Justified True Belief

(●) The Carmelite friar who was jailed by his own order, wrote poetry in the dark, and left the church its most careful account of what happens when prayer goes cold. + Almost everyone has heard the phrase "the dark night of the soul." It gets used for depression, for grief, for the flat stretch after a bereavement, for whatever the worst year of a life turns out to be. The phrase comes from a Spanish friar who spent nine months locked in a room the size of a large closet, and who meant something a good deal more precise by it than the phrase now carries. John of the Cross was born poor, stayed poor on purpose, and worked most of his life as an administrator and a confessor rather than an author. He wrote for a small audience: nuns and friars in the reformed Carmelite houses he helped to found, who had come to him saying that prayer had stopped working. His answer to them ran to four prose treatises, two of which he left unfinished, and a handful of poems, and by the ordinary reckoning of Spanish literature the poems are among the finest anyone has written in the language. He is also, since 1926, a Doctor of the Church, which is the title the Roman church gives to a teacher whose writing it commends to everybody rather than to a school. One fact stands out ahead of all the rest. Much of the poetry that made his name was composed in a cell ten feet by six, with a slit high in the wall for light. He carried the stanzas in his head, and got them onto paper only when a jailer took pity on him late in the nine months and brought him some.

(●) 1542 AD: He was born at Fontiveros into a poverty his father had chosen. + Juan de Yepes was born in 1542 in Fontiveros, a small town on the wheat plain northwest of Ávila, in Old Castile. The traditional date is 24 June, the feast of John the Baptist, though the family record has not survived to confirm it. His father Gonzalo came from a family of silk merchants in Toledo and had been sent out to buy and sell cloth. On the road he met Catalina Álvarez, a weaver with no money and no name worth listing, and married her. His family cut him off completely. Gonzalo learned the loom, and the household lived on what a weaver earns, which in sixteenth-century Castile was very little. He died while John was still a small child. Catalina walked to Toledo with her three boys to ask her husband’s relatives for help, and came away with nothing. Not long after, the middle son, Luis, died, and the early accounts put it down to plain want of food. Whatever else John learned in childhood, he learned first that being poor is not a spiritual exercise but a thing that kills children, and nothing he wrote later about detachment was written by a man who had to imagine it.

(●) c. 1551 to 1563 AD: At Medina del Campo he went to the charity school, nursed in the hospital wards, and took the Carmelite habit. + The family moved to Medina del Campo, a market town busy with fairs, and John was enrolled in the Colegio de la Doctrina, a school that fed and taught boys who had nothing. He served at Mass, ran errands, and was tried out at carpentry, tailoring, carving and painting, and was reportedly no good at any of them. Then he was taken on at the Hospital de la Concepción, which cared for the poor with contagious and venereal disease. He worked there for something like seven years, begging in the streets for the hospital’s upkeep and nursing patients nobody else wanted to touch, while attending the Jesuit college in the same town for grammar, rhetoric and the classics. The hospital’s administrator thought so well of him that he offered him a chaplaincy there for life. He turned it down. It is worth pausing on how strange that was: a boy of no family, offered a secure living, saying no. In 1563 he took the Carmelite habit at the house of Santa Ana in Medina and was given the name Juan de Santo Matía, John of Saint Matthias.

(●) 1564 to 1568 AD: He studied at Salamanca, was ordained, and met Teresa of Ávila, who changed his plans. + The Carmelites sent him to Salamanca, then one of the great universities of Europe, where he spent three years in arts and one in theology. There he read the schoolmen, the medieval university theologians who taught by stating a question, raising every objection anyone had made to it, and answering them one at a time. It shows. For all the poetry, his prose argues in careful distinctions, and the treatises are laid out the way a trained theologian lays out a question. He was ordained priest in 1567, at twenty-five. He was also, by his own account, unhappy. The Carmelite order he had joined had grown comfortable, and he was seriously considering leaving it for the Carthusians, whose monks live in near-total silence and solitude. That summer he went back to Medina to say his first Mass, and in Medina he met Teresa of Ávila, then fifty-two, who was in town founding one of her reformed convents. Teresa had permission to found two houses of friars on the same strict pattern and no friars to put in them. She talked him out of the Carthusians. A saying his biographers have repeated ever since has her calling the pair who eventually joined her "a friar and a half," John being very short and his companion tall. It is in none of her surviving writings, and it has lasted because it caught the affection between them.

(●) 28 November 1568 AD: In a borrowed farmhouse at Duruelo the reform’s first house of friars opened, and he took the name John of the Cross. + The building Teresa found for the first house of reformed friars was a small farmhouse at Duruelo, in open country. She described it as having a porch, a room, a loft and a little kitchen, and John and two companions turned it into a friary by putting crosses on the walls and skulls on the sills. On 28 November 1568 they made their profession, the vows that bind a man to the life, under the primitive Carmelite rule. Primitive here means original: the older and harder version of the rule, as it stood before the softenings of later centuries had let the order settle into comfort. John marked the day by dropping his old religious name for a new one, Juan de la Cruz, John of the Cross. They were called the discalced friars, from the Latin for unshod, because they went barefoot or in rope sandals. What that meant in practice was cold, hunger, long hours of silent prayer before dawn, and walking to the surrounding villages to preach to farm workers who had rarely been preached to. Over the next years John taught novices, and from 1572 he served as confessor at the Monastery of the Incarnation in Ávila, the large unreformed convent where Teresa had been sent as prioress. He stayed more than five years. It was the making of him as a spiritual director: a hundred and thirty women, most of them not there by choice, and one small friar hearing all of it.

(●) December 1577 AD: His own brethren seized him and shut him in a Toledo cell for nine months. + The reform was a legal quarrel as much as a spiritual one. The unreformed Carmelites, the calced, held that the discalced houses had been founded on authority that had since been withdrawn, and they meant to put a stop to it. On the night of 2 December 1577 a party of friars and armed men took John from his lodging at the Incarnation and carried him to the Carmelite priory in Toledo. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1910 gives the date as 3 December; the difference is a night. He was tried as a rebel, refused to renounce the reform, and was locked in a room about ten feet by six that had been a latrine closet, with a slit high in the wall for light. He was fed on bread, water and scraps of salt fish. At intervals he was brought down to the refectory, the room where the community ate together, made to eat on the floor, and given the circular discipline, which meant the friars filing past him in turn to lash his bare back. He carried the scars for the rest of his life, and he wore the same tunic month after month. What he did there is the thing that keeps being retold. A friar set to guard him took pity, brought him paper and ink, and gave his own account of it years later when the church was gathering testimony about John. In that room John composed the first thirty-one stanzas of the Spiritual Canticle, the poem on the Trinity that begins "I know the fountain well which flows and runs, though it be night," and the romances on the Word made flesh. In mid-August 1578 he worked the screws out of the lock on his door, let himself down the wall on a rope of torn bed covers, and reached the discalced nuns in Toledo, who hid him until friends could get him out of the city.

(●) 1578 to 1591 AD: In Andalusia and Segovia he governed houses by day and wrote the four treatises. + After the escape he was sent south, and from then on he was never without a job to do. He was superior at El Calvario first, then rector of the new college at Baeza from 1579, then prior at Los Mártires in Granada from 1582. Later he was made vicar provincial of Andalusia, the officer answerable for every discalced house in the province, which in practice meant years of visiting them on foot and by mule. From 1588 he was prior at Segovia and one of the order’s senior officers. All four of his prose works belong to these years, and all four are commentaries on his own poems. Someone would ask him what a stanza meant, and he would write an explanation that grew into a book. The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night are two halves of one long treatise on the same eight-stanza poem, and both break off unfinished. The Spiritual Canticle was written out for Ana de Jesús, a prioress; The Living Flame of Love for Ana de Peñalosa, a widow in Granada. Juan Evangelista, a friar who lived alongside him in those years, testified afterwards that the whole of that last commentary was written in fifteen days, at a stretch when he was busy with everything else. He was not a professional writer and never sought a printer. The books went from hand to hand in manuscript, copied by nuns, which is exactly why the texts come down in more than one state and why scholars still argue about which version of the Canticle he left last.

(●) 14 December 1591 AD: Stripped of every office by his own reform, he died at Úbeda at forty-nine. + The last turn is bitter. Nicolás Doria, by then the head of the discalced Carmelites, was reorganizing the order along tighter and more centralized lines. John opposed him, defended the nuns whose constitutions Doria wanted altered, and stood by Jerónimo Gracián, whom Doria was moving to expel. At the general chapter that opened in Madrid on 1 June 1591, the assembly where the order’s superiors gather to elect officers and settle its business, John was left without a single office and sent to La Peñuela, a remote house in the Sierra Morena. There was talk of shipping him to Mexico. At La Peñuela an infection in his leg turned serious, and on 28 September he was moved to Úbeda for treatment. The prior there, Francisco Crisóstomo, had been rebuked by John in the past and made no secret of resenting the extra expense of a sick guest; the surgery on the ulcers was done without anything to dull it. The provincial eventually heard and intervened. He died shortly after midnight on 14 December 1591, aged forty-nine, having asked for the Song of Solomon to be read aloud to him. Two years later his body was carried secretly to Segovia, Úbeda petitioned Rome to get it back, and the quarrel was settled by leaving each town a share of the remains. He was beatified in 1675, the step that allows a person to be honoured publicly in one place or one order, and canonized in 1726, which extends that honour to the whole church. In 1926 Pius XI named him a Doctor of the Church. Spain has since kept him on two shelves at once, in the anthologies of its poetry and in the list of the church’s teachers.

What He Taught

(T1) The road to having everything runs through wanting nothing. + Think of a man who cannot enjoy a holiday because he keeps checking whether it is going as well as it should. The holiday is fine. His grip on it is the problem. He is not free to receive the thing he is holding so tightly. That is roughly the observation John builds a whole spirituality on, and his word for the grip is apetito, appetite: not hunger or thirst, which he takes to be part of being a creature, but the settled wanting that attaches the will to a particular good and will not let go. His claim is that appetites do not merely distract the soul, they tire it, blind it, and stain it, the way soot dulls a bright surface. And the size of the object does not matter much. He says a bird held by a thread is as unable to fly as a bird held by a rope, and it must break the thread all the same. The famous counsels follow. To have pleasure in everything, seek pleasure in nothing. To possess all things, seek to possess nothing. He drew a sketch of Mount Carmel for his directees, with a broad road of earthly goods and a broad road of heavenly goods, both of which stop halfway up, and a narrow track between them along which the only word written is nada, nothing. The word is easy to misread. It is not a claim that created things are bad; John repeatedly says they are God’s and good. It is a claim about proportion. Nothing created is of the same order as God, so no amount of it, and no attachment to it, gets you nearer. Paul says the same in his own idiom when he counts everything as loss for the surpassing worth of knowing Christ (Philippians 3:8).

(Q) "That thou mayest have pleasure in everything, seek pleasure in nothing. That thou mayest know everything, seek to know nothing. That thou mayest possess all things, seek to possess nothing. That thou mayest be everything, seek to be nothing." + Source: John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book I, chapter 13, section 10 (David Lewis translation). These are the "instructions for ascending to the summit of Mount Carmel" that close his chapter on how to begin. Four more follow in the same breath, turning the same key: to attain what you do not know, you must go through what you do not know (T1).

(T2) The dark night is not God withdrawing; it is God arriving in a way the senses cannot register. + Here is the situation John was actually asked about, over and over, in the confessional. Someone has prayed happily for years. Scripture was warm, prayer was easy, and there were tears in it. Then it stops. The words go dead, the feelings drain out, and the person concludes that God has left, or that some hidden sin has done it, and starts trying harder at exactly the things that no longer work. John says the diagnosis is usually wrong. He distinguishes the night of sense, where the felt sweetness of prayer is withdrawn, from the deeper night of the spirit, where a person’s own understanding of God is taken apart. He also distinguishes the active night, what a person does, from the passive night, what is done to them. And his central claim is that the passive night is not absence at all. It is contemplation: God communicating himself directly rather than through images and reasoning, and the mind registering that arrival as darkness for the same reason that a man walking out of a cinema at noon registers full daylight as blindness. Too much light, not too little. He gives three practical signs for telling this night from mere dryness, lukewarmness or illness, and he insists on all three together: the person no longer finds satisfaction in creaturely things either, so it is not simple boredom; there is an anxious care about God and a fear of having gone backward, which lukewarmness never produces; and the mind cannot meditate the old way even when it tries. Where the signs are present, his counsel is almost aggressively simple. Stop working. Remain in loving attention, quietly, without straining to produce thoughts. Christians outside his tradition have found this passage useful precisely because it is not sentimental. It refuses to make the felt warmth of prayer the measure of God’s nearness, and it hands a name and a shape to the experience of a believer who is still praying and getting nothing back. "For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God" (Colossians 3:3) is the same thought from the other side.

(Q) "The dark night is a certain inflowing of God into the soul, which cleanses it of its ignorances and imperfections, habitual, natural, and spiritual." + Source: John of the Cross, The Dark Night, Book II, chapter 5, section 1 (David Lewis translation). The definition opens the chapter that explains why the same light is felt as pain. The next sentence names it: contemplatives "call it infused contemplation, or mystical theology, whereby God secretly teaches the soul and instructs it in the perfection of love, without efforts on its own part beyond a loving attention to God" (T2). The poem the treatise comments on begins: "In a dark night, With anxious love inflamed, O, happy lot! Forth unobserved I went, My house being now at rest" (The Dark Night, stanza 1, Lewis translation). The night in the poem is not a disaster. It is cover for an escape, written by a man who had made one.

(T3) No thought, picture or feeling is God, so faith is the only road the mind can take. + Ask someone what they picture when they pray, and you will get an answer: a light, a face, a presence, a bearded figure, a warmth in the chest. John’s point is not that these pictures are wicked. It is that none of them is God, and that a person who settles into one has quietly swapped the infinite for something the size of their own imagination. His argument is about proportion, and it is the same shape as an argument any of us would accept elsewhere. A means has to match its end: no ladder is long enough to reach the moon, however good a ladder it is, because the gap is not the kind of gap a ladder closes. So too, he says, nothing the understanding can grasp bears any proportion to God, and therefore no created idea or image can serve as the near, direct means of union with him. What can? Faith, which presents God as he is, infinite and three in one, without pretending to see him. Faith is dark to the understanding in exactly the way a truth held on someone else’s word is dark: you have it without seeing it. Out of that he builds a scheme, and it is worth having, because the rest of the Ascent runs on it. He takes the soul to work by three faculties, three powers: the understanding, which reasons and grasps; the memory, which keeps hold of what it has; and the will, which loves and chooses. To each one he assigns a theological virtue, the name Christian teaching gives to faith, hope and love because they have God himself for their object rather than some good in the world. Faith empties the understanding of its own ideas and fills it with God’s. Hope does the same work on the memory, loosening its grip on what it has and turning it toward what has been promised. Love does it for the will. And through the whole scheme he keeps insisting that the darkness is a feature rather than a defect, quoting the psalm that says God "made darkness his covering, his canopy around him, thick clouds dark with water" (Psalm 18:11). The practical upshot is a rule for prayer that has outlived his order. Do not chase experiences. Do not measure prayer by what it produces in you. Believe, and stay.

(Q) "Faith is the sole proximate and proportionate means of the soul’s union with God, seeing that there is no other alternative, but that God is either seen, or believed in." + Source: John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book II, chapter 9, section 1 (David Lewis translation). "Proximate" means the immediate, direct means rather than a remote or preparatory one, and "proportionate" means of a kind that can actually bridge the distance. The rest of the chapter piles up Scripture for the claim, and the conclusion John draws from it is the blunt one: "the greater the faith of the soul the more is that soul united to God" (T3).

(T4) God has already said his whole Word in his Son, and has nothing further to add. + Sixteenth-century Spain was full of visions. Convents produced them, popular devotion prized them, and the Inquisition spent a good deal of its time sorting the genuine from the fraudulent and the deluded. A director in that climate had to answer a question that came up constantly: what do I do about what I saw? John’s answer is the most surprising thing in his writing, because it is the opposite of what a mystic is expected to say. Do not seek them. Do not lean on them. Do not tell a director about them in the hope of being told they are real. His reasoning is not that God cannot speak this way, but that he has already spoken, once and completely, in Christ, and that asking for private extras treats the Son as though he were not enough. He hears God saying, in effect: I have spoken all by my Word, my Son; fix your eyes on him, and you will find more than you ask. He anchors it in Hebrews: "Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world" (Hebrews 1:1-2). Under the old covenant, he argues, consulting God by vision and oracle was proper because the faith had not yet been revealed. After Christ it is not. There are risks he names too, and they are the ordinary ones: the devil can counterfeit, the imagination can manufacture, and the soul that grows attached to marvels grows proud of them. Protestants who would part company with him on a great deal find this chapter oddly familiar, because it is the same instinct that made the Reformers insist that Scripture is sufficient. It is Christ, John says, who is God’s whole voice and answer.

(Q) "For in giving to us, as He hath done, His Son, Who is His only Word, He has spoken unto us once for all by His own and only Word, and has nothing further to reveal." + Source: John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book II, chapter 22, section 3 (David Lewis translation). He is answering a fair objection: prophets and priests under the old law asked God for visions and were answered, so why may we not do the same? He presses it further a few lines on: "God hath now so spoken, that nothing remains unspoken; for that which He partially revealed to the prophets He hath now revealed wholly in Him" (T4).

(T5) The end of the emptying is not emptiness but a flame: a soul transformed by love. + If the account stopped at the nights, John would be a teacher of endurance and nothing more, and he is regularly read that way by people who have only met the phrase. The nights are the first two thirds of a route, and he wrote the third part as well. His picture for the destination is a log in a fire. Green wood put on a hearth first sweats, blackens, smokes and hisses, which is what the dark night looks like from inside: the fire is not attacking the wood, it is drying it. Then the wood catches, and at the end it is so thoroughly on fire that you would say the log has become flame, though the log is still a log and the fire is still the fire. That is his image for union: not absorption, not the soul dissolving into God like a drop in the sea, but a creature so saturated with God’s love that its acts are God’s acts in it. He states the guard-rail himself in one of his maxims, and it matters: God’s aim is "to make us God by participation, He being God by nature; as the fire changes everything into fire" (Spiritual Maxims, 69, Lewis translation). Participation, not nature. The creature stays a creature. Peter says as much when he writes that we "become partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4), and the distinction John draws is the one that keeps the Christian claim on the right side of the line dividing it from every religion in which the self is finally swallowed. His last book, written for a widow in Granada in about two weeks, is a commentary on four stanzas addressed to that fire. And the register has changed completely from the treatises on the night. It is a love poem, and it is happy.

(Q) "O Living Flame of Love, That woundest tenderly My soul in its inmost depth! As thou art no longer grievous, Perfect thy work, if it be thy will, Break the web of this sweet encounter." + Source: John of the Cross, The Living Flame of Love, stanza 1 (David Lewis translation). The flame is the Holy Spirit. "As thou art no longer grievous" looks back over the whole road: the same love that burned as pain in the night is now felt as delight. The "web" is the thin remaining thread of mortal life, and asking for it to be broken is asking to die and see God (T5).

(Q) "At the close of life you will be examined as to your love: learn then to love God as He wishes to be loved, and give up all that is your own." + Source: John of the Cross, Spiritual Maxims, 70 (David Lewis translation); the collection is titled Sayings of Light and Love in modern editions. The short maxims were written on scraps for individual friars and nuns, and this is the most quoted sentence he ever wrote. It is also the summary of everything else: the stripping in (T1), the darkness in (T2) and (T3), and the fire in (T5) are all in service of one thing, and at the end only that one thing is asked about.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) His books survived because nuns copied them, and the first printed edition came out with a piece missing. + Nothing he wrote was printed while he lived. The treatises circulated as manuscripts, copied out by hand in the convents he had served, which is a fragile way for a book to survive and explains why the texts come down in competing states. His letters fared worse: he destroyed some himself, and more were burned during the order’s internal troubles, so that of a correspondence that once included years of exchanges with Teresa only thirty-three short letters remain. The first printed edition appeared at Alcalá in 1618, twenty-seven years after his death, and it left out the Spiritual Canticle altogether. The reason usually given is caution. A commentary on the Song of Solomon, written in Spanish for nuns, was exactly the kind of book the Spanish Inquisition watched: Luis de León had spent nearly five years in its cells at Valladolid, and the Spanish version he had made of that same book of the Bible was among the charges. John’s editors trimmed and softened elsewhere besides. The Canticle reached print in Spanish at Brussels in 1627, and entered the Spanish editions three years after that, at Madrid. It is worth registering how close the whole thing came to being lost. A poem that Spanish critics rank at the summit of the language was composed by a prisoner who for months had nothing to write it on, set down at last on paper a jailer brought him, copied out by hand in convents, and then held back from the press.

(†) The order that jailed him ended by naming him one of the church’s teachers. + He was beatified by Clement X in 1675, canonized by Benedict XIII in 1726, and in 1926 Pius XI declared him a Doctor of the Church, the Mystical Doctor. There are only a few dozen Doctors in the whole history of the Roman church, and the title means that a teacher’s writing is commended for general use rather than treasured by a school. What was commended was mostly a set of distinctions that spiritual directors had not previously had in usable form. Before John, a director faced with a person whose prayer had gone flat had to guess between sin, sloth, melancholy and grace. John gave three tests, said plainly what each verdict implied for practice, and warned directors at length against the two standard errors: forcing a person back to methods they have outgrown, and treating every dry season as a mystical grace. Later writers in the field, Catholic and otherwise, work with his vocabulary whether or not they accept the whole system, and the terms night of sense and night of spirit are still the working shorthand. The debt runs the other way too. He wrote the theology of the road that Teresa of Ávila had mapped from experience, and the two names have been paired ever since. Her interior castle and his mountain are two drawings of the same country.

(†) He is read far outside the order and the communion he wrote for. + A sixteenth-century Spanish friar writing for enclosed Carmelites, readers who had undertaken to spend the rest of their lives inside one house, had no reason to expect anybody else to pick the books up. He got them anyway, and from unlikely directions. - Poets. T. S. Eliot turned John’s counsels from the Ascent into English verse in "East Coker," the second of the Four Quartets, where to arrive at what you do not know you go by the way of ignorance, and to possess what you do not possess you go by the way of dispossession. - Philosophers. Edith Stein, the German phenomenologist who became a Carmelite and died at Auschwitz in 1942, spent her last years writing The Science of the Cross, a study of John, and left it unfinished on her desk when she was arrested. - Theologians. Karol Wojtyła wrote his doctoral thesis in Rome on faith in the writings of John of the Cross before he was a bishop, let alone Pope John Paul II, and the vocabulary stayed with him. - Ordinary readers. Thomas Merton, whose autobiography sent a generation of Americans to the Carmelite shelf, is one route; the plain popularity of the Dark Night among Protestant readers with no interest in the rest of his system is another. Not all of the borrowing is careful, and the phrase "dark night of the soul" now does duty for any bad stretch at all. But the reason people keep reaching for him is not obscure. He wrote about the part of the Christian life that most books skip, the long middle where nothing is happening, and he wrote about it as someone who had been there rather than as someone describing it from outside.

(†) He told souls to turn away from every vision, even a true one, and taught the cloistered to look on their own kindred as strangers. + Two things he taught have troubled Christians who otherwise admire him, and both come from his own pen rather than from anything later readers did with it. - The blanket refusal of visions and locutions. A vision is something seen in prayer; a locution is an inward word, a sentence heard in the soul rather than with the ears, the sort of thing a person means when she says that God told her something. John does not merely warn against seeking either one. He tells the soul to turn away from all of them, including the ones that come from God, and writes that "the spiritual man must therefore reject all these apprehensions" (Ascent, Book II, chapter 11). The difficulty is that Scripture itself records God giving visions to people who were right to receive them, from Peter on the rooftop to Paul’s man of Macedonia (Acts 10:9-16; Acts 16:9-10), and Paul writes "Do not quench the Spirit" (1 Thessalonians 5:19). John knows the objection and answers it: the good of a true vision, he says, is done to the soul passively at the moment it is given, so nothing is lost by declining to grasp at it. Readers have divided ever since on whether that answer covers the ground, or whether a rule built for a convent full of imagined revelations was generalized too far. - The counsel to forget one’s kindred. In the Precautions, written for a religious under vows, the first counsel against the world is to keep "an equal love and an equal forgetfulness of all men whether relatives or not," withdrawing affection more from relatives than from strangers, and to "look upon your kindred as strangers." He gives a reason: undivided attention to God will make you discharge your obligations to them better rather than worse. Even so, Christians have found it hard to square with the plain duties Scripture attaches to family, where a man who does not provide for his relatives "has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever" (1 Timothy 5:8). It is written for cloistered readers who had already left their families by vow, and it reads very differently on any other shelf. Neither of these is a small point, and neither is a reason to put him down. They are the marks of a teacher writing hard counsel for a particular room of people, and both are worth reading with the room in mind.