📖Dark night of the soul

authors
St. John of the Cross
year
1959
url
http://carmelitemonks.org/Vocation/DarkNight-StJohnoftheCross.pdf

On the spiritual path to God, people experience two “dark nights” (dark night of senses and dark night of spirit).

The first purgation or night is bitter and terrible to sense […]. The second bears not comparison with it, for it is horrible and awful to the spirit […].

The nights are very similar to depression but are spiritual in nature (some call them spiritual depression) and result in purgation of spiritual imperfections (re: Spiritual Materialism).

Dark night of senses is arid and empty of sensory sweetness, so the person cannot derive any pleasure from spiritual works or any other thing.

God now sees that they have grown a little, and are becoming string enough to lay aside their swaddling clothes and be taken from the gentle breast; so He sets them down from His arms and teaches them to walk on their own feet; which they feel to be very strange, for everything seems to be going wrong with them.

During this time, God is working on their spirit (which they cannot experience) so the senses remains dry.

Poem

On a dark night,
Kindled in love with yearnings—oh, happy chance!—
I went forth without being observed,
My house being now at rest.

In darkness and secure,
By the secret ladder, disguised—oh, happy chance!—
In darkness and in concealment,
My house being now at rest.

In the happy night,
In secret, when none saw me,
Nor I beheld aught,
Without light or guide, save that which burned in my heart.

This light guided me
More surely than the light of noonday
To the place where he (well I knew who!) was awaiting me—
A place where none appeared.

Oh, night that guided me,
Oh, night more lovely than the dawn,
Oh,  night  that  joined  Beloved  with  lover,
Lover  transformed  in  the Beloved!

Upon my flowery breast,
Kept wholly for himself alone,
There he stayed sleeping, and I caressed him,
And the fanning of the cedars made a breeze.

The breeze blew from the turret
As I parted his locks;
With his gentle hand he wounded my neck
And caused all my senses to be suspended.

I remained, lost in oblivion;
My face I reclined on the Beloved.
All ceased and I abandoned myself,
Leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies.

Book the first: of the dark night of the senses

nights:

“The first purgation or night is bitter and terrible to sense, as we shall now show. The second bears not comparison with it, for it is horrible and awful to the spirit, as we shall show presently.”

Spiritual imperfections:

When they are going about these spiritual exercises with the greatest delight and pleasure, and when they believe that the sun of Divine favour is shining most brightly upon them, God turns all this light of their into darkness, and shuts against them the door and the source of the sweet spiritual water which they were tasting in God whensoever and for as long as they desired. […] For, as I have said, God now sees that they have grown a little, and are becoming string enough to lay aside their swaddling clothes and be taken from the gentle breast; so He sets them down from His arms and teaches them to walk on their own feet; which they feel to be very strange, for everything seems to be going wrong with them.

Signs of the dark night of senses (ch. ix):

  1. No pleasure or consolation in the things of God and in any thing created.

  2. The memory is ordinarily centered upon God, thinking that it is not serving God, but is backsliding, because it finds itself without sweetness in the things of God.

    When the cause is aridity, it is true that the sensual part of the soul has fallen low, and is weak and feeble in its actions, by reason of the little pleasure which it finds in them; but the spirit, on the other hand, is ready and strong.

    […] and ordinarily, together with the aridity and emptiness which it causes in the senses, it gives the soul an inclination and desire to be alone and in quietness, without being able to think of any particular thing or having the desire to do so.

  3. The soul can no longer meditate or reflect in the imaginative sphere of sense as it used to, however much it would try.

    For this night of aridities is not usually continuous in their senses. At times they have these aridities; at others they have them not. At times they cannot meditate; at others they can.

How to conduct themselves in this dark night (ch. x–xi):

Benefits of the dark night of senses:

Book the second: of the dark night of the spirit