The Dark Night of the Soul

The dark night of the soul takes its name from a poem and the accompanying prose commentary written by the sixteenth century Spanish Carmelite friar John of the Cross, describing the soul's passage away from reliance on sensory devotion and consoling spiritual experience toward a purer, more difficult union with God. John distinguishes two nights: the night of the senses, in which the beginner's reliance on pleasurable feelings in prayer is stripped away, and the far more severe night of the spirit, in which even the soul's deeper faculties are purified through a sense of God's absence, dryness and apparent abandonment.

The darkness is not, in John's account, a sign of spiritual failure or divine punishment but the opposite, a necessary and God given purgation that clears away everything that is not God so that the soul can be united to God more completely than consoling experience alone would allow. The poem's central image, a soul slipping out in secret at night to meet its beloved, frames what could read as pure desolation as, underneath, a love story, the night as the necessary darkness in which the most important meeting can happen. John composed both the poem and its extended prose commentary while himself imprisoned by fellow Carmelites opposed to his reform efforts, a biographical detail that has shaped how later readers understand the darkness he describes.

John of the Cross wrote the dark night as a technical stage within a specific, disciplined program of Carmelite contemplative prayer, addressed to men and women already committed to advanced spiritual practice, and his commentary is precise about what does and does not count as the dark night proper, distinguishing it from ordinary discouragement, depression or a simple lapse in devotional feeling. The phrase has since traveled far outside that context into general English usage, where dark night of the soul now commonly describes almost any period of severe personal crisis, doubt or suffering, religious or otherwise, a broadening that theologians and scholars of Christian spirituality regularly note as a loosening of John's original and much more specific meaning.

Even within Christian theology, the concept has been extended by later writers, including Mother Teresa of Calcutta, whose posthumously published letters revealed a decades long experience of interior darkness and absence of felt closeness to God that she and her spiritual directors interpreted through the Carmelite framework John established. The doctrine remains most precisely a description of a stage within contemplative progress, even as its name has become a byword for suffering in general.