Religious Ecstasy - Pt. 2

To read the first post of this series, click here.


The next three or four posts of this series will be a summary and commentary on St. John of the Cross’ book, Ascent of Mount Carmel, which is a “how-to” book for achieving mystical union/religious ecstasy. If you are interested in this subject, I strongly encourage you to read the original source material itself. It is a fairly easy read.

The According to Pope Pius XI, St. John of the Cross “points out to souls the way of perfection as though illumined by light from on high, in his limpidly clear analysis of mystical experience. And although [his works] deal with difficult and hidden matters, they are nevertheless replete with such lofty spiritual doctrine and are so well adapted to the understanding of those who study them that they can rightly be called a guide and handbook for the man of faith who proposes to embrace a life of perfection.”

St. John of the Cross calls the process of achieving mystical union as passing through the dark night. The night is dark because we are not fully illuminated by the truth of God. As I stated in my original post on this subject, achieving mystical union is not common. According to Ascent of Mount Carmel, however, the reason for that is because most of us lack the will to follow through. St. John of the Cross reassures us that all the things that he lays out in his book are “quite sufficient for entrance into the night of sense.” However, the path he describes is extremely difficult and would likely be unsettling since it requires us to strip away our conceits, pleasures, and habits.

According to St. John of the Cross, the reasons most people don’t achieve religious ecstasy are as follows:

·        Most people don’t have any desire to enter the dark night or to allow themselves to be led into it;

·        Most people lack competent and alert spiritual directors who can guide them;

·        Some spiritual advisors might not understand that novices passing through the dark night should be left in the state of purgation and even desire it until God decides otherwise; and

·        While passing through the dark night dark an individual will be contemplative and he will probably feel darkness, trials, and constraints. His friends will diagnose it as depression and encourage him to cheer up and go out and have some fun. Such comforters will certainly derail the novice from his journey.

Book One – The Senses

The journey through the dark night has three parts. It begins with a denial of the senses. The first book of Ascent of Mount Carmel can be summarized in this way – We must make ourselves a vacuum so that God can then fill us.

Desires, when they are acted upon, seem sweet and often appear to be good, but they leave a bitter after-taste.

An individual needs to gradually to deprive himself of the desire for all the worldly things he possesses. “Things” and pleasures distract us. All of creation, compared with the infinite Being of God, is nothing. And therefore the soul that sets its affection upon the distractions of creation restricts what he sees.

The more our souls are filled with desire for “things,” the less capacity we have for God. According to St. John of the Cross, a soul that is clothed in pleasure has no capacity for enlightenment or possession of the pure and simple light of God. Once we purge ourselves of those “creatures,” our souls are like a smooth, blank board upon which nothing is painted, with nothing distracting it. This is the first step.

The soul that loves many other things becomes incapable of pure union with God and transformation in Him. To make progress toward mystical union we must concentrate less on giving up things and instead working on giving up desiring things.

Catechism of the Catholic Church

2015 The way of perfection passes by way of the Cross. There is no holiness without renunciation and spiritual battle. Spiritual progress entails the ascesis and mortification that gradually lead to living in the peace and joy of the Beatitudes.

In my previous post I wrote about my return to the Church. My first two Lents were amazing. Through fasting and prayer I gained much better understanding of God’s plan. As a result, Lent became my favorite time of the year. However, the next few Lents were less remarkable despite the fact that I was giving up more and more “things.” After reading Accent of Mount Carmel I now realize that it was because each Lent I would take two steps forward and two steps back. I would give up distractions for 40 days, only to return to them immediately after Lent.

According to St. John of the Cross, the first thing that we must do on our journey through the dark night is to abandon our pride. For most people, this is probably their biggest distraction, the hardest to recognize in themselves, and the most difficult to strip away.

There is a difference between pride and self-confidence and self-respect. St. John of the Cross says that “those who consider themselves to be persons with a certain amount of knowledge are very ignorant, so that the Apostle, writing to the Romans, says of them: Dicentes enim se esse sapientes, stulti facti sunt. That is: Professing themselves to be wise, they became foolish. And those alone acquire wisdom of God who are like ignorant children, and, laying aside their knowledge, walk in His service with love.” When stripped of the defense shield of pride, the dark night might become very dark and foreboding. However, we must work through it because these feeling will pass.

St. John of the Cross says that we should not seek honors before other men because this is also pride. All the wealth and glory of all creation, in comparison with the wealth which is God, is supreme poverty and wretchedness.

We do not gain grace when we don’t raise our desires above “childish” things. In simple spiritual food we could find sweetness, but when we have worldly desires we instead taste things that are only frivolous in fleeting.

Before ascending to the summit, we need to do two things perfectly:

1. We must cast away all strange gods -- namely, all strange affections and attachments; and
2. We must purify ourselves of the remnants of those desires left in the soul, by habitually denying them.

Through the observance of these two things, God will change us, from old to new, by giving us a new understanding of Him, and we will attain the state of union.

As noted in a previous post, St. John of the Cross says, “Wherefore, as in natural generation no form can be introduced unless the preceding, contrary form is first expelled from the subject, which form, while present, is an impediment to the other by reason of the contrariety which the two have between each other; even so, for as long as the soul is subjected to the sensual spirit, the spirit which is pure and spiritual cannot enter it.”

There are five “positive” evils that come from desires. They are as follows:

·        The first evil is a resistance to the Spirit of God.

·        The second effect is that distractions weary the soul by tormenting, defiling, and weakening it. Desires weary the soul because it is never satisfied. After the temporary pleasures of hedonism wear off, we are left with an even greater emptiness and hunger. The more intense the desire, the greater is the torment that it causes the soul.

·        The third evil is blindness and darkening of the soul. When the soul is darkened in understanding, the understanding has no capacity for receiving enlightenment from the wisdom of God.

·        The fourth evil is the staining and defilement of the soul.

·        The fifth evil is making the soul lukewarm and weak. If are many and dispersed, the attention to things of God is dispersed and the soul is weaker in virtue. The soul is set upon various trifles and becomes like water which, having a place below to empty itself, never rises. Desires are like leeches, which are forever sucking the blood from our veins,

For most of us, our blindness is so extreme that we stumble “at midday as though it was in the darkness. For he that is blinded by desire has this property, that, when he is set in the midst of truth and of that which is good for him, he can no more see them than if he were in darkness.”

All desires are not equally harmful.

There are also natural desires such as hope, fear and grief. The natural desires “hinder the soul little, if at all, from attaining to union.”

It is the voluntary desires that are grave and those must all be driven away no matter how slight they may be.

St. John of the Cross says “a garment, a book, a cell, a particular kind of food, tittle-tattle, fancies for tasting, knowing or hearing certain things, and suchlike. Any one of these imperfections, if the soul has become attached and habituated to it, is of as great harm to its growth and progress in virtue.”

It is difficult to cast-aside things that are important to us - the same things that we use to define ourselves – our passions and hobbies. These things are different for everyone. They might be:

·        Listening to sports-talk radio;

·        Going out to dinner;

·        Movies;

·        Fine wine;

·        Television (other than EWTN);

·        Reading novels;

·        Home brewing;

·        Fantasy football;

·        Crossword puzzles;

·        Online poker;

·        Golf;

·        Vacations;

·        …and many more.

All of these things may seem harmless. However, they allow subtle evils to enter our lives. Even a love of scripture can be a distraction if we become prideful and use it like a club to bully others on Internet forums.


The problem with letting a single distraction remain can be illustrated by this example: Have you ever done a single thing or task throughout the entire day? That night there was a good chance that you dreamed about it. Therefore if we strip ourselves of all distractions except one, there is a good chance that that single distraction will have an inordinate amount of power over our souls.

Of course we can’t purge ourselves of everything. Family may be a pleasure but it is also our obligation to take care of them and spend time with them. Exercise is also important because our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. Even money isn’t always a distraction. St. John of the Cross said, “David says these words: Pauper sum ego, et in laboribus a indenture mea. Which signifies: I am poor and in labors from my youth. He calls himself poor, although it is clear that he was rich, because his will was not set upon riches, and thus it was as though he were really poor.”

To achieve religious ecstasy, the first step is that virtually everything that that lives in our souls must die; both little and great, and the soul must be detached from desires.

In addition to the five “positive” evils stemming from desires that are listed above, there is also the “privative” evil, which comes from depriving the soul of the grace of God. The privative evil can only be wrought by voluntary desires for things relating to mortal sin. Mortal sins produce total blindness, torment, impurity, and weakness.

All “unnatural” desires produce evils. According to St. John of the Cross, “Although one avaricious desire produces them all, its principal and direct result is to produce misery. One vainglorious desire produces them all; its principal and direct result is to produce darkness and blindness. And, although one gluttonous desire produces them all, its principal result is to produce luke-warmness in virtue.”

All the virtues grow through the practice of any one of them, and all the vices grow through the practice of any one of them.

A person needs to develop a habitual desire to imitate Christ in everything that he does. In to do this well, every pleasure that presents itself to the senses, if it does not add to the honor and glory of God, must be rejected.

In this detachment the spiritual soul finds its repose. Since it covets nothing, nothing wearies it when it is lifted up, and nothing oppresses it when it is cast down, because it is in the center of its humility. But when it covets anything, at that very moment it becomes wearied.

Strive to do the following:

·        To prefer, not that which is easiest, but that which is most difficult;

·        To desire nothing;

·        To enter into complete detachment, emptiness, and poverty with respect to everything that is in the world; and

·        To think humbly of yourself.

It will take “courage to remain in darkness as to all things, depriving itself of desire for them all.”


We could, perhaps, accomplish some of what is described above by going into a sensory deprivation tank. However, if we did so without first going to confession, learning humility, and learning obedience, our emptied souls would still be blinded by the sins, which we have not purged. We would be more open to demonic forces rather than to the grace of God. 

The next post in this series will summarize Book Two, which deals with Faith – which is midnight during “the dark night.”

Click here to see the next post in this series.