According to Karmelimpulse 2000/I-IV
prepared by Norbert Žuška, O.Carm.
This is a graphic poem by St. John of the Cross (1542–1591), which represents a spiritual work on a single piece of paper sized to fit into a breviary. Experts call it the "optical summary of the entire teaching of John," and John himself valued it highly. The first copies were drawn during his stay at the El Calvario monastery in Andalusia (1578–79) for the Carmelite nuns in nearby Beas, whom he spiritually accompanied. According to the sisters' testimonies, John dedicated one copy to each of them. Whether these copies were identical is unknown; however, it is certain that John supplemented and revised his original sketch multiple times. It is believed that he personally drew 60–65 images of the Hill of Perfection, of which unfortunately not a single one has survived. The one we print here (fig. 1) is a notarized copy of the original, dedicated to Sister Magdalene in Beas and dates back to 1759. It was redrawn and translated into Czech by Vojtěch Kohut OCD. When John - also in El Calvario - began writing Ascent of Mount Carmel, he wished for this drawing to be printed at the beginning of the book,1 as he considered it successful and well-representative of the Christian spiritual journey.
Mount Carmel?
At first glance, the sketch may surprise us. Without the inscription "Mount Carmel" at the top of the image, one would hardly have the impression that it is a sketch of a mountain. When someone wants to draw a mountain, they usually draw it from a frontal view, from the perspective of someone facing it. It rises before them to its peak, to the sky. Mountains symbolically depicting the path to holiness were drawn this way in John's time. John's sketch looks different. Instead of the usual "mountain of perfection," which towers over the observer and seems to say: "Strain yourself, you have a steep and dangerous ascent ahead!", John's hill2 rather conveys the wonderful experience of one standing at its summit.
John has essentially sketched the summit of the mountain. And even this differs from the peaks of other notions of perfection in John's time. What we see is a large plateau, which has room for many pilgrims, not just a few individuals who have managed the steep walls of ascent and can remain on a small pointed top. On John's plateau, one can move freely, run in all directions! Here one can jump, dance, simply live! The observer is meant to be struck at first glance by this plateau and have their heart stirred. Naturally, there are paths drawn on John's sketch leading to the summit. They are an important part of the image and belong to its essence. However, the observer does not have the impression that these are barely surmountable ascents to a peak that towers over them almost out of sight. The observer looks at them more from a bird's perspective.
John of the Cross never saw Mount Carmel in the Holy Land, nor did the sisters, for whom the first copies were drawn, know its appearance. However, John had experience with plateaus. On his foot journeys across Castile and Andalusia, he often conquered hilly terrain and was many times rewarded for the arduous ascent with wonderful views and experiences of beauty, expanse, distance, and freedom. Above the El Calvario monastery, a mountain massif towers, capped by a large plateau. It is not unlikely that John saw it from the window of his cell and that it served as inspiration for his sketch.
What is certain is that John knew the mountains and loved them. In his commentary on the Spiritual Canticle, we find these poetic words: "The mountains are high, numerous, wide, beautiful, charming, blooming, and fragrant. These mountains are, for me, my Beloved."3
Perhaps this very sentence may hold the key to understanding the "optical summary of John's teaching" in the sketch of the Hill of Perfection. For John, God Himself is the mountain. God, who - as Revelation presents Him - bends down to man first and offers him "the gift of new life."
What is this new life?
In accordance with tradition, John calls this new life "union with God." Right at the beginning of the book Ascent, he writes: "The entire teaching that I intend to discuss in this 'Ascent of Mount Carmel' is summarized in the following songs. They contain the way to ascend to the summit of the mountain, which is the high state of perfection, which we here call the union of the soul with God." By the union with God, John does not mean "an eternal banquet," that is, the eternal feast in God's kingdom, as placed at the summit of the mountain by El Greco's disciple Diego de Astor, who "improved" John's sketch (fig. 2). It is noteworthy that Astor's version replaced John's sketch at the beginning of the Ascent since its first publication in 1618, significantly changing the perspective of reading this work.
John's understanding can be found in the preface of this book. He explicitly speaks of reaching "the divine light of perfect union of love with God, as is possible in this life"4 and also in the subtitle of the book's title we read: "Deals with how the soul can prepare itself to rapidly achieve union with God."5 John himself evidently alluded to the misunderstanding of his contemporaries and readers. When he revised The Living Flame of Love, he added words that were not in the first edition: "And we must not consider it incredible that on a soul, already tested, purified, and proven in the fire of suffering and labor and various temptations and found faithful in love, may fulfill in this life what the Son of God promised, namely that 'if anyone loves him, the Most Holy Trinity will come to him and make his dwelling with him' (John 14:23),
that is, God will divinely enlighten his mind with the wisdom of the Son, bless his will with the Holy Spirit, and the Father will mightily and strongly immerse him in the abyss of His sweetness."6
In this regard, the union of love with God in John's view is not a "reward earned" for heroic ascetic effort on the part of man, but primarily a free gift from God. Western thinking tends to understand religion primarily as "the way (or ascent) of man to God"; John of the Cross feels the need to emphasize a more biblical, i.e., Eastern perspective: Christianity as the path through which God Himself came to us in Jesus Christ: "In this is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins."7 In The Living Flame, John of the Cross expresses the same idea in different words: "It must be known that if the soul seeks God, her Beloved seeks her much more."8
The quote that John highlighted as the central point of the summit confirms this perspective, in which God's action takes precedence over human action. It is an adapted quote from the Vulgate,9 which Vojtěch Kohut leaves untranslated: "Introduxi vos in terram Carmeli ut comederetis fructum eius et bona illius" and which means: "I brought you into the land of Carmel, that you might eat its fruits and good things." God brought man to this place! In the middle then stands: "On this mountain dwells only God's honor and glory" and to the left of the summit on the edge: "nothing honors me." It is thus a "grace of union," which neither John nor any other pilgrim standing at the summit can earn or deserve.
Therefore, John of the Cross leads us to a way of life, which Jesus speaks of in the gospel and justifies his coming into the world: "I came that they may have life and have it abundantly."10 This "life abundantly" is symbolized in John's sketch by the plateau. It is a life overflowing, as the sketch suggests, since the plateau on both sides extends beyond the edge of the paper. It is a life in the freedom and expanse of the Holy Spirit, of which Paul writes in his letter to the Galatians: "For freedom, Christ has set us free. Stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery."11 Therefore, John places at the summit of the mountain the fruits of life in the Spirit, as Paul speaks of them in the same letter: "love," "joy," "peace,"12 and adds others: "cheerfulness," "delight," "wisdom," "righteousness," "fortitude," and "piety."
John does not hesitate to begin by showing his spiritual sons and daughters the full richness of the Spirit, precisely because he perceives them - in accordance with Scripture and the Church's teaching - as those to whom this wealth is not foreign, who have already received this wealth and who know its Giver: "You know Him (the Spirit), for He dwells with you and will be in you."13 And what he then seeks to bring them to is a kind of "awakening of God in the soul," or rather - as he himself specifies in The Living Flame - "awakening of the soul in God."14 In other words: to the awakening of a person to the deepest truth that God dwells in his interior and with Him "the fullness of life," as well as the highest degree of "righteousness and freedom," as evidenced by (the bold) widely spread declaration on the upper edge of the plateau: "Here the path no longer leads, because for the righteous there is no law; he is a law unto himself."15
John of the Cross is convinced that God wants to lead a person to this summit, to this plateau. Any other way of life is slavery and a life beneath the level of our dignity, below the level of the possibilities that God has placed in us. This summit is He Himself, who in Jesus Christ has also become our "way."16 The "life at the summit" and the "life on the way" thus overlap. Already in the preface to the Ascent, John explicitly speaks of the "way of union with God"17 and then again and again about the "way of union" or "way of union in love." The plateau is therefore not "just the goal" of a certain path; it is "the goal and the way" at the same time. From this perspective, one can understand the paths in the sketch as certain warnings. They testify to what one must guard against, so as not to walk "blind alleys," so that one does not live in slavery when one has been granted the dignity of God's child through Jesus Christ.
In the second part, we will talk about what "our walking" means, what specifically represents the two false paths and the path of perfection in the middle, as well as the asceticism that is an essential part of our journey (to) union with God.
continuation
