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WorkJohn of the Cross

The Ascent of Mount Carmel

A guide to the climb toward God with a single rule: want nothing, not even visions that seem sent from heaven.

by John of the Cross412 passages held

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Original title
Subida del Monte Carmelo
First published
(published posthumously)
Original language
Spanish

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Overview

Confessors who had never been through the darkness themselves were, John of the Cross believed, doing real harm. In the prologue to this book he describes them telling a person lost in dryness, unable to pray as before, that the trouble was melancholy, poor health or some hidden sin, and making them confess their whole past life again. He wrote instead for the friars and nuns of the Discalced Carmelites, the strict reform of the order begun by Teresa of Ávila, so that they could recognise that darkness as the road and stop fighting it. The book's claim is severe and easy to state: to reach union with God a person must be emptied — first of every craving for created things, then of reliance on what the mind understands, remembers and wants. That includes visions and revelations, which he tells his readers to refuse even when they may come from God, because clinging to them stops the climb. The image came before the book. John drew a mountain for the nuns he directed, with a straight path up its centre marked nada, nothing, and gave copies away; the treatise took its title from that sketch. He began writing at Baeza and carried the manuscript to Granada, working on it with many interruptions. The third book stops partway through what he has to say about preachers and sermons, and he never finished it. The text was first printed at Alcalá in 1618, twenty-seven years after his death, by the Carmelite Diego de Jesús, who toned down or left out passages and added three essays explaining its mystical language. John was canonised in 1726 and named a Doctor of the Church in 1926.

Key concepts

What does John mean by the desires a soul must be emptied of?

Attachments the will consents to, not natural feelings. Hunger, attraction or a passing wish are not the problem; a craving the person accepts and feeds is. John's examples of the small ones are homely: a habit of talking too much, a fondness for a particular person, a book or a cell. Each consented desire, however slight, tires and darkens the soul, and while it lasts the soul cannot reach union with God.

Why does John call the whole journey to God a night?

Because each of its three stages takes a light away. The soul starts by refusing the pleasures of the senses, which leaves them in the dark; it travels by faith, which is dark to the mind; and it goes toward God, who in this life is darkness to the soul. John compares the three to nightfall, midnight and the darkness just before dawn, and calls faith, the middle stage, the darkest.

What are the three faculties, and how is each one emptied?

Understanding, memory and will: the soul's powers of knowing, remembering and wanting. John pairs each with a virtue that empties it. Faith empties the understanding, because it holds what cannot be seen. Hope empties the memory, because it looks toward what is not yet possessed. Love empties the will of everything that is not God. The emptiness is not a blank mind but room made for God.

What is the difference between meditation and contemplation in the Ascent?

Meditation is prayer a person does; contemplation is prayer they receive. In meditation the mind works with pictures and reasoning, imagining scenes from Christ's life in order to imitate him. Contemplation is a quiet, general, loving awareness of God with no particular thoughts. Contemplation begins when meditation stops working, and the person should then stay quiet in loving attention rather than force the old method back.

What are the supernatural apprehensions John discusses?

Anything that seems to reach the soul from beyond nature: visions, revelations, heard words and spiritual feelings, some through the bodily senses and some directly to the mind. John sorts them with great care only to give one rule for all of them: the soul should not rely on them or desire them. Even a genuine one gives less of God than the dark, general knowledge that faith gives.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The path marked nothing

What must a person stop wanting before God can fill them? Every craving they consent to, however small, because the smallest one keeps the soul on the ground.

The desires John means are the cravings a person consents to, not the natural stirrings of appetite, and they weary, torment, darken, defile and weaken the soul. Feeding one is like a starving man gulping wind. Size saves none of them: a bird tied by a thread is as grounded as one tied by a rope. Hence the line from his mountain sketch, to possess all things, seek to possess nothing. What harms is the wanting, not the thing, which a free soul may still hold.

  • detachment
  • desire
  • attachment
  • self-denial
  • virtue
  • humility
  • will
  • spiritual practice
  • spirituality

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A faith darker than midnight

How can anyone go toward God when nothing the mind can picture resembles him? By faith, which leads by darkening the mind rather than lighting it.

No image, idea or memory is like God, John argues, so none can carry the soul to him. The understanding must travel by faith, which believes what it cannot see; the memory is emptied by hope, the will stripped by love. Faith is the dark cloud that went before Israel and lit the night. When meditation with images dries up, the person is to wait in loving attention, though it looks like doing nothing. Union is the sunlit window: it seems to become light, and stays glass.

  • faith
  • hope
  • charity
  • memory
  • reason
  • imagination
  • epistemology
  • meditation
  • contemplation
  • prayer
  • divine union
  • divine grace

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Visions to turn away

What should someone do with a vision, a voice or a revelation that seems to come from God? Turn from it, John holds, whether it is true or false.

Whatever reaches the senses or the mind by supernatural means, a vision, a heard word, a revelation, is to be put aside without asking whether it is good or evil, because clinging to it stalls the climb and invites deception. Prophecies read in their literal sense misled the very people they were given to. Directors who prize such things lead their penitents into the same error. And God has nothing further to say: he spoke everything in Christ, and asking for more wrongs his Son.

  • discernment
  • religious experience
  • revelation
  • prophecy
  • spiritual knowledge
  • scripture
  • interpretation
  • mysticism
  • spiritual direction

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Within this work

passages held
412
distinct concepts
366
by passages held, corpus-wide
#181

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “divine union” and “faith”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 26 pairings. 82 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
divine unionfaith18
detachmentdivine union17
detachmentfaith15
desiredetachment14
discernmentreligious experience14
divine unionmysticism14
faithmysticism12
discernmentfaith11
desiredivine union10
contemplationdivine union9
detachmentreligious experience9
contemplationfaith8
detachmentdiscernment7
detachmentmysticism7
faithreligious experience7
mysticismreligious experience6
contemplationdetachment5
discernmentdivine union5
contemplationdiscernment2
contemplationmysticism2
desirediscernment2
desirereligious experience2
contemplationdesire1
contemplationreligious experience1
discernmentmysticism1
divine unionreligious experience1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1618 The Ascent of Mount Carmel (Subida del Monte Carmelo) you are here EN
  2. 1618 The Dark Night of the Soul (Noche oscura)

    The companion to The Ascent of Mount Carmel: it returns to the same poem and takes up the darkness that the soul suffers, where the earlier book described the darkness it chooses.

     EN
  3. 1618 The Living Flame of Love (Llama de amor viva)

    Written after the Spiritual Canticle and meant to go further: the shortest of his four commentaries, on the highest love he thought a person could reach in this life.

     EN
  4. 1627 A Spiritual Canticle of the Soul and the Bridegroom Christ (Cántico espiritual)

    A love poem in the manner of the Song of Songs, with a commentary written for the nuns of Granada; it was the one major work left out of the first edition of his writings.

     EN
  5. 1864 Precautions, Letters, Maxims and Poems

    The place to meet him outside the treatises: practical rules, sayings and poems, and letters to the nuns and lay people he guided.

     EN
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