We learn from Pascal’s gambler, described in the first chapter, that the tragedy of man’s state on earth is not simply that he has passions. On the contrary: that is no tragedy. If you have no passions, you are not human. (And that is why it is pointless for preachers to rant about desires, which are a basic natural good, as if passion were synonymous with sin and the mere fact of having a body were an almost irreparable evil!) Nor is the essence of our tragedy to be found in the fact that our passions are a source of illusion. For we have reason. And reason is essentially sufficient to break through the web of illusion woven around us by passion.
Our tragedy consists in this: that although our reason may be capable of showing us clearly the futility of what we desire, we continue to desire it for the sake of the desire. Passion itself is our pleasure. Reason then becomes the instrument of passion. Its perverted function is to create idols—that is, fictions—to which we can dedicate the worship of love and hatred, joy and anguish, hope and fear.
From this servitude there is no natural deliverance. Reason itself, which has the power to free itself from passion, has in fact devoted itself in advance to the service of passion: and that is what we call original sin. It takes faith and grace, it takes the irruption into our life of the supernatural order, for the web of passion to be finally broken by our reason.
The spiritual life, for Saint Gregory of Nyssa, is a journey from darkness to light and from light to darkness. It is a transition from a light which is darkness to a darkness which is light. The ascent from falsity to Truth begins when the false light of error (which is darkness) is exchanged for the true but insufficient light of elementary and too-human notions of God. Then this light must itself be darkened, he says. The mind must detach itself from sensible appearances and seek God in those invisible realities which the intellect alone can apprehend. And this is what we have been talking about as theoria—an intellectual form of contemplation. This darkening of the senses is like a cloud in which the soul becomes accustomed to traveling blind, without relying on the appearances of changing things or on the emotional import of experience in its judgments of truth and falsity, of good and evil. Before the spirit can see the Living God, it must be blind even to the highest perceptions and judgments of its natural intelligence. It must enter into pure darkness. But this darkness is pure light—because it is the infinite Light of God Himself. And the mere fact that His Light is infinite means that it is darkness to our finite minds.
These degrees of the ascent to God were symbolized, thought Saint Gregory, in the degrees of illumination and darkness through which Moses journeyed to God. Moses first saw God in the burning bush. Then he was led by God across the desert in a pillar of cloud. Finally he ascended Sinai, where God spoke to him “face to face” but in the divine darkness.
To the great Moses God first appeared in light. Afterwards God spoke to him through a cloud. Finally, when he had ascended to greater and more perfect heights, Moses saw God in darkness. All this signifies that our passage from false and errant notions of God is a passage from darkness to light. A closer consideration of hidden things through things which can be seen leads the soul to that nature which cannot be seen: and this is like a cloud overshadowing all that has outward appearances, in order to lead the soul on and accustom it to the dark. The soul that thus climbs into the heights, leaving behind everything that human nature can attain by itself, enters into the sanctuary of the knowledge of God, surrounded on every side by the divine darkness. And there, everything that can be seen or understood having been left outside, nothing is left for the soul to see but that which is invisible and incomprehensible. And therein God is hidden, for Scripture says, of the Lawgiver: “Moses entered into the darkness where God was.” (Exod. 24:18.)1
Now, this voyage in darkness is not accomplished without anguish. Our spirits were made for light, not for darkness. But the fall of Adam has turned us inside out, and the light we now love is darkness. The only way to true life is a kind of death. The man who feels the attraction of the Divine Truth and who realizes that he is being drawn out of this visible world into an unknown realm of cloud and darkness, stands like one whose head spins at the edge of a precipice. This intellectual dizziness, spiritus vertiginis, is the concrete experience of man’s interior division against himself by virtue of the fact that his mind, made for the invisible God, is nevertheless dependent for all its clear knowledge on the appearances of exterior things.2 And this vertigo, which reminds us of the dark fear that pervades the pages of the Danish mystic Sören Kierkegaard, is also one of the aspects of that theoria physica of which we have spoken. It is the metaphysical anguish that seizes a soul for whom the “nothingness” of visible things is no longer merely a matter of discourse but of experience!
All this brings to mind the classical pages which Saint John of the Cross wrote on the two nights: the Night of Sense and the Night of the Spirit. There is a clear correspondence between Saint Gregory of Nyssa’s degrees of obscurity and the Nights of Saint John of the Cross.
Just as Saint Gregory of Nyssa takes Moses through three stages in his ascent to God, so Saint John of the Cross divides his night into three:3
These three parts of the night are all one night; but like night itself, it has three parts. For the first part, which is that of sense, is comparable to the beginning of night, the point at which things begin to fade from sight. And the second part, which is faith, is comparable to midnight, which is total darkness. And the third part is like the close of night: which is God, the part which is near to the light of day.
Saint John of the Cross is a remarkably lucid and simple writer. If some find him difficult, it certainly cannot be because he is obscure. He is almost brutally clear. And that is the trouble. His simplicity is too radical. He never wastes time attempting to compromise.
He sums up his asceticism in lines which have proved to be a terror and a scandal to many Christians:
In order to have pleasure in everything
Desire to have pleasure in nothing.
In order to arrive at possessing everything
Desire to possess nothing.
In order to arrive at being everything
Desire to be nothing.
In order to arrive at knowing everything
Desire to know nothing.
In order to arrive at that wherein thou hast no pleasure
Thou must go by a way in which thou hast no pleasure.
In order to arrive at that which thou knowest not
Thou must go by a way that thou knowest not.
In order to arrive at that which thou possessest not
Thou must go by a way that thou possessest not.
In order to arrive at that which thou art not
Thou must go through that which thou art not.4
Todo y Nada. All and nothing. The two words contain the theology of Saint John of the Cross. Todo—all—is God, Who contains in Himself eminently the perfections of all things. For Him we are made. In Him we possess all things. But in order to possess Him Who is all, we must renounce the possession of anything that is less than God. But everything that can be seen, known, enjoyed, possessed in a finite manner, is less than God. Every desire for knowledge, possession, being, that falls short of God must be blacked out. Nada!
But be careful! Saint John of the Cross does not waste words. Therefore every word in his writings is important. And the key word in each of his rules for entering into the ascetic night is the word “desire.” He does not say: “In order to arrive at the knowledge of everything, know nothing,” but “desire to know nothing.” It is not pleasure, knowledge, possession or being as such that must be “darkened” and “mortified,” but only the passion of desire for these things.
Far from seeking to deprive the soul of pleasure, knowledge, and the rest, Saint John of the Cross wants us to arrive at the purest of pleasure and the highest knowledge—“pleasure in everything,” “knowledge of all,” “possession of All. . . . ” His motive in prescribing this blackout of desire is the deep psychological fact with which Pascal and Gregory of Nyssa have already made us familiar. Desire, considered as a passion, is necessarily directed to a finite object. Therefore all desire imposes a limit to our knowledge, possession, existence. Now, in order to escape from every limitation, we must cast off that which ties us down. There are a thousand passions which involve us in what is finite and contingent. Each one of them causes us to be occupied with sensible things. And this occupation (Pascal’s “diversion”) narrows and closes the soul, imprisons it within its own limitations, and makes it incapable of perfect communion with the Infinite.
All the passions can be reduced to four: joy, hope, fear, and grief. These four are so closely connected that, when one is controlled, the others all obey. Consequently they can be reduced to one: joy. And desire is the movement of the soul seeking joy. Therefore the secret of ascetic liberation is the “darkening” of all desire.5
Saint John of the Cross, in his usual matter-of-fact way, explains that this black-out of desire is necessary if we are to arrive at a literal fulfillment of the First Commandment! That sounds like a shattering statement. However, we must remember that Saint John of the Cross regarded the First Commandment as a summary of the entire ascetic and mystical life, up to and including Transforming Union. He tells us in fact that his works are simply an explanation of what is contained in the commandment to “love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy strength.”
Herein is contained all that the spiritual man ought to do, and all that I have here to teach him, so that he may truly attain to God, through union of the will, by means of charity. For herein man is commanded to employ all his faculties and desires and operations and affections of his soul in God so that all the ability and strength of his soul may serve for no more than this.6
He also tells us in another place that this complete mortification of desire is simply the imitation of Christ. For if we wish to conform ourselves to Christ, “Who in His life had no other pleasure . . . than to do the will of His Father,” we must “renounce and completely reject every pleasure that presents itself to the senses, if it be not purely for the honor and glory of God.”7
In other words, the nada of Saint John of the Cross is simply a drastically literal application of the Gospel. “If any one of you renounce not all that he possesses, he cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:33.)
In the first book of The Ascent of Mount Carmel Saint John of the Cross gives a most exhaustive analysis of the effects of inordinate desire upon the soul. Every Christian is aware that when desire reaches a certain measure of disorder, called mortal sin, the soul is entirely deprived of the supernatural presence and light of God. Everyone who takes his religion seriously fears this obvious danger. But it is not what most concerns Saint John of the Cross. He probes into the soul that is apparently healthy and full of life, in order to show the great harm done by the infection of desires that scarcely anyone fears. Before he does so, he is careful to explain that no harm can be done in the soul by desires which receive no consent from the will. Involuntary movements of passion can never be suppressed on this earth and it would be extremely harmful to attempt to do so by violence. Saint John of the Cross is in no sense trying to root out the instinctive movements of the flesh or to destroy human nature. But he does pay close attention to the effects of conscious, deliberate venial sins and imperfections, for there is much that we can and should do to get rid of them. Much, he says, but not all. For in the end only God can wash the soul clean of these things, in passive or mystical purifications.
This is not the place to go into all the details of Saint John’s psychology of desire. But one chapter is important for us here. It will help to clear up the false idea that, because Saint John of the Cross is constantly talking of “darkness,” he is fundamentally irrational and anti-intellectual.
We have already seen that Saint John of the Cross is trying to bring the soul to the knowledge of all truth in the Truth of God. If there is a knowledge with which he is not content, it is one that is fragmentary, illusory and incomplete. This is what must be darkened, in order that through darkness we may come to the light of truth.
Everybody knows that passion blinds the intelligence. Prejudice is the fruit of inordinate desire. When the truth is not what we want it to be, we twist its image out of shape in our own mind to fit the pattern of our desires. In so doing, we do not hurt the truth itself: we ruin our own spirit. Saint John of the Cross says:
Even as vapors darken the air and allow not the bright sun to shine; or as a mirror that is clouded over cannot receive in itself a clear image; or as water defiled by mud reflects not the image of one that looks therein; even so the soul that is clouded by desires is darkened in the understanding and allows neither the sun of natural reason nor that of the supernatural wisdom of God to shine upon it and illumine it clearly.8
Clear as Saint John of the Cross may be, he is so drastic that many people are convinced he is preaching a kind of Manichaean dualism, as if nature were evil in itself, as if creatures could never be anything but obstacles to union with God. But the strict logic of Saint John is unimpeachable. On the one hand he affirms, without reservation, that the desire of creatures as ends in themselves cannot coexist with the desire of God as our true end. We cannot serve God and Mammon. And when our minds and wills are involved in the desire of illusory values (the vanity of Ecclesiastes) we become darkened by error, tormented and exhausted by frustration. In this state we can know neither God nor creatures as they are. We do not rest in God and we do not find true joy in His creation. Everything becomes “vanity and vexation of spirit.”
On the other hand, as soon as we are liberated from the slavery of desire we become capable of serene knowledge, incorruptible joy. This knowledge and joy are fulfilled in God, true enough: but in Him they also find and know and enjoy all creation. That is why the saint can love God’s creation. In fact, only the saint can know and enjoy this world and the creatures in it “according to their reality” and “as they are.”
Speaking of the man who is “spiritual” and detached from created things, Saint John of the Cross says:
He will find greater joy and recreation in creatures through his detachment from them, for he cannot rejoice in them if he look upon them with attachment to them as his own. Attachment is an anxiety that, like a bond, ties the spirit down to the earth and allows it no enlargement of heart. He will also acquire in his detachment from things a clear conception of them, so that he can well understand the truths relating to them, both naturally and supernaturally. He will therefore enjoy them after a very different fashion from that of one who is attached to them. . . . For while he enjoys them according to their truth the other enjoys them according to their deceptiveness; the one appreciates the best side of them, the other the worst; the one rejoices in their substance, the other, whose sense is bound to them, in their accident. For sense cannot attain to more than the accident, but the spirit, purged of the clouds and species of accident, penetrates the truth and worth of things.9
Far from teaching us to hate this world, John of the Cross is telling us the way to love it and understand it. His message could not be more plain. His is an ignorance that ignores nothing but error, and is therefore the surest path to truth.