Jean Khoury
Summary: This article proposes and substantiates a historical and textual hypothesis: that St. John of the Cross knew and was influenced by the Theologia mystica of Hugh of Balma, Viae Sion lugent, a late-thirteenth-century Carthusian work which circulated in manuscript under Balma’s name but entered the printed tradition from 1495 onwards principally under the far more prestigious name of St. Bonaventure. The argument proceeds through several converging lines of evidence. First, the article reconstructs the bibliographical history of Balma’s work and the significance of its Bonaventurian attribution for its early-modern reception. Secondly, it considers the wider transmission of affective and aspirative mysticism through Henry Herp and the Carthusian tradition, and the subsequent entry of Balma’s text into the Spanish and Discalced Carmelite milieu through Jerónimo Gracián’s adaptation. Thirdly, it examines the direct testimony of Elíseo de los Mártires concerning John’s oral teaching on “anagogical and loving acts”, a testimony which provides an unusually precise point of contact with Balma’s doctrine of anagogical ascent and affective aspiration. The article then compares Balma’s aspirationes, affectus and actus affectus with John’s doctrine of the interior exercises of love, his teaching that the will can love without a corresponding increase in distinct intellectual comprehension, and his pneumatological theology of the fire of love in the Living Flame of Love. The argument is extended through the testimony of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who explicitly records that she had repeated John’s teaching on exercising oneself in love throughout her religious life. Finally, the article examines deeper theological correspondences between Balma and John: their distinction between scholastic and mystical theology; their threefold treatment of intellect, memory and will; and their Dionysian understanding of mystical contemplation as a supernatural knowledge which transcends the ordinary operations of the faculties. None of these correspondences, taken individually, proves literary dependence. The argument is cumulative. Taken together with the documented transmission of Balma’s work, its circulation under Bonaventure’s name, its possible reception within the Discalced Carmelite reform, and Elíseo’s independent testimony to John’s anagogical vocabulary, they constitute a serious historical case for reconsidering Jean Orcibal’s refusal to posit a dependency. The hypothesis advanced here is therefore not that John of the Cross simply copied Hugh of Balma, but that Balma’s affective and anagogical theology may stand among the significant medieval sources which John received, transformed and integrated into his own mature theology of love, contemplation and union with God.
Note: It may help considerably to understand the context of this article to read the following articles and texts: [The Anagogical Acts According to St John of the Cross] and [Spiritual Sayings Attributed to St John of the Cross, Fr Elíseo de los Mártires (A. Peers, vol. III)].
Introduction
Every historian of Christian mysticism knows that texts do not always travel under their own names. A work may circulate for centuries under an attribution which profoundly affects how it is read, valued and transmitted. Hugh of Balma’s Viae Sion lugent provides an especially important example. The work circulated in manuscript under different attributions, but its first printed edition, at Strasbourg in 1495, placed it among the Opuscula parva of St. Bonaventure. From there it entered the great printed editions of Bonaventure’s works and continued to be transmitted under the Seraphic Doctor’s name until the critical work of the Quaracchi editors restored its authorship to Hugh of Balma.
This bibliographical history is not merely an antiquarian curiosity. It raises a concrete question for the history of mystical theology. If a Carthusian work containing a highly distinctive theology of affective, anagogical ascent was available to sixteenth-century readers under the name of one of the greatest authorities of the Franciscan tradition, then the question of its influence cannot be answered simply by asking whether John of the Cross ever cited “Hugh of Balma”. The relevant historical question is rather: what theological text was actually available to John, under what name, through what channels, and within what intellectual and religious environment?
The work itself is important for this investigation because of the unusual character of its mystical psychology. Balma organises the ascent to God around the three traditional ways of purgation, illumination and union, but at its summit he places the affective movement of the soul towards God. His Quaestio unica asks whether the soul, according to its affective power, can be moved towards God by aspiration and desire without a preceding intellectual apprehension. His answer gives a distinctive priority to loving movement: the soul can be moved towards God through the affectus, under the action of the Holy Spirit, and can therefore advance towards union through ardent aspirations. Modern scholarship likewise identifies the anagogical movements and fervent aspirations of Balma’s theology as central to his account of contemplative ascent.
This distinctive structure provides the starting point for the present investigation, but not its conclusion. The argument is deliberately cumulative. It does not rest upon a single verbal resemblance between Balma and John of the Cross, nor upon the fact that both authors belong to the broad Dionysian tradition. Indeed, John himself stands within a much wider mystical inheritance, and many of the images and concepts found in his writings were already part of the common language of Christian mysticism. The question is whether, beneath this common inheritance, there are more specific correspondences which point towards a particular channel of transmission.
The first such channel is bibliographical. Balma’s Theologia mystica was not an inaccessible medieval curiosity. It was printed from 1495 onwards as a work of Bonaventure and remained within the Bonaventurian corpus for centuries. The modern critical edition notes that the Strasbourg incunable passed into the Roman edition of Bonaventure’s complete works of 1588–1596 and thence into subsequent editions until the nineteenth century. The work was therefore available to early-modern readers precisely through the authority of a theologian whom they already regarded as the Seraphic Doctor of mystical theology.
The second line concerns transmission. Balma’s theology did not remain confined to the medieval manuscript tradition. His work exercised influence on a succession of spiritual writers, including Gerson, Denis the Carthusian and Henry Herp, and scholarship has traced a wider line of transmission from Thomas Gallus and Hugh of Balma through Gerson and Francisco de Osuna towards Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross. The later appearance of Balma’s work in Spanish, culminating in Jerónimo Gracián’s Carmelite adaptation (early XVII Century), is particularly important because it establishes a concrete connection between this medieval theology and the Discalced Carmelite environment.
The third line of evidence is much more specific. Elíseo de los Mártires, who personally knew John of the Cross, records John’s teaching concerning “actos y movimientos anagógicos y amorosos”. The soul, according to this testimony, can turn away from a disturbance through an affective movement towards God, presenting itself before Him and becoming united with Him. This testimony deserves particular attention because it concerns John’s oral pedagogy rather than simply his surviving literary corpus. It therefore provides an opportunity to compare the vocabulary and structure of John’s actual spiritual instruction with Balma’s distinctive doctrine of anagogical and affective ascent.
The fourth line concerns John’s theology of love itself. In the Spiritual Canticle John speaks of the “interior exercises of love”, while in the Living Flame of Love he insists upon the importance of exercising oneself in love so as to be consumed quickly and arrive at the vision of God. These passages become particularly significant when placed beside Balma’s insistence upon the active exercise of the affectus through aspiration and desire. The issue is not merely that both authors speak of love. It is that both understand love as an active movement of the soul towards its divine end.
This raises a further theological question which becomes central to the comparison: can the soul love what it does not distinctly comprehend? Balma’s answer is fundamental to his mystical theology. The affective movement towards God does not depend upon a prior conceptual comprehension of God. John of the Cross likewise insists that the will can love without the understanding possessing a corresponding distinct apprehension. Faith gives the soul a supernatural knowledge of God, but love can advance beyond what the intellect distinctly comprehends. The comparison therefore concerns not simply the vocabulary of aspiration but a deeper theological anthropology in which love can move towards the incomprehensible God beyond the limits of discursive understanding.
Read also: Knowledge and Love in the Darkness of Faith: From Dionysius to John of the Cross
The fifth line of evidence concerns reception. John’s teaching on the exercise of love did not remain a literary formulation. St. Thérèse of Lisieux explicitly records that she repeated John’s words concerning the importance of exercising oneself in love “from the beginning of my religious life”, and she describes the words as a source of desire and consolation. Her testimony provides an important later witness to the practical force of this particular Sanjuanist teaching. The question therefore becomes one of continuity: whether the affective movement which Balma formulates systematically, and which John integrates into his mature theology of transformation, continues in Thérèse as an explicitly practised principle of Carmelite life.
The sixth line is provided by John of Saint-Samson. In the Touraine Carmelite Reform (OCarm.), aspirative prayer becomes not merely a theological idea but a structured method of spiritual formation. Saint-Samson explicitly describes forms of aspiration as the “basis and foundation” of his method and develops aspiration into a graduated practice intended to lead the soul towards union with God. The importance of Saint-Samson is therefore historical as well as theological: he provides evidence for the capacity of the aspirative tradition to become a concrete Carmelite pedagogy of prayer.
The article will then examine three deeper theological correspondences. The first concerns the distinction between scholastic theology and mystical theology. Both Balma and John distinguish theological knowledge acquired through intellectual study from the experiential wisdom of mystical theology, in which divine truth is known through love. The second concerns the three faculties of intellect, memory and will. Both authors employ this tripartite structure within their mystical anthropology, although they develop it in different ways and within different theological contexts. The third concerns the Dionysian understanding of contemplation. Both authors insist that the highest knowledge of God transcends the ordinary operations of the faculties and belongs to a supernatural mode of knowing in which God communicates Himself beyond discursive apprehension.
These final correspondences are important precisely because they prevent the argument from being reduced to a study of isolated words. The question is not simply whether John uses anagógico, whether Balma uses aspiratio, or whether both speak of fire. It is whether a coherent theological structure can be discerned: the soul’s movement towards God through love; the capacity of the affective faculty to move beyond distinct intellectual comprehension; the purification and transformation of intellect, memory and will; the passage beyond discursive knowledge into infused contemplation; and the ultimate consummation of this movement in union with God.
The hypothesis proposed here must therefore be stated carefully. The claim is not that John of the Cross simply reproduced Hugh of Balma, nor that every resemblance between the two authors proves literary dependence. John possessed a profound originality, and his theology is formed from Scripture, the Fathers, scholastic theology, Dionysian mysticism and the wider Christian mystical tradition. The question is whether Hugh of Balma represents one of the more concrete and historically plausible sources within that inheritance.
Jean Orcibal’s caution is therefore an important starting point rather than an obstacle to be dismissed. The present article does not seek to replace one simplistic source theory with another. Rather, it asks whether the accumulation of evidence changes the historical probability. A text circulating under Bonaventure’s name, a documented chain of transmission through the affective mystical tradition, its eventual reception within the Discalced Carmelite milieu, the striking testimony of Elíseo concerning John’s “anagogical and loving acts”, and the structural correspondences in the theology of affective ascent, exercised love, mystical knowledge and union together create a case which deserves to be reconsidered.
The argument that follows is consequently a historical hypothesis rather than a claim of demonstrative proof. Its purpose is to reopen the question of Hugh of Balma’s place in the genealogy of Carmelite mystical theology. If the evidence is read cumulatively, the possibility emerges that the vocabulary and theological architecture of John’s final doctrine of love did not arise solely from a general Dionysian inheritance, but also from a more specific medieval tradition of affective and anagogical theology which reached the early-modern world under the name of Bonaventure and which, through various channels, entered the intellectual and spiritual world of Carmel.
That is the argument the present article will now test.
I. Hugh of Balma and the Theologia Mystica that Bonaventure Never Wrote
Hugh of Balma was a Carthusian associated with the charterhouse of Meyriat, and his Viae Sion lugent is structured around the three classical ways: purgative, illuminative and unitive. The work has circulated under several titles, including Viae Sion lugent, De triplici via and Theologia mystica. Modern scholarship has established Balma as its author, although the history of its attribution is unusually complicated.
The bibliographical record is particularly important because it does not describe a simple replacement of one name by another. The manuscript tradition contains copies associated with Hugh of Balma, while the printed tradition beginning in Strasbourg in 1495 placed the work within the works of Bonaventure. The 1495 printing was therefore not the beginning of the work’s existence, but the beginning of a new and extraordinarily influential phase of its reception. The Bonaventurian attribution was subsequently reproduced in later editions of Bonaventure’s works. (Text Manuscripts)
This distinction is fundamental to the argument of this article. Hugh of Balma’s Theologia mystica was not simply “lost under Bonaventure”. Rather, two forms of transmission existed alongside one another: a manuscript tradition in which Balma’s authorship could remain visible, and a printed tradition in which the work was presented as Bonaventure’s. Indeed, manuscript evidence demonstrates that the work could circulate without the Bonaventurian attribution at all. One modern account notes that many of the manuscripts associated with the Carthusian tradition bear Hugh’s name, while others are anonymous, reflecting the frequent anonymity of Carthusian manuscript production.
The consequence is historically significant. A sixteenth-century reader could encounter Balma’s theology under the name of Balma, under no author’s name at all, or under the name of Bonaventure. The printed Bonaventurian attribution therefore created not the existence of Balma’s theology, but a new and prestigious identity through which that theology could be encountered. This is precisely what makes the question of John’s possible dependence so difficult and so interesting. If John knew the work through a Bonaventurian edition, the absence of the name “Hugh of Balma” from his writings would be entirely unsurprising.
Balma’s doctrine is built on a distinctive and technical psychology of the affective faculty. His governing question asks whether the soul, according to its affectus, can be moved towards God by aspiring or desiring, without requiring a preceding act of the intellect. His answer gives a remarkable priority to the affective movement. The will does not simply wait upon discursive intellectual apprehension; the soul can rise towards God through aspirationes, through movements of loving desire which are directed towards union. His sequence is therefore profoundly dynamic: aspiration, affective movement, inflammation, elevation and union. The affective faculty possesses its own proper activity, and that activity is not reducible to discursive reasoning. This is not merely devotional imagery. It is a systematic mystical psychology, and it is this psychology, I will argue, that appears again in John of the Cross under a different vocabulary and within a much more developed theological synthesis.
The historical question, however, must be stated carefully. Similarity does not automatically establish literary dependence. The question is whether the particular combination of affective acts, aspiration, anagogical movement, divine fire and union is sufficiently distinctive, and whether the historical routes of transmission are sufficiently plausible, to justify the hypothesis of influence.
Note: Viae Sion lugent, most often called Theologia mystica or De triplici via, was translated into Spanish in the Sol de contemplativos, first published at Toledo in 1514, with later editions. Jerónimo Gracián produced a Spanish adaptation which appeared at Valencia in 1607. The existence of these translations demonstrates that Balma’s work entered the Spanish spiritual world well before and during the period of the Carmelite reform.
II. Henry Herp and the Carthusian Transmission
The pattern of affective mystical theology associated with Balma did not remain isolated. A related development appears in Henry Herp, or Harphius. Herp did not himself compose a single treatise entitled Theologia mystica. Rather, the Carthusian Dirk Loher gathered Herp’s mystical writings and published them at Cologne in 1538 under the title Theologia mystica: cum speculativa, tum praecipue affectiva. The title is significant. By this period Theologia mystica had become an important title for works concerned with the experiential and affective knowledge of God. Hugh of Balma’s work had already circulated in the printed works of Bonaventure under this title, and Herp’s writings were subsequently gathered under the same Dionysian designation. A recent scholarly study explicitly notes both phenomena: Balma’s work circulated in Bonaventure’s works as De mystica theologia, while Herp’s writings were published under the Dionysian title Theologia mystica in 1538.
The importance of Herp for the present argument is therefore not that he necessarily copied Balma directly. That question requires a separate textual study. Rather, Herp demonstrates the continuing life of an affective and aspirative form of mystical theology in the Carthusian and northern European tradition. The existence of this parallel transmission matters because it shows that the vocabulary of affective aspiration was not an isolated medieval phenomenon which disappeared before the emergence of Carmelite mysticism. It continued to be copied, edited, translated and transmitted. The historical pathway is therefore broader than a simple line from Balma to John. It is better conceived as a network: Balma, the Carthusian tradition, Herp, Spanish translations, Franciscan and Carmelite readers, and finally the Carmelite mystical synthesis of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
III. The Modern Recovery of Balma’s Text
Modern scholarship has now restored Hugh of Balma’s authorship with considerable confidence. The critical edition by Francis Ruello and Jeanne Barbet, published as Théologie mystique in Sources Chrétiennes 408–409, provides the principal modern scholarly basis for reading the text. The edition was based on a substantial manuscript tradition; Ruello worked with fifty-nine manuscripts. This modern recovery is important precisely because it allows us to see something that earlier readers did not necessarily see: the difference between the author of the work and the authority under which the work was printed. For a modern reader, “Hugh of Balma’s Theologia mystica” is a straightforward bibliographical designation. For a sixteenth-century reader, however, the same work could appear as part of the works of Bonaventure. The question of John’s possible encounter with Balma must therefore be framed historically rather than anachronistically. We should not ask whether John knew the modern author “Hugh of Balma”. We should ask whether he encountered the work now identified as Balma’s Theologia mystica, regardless of the name attached to it at the time.
IV. The Spanish Carmelite Channel: Sol de contemplativos and Jerónimo Gracián
The bibliographical facts assembled so far would remain a matter of general European intellectual history were it not for the appearance of Balma’s work in Spain. The first Spanish translation, Sol de contemplativos, appeared at Toledo in 1514. It was therefore available in the Spanish spiritual milieu more than half a century before the birth of John of the Cross and during the formative period of the Spanish mystical tradition. Modern Spanish editions continue to describe the work as an important source for sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Spanish mysticism. This is important because it establishes that Balma’s theology was not merely available in distant Latin collections. It entered the vernacular spiritual literature of Spain.
The second and particularly significant development is Jerónimo Gracián de la Madre de Dios, O.C.D., whose adaptation of Balma appeared at Valencia in 1607 under the title Mística teología compuesta por San Buenaventura del verdadero camino del cielo, con algunas declaraciones hechas por el P. M. F. Gerónimo Gracián de la Madre de Dios. The title itself preserves the historical problem with remarkable clarity: the work is presented as the mystical theology of St Bonaventure, even though modern scholarship identifies its underlying work as Balma’s. Gracián’s adaptation therefore represents an important moment in the history of the text. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, Balma’s theology had not only entered Spain; it had entered the Discalced Carmelite world through one of the principal figures of the Teresian reform.
The chronology must nevertheless be handled carefully. Gracián’s adaptation postdates John of the Cross. It therefore cannot be used as evidence that John learned Balma directly from Gracián. What it does establish is that Balma’s theology was considered sufficiently valuable and compatible with Carmelite spirituality to be adapted and disseminated within the Discalced reform shortly after John’s death. This distinction is crucial. Gracián is evidence for Carmelite reception of Balma, not proof of John’s personal reading of Gracián. The earlier Sol de contemplativos, however, predates John by decades and establishes a Spanish vernacular channel through which Balma’s theology was available before John’s mature mystical writings.
V. Orcibal’s Caution and the Case for Reconsideration
Jean Orcibal’s studies of John of the Cross’s sources remain indispensable. It would therefore be a mistake to caricature his position. Orcibal knew of Hugh of Balma and named him among possible antecedents for John’s language concerning the centre of the soul. The question is not whether Balma was visible to scholarship before Orcibal. He was. The question is whether the evidence permits us to move from “possible antecedent” to “probable influence”. The distinction matters because literary dependence is often difficult to establish in mystical literature. Authors frequently receive ideas through intermediaries, translations, compilations and unattributed texts. The absence of an explicit citation therefore cannot automatically be treated as evidence of absence. This is particularly true in the case of Balma because the work itself was transmitted under different identities. A reader who encountered the work under Bonaventure’s name would have no reason to cite “Hugh of Balma”. The historical problem is therefore one of transmission rather than simply citation.
There is another dimension to the problem. The surviving manuscripts of mystical authors do not necessarily represent every text or passage that circulated among their contemporaries. This does not mean that we should posit lost writings whenever a convenient explanation is needed. It means simply that the history of transmission must distinguish between what an author wrote, what was copied, what was preserved and what survived. This becomes especially important when dealing with writings that could attract ecclesiastical scrutiny. Here I propose a hypothesis, not an established historical fact.
VI. Elíseo de los Mártires and the Anagogical Acts
The single most important piece of evidence in this argument is not literary but testimonial. Elíseo de los Mártires, a Discalced Carmelite who knew John of the Cross personally, states at the opening of his deposition: “Conocí al P. Fr. Juan de la Cruz, y le traté, y le comuniqué muchas y diversas veces.” In his testimony, Elíseo records a particular spiritual practice which John taught orally and which does not appear, at least under this precise formulation, in John’s surviving published writings.
Elíseo describes a way of overcoming temptation which is “más fácil, provechoso y perfecto” than direct resistance. The soul acts “por solos los actos y movimientos anagógicos y amorosos”, by which it raises its affection to union with God, so that “el alma se ausenta de allí y se presenta a su Dios y se junta con Él”. Elíseo further connects this vocabulary with vocal aspirative prayer, speaking of “actos y movimientos anagógicos y jaculatorias oraciones”. The importance of this testimony is considerable.
It is not simply another literary similarity. It is the testimony of a Carmelite who knew John personally and who reports a technical spiritual practice belonging to John’s oral pedagogy. The term anagógico is particularly striking. In Balma’s theology, the movement of the affectus towards God is precisely an anagogical movement. His language of sursumactio describes the elevation of the soul towards God through affective movement. The comparison therefore deserves to be taken seriously. Elíseo’s sequence is: affective movement, anagogical elevation, withdrawal from the lower object, presentation before God, union.
Balma’s sequence is: aspiration, affective movement, inflammation, anagogical elevation, union. The two sequences are not identical, and one should not pretend that they are. But the structural correspondence is sufficiently close to justify further investigation. The significance becomes greater because Balma’s work was available in Spain under different names and because its Bonaventurian printed identity made it possible for a reader to encounter Balma’s theology without knowing Balma’s authorship. This is precisely the kind of evidence which cannot be adequately evaluated simply by asking whether John ever cited “Hugh of Balma”.
VII. The Fire of the Spirit: From Balma’s Aspirations to the Living Flame
Once the anagogical vocabulary is established as a genuine point of contact, the imagery of fire shared by Balma and John takes on greater significance. Balma’s aspirative theology is explicitly pneumatological. The soul’s movement towards God is associated with the fire of the Holy Spirit, with fiery desires and with the inflammation of love. John’s Living Flame of Love does not merely repeat this imagery. He develops it into the summit of his mystical theology. “¡Oh llama de amor viva, / que tiernamente hieres / de mi alma en el más profundo centro!” And again: “¡Oh lámparas de fuego, / en cuyos resplandores / las profundas cavernas del sentido, / que estaba oscuro y ciego, / con extraños primores / calor y luz dan junto a su Querido!” John’s theology is considerably more developed. The fire is not merely the stimulus which awakens desire. It has become the divine action itself, wounding, illuminating and transforming the soul at its deepest centre. Nevertheless, the underlying constellation is striking: affective movement towards God, anagogical elevation, the action of the Holy Spirit, fire or flame, and union. This constellation should not be presented as proof by itself. Fire is a biblical and patristic image, and the Holy Spirit is traditionally associated with fire. The evidential force lies instead in the convergence of these elements with the more unusual category of the anagogical act. Balma’s sequence may therefore be described as: aspiratio → affective inflammation → Holy Spirit → anagogical elevation → union.
John’s mature theology becomes: loving and anagogical movement → elevation towards God → union → divine fire → transformation at the deepest centre. The second is not a repetition of the first. It is a development of a theological architecture which may have been received and transformed.
VIII. Interior Exercises of Love, Faith and the Primacy of Desire: Balma and the Spiritual Canticle
A further correspondence appears near the conclusion of the Spiritual Canticle. John describes the soul’s proper occupation as “the interior exercises of love”. The expression ejercicios interiores de amor is significant because it presents love not simply as a state or disposition, but as an activity which is exercised. This corresponds closely to the conception underlying Balma’s mystical psychology, in which the affectus possesses its own acts and movements. Balma’s central movement is aspiration. The soul aspires, desires, longs for and reaches towards God. These aspirations are not merely devotional expressions. They are acts of the affective power through which the soul moves towards its end, union with God. The mystical theology is therefore fundamentally dynamic. The soul does not merely receive knowledge about God. It is moved towards God by love. John develops the same fundamental dynamism within his own account of mystical transformation. The Spiritual Canticlecan be read as a description of the growth and purification of love. The soul searches for the Beloved because it loves Him; it suffers His absence because its love has become more intense; it seeks His presence with increasing desire; and this love is progressively purified until it reaches transforming union. This is why the “interior exercises of love” are so significant. They represent the maturation of the dynamic which Balma describes through the actus affectus. What in Balma appears as the repeated exercise of the affective faculty in loving aspiration appears in John as the mature soul’s continual exercise of love. There is, however, another dimension of this correspondence: the capacity to love what one does not distinctly comprehend.
In the Prologue to the Spiritual Canticle, John writes that the mystical wisdom of which the Canticles treat, “which is understood through love”, does not need to be distinctly understood in order to produce an effect of love and affection in the soul, just as faith enables us to love God without knowing Him in a comprehensive way. John is not denying that faith is knowledge. Faith is a supernatural mode of knowledge. His point is that the soul does not require distinct, discursive comprehension before it can love. He expresses the point even more directly when he observes that “they can understand little, and love much, and they can understand much, and love little”. He therefore distinguishes the operations of understanding and love without separating them. Faith gives the intellect a supernatural but obscure knowledge of God, while charity moves the will towards the God whom faith reveals without comprehending Him. This is closely related to Balma’s insistence upon the capacity of the affectus to move towards God without waiting for a preceding intellectual comprehension.
The point is important because it provides a theological basis for aspirative prayer. If love could move only towards an object which the intellect had already comprehended distinctly, mystical union would ultimately be limited by intellectual comprehension. But God cannot be comprehended by the finite intellect. Therefore the soul must be capable of loving beyond what it can distinctly comprehend. John’s mystical theology gives this principle a highly developed form. Faith makes possible the supernatural movement; charity carries the soul towards union. The correspondence with Balma is consequently conceptual and structural rather than merely verbal. Balma provides a psychological account of the soul’s capacity to move towards God through loving aspiration. John describes the progressive transformation of that movement into the continual exercise of love and ultimately into union. The question is not whether John simply reproduced Balma. He manifestly did not. The question is whether Balma represents one source within the theological background from which John developed his own mature synthesis.
IX. From Balma’s Aspirations to John’s “Exercise of Love”: The Testimony of Thérèse of Lisieux
A further line of continuity concerns the concrete practice of repeated, active love. Balma’s Theologia mystica gives a central place to the affectus and to the soul’s movement towards God through ardent aspiration. John of the Cross articulates a remarkably similar principle at the opening of the Living Flame of Love. Commenting on the first stanza, he writes that “it is… of the greatest importance for the soul to exercise itself in love during this life, so that, being consumed quickly, it may not remain long, either here below or hereafter, without seeing God” (Living Flame of Love, I, 6). The verb matters. John does not simply say that the soul should possess charity habitually. He speaks of exercising itself in love. The importance of this teaching is confirmed independently by its reception in the life of St Thérèse of Lisieux.
On 27 July 1897, near the end of her life, Thérèse testified: “With what desire and consolation I have repeated from the beginning of my religious life these other words of Our Father St John of the Cross: ‘It is of the greatest importance that the soul exercise itself much in Love, so that, being consumed quickly, it may not linger long here below but may arrive promptly at seeing its God face to face.’” Thérèse explicitly says that she had repeated this teaching “from the beginning of my religious life”. It had therefore become a governing principle of her spirituality.
Her little way can consequently be understood, at least in part, as a radical simplification and universalisation of the Johannine doctrine of exercised love. The repeated movement towards God does not require extraordinary mystical experiences. It can take the form of the smallest acts, sacrifices, desires and movements of love.
The historical sequence is therefore significant: Balma systematises loving aspiration. John of the Cross develops the active exercise of love within his mature mystical theology. Thérèse receives John’s teaching and makes it a lifelong principle of spiritual practice. This does not prove a direct line of literary dependence from Balma to John. It does, however, show the remarkable persistence of the theological idea that loving movement towards God is not merely a consequence of union but an active means by which the soul is progressively drawn towards union.
X. Jean de Saint-Samson and the Carmelite Method of Aspiration
If Balma provides an early systematic theology of aspiration and Herp provides an important Carthusian continuation of affective mystical theology, the Carmelite reception of aspirative prayer finds a highly developed practical expression in Jean de Saint-Samson (1571–1636) of the Touraine Reform. Saint-Samson’s importance lies particularly in the fact that aspiration becomes, in his teaching, a structured method of formation. In Le Vrai Esprit du Carmel, he speaks of “the method of the four kinds of aspirations which we have specified and established as its basis and foundation”. Aspiration is therefore not simply a devotional technique. It becomes a method through which the soul is established in the spiritual life and led towards the contemplative life. Saint-Samson’s account of the maturation of aspiration is particularly significant. The practice begins as a deliberate act, but gradually becomes more interior. At the highest degree he uses remarkably bold language: the soul will never cease to aspire, that is, to “spirate” the Holy Spirit. Here aspiration has become more than a psychological exercise. It has become a participation in the life of the Spirit. Modern scholarship has explicitly identified Saint-Samson as a major promoter of aspirative prayer within Carmelite mystical tradition. His teaching therefore provides an important witness to the continuing development of this form of prayer within Carmel. He also gives the practice a concrete pedagogical form. Aspirations consist in “exclamations, interrogations and requests of love, of union, of perfection, and of similar things”. These are “darts” of love penetrating the heart and drawing it towards God. This is precisely the sort of practice that can be taught, repeated and transmitted within a community of formation. The place of Saint-Samson in the present argument should therefore be stated carefully. Balma provides an early systematic theology of loving aspiration. Herp provides an important later witness to the continuing affective tradition. The Spanish transmission demonstrates the movement of Balma’s theology into the Iberian spiritual world. The Discalced Carmelite reception through Gracián demonstrates that Balma’s theology eventually entered the Carmelite reform explicitly. Saint-Samson demonstrates the later maturation of aspirative prayer into a structured Carmelite method. This does not establish that Saint-Samson consciously received the doctrine directly from Balma. It demonstrates instead the remarkable durability of an aspirative tradition within the wider history of mystical theology.
XI. Salamanca, Dionysius and the Franciscan Context
The next strand concerns opportunity rather than direct textual proof. John of the Cross’s intellectual formation at Salamanca is associated with serious theological study and with engagement with mystical theology and Pseudo-Dionysius. John subsequently uses mística teología as a technical expression in his writings. Balma’s work is itself a highly developed affective appropriation of Dionysian mystical theology. The question therefore arises whether a reader deeply engaged with Dionysius and the mystical tradition could have encountered Balma’s work through the Bonaventurian printed tradition. The Bonaventurian attribution is especially relevant because it gave Balma’s theology an authority which the name of an obscure Carthusian prior could not have supplied. This is not an argument that John necessarily read the work because it bore Bonaventure’s name. It is an argument about historical plausibility. If John encountered a work presenting itself as Bonaventure’s mystical theology, he would have had every reason to regard it as an authoritative theological source. The hypothesis becomes more interesting because the work’s actual history is precisely one of multiple identities. Balma’s name survived in the manuscript tradition, while the Bonaventurian name became extraordinarily influential in print. The modern bibliographer sees a problem of attribution. The sixteenth-century reader could simply have seen an authoritative Bonaventurian work. This is precisely why the absence of “Hugh of Balma” in John’s writings cannot by itself settle the question.
XII. Scholastic Theology and Mystical Theology
Another striking parallel between Hugh of Balma and St John of the Cross concerns their distinction between scholastic theology and mystical theology. Hugh of Balma distinguishes intellectual theological investigation from the experiential knowledge of God received through mystical contemplation. His mystical theology belongs to another mode of knowing: one in which divine illumination and love lead the soul towards union. John of the Cross makes a remarkably similar distinction in the Prologue to the Spiritual Canticle. He does not denigrate scholastic theology. On the contrary, he explicitly acknowledges its value. But he distinguishes it from mystical theology, which he calls “the science of love”, by which divine truths are not only learned but “relish[ed]”. The distinction is subtle. John is not opposing two incompatible theologies. He is distinguishing two modes of knowing the same divine truths. Scholastic theology explains. Mystical theology experiences through love. The similarity with Balma is therefore suggestive, although it must not be overstated. Both belong to the wider Dionysian and affective tradition, and John had other possible sources for this distinction. The parallel therefore contributes to the cumulative argument rather than functioning as independent proof.
XIII. The Three Faculties of the Soul: Intellect, Memory and Will
A further comparison concerns the three faculties of intellect, memory and will. St. John of the Cross repeatedly structures his mystical anthropology around these three faculties, associating them with faith, hope and charity. Faith purifies the understanding. Hope purifies the memory. Charity purifies and transforms the will. This tripartite anthropology is especially interesting when compared with Hugh of Balma. St. Thomas Aquinas, in Summa Theologiae I, q. 79, a. 7, explicitly rejects the idea that intellectual memory constitutes a power distinct from the intellect. Augustine’s triad of memory, understanding and will is therefore interpreted differently within Thomistic psychology. John, however, consistently speaks of “the three faculties of the soul — understanding, memory and will”. Balma’s mystical theology likewise operates with a threefold anthropology involving intellect, memory and will. The similarity should not be exaggerated. The tripartite structure has a much older history, especially through Augustine’s De Trinitate. John was also deeply formed by the scholastic tradition. Nevertheless, the correspondence is interesting because the three faculties function within both authors’ mystical anthropology as dimensions of the soul’s transformation. The comparison therefore belongs to the cumulative argument. Neither the three faculties nor their purification proves literary dependence. But when placed alongside the distinction between scholastic and mystical theology, the primacy of affective movement, the anagogical acts and the doctrine of infused contemplation, the parallel becomes increasingly worthy of investigation.
XIV. The Spirit Beyond the Faculties: Dionysian Anthropology and Pure Contemplation
Another fundamental similarity concerns the nature of contemplation. Pseudo-Dionysius teaches that the ascent towards God requires the abandonment not only of sensible realities but also of intelligible forms. The contemplative enters the divine darkness beyond ordinary modes of knowledge. Hugh of Balma develops this Dionysian principle within his own mystical theology. The highest knowledge of God is not attained by accumulating increasingly refined concepts. The soul must pass beyond ordinary discursive activity. John of the Cross develops this principle systematically in the Ascent of Mount Carmel and Dark Night. The soul must be progressively freed from dependence upon sensible images, forms and discursive apprehensions. For John, contemplation is infused by God. It is not produced by the soul’s own discursive activity. He describes it as “a secret and peaceful and loving knowledge of God”. This helps explain John’s distinction between the ordinary operations of the faculties and the deeper action of God in the spirit. The spirit of the soul is not simply another faculty alongside understanding, memory and will. Rather, it signifies the deepest dimension of the person in which God communicates Himself beyond the ordinary mode of operation of the faculties. This becomes especially profound in the Spiritual Canticle and the Living Flame of Love, where John speaks of the deepest centre of the soul as the place of God’s transforming action. The comparison with Balma is therefore significant because both authors understand mystical contemplation as involving a passage beyond ordinary discursive cognition.
Yet again, this should not be treated as proof of direct literary dependence. Both authors are profoundly indebted to Pseudo-Dionysius, and the Dionysian tradition itself provides an obvious explanation for much of the correspondence. The value of the comparison lies in the cumulative pattern. Affective ascent. Anagogical movement. The primacy of love. The distinction between ordinary intellectual knowledge and mystical knowledge. The transformation of the faculties. The action of the Holy Spirit. The passage beyond ordinary cognition. The possibility that these elements represent not merely parallel developments but a historical transmission remains a serious question.
Practical Consequences: Reading Balma and Herp Today
This historical reconstruction is not offered merely as an antiquarian exercise. It has consequences for the way the Carmelite mystical tradition is read and taught. Hugh of Balma’s Théologie mystique, in the critical edition of Ruello and Barbet, deserves to be read directly by anyone seeking to understand the historical background of the Sanjuanist doctrine of affective ascent. It supplies a technical vocabulary — aspiratio, affectus, sursumactio, anagogical elevation — which provides an illuminating comparison with John’s own vocabulary. Balma’s insistence that the affective faculty has its own proper acts offers a precise theological vocabulary for what is often described more loosely as “prayer of the heart”. It should be compared with John’s “interior exercises of love”, while maintaining the distinction between the two theological systems.
Herp’s Theologia mystica remains an important witness to the continuing transmission of affective and aspirative spirituality in the sixteenth century. Its place in the history of mystical theology deserves further study, particularly in relation to Balma.
Elíseo de los Mártires’ testimony deserves attention independently of the question of literary dependence. His account of the “actos y movimientos anagógicos y amorosos” provides a concrete witness to John’s oral pedagogy and should be studied as part of the history of Carmelite spiritual formation.
Future studies of the sources of St John of the Cross should take seriously the bibliographical history of Balma’s work. The fact that the text circulated under Balma’s name in manuscript and under Bonaventure’s name in print means that the absence of an explicit reference to “Hugh of Balma” cannot be treated as decisive evidence against John’s having encountered the work.
Finally, the development of the doctrine of exercised love deserves to be studied across the Carmelite tradition: from Balma’s affective aspiration, through John’s teaching that the soul must “exercise itself in love”, through Thérèse’s lifelong reception of that teaching, and into the highly structured aspirative spirituality of Jean de Saint-Samson.
Conclusion
The argument of this article does not claim to have produced a manuscript in John of the Cross’s hand annotated “Hugh of Balma”. Nor does it claim that the Inquisition ordered the destruction of a manuscript containing John’s teaching. There is no evidence sufficient for either assertion. The argument is more modest, but also more precise. Hugh of Balma’s Viae Sion lugent circulated in manuscript under Balma’s name and under other forms of attribution. From 1495 onwards it was also printed as part of the works of St Bonaventure. The work therefore possessed multiple textual identities. A reader could encounter Balma’s theology without knowing that Balma was its author. (Text Manuscripts)
This matters for the question of St John of the Cross. John was formed within a theological world deeply influenced by Dionysius, Bonaventure and the wider affective mystical tradition. Balma’s work represented a particularly developed synthesis of Dionysian apophaticism and affective ascent. It was available in Spain in vernacular form through the Sol de contemplativos from 1514, and it subsequently entered the Discalced Carmelite world explicitly through Jerónimo Gracián’s adaptation.
None of this proves that John read Balma. But it establishes historical opportunity. More importantly, John’s surviving mystical theology contains several striking correspondences with Balma: the primacy of affective movement, the capacity of love to move beyond distinct intellectual comprehension, the anagogical ascent of the soul, the action of the Holy Spirit as fire, the movement towards union, and the active exercise of love.
The testimony of Elíseo de los Mártires adds a particularly unusual element. John is reported to have taught “actos y movimientos anagógicos y amorosos”, movements through which the soul withdraws from the object of temptation and presents itself to God. This is not merely a comparison between two literary texts. It is evidence concerning John’s oral spiritual pedagogy.
The cumulative significance of this evidence is therefore greater than that of any single parallel. At the same time, the history of manuscript transmission warns us against assuming that the surviving texts necessarily contain every aspect of John’s teaching which circulated among his contemporaries. If copyists sometimes filtered texts because of fear of ecclesiastical scrutiny, such filtering could take place before an inquisitor ever encountered the manuscript. The surviving witnesses would then represent what had been preserved after transmission had already exercised its own selection.
This possibility should remain a hypothesis, not a historical assertion. The same methodological caution should govern the claim concerning Balma. The evidence does not establish direct literary dependence beyond doubt. But neither can the possibility of such dependence be dismissed simply because John does not cite “Hugh of Balma” by name. The very history of Balma’s text makes that absence unsurprising.
Jean Orcibal was therefore right to insist that John transforms whatever he receives into his own mystical theology. But transformation does not exclude reception. A source can disappear into a greater synthesis and cease to be recognisable as a source while nevertheless remaining one of the elements from which that synthesis was formed.
If the hypothesis proposed here is correct, Hugh of Balma’s theology stands considerably closer to the historical background of St John of the Cross than is generally acknowledged. The decisive issue is not whether John copied Balma. He clearly did not. The question is whether some of Balma’s distinctive theological categories — especially affective aspiration and anagogical movement towards God — entered John’s mystical synthesis through a textual tradition whose authorial identity had become obscured.
The bibliographical history makes such a transmission possible. The Spanish history makes it plausible. The Carmelite reception makes it significant. Elíseo’s testimony makes it particularly intriguing. And John’s own theology provides the conceptual field in which the hypothesis can be tested.
The result should therefore not be presented as a solved question but as a historical hypothesis worthy of serious investigation: that St John of the Cross may have encountered Hugh of Balma’s theology without knowing that it was Hugh of Balma’s, most plausibly through the work’s circulation under the authority of St Bonaventure, and that elements of Balma’s affective and anagogical theology may subsequently have been transformed within John’s own mystical synthesis.
The deeper question is consequently one of transmission. How does mystical theology travel when authors’ names change, when manuscripts are copied selectively, when works are translated and adapted, and when oral teaching is only partially committed to writing? In such a history, what survives is not necessarily the whole tradition that once existed. Sometimes a name disappears. Sometimes a text changes its name. Sometimes a copy preserves only what a scribe considered safe to transmit. And sometimes an idea survives precisely because it has been transformed so completely that the source is no longer visible. That is the historical possibility which the comparison between Hugh of Balma and St John of the Cross invites us to investigate. And it may be precisely here that the history of Carmelite mystical theology needs to be reopened: not by claiming certainty where the evidence does not permit it, but by recognising that the transmission of mystical doctrine may be considerably more complex than the surviving authorial labels suggest.
Read also:
– The Anagogical Acts, (How to fight temptation)
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