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WorkJohn of the Cross

The Dark Night of the Soul

Eight stanzas about a lover's escape by night, read line by line as the darkness God leads a soul through.

by John of the Cross162 passages held

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Original title
Noche oscura
First published
(published posthumously)
Original language
Spanish

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Overview

In the last weeks of 1622 the Inquisition in Seville was rounding up a circle of alumbrados, "the enlightened", spiritual groups it prosecuted for claiming direct inspiration from God. Domingo Farfán, a Dominican who advised the tribunal, held the keys to the suspects' rooms, and in house after house he found the same book: the volume of John of the Cross's works printed at Alcalá in 1618, which its readers simply called the Noche oscura, the dark night. He marked fifty passages he thought matched the heretics' errors and laid them before the tribunal. The poem that gave the book its popular name has eight stanzas. A woman slips out of her sleeping house in the dark, guided by no light but the one burning in her heart, and finds her lover. John had written it by 1579, within a year or so of escaping from the cell in Toledo where his own order had locked him up; scholars disagree over whether he began it there. Around 1584–85, in Granada, he wrote the commentary. Its claim is that the night is God's doing. The pleasure beginners take in prayer feeds a spiritual vanity, which he sorts under the seven deadly sins, down to a gluttony for devotional sweetness; God removes that pleasure, first from the senses and then from the mind, and the dryness that follows is the cure, not a sign of failure. He gives signs to tell it apart from melancholy or plain laziness. The commentary breaks off soon after reaching the third stanza. In July 1623 the Augustinian theologian Basilio Ponce de León, nephew of the poet Luis de León, answered Farfán's charges in writing, and the Inquisition's council in Madrid let the case drop without a sentence. In English, "dark night of the soul" now names any long stretch of despair, religious or not.

Key concepts

What is the difference between the night of sense and the night of the spirit?

They are two stages of one purification. The night of sense comes first and to many: God takes away the pleasure of prayer and of meditating with images, so the senses learn to live without sweetness. The night of the spirit comes later and to few. It strips the mind itself, its ways of understanding and its feeling of God's nearness, and it is far darker and more painful.

What does John mean by spiritual gluttony?

A greed for the pleasure of devotion rather than for God. Beginners with this fault chase the sweet feeling of prayer, pile on penances and fasts beyond what they are told, and judge a prayer by how good it felt. When the sweetness is refused they sulk like children and think they are not serving God. John says almost no beginner escapes it entirely.

What is infused contemplation in the Dark Night?

Prayer in which God teaches and the soul does no work of its own. Instead of reasoning and imagining, the person receives a dark, loving knowledge, which John also calls mystical theology, a secret wisdom. It is secret even from the one who receives it: they cannot say what it is, and at first they notice only the dryness and darkness it brings.

Why does John say the soul is passive in this night?

Because God does the purifying and the soul only undergoes it. In the Ascent a person deliberately gives up pleasures and supports; here what goes is taken without being chosen. The soul can neither hurry the process nor end it. Its part is patience: to stay quiet, keep faith, and not run back to the old ways of praying for the sake of comfort.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Weaned from sweetness

Why does God take away the pleasure a beginner finds in prayer? Because that pleasure feeds a quiet vanity the beginner cannot see in themselves.

God treats beginners, John writes, as a mother treats a nursing child: carried and fed on sweetness until she rubs bitter aloe on her breast and sets the child down to walk. Their fervour is real, but they love the taste of it. He sorts their faults under the seven deadly sins, each in a spiritual form: pride that wants to be the confessor's favourite, greed for costly rosaries and images, gluttony for devotional sweetness, anger at their own faults. Effort alone cures none of it.

  • spiritual development
  • humility
  • self-knowledge
  • devotion
  • spiritual consolation
  • virtue
  • meditation
  • prayer
  • spiritual discipline
  • desire

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The night God sends

What is happening when prayer goes dry and God seems to have left? God is at work in the dark, John answers, and the dryness is his cure, not the person's failure.

Where the Ascent describes the darkness a person chooses, this book describes the darkness they suffer. God withdraws comfort first from the senses and then from the mind, and teaches in secret what the soul cannot grasp; his light is so strong it blinds, as the sun blinds an owl. Those inside it feel cast off, like Job on his dung-heap or Jonah in the whale, while the soul is refined like gold in a furnace. John gives tests to tell this night from melancholy or lukewarmness.

  • spiritual purification
  • purification
  • spiritual dryness
  • suffering
  • spiritual suffering
  • spiritual trials
  • contemplation
  • divine illumination
  • mystical theology
  • divine wisdom
  • divine grace
  • faith
  • hope
  • detachment

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In darkness and in safety

How can a soul that sees nothing still find its way? Love and faith lead it, the poem answers, and the darkness itself keeps it from harm.

The poem's lover leaves her sleeping house by a secret ladder, in disguise, with no light but love, and John reads each phrase in turn. The dark is safe because the powers that usually lead a person astray are stilled, so the soul slips past its enemies unseen. Its disguise has three colours: the white of faith against the devil, the green of hope against the world, the purple of love against the flesh. The ladder has ten steps, from lovesick languor to the vision of God after death.

  • divine love
  • divine union
  • union with god
  • spiritual longing
  • mysticism

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Within this work

passages held
162
distinct concepts
194
by passages held, corpus-wide
#393

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “contemplation” and “spiritual purification”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 26 pairings. 83 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
contemplationspiritual purification19
spiritual purificationsuffering12
divine unionspiritual purification11
divine lovespiritual purification9
divine lovemysticism8
contemplationdivine love7
contemplationspiritual dryness7
mysticismspiritual purification7
contemplationsuffering6
contemplationdetachment5
contemplationdivine union5
detachmentdivine union5
detachmentspiritual purification5
divine unionmysticism4
contemplationmysticism3
mysticismsuffering3
detachmentmysticism2
spiritual drynessspiritual purification2
detachmentdivine love1
detachmentspiritual dryness1
detachmentsuffering1
divine lovespiritual dryness1
divine lovesuffering1
divine unionspiritual dryness1
divine unionsuffering1
spiritual drynesssuffering1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1618 The Ascent of Mount Carmel (Subida del Monte Carmelo)

    The longest and most methodical of his prose works, written for the friars and nuns of his own reform and left unfinished in its third book.

     EN
  2. 1618 The Dark Night of the Soul (Noche oscura) you are here EN
  3. 1618 The Living Flame of Love (Llama de amor viva)

    Written after the Spiritual Canticle and meant to go further: the shortest of his four commentaries, on the highest love he thought a person could reach in this life.

     EN
  4. 1627 A Spiritual Canticle of the Soul and the Bridegroom Christ (Cántico espiritual)

    A love poem in the manner of the Song of Songs, with a commentary written for the nuns of Granada; it was the one major work left out of the first edition of his writings.

     EN
  5. 1864 Precautions, Letters, Maxims and Poems

    The place to meet him outside the treatises: practical rules, sayings and poems, and letters to the nuns and lay people he guided.

     EN
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