Ascent of Mt. Carmel - St. Patrick's Basilica

thirty) stanzas of the 'Spiritual Canticle,' the nine parts of the poem 'Far away in the
beginning . . .,' the paraphrase of the psalm Super flumina Babylonis and the poem
'How well I know the fount . . .' This was really a considerable output of work, for, except
perhaps when his gaoler allowed him to go into another room, he had no light but that of
a small oil-lamp or occasionally the infiltration of daylight that penetrated a small interior
window.
Apart from the statement of M. Magdalena already quoted, little more is known of
what the Saint wrote in El Calvario than of what he wrote in Toledo. From an
amplification made by herself of the sentences to which we have referred it appears that
almost the whole of what she had copied was taken from her; as the short extracts
transcribed by her are very similar to passages from the Saint's writings we may
perhaps conclude that much of the other material was also incorporated in them. In that
case he may well have completed a fair proportion of the Ascent of Mount Carmel
before leaving Beas.
It was in El Calvario, too, and for the nuns of Beas, that the Saint drew the plan
called the 'Mount of Perfection' (referred to by M. Magdalena 7 and in the Ascent of
Mount Carmel and reproduced as the frontispiece to this volume) of which copies were
afterwards multiplied and distributed among Discalced houses. Its author wished it to
figure at the head of all his treatises, for it is a graphical representation of the entire
mystic way, from the starting-point of the beginner to the very summit of perfection. His
first sketch, which still survives, is a rudimentary and imperfect one; before long,
however, as M. Magdalena tells us, he evolved another that was fuller and more
comprehensive.
7MS. 12,944. 'He also occasionally wrote spiritual things that were of great benefit. There, too, he
composed the Mount and drew a copy with his own hand for each of our breviaries; later, he added to
these copies and made some changes.'
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