Ascent of Mount Carmel

The soul’s preparation for this union is not that it should understand or perceive or feel or imagine anything concerning either God or anything else, but that it should have purity and love—that is, perfect resignation and detachment from everything for God’s sake alone.

God communicates himself most to the soul that has progressed farthest in love, meaning that its will is in closest conformity with the will of God.

Not only does it provide no knowledge, but also it deprives us of all other information and knowledge and blinds us to them, so that they cannot judge it well. Other knowledge can be acquired by the light of the understanding, but the knowledge that comes from faith is acquired without the enlightenment of the understanding, which is rejected for faith

This kind of detachment from the world is night to the soul, for simply lacking goods does not imply detachment from the world if the soul still desires those goods. Rather, detachment from the world occurs when the desire for such goods leaves the soul free and empty of them. It is not worldly things themselves that occupy the soul or cause it harm—those things cannot enter the soul. It is the will and the desire for them that cause harm.

Two opposite qualities cannot coexist in one person. Darkness, which is passion for created things, and light, which is God, are opposites

Love creates likeness between one who loves and the object of its love.
One who loves a created thing becomes as low as that created thing, and in some ways lower. Love not only makes the lover equal to the object of his love, but even subjects him to it. In the same way the soul that loves anything else becomes incapable of pure union with God and transformation in him

The beauty of created things compared with the infinite beauty of God is the height of deformity, as Solomon says in the Proverbs: Favor is deceitful and beauty is vain. The soul that is passionately attached to the beauty of any created thing is the height of deformity in God’s eyes

for the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. In order to come into union with God’s wisdom, the soul must proceed by unknowing rather than knowing.

Compared to God’s wealth, the wealth and glory of creation are supreme poverty and wretchedness. The soul that loves and possesses creature wealth is supremely poor and wretched in God’s sight, and for that reason will be unable to gain the wealth and glory that is the state of transformation in God.

Speaking of the privative, the more the soul spends its passion on a created thing, the more the desire for that thing will fill the soul and the less capacity the soul will have for God