page_title: Dark Night of the Soul
section_title: Poem and treatise of St. John of the Cross
hierarchical_section_title: Dark Night of the Soul / Poem and treatise of St. John of the Cross
context_page_description: Dark Night of the Soul is a poem written by the 16th-century Spanish mystic and poet St. John of the Cross. The author himself did not give any title to his poem, on which he wrote two book-length commentaries: Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night.
context_section_description: The poem of St. John of the Cross, in 8 stanzas of 5 lines each, narrates the journey of the soul to mystical union with God. The journey is called "The Dark Night" in part because darkness represents the fact that the destination, God, is unknowable, as in the 14th century, mystical classic The Cloud of Unknowing, which, like St. John's poem, derives from the works of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in the sixth century. Further, the path per se is unknowable. The first verse of the poem is translated:
  In an obscure night
  
  Fevered with love's anxiety
  
  (O hapless, happy plight!)
  
  I went, none seeing me
  
  Forth from my house, where all things quiet be
  —that is, the body and the mind, with their natural cares, being stilled. At the beginning of the treatise Dark Night (the Declaración), St. John wrote: "In this first verse, the soul tells the mode and manner in which it departs, as to its affection, from itself and from all things, dying through a true mortification to all of them and to itself, to arrive at a sweet and delicious life with God."
  The "dark night of the soul" does not refer to the difficulties of life in general, although the phrase has understandably been taken to refer to such trials. The nights which the soul experiences are the two necessary purgations on the path to Divine union: the first purgation is of the sensory or sensitive part of the soul, the second of the spiritual part (Ascent of Mount Carmel, Ch. 1, 2). Such purgations comprise the first of the three stages of the mystical journey, followed by those of illumination and then union. St. John does not actually use the term "dark night of the soul", but only "dark night" ("noche oscura").
  There are several steps in this night, which are related in successive stanzas of the poem. The thesis of the poem is the joyful experience of being guided to God. The only light in this dark night is that which burns in the soul. And that is a guide more certain than the mid-day sun: Aquésta me guiaba, más cierto que la luz del mediodía. This light leads the soul engaged in the mystical journey to Divine union.
  The Ascent of Mount  Carmel is divided into three books that reflect the two phases of the dark night. The first is a purification of the senses (It is titled "The Active Night of the Senses"). The second and third books describe the more intense purification of the spirit (Titled "The Active Night of the Spirit"). Dark Night of the Soul further describes the ten steps on the ladder of mystical love, previously described by Saint Thomas Aquinas and in part by Aristotle.
  The time or place of composition are not certain. It is likely the poem was written between 1577 and 1579. It has been proposed that the poem was composed while John was imprisoned in Toledo, although the few explicit statements in this regard are unconvincing and second-hand.
  The treatises, written sometime between 1578 and 1585, are commentaries on the poem, explaining its meaning line by line. Padre Lucinio del SS. Sacramento, who edited the critical edition (edition 5), with extremely thorough notes, of John of the Cross's Complete Works in the Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos series, writes that "the idea of the 'night' to analyse the complex psychology of the soul under the purifying influence of grace is the most original and fruitful symbolic creation of the Mystic Doctor's doctrine." The Ascent and the Dark Night should be considered as forming a single body as P. Lucinio states, quoting Andrés de la Incarnación and P. Silverio de Santa Teresa. Both works were left uncompleted.
caption: St. John of the Cross, OCD
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