The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious Experience“Not to seek the best in everything, but to seek the worst, so thatyou may enter for the love of Christ into a complete destitution, aperfect poverty of spirit, and an absolute renunciation of everythingin this world.“Embrace these practices with all the energy of your soul and youwill find in a short time great delights and unspeakable consolations.“Despise yourself, and wish that others should despise you;“Speak to your own disadvantage, and desire others to do the same;“Conceive a low opinion of yourself, and find it good when othershold the same;“To enjoy the taste of all things, have no taste for anything.“To know all things, learn to know nothing.“To possess all things, resolve to possess nothing.“To be all things, be willing to be nothing.“To get to where you have no taste for anything, go through whateverexperiences you have no taste for.“To learn to know nothing, go whither you are ignorant.“To reach what you possess not, go whithersoever you own nothing.“To be what you are not, experience what you are not.”These later verses play with that vertigo of self-contradiction whichis so dear to mysticism. Those that come next are completely mystical,for in them Saint John passes from God to the more metaphysicalnotion of the All.“When you stop at one thing, you cease to open yourself to the All.“For to come to the All you must give up the All.“And if you should attain to owning the All, you must own it,desiring Nothing.“In this spoliation, the soul finds its tranquillity and rest. Profoundlyestablished in the centre of its own nothingness, it can beassailed by naught that comes from below; and since it no longerdesires anything, what comes from above cannot depress it; for itsdesires alone are the causes of its woes.”182And now, as a more concrete example of heads 4 and 5, in fact of all182 Saint Jean de la Croix, vie et Oeuvres, Paris, 1893, ii. 94, 99, abridged.276