"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 whatever experiences 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 which is so dear to mysticism. Those that come next are completely mystical, for in them Saint John passes from God to the more metaphysical notion 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. Profoundly established in the centre of its own nothingness, it can be assailed by naught that comes from below; and since it no longer desires anything, what comes from above cannot depress it; for its desires alone are the causes of its woes."[1]
And now, as a more concrete example of heads 4 and 5, in fact of all our heads together, and of the irrational extreme to which a psychopathic individual may go in the line of bodily austerity, I will quote the sincere Suso's account of his own self-tortures. Suso, you will remember, was one of the fourteenth century German mystics; his autobiography, written in the third person, is a classic religious document.
- ↑ Saint Jean de la Croix, Vie et Œuvres, Paris, 1893, ii. 94, 99, abridged.
