The Published Articles of Ernest E. Larkin, O.Carm. The Dark Night Of

The Dark Night Of John Of The Cross

A well-known image of St. John of the are to make use of the sacraments and to Cross that has come down to us is that of a occupy himself in divine things.”3 stern, bald-headed ascetic, seated with finger But do not exaggerate. Such people are raised in emphasis, addressing a kneeling still on an elementary level, often on the penitent, Ana de Pefialosa, who looks up to plateau of mediocrity. They “are moved to him with tear-filled eyes. His words are stark these spiritual exercises by the consolation and absolute: “Nothing, nothing, nothing, and pleasure they find in them,” and have even to the stripping of our very skin for “many faults and imperfections with respect to Christ.” these spiritual actions of theirs.”4 They belong to the third mansion of St Teresa’s Interior The Symbol Castle; dutiful but complacent and pharisaical, they are still too filled with themselves to These words are the call and the initiation into the dark night. One who takes experience the joy and the freedom of the children of God. Their great need is to them seriously is assured by the saint of surrender to the Spirit in a more radical entering quickly into the first stage of that night, the night of the senses. Classical authors fashion. Liberation will come by way of self- call this resolve the proposal of “total abnegation.” It is the desire to live “purely for denial and mortification. The proposed by John of the Cross is absolute. It the honour and glory of God.”1 It initiates spells darkness to normal sense-pleasures and “second conversion,” in which a stabilized but mediocre spiritual life is changed into one of thus induces the that is rightly called the dark night of the senses.5 The more significant fervor and manifest growth, and is moved to a higher level. principle of this stage, however, is the subtle contemplation that is the passive complement The candidates for the programme of to this active purification. The asceticism is total abnegation are not new converts. They are of some experience, who “now have possible because “another, better love (love of one’s heavenly bridegroom) is stirring in the had practice for some time in the way of virtue 6 and have persevered in meditation and prayer, .” This initial contemplation is at first so whereby, through the sweetness and pleasure tenuous and delicate that it would go that they have found therein, they have lost their love of the things of the world and undetected without the outside assurance of a spiritual director. It is dark contemplation, gained some degree of spiritual strength in God.”2 It is important to note this fact, lest an sometimes painful, sometimes serene, and it finds its theological explanation in a faith that indiscriminate application of the programme has become more personal. The darkness do harm to those for whom it is not intended. Only advanced “beginners” on the threshold increases with each step towards a purer and more naked faith; eventually the darkness of contemplation are directly envisaged. Such is the person who “finds his becomes “midnight,” the night of faith properly so called. The “night of the senses” delight in spending long periods, perchance thus gives way to the “night of the spirit.” The whole nights in prayer; penances are his pleasures; fasts his joys; and his consolations two nights are two degrees of the one night of faith. Both are ordered to the final night,

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which is not only contemplation but the The doctrine of the nights gives the lie beginning of the experience of union. to instant , to any theory of easy Occasionally and intermittently the mystic access to perfect love of God that would by- experiences immediate contact with God, pass the cross. At the same time it is overwhelming and blinding by its powerful something of a validation for a large number light. While it is difficult to be precise, the of christians in our day whose lives are experience seems to occur around the spiritual burdened by a loss of clarity in their faith- betrothals and before the spiritual marriage. experience and a troubled sense of not being This “night of God” is the third dark able to find God in their prayer. night, occurring in faith and, therefore, in The dark night is a negative way of darkness. But it is just before the dawn when experiencing God. It is the counterpart of shadowy rays of light are beginning to filter negative or apophatic (dark) theology. through the darkness. Unlike the other two Negative theology proceeds by denying to nights, this phase is not painful but delightful, God all the limitations of created reality; in a calm and serene.7 God has become a “tranquil true sense it is non-knowledge. The dark night night” to the soul.8 The three nights are is the experience of void, of emptiness, of no- portions of the one same night of faith, thing and non-being; it is the condition of however much the third differs in terms of and poverty of spirit. The sense of experience from the two purgative periods.9 absence and negation is painfully real. Yet the Only the first two nights are treated experience seizes the reality of God more explicitly and at length in the Ascent and the truly, because it touches him as he is, beyond Dark Night, as these uncompleted feelings, images and concepts. Living faith commentaries on the poem “Dark Night” have alone can achieve this, and the purer and less come down to us. Later stanzas of this poem encumbered the faith, the more real the refer to the third night, as do the poem possession of God. By the same token, “” and its prose commentary. however, God, the object of faith, becomes The symbol of the night is absent only in the less “visible” or empirically experienced in sublime descriptions of the mystical any human terms. experience in the Living Flame of Love. This The experience of absence is different does not mean that union with God has in each of the three phases of the night. In the ruptured the veil of faith. The veil is still there, first two cases the potential of the prayer— but it is most transparent; the experience is a first of meditation, then of contemplation— foretaste of heaven. seems to be exhausted. The third night inaugurates the state of real possession. A II Presence in Absence fearful sense of loss replaces the previous sense of peaceful possession. The God who The dark night is perhaps the most seemed so near is now lost from sight. St John characteristic and original symbol in St John of the Cross. It describes the heart of the reassures the pilgrim contemplative that these changes are advances, that the loss in each mystical itinerary, from the end of the purgative way through the illuminative and case is a real gain, that the absence is a deeper presence. The law of the nights might be into the unitive way. The symbol, especially stated thus: the sense of full presence at the as explained didactically in the prose commentaries, expresses the aspect of absence end of each of the first two stages along the way, namely meditation and contemplation, in all divine encounter and the long, painful growth process that must precede full mystical gives way to absence. This absence itself is a deeper presence that will grow into a felt union.

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presence. This is the spiral of spiritual growth. shifted dramatically to “solid and substantial” Thus meditation loses itself in a contemplation spirituality. 11 that is more absence than presence, and The contemplation develops on this mature contemplation becomes a deeper new level in dark faith, with a deepening of absence that leads to the reward of mystical the original experience. Eventually a deep, union in the strictest sense. peaceful, yet very simple communion with One who meditates is supported in his God becomes normal, and this may last for prayer by sensible consolations and years.12 Then the same cycle of purification intellectual satisfactions. Through this begins over again and the second night occurs. approach he finds a real sense of divine Unprecedented darkness destroys the tranquil presence. But the contact is at best distant and contemplative presence which till now seemed ultimately unsatisfactory, since it does not so secure. There is a new and greater agony of touch God as he is in any experimental absence. If the first night was “bitter and fashion. The euphoria cannot be sustained; terrible to sense,” the second is incomparably boredom sets in; the psychological and worse; it is “horrible and awful to the spirit.”13 spiritual rewards follow the law of Relatively few pass through the second night, diminishing returns. Eventually the point is which John of the Cross equates with reached when the beginner either settles for purgatory. mediocrity or lays himself open to the deeper The third night brings relief and offers potentials of faith, hope and charity by intimations of the mystical union that is the cultivating a more simple and unselfish goal of the christian life. The pre-dawn rays of approach to God. If he follows the ascetical light are momentary experiences of union. But programme of John of the Cross, he will they pass away, having whet the desire for a shortly experience the dark night of the more lasting, indeed for a full and permanent, senses. possession of the Beloved. The “enraptured To the uninstructed this night looks soul” is a soul on fire, waiting to be consumed like disaster. It is in fact the entrance into a by the reality that blinded it with his new stage of spiritual development, the way of brightness in the first encounters. Only when purer faith that dispenses with the props of the nuptial union is sealed will there be the earlier methods of prayer. The apparent full possession by the Lord that bespeaks total regression, consisting in a felt absence instead transformation into the Beloved. The darkness of some real sense of presence, is actually of the night will have almost disappeared. progress; it is presence in disguise. Proof that divine presence is real, says III Purification John, comes from the combination of a strong No one reaches the heights of mystical desire for God, a free, detached spirit, and the union or even the lower reaches of inability to reach out to God in meditation. contemplation without passing through the These are the famous “three signs” of John of dark night of renunciation and faith. For St the Cross, described in the Ascent 2, 13-15 John of the Cross “contemplation or and the Dark Night 1,9. Meditation has run its detachment or poverty of spirit ... are almost course and, to one degree or another, has one and the same thing.”14 outlived its usefulness. God is providing the This fact is graphically expressed in better fare of contemplation, which is “a the drawing from the saint’s hand called secret, peaceful and loving infusion from God, “Mount Carmel” or the “Mount of which enkindles the soul with the spirit of Perfection.” The picture is a simple pencil love.”10 “Moral and delectable ways” have sketch, the mount represented as a large oval,

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and three paths are at its base. In the original its lowly perception, and its miserable loving drawing, and in adaptations faithful to the and liking.”16 For convenience’s sake we call saint’s doctrine, only the centre path, that of the affective purification “exorcism,” the “the perfect spirit,” opens on to the mountain. cognitive bypassing “iconoclasm.” It is identified as the way of the “nothings,” “Exorcism” demands the removal of the word nada marking each stage along the whatever does not find its source and road and describing the mountain itself. The orientation in God. The test for the legitimate other two paths, “the way of the imperfect use of created goods which John proposes in spirit,” denote the search for “goods of earth” many places is a rigorous discernment of and “goods of heaven.” Both are dead ends one’s intention. God must be affirmed, even in and lead nowhere, not even to the foothills of apparently innocuous sense-gratifications. The the mountain itself. Both imperfect spirits person must find “more satisfaction in the describe beginners who never move beyond thought of God than in the sensible object,” that state. and accept “no gratification in the senses save The mountain represents the mystical for this motive.”17 Autonomous self- union that is the universal christian vocation. expression that leaves God out of the picture Its perspectives are thoroughly “sanjuanist,” is to be renounced. Like an Old Testament from above, the vantage point of God, who is prophet, John proclaims that the Lord lives the Todo or All. The “nothings” are the and that no activity should escape his condition and concomitant, the underside as it direction. In their unconverted state, senses, were, of perfect love. Todo and nada are emotions, even reason and will, are correlatives: the two are possessed in the same ambivalent and must be “exorcized.” The degree. The detachment of the perfect soul is problem of relating to the world is inside man, utter freedom; the goods of both earth and not in outside creation; the problem is man’s heaven are repossessed after the burdens of divided heart. Affirming the rights of God and purification, as John’s jubilant Prayer of the suppressing voluntary expressions of Enamoured Soul states: independent desires, especially habitual ones, Mine are the heavens and mine the earth. is part of the via negativa. Once the senses Mine are the nations, the just are mine, and mine and spirit are purified by the night, a man’s the sinners. The angels are mine, and the Mother whole emotional apparatus will orchestrate the of God, and all things are mine; and God himself love of God. is mine and for me, because Christ is mine and all for me. The shortness and directness of this This journey into the heart of God’s route justify its intransigence. In order to be universe is the quest of love. For pilgrim man wholly receptive to the divine influence at on his way to full redemption, however, each stage of growth, the contemplative closes John’s preferred definition of love is “to his eyes to terrestrial goods and endeavours to labour to divest and deprive oneself for God regard the world with detachment. of all that is not God.”15 Love is a process as Detachment is not apathy. It is to look on the well as a goal, and its first order of business is world with God’s eyes; only then can one see 18 the destruction of every species of selfishness its “truth,” its “best side”, its “substance.” and every form of idolatry in as effective a Detachment does not impoverish the human way as possible. The way is negative: it is the dimension of life; even on the human level it dark night of the renunciation of desires on the is its own reward, as the saint states affective level and the denial of mere human trenchantly in a very contemporary chapter of 19 understandings on the noetic level, the the Ascent. rejection of the soul’s “scant understanding,

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The “iconoclasm” goes beyond the delineation of the implications of that “no rejection of disordered use intimated in the less.” He is able to express how much is process of “exorcism.” This second negation involved in perfect behavior. Any loss in the has images and concepts in view, since these process is only temporary; none of God’s gifts instruments of knowledge are counter- is permanently lost; in the end the world is productive in contemplation and hinder the found in God and God in all things. delicate relationship with God that has been Perhaps the closest parallel to the reached. Images and concepts do not represent sanjuanist viewpoint in a non-contemplative God as he really is. The contemplative, context is that of St , who therefore, must “rise above” thoughts about preceded John by one generation in the God to foster the contact with the reality effervescent “golden age” of Spain of the himself.20 The advice is for prayer, and the sixteenth century. Ignatius proclaimed the strategy is aimed at promoting perfect same high ideal of christian perfection as contemplation. John, but in the setting of apostolic action John is perfectly consistent in his rather than hidden contemplative life. Ignatius teaching at every stage of the spiritual life. His proposed a no less rigorous negative way. But disciple will always go directly to God and since his goal was a concrete choice of human from God to the world of man, never vice means, he could not appeal to wholesale versa, even in the final transformation when denial of the human element in order that the God and his creation are possessed together in divine shine through. Instead, Ignatius sought one ecstatic love. “Iconoclasm” is thus a high God’s will in action by multiplying examens form of the practice of the presence of God. It and placing immense stress on discernment of is not the cultivation of the absence of God, spirits. The contemplative mystic, as Evelyn much less promoting the state of nirvana. It is Underhill remarked, can “brush aside the seeking out God as he is. universe.” The apostle cannot be so cavalier; Contemporary readers might criticize he must deal in the nitty-gritty of the human, St John of the Cross for his negative attitude with more involvement in the human to the universe. John does espouse a negative dimension. But the difference between the two course, but only when it is a question of saints” doctrine is accidental. Both of them creation standing in the way of the Creator, stand as a warning to overly optimistic only when human selfishness and human christians who underestimate the depth of obtuseness stand in the way of total man’s weakness and the transcendence of the transformation into Christ. Denial does not christian vocation. give way to affirmation of created goods until Hans Urs von Balthasar has identified the affection and use are totally subject to the Ignatian indifference with biblical faith, a divine order. In no way does this denigrate waiting on God’s word before any action is God’s magnificent gifts which John himself taken. Sanjuanist detachment is the same celebrates in poetry and life. He simply sees reality. When all is said and done, the mystical the possibility of enjoying these gifts only by doctor is the doctor of faith; his doctrine of the the removal of all selfishness, by a complete dark night is an explanation of the demands of poverty of spirit. The christian must slough off faith, which is “the mean or the road along the old man and be totally attuned to the which the soul must travel to this union (with Spirit. Then he can really appreciate life. The God).”21 John does not present a super- way to this goal is no more (or no less) than christianity; his spirituality is that of the perfectly virtuous action. One achievement of gospel, pure and simple. He spells out certain the genius of St. John is his detailed aspects, such as the reality of the divine

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presence in the experience of divine absence, the absence of God in our time, and offers a and the long, painful but necessary process of clue to turn to advantage modern man’s purification. On both of these counts, and frequently expressed inability to achieve the others as well, he challenges our brand of lesser unions of the spiritual life. John’s word christianity. At the same time he consoles is Ascende superius. Go higher, friend. those who anguish over the phenomenon of

1 Allison Peers E.: The complete works of St John of the Cross (London, 1953), 3 volumes; the one-volume edition is shortly due for re-printing by Antony Clarke Books. 2 , 1, 8, 3. 3 Dark Night, 1, 1, 3. 4 Dark Night, 1, 1, 3. 5 Ascent, 1, 2, 1. 6 Ascent, 1, 14, 1. 7 Ibid., (A), 14, 22; 38, 9. 8 Spiritual Canticle, 14, 23. 9 Ascent, 1, 2, 5. 10 Dark Night, 1, 10, 6. 11 Ascent, Prologue, 8. 12 Dark Night, 2, 1, 1. 13 Dark Night, 1, 8, 2. 14 Dark Night, 2, 4, 1. 15 Ascent, 2, 5, 7. 16 Living Flame of Love, 3, 38. 17 Ascent, 3, 24, 5. 18 Ascent, 3, 20, 2. 19 Ascent, 3, 20. 20 Ascent, 3, 15, 1-2. 21 Ascent, 1, 2, 1.

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