St. John of the Cross warns us against relying solely on our understanding to map out the spiritual life. If you are experiencing spiritual dryness, it is often because you are treating the Divine Mystery as a biological trigger or a data set to be mastered rather than an infinite reality to be encountered through faith. This episode performs a metaphysical surgery on our need for "understanding," demonstrating why trying to grasp God's essence with our intellect leads to a self-imposed gnosticism. We must actively strip away our limited perceptions and allow the darkness of faith to be our true guide.

Clinical Notes:

  • The difference between identifying an object (like a rose) and truly understanding its essence, which remains impossible when it comes to the mystery of God.
  • How faith acts as the necessary darkness that helps us see and understand the formal structure of reality proposed by the Church.
  • The specific danger of reducing your spiritual life to a dopamine hit or a closed biological system rather than a relationship with the Divine.
  • The true nature of mercy (Luke 6:36) as an unpredictable gift that requires us to let go of our affairs and desire for vengeance once justice is acknowledged.

You have the concepts, but you need the tool. When the audio ends and the silence returns, don't go back to "trying harder." Use the "5-Minute Prayer Reset" to stabilize your interior life and prepare for the Divine Physician.

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TRANSCRIPT

Hello there. Welcome to this week's episode of Midnight Carmelite. This week I'm going to go back to St. John of the Cross. I came across this passage in the Kavanaugh translation; it's just a short little paragraph in the Ascent, Book 2, Chapter 4, Section 4. John lists understanding, feeling, imagining, opinion, desire, or way of their own, or any of their other works or affairs, and know not how to detach and strip them—it says "denude" in this translation, which really means to strip themselves of these impediments. I want to start here by going through understanding.

What does it mean when we understand something? Well, when we understand something, it goes from being confused to clear. That's a simple way to put it. For example, you see a flower and you say, "I think that's a rose," but you don't know everything about roses. You have a confused understanding. You understand something, but it's not a full understanding. As St. Thomas says, we can't even know the essence of a housefly fully. This is not epistemological nihilism; it's not saying you can know nothing about anything. It is saying there are degrees and limits to what we can know, and many things will always remain a mystery because, in a sense, all things remain a mystery.

How does understanding deal with this? In our faith life, what tends to happen is we will attempt to treat it like some sort of system of data or biological triggers. If we remember the Gospel from the first Sunday of Lent, Year A, Matthew says that one does not live on bread alone, but from every word that comes from the mouth of God. But we can't fully understand the word from the mouth of God, so it's a mystery. Christ is mystery; the Trinity is mystery.

St. John of the Cross is saying that you have to be guided by faith. That doesn't mean faith is contradictory to understanding. It means faith helps you see and understand through what you've been given through the Church. This isn't just a matter of assenting to rules; you are seeing that the Church is proposing a specific understanding of the formal structure of reality. The Church is making explicit what is implicit. The evidence for that is not something we can grasp with our intellect completely. I can learn more about a rose and have some idea of its limits, but God is beyond limits. He is a mystery, yet we can grasp things about Him from what He has revealed. That is the analogy of faith.

We are looking with the eyes of faith on ourselves, on our neighbor, and on God directly in prayer and in the presence of our lives. We have to remember that understanding is not something where we create a closed system, follow the rules, and it works. We have to remember that God substantially touches us, as St. John of the Cross says. There's a direct communication here that can't be reduced to a dopamine hit. We have to focus on that; otherwise, we end up in a kind of Gnosticism where we believe the spiritual life is a byproduct of material input. You have to see it as the darkness of faith, seeing the mystery rather than the limits of things.

The goal transcends limits because God is beyond limit. To say "I understand everything about God because I read the whole Catechism" doesn't even begin to scratch the surface. Furthermore, if you think of Luke 6:36, "Be merciful also as your Father is merciful," mercy is a mystery too. It is unoptimizable. It's not about data; it's a gift to those who don't have, and it's not predictable. Mercy requires that we let go of ourselves and our affairs and acknowledge justice. You can't have mercy without justice.

When justice is restored as best as possible, you are required to let it go as God lets it go. We don't fully understand someone else's thoughts; we can only see what they say and do. God knows the heart, but if someone approaches us and says, "I wronged you and I'm sorry," we prudentially judge the circumstance and acknowledge where we were wrong to come to an understanding. It's not a perfect understanding because you aren't them, but there is a mystery there. In that moment, you offer mercy and you are merciful as the Father is merciful. God loves all of us by virtue of taking on a human nature; He sees the just and the unjust with love because He loved us from the beginning.

Before I conclude, we must remember to strip ourselves of this understanding and detach, trying to see through the Word of God. We cannot live on bread alone. Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor is wrong; we need the Word of God to feed us. I'll see you next time.