When a Guiding Image Falls Out of Focus
A couple of years ago, a colleague typed the phrase ‘the dark night of the soul’ into Google. The resulting search yielded around 1,890,000 results in English alone – nearly two million.[1] The phrase has indeed become ubiquitous, dispersed way beyond its original context in the writings of John of the Cross. Utilised by the writers of self-help manuals, poets, singers and journalists alike, it seems there is almost nothing that cannot be awarded the status of dark night. In many cases, the expression is employed to indicate situations of unimaginable suffering and perplexity but, more superficially, the expression has also been trivialised and even parodied in popular culture such as in the title of Douglas Adams’ 1988 book, The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul. It’s doubtful whether many of those using the phrase ‘dark night’ in these ways are familiar with its Spanish origin – noche oscura – in the mystical theology of St John of the Cross. It’s equally doubtful whether many of them have even heard of John. On the other hand, for those who do know of John, his name has become almost synonymous with the phrase. It is usually the first thing that springs to mind when he is mentioned; John of the Cross and the dark night of the soul have become so closely entwined that it’s hard to remember he ever wrote about anything else, a fact which contributes much to the popular misconception of John as a ‘grim and gloomy saint’, a ‘horrible ascetic’, ‘terrible, dry-eyed and bleeding.’[2]
Seeing John Clearly Again
These statements, somewhat broad and sweeping though they may be, reveal two rather regrettable facts. On the one hand, John’s original master symbol has become, in many situations, completely detached from its initial context, free-floating and denuded of its original implications. On the other hand, the significance of the dark night metaphor has expanded so greatly that it risks overshadowing the rest of John’s theological project, of which it forms an essential and integral part but is far from being the whole message. This article will attempt to reorder this imbalance, to try to see John’s dark night in the perspective he originally intended.
During a recent relatively bleak period, I found myself stranded in a foreign city for several weeks with only three suitcases of belongings and a copy of John’s collected works which I had stuffed in at the last moment conscious of the upcoming task of writing a paper on his significance for the contemporary world. The situation was sufficiently dire to qualify for being labelled – at least in popular parlance – a dark night, and I resignedly set about the assigned task, expecting my misery only to be confirmed by John’s mystical texts. To my surprise and to my relief, I found that what I was drawn to, what sang in my heart, was not John’s expert analysis of the process of the dark night, but the purpose he sees it as having. Because for John the dark night is not an end itself, not even some sort of spiritual endurance test from which we emerge with the cheerless satisfaction of having made it to the end, but is fundamentally ordered to the attainment of spiritual union, and not just spiritual union in this life, but to the full and lasting union of the soul with God in eternity: heavenly glory, eternal beatitude. As it turns out, John is not a ‘grim and gloomy saint’ fixed on the tortuous process of purgation and purification, necessary though those may be. Rather, John’s fullest attention, that thing which drives him to write, the matter that he feels compelled to broadcast as loudly as he can, is his understanding of the glory of the beatific vision, the ultimate goal of the soul’s eternal union with God, to which all are called and in relation to which everything experienced on earth is ordered and oriented. John is as much – is indeed so much more – a foreteller of the glories of heaven and eternal joy than he is an exponent of asceticism and mortification. He is, as it turns out, more todo than nada. Let’s unpack something of this vision of heavenly beatitude that John’s writings hold for us, and thus see the dark night illumined by that light.
Tasting Union and Leaning Towards Eternity
Like his contemporary St Teresa, John’s experience tells him that it’s possible for the soul to attain a state of ongoing, persisting union with God even in this life; a state which they label spiritual marriage, and which is something very close to participation in the divine life of the Trinity, if not divinisation: ‘having been made one with God, the soul is somehow God thorough participation’ (LF 3.78).[3] John describes this state as ‘the special grace of divine union with God’ (CB 1.11) in which the soul ‘will know love and enjoy God with all its might’ (LF 1.12) and is ‘transformed into a flame of love in which the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are communicated to it’ (LF 1.6). Such is the intensity of this union that ‘a reciprocal love is thus actually formed between God and the soul […] in which the goods of both […] are possessed by both together’ (LF 3.79) and ‘the same spiration passes from God to the soul and from the soul to God’ (CB 39.4).
It is hard to imagine a state more exalted, more intimate, more perfect than this and yet, time and time again, as John struggles to provide us with an adequate account of this union which is ‘beyond words and thought’ (CB22.4), he immediately qualifies his description with the caution that this should not be understood as the fullest state of perfection to which the soul is called. Repeatedly, he reiterates that this state of union is not yet perfected, not yet complete, not yet brought to that fullest degree which will be known in heaven: ‘even though a soul attains to as lofty a state of perfection in this mortal life as that which we are discussing, it neither can nor does reach the perfect state of glory’ (LF 1.14). Thus, John presents us with one of his great paradoxes: this state of union is so close to eternal perfection of heaven that it is a ‘taste of eternal life’ (LF 2.23), a savouring, a foreshadowing; an experience so near to beatitude ‘that only a thin veil separates it’ (LF 1.1). And yet, and yet, it remains so far from the fullness to be known in heaven, so incomplete, so unfulfilled, so imperfect, that John can simultaneously describe it as being still part of the dark night of the soul’s earthly transformation:
This contemplation, in which the soul, by means of her transformation, has sublime knowledge in this life of the divine grove and its living beauty, is consequently called “night.” Yet however sublime this knowledge may be, it is still a dark night when compared with the beatific knowledge. (CB 39.13)
As John has been at pains to point out in the treatises of The Ascent of Mount Carmel and in The Dark Night, unrequited desire for God is intrinsic to the soul’s experience of the earlier phases of the dark night. As now becomes evident, the desire of the soul for her Beloved in the state of spiritual marriage is not quenched or even diminished, but rather inflamed, increased and enkindled to a new intensity:
In the meantime, even though the soul reaches union in this life (the highest state attainable here below), she always exclaims; “Where have You hidden?” For even in the state of union he is still hidden from her, in the bosom of the Father, as we said, which is how she wants to enjoy him in the next life. (CB 1.11)
Every Gift Draws the Soul Forward
In John’s mystical theology, then, it transpires that even – especially – the soul in the state of spiritual marriage is left in a state of ardent longing for her Bridegroom, a state of longing for fulfilment which John dares to call a continuation of night. And this perspective illumines all the pains and struggles of the earlier phases of the dark night which are similarly ordered to the attainment of this state of glory. Everything God does within the soul, everything he does to shape or purify or transform her – whether delightful as in spiritual marriage, or more purgative as in the earlier processes – is ordered to the same purpose. Spiritual marriage and the purgation of the dark night are the same benevolent hand of God leading the soul to the same divinely-ordained goal of union with him. There is not a dark night and then a spiritual marriage, there is only God drawing us towards him:
[God] is always wanting to bestow eternal life and transport [the soul] completely to perfect glory by bringing it into himself. All the gifts, first and last, great and small, that God grants to the soul, he always grants in order to lead it to eternal life. (LF 3.10)
The Night Seen in Heaven’s Light
The purpose of the dark night is thus made clear in the light of the heavenly glory to which the soul is called: heavenly light is literally shone on earthly darkness. And John’s urgent insistence on the necessity of speaking about the dark night is now understood. As one who already stands on the brink of eternal beatitude in heaven, how can he not sing of this? How can he not urge us forward? John is – like St Paul before him[4] – compelled to speak of what he knows, articulating his own foretasting of the heavenly state which lies far beyond what is in the power of human words to express: ‘since the soul in this state of spiritual marriage knows something of this “what,” she desires to say something about it’ (CB 39.1). The dark night is indeed central – critical, even – to John’s message, but it is not the fulness of his message, it is not even the most important part of his message, it is only a gateway to the eternal beatitude which we will one day know without end. That is the point of John’s story.
[1] Steven Payne OCD presented this research to the Order’s intellectual research seminar in Rome, June 2024 (unpublished paper).
[2] These characterisations come from Allison Peers, Spirit of Flame: A study of John of the Cross, SCM Press, London 1943.
[3] All quotations from John’s writings are taken from K. Kavanaugh and O. Rodriguez (trans.), The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, Revised Edition, ICS Publications, Washington DC 1991. LF = Living Flame; CB = Spiritual Canticle (B).
[4] See I Cor 9:16.
