O ADONAI — Juan de la Cruz | John of the Cross

ANTIPHONUM

O Adonai, et Dux domus Israel,
qui Moysi in igne flammae rubi apparuisti,
et ei in Sina legem dedisti:
veni ad redimendum nos in brachio extento.

Oh Adonai, Pastor de la casa de Israel, que te apareciste a Moisés en la zarza ardiente y en el Sinaí le diste tu ley, ven a librarnos con el poder de tu brazo.

O sacred Lord of ancient Israel, who showed yourself to Moses in the burning bush, who gave him the holy law on Sinai mountain: come, stretch out your mighty hand to set us free.

LECTIO

De lo cual tenemos autoridad y ejemplos juntamente en la divina Escritura. Porque la cortedad del manifestarlo y hablarlo exteriormente mostró Jeremías (1, 6), cuando, habiendo Dios hablado con él, no supo qué decir, sino: a, a, a. Y la cortedad interior, esto es, del sentido interior de la imaginación, y juntamente la del exterior acerca de esto, también la manifestó Moisés delante de Dios en la zarza (Ex. 4, 10), cuando, no solamente dijo a Dios que después que hablaba con él, no sabía ni acertaba a hablar, pero aun, según se dice en los Actos de los Apóstoles (7, 32), con la imaginación interior no se atrevía a considerar, pareciéndole que la imaginación estaba muy lejos y muda, no sólo para formar algo de aquello que entendía en Dios, pero ni aun capacidad para recibir algo de ello. De donde, por cuanto la sabiduría de esta contemplación es lenguaje de Dios al alma de puro espíritu a espíritu puro, todo lo que es menos que espíritu, como son los sentidos, no lo reciben, y así les es secreto y no lo saben ni pueden decir, ni tienen gana porque no ven cómo.

Noche Oscura: Libro 2 Capítulo 17

We have examples of this ineffability of divine language in Sacred Scripture. Jeremiah manifested his incapacity to describe it when, after God had spoken to him, he knew of nothing more to say than ah, ah, ah! [Jer. 1:6]. Moses also declared before God, present in the burning bush, his interior inability (the inability of both his imagination and his exterior senses) [Ex. 4:10]. He asserted that not only was he unable to speak of this conversation but that he did not even dare consider it in his imagination, as is said in the Acts of the Apostles [Acts 7:32]. He believed that his imagination was not only unable to speak, as it were, in the matter of forming some image of what he understood in God, but also incapable of receiving this knowledge.

Since the wisdom of this contemplation is the language of God to the soul, of Pure Spirit to pure spirit, all that is less than spirit, such as the sensory, fails to perceive it. Consequently this wisdom is secret to the senses; they have neither the knowledge nor the ability to speak of it, nor do they even desire to do so because it is beyond words.

The Dark Night: Book Two, Chapter 17

John of the Cross, St. 1991, The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, Revised Edition, translated from the Spanish by Kavanaugh, K and Rodriguez, O with revisions and introductions by Kavanaugh, K, ICS Publications, Washington DC.