Dark Night Of The Soul Book Pdf
Adabella Frierdich
The Dark Night of the Soul (La noche oscura del alma) is a phase of passive purification of the spirit in the mystical development, as described by the 16th-century Spanish mystic and poet St. John of the Cross in his treatise Dark Night (Noche Oscura), a commentary on his poem with the same name. It follows after the second phase, the illumination in which God's presence is felt, but this presence is not yet stable. The author himself did not give any title to his poem, which together with this commentary and the Ascent of Mount Carmel (Subida del Monte Carmelo) forms a treatise on the active and passive purification of the senses and the spirit, leading to mystical union.[1]
The poem of St. John of the Cross, in eight stanzas of five lines each, narrates the journey of the soul to the mystical union with God. The time or place of composition are not certain. It is likely that 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.[2]
The journey is called "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; both pieces are derived from the works of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in the 6th century. Further, the path per se is unknowable. The "dark night" does not refer to the difficulties of life in general,[3] although the phrase has been taken to refer to such trials.
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 (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").[6] The active purgation of the senses comprises the first of the classical three stages of the mystical journey, followed by those of illumination and then union. The passive purgation of the spirit takes place between illumination and full union, when the presence of God has already been felt but is not stable.[7]
At the beginning of the commentary Dark Night, 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 is a stage of final and complete purification, and is marked by confusion, helplessness, stagnation of the will, and a sense of the withdrawal of God's presence.[note 1] It is the period of final "unselfing" and the surrender to the hidden purposes of the divine will. The final stage is union with the object of love, the one Reality, God. Here the self has been permanently established on a transcendental level and liberated for a new purpose.[8]
The term "dark night of the soul" can be used as a synonym for a crisis of faith.[9] More generally, it is "used informally to describe an extremely difficult and painful period in one's life".[note 2]
This crisis may endure for a long time. The "dark night" of St. Paul of the Cross in the 18th century endured 45 years, from which he ultimately recovered. The dark night of Mother Teresa, whose own name in religion she selected in honor of Thrse of Lisieux, "may be the most extensive such case on record", having endured from 1948 almost until her death in 1997, with only brief interludes of relief, according to her letters.[11][12]
Inayat Khan states, "There can be no rebirth without a dark night of the soul, a total annihilation of all that you believed in and thought that you were."[13] Joseph Campbell states "The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation. When everything is lost, and all seems darkness, then comes the new life and all that is needed."[14]
"This," says St. John of the Cross again, "is one of the most bitter sufferings of this purgation. The soul is conscious of a profound emptiness in itself, a cruel destitution of the three kinds of goods, natural, temporal, and spiritual, which are ordained for its comfort. It sees itself in the midst of the opposite evils, miserable imperfections, dryness and emptiness of the understanding, and abandonment of the spirit in darkness."
In books with hope, this will be the darkness before the dawn, and the character will then be able to move in a more positive direction, frequently with the help of another character. In a tragedy, the dark night of the soul sets the individual on the path to her ultimate destruction, ruin, despair.
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I was 31, married to my dearest friend on earth, and had a precious baby boy. I was leading a new and rapidly growing ministry, working alongside a mentor and friend I loved and esteemed highly. We were part of a growing, healthy, vibrant church that was reaching its local community and sending people to the far reaches of the globe with the gospel. My wife and I were involved with my brother and his wife in the gestational stage of what would become an inner-city, truly multicultural church plant reaching hard-to-reach and hardly-reached people. Life was mostly ministry, and mostly wonderful.
It took no time for the void of God to produce in me the void of meaning. The vanity, emptiness, and striving after the wind that the preacher proclaimed I understood as never before (Ecclesiastes 1:14). Everything appeared hollow. Work appeared meaningless, rest appeared meaningless, leisure appeared meaningless, the cosmos appeared meaningless. Life appeared meaningless.
The bleak darkness was horrible in its truest sense. I did not wish to commit suicide, but I knew I could not endure this darkness indefinitely. And whatever secret envy I had ever harbored for unbelievers, who seemed free to pursue whatever sinful pleasures they wished, was gone. The bankruptcy of that deceitful fantasy was fully exposed.
And then light dawned. It was Saturday, August 23, 1997. In the afternoon, my wife and child were running errands, and I was alone in the house. I threw myself on the living room floor and pleaded with God for light and deliverance.
About 9:30 that night I received a phone call from the new worship pastor at church. He told me the elder who was scheduled to read the sermon text the next morning was in the ER with a sudden illness, and asked if I would be willing to step in and read.
Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted. In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons?
It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.
I sat in bed stunned, remembering my living room prayer. As suddenly as the eclipse had come, light now dawned. And though it would take a long time for my weakened soul to recover fully, the night was over. I read the Scripture the next morning before the pastor preached with a heart full of trembling awe.
I write this article as a memorial stone twenty years later. My God answered. He answered when I was disturbed by the idolatry I saw growing in my heart and asked for deliverance. He answered when I asked that he not allow me to lose my faith altogether. He answered by staying imperceptibly near when I feared he was gone forever. And he answered with light when the time was right.
We may also think that the dark night of the soul is something completely incompatible with the fruit of the Spirit, not only that of faith but also that of joy. Once the Holy Spirit has flooded our hearts with a joy unspeakable, how can there be room in that chamber for such darkness? It is important for us to make a distinction between the spiritual fruit of joy and the cultural concept of happiness. A Christian can have joy in his heart while there is still spiritual depression in his head. The joy that we have sustains us through these dark nights and is not quenched by spiritual depression. The joy of the Christian is one that survives all downturns in life.
This coexistence of faith and spiritual depression is paralleled in other biblical statements of emotive conditions. We are told that it is perfectly legitimate for believers to suffer grief. Our Lord Himself was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Though grief may reach to the roots of our souls, it must not result in bitterness. Grief is a legitimate emotion, at times even a virtue, but there must be no place in the soul for bitterness. In like manner, we see that it is a good thing to go to the house of mourning, but even in mourning, that low feeling must not give way to hatred. The presence of faith gives no guarantee of the absence of spiritual depression; however, the dark night of the soul always gives way to the brightness of the noonday light of the presence of God.
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