Chapter V

Knowledge and Unknowing in Saint John of the Cross

Saint John of the Cross comments on Saint Paul’s words: “If any man among you seem to be wise in this world, let him become ignorant that he may be wise.” (I Cor. 3:18–19.) We have already seen something of what it means to be “wise in this world.” And we now know that there are very important qualifications to be applied to this “unknowing” which leads to true wisdom. Even then, there seems to be a devastating absoluteness about Saint John’s remarks on this subject:

 

In order to come to union with the wisdom of God the soul has to proceed rather by unknowing than by knowing. . . . Any soul that makes account of all its knowledge and ability in order to come to union with the wisdom of God, is supremely ignorant in the eyes of God and will remain far removed from that wisdom . . . for ignorance [in the bad sense] knows not what wisdom is. . . . Those alone gain the wisdom of God who are like ignorant [in the good sense] children and, laying aside their knowledge, walk in His service with love.¹

 

This is all quite true, and it is moreover in the direct line of Christian mystical tradition. Saint John of the Cross bases his doctrine in this one paragraph on the clear teaching of Saint Paul. But is there no difference between this and Quietism? It might seem hard to see where that difference lies when the two doctrines are presented in a few scattered quotations taken out of context.

First of all, Saint John of the Cross is here talking about mystical wisdom: the experiential knowledge of God that is received by the soul in contemplation. Saint Thomas Aquinas interprets the passages of Saint Paul in this same sense also.

Both Saint John of the Cross and Saint Thomas clearly distinguish between acquired wisdom, which is the fruit of man’s own study and of his thought, and infused wisdom or contemplation, which is a gift of God. In this particular passage, Saint John of the Cross is contrasting the two. Man’s “knowledge and ability”—acquired wisdom—can do nothing to bring a man to “Divine Union with God.” The apparent redundancy of this term should not be overlooked. It is only apparent, for Saint John of the Cross uses the word “divine” here as synonymous with “mystical.” All through The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night of the Soul, this “Divine Union with God” is proposed as the summit of the ascent, the end of the soul’s journey. It is the “perfection” toward which the beginner aspires when he undertakes the active mortification (“night”) of the senses, and which the progressive approaches in the “passive nights” of the senses and of the spirit.² Neither beginners nor progressives have attained this “Divine Union.” It is the reward of the “perfect.” Yet progressives are already contemplatives, which is to say, in Saint John of the Cross’s language, mystics. Beginners, however, are already ascending the mountain. They are on the spiritual way that leads to this “Divine Union with God.” It is their vocation, and if they are faithful, it will be their destiny.

Now, in the light of this, what is the meaning of Saint John’s statement about the importance of “unknowing”? It is this. Man’s knowledge and ability, that is to say, theological learning or acquired wisdom, cannot bridge the distance that lies between the state of a beginner and the state of “Divine Union.” Mystical union is a gift of God. It cannot be acquired by any ascetic technique. It cannot be merited (de condigno) in the strict sense by any man, however holy he may be. No system of meditations, of interior discipline, of self-emptying, of recollection and absorption can bring a man to union with God, without a free gift on the part of God Himself. Still less can a man arrive at mystical union with God by an effort of the intellect on his own natural level. Mystical vision cannot be produced by study. The knowledge of God in mystical contemplation is so different in its essence from the knowledge of God gained by theological study that Saint John of the Cross calls them in a certain sense “contraries.” That is why the man who thinks the power of his intellect, his learning and capacity to learn, will bring him to the supreme goal of all theology, which is contemplation, is blinded by an attachment, a source of illusion which makes his soul “pure darkness in the eyes of God” so that it “has no capacity for being enlightened or possessed by the pure light of God.”³

Pursuing the same line of thought, Saint John of the Cross returns to what is, in fact, the theme of The Ascent of Mount Carmel: that the whole ascetical and mystical life is a reproduction of the life of Christ on earth because it completely empties and “annihilates” the soul in order to unite it to God. For Saint John of the Cross, the imitation of Christ means one thing only: absolute self-renunciation. The only way to make any progress in the ways of the spirit is to advance in this imitation of Christ, for “no man comes to the Father but by Him.”⁴

“Christ is the Way, and this Way is death to our natural selves in things both of sense and of spirit.”⁵ Even those who have embraced a hard life for the love of Christ, and who consider themselves His friends, know Him too little, says the Carmelite saint, because they look rather for spiritual consolations than for a share in His Cross. And if those who are apparently the “friends of Christ” do not know Him, how much more true is this of others! Saint John gives us a few examples of what he means by these others: “Those who live far away, withdrawn from Him, great men of letters and of influence and all others who live yonder, with the world, and are eager about their ambitions and their prelacies, may be said not to know Christ.”⁶

The grandes letrados, rendered in the translation as “great men of letters,” were not secular writers—poets like Garcilaso de la Vega, who exercised a marked influence on Saint John of the Cross himself. They were evidently men learned in Sacred Sciences. The context tells us so. God has set them up as “guides by reason of their learning and position.” Damaging as this text may seem to be, it cannot be advanced as an argument that Saint John of the Cross is against theological learning as such. He is clearly talking about men who have abused their learning by making it an instrument of unworthy ambitions. They have perverted a gift which God has given them for their own spiritual advantage and for the sanctification of other men. No other sense can be drawn from the notion that God had set them up as “guides.”

In any case, it must be remembered that the great Discalced Carmelite mystics of the sixteenth century had a very healthy respect for learning and for letrados. There is a famous saying of Saint Teresa of Avila: buen letrado nunca me engañó. It can be translated: “I have never known a good theologian to let me down.” Saint Teresa insisted that her nuns should receive spiritual direction, if possible, from good theologians. Not that learning was the first qualification she demanded in a director of contemplatives. There were two others that came before this: prudence (“sound understanding”) and experience. Nevertheless she added that all three of these qualifications were necessary. “If a spiritual director have no learning,” she says, “it will be a great inconvenience.”⁷ Inconvenience is too mild a word for the suffering she herself had to undergo at the hands of stupid directors. Yet she did not hesitate to say that even if a learned theologian had no experience of the ways of mystical prayer, his learning might suffice to make him a competent director of contemplatives. Here are some of her statements:

 

My opinion has always been and always will be that every Christian should try to consult some learned person, if he can, and the more learned the person the better. Those who walk in the way of prayer have the greater need of learning; and the more spiritual they are, the greater is their need. Let us not make the mistake of saying that learned men who do not practice prayer (by this she means contemplative prayer) are not suitable directors for those who do. I have consulted many such. . . . I have always got on well with them, for though some of them have no experience [i.e. in contemplative prayer] they are not averse from spirituality nor are they averse from its nature, for they study Holy Scripture where the truth about it can always be found. I believe, myself, that if the person who practices prayer consults learned men, the devil will not deceive him with illusions except by his own desire; for I think the devils are very much afraid of learned men who are humble and virtuous, knowing these will find them out and defeat them.⁸

 

There is no reason to believe that Saint John of the Cross would have disagreed with this. In fact, his reproof of learned men who do not fulfill their function as guides contains an implicit assertion of the same truth. They fail because of their lack of humility. In any case, Saint John of the Cross himself has much to say about bad directors. In The Living Flame of Love he demands the same three qualities in a confessor of contemplatives that Saint Teresa has just set down for us. The spiritual guide must, says Saint John of the Cross, be wise, discreet and experienced. For in order to be a spiritual director, although the fundamental qualification is knowledge and discretion [saber y discreción], if one does not also have experience of the higher reaches of prayer, he will not be able to set the soul on the right road to them when God grants it such a gift.⁹

Saint John of the Cross was himself one of Saint Teresa’s directors, and we know that she was delighted with his wisdom.

As for directors who do not know their business, Saint Teresa has something more to say about them. She hated to see a contemplative fall into the hands of such a one, with no chance to consult anyone else: “For directors who cannot understand spirituality, afflict their penitents both in soul and in body and prevent them from making progress.”¹⁰ She advised all those who could choose their own director to take full advantage of their freedom. And she expressed her sympathy for those who had no recourse to any but one unenlightened guide who, besides laying down the law about the spiritual life in a way that made prayer a great burden, also arrogated to himself a tyrannical command over the soul.

It is interesting to see what she gives as an example of stupid direction. A married woman is attracted to a life of prayer. Her confessor, instead of telling her how to carry out her household duties in a spirit of prayer, tells her to drop her work and to pray when she ought to be doing the dishes. Her life of prayer at once becomes an obstacle to her happiness as a wife, and her marriage, at the same time, erects a barrier between herself and God.

So much for spiritual directors. But to return to the real issue. In what sense does Saint John of the Cross mean that man cannot arrive at union with God by “his own knowledge and ability”?

Remember his division of spiritual men into three classes: beginners, progressives, and the perfect. If the saint prescribes a course of “unknowing” and “unlearning,” is it for all these three classes? Is it for some and not for others? Do the three groups pass through different kinds and different degree of “night”?

Saint John of the Cross does not demand that a spiritual man abandon all intellectual and affective activity from the very beginning of his spiritual life. This is one of the big differences between Saint John and the Quietist Molinos. Saint John of the Cross insists that the beginner must meditate on spiritual truths. He must put his mind to work in order to grasp spiritual and even philosophical principles. Over and over again, in The Ascent of Mount Carmel, the Spanish saint presents his reader with basic axioms from scholastic philosophy. More numerous still are the thoughts taken from Scripture and theology and offered to the one ascending the mountain with an explicit injunction that he must meditate on these things in order to arrive at detachment.¹¹

Clearly, for Saint John of the Cross, there is a stage in the ascent to Divine Union in which one must acquire a clear knowledge of principles and think clearly and coherently about them. Above all, one must meditate on the life of Christ in order to imitate His renunciation.¹² This is the foundation of the whole spiritual life for Saint John of the Cross, as it is for all Christian mystics. For those called to be priests and spiritual directors, all this necessarily implies a thorough knowledge of philosophy and theology. Such knowledge cannot be acquired without a long course of study. It demands, in fact, the rudiments of an intellectual life.

The beginner thinks, studies, and meditates. Now, in his prayer, he begins to approach the borderline of infused contemplation. What does this mean? That he has a vision? No. Saint John of the Cross, who treats visions, revelations, and interior locutions as an unimportant by-path of the mystical life, gives a deep and subtle analysis of the beginnings of mystical prayer in what he calls the “night of the senses.” I do not mean to discuss his treatment of the subject in detail here.

One thing concerns us. It is the fact that mystical, or infused, prayer tends to inhibit the free and natural play of thought and imagination. The man who has been used to deep and fruitful insights into spiritual truths is now distressed to find that he cannot pray and meditate as he used to. Clear and precise notions of God tend to be fogged over and the usual discursive way of reaching God through notions heavily charged with meaning and affectivity no longer satisfies him. The very effort to think about God is wearisome—but so is the effort to think about anything else. He has lost his taste for ideas and for affections. He wants to keep quiet. He feels himself somehow imprisoned in a baffled silence which, crippling though it may be, offers an inscrutable promise of satisfaction and of deliverance.

It is here that the desire for intellectual activity begins to present a serious problem.

Infused contemplation raises the spirit of man to union with God above the level of any distinct image or idea. There is much discussion among theologians as to whether, in mystical prayer, the intellect can be said to be in immediate contact with the essence of God. I do not mean to enter into this discussion. It is enough to say that there is a real immediacy of union between the soul and God in infused contemplation.

It does not have to be an immediacy of intuition, or an immediate intellectual union of the soul with God: theologians are much more willing to agree on the fact that in mystical prayer there is an immediate union of the soul and God in love, that is, there is an immediate union or “contact” of wills, which serves as the basis for a mystical experience of God. Saint John of the Cross says that when this union is produced by infused love the intellect tends to be absorbed in a general, obscure attention to God, not as reflected in a clear, definite idea, but simply to God, unlimited by any idea, yet somehow realized as a “presence.” In mystical experience, God is “apprehended” as unknown. He is realized, “sensed” in His immanence and transcendence. He becomes present not in a finite concept but in His infinite reality which overflows every analogical notion we can utter of Him.

Now, the mind of man naturally acquires knowledge only in concepts, ideas, and judgments. The mystical knowledge of God is a judgment, but it is above concepts. It is a knowledge that registers itself in the soul passively without an idea. This sounds strange. The testimony of those who experience such things assures us, however, that there is nothing essentially disturbing about this knowledge of God in lucid “darkness,” for it brings with it a deep and inexpressible peace.

But it is easy to see that the desire for conceptual knowledge or ideas will become a problem for one who is called to mystical prayer. Saint John of the Cross expresses it in these terms:

 

No thing, created or imagined, can serve the understanding as a proper means of union with God. All that the understanding can attain serves rather as an impediment [to this union] than as a means, if [the soul] should desire to cling to it. . . .

Among all created things, and things that belong to the understanding, there is no ladder whereby the understanding can attain to this High Lord. Rather it is necessary to know that if the understanding should seek to profit by all of these things or by any of them as a proximate means to such union, they would be not only a hindrance but even an occasion of numerous errors and delusions in the ascent of this mount.¹³

 

And then, having described the state of a soul united to God in contemplation, in which it receives a supernaturally infused light in “passive understanding,” he goes on to explain how active knowledge interferes with this union:

 

Although in this condition the will freely receives this general and confused knowledge of God, it is needful, in order that it may receive this divine light more simply and abundantly, only that it should take care not to interpose other lights which are more palpable, whether forms or ideas or figures having to do with any kind of meditation; for none of these things is similar to that pure and serene light. Wherefore if at this time the will desires to understand and consider particular things, however spiritual they be, this would obstruct the pure and simple general light of the spirit by setting those clouds in the way; even as a man might set something before his eyes which impeded his vision and kept from him both the light and the sight of things in front of him.¹⁴

2

The desire to have a clear knowledge and understanding of truths about God is necessary for beginners in the way of prayer. It stimulates their appetite for reading and meditation and prayer. God answers this desire in the gift of contemplation. But contemplation obscures the clear knowledge of divine things. It hides them in a “cloud of unknowing.” In this cloud, God communicates Himself to the soul, as Saint John of the Cross says, passively and in darkness.

This does not satisfy the natural desire of the intellect. The intelligence, by its very nature, needs light. It wants to see, to penetrate the essence of things. It wants to understand. But man’s instinct to analyze and to rationalize his experience does not prove to be a useful servant in moments of contemplative prayer! If infused contemplation is really being given to the soul, this instinctive hunger for clear ideas can only fill the mind with obstacles to contemplation. It tends to replace the real thing with a series of fabricated and human illusions. Even though the ideas and judgments may, in themselves, be philosophically and theologically sound, they still only detract from the pure light of contemplation. Unfortunately, imaginative and intellectual minds do not realize the harm that is being done by this substitution of the human for the divine, the limited for the infinite.

Saint John of the Cross does not hesitate to apply his principles to every kind of “clear knowledge” about God, even if it should come to the soul in the form of a vision or revelation. All these experiences are less perfect than the union of the soul with God in “pure faith,” that is to say, in the “night” of contemplation.

The second book of The Ascent of Mount Carmel methodically proceeds from one supernatural “experience” to another and sweeps every kind of revelation, vision, and locution from the house of pure contemplation. Saint John of the Cross is inexorable. He spares practically nothing that popular piety designates by the term of “mysticism.” He does not deny that visions may at times be genuine: he simply says that they cannot serve the soul as “proximate means of union with God.” The only proximate means of union with God is faith. No vision, no revelation, however sublime, is worth the smallest act of faith, in his eyes.

Speaking of bodily visions, appearances of saints, angels, “supernatural lights and the perception of ethereal perfumes,” he says:

 

Although all these things may happen to the bodily senses in the way of God, we must never rely on them or admit them but we must always fly from them without trying to ascertain whether they be good or evil. . . . The more completely exterior and corporeal they are, the less certainly they are of God. . . . He that esteems such things errs greatly and places himself in great peril of deception; and at best he will have in himself a complete impediment to the attainment of spirituality.¹⁵

 

He goes on to say that these things tend to diminish the faith of those who receive them. Pure faith is a stony and arid path. Spiritual experiences stimulate and refresh the soul, and a spirit that has been long in dryness is all the more likely to cling to the sweetness that these things bring. No doubt God sends him such things because he needs them. But who cannot see the temptation that lies in them? What man, seeing the saints and God Himself in visions, is not likely to imagine that his vision is something greater than faith? Saint John of the Cross is always there to remind him that this is an illusion.

To resume these texts: here is their burden. They all say that any knowledge that pretends to offer us a “clear” and “precise” concept of God is inferior to the “obscure” experience of Him in the union produced by infused love. The temptation to prefer any clear knowledge, whether natural or supernatural, to this dark knowledge of God puts the soul in danger of abandoning a reality for an illusion.

What is the conclusion? Many readers might be tempted to argue from such evidence that the mysticism of Saint John of the Cross is completely anti-intellectual and antirational. If this be so, then the saint would have to be considered essentially alien to the intellectual climate of Catholic theology.

The teaching authority of the Church, constantly proposing Saint Thomas Aquinas as the guide and model of Catholic theologians, frowns on anti-intellectualism. The theological structure of Catholicism culminates in a mystical contemplation that is supported not by agnosticism but by a speculative theology and philosophy which show the greatest respect for the light of human reason. Catholic mysticism is in no sense a refuge to which the saints have fled from an unintelligible universe: it is the crown and glory of the human spirit. It fulfills the highest aspirations of a theology, a metaphysics and a cosmology which find the world transparently intelligible because it is “charged with the grandeur of God.”

My task is to point out the true significance of Saint John of the Cross’s doctrine of “unknowing.” What does it mean, and what does it not mean?

In the first place, Saint John of the Cross is not trying to say that the intellect is incapable of knowing any truth. There is not one word in any book of Saint John of the Cross to indicate that he despises the power of the intellect to arrive at scientific, philosophical, or theological conclusions. He nowhere suggests that science, philosophy, and theology are of themselves useless or baneful. Saint John of the Cross is not concerned with general problems of epistemology. He is not scrutinizing the validity of human knowledge, either of created things or of God. In fact, we have seen that his whole teaching is based on solid principles of scholastic philosophy and theology. The mysticism of Saint John of the Cross is built on the epistemology of the Schools.

What is the place of intellectual knowledge in Saint John of the Cross? Knowledge that is acquired by the intelligence, working in its own human mode, whether on the level of reason alone or in the order of grace, where reason deals with the revealed truths of faith, has, for Saint John of the Cross, all the validity it has for Saint Thomas Aquinas. It penetrates, in some sense, all being. It arrives at a valid univocal knowledge of created being, and it can truly know the Supreme Being of God through the medium of created analogies.

We not only can, but we must, use the means offered by this knowledge to bring us to God. We shall see that even the dark mystical knowledge of God which is beyond concepts nevertheless depends upon the existence of concepts. They are its starting point, the diving board from which it springs into the abyss of God.

Therefore—and this is extremely important—conceptual knowledge presents no problem to Saint John of the Cross in the merely natural order. For Oriental mystics, for idealists and others in the West, the “cloud of unknowing” can descend upon philosophers. The reality of the world itself is brought into question, and therefore it becomes part of the wisdom of a philosopher to ignore what is thought to be essentially an illusion. Not so for Saint John of the Cross. Knowing and “unknowing” do not come into conflict, in his doctrine, until the soul has actually entered mystical prayer.

Remember, therefore, that Saint John of the Cross does not offer us his doctrine of unknowing as a philosophical approach to the universe. It is in no sense a substitute for cosmology. It is not a prescription for the annihilation of physical science, or a technique of entering into a quasi-magical relation with cosmic forces so as to gain control over what seems to be a world. The only cosmology that underlies the doctrine of the Carmelite saint is the cosmology of Saint Thomas Aquinas.

Saint John’s “Night” of unknowing concerns only the knowledge of God. Now, even speculative theology can become absorbed in apophasis, considering the names of God in so far as they tell us rather what He is not than what He is. This is not the approach of Saint John of the Cross. His is not a speculative theology. He is concerned with the practical problems of mysticism and of experience. However, his practical doctrine is based on the speculations of Saint Thomas and Pseudo-Dionysius.

Three clear statements will show the exact function of “unknowing” in the doctrine of Saint John of the Cross.

1. Acquired, conceptual knowledge of God should not be discarded as long as it helps a man toward Divine Union. And it continues to help a man toward Divine Union as long as it does not interfere with the infused, passive, mystical experience of God in obscurity.

2. It is not so much the presence of concepts in the mind that interferes with the “obscure” mystical illumination of the soul, as the desire to reach God through concepts. There is therefore no question of rejecting all conceptual knowledge of God (as we shall see later on) but of ceasing to rely on concepts as a proximate means of union with Him.

3. You are not supposed to renounce this desire of clear, conceptual knowledge of God unless you are actually receiving infused prayer—or unless you are so advanced in the mystical life that you can enter into the presence of God without active thought of Him.

Saint John of the Cross not only says that progressives, who have begun to receive graces of mystical contemplation, should return to active meditation whenever they “see that the soul is not occupied in repose and (mystical) knowledge.”¹⁶ He adds that meditation is an ordinary means of disposing oneself for mystical prayer. “In order to reach this state, [the soul] will frequently need to make use of meditation, quietly and in moderation.“¹⁷

The reason for all this is clearly that the theology of Saint John of the Cross is not purely negative—any more than is the theology of any other Christian saint. It has a strongly positive element. Light and darkness succeed one another, and they work together. If meditation, if concepts cannot bring us to immediate union with God, they nevertheless have a very definite function in preparing us for that union. And this is what we must now attempt to understand.