A Treatise John Never Finished

Unusually for a work now read as a completed classic, the Ascent of Mount Carmel breaks off mid argument, ending abruptly partway through its planned treatment of the will without reaching the fuller union with God that the earlier books had been building toward, and scholars generally regard the text as genuinely unfinished rather than deliberately open ended.

The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross presents the Ascent and the Dark Night as a linked pair precisely because they comment on the same poem from complementary angles, active discipline in the Ascent and passive purification in the Dark Night, and modern readers are usually advised to read them together rather than in isolation to get the full shape of John's teaching. Despite its incompleteness, the Ascent has become one of the standard reference points in Catholic ascetical theology for the concept of detachment, cited far beyond specialist mystical theology in general discussions of Christian spiritual discipline, and its formula of systematic nada toward every attachment remains one of the most quoted phrases in the whole literature of Christian mysticism. Even in its unfinished state, the book's three completed sections have supplied enough material for centuries of subsequent commentary and citation.