Became Lost to Be Won. The Woman’s Personal Fulfillment, under the Symbol of the Soul-wife, in the Spiritual Canticle of Juan de la Cruz

Abstract

This article investigates the specificity of the woman’s fulfillment, latent in the figure of the wife of the Spiritual Canticle of John of the Cross. In the last verse of Song 20, the wife declares: “I became lost, and I was won.” This expression, of an evangelical (Mt 16.25) and Pauline (Phil 1.21) stamp, constitutes a specific feature of the wife’s love, and opens the way for the understanding of its paradoxical realization, which is verified in the analysis of the other texts of the Canticle relative to the wife’s soul. This study privileges the order of the first version of the sanjuanista Canticle, whose stanza 20 also corresponds to the proto-canticle and expresses more harmoniously the movements towards the interiority and the entrambos. However, the transmutation of drama lovers into symbolic dynamism seems to blur all specificity of love and the consequent personal fulfillment. The union of love articulates, not without conflict, the symbols related to places for the wife and movement for the husband. The drama begins with the departure of the wife in search of the Beloved, for a new entry into the innermost of herself, where the Husband dwells. The alternation of mobility and stability is transversal to the poem. The sudden presence of the Holy Spirit in the drama, as “lodger of the Verb in the soul”, makes a third party explicit in the love relationship and eliminates any attempt to understand it in linear terms. The Spirit sustains and enriches reciprocity in the alterity proper to love, whose matrix is the Incarnation, and finally reveals—in that dialogical spousal love—the mystery of Trinitarian love. The specificity of the woman’s fulfillment transcends as availability to the Spirit, to which all love that does not suppress the painful paradox, is equated.