Des ténèbres à la lumière : Jean de la Croix dans la prison des Carmes mitigés de Tolède (1577-1578). Les enjeux du récit biographique

Abstract

The prison experience of John of the Cross in the Carmelite Convent of Toledo is inseparable from the development of a literary creation recognized as one of the summits of universal mystical poetry. The prison episode, experienced in pain and abandonment, is above all a story constructed a posteriori in the strategies of “recovery” of the polemical figure of the intransigent reformer. This mythification of the detention and escape of the prisoner is patent in the hagiographic writings and the lives in images which preceded the canonization in 1726. They opened the way to multiple interpretive readings including that which makes the dark dungeon the place privileged with an interior freedom in a prison which would then only be exterior, offered to a saving spiritual sublimation and which a reversal of perspectives leads to divine union.

Keywords

• hagiography
• John of the Cross
• mystical poetry
• prison