Saint Rose of Lima: The Rose, the Lamp and the Cross August 30
Few saints demonstrate more beautifully the genius of the traditional Roman liturgy than Saint Rose of Lima. Popular devotion remembers the roses, the crown of thorns, the extraordinary fasts, the garden hermitage and the mystical espousal with Christ. The Church, however, does something more. On August 30 she takes all these elements and interprets them. Rose is not presented merely as an extraordinary ascetic from seventeenth-century Peru, but as a Virgin of the Church, a bride awaiting the Bridegroom, a lamp filled with the oil of charity, a flower opened by prevenient grace, and a soul whose fragrance is nothing other than the “good odour of Christ.” The Mass therefore supplies the theological key by which her remarkable life must be understood.
Its proper Collect is among the loveliest in the traditional Roman Missal:
Bonórum ómnium largítor, omnípotens Deus, qui beátam Rosam, cæléstis grátiæ rore prævéntam, virginitátis et patiéntiæ decóre Indis floréscere voluísti: da nobis fámulis tuis; ut in odórem suavitátis ejus curréntes, Christi bonus odor éffici mereámur.
“Almighty God, giver of all good things, Who didst will that blessed Rose, prevened by the dew of heavenly grace, should blossom in the Indies with the beauty of virginity and patience: grant unto us Thy servants that, running after the fragrance of her sweetness, we may deserve to become the good odour of Christ.”¹
The important word is præventam. In ordinary English translations it is sometimes weakened into “imbued” or “watered,” but the Latin says more. Rose has been anticipated by grace: grace has gone before her. The Collect thus begins not with Rose’s fasting, her mortification, her virginity or even her decision to follow Christ, but with God. Bonorum omnium largitor — He is the giver of every good thing. The heavenly dew descends before the flower opens. Rose’s response is real, arduous and heroic, but it is a response. The saint is first something God has made before she becomes an example of what man may do. That is profoundly Augustinian, profoundly Catholic, and an indispensable safeguard against interpreting her life as though sanctity were a feat of spiritual athleticism.
From that dew comes a flower: Indis florescere voluisti — God willed Rose “to blossom in the Indies.” Then comes fragrance: in odorem suavitatis ejus currentes. Finally the fragrance becomes Christological: Christi bonus odor effici mereamur. The whole Collect moves from grace to sanctity, from sanctity to witness, and from witness to Christ. Rose is not the destination. Christ is. The Church does not ask that we become curiosities resembling Rose; she asks that, following Rose, we become ourselves the fragrance of Jesus Christ.
The first flower of the New World
Isabel Flores de Oliva was born at Lima on 20 April 1586, in the Viceroyalty of Peru. She came to be called Rosa, and later Rosa de Santa María. From childhood there appeared in her an unusually intense attraction towards prayer, virginity and penance. Above all, she took as her spiritual model another Dominican tertiary and mystic, Saint Catherine of Siena. In her twentieth year Rose received the habit of the Third Order of Saint Dominic, but she did not enter an enclosed monastery. Her vocation unfolded largely within the household and garden of her family home.²
This is important because the popular image of Rose as an almost entirely secluded penitent is incomplete. She did indeed construct a small hermitage in the garden where she gave long periods to contemplation, fasting and prayer. Yet she also worked with her hands, helped support her family and cared for the needy. The contemplative cell did not close her eyes to suffering outside it. The same woman who sought Christ in silence received the poor and the sick. This was not an incidental benevolent activity attached to an essentially private mysticism; it belonged to the very structure of her Dominican spirituality. Contemplation was meant to bear fruit in charity.
A saying attributed to Rose, later incorporated into Catholic catechetical tradition, expresses this with astonishing correspondence to her traditional Collect: “When we serve the poor and the sick, we are the good odour of Christ.” The flower, the fragrance and the works of mercy belong together. The authenticity of contemplation is proved not simply by what happens within the soul, but by whether love of God flowers into love of neighbour.
Rose died at Lima on 24 August 1617, aged only thirty-one. Because August 24 was already occupied by the ancient feast of Saint Bartholomew the Apostle, her universal Roman feast came to be observed on August 30. Canonised by Pope Clement X in 1671, she was the first person born in the Americas to be raised to the altars by canonisation. Her cult rapidly became a major expression of Catholic identity throughout Spanish America and beyond; surviving seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art demonstrates how quickly her iconography spread across the Atlantic and Pacific worlds.³
By the pre-1955 arrangement of the General Roman Calendar, August 30 therefore gives us St Rose of St Mary, Virgin of Lima, Double, in white vestments, with a commemoration of the ancient Roman martyrs Saints Felix and Adauctus.⁴ This last detail matters. The Church has not erased the old martyrs in order to make room for the New World saint. They remain beneath the later feast as an older layer of the Roman sanctoral cycle. The calendar resembles an ancient basilica whose successive centuries remain visible rather than a building repeatedly demolished and reconstructed according to contemporary taste.
Blessed Ildefonso Schuster notices precisely this liturgical layering. Rose’s feast, he explains, came to overshadow in rank the earlier observance of Felix and Adauctus, yet their commemoration remains. He also records the remarkable tradition that the Office of Rose was composed by the learned seventeenth-century liturgist Cardinal Giovanni Bona.⁵ An American saint of comparatively recent date is consequently inserted into the ancient Roman cycle using its inherited language rather than by constructing an isolated liturgical idiom around her. Rome receives Lima without ceasing to be Rome.
The Bride: “I have espoused you to one husband”
The Mass is Dilexisti, from the Common of a Virgin not a Martyr. The Introit takes up Psalm 44: Dilexisti justitiam, et odisti iniquitatem — “Thou hast loved justice and hated iniquity; therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness.” The Epistle is 2 Corinthians 10:17–18 and 11:1–2, culminating in Saint Paul’s declaration: “I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ.” The Gradual, Alleluia and Offertory continue the royal and bridal imagery of Psalm 44, while the Gospel is the parable of the ten virgins awaiting the Bridegroom in Matthew 25.¹
This is the Church’s first great interpretative judgement upon Rose: her life is nuptial. Her virginity is not primarily a negation of marriage, still less a hostility towards the body. It is an espousal. Christ is not simply the object of her religious convictions; He is the Bridegroom for whom the soul reserves itself.
Saint Thomas Aquinas gives the precise scholastic explanation. Virginity is not praiseworthy simply because physical integrity has been preserved. Its virtue lies in the deliberate consecration of that integrity for the sake of divine things. Following Saint Augustine, Thomas insists that bodily virginity receives its religious excellence from the intention by which it is offered to God. Nor does Aquinas commit the mistake of making virginity itself the supreme Christian virtue. Charity is greater, because virginity is a means of more undivided dedication to God whereas charity unites the soul directly to Him.⁶
That distinction is essential for understanding Rose. Otherwise her life can be turned into an inventory of increasingly extraordinary renunciations: she refused marriage, cut her hair, fasted, wore instruments of penance, restricted sleep, embraced solitude. But none of these things, taken merely as physical facts, constitutes sanctity. Their Christian meaning is supplied by their end. Rose belongs to Christ. Her chastity is bridal; her fasting is penitential; her solitude is contemplative; her suffering is participatory; her works of mercy are acts of charity. The unifying reality is not austerity but love.
Aquinas elsewhere calls charity the form of the virtues, because it orders virtuous actions to man’s final supernatural end in God.⁷ This gives us the safest theological rule for reading the more startling pages of Rose’s biography. If we remove charity, her penances become incomprehensible. If we restore charity, they become intelligible as the severe ascetical expression of an overwhelmingly Christocentric vocation.
The lamp and the oil
The Gospel makes the point even more forcefully. Ten virgins go out with lamps to meet the Bridegroom. All have lamps. All await Him. All fall asleep when He delays. What separates the wise from the foolish is not the outward profession of virginity but the possession of oil.
The Fathers did not treat that oil as an incidental detail. Saint Augustine, commenting upon the wise and foolish virgins, sees the decisive reality as interior: works must proceed from a heart directed towards God rather than from the desire to be seen and applauded by men. The lamp may be visible, but the oil is carried within. The parable therefore warns that an external appearance of religion cannot substitute for the interior reality of charity.
Saint John Chrysostom makes the application sharper still. For him the oil signifies mercy and almsgiving, concrete assistance to those in need. His reading is deliberately unsettling: the foolish virgins have accomplished something apparently difficult — they are virgins — and nevertheless remain outside because austerity without mercy is insufficient. The point is not that virginity is worthless but that the lamp requires oil. Christian renunciation reaches its purpose only when it is animated by charity.
The great post-Tridentine Catholic exegete Cornelius à Lapide, gathering the patristic inheritance in his commentary upon Matthew 25, likewise understands the prudent virgins as possessing not an exterior profession alone but the inward substance represented by oil: charity, mercy and good works. The Bridegroom is Christ; the nuptials are the consummation of the Kingdom; the delay is the span of this mortal life; the midnight cry is the sudden summons to judgement. One cannot borrow at the last moment the charity by which another soul has lived.
Suddenly Rose’s biography appears in a different light. The Gospel is not assigned to her merely because the Missal required a generic reading for the category “Virgin.” Rose actually embodies its logic. She had the lamp of consecrated virginity, but she also carried the oil. The garden hermitage and the care of the sick therefore interpret one another. If we remember only her fasts, chains and crown of thorns, we have remembered the lamp and forgotten the oil.
Pius Parsch sees precisely this ecclesial dimension in the Mass. He describes a threefold liturgical identification: Rose herself is the bride; Rose represents the Church awaiting Christ; and each worshipper must discover his own soul within that bridal drama. In his reading, the Mass itself becomes an anticipation of the coming of the Bridegroom. At the Offertory the Church stands as the adorned bride; in Holy Communion the heavenly banquet is sacramentally anticipated.⁸ The Gospel therefore refuses to remain a story about Rose. It becomes a question addressed to everyone at the altar: is there oil in my lamp?
The secret of the thorns
No account of Rose can evade the severity of her penances. Nor should it. Modern hagiography can become embarrassed by precisely those features which earlier Catholic generations regarded as evidence of heroic asceticism. Rose fasted with extraordinary rigour, practised prolonged vigils, used a hairshirt and other penitential instruments, and in deliberate imitation of the Passion wore beneath her veil a metal crown furnished inwardly with points. The physical austerities were extreme.
Dom Prosper Guéranger catches the paradox of her sanctity by placing the beauty of the rose beside the hidden thorn. Rose was gentle and charitable towards others while reserving severe mortification for herself. But Guéranger’s deeper point is not admiration of pain in itself. He reads her against the troubled moral landscape of colonial Peru, where authentic evangelisation existed beside avarice, exploitation and violence, and sees her penitential life as possessing an expiatory and reparative character.⁹ Her suffering is ecclesial: sin has been committed, Christ has been offended, souls must be converted, and love desires to make reparation.
There is nevertheless a necessary Catholic distinction. Canonisation does not mean that every material practice of a saint is proposed for literal imitation by every Christian. The Church canonises heroic virtue, not a universal programme of identical bodily austerities. This distinction is not a modern retreat from ascetical Christianity; it comes from the very mystical tradition Rose followed.
Her chosen spiritual mother, Saint Catherine of Siena, is strikingly explicit in the Dialogue. Bodily penances are instruments of virtue. The soul must not build its perfection upon penance as though the amount of physical suffering endured were itself the measure of holiness. Catherine insists that penance be governed by discretion, humility and charity; the primary affection must be placed in virtue and love. “Penance should be but the means to increase virtue,” she teaches, according to the individual soul’s needs and capacity.¹⁰
This is the proper Catholic hermeneutic for Rose’s austerity. It avoids two opposite falsifications. The first is the modern therapeutic reduction which finds severe penance embarrassing and therefore sanitises Rose into a pleasant humanitarian with flowers. The second is an undiscerning traditionalism which treats the most extreme bodily practices as though extremity itself constituted holiness. Neither is the doctrine of Catherine, Thomas or Rose. Penance is real, necessary and Christian; but its supernatural value arises from charity, prudence, obedience, reparation and conformity to Christ.
The universal lesson, then, is not that every Catholic should reproduce Rose’s instruments of mortification. It is that no Catholic may abolish the Cross. Her severity rebukes the contemporary fantasy that Christianity should demand nothing painful, that self-denial is psychologically unhealthy simply because it hurts, or that spiritual maturity means the perpetual avoidance of discomfort. Rose forces us to recover categories such as mortification, expiation, reparation, discipline of the passions, voluntary sacrifice and participation in the Passion of Christ.
“Apart from the Cross there is no other ladder”
Rose’s own spiritual doctrine comes to its most concentrated expression in the celebrated saying: **“Apart from the Cross there is no other ladder by which we may get to heaven.”**¹¹ The sentence can sound forbidding only if the Cross has first been detached from Christ. Christianity does not worship pain. The Cross saves because it is the Cross of the incarnate Son, the supreme act of obedient love in which suffering, sin and death are conquered from within.
Rose’s mystical writings speak repeatedly of the relation between tribulation and grace. Her conviction is not that affliction earns God’s love as though grace were a wage paid for pain. Her own liturgical Collect has already excluded that idea: heavenly grace prevenes. Rather, grace enables the soul to suffer fruitfully with Christ; trial strips away disordered attachment; patience deepens; charity is purified; and the Cross becomes the place of conformity between Bride and Bridegroom.
Here Aquinas and Catherine again prevent distortion. The Cross is not an alternative to charity; the Cross is where charity proves itself. Rose’s fasting is not holy because hunger is holy. Her sleeplessness is not holy because exhaustion is holy. Her virginity is not holy merely because marriage is renounced. Her sufferings become holy insofar as they are caught up into a life deliberately offered to the crucified Christ.
This explains why her public charity and her hidden penance cannot be separated. The same love moves in both directions. It ascends towards Christ in contemplation and reaches outward towards Christ in the poor. The vertical beam of the Cross and the horizontal beam belong to the same mystery.
The dark night of Rose
The most demanding penances of Rose’s life may not, in fact, have been bodily. Traditional accounts emphasise that for approximately fifteen years she endured prolonged periods of severe spiritual desolation and aridity. Parsch stresses this trial in his presentation of the feast, and the older liturgical lessons describe an interior anguish more bitter to her than bodily death.⁸
This allows Rose to be read alongside Saint John of the Cross. John’s Dark Night describes the purgation by which God may withdraw sensible and even spiritual consolations so that the soul’s attachment is purified for the “union of love with God.”¹² The soul may find understanding darkened, affection dry and former religious sweetness absent, yet beneath the darkness a deeper work of God proceeds.
This is particularly illuminating when set beside the Gospel: moram autem faciente sponso — “and the bridegroom tarrying.” The virgins must wait. Nothing dramatic happens for a time. The Bridegroom appears absent. Sleep descends. Faithfulness consists in possessing the oil necessary to endure the delay.
Rose therefore does not teach merely how to pray when prayer is consoling. She teaches how to remain when God seems silent. Her garden cell was not simply a theatre of ecstasy and visions. It became the place where fidelity survived aridity. The sensible sweetness disappeared, but the Bridegroom remained the Bridegroom. This is a far more mature mystical doctrine than the contemporary tendency to equate religious experience with emotional intensity. Genuine prayer is tested precisely when consolation ceases.
Schuster: the good odour of Christ
Blessed Schuster takes the proper Collect as the programme of Rose’s feast. His commentary draws attention to its remarkable demand that Christians not merely admire the saint but reproduce Christ in their own lives, thoughts and words, allowing Christian devotion to appear with the sweetness proper to the divine Master.⁵ It is an arresting interpretation because Rose’s biography could so easily lead the reader to concentrate upon severity. The liturgy instead concludes with fragrance.
This is no sentimental softening of asceticism. It is its purpose. Mortification which makes a Christian harsh, proud, censorious or spiritually vain has contradicted the very Christ whom mortification is supposed to reveal. Rose’s austerity towards herself existed beside charity towards others. The harder the discipline, the greater the requirement that its fruit should be patience, gentleness and love.
Schuster therefore brings us back to the Collect: the heavenly dew, the flowering, the fragrance. Sanctity ought to make Christ perceptible. Saint Paul’s image in 2 Corinthians 2:15 — the bonus odor Christi, the good odour of Christ — is not decorative poetry added to Rose’s feast because her name happens to be a flower. It expresses the missionary quality of holiness. A saint communicates Christ by becoming transparent to Him.
Guéranger: sanctity as the answer to a civilisation’s sins
Guéranger begins his meditation upon the feast with the image of a fragrance crossing the ocean from the New World to the Old. His historical frame is deliberately unsentimental. The evangelisation of the Americas produced missionaries of extraordinary heroism, but the colonial enterprise also contained men whose greed gravely contradicted the Gospel. Rose appears within this compromised world not as an argument against evangelisation but as evidence of what the Gospel was capable of producing when actually received.⁹
This makes her an uncomfortable saint for every age. The Church may preach the truth while individual Christians scandalously betray it. The answer to that contradiction is not to dilute Christianity until it no longer judges anyone. It is sanctity. Rose does not repair the sins around her by revising the Gospel; she allows the Gospel to convert her more completely.
Guéranger’s insight has enduring importance. Cultures are not renewed merely by ecclesiastical strategies, programmes, administrative restructurings or slogans. They require saints. Peru’s first universally canonised flower of holiness was a young Dominican tertiary praying in a garden, caring for the poor, labouring for her family and offering suffering to God. The apparently hidden life became historically more enduring than the power, wealth and politics that surrounded it.
Parsch: the saint, the Church and the soul
Parsch’s commentary reaches another essential insight: the liturgy never allows the feast to become a museum-piece biography. In the saint, the Church recognises herself. Rose is the bride awaiting Christ; but the Church is also the Bride. Rose carries her lamp; but every baptised soul must carry one. Rose enters the banquet; but every Mass sacramentally anticipates that same eschatological feast.⁸
This is why the older Common of Virgins possesses such theological power. Its texts are not generic material carelessly imposed upon different women. They disclose the ecclesiology of virginity. The consecrated virgin is an intensified sign of what the whole Church is: Sponsa Christi, the Bride of Christ. What is bodily explicit in the virgin is sacramentally true of the entire Christian people.
And so Rose’s feast is not finally about an unusual Peruvian woman who lived four centuries ago. It is about the destiny of the Church and of each soul. The midnight cry in Matthew is addressed to us: Ecce sponsus venit: exite obviam ei — “Behold, the Bridegroom cometh: go ye forth to meet Him.”
Felix and Adauctus: the old Rome beneath the New World
There is a final liturgical detail easily overlooked. Beneath Rose on August 30 stand the martyrs Felix and Adauctus, whose Roman cult reaches back to antiquity. Their commemoration survives in the pre-1955 feast. Schuster notes their ancient burial on the Via Ostiensis, while the tradition associates their tomb with an inscription of Pope Saint Damasus.⁵
The juxtaposition is almost a miniature portrait of Catholic Tradition. Ancient Roman martyrs and a seventeenth-century Peruvian virgin stand within the same Mass. One gave blood beneath pagan persecution; another embraced a mystical martyrdom of penance and charity in colonial Lima. The geography, century and circumstances differ, but the principle is identical: Christ produces saints everywhere without changing the nature of sanctity.
The old calendar thus performs an act of memory simply by refusing to forget. Rose does not need Felix and Adauctus to disappear in order for her to be honoured. The newer flower grows within soil already fertilised by earlier blood. That cumulative quality is characteristic of the inherited Roman liturgy: tradition develops by receiving, layering and remembering, not by assuming that the presence of the new requires the deletion of the old.
What Saint Rose teaches now
Saint Rose is particularly necessary in an age which struggles to understand nearly every category upon which her life depends. She speaks to a culture suspicious of virginity because it cannot imagine a love greater than sexual fulfilment; suspicious of penance because it cannot imagine suffering voluntarily accepted for a supernatural good; suspicious of contemplation because silence appears unproductive; suspicious of reparation because sin has been psychologised into dysfunction; and suspicious even of sanctity because radical holiness contradicts the comfortable assumption that Christianity exists chiefly to affirm us as we already are.
Yet Rose also corrects religious distortions from the opposite direction. She will not permit penance to become theatre, austerity to become pride, orthodoxy to become hardness, or contemplation to become indifference towards the poor. Catherine’s discretion, Thomas’s primacy of charity, Augustine’s interior oil, Chrysostom’s almsgiving, à Lapide’s good works, John of the Cross’s purification, Guéranger’s reparation, Schuster’s fragrance and Parsch’s bridal liturgy all converge upon one point: the saint is a soul transformed by divine charity.
That is why the traditional Collect remains the finest commentary upon Rose ever composed. It begins with God: Bonorum omnium largitor. It continues with grace: cælestis gratiæ rore præventam. Grace causes flowering: floréscere. The flower possesses the beauty of virginitas et patientia. The beauty produces fragrance: odor suavitatis. And the final purpose is Christ: Christi bonus odor effici mereamur.
The whole spiritual life is there.
Grace first. Then response.
Virginity, but for the Bridegroom.
Penance, but under charity and discretion.
Contemplation, but flowering into mercy.
Suffering, but united to the Cross.
Darkness, but with the lamp still burning.
The saint, but only so that Christ may be perceived.
When the midnight cry finally sounds, the decisive question will not be whether we admired Rose, nor whether our penances were dramatic, nor whether others thought us devout. It will be whether the heavenly dew was allowed to bear fruit; whether charity remained in the vessel; whether Christ recognises in us something of His own fragrance.
Ecce sponsus venit: exite obviam ei.
Behold, the Bridegroom cometh. Go ye forth to meet Him.
And the prayer of the Church is that when we go forth, following the fragrance of Rose, we ourselves may have become the good odour of Christ.
¹ Missale Romanum, Mass Dilexisti for St Rose of Lima, August 30. The Mass gives Psalm 44:8 as the Introit, 2 Corinthians 10:17–18; 11:1–2 as the Epistle, Matthew 25:1–13 as the Gospel, and the proper Collect beginning Bonorum omnium largitor. The Communion deliberately returns to the wise virgins and the midnight cry.
² The older Catholic biographical tradition records Rose’s birth at Lima in 1586, her conscious imitation of St Catherine of Siena, her reception of the Dominican habit in her twentieth year, her work for her family and the needy, and her garden retreat for prayer. The Museo de América likewise identifies Isabel Flores de Oliva as a Dominican tertiary, Rosa de Santa María.
³ Rose died on 24 August 1617 and was canonised by Clement X in 1671, becoming the first canonised saint born in the Americas. Her rapid importance within Dominican and Spanish-American Catholic culture is illustrated by Claudio Coello’s c.1685 painting for a Dominican friary in Madrid, where the Prado notes that Rose and St Dominic were accorded corresponding positions in the church’s side altarpieces.
⁴ The General Roman Calendar immediately before the 1955 alterations lists August 30 as “St. Rose of St. Mary Virgin of Lima, Double, Com. of Ss. Felix and Adauctus Martyrs.”
⁵ Bl. Ildefonso Schuster, Liber Sacramentorum, vol. V, on August 30. Schuster identifies Rose as a Dominican tertiary after the pattern of Catherine of Siena, attributes the composition of her Office to Cardinal Bona, comments upon her proper Collect, and treats Felix and Adauctus as the older Roman observance underlying the day. A modern reprint of Schuster’s fifth volume is published as The Sacramentary (Liber Sacramentorum), Volume 5.
⁶ St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II–II, q.152, especially aa.3–5, on virginity as consecration to divine things and its relation to the other virtues.
⁷ St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II–II, q.23, aa.7–8, on charity as ordering the other virtues towards the supernatural final end.
⁸ Pius Parsch, The Church’s Year of Grace, treatment of St Rose of Lima. Parsch emphasises her fifteen-year spiritual desolation and interprets the Mass through the threefold figure of Rose as bride, the Church as Bride, and the individual Christian soul awaiting the Bridegroom; he reads Holy Mass itself as an anticipation of the heavenly nuptials. The text is reproduced alongside the traditional liturgical commentary for August 30.
⁹ Dom Prosper Guéranger, The Liturgical Year, August 30, St Rose of Lima. Guéranger places Rose within the evangelisation and moral disorders of colonial Spanish America, presents her penitential life in reparative terms, and repeatedly develops the feast’s imagery of fragrance, dew, flower and the good odour of Christ.
¹⁰ St Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, Treatise of Discretion. Catherine explicitly teaches that bodily penances are instruments rather than the foundation of perfection, that principal affection must be placed in virtue and charity, and that penance must be governed by discretion according to the soul’s circumstances and capacity.
¹¹ The traditional saying of St Rose, “Apart from the Cross there is no other ladder by which we may get to heaven,” has entered the wider catechetical presentation of the Church’s doctrine of participation in Christ’s sacrifice.
¹² St John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, Prologue and subsequent treatment of the purgative nights. John describes the stripping of sensible and spiritual consolation as preparation for the “perfect union of love with God.”
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