Abstract
The strenuous ascetic that is established in The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night by John of the Cross, frequently, and not illegitimately, is viewed as the purging of desire, but often to the extent that desire exclusively is perceived as a detrimental and negative quality. With a modest shift in perspective, this article attempts to read John through the lens of desire, rather than against it. It employs the notion of ‘desireless desire’, in order to describe John’s final position of waiting as one that neither dispenses with an authentically human and desiring subject, nor compromises the final aim of union with God.
Highlights
6 for Augustine, memory is the place in which God is found “[b]ecause we find God precisely as those who have once lost him, and our search for him is like trying to recollect a truth that we have forgotten” (Cary 2000:138)
The image of night is appropriate, not merely because it coheres with the teaching that John lays down about stripping and purifying the soul of both its appetitive and intellectual attributes, and because the goal of the pilgrimage is a teleological desire, which is understood in terms of what, and is the only true desire of human persons
His exploration of the purification of the will remains unfinished, as the passive nights are awaited. This phase – those of the passive nights – appears, possibly, to undermine the cessation of desire, whether for self or for God. This is because the passive waiting for the visitation of God is itself a stance of expectation, and to be expectant means remaining trapped in the network of desire – desiring what one may be expecting even when no exact definition may be offered about what is expected
Summary
(“Stanzas of the soul that suffers with longing to see God”) He summarizes perfection with a centred attentiveness as Forgetfulness of creation, Remembrance of the Creator, Attention to what is within, And to be loving the Beloved (“The Sum of Perfection”). Accepting the telic aim of reasoned desire for the good from Aquinas, and aware of the deceptive power of instrumental and prohibitive desires for finite goods from Augustine, John maintains the importance of desire’s presence in the pursuit of the soul’s ultimate telos, but he reconceptualizes desire as “desireless desire”, as desire that employs one kind of desire and discards another kind of desire, which is reconfigured as an attitude of non-possessive disinterestedness, a final stage which establishes a site where that telic desire is transformed into an act of waiting.. John produces an epistêmê, a knowledge system, which, significantly, is mystical, in the sense that knowledge – knowing oneself, knowing one’s passions and pursuits, and knowing God – is not the product of rational procedural reflection, but it is both a means to ensure, and is implicit in, the proper hierarchical ordering of one’s affections, as is this proper ordering of one’s affections a means to ensure, and implicit in, the very activity of acquiring knowledge itself
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