Ascent of Mount Carmel and Dark Night of the Soul by Saint John of the Cross

First transcribed:La subida del monte Carmelo, 1578-1579 (English translation, 1864); Noche oscura del alma, c. 1585 (English translation, 1864)

Editions used:Ascent of Mount Carmel, translated and edited, with a general introduction, by E. Allison Peers. New York: Image Books, 1958. Dark Night of the Soul, translated and edited, with an introduction, by E. Allison Peers. New York: Image Books, 1959

Genre: Nonfiction

Subgenres: Meditation and contemplation; mysticism; spiritual treatise

Core issues: Illumination; purgation; soul; union with God

Overview

The sixteenth century Carmelite monk Juan de Yepes (canonized in 1726 as Saint John of the Cross) drew upon the long tradition of apophatic mysticism to chart the ascent of Mount Carmel, which is his image for the ascent of the soul to God. There is reason to believe that Saint John was familiar not only with the writings of the early apophatic mystic, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, but also such later ones as Eckhart and Ruysbroeck. Saint John, however, provides a precise, comprehensive, and elegant description of the way of unknowing that is missing in preceding texts.

Although the Ascent of Mount Carmel and Dark Night of the Soul appear as two volumes with different titles, they constitute a single treatise on one poem. The recommended order for reading them is:

(1) Active purgation of the senses: Ascent, book 1

(2) Passive purgation of the senses: Dark Night, book 1

(3) Active purgation of the spirit: Ascent, books 2 and 3

(4) Passive purgation of the spirit: Dark Night, book 2

It is well to begin the “ascent” with chapter 5 of book 2 of the Ascent of Mount Carmel, wherein Saint John defines substantial union and mystical or transforming union. The former is natural union with God whereby the soul is able to exist; the latter is supernatural in that the transformation of the soul, whereby the will is brought into conformity with the will of God, is effected through grace. Substantial union is the union of essence, while transforming union is the union of likeness. Saint John suggests that the purpose of the Christian life is to experience mystical union; all Christians, therefore, are called to ascend the mount.

Saint John’s mystical map assumes that God is totally other than the soul and yet can be known by the soul. Granted that God is not like the soul, the soul cannot rely on what is like her to know and love God. Since all means must be proportioned to the end, and since the end is the unknown, the soul must travel by the unknown to the unknown. Thus the ascent is a leaving behind and being detached from that which is known, meaning that which is like the soul, in order to travel by the unknown (the unlike) into the unknown (the unlike) which is God. Night is the image for the journey wherein the soul is deprived of desire for worldly things, dispossessed of natural understandings of God and plunged into Divine Darkness.

There is only one night, but there are stages in the night. In the first part of the night, the Active Night of the Senses, the soul strives actively to rid herself of desires that come in a natural way through the five exterior senses and the interior senses of the imagination and fancy. Unless desires are purged, the soul will suffer privative desire: The more she fills herself with desire for things, the more she is deprived of God. She will also suffer five positive effects: She is wearied, tormented, darkened, defiled, and weakened. The main point that Saint John makes is that it is our craving for things rather than the things themselves that hinders the ascent.

The soul is unable to accomplish the purgation of the senses. God perfects the work in a more intense darkness known as the Passive Night of the Senses. Saint John describes passive purgation in terms of the spiritual imperfections that afflict beginners: pride, avarice, luxury, wrath, gluttony, envy, and sloth. These chapters reveal the author’s spiritual perceptiveness, sharpened not only by reflection on his own journey but also by years of service as spiritual director to novices, brothers, priests, and nuns. He knew firsthand, for example, the grave obstacle of pride that blocked the ascent of beginners who flaunted their piety, looked to confessors for praise, and were impatient with their own faults; or the extremes of bodily penance in which the gluttonous indulged while in pursuit of spiritual sweetness.

Spiritual sweetness, that is, the good feelings the soul experiences in meditation and devotion, must cede to dryness if the ascent is to continue. In a chapter of stunning clarity Saint John sets forth three signs by which to discern if the absence of sweetness in spiritual activities is caused by the soul’s own lukewarmness or is God’s way of leading her into a more delicate mode of prayer. Had Saint John left no more than this one chapter (nine), his place in mystical literature would be assured. The first sign is that the soul finds no pleasure in God or things created; the second is that the soul is anguished because without spiritual sweetness she thinks she is not serving God but backsliding; the third is that she cannot meditate or use her imagination in prayer, devotion, and reading. If the three signs exist together, they mark the transition from meditation to contemplation, from active consciousness to passive, from the natural to the supernatural, from the known to the unknown. The proper response to the experience of aridity that is indicated by the coexistence of the three signs is to rest in peace and do nothing except remain attentive to the darkness. God infuses love into the soul in ways too subtle for the senses to grasp. Infused loving, however, is discernible in the effects of humility, charity, increased virtue, remembrance of God, and liberty of spirit. Now, as the poem sings, the house (of the senses) is at rest.

The climb becomes steeper and darker as the soul becomes ever more aware of the need to cleanse herself of attachments, not only to natural understandings but also to supernatural ones. Chapter 10 of the second book of the Ascent of Mount Carmel is the necessary introduction to all of book 2, which treats purgation of understanding, and book 3, purgation of memory and will.

Saint John’s explanation of the two kinds of understanding, natural and supernatural, derives from the process of knowing wherein we gather information about an exterior reality through the senses, store the data in the imagination as images, and conceptualize the images. If the elements of exterior reality, senses, imagination, images, understanding, and concepts are present or active, the mode and content of knowing/understanding are natural. If one of more of the elements are absent, the mode of understanding is supernatural, but the content is not necessarily supernatural.

For example, if a person is present at the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, sees the event with the eyes, stores images in the imagination, and conceptualizes the images as the execution of a man, the knowing is natural in mode and content. This knowing John calls corporeal natural understanding. If the exterior reality of the crucifixion is absent, the phenomenon is a corporeal supernatural understanding, supernatural in mode in that the first element is missing but not in content because that which is seen in a supernatural way is nonetheless specific and distinct, hence natural (that is, a man executed by crucifixion).

If the image of the crucifixion is impressed directly on the imagination without benefit of the exterior reality or use of senses, the phenomenon is a supernatural imaginary vision, supernatural in mode in that the elements of exterior reality and senses are absent but not in content because that which is seen in the imagination (a man executed by crucifixion) is nonetheless specific and distinct, hence natural.

If the exterior reality of the crucifixion, the senses, the imagination, and the understanding are absent or not active, and if the understandings are given to the understanding in the form of distinct, clear visions, revelations, or locutions—that is, they can be articulated in the form of concepts—the phenomenon is a supernatural spiritual understanding, supernatural in mode in that said elements are absent, but not in content because that which is understood in the understanding in the guise of a vision or revelation or locution is nonetheless specific and distinct, hence natural.

If, however, the vision or revelation or locution is not distinct—as, for example, in the case of an angel or an event prophesied—but is dark and confused, and if the dark, confused understanding leaves the soul quiet, desirous to do God’s will, and inwardly convinced of being present to God, even though she does not see or imagine or understand anything clear and specific, then the content as well as the mode of understanding is supernatural.

The summit of Mount Carmel is dark, confused, and general understanding, for the summit is God; to human reason God is darkness. All that is not dark, confused, and general is to be dispossessed in the ascent; the soul is not to depend on anything specific, hence natural, to mediate that which is not specific, hence supernatural.

Throughout the rigorous treatment of these kinds of understandings, Saint John states repeatedly the case against depending on specific and distinct knowledge. Surely he was painfully aware of the precipitous plunges suffered by contemporaries who mistook their visions of angels and prophecies of the future for the Divine Darkness that, for Saint John, must overwhelm the traveler if God is to be met in the transforming love of mystical union.

The structure of understanding outlined in the second book of the Ascent of Mount Carmel is the foundation for the active purgation of memory and will that follows in the third book. Just as one acquires knowledge, so it is remembered; hence the purging of memory of natural and supernatural understandings in the order established in the preceding book. The rest of book 3 is devoted to cleansing the ill of affections of joy, hope, grief, and fear. Saint John breaks off discussion after defining temporal, natural, sensual, moral, supernatural, and spiritual joys, describing the evils of attachment to them and benefits of purging attachment. Saint John has made his case against attachment so thoroughly that by this time further explanation would be tedious. The point of purgation is clear.

Night, however, is not over. The mount is steeper and darker than ever. The soul feels bound for desolation. If she was disconsolate in the Passive Night of the Senses, what she is made to endure in the Passive Night of the Spirit leaves her gasping and groaning. Gone are consolations: The understanding is dark; the will, dry; memory, empty. In vain she labors to meditate and read; in vain she seeks comfort from spiritual directors. She feels abandoned by friends, books, devotions, by whatever once served to bring alive God’s presence; and she feels abandoned by God, cast into a cell of dark solitude, her only companion Darkness itself. She cannot see that God is dispossessing her of cravings, desires, and attachments, whatever form they take—and Saint John hastens to advise that the way is individual, beset with unique difficulties such that no person, only God, can illumine the way. However, God’s illumination the soul cannot see in the blackness of night, as God blinds the eyes of natural understanding, annihilating her with respect to how and what she knows, remembers, and wants.

Thus God secretly instructs the soul, lighting her with divine wisdom. However, the more she is illumined by God with God, the more her natural faculties are darkened. She cannot see the Light that is darkness to her faculties.

So the soul suffers. She undergoes. She is passionate. Paradoxically, her suffering—her passion—is her love for God and God’s love for her, for she would not suffer if God were not present to her beyond her natural understanding and if she did not yearn with all her being to love and know God as God is. In the awful darkness come moments of relief, fleeting yet sufficient to sustain her, when she discerns God in the sudden enflaming of her will to love. Emboldened, she runs in search of her Beloved.

In darkest night, faculties and senses purged, freed from attachments to the natural, the soul is freed to love God and know God, not as she thought or expected God to be, but as God is. Securely, secretly, joyously, she runs up the dark slopes to be touched again and again by God, to seize him, hold him fast and be held, to soar upward to her Beloved, the house of her spirit and senses now at rest.

Christian Themes

A summary of the main Christian concerns of Saint John’s treatises would include the following points:

•In the apophatic way, also known as the via negativa, the soul increasingly detaches herself and is detached from the specific and knowable until in utter detachment she knows only that which is dark, confused, and general, which is God.

•The journey is traced in terms of the sensual and spiritual parts of the soul as well as active and passive consciousness.

•Night is the image for the journey of purgation or detachment.

•The stages of night are active purgation of the senses, passive purgation of the senses, active purgation of the spirit, and passive purgation of the spirit.

•Actively and passively purged in the sensual and spiritual parts, the soul is transformed by God so that her will is conformed to God’s will.

Sources for Further Study

Dicken, E. W. Trueman. The Crucible of Love. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1963. This study remains the indispensable introduction to the mystical theology of Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Ávila.

Feldmeir, Peter. Christianity Looks East: Comparing the Spiritualities of John of the Cross and Buddhaghosa. New York: Paulist Press, 2006. A Roman Catholic priest considers Saint John’s dialogue with Buddhaghosa to explore the similarities and differences between Christian and Buddhist paths toward liberation. Bibliography, index.

John of the Cross, Saint. The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross. Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D., and Otilio Rodgríguez, O.C.D. Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1979. Contains Saint John’s Spiritual Canticle and Living Flame of Love in two excellent translations.

May, Gerald G. The Dark Night of the Soul: A Psychiatrist Explores the Connection Between Darkness and Spiritual Growth. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004. Psychiatrist May draws on the Carmelite mystics Saint John and Teresa of Ávila, along with pscyhological research and biblical scripture, to address the mysterious “dark night of the soul” as necessary to overcome depression, addiction, and other mental afflications. Bibliography, index.