An Architectonics of Desire: The person on the path to <i>Nada</i> in John of the Cross.

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. INTRODUCTIONDesire is solicitous. Implicit in desire is lack and need: implicit in solicitation is motion, agitation, and anxiety. The movement towards fulfilling the need -the solicitation of the desire -causes anxiety. In theology, desire, as that endeavour to solicit what is required, has long been rendered suspect. In fact, in most of the tomes of spiritual ascetics, desire is a dirty word. It indicates egoism and self-seeking avarice. Desire transgresses the threshold of the temperate and publically permissible, and travels into the regions of the permissive, the excessive, and the shameful. Desire conjures up images of the illicit and, particularly, the forbidden regions of sensual and sexual pleasure. Such an evocation of desire may appear to be precisely what a sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite wishes to expunge. However, ask John of the Cross about what he most desires, about the pursuit of that desire, and, thus, about the necessity of taking a journey to obtain that which is most desirable, and he will answer that Acta Theologica 2013 33(1): 79-95 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/actat.v33i1.4