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Dark Night of the Soul


Dark Night of the Soul (Spanish: La noche oscura del alma) is the title given to a poem of the 16th-century, Spanish poet and Roman Catholic, Discalced Carmelite mystic, priest, and Doctor of the Church St. John of the Cross, OCD. The author did not entitle his poem, on which he wrote two book-length commentaries: The Ascent of Mount Carmel (Subida del Monte Carmelo) and The Dark Night (Noche Oscura).

The poem of St. John of the Cross, OCD, 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 derives, as does St. John's poem, from the works of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in the 6th century. Further, the path per se is unknowable. Salí sin ser notada, estando ya mi casa sosegada, St. John writes in the first verse of the poem, which verse in its entirety 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 necessary purgations on the path to Divine union, of which there are two: the first 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").


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