The Dark Night Of The Soul

There’s often a misconception about this phrase – the dark night of the soul. You may have heard it increasingly over the past few years, with the exodus from the evangelical church, and the growth of the post-Christian deconstruction culture. But much like deconstruction is used differently than the way Jaques Derrida popularized it, the colloquial meaning of the phrase “dark night of the soul" has become foreign to its original use as well. Let's explore what it really means.

Transcript

Hello,

And welcome to Methods,

An exploration in guided prayer and meditation.

Today's focus is The Dark Night of the Soul.

There's often a misconception about this phrase,

The dark night of the soul.

You may have heard it increasingly over the past few years,

The exodus of white evangelicals from the evangelical church,

And the growth of the post-Christian deconstruction culture.

But much like deconstruction is used differently than the way Jacques D'Ereida popularized it,

The colloquial meaning of the phrase,

The dark night of the soul,

Has become foreign to its original use as well.

In its common usage,

It has come to mean something like a particularly difficult time in life,

Or is often used in conjunction with the loss or transformation of someone's faith.

But the original meaning of the term had a more mystical context.

The phrase has its origins in a text commentary of the poem,

An Una Noche,

Azcura,

By the late medieval Spanish mystic Juan de la Cruz,

Or John of the Cross.

The commentary,

Called The Dark Night of the Ascent of Mount Carmel,

Talks about the first stage of the mystical path of purgation.

The latter stages of illumination and union aren't commented on,

Except for in reference to his other poetry,

The Spiritual Canicle and The Living Flame of Love.

There are essentially two parts to the dark night,

One being the more common night of sense,

And the following,

The more rare night of the soul.

Both of these states of consciousness are set within the framework of contemplation,

The intentional inner disposition toward the real.

But I think the best person to describe this event is John of the Cross himself.

Let yourself settle into your meditation posture and follow your breath for a moment.

I'll be reading from book 1 chapters 1-3,

And 8,

And book 2 chapter 5.

Upon a dark night,

With anxious love inflamed,

O happy lot!

Forth unobserved I went,

My house now being at rest.

This stanza describes the happy state of the soul and its departure from all things,

From the desires and imperfections to which our sensual nature is subject because it is not bordered by reason.

The meaning of it is this,

In order to reach perfection,

The soul ordinarily has to pass through two kinds of night,

Which spiritual writers call purgations or purifications of the soul,

And which I have called nights because in the other one as well as the soul travels,

As it were,

By night in a darkness.

The first night is the night or purgation of the sensual part of the soul,

Treated in the first stanza and the first part of this work.

The second night,

Of which the second and following stanza speaks,

Is the night of the spiritual part.

I shall discuss this night in the second part of my work,

Insofar as it relates to the soul's activity in the second and third parts,

And insofar as it relates to its passive condition in the fourth part.

This first night pertains to the beginners at the time when God begins to put them in a state of contemplation in which the spirit also has a part,

As we shall say later on.

The second night,

Or purification,

Pertains to the advanced at a time when God wants to lead them into a state of union with him.

The state is a more obscure,

Dark,

And terrible purgation,

As will be said below.

The meaning of the stanza,

Then,

Is that the soul went forth,

Led by God,

Through love of him only,

And with that love inflamed in the dark night.

This is the privation and purgation of all sensual desires for the outward things of this world,

The pleasures of the flesh,

And the satisfactions of the will.

This is accomplished in this purgation of sense,

And for this reason it is said that the soul went forth,

Its house,

I.

E.

The sensual part,

Being at rest.

All its desires being at rest and asleep,

And the soul asleep to them.

One has not departed from the pains and vexations of these desires until they are mortified and put to sleep.

The happy lot of the soul,

Then,

Lies in this unobserved departure,

Which no carnal desire or anything else was able to hinder.

It was also happy that this departure took place by night,

Which signifies that the privation was done in it by God,

A condition that is night to the soul.

This was the happy lot,

Then,

That God should lead it into this night,

From which so great a blessing results,

But into which it could not have entered of itself,

Because no one is able in his own strength to empty his heart of all desires.

In order to draw near to God.

Chapter 2 Upon a dark night,

The journey of the soul into the divine union is called night for three reasons.

The first is derived from the point which the soul sets out,

The privation of desire of all pleasure and all things of this world,

By detachment.

This is night for every desire and sense of a person.

The second,

From the road by which it travels,

That is,

Faith,

For faith is obscure,

Like night to the understanding.

The third is from the goal to which it ends.

God,

Incomprehensible and infinite,

Who in this life is as night to the soul.

We must pass through to these three nights if we are to attain to divine union with God.

They are foreshadowed in Holy Scripture by the three nights that were to elapse,

According to the command of the angel,

Between the betrothal and the marriage of the young Tobias.

On the first night,

He was to burn the heart of a fish in the fire,

Which signifies that the heart's affections are set on the things of this world.

In order to enter on the road that leads to God,

These must be burned up and purified of all created things in the fire of his love.

This purgation drives away the evil spirit who has dominion over the soul,

Because of our attachment to those pleasures that flow from temporal and corporeal things.

On the second night,

The angel told him that he would be admitted into the Society of the Holy Patriarchs,

The fathers of the faith.

The soul having passed the first night,

Which is the privation of all sensible things,

Enters immediately into the second night,

Being alone in pure faith,

Not to the exclusion of love,

But in a faith that excludes other forms of knowledge,

For this does not pertain to the senses.

The third night,

The angel said he would obtain a blessing,

That is,

God,

Who,

In the second night of faith,

Communicates himself so secretly and so intimately to the soul.

This is another night,

Since this communication is more obscure than the others,

As I shall presently explain.

When this night is over,

Which is the accomplishment of the communication of God and the spirit,

Ordinarily affected when the soul is in great darkness,

The union with the bride,

Which is the wisdom of God,

Immediately ensues.

The angel also adds to Tobias that after the third night has passed,

He would be joined to his bride with the fear of the Lord.

This fear and the love of God become perfect together,

And are then perfect when the soul is transformed by love.

Chapter 3 We here call night the deprivation of pleasure and the desire for all things.

For just as night is nothing else but the absence of light,

And consequently of visible objects in which the state of the faculty of vision remains in darkness and emptiness,

So too the mortification of desires is night to the soul.

For when the soul denies itself of those pleasures that outward things furnish to the desire,

It is as it were in darkness,

Without occupation.

As the faculty of vision is nourished by light and fed by visible objects,

And ceases to be fed when the light is withdrawn,

So the soul by means of desire feeds on those things that correspond with its powers and give it pleasure.

But when the desire is mortified,

It derives no more pleasure from them,

And thus,

So far as the desire is concerned,

The soul abides in darkness,

Without occupation.

This may be illustrated in the case of all the faculties of the soul.

When the soul denies itself the pleasure arising from what gratifies the ear,

It remains,

So far as the faculty of hearing is concerned,

In darkness,

Without contemplation,

Without occupation.

When it denies itself of all that is pleasing to the eye,

It remains in darkness,

So far as it relates to the faculty of sight.

Hence the soul that is denied and rejected,

The gratifications that come from all the things by mortifying its desire for them,

May be said to live in the darkness of night.

And this is nothing else but an emptiness within itself of all things.

The reason for this,

As the philosophers say,

Is that the soul is like a clean slate when God first infuses it into the body,

Without knowledge of any kind,

Whatever,

And incapable of receiving knowledge,

In the course of nature,

In any other way than through the senses.

Thus while in the body,

The soul is like a person in a dark prison,

Who has no knowledge of what passes outside,

Beyond what he can learn by looking through the windows of his cell,

And who,

If he did not look outside,

Could in no other way learn anything at all.

Thus the soul cannot naturally know anything but through the senses,

The windows of its cell.

If the impressions and communications of the senses be rejected and denied,

We may well say the soul is in darkness and empty,

Because according to this view there is no other natural way for light to enter in.

It is true indeed that we cannot help hearing,

Seeing,

Smelling,

Tasting,

And touching.

But this is of no moment,

And does not trouble the soul when the objects of sense are repelled,

Any more than if we neither heard nor saw.

For he who shuts his eyes is as much in darkness as a blind man who cannot see.

This is the meaning of David when he said,

I am poor and in labors from my youth.

Though he was certainly rich,

He says that he is poor,

Because he had not yet set his mind upon riches,

He really was like a poor man.

But if he had been really poor,

Yet not in spirit,

He would have not been truly poor,

For his soul would have been full of riches and full of desires.

For this reason we call this detachment the night of the soul.

For we are not speaking here of the absence of things,

For absence is not detachment if the desire remains,

But of that detachment which consists in suppressing desire and avoiding pleasure.

It is this that sets the soul free,

Even though possessions may still be retained.

It is not things of this world that occupy or injure the soul,

For they do not enter into it.

It is rather the wish and the desire for them that abide within it.

Chapter 8 This night,

Which as we say is contemplation,

Produces in spiritual persons two sorts of darkness or purgations corresponding to the two divisions of man's nature and to sensual and spiritual.

Thus the first night or purgation will be sensual,

In which the soul is purified according to the senses,

Subjecting them to the spirit.

The other is the night or purgation that is spiritual,

In which the soul is purified and stripped in the spirit,

And which subdues and disposes it for union with God and love.

The night of sense is common and happens to many.

These are the beginners of whom I shall first speak.

The spiritual night is the portion of very few,

And there are those who have made some progress who are proficient,

Of whom I'll speak later.

The first night or purgation is bitter and terrible to sense.

The second is not to be compared with it,

For it is horrible and frightful to the spirit,

As I shall soon show.

But as the night of sense is the first in order and the first to be entered,

I shall speak of it briefly.

For being of ordinary occurrence,

It is the matter of many treatises,

So that I may pass on to treat more at large of the spiritual night.

For of that very little has been said,

Either by speech or in writing,

And little is known of it even by experience.

Book II Chapter V The dark night is an inflowing of God into the soul,

Which cleanses it of its ignorance and imperfections,

Habitual,

Natural,

And spiritual.

Contemplatives call it infused contemplation,

Or mystical theology,

By which God's secret secretly teaches the soul and instructs it on the perfection of love,

Without effort on its own part or understanding how this happens.

Insofar as infused contemplation is the loving wisdom of God,

It produces two special effects in the soul.

For by both purifying and enlightening it,

This contemplation prepares the soul for union with God and love.

It is the same loving wisdom that by enlightening purifies the blessed spirits,

But here purifies and enlightens the soul.

But it may be asked,

Why does the soul call the divine light that enlightens the soul and purges it of its ignorance a dark night?

The answer to this is that for two reasons this divine wisdom is not only night and darkness,

But also pain and torment.

The first is because the divine wisdom is so high that it transcends the capacity of the soul,

And therefore in that respect is darkness.

The second reason is based on the meanness and impurity of the soul,

And in that respect the divine wisdom is painful to it,

Afflictive,

And also dark.

To prove the truth of the first reason,

We take for granted a principle of the philosopher,

Namely,

The more clear and evident divine things are,

The more dark and hidden they are to the soul naturally.

Thus the more clear the light and the more it blinds the eyes of the owl,

The stronger the sun's rays and the more it blinds the visual organs,

Overcoming and overwhelming them and their weakness.

So too the divine light of contemplation,

When it strikes on a soul not yet perfectly enlightened,

Causes spiritual darkness,

Because it not only surpasses its natural strength,

But also blinds it and deprives the soul of its natural perception.

It is for this reason that St.

Dionysius and other mystical theologians call infused contemplation a ray of darkness,

That is,

For the unenlightened and unpurified soul.

For this great supernatural light masters the natural power of the intellect and deprives it of its vigor.

Therefore David also said,

Clouds and darkness are round about him.

Not that this is so in reality,

But in reference to our weak understanding,

Which,

In light so great,

Becomes dimmed and blind,

Unable to ascend so high.

Hence he explains,

Saying,

Clouds passed before the splendor of his presence,

That is,

Between God and our understanding.

This is the reason why God sends the illuminating ray of hidden wisdom from himself into the soul that has not yet transformed.

It produces thick darkness in the understanding.

It is evident that this dark contemplation in its beginnings is also painful to the soul.

For as the infused divine contemplation contains many excellences in the highest degree,

And as the soul that receives them,

Not yet purified,

Has many extreme miseries,

Because two contraries cannot coexist in the same subject,

The soul must suffer and be in pain.

Due to the purgation of the imperfections of the soul produced by this contemplation,

The soul becomes the subject in which the two contraries meet and resist each other.

I shall show it to be so by the following induction.

In the first place,

Because light and wisdom of contemplation is most pure and bright,

And because the soul in which it beats is in darkness and impure,

The soul that receives it must suffer greatly,

As eyes weakened and clouded by humor suffer pain when the clear light beats upon them,

So the soul,

By reason of its impurity,

Suffers exceedingly when the divine light really shines upon it.

And when the rays of this pure light strike upon the soul in order to expel its impurities,

The soul perceives itself to be so unclean and miserable that it seems as if God had set himself against it,

And that it itself were set against God.

So grievous and painful is this feeling,

For it now thinks that God has abandoned it,

That this was one of the heavier afflictions of Job during his trial when he said,

Why have you set me against you,

And I have become burdensome to myself?

The soul,

Seeing its own impurity distinctly in this bright and pure light,

Though dimly,

Acknowledges its own unworthiness before God and all creatures.

That which pains it the most is the fear that it will never be worthy,

And that all its goodness is gone.

This is caused by a deep immersion of the mind and the knowledge and sense of its own wickedness and misery.

For now the divine and dark light reveals to it all its wretchedness,

And it sees clearly that of itself it can never be other than what it is.

In this sense we can understand the words of David,

For iniquities you have chastised man,

And you have made his soul to be undone and consumed.

He wastes away as a spider.

The second way in which the soul suffers pain comes from its natural,

Moral,

And spiritual weakness.

For when this divine contemplation strikes it with certain vehemence in order to strengthen it and subdue it,

It is then so pained in its weakness that it almost faints away.

This is especially so at times when divine contemplation strikes it with greater force,

Or sense and spirit,

As if under an immense and dark burden,

Suffering grown in agony so great that death itself would be a desired relief.

This was the experience of Job when he said,

I desire that he not commune with me with much strength,

Lest he oppress me with the weight of his greatness.

The soul under the burden of this oppression and weight feels itself so removed from God's favor that it thinks,

And correctly so,

That all the things that consoled it formerly have utterly failed it,

And that no one is left to pity it.

In this sense,

Job also cried out,

Have pity on me,

Have pity on me.

At the least of you,

My friends,

Because the hand of our Lord has touched me.

It is amazing and pitiful that the soul's weakness and impurity is so great that the hand of God,

So soft and so gentle,

Should now be felt so heavy and oppressive.

For God's hand neither presses nor rests on it,

But merely touches it,

And that mercifully,

For he teaches the soul not to chastise it,

But to grant it favors.

Essentially here,

St.

John of the Cross takes two aspects of the human ego,

The sensual portion where we deal with the phenomenology of the world,

And the spiritual portion where we deal with our own inner landscape.

And both of these,

He says,

Has to be purified through the process of purgation to reach a divine union.

The first one is the Night of Sense,

The second one the Night of Spirit.

In the Night of Sense,

He uses a metaphor of the soul in sort of a prison.

And the holes or windows in that prison where the light comes in are the senses which occupy the soul and give it something to do.

Now,

Differing from mindful practice where one would take a look through these windows of the soul and try to experience that information that comes in on its own accord,

Or unlike incarnational theology where you try to use what comes in through those windows as an icon or a sacrament to God,

What St.

John is saying is that these essentially have to be shut out.

You can take that as shutting off the senses entirely,

Or as a mere detachment from the senses or an equanimity.

So not in the sense that we stop hearing,

We stop seeing,

We stop tasting,

But more as we don't identify or get caught up in those sensory perceptions.

And the second,

The Dark Night of the Soul,

Or the Night of Spirit,

Is more the purgation of the ego.

And he uses a lot of what you might call Augustinian theology there,

And it may be bristly to some folks considering a lot of people now are taking kindly to the ideas of original blessing or original goodness.

But John's not denying that here.

He actually affirms that,

As we saw when he talks about the soul as a clean slate.

However,

When he says that the soul comes in contact with its own wickedness,

He's essentially saying that in the context of contemplation,

That is,

When you're engaged in silent prayer,

After a while,

Things start to come up.

Things that you've repressed,

Things that you've denied and pushed down,

Start to kind of bubble their way to the surface.

Initially,

All you're getting is the gross sensations,

The aches and pains in your back,

The smell of the food cooking in the other room,

The sound of the dog barking.

And it's this that corresponds to the Dark Night of Sense.

These windows have to be kind of shut out in a way,

Not externally,

You don't have to go muzzle the dog or put the food away,

But you have to kind of detach from those things.

And once you do that,

You become more able to perceive the subtler levels of attachment,

Like in thought,

And even deeper still into your unconscious mind,

Things that you may not even realize.

And when these things come up,

A lot of times it's very cathartic,

Or it can be terrifying,

Like he says,

Because you're faced with the reality of yourself,

You can see through yourself and through your own schemes,

And you're faced with the reality of why you do the things you do.

So even though it can come off a bit self-deprecating,

What he's saying is that the shadow side of ourselves,

The side that we repress,

The things that we don't let into our awareness,

Are the things that control us.

They are,

As the Philokalia says,

The passions,

Or as psychotherapy says,

The things that we don't bring to consciousness can control us.

The goal of psychology and I believe good spirituality is to make the unconscious conscious,

And in that way it can no longer control us.

And that's essentially what the Dark Knight does,

And it's very liberating,

But at first it can be painful.

Although John says these nights are not voluntary,

They're not things that you can take up and accomplish solely of your own effort,

There are ways in which we can dispose ourselves to be available to God for these things.

Let's do that now.

Find a quiet place.

If you can,

Shut out the lights or draw the blinds.

Make it as dark as possible.

If you can,

Shut off all sources of sound.

If not,

That's okay.

Try to limit any smells,

So don't burn any candles or any incense if you can help it.

Take a drink of water and wash out any taste of food or drink that you've eaten recently.

Rest your hands gently on your legs.

Try not to get too attached to the tactile sensation of your hands touching things.

Just rest them there.

Allow them to be heavy.

Begin to follow your breath.

Inhale and exhale.

With each exhale,

Release the tension corresponding with those sensory perceptions.

As you inhale,

Feel the tension in your eyes and as you exhale,

Release that tension.

As you inhale,

Feel the tension in your sinuses.

As you exhale,

Release that tension.

As you inhale,

Feel the tension in your mouth and as you exhale,

Release that tension.

As you inhale,

Feel the tension in your hands and your feet and as you exhale,

Release that tension.

Exhale and feel all the tension in your body at the same time and as you exhale,

Release all that tension.

Now allow yourself to draw your sensory perceptions into yourself.

Not to feel or perceive anything within as opposed to without,

But to detach from the extrinsic stimuli of the substrate of awareness.

In other words,

Don't be sucked into the TV show,

But just be aware of the TV itself doing its thing.

If you begin to notice your thoughts or emotions,

Feel the tension in those thoughts and those emotions and then release them.

Now that you've released the attachment to all your sensory perceptions and to your thoughts and emotions,

You've made yourself available to the night of sense and the night of spirit.

Now simply wait here in the presence of God for the infused ray of contemplation.

Reviews

super deep spiritual stuff- i’ll be listening to your talk a few more times trying to understand what JotC was teaching us. thank you 🙏✝️🕊️🙏✝️🕊️🙏✝️🕊️🙏

Many people offer explanations of the dark night, but there’s nothing better than hearing it directly from John of the Cross. I very much appreciated the actual text being read. The meditation that dissolves all of our senses taking us into a darkness with the Spirit of love was very comforting to me.

Heavy, heavy, heavy, duty! Not for the faint of heart. Hauntingly beautiful! Must listen to it several times to peel the onion...