Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint John of the Cross, The Poets' Jesus: Representations at the End of the Millennium, and The Christ of Velazquez.

Bernard of Clairvaux
Gillian R. Evans
Oxford University Press, $18.95, 220 pp.

Saint John of the Cross
By Kieran Kavanaugh
Crossroad, $16.95, 216 pp.

The Poets' Jesus: Representations at the End of the Millennium
Peggy Rosenthal
Oxford University Press, $29.95, 198 pp.

The Christ of Velazquez
Miguel de Unamuno
Translated by Jaime R. Vidal
Franciscan Press, $19.95, 112 pp.

Bernard of Clairvaux (1090- 1153) is a giant of the medieval era. Monk and mystic, monastic theologian and papal counselor, hagiographer and polemicist, a renowned preacher in the cloister and beyond it, Bernard was the single most important impetus for the spread of the Cistercians. Gillian R. Evans's new sketch of Bernard for the Oxford "Great Medieval Thinkers" series is a fine addition to her estimable The Mind of Bernard of Clairvaux (Oxford, 1983), and to her edition of Bernard's writings for the "Classics of Western Spirituality" series (Paulist, 1987).

In the opening chapter of Bernard of Clairvaux, Evans outlines Bernard's life, devoting subsequent chapters to his written work. She explores Bernard's attitude toward the new dialectical theology, his method of exegesis, his thinking about ethics and politics, and his positive and negative theology. (By the latter she means his polemics against heresy and schism.) Throughout it is clear that Evans has a full command of the vast corpus of Bernard's writings and an equal command of his culture.

Full command does not signify total sympathy. Evans does not hesitate to enumerate Bernard's shortcomings. As a proponent of orthodoxy, Bernard was a restless theological street fighter. Both Abelard and Gilbert of Poitiers followed his model to their disadvantage. Nor does Evans make too large a claim for Bernard as an original theological thinker. That honor belongs to his contemporary (and biographer), the Benedictine turned Cistercian, William of Saint-Thierry.

Bernard's strength, rather, is found in the power he was able to bring to bear on language. "Bernard minded most that his words should strike chords and make people enthusiastic for God." In this Evans echoes the late Etienne Gilson, who once said that the early Cistercians gave up everything for God except the art of writing well. Evans frequently cites lines of Bernard in Latin to illustrate his almost aphoristic style but, alas, does not always provide the translation.

The brevity required by the series does not permit Evans the luxury of considering all aspects of Bernard's thought. A more sustained reflection on Bernard's sermons on the Song of Songs, one of the most important mystical texts of the medieval world, would have been welcome. What Evans has provided, however, is a well-written and masterful introduction to this great monastic contemplative and doctor of the church.

One could list any number of cliches about Saint John of the Cross. He was the champion of the Dark Night of the Soul. (He wrote The Dark Night but never added "of the soul.") He was a reclusive contemplative. (Yes, he was contemplative, but no recluse: Federico Ruiz estimated that he walked more than seventeen thousand miles during his lifetime.) He spent his whole life in prayer. (In fact, he was an able administrator, drew and painted, designed and constructed an aqueduct, knew the arts of husbandry and farming.)

What is undeniable is that, although John was a writer mainly by accident, his work constitutes one of the great treasuries of Christian spiritual writing. Considered as a whole, it is a work of theological genius. English speakers owe an inestimable debt to Kieran Kavanaugh for his intelligent and luminous translation of the complete John, which supersedes the translations of E. Allison Peers, and is available from the Institute of Carmelite Studies for the giveaway price of less than twenty dollars.

Kavanaugh's present work is an excellent addition to the uneven Crossroad Spiritual Legacy series, and beckons the uninitiated to enter the world of John. A feature of the series is to mix commentary with actual texts. Kavanaugh follows the procedure. Poems from The Spiritual Canticle, The Dark Night, The Living Flame of Love, along with the original sketch that John made for The Ascent, and his famous drawing of the crucifixion can be found here. Kavanaugh briefly outlines John's life and place in his culture. John's own description of the spiritual journey--from his prescriptions for Christian asceticism to his final experiences of the Christian life--is well treated. As Kavanaugh astutely observes, that journey ends not in darkness but in the energizing flame of the Holy Spirit.

Kavanaugh's gift for translating John's scholastically informed language into our own allows him to get closer to John's intentions than is usual. It has been all too easy to think that John is only interested in the "soul" or that he favors the suppression of all "appetites." Also praiseworthy is Kavanaugh's emphasis on John as a close reader of Scripture, and as a person of the church with a wide apostolic mission to direct others in the life of contemplative prayer. John had an absolute disdain for bad spiritual directors whom he ranked with Satan. And unlike his contemporary, Teresa of Avila, John had little patience for the epiphenomena of mystical prayer. He felt the visions and locutions were distractions, and he argued that a Christian might take more pleasure in them than in seeking union through the love of God.

John had one profound insight at the heart of his religious experience. From it, he built a theology of the life of prayer. The insight was this: God once spoke his Word and having spoken that Word need speak no more. That Word resonates not only through creation, as the prologue of the Gospel of John says, but is in human history in the person of Jesus Christ (John 1:14). How can we--how do we--receive that Word? John of the Cross's answer is that we need to live fully the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love.

John's single-mindedness does not mean that he is simple to read. Many of his writings were done ad hoc. His prose commentaries to the poems attract disproportionate attention at the expense of the very art that, while difficult and full, outstrips the commentary. Scholars like Kieran Kavanaugh give us the courage to try. In fact, a little excursus on how to read this great figure of contemplative prayer and in what order to read him would have made Kavanaugh's excellent work a perfect one.

A few years ago, Peggy Rosenthal co-edited Divine Inspiration, a wonderful anthology of world poetry about Jesus. Rosenthal now gives us The Poets' Jesus, a study of how Jesus appears in modern poetry. Her scope remains international and her new book includes, in addition to the familiar canon, virtually unknown voices from Africa and the Arabic-speaking world. Many of the poets Rosenthal discusses write not out of devotion, but inspired by the rich possibilities of the elusive figure of Jesus. Her widely cast net results in a book that both sprawls and, of necessity, omits.

Because her subject is modern poetry, Rosenthal's opening chapter rapidly surveys, by way of orientation, the figure of Jesus in poetry up to the eighteenth century. This is the weakest chapter since, given the myriad of possibilities, it merely skims giants like Dante, Milton, and Donne. In the second chapter we land on surer, more engaging ground as Rosenthal analyzes poets who locate Jesus in the romantic garb of the hero, presenting a sublime figure in vivid natural settings. By contrast, the poets of chapter three, reflecting the nineteenth-century deconstruction of the gospel stories, present a Jesus who is unrisen (Clough), or a weakling (Baudelaire), or pejoratively compared to the pagan Pan (Ruben Dario). Swinburne, the paradigmatic poet of this tendency in his observations on the pale Galilean, is strangely absent.

Two other chapters explore the image of Jesus in African and Arabic poetry, and still two more take up the theme of Christ's absence as expressed in the writings of Rilke and Borges as well as Samuel Beckett, Czeslaw Milosz, and the Welsh poet and priest, R. S. Thomas. Rosenthal contrasts these with poets for whom, and poems in which (for example, W. H. Auden's "Horae Canonicae"), we are absent to Jesus rather than he to us. In the words of the New Zealand poet James K. Baxter, "When his Tears ran down like blood/I was sleeping in my clothes." The final chapter treats poets, among them Richard Wilbur, Denise Levertov, Annie Dillard, for whom Jesus remains present.

Readers will wish to add poems and poets to Rosenthal's list. Why not the moving lines of Edith Sitwell on the London raids of 1940 ("Still falls the rain/at the feet of the starved man hung upon the cross")? Why not African American spirituals? What we might add would not contradict Rosenthal's penetrating understanding of the diverse modulations of modern poetry about Jesus, which is the real merit of her book. She shows Jesus not only transformed in the crucible of modernism, but lingering there as an absence, as well as slowly returning to our consciousness. Disappointingly, the book lacks a bibliography of primary poetic sources to guide those seeking more poems.

Where Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) is known among English-speaking readers, it is because of his great work The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), which has an honored place in the existentialist canon running roughly from Kierkegaard through Dostoevsky to Heidegger and Sartre. Unamuno wrestled with the agonizing tensions between belief and reason his whole life. Like many Spanish writers, he was haunted by his inherited Catholic background, but his sharp criticisms, his skepticism in the face of the then regnant scholastic articulations of faith, and his near contempt for the institutional church earned him the title of heretic.

For all of his distance from the church, Unamuno was stirred by religious questions and was a frequent retreatant at religious houses and monasteries like the Benedictine abbey of Silos (now familiar for its chant recordings). Between 1913 and 1920, Unamuno labored at a long poem (some twenty-five hundred lines divided into eighty sections and four books) inspired by the famous crucifixion painted in 1632 by Diego Velazquez for a convent in Madrid. The painting, known today as the Madrid Crucifixion, resides in the Prado.

It is stunning. Jesus hangs upon the cross, a thorn-garland about his drooping head, his face half covered by long hair. Most striking is the dramatic chiaroscuro: the ghostly white of a dead body juxtaposed against the inky black background made all the more stark because the body obscures most of the cross. There is no other figure in the painting. The traditionally depicted mother, beloved disciple, and centurion are omitted. Only the dead Christ and darkness are present.

Unamuno does two things in this long poetic meditation. He seeks symbols from outside the poem to shed light on the painting's significance, and he scrutinizes it in detail in order to explicate the meaning of its sole figure. Unamuno meditates on the hair, forehead, eyes, nose, and mouth of Jesus in this dual fashion. These are the parts of a man who sees and savors the world in which we live, but who also has an instinct for the hidden realm of God: "Your flowing mane covers and veils your ears/like a symbol designed by God your Father/Our faith finds not its base on what is told us/but on whether we have heard."

In his prefatory essay, translator Jaime Vidal persuasively argues that the poem can be read in a perfectly orthodox way, pace the vehement reaction against Unamuno and his poem by the bien pensants of Opus Dei in Spain. It is not a work to read in one sitting; parts are overlush, but there are moments of great beauty and passion made all the more moving by half-hidden parallels to the language--of silence, abandonment, and solitude--of John of the Cross.

Vidal's translation is enhanced by unobtrusive scriptural citations at the text's side and illuminating footnotes, which flag Spanish word play as well as patristic and medieval sources for some of the more recondite references in the work. Apart from its intrinsic merit, Unamuno's poem hints how one might be inspired to reflection and prayer by what the Greek fathers called (in reference to icons) gazing--that long meditative attention to a masterpiece which, by definition, has a surplus of meaning.

Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame.