Desire and the spiritual ascent

Chapter 2 explores the distinctiveness of John’s writing, examining the various theological and non-theological traditions by which John’s notion of desire was informed. A brief biography of John, to give the reader entirely unfamiliar with John an initial understanding of his context, is offered. John’s appropriation of Thomas Aquinas’s anthropology is inspected. John’s thought was also rooted in a sixteenth-century reappraisal of the Augustinian tradition that emphasized the spiritual ascent as undergone through the transformation of the interior faculties of the soul. In addition, John was influenced by his reading of late medieval Dionysian traditions, with their heightened sense of the metaphysical rootedness of the soul’s appetites in the desiring quality of divine love. It is, of course, difficult to speak uncomplicatedly of a Dionysian, Augustinian, or Thomist understanding of any given theological topic. Accordingly, the chapter pays particular attention to John’s late medieval intellectual and monastic context, examining how these diverse traditions may have been transmitted to John and received by him. At the end of Chapter 2 the elevated attention that John pays to the potential and limits of language is examined. John’s depiction of the significance of language on the ascent is influenced by Dionysian thought, by non-theological poetic traditions and by traditions of allegorical exegesis of the Song of Songs. John’s thought, in short, draws creatively on a range of theological and non-theological traditions that themselves draw in diverse fashion on biblical, Christian, and Platonic understandings of desire.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter examines the implications (as already briefly laid out in the Introduction) of John’s thought for contemporary theological discussion of desire. The narrowly sexual connotations that the notion of desire has acquired in modern theological and philosophical debate, particularly through its erotic Platonic formulations conjoined to modern Freudianism, have prevented recognition of John’s insightful construal of desire. John’s account should no longer be the subject of neglect by systematic theologians. He is a magisterial thinker whose theology is worthy of comparison with some of the greatest sixteenth-century accounts of the transformation of the soul. Reconsideration of John’s thought, with its creative reworking of the notion of desire as a constellating category for the depiction of the spiritual ascent, may enrich the ongoing current theological re-evaluation of desire. His thought is, this chapter concludes, a rich resource for the purposes of contemporary theological discussion.

The neglect of desire

Chapter 1 examines the intellectual, ecclesial, and wider cultural context underpinning the diverse modern interpretations of John’s thought. Twentieth-century studies of John, for all their methodological variety, have been dominated by three traditions of interpretation that have only grasped partial elements in his teaching, important though these elements are. These traditions have emphasized the importance of ‘affectivity’ in the spiritual life, the meanings of ‘mysticism’ or ‘mystical experience’, and the theological significance of John’s poetic language. Each strand of thought, however, originates from particular early twentieth-century theological and philosophical commitments whose legacy continues to inform present-day reading of John. Recognition of the extent to which previous works have been shaped by disciplinary boundaries that took their shape in the last century enables a renewed appreciation of John’s theology on its own terms. Through this insight aspects of his work that have all too often been split between spirituality, mysticism, literary studies, and theological anthropology—in particular, his creative reworking of the notion of desire—may be better appreciated.

Union in the Canticle and Flame

Chapter 5 examines the highest stages of the spiritual ascent, depicted in the Spiritual Canticle and Living Flame of Love. Only at the culmination of the ascent does the desire that has propelled the soul through the contradictions and apparent meaninglessness of the dark night fully materialize in the soul. Chapter 5 examines how John uses sensory metaphors of beauty, touch, and taste, as well as a series of deeply erotic images of yearning and consummation, to depict the re-engagement of the soul with the created order, its desires now appropriately reoriented towards God. In the state of union, the soul’s desire for God is revealed to be not only a yearning on the part of the soul itself, but more truly a reflection of the loving desire that unites the persons of the Trinity. John’s anthropology terminology concomitantly shifts towards the use of terms such as the ‘substance of the soul’, as a means of depicting the intense and cohesive desire of the entire soul for God. John’s striking reworking of the highly traditional theological concept of desire therefore plays a crucial role throughout his theology, mediating and uniting what would otherwise appear a disjunctive passage for the soul from an originary state of deep sin, through the noetic, sensual, and spiritual darkness of the dark night, to the state of union with God.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the work. Four interconnected aspects of John’s thought constitute, it is suggested, a bold and sophisticated account of desire that may enrich current research and reflection. None of these aspects is, by itself, unique to John. Taken as a whole, however, they form an account that has not been adequately recognized in recent academic studies of John’s thought, and which may deepen and enrich the theological grounding of recent accounts of desire. First, these four contributions are surveyed. Then a survey of recent theological approaches to desire is undertaken, before finally indicating, as will be laid out more fully in the conclusion, the resources offered by John’s thought that may aid the ongoing theological recovery of desire.

The ‘dark night of the soul’ and the purification of desire

Chapter 4 examines John’s account of the initial stages of the transformation of the soul in The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night of the Soul. The appetites that dominate the untransformed soul, giving rise to the sin that permeates ordinary human existence, must be stilled and purified before the soul can be united with God—and so strong is John’s commitment to divine transcendence that this process of transformation is, he believes, best depicted as the undergoing of a process of noetic, sensual, and spiritual ‘darkness’. Yet despite this vision of the apparent human separation from God, and despite John’s insistence throughout the ascent on the negation of all desire for the created order, his account does not present a pessimistic view of the desiring self. Instead, it relentlessly sets out (by means of his own distinctive, although at root Thomist, anthropology of the sensual and spiritual faculties) the stages by which the soul is progressively transformed. This chapter traces John’s account of the purification of these desires through the two stages of the ‘dark night of the soul’, and the associated passage of the soul from meditation to contemplation. In doing so, it attends both to John’s description of the deeply ascetical performance required in the ‘active night’ and the disorienting loving graced interventions of God (a prime example of his thoughtful and complex theory of the affections) in the ‘passive night’.

Language, form, and imagery in John’s poetry

Chapter 3 turns to John’s poetry, the first genre in which he wrote and the foundational form of his thought. In their imaginative, narratival depiction of the inner life of the Trinity, John’s Romances explore the communicative nature of language, examining how the loving desire that constitutes the pneumatological bond of Father and Son is also is to be found in the creativity of language itself. John is certainly intrigued by the limits of language that are encountered in the spiritual ascent, which he explores in his glosa and copla poems by playing in various fashions on the theme of the paradoxes involved in human union with the divine. Yet his lira poems, which serve as the basis for his prose commentaries, show him to be chiefly animated by the value of the language and imagery of erotic desire for the depiction of the spiritual ascent. The form and imagery of these poems present a heightened sense of the erotic potential of language itself, which in its very superabundance and excess supports the poem’s accounts of the lovers’ yearning and consummation. Through his poetry, therefore, John presents erotic desire as a force that propels the soul towards its goal, and whose eventual realization in union with God may be meaningfully depicted through the superabundant deployment of images and language drawn from human sexual love.