The Ascent of Mount Carmel by John of the Cross: Complete Guide to Nada and Divine Union

Overview and Context

The Ascent of Mount Carmel (Subida del Monte Carmelo) is one of four major works by St. John of the Cross (1542-1591), the Spanish Carmelite mystic, poet, and Doctor of the Church. Written between approximately 1579 and 1585, it is the most systematic and intellectually rigorous of John's works, presenting a comprehensive guide to the active purification required for mystical union with God.

The work takes the form of a commentary on the first two stanzas of John's poem "On a Dark Night" (En una noche oscura), which begins: "On a dark night, kindled in love with yearnings, oh, happy chance! I went forth without being observed, my house being now at rest." The Ascent covers the "active" dimension of the dark night: what the soul itself must do, through deliberate effort and grace, to prepare for divine union. Its companion work, The Dark Night of the Soul, covers the "passive" dimension: what God does in and to the soul through trials, spiritual dryness, and the withdrawal of consolation.

The Ascent was left unfinished. John completed three books but did not finish his treatment of the third book's final section on the purification of the will through love. Despite this incompleteness, the work provides the most detailed treatment of the purgative way in all of Christian mystical literature.

The Mount Carmel Sketch

John drew a famous sketch of Mount Carmel that serves as a visual summary of the entire work. The drawing shows a mountain with three paths ascending toward the summit:

The left path: Labelled "path of the imperfect spirit," it represents attachment to spiritual goods: consolations, visions, ecstasies, and the satisfaction derived from religious practices. This path dead-ends before reaching the summit because attachment to spiritual goods is still attachment.

The right path: Labelled "path of the imperfect spirit," it represents attachment to earthly goods: possessions, pleasures, honours, and comfort. This path also dead-ends before the summit.

The middle path: This narrow, steep path is inscribed with John's most famous words: "Nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, y aun en el monte nada" ("Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, and even on the mountain nothing"). At the summit, the inscription reads: "Solo mora en este monte honra y gloria de Dios" ("Only the honour and glory of God dwells on this mount").

The sketch teaches that both earthly and spiritual attachments can prevent the soul from reaching its goal. The person who clings to material comfort and the person who clings to spiritual consolation are equally prevented from ascending. Only the path of radical detachment, of nada, leads to the summit where God alone is found.

Relationship to The Dark Night of the Soul

Understanding the relationship between the Ascent and the Dark Night is essential for reading either correctly:

The two works are complementary halves of a single teaching. The Ascent tells you what to do; the Dark Night tells you what will happen to you. Active purification prepares the ground; passive purification completes the work. Neither is sufficient alone.

The Poem: "On a Dark Night"

The poem that both the Ascent and the Dark Night interpret is one of the greatest short poems in any language:

The "dark night" is the experience of purification. The "house at rest" is the soul whose disordered appetites have been quieted. The "secret ladder" is faith, which leads the soul upward in darkness. The "disguise" is the transformation of the soul's faculties through the theological virtues. And the "happy chance" is the paradox that what the soul experiences as painful deprivation is actually the doorway to union with God.

Book 1: The Active Night of the Senses

The first book addresses the purification of the sensory dimension of the soul: the appetites and desires that arise from the body's relationship with the material world.

John begins by establishing a principle that governs the entire work: "To arrive at having pleasure in everything, desire to have pleasure in nothing. To arrive at possessing everything, desire to possess nothing. To arrive at being everything, desire to be nothing. To arrive at knowing everything, desire to know nothing." This paradoxical formula encapsulates the logic of nada: the soul that empties itself of all created satisfaction creates the space for divine fullness.

John is careful to distinguish between natural desires (which are involuntary and morally neutral) and voluntary appetites (which involve the will's consent and attachment). You cannot help feeling hungry when you smell food. You can choose not to be ruled by that hunger, not to make the satisfaction of appetite the organising principle of your life. It is the second, the attachment, that John targets.

He identifies the damage that unchecked appetites cause to the soul using five vivid analogies:

• Appetites weary the soul (like a restless child who is never satisfied)
• Appetites torment the soul (like being bound with ropes)
• Appetites darken the soul (like soot on a mirror)
• Appetites defile the soul (like pitch on a beautiful face)
• Appetites weaken the soul (like a tree sending its sap into too many branches)

The remedy is not the violent suppression of desire but the consistent, gentle redirection of the will away from created satisfactions and toward God. John recommends a habitual practice of choosing the less pleasant over the more pleasant, the less comfortable over the more comfortable, not out of masochism but as a training in freedom from the tyranny of preference.

The Doctrine of Appetites

John's treatment of appetites is one of the most psychologically sophisticated sections of the Ascent. He argues that the soul's capacity for God is infinite, but that this capacity is filled, or rather blocked, by finite attachments. Like a bird tied to the ground by a thread, the soul cannot fly to God as long as any attachment, however small, holds it down. "It comes to the same thing," John writes, "whether a bird is held by a slender cord or by a stout one. For, even if it be slender, the bird will be as well held as though it were stout, for so long as it does not break it to fly away."

This teaching challenges comfortable spiritual practice. Most seekers are willing to release obviously harmful attachments: addictions, toxic relationships, destructive habits. John insists that apparently harmless attachments, a preference for a particular food, an attachment to a comfortable routine, an identification with a spiritual self-image, can be equally binding. The issue is not the object's moral value but the soul's clinging to it.

The parallel with Buddhist teaching on upadana (clinging) is striking. The Buddha similarly taught that suffering arises not from the objects of desire but from the act of clinging to them, and that liberation requires the release of clinging at every level, not just the obvious ones. John and the Buddha arrive at remarkably similar diagnoses of the human condition from very different theological starting points.

Book 2: The Active Night of the Spirit (Faith)

The second book addresses the purification of the intellect through the theological virtue of faith. This is the most philosophically demanding section of the Ascent and the one that most clearly reveals John's debt to the apophatic theology of Pseudo-Dionysius.

John's argument is that the intellect, in its natural operation, works through concepts, images, and categories. But God transcends all concepts, images, and categories. Therefore, the intellect's natural operation must be "darkened" through faith in order for it to receive the divine self-communication that exceeds its natural capacity.

"Faith is a dark night for the soul," John writes, "but in this way it also gives light. The more darkness it brings upon the soul, the more light it gives." This paradox is not mystical obscurantism but a precise philosophical claim: just as the eyes are blinded by looking directly at the sun (they receive more light than they can process), the intellect is "blinded" by the divine reality that exceeds its processing capacity. Faith is the faculty that enables the soul to navigate in this darkness, moving toward a reality it cannot comprehend but can trust.

Supernatural Communications and Their Dangers

One of the most surprising sections of the Ascent is John's extended treatment of supernatural communications: visions, locutions (inner voices), revelations, and spiritual feelings. Rather than encouraging the pursuit of these experiences, John warns strenuously against attachment to them.

His reasoning is characteristically rigorous: even genuine supernatural experiences are not God. They are created mediations of the divine presence, and to cling to them is to mistake the medium for the message. "All these imaginative apprehensions and visions cannot serve the intellect as a proximate means of union with God," he writes. The soul that becomes attached to visions has substituted a finite experience for the infinite God, even if the experience was genuinely given by God.

John's counsel is to receive supernatural communications gratefully but to let them go immediately, without dwelling on them, analyzing them, or seeking to repeat them. The grace they convey is absorbed by the soul in the moment of reception; clinging to the experience afterward adds nothing to this grace and introduces the danger of spiritual pride and self-deception.

This teaching has practical relevance for contemporary spiritual seekers. In an era of "spiritual materialism" (a term coined by Chogyam Trungpa), where extraordinary experiences are often pursued as signs of spiritual advancement, John's insistence that the most advanced spiritual state involves not clinging to experiences is a corrective.

Book 3: Memory, Hope, and Will

The third and final book (left incomplete) addresses the purification of memory through hope and the purification of the will through love.

Memory and hope: John argues that the memory, by storing past experiences and projecting future expectations, keeps the soul anchored to created realities. The purification of memory involves releasing attachment to past experiences (even positive spiritual ones) and to future expectations (even expectations of divine union). Hope, the theological virtue that directs the soul toward God alone for its future fulfillment, is the antidote to the memory's tendency to cling.

Will and love: The will is purified through the redirection of its fundamental desire from created objects to God. John identifies four passions of the will: joy, hope, sorrow, and fear. Each passion, when directed toward created things, becomes a source of attachment and suffering. When redirected toward God, each becomes a vehicle for divine union. Joy in God replaces joy in possessions. Hope in God replaces hope in worldly outcomes. Sorrow for sin replaces sorrow for worldly loss. Fear of God replaces fear of created threats.

Nada and Todo: Nothing and Everything

The logic of the Ascent culminates in the paradox inscribed on John's sketch of Mount Carmel: the path of nada (nothing) leads to todo (everything). This is not a stoic resignation or a Buddhist emptiness but a specifically Christian claim: the soul that has released all created attachments discovers that it possesses everything in God, because God, who created all things, contains all things in a manner infinitely more real than the things themselves.

"To come to possess all, desire to possess nothing. To come to be all, desire to be nothing." These famous maxims are not counsels of self-annihilation but of self-transcendence. The soul that lets go of finite satisfactions does not end up with less but with infinitely more, because it receives the Source from which all finite satisfactions derive.

Practical Application Today

Cross-Traditional Connections

The Ascent's teaching on detachment resonates powerfully across contemplative traditions:

Buddhist non-attachment: The structural parallel between John's nada and the Buddhist concept of sunyata (emptiness) is significant. Both teach that clinging to any finite reality, whether material or spiritual, produces suffering and prevents liberation. Both prescribe a radical letting go that paradoxically leads to fullness rather than deprivation.

Stoic indifference: The Stoic concept of apatheia (freedom from passions) and Epictetus's distinction between what is "up to us" and what is "not up to us" share structural similarities with John's treatment of appetites. Both traditions teach that freedom comes from releasing attachment to outcomes.

Meister Eckhart's detachment: Eckhart's concept of Abgeschiedenheit (detachment or releasement) is the closest Western parallel to John's nada. Eckhart taught that the soul must become "empty" of all created things, including concepts of God, in order to receive God as God truly is.

Modern minimalism: The contemporary minimalist movement, while lacking John's theological framework, echoes his insight that accumulation (of possessions, experiences, or information) does not produce fulfillment. The recognition that "less is more" is a secular expression of the principle that John articulates in spiritual terms.

Scholarly Reception

The Ascent has attracted attention from philosophers, psychologists, and literary scholars as well as theologians:

Jacques Maritain drew on John's epistemology of faith in his neo-Thomist philosophy. Edith Stein (St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross) wrote her doctoral work on empathy and later developed a phenomenological interpretation of John's mystical theology. The philosopher Jean Baruzi's 1924 study Saint Jean de la Croix et le probleme de l'experience mystique remains a landmark of Sanjuanist scholarship, situating John within the broader history of European philosophy.

In psychology, the Ascent's analysis of how disordered desires create suffering and limit the soul's capacity for fulfillment resonates with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which similarly identifies "experiential avoidance" and rigid attachment as the primary mechanisms of psychological dysfunction (Hayes, Strosahl & Wilson, 1999).

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The Ascent is best read alongside The Dark Night as a single, comprehensive treatment of the purification process. Both are included in the Collected Works.

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