The publication of the visionary writings of St. John of the Cross coincides with the historical era during which the Roman Catholic Church in Spain reacted against the challenge raised by Martin Luther, a renegade German monk, who, in 1517, openly challenged the Church to reform itself. That challenge, which precipitated a break from the Church and the beginnings of the Protestant movement, provoked nearly a century of theological wrangling and Church-wide discussions into the institution and its protocols. Luther and his followers charged the Church with corruption and even heresy, arguing that the Church across Europe was inconsistent in the gospel message it preached, in the dispensation of the foundational sacraments, in the training of its own clergy, and in the day-to-day practices of the clergy as they ministered to their congregations. In rejecting the institutional Church as corrupt, Luther and his followers argued that individuals, without the assistance of the Church, could find their way to salvation through their faith alone.

John represents one of the purest expressions of a branch of what came to be called the Counter-Reformation (roughly 1540-1640) when the institutional Church sought to respond to the charges of its spiritual decline by reinvigorating its own spiritual life, reanimating the faith through the re-discovery of old-school devotional Catholicism.