The Work
Dark Night of the Soul (Noche Oscura del Alma) exists in two forms: as an eight-stanza poem, written during or shortly after John of the Cross's imprisonment in Toledo (1577-1578), and as a prose commentary on that poem in two treatises - The Ascent of Mount Carmel (Subida del Monte Carmelo) and The Dark Night (Noche Oscura) - that John began around 1579 and never completed. The poem itself is short and lyrical, drawing on the imagery of the Song of Solomon to describe the soul's secret departure to meet the Beloved. The two prose commentaries are much longer (over 200,000 words combined) and provide a systematic account of the mystical journey as John understood it.
The work was not published until 1618, twenty-six years after John's death. The Obras Espirituales published in Alcalá de Henares in 1618 included all of John's major works. The standard modern critical edition is the Obras Completas edited by Lucinio Ruano de la Iglesia (1991). The most widely used English translations are those of Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (ICS Publications, 1979, revised 1991) and the earlier translation by E. Allison Peers (1935).
Biblical Engagement
The Song of Solomon (Song of Songs) provides the poem's primary imagery and language. The opening stanza - 'On a dark night, / Kindled in love with yearnings - oh, happy chance! - / I went forth without being observed' - echoes Song of Solomon 3:1-2: 'By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not. I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets.' The soul's secret departure in darkness to seek the Beloved, the finding and clinging, the brought-back rest - all are drawn from the Song. John reads the Song, following Origen's allegorical interpretation, as an account of the soul's journey to mystical union with God.
Psalm 22:1 - 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' - is the primary scriptural text for the doctrine of the 'dark night of the spirit.' This second, deeper night - the night of the spirit - is a state of apparent divine abandonment in which God is experienced as absent, hostile, or dead, and in which the soul's habitual consolations, religious certainties, and sense of God's presence are completely withdrawn. John locates this experience in the tradition of Job, the Psalms of lament, and ultimately in Christ's cry from the cross (Matthew 27:46). The apparent desolation is not, John insists, abandonment but purification: God is closer than ever, but the soul's capacity to perceive God is being purified by a light too intense for its current state.
Psalm 88:6 - 'Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the deeps' - articulates the experience of the night of the spirit from the inside. This darkest of the Psalms, which ends without consolation or resolution, is the biblical text that most closely mirrors the phenomenology of the dark night: 'Thy fierce wrath goeth over me; thy terrors have cut me off... Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness' (Psalm 88:16, 18). The Psalmist's experience validates John's claim that the night of desolation is not a sign of spiritual failure but a stage in the journey of love.
Romans 8:26 - 'Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered' - provides the Pauline framework for the dark night's prayer. In the deepest stages of the night, verbal, conceptual prayer becomes impossible: the soul can neither think about God nor address him in familiar terms. Paul's 'groanings which cannot be uttered' is John's account of the soul's prayer in the dark night: not the absence of prayer but its deepest form, in which the Spirit prays through a soul that has been emptied of all its own resources.
Author and Context
Juan de Yepes Álvarez (1542-1591) was born in Fontiveros, Ávila, Spain, into a poor family. His father, a silk weaver of converso (Jewish-convert) ancestry, died when John was two; his mother, Catalina Álvarez, raised the family in extreme poverty. John was educated partly at the Colegio de los Pobres (school for the poor) in Medina del Campo and later at the University of Salamanca. He entered the Carmelite Order in 1563 and was ordained a priest in 1567.
His encounter with Teresa of Ávila in 1567 was decisive: she recruited him to join her reform movement (the Discalced, or 'unshod' Carmelites, who followed a stricter observance than the Calced Carmelites). His advocacy for the reform provoked fierce opposition from the unreformed Carmelites, who kidnapped him and imprisoned him in a tiny cell in Toledo for nine months (December 1577 to August 1578). He was beaten weekly, given inadequate food and clothing, and given no light except what came through a small crack in the wall. During this imprisonment he composed much of the poetry that would become Dark Night of the Soul and the Spiritual Canticle.
He escaped by tying together strips of cloth from his cell covering and lowering himself from a window. He spent the remaining years of his life serving in various Discalced Carmelite communities in Andalusia and writing his prose commentaries. He died in 1591 of erysipelas, a skin infection. He was canonized in 1726 and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1926.
The Two Nights
John distinguishes between two 'dark nights.' The night of the senses is the first: a state in which God withdraws the sensory consolations and emotional satisfactions that have previously accompanied prayer and devotion. The beginner in prayer is sustained by feelings of God's presence, emotional warmth, and sensory pleasure in devotion; God removes these to wean the soul from spiritual childhood and begin its maturation. This night resembles - and can be mistaken for - spiritual laziness, depression, or loss of faith.
The night of the spirit is far more severe: a state in which not only sensory consolations but all intellectual and spiritual certainties are withdrawn. The soul's image of God is shattered; its habitual ways of knowing God are abolished; it is left in a darkness in which God appears absent and all its previous spiritual achievements appear worthless. This is the direct work of the divine light itself - a light so pure that it blinds rather than illuminates until the soul's capacity to receive it has been sufficiently purified.
The purpose of both nights is union: the transformation of the soul in God such that 'the soul seems to be God rather than a soul, and is indeed God by participation' (Living Flame of Love, 3.8).
Reception and Influence
John's works were controversial during and after his lifetime: some feared that his doctrine of 'the dark night' gave spiritual sanction to states that might be melancholy, demonic, or sinful. His reputation was defended by successive generations of Carmelite scholars. The twentieth century brought an extraordinary revival of interest: Thomas Merton drew on John extensively; Edith Stein (St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross) wrote her doctoral dissertation on John's epistemology; psychologist Gerald May's The Dark Night of the Soul (2004) applied John's categories to modern psychological experience.
Legacy
The phrase 'dark night of the soul' has entered global vocabulary as a description of profound spiritual, psychological, or existential crisis. It is used by people who have never read John of the Cross and by those who read him with deep scholarly attention. Its influence on Christian spirituality - particularly in the tradition of contemplative prayer - is fundamental: John provides the most systematic account in Christian literature of what happens when God appears absent, and his insistence that this absence is a form of divine gift and purification has sustained countless souls through crisis. The tradition he represents continues in the work of contemplative communities worldwide.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Song of Solomon 3:1-4 (the night search), Psalm 88 (the darkest lament psalm), Psalm 42-43 (thirsting for God in the valley), Job 23:1-9 (the hidden God), Matthew 27:45-46 (Christ's cry of desolation), and Romans 8:26-27 (the Spirit's intercession).
Further Reading
- Federico Ruiz, Mystic, Saint and Poet: The Life of St. John of the Cross (1991) - the most complete modern biography. - Iain Matthew, The Impact of God: Soundings from St John of the Cross (1995) - the best pastoral introduction to John's spiritual teaching. - Gerald May, The Dark Night of the Soul: A Psychiatrist Explores the Connection Between Darkness and Spiritual Growth (2004) - a valuable contemporary appropriation for readers encountering the tradition for the first time.