the case of the operation of ‘reversal of vision’ that I shall be analyzing in this paper. Vision, working impossibly to trans/conform (in a most tactile registry), that which it sees; specular unfolding, serving to project embodied desire (in a most gastric registry) and turn bodily sensations into meaning; paradoxical identity conferral, and so, meaning codified to endure, through the transformational power of vision. Apophasis, thus, gets enacted in the subtle code of synesthesia to be able to accommodate the shifting social and discursive function of mysticism in the late sixteenth century, and the origin that the mystical body claims as foundation of its legitimacy: a body that after death could not be found, the promise of its reintegration into history, the need to re-invent that body, and the uneasy feeling that the promise of its ultimate apparition references a horizon rather than a point. 

Having shown how the synesthetic mode serves to deploy the paradox of apophasis in a productive way, we can now proceed to analyze the stanzas where this entanglement is most starkly made operative throughout the Cántico Espiritual. 

1) «Mil gracias derramando/ pasó por estos sotos con presura,/ e, yéndolos mirando,/ con sola su figura/ vestidos los dejó de hermosura.» (San Juan CE, 78) 

These verses sing the prosopopoeial answer that forests and meadows (‘criaturas’) give the seeker (‘esposa’) of the Loved One (Amado). They inaugurate a pattern that will traverse the Cántico Espiritual and will ultimately reveal, as I will comment in detail, the operations of production of sense that arise from apophasis and paradox and are made possible by synesthesia. The pattern is a poetic reversal of vision whereby ‘seeing’ is not an operation of perception insofar as it is not inventorial, but rather, transformational: «yéndolos mirando,/ con sola su figura/ vestidos los dejó de hermosura». It is a seeing that, in a way, creates or transforms what is seen; this pattern of reversal of vision provides with one of the most extreme cases of synesthetic vision in the baroque. 

A vision that creates what is seen, or at least perfects it, as it is being cast. The descriptive force of the poetics lies on the movement of the Loved One, as referenced in the use of the verb ‘derramando’ in the gerund. We are at a point in the poem where the first poetic voice is seeking the Loved One spurred by ‘her’ desire3. The impossibility of this vision is highlighted not least by the fact that, unlike visions described by the more standard ‘humbled’ poetic voices of previous mystic traditions, the motive of the vision here is not the contemplation of the Loved One but the effects that He ‘leaves behind’ for a witness that, longing for Him, follows closely behind his footprints. That is, unlike other mystical poetry where the journey towards mystical union is undertaken through contemplation and it is only the contemplative poetic voice that moves ‘towards’ an immobile fulfillment of vision; in San Juan’s Cántico Espiritual the aim of the erotic mysticism is a moving target, so to speak. Thus, the kinetics of the poem are not anchored in the mystic’s journey, but in the path signaled to the mystic by a (lost) preceding and receding poetic force. Already a hint of apophasis is entailed in this poetic operation, the larger point being that, when it comes to mystical union, the contemplative’s efforts are futile for it is not his endeavors that will achieve it, but rather the gratuitous acquiescence of a graceful and elusive Loved One who, by moving, sets the path of the mystical journey and the rhythm of the poetics that sing it. Also, it opens the poetic space to the need to encode the journey towards the union in synesthetic mode. A vision doubly impossible: on the one hand, vision capable of creating what it sees as it sees it, on the other, vision invisible, for a dynamic like the one described above would be impossible for any creature to witness. Thus the need to beckon to the meadows and the forests: an impossible operation of witnessing must be assembled whereby the absent and absconding Body of the Loved One can be known and followed by the signs that its bounty leaves behind. 

The simultaneity of the Loved One s’ gaze and its transformational effects on the world is highlighted by an even more sophisticated use of the gerund than that of the verb to spill (‘derramando’), namely that of the compound verb which literally translates as: ‘going about looking’ (‘yéndolos mirando’). The reflexive inflection of the compound inextricably links together world and gaze, a gaze that is not ‘outside’ the world, nor self-aware of its detachment from it, but, in fact, oriented exclusively to transforming it by its entanglement with it through overabundance. Thus, far from constituting a mere projection of the mystic’s own visionary patterns unto those of the ineffable ‘It’ of his/ her endeavors, this passage subverts the foundations of the mystical mode itself. 

Vision, at least in this instance, is not yet revelatory, nor is it a transitory milestone on the way to mystical union, but rather a gratuitous, overabundant, and unavoidable effect of the passage of a (lost) presence that transforms without the need to recursively re-trace its steps in search of sense. Furthermore, nothing in the passage suggests that the Loved One would be imbued with purpose in His joyful wanderings, in fact, a possible reading could conclude that the behavior described in the verses is gratuitous: the Loved One cannot help Himself. That a seeker interprets the beauty spilled from His graces and Nature’s praise of it as signals towards his presence, is secondary. 

This subversion on the use of the semantics of vision creates an opening for apophasis to gain a foothold on the larger narrative of the amorous encounter between seeker and Loved One, transforming the trope of a beauty that is ‘meant’ for someone into the trope of a beauty that gives itself indiscriminately and, ultimately, senselessly. At the heart of this behavior lies a mystery: devoid of sense, grace is no longer salvific, not even revelatory, further highlighting the pointlessness of human strife to provoke it, harness it or derive any clear benefit from it. In the central and disruptive placement of apophasis as a constitutive element of contemplation, Juan de la Cruz stands out within the mystic tradition. Unlike his contemporary’s Teresa de Ávila’s works where warnings to transform visionary revelations into good deeds are a constant, in San Juan’s the doctrinal consequences of the mystical mode are largely absent. 

2) «Apaga mis enojos,/ pues que ninguno basta a desacellos,/ y véante mis ojos,/ pues eres lumbre dellos,/ y sólo para ti quiero tenellos». (Juan de la Cruz CE, 79) 

As the seeker gets closer to the Loved One the poetic voice shifts interlocutors: from a second person plural directed at ‘creation’ (‘las criaturas’ CE 78) to the second person singular directed at the ‘husband’ (Esposo CE 79). This progressive focus on a single interlocutor is paired with a narrowing down of the field of vision and an increase in the acuteness of the manifestations of passion and internal movements. Thus, from the forests and the meadows, the poetic voice shifts its attention towards what we could call, heuristically, reflexivity. This movement, from an ‘outside’ into an ‘inside’, is expressed in the semantics of sickness and injury («¡Ay, quién podrá sanarme!» CE 78) that begin in bodily metaphors («y todos más me llagan,/ y déjanme muriendo» CE 78 and further down, «¿Por qué, pues has llagado/ aqueste corazón no le sanaste?» CE 79) but quickly transition to metaphors of vision that reach such a degree of circularity as to place them in the vicinity of pleonasm or absurdity. The fragment under consideration is a case in point, the instance in the poem where the reversal of vision first explored in reference to the creative potency of the Loved One whose gaze is enough to transform a landscape (CE 78), travels back to the ‘esposa’s’ own gaze. And yet, differently from the Loved One, the ‘esposa’s’ gaze’s transformative powers are not endowed with simultaneity, nor are they gratuitous or overabundant. There is a certainty that the gaze is not merely inventorial, and yet, the full positive extent of what it is remains unclear. A way to understand the disparity could be the act/ potency distinction, whereby the Loved One’s powers would be actual whereas the seeker’s would be potential, but, as we will explore further down, the distinction mediate/immediate better clarifies the difference. 

The nature of the seeker’s vision is hinted at by pointing to its purpose: «only for you do I wish to have them [my eyes]» («solo para ti quiero tenellos»). It is unclear at this point whether ‘for you’ refers to an actual metaphorical offering where the eyes would be a metonym for the whole being, or to the actual operations of vision taking place, i.e. anything from the pledge to direct vision exclusively at the Loved One to the inevitability of the gaze being trapped by His powerful attraction. The difference is not minor since it entails a statement about its own fluidity in the vicinity of the Loved One. Is the seeker implying that her eyes take on the true meaning of their existence only when the Loved One is visible? Or is she professing an oath of fidelity whereby the free will is purposefully locked to the sight of the Loved One? The use of the verb ‘to want’ seems to point to the latter possibility, but if we turn to the preceding verse, we find support for the former: «pues eres lumbre dellos». The tension is not resolved. 

In true apophatic style, San Juan leaves both possibilities open and operative throughout the poem and thus inaugurates an asymptotic (which is to say impossible) pattern for the mystical union. This is revealed in the transposition of the creational qualities of the Loved One’s gaze unto the gaze of His seeker, the one condition for which is the relinquishment of the eye’s identity with the gaze. In other words, only insofar as the seeker is willing to admit that the ‘lumbre’ (both fire—reference to the erotic desire that tinges the semantics—and light— not as a quality but as the condition of possibility for any vision) is not an inherent quality of the eyes (something that would run counter to the mainstream metaphoric patterns of contemporary and later texts where eyes are commonly referred to as various types of celestial bodies and sources of light), can true vision occur. The staple of true vision? A transformational or creational effect on the being that is envisioned. This prompts some favored questions of the apophatic mystical tradition: where does God really dwell? Am I contemplating him or is he contemplating me? Who is being transformed in this rarefied dispossession of referents? The elucidation of which is what brings the radically apophatic San Juan closer to his more forgiving contemporary Teresa de Ávila. All is well so long as he unsays certainties about God, the soul and their relationship, but as soon as it becomes a matter of ‘figuring’ out the spatial contours of the apophatic drama, that is, of grounding it in semantics that purport to inform about mystical union, synesthesia not only becomes possible, but, to a certain extent, inevitable. 

Where do these contagious reversals of vision leave vision itself? Apart from productively oscillating to produce provisional meanings of a promise that cannot ever be fulfilled inasmuch as its elements and contents are permanently changing; in a state where its relationship to the senses, the body, and linear perception are radically questioned. If the ‘lumbre’ of the eyes was placed there by the Loved One, and if the vision of the Loved One is the purpose of the eyes, and if the mode of the vision is transformational rather than inventorial; then the eyes and their perceptive operations are mere recipients of a potency that senselessly and gratuitously grants them meaning. 

3) «¡Oh cristalina fuente,/ si en esos tus semblantes plateados/ formases de repente/ los ojos deseados/ que tengo en mis entrañas dibujados.» (San Juan de la Cruz CE, 79) 

One of the most enigmatic stanzas in the whole of Cántico espiritual, no. 11, conveys, in a distinctly synesthetic mode, a startling image of what later in the baroque would be developed as the trope of ‘desengaño’. The reference to the «fountain of silvery visages» entails a deployment of the semantics associated with the imagery of the mirror, a trope that from the Renaissance onward grew in use and complexity in all of Europe and would become a preferred vehicle for synesthetic uses of the semantics of the senses, especially, but not exclusively, those of sight. Unlike a conventional mirror, (the description for which would be based on semantics of optics and perception) the mirror invoked by the poetic voice is called upon to «suddenly conform» (in the sense of shaping something from raw material) the eyes that desire has etched into the entrails of the poetic voice. If we reverse the hyperbaton, the logic of an operation of production of sense is revealed: shaped by desire, a model is embedded in the seat of the poetic voice’s passion—the entrails; as it stands, the model is inaccessible to the desire that made it possible to begin with, because its immediacy locks the code of its design in a site that is not accessible for the normal channels of perception. Thus, the demiurgic capabilities of the mirror are invoked in order to decodify the model and transfer it from the multisensory/ passionate entrails (the place of the immediate certainty of presence) to the visual/bi-dimensional surface of the mirror (the place of the mediated construction of an image). The poetic voice, in other words, yearns for mediation in order to deploy what its desire craves. 

What is most astonishing is the final image that the seeker demands from the mirror: not the Loved One but a metonym of Him. A telling metonym, since the choice of ‘the eyes’ throws the visionary journey in a loop where a now familiar operation can take place: the reversal of vision. The poetic voice yearns for a vision that its desire seeks, but once the vision appears, its sense shifts the dynamics: it is not about ‘seeing’ something, but rather about ‘being seen’ by something. The sense of the desire is thus hinted at: not to access a revelation but to find comfort in the certainty that one can know oneself to have been revealed to the eyes of the Loved One. Thus, the seeker finds her own meaning, not in the fact that she envisions a particular content, but in the fact that she is envisioned by that which her desire pursues. 

Thus, the full synesthetic dimension of the passage is revealed: the highest truth of someone’s being is invisible and hides in an inaccessible locus. Insofar as it remains thus, it is the motive for ceaselessly seeking (a major motif of the mystics). The access to this truth is mediated by a demiurgic unfolding in a mirror that renders it into an image. The image itself is devoid of any content and only refers to the replication of the operation of vision. Thus, a mise-en-abysme opens up at the heart of the vision that completely drains it of its optical-perceptive elements to give way to pure meaning. The creational/transformational powers of vision as referenced in the effects of the Loved One’s gaze upon the forests and the meadows commented above, render its optical dimension useless, opening the floodgates for any number of multisensory and sense-production operations to take place in its name and use it as an empty vehicle or medium. As we shall shortly see, the full power of this kind of synesthetic vision is revealed in its apophatic undertone in stanza 23. 

4) «Cuanto tú me mirabas/su gracia en mí tus ojos imprimían;/ por eso me adamabas,/ y en eso merecían/ los míos adorar lo que en ti vían». (San Juan de la Cruz CE, 81) 

The stanza relates a moment much closer to the mystical union than the preceding ones: no more seeking, no more tracing the steps of the Loved One by following the transformations in the landscape, no more mirrors and mediations, finally, the famous call on stanza 6 to «Acaba de entregarte ya de vero;/ no quieras enviarme más ya mensajero» (San Juan CE, 78) has been heeded to. The gazes, already codified in synesthetic mode, meet. The symmetry is almost perfect, the circularity of the operation near complete. Only a slight difference in ontological dignity prevents the loop from closing into a circle: whereas the ‘esposa’ can only ‘adore’ what she sees, the Loved One can ‘imprint grace’ on what He sees. Thus, the operation of production of sense entailed in the use of vision in the Cántico Espiritual, reveals itself to be an operation of conferral of identity. The seeker’s being acquires sense by being dignified and graced by the gaze of the Loved One. Her gaze simultaneously acquires its ‘right’ meaning: give rise to adoration. The imbrication between being and seeing is at its pinnacle in this stanza: one is because one is seen: one is a vision of His. Thus, the transformational powers of vision come front and center, leaving its optical-perceptive elements in the distant background. Only when vision is synesthetic, does it have the power to create and, in a meta-level, self-refer to its creational role. 

That the seeker’s gaze requires mediation does not make it any less transformational than the Loved One’s. Her desire, and the mediation to which she submits what she intuits are its contents, have had the effect of ‘finding’ the loved one, in the sense of making Him visible. From there unto the mystical union the transit is relatively smooth. Ultimately, as we have seen, her identity is acquired by her own transformation, but this last transformation is not enacted by the gratuitous and overabundant gaze of the Loved One as rendered in stanza 5, but by His frontal gaze in mystical union. The Loved One’s transformative gaze might be unbound, but on the scene of mystical union it is focused, conferring meaning to the seeker’s quest by imprinting grace upon her; but also acquiring meaning by conferring it unto her. A qualitative leap has taken place in the transit from stanza 5 to stanza 23: the transformative effects of the Loved One’s gaze no longer result in mere superficial beauty («vestidos los dejó de hermosura» CE 78) but in mystical love whose sense it is to be adored («por eso me adamabas,/ y en eso merecían/ los míos adorar lo que en ti vían» CE 81), nor is his gaze gratuitous any more. The gaze and its powers have meaning now, having duplicated the mediated operation that was performed in stanza 11. The ‘mirror’ is now the seeker’s gaze: only when visible in the adoring and loved surface of her ‘eyes’ is the Loved One’s identity paradoxically revealed: He is who loves; He is this transformation in me; He is this imprint of grace, the only trace of his love; He is only insofar as I am. 

Conclusion 

Speaking to what these instantiations of a poetics of apophasis in synesthetic mode made possible for later rhetorical and poetic gestures, it is necessary to remark that in the Baroque, it is difficult to find the same operations of production of sense in such a condensed fashion. However, it is possible to find some examples of a variety of assemblages between the elements that have been analyzed. Apophasis, paradox, synesthesia and problematic identities, hoover over literary productions well into the century following Saint John’s works. 

Up to the point at which my research currently stands, it appears that during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries a decisive shift takes place in Catholic theological discourse, likely following the gradual implementation of doctrinal changes brought about by the Council of Trent (1545-1563) whereby apophasis fades from view as a theological mode while not only the synesthetic mode but all modes that are conditioned by the senses, the passions, and sensuality, acquire great prominence. In fact, this shift in theology away from the questioning of the foundations of the Christian faith and into the embodiment of divine grace is commonly taken to be a defining feature of the baroque. However, albeit stripped off its theological status, the apophatic mode still emerges fleetingly in the literature of the seventeenth century. And it does so still very much entangled with the synesthetic mode and around issues of identity conferral. 

Francisco Quevedo, for instance, recurrently resorts to apophatic undertones in synesthetic mode when he probes the poetics of death and ‘desengaño’ («y es lo peor que piensa que el delito,/ tan grande, puede estar a Dios secreto,/ cuya sabiduría/ la oscuridad del corazón del hombre/ desde el cielo mayor leerá más claro» [Quevedo, Salmo 14, 109]). 

Later in the seventeenth century, the subdued apophatic undertones stripped from theological authority seem to take divergent paths. On the one hand, we can see apophasis at work in Sor Juana’s Primero Sueño whereby the supreme mystery of epiphany is transposed to the desire to intellectually grasp the mysteries of nature through contemplation, and it is also apophasis wrapped in synesthetic mode («así ella [fantasy], sosegada, iba copiando/ las imágenes todas de las cosas,/ y el pincel invisible iba formando/ de mentales, sin luz, siempre vistosas/ colores, las figuras/ no solo ya de todas las criaturas/ sublunares, mas aun también aquellas/ que intelectuales claras son estrellas,/ y en el modo posible/ que concebirse puede lo invisible,/ en sí, mañosa, las representaba/ y al alma las mostraba» [Sor Juana, 167 my emphasis]). 

On the other, the horizon of the mysterious ‘interior’ of a person becomes the stage for deploying apophasis in synesthetic mode in the work of Jesuit Baltasar Gracián («Seréis hombres tratando con quienes lo son, que eso es propiamente ver mundo; porque advertid que va grande diferencia del ver al mirar, que quien no entiende no atiende: poco importa ver mucho con los ojos si con el entendimiento nada, ni vale el ver sin el notar. Discurrió bien quien dixo que el major libro del mundo era el mismo mundo, cerrado cuando más abierto; pieles estendidas, esto es, pergaminos escritos llamó el mayor de los sabios a essos cielos, iluminados de luzes en vez de rasgos y de estrellas por letras. Fáciles son de entender essos brillantes caracteres, por más que algunos los llamen dificultosos enigmas. La dificultad la hallo yo en leer y entender lo que está de las tejas abaxo, porque como todo ande en cifra, y los humanos coraçones estén tan sellados y inescrutables, asegúroos que el mejor lector se pierde» [Gracián, 611]) 

Granted, as a theological motif apophasis appears to have moved far to the margin in the baroque due to changes in a much larger scale in the entirety of Christendom, however, the poetics that it made possible and are best—though not exclusively—exemplified by Saint John of the Cross, persisted outside theology and served as condition of possibility for semantics that dealt with paradox, fraught identity, and cosmological uncertainty in specific and diverse discursive forms. From the picaresque tradition to the poetic heights of Góngora, Quevedo and Sor Juana, apophasis when deployed in synesthetic mode, served to navigate the gulfs of ontological obscurity so insistently alluded to in baroque literature and so thoroughly studied by recent scholarship, and insofar as the entanglement that we have analyzed in this work appears in baroque and Siglo de Oro literature, it is a direct objection to the assessment, by Maravall and others, that mysticism and Spanish baroque are antithetical. 

Works cited 

Barro, Ana; Shira Wolosky; Bernard McGuirk et al. Trajectories of Mysticism in Theory and Literature. Leonard Phillip (ed.), New York, McMillan, 2000. Print 

Certeau, Michel De. The Mystic Fable. Vol. I. The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Michael B. Smith (tr.), USA, The University of Chicago Press, 1992. Print 

Góngora, Luis de and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Soledades followed by Primero sueño. Antonio Alatorre and Antonio Carreira (eds.), 2nd edition, Mexico, FCE, 2010, Book, print. 

Gracián, Baltasar. El Criticón. 11th edition, Santos Alonso (ed.), Madrid, Cátedra, 2009. Print 

Green, John D. A Strange Tongue. Tradition, Language and the Appropriation of Mystical Experience in late fourteenth-century England and sixteenth-century Spain. Belgium, Peeters, 2002. Print 

Heidegger, Martin. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Richard Taft (tr.), 4th edition, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1990. Print 

Juan de la Cruz (San). Obra Completa 1. Luce López-Baralt and Eulogio Pacho (eds.), 3rd edition, Madrid, 2015. Print 

Keller, Catherine. Cloud of the Impossible. Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement. New York, Columbia University Press, 2015. Print 

Luhmann, Niklas. Theory of Society Vol. I. Rhodes Barret, trans. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012, Print. 

Maravall, José Antonio. La cultura del barroco. Análisis de una estructura histórica. 3rd Edition. Barcelona, Editorial Ariel, 2012. Print. 

McGuinn, Bernard. The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism. New York, Random House, 2006. Print 

Quevedo Villegas, Francisco de. Poesía varia. James O. Crosby (ed.), 17th edition, Madrid, Cátedra, 2014. Print 

Note 

1 There are two distinct fields in the study of synesthesia: the neurosciences and linguistics. Synesthesia was identified first as a field of inquiry for neurology in the nineteenth century, and later, in the 1980’s, became a staple in neuroscience academia following the works of scholars such as Marks, Cytowick, Baron-Cohen and Gray. The type of synesthesia that I will address in this study is commonly referred to as ‘literary synesthesia’. Reuven Tsur warns that: «One must distinguish between the joining of sense impressions derived from various sensory domains and the joining of terms derived from the vocabularies of the various sensory domains» (Tsur 30). Thus, he continues: «Literary synesthesia is the exploitation of verbal synesthesia for specific literary effects […]» (Tsur 30), Francesca Strik Lievers, for her part, situates synesthesia in linguistics in the following manner: «’synaesthesia’ [sic] in linguistics commonly refers to a metaphorical process of transfer from one sensory modality (source) to another (target): a perceptual experience related to one sense is described through lexical means typically associated with a different sense» (Strik Lievers 69-70). 

2 The formulation of this problem can be reached as conclusion to a number of well-known arguments and conceptualizations. Most famously, Martin Heidegger’s proposal of «The Transcendental Power of Imagination and the Problem of Human Pure Reason» in his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Richard Taft (tr.), 4th edition, USA, Indiana University Press, 1990, under heading 34: «Time as Pure Self-Affection and the Temporal Character of the Self» pp. 129-33. Also with a stress on the ‘unfolding’ of the paradox, within the context of Systems Theory as a problem of the autopoiesis of meaning, amongst other examples, as formulated by Niklas Luhmann in various instances of Theory of Society Vol. 1. Rhodes Barret (tr.), USA, Stanford University Press, 2012, passim: pp. 26-7, pp. 48-9, p. 82, and p. 219, amongst others. 

3 The edition of San Juan de la Cruz’s complete works that I used: San Juan de la Cruz. Cántico espiritual. En: Obra completa 1. Luce López-Baralt and Eulogio Pacho (eds.), 3rd edition, Madrid, 2015. Print includes two kinds of annotations in the Cántico Espiritual: a number at the heading of each stanza that produces a progressive count from 1 to 39, and stage directions that clarify which poetic voice is speaking at each turn. There are three poetic voices and four instances of shift between them: ‘esposa’, ‘esposo’ and ‘criaturas’. It is through these annotations that I assign gendered labels to the poetic voices throughout the analysis: ‘she’ for ‘esposa’; ‘them’ for ‘criaturas’ and ‘He’ for ‘esposo’. The reason I capitalize ‘He’ is that he is referenced in the body of the poem as the Loved One (Amado with capital A), a title that references God.