A Synthesis of St. John of the Cross's Doctrine on Union with God

The reason for the necessity of detachment from creatures for perfect union with God is given in a masterly fashion by St. John of the Cross. The following is a brief synthesis of his thought:

1) God is all, the necessary and absolute being, most pure act without the shadow of potency, who exists of himself and possesses the absolute plenitude of being. Compared with him, creatures are nothing; they are contingent beings which have more of potency than act.

2) Two contraries cannot exist in the same subject because they mutually exclude each other. Therefore, light is incompatible with darkness and the All is incompatible with nothing.

3) If, then, creatures are nothing and darkness, and God is the All and light, it follows that the soul which wishes to be united with God must detach itself from creatures. Without this, union with God is impossible.

4) "And hence it is necessary that the way and ascent to God should consist in the ordinary care of mortifying the appetite; and the soul will more quickly arrive at a goal as it gives itself more energetically to this detachment. But until these appetites cease, the soul will not arrive at perfect union, although it may exercise many virtues, because it still does not perform those virtues with perfection, which consists in having the soul empty and naked and purified of every appetite."

5) For that reason, one must weep at the ignorance of certain souls who burden themselves with extraordinary penances and many other exercises, and think that this or that will suffice for them to arrive at union with divine wisdom; such is not the case if they do not diligently endeavor to negate their appetite. If such persons would exert half the effort in mortifying their appetites, they would advance more in one month through this practice than they would in many years by means of the other exercises. Just as it is necessary that one labor over the earth if it is to bear fruit, and without labor it will bear nothing but weeds, so also mortification of the appetites is necessary if there is to be any fruit or profit in the soul. Without this, St. John dares to say that one will make no more progress than one would who would cast seed on untilled soil. For that reason, the principal concern of spiritual [directors] should be to mortify every appetite in their disciples and to make them remain in emptiness as regards that which they desire. [...]

The system of St. John of the Cross can be reduced to one important statement: God is all. His negations rest on affirmation, because they have as their object to detach the soul from the false appearances of creatures, which are nothing, in order to enable the soul, once purified and ennobled, to lose itself in the profundity of the All. He does not disdain creatures; he wishes only to withdraw the gaze from that which is imperfect and limited and enable the soul to see in creatures the traces and vestiges of the divine being. From the summit of that mountain the saint sings of the beauty of creation with lyrical accents that have never been surpassed by any other poet.

But in order to find them in God again, now purified and ennobled, it is necessary to leave the contemplation of creatures with carnal eyes and to detach oneself energetically from the bonds which hold the soul to the chains of earth. No one can arrive at the All except by the narrow path of the absolute negation of the nothing. [...]

St. John of the Cross does not intend to annihilate the natural tendencies of human nature by removing them from their object and leaving them suspended in nothing, but he wishes to orientate them to God, to make God the sole object of their tendency, thus reducing all of their forces to unity. It is true that this can never be attained perfectly until the soul has been  introduced by God himself into the obscurities of the passive nights, but much can be done by one's own efforts and the help of grace. God does not usually complete the purification of the soul by means of the passive nights until the soul itself has done all that it can by using the ordinary means within its grasp. For that reason St. John of the Cross repeats with insistence that one must mortify the appetites which divide the forces of the soul to such an extent that it is spent entirely on the things of the earth. When the soul shall have attained the emptiness from every creature, it will be filled with God.

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Source: Fr. Antonio Royo Marin, The Theology of Christian Perfection, trans. by Jordan Aumann (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2011), 319-322.