The dark night of St John of the Cross, read in the text

The previous article read Rumi's reed, which laments separation. This one returns to a sixteenth-century Spanish text with another voice in love that goes out at night, and that has long been lending its name to something else. "The dark night of the soul" is used today to speak of very bad periods of life. Here we read what John of the Cross wrote: the Noche oscura ("Dark Night"), a poem of eight stanzas and its prose commentary. I read the text in Spanish, and what I did not read, I say at the end. The quotations below are given in the Spanish original, with my translation.

A note before going on. This article is about a religious text, not about health, and it cannot tell anyone how they are. Depression is a common disorder, and effective treatment exists: according to the WHO it consists of a depressed mood or a loss of pleasure or interest for a long time (at least two weeks, nearly every day), and it can bring hopelessness, disrupted sleep and thoughts of dying or of harming oneself.¹ If any of that sounds familiar, talk to someone you trust or to a professional; findahelpline.com leads to a helpline in your country. John of the Cross himself separates the night from melancholy (below), and the criteria the text gives are religious: they are not a test.

What the text does not say

The title is not "dark night of the soul". In the text of the Noche oscura that I read, that expression does not appear once: "noche oscura" appears 39 times (some of them quoting the first line) and "oscura noche" 13. The Spanish Wikipedia says so too: John of the Cross "does not use the term 'noche oscura del alma', but only 'noche oscura'".² I could not find out when or by whom "of the soul" began to be added. According to the English Wikipedia, the author did not give the poem a title.⁵

John of the Cross was born in Fontiveros in 1542 and died in Úbeda in 1591, and was a reformer of the Carmelite order together with St Teresa.³ It is not known for certain when the poem was written: Wikipedia proposes between 1577 and 1579, and says it has been supposed to have been in the Toledo prison, without solid evidence.²

A joyful poem

The poem has eight stanzas of five lines. The first:⁴

En una noche oscura, con ansias, en amores inflamada, ¡oh dichosa ventura!, salí sin ser notada estando ya mi casa sosegada.

"On a dark night, with anxious longings inflamed by love, oh happy chance!, I went out unseen, my house being now at rest." It is an exit, and a happy exit: "oh dichosa ventura". Later the night "guides" and "joins": "oh night more lovely than the dawn! oh night that joined Beloved with lover, lover transformed in the Beloved!" In the poem's 183 words God does not appear once: it says "the Beloved" and "the one I knew well".

John of the Cross explains from where it is sung. Before commenting on the first stanza the text says that "the soul says them being already in perfection, which is union of love with God" (el alma las dice estando ya en la perfección, que es la unión de amor con Dios), after having passed through toils and straits.⁴ That is: the night is told from the other side, as a road that turned out well.

A treatise that hurts, and was not finished

The prose commentary is another thing. It has two books. The first (14 chapters) deals with the night "of the senses": first the imperfections of beginners, and from chapter 8 the night itself. The second (25 chapters) deals with the night "of the spirit", the harder one, and goes on to the second stanza.⁴ And it does not reach the end: it comments on the first stanza twice, once for each night, then the second, and begins the third, and ends in chapter 25 with these words: "Síguese el verso: En la noche dichosa" ("The line follows: On the happy night"). The prologue promised more: "in the other six are declared various and admirable effects of spiritual illumination and union of love with God". The English Wikipedia says both this treatise and the Ascent of Mount Carmel were left unfinished.⁴⁵

And the vocabulary changes. The piece below counts how many times each word appears in the poem and in the commentary. The differences are large: God appears 0 times in the poem and 463 in the commentary; "pena" (pain) 0 and 66; "sequedad" (dryness) 0 and 51; "tinieblas" (darkness) 0 and 51. In the poem, on the other hand, "noche" appears five times and "Amado" five, in 183 words.

The commentary is not all pain either: there is tenderness, safety ("a oscuras y segura", "in darkness and secure") and even a ladder of ten degrees of love. But you can see that the poem and its commentary do not speak the same way: the poem sings to the Beloved; the commentary explains in detail what hurts and why.

Why "dark": too much light

Here is the most surprising thing in the commentary. The night is not dark from a lack of light but from an excess. In Book Two, chapter 5, John of the Cross explains that "the more clear and manifest divine things are in themselves, the more dark and hidden they are naturally to the soul; just as light, the clearer it is, the more it blinds and darkens the pupil of the owl" (cuanto las cosas divinas son en sí más claras y manifiestas, tanto más son al alma oscuras y ocultas naturalmente; así como la luz, cuanto más clara es, tanto más ciega y oscurece la pupila de la lechuza). And the text recalls that St Dionysius called this contemplation a "ray of darkness" (rayo de tiniebla).⁴

Chapter 10 says it with another image, that of fire and wood. Fire, applied to wood, "the first thing it does is begin to dry it"; then it makes it "black, dark and ugly, and even foul-smelling", until it transforms it into itself. And it adds that the pains do not come from the light but "from the weakness and imperfection of the soul, which cannot receive without this purgation its light".⁴ It is a religious interpretation of pain, and it is what the text says. It is not advice: nobody is obliged to endure suffering because they believe it does them good.

What John of the Cross separates: melancholy

This is the passage that matters most for reading the phrase today. In chapter 9 of Book One, John of the Cross gives three "signs" for knowing whether a spiritual dryness is the night. But first it warns that these dry spells "could come often not from the said night and purgation of the sensory appetite, but from sins and imperfections or from slackness and lukewarmness, or from some bad humour or bodily indisposition" (algún mal humor o indisposición corporal).⁴

And of melancholy it says, without detours, that it can look alike: "this taking no pleasure in things above or below could come from some indisposition or melancholic humour, which often does not let one find pleasure in anything" (humor melancólico, el cual muchas veces no deja hallar gusto en nada). It adds that when it is "pure humour" it only ends "in distaste and ruin of one's nature" (en disgusto y estrago del natural), without the desires to serve God which, according to John, accompany the night. And in another chapter (the 4th), about those who, "touched by melancholy" (tocados de melancolía), suffer ugly images that terrify them, it writes that "they are to be greatly pitied, because they live a sad life" (es de haberlos lástima grande, porque padecen vida triste).⁴

Two things must be said plainly. First: "bad humour" and "melancholy" are words of the medicine of that time, not today's diagnosis. Second: the criteria in the text (that the person finds no pleasure in anything created or divine, that it pains them to think they are not serving God, that they cannot meditate as before) are signs for someone walking a religious path. They cannot be used to decide whether someone has depression, nor to reassure oneself: John himself says that a melancholic humour also stops finding pleasure in everything. Weeks without pleasure in anything are a reason to consult a health professional, whatever the reading given to it afterwards.

How it became a set phrase

Today the expression is used for a crisis of faith or, in general, "to describe an extremely difficult and painful period" (English Wikipedia).⁵ The Spanish Wikipedia records the line of F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Crack-Up ("the real dark night of the soul is always three o'clock in the morning", in its Spanish rendering), and also that Jung, of whom we spoke in the article on the anima mundi, used the expression when speaking of the process of individuation.² Each use shifts the meaning. In John's text, the night is a stretch of a road with an end; in today's speech it is usually just pain.

A map for the whole world?

The word "night" has neighbours. John himself cites St Dionysius and the "ray of darkness". Wikipedia says the Noche oscura and the Cloud of Unknowing (14th century) derive from the works of Pseudo-Dionysius.² In addition, some scholars propose an influence of the Andalusi Sufi Ibn ʿAbbād of Ronda, and others, such as José Nieto, that the similarities are an independent development; Wikipedia lists San Juan de la Cruz y el Islam by Luce López-Baralt (1985). And teachers of Vipassana Buddhism compare with this night certain stages of suffering in meditation, although not all variants of Buddhism recognise those stages.² These are secondary readings; I read none of those authors. What can be said from what I read is that the image of a darkness that is not a lack of anything and that makes sense to the one living it is not exclusive to one text: the article on Persian alchemy saw another path, Ghazali's, for transforming the soul.

What I could not read

I read in Spanish the Noche oscura (the poem and its two books of commentary), in a PDF copy with no identified edition and with modernised spelling; another copy (Editorial Monte Carmelo, which reserves the rights to its edition) has the same number of mentions of "melancolía" and "humor", but I did not compare them word by word. I did not read the Ascent of Mount Carmel, nor the Spiritual Canticle nor the Living Flame of Love, nor the manuscripts. The piece's numbers come from that copy and the method the piece itself explains. Of others' readings (López-Baralt, Nieto, Ingram, Engler, Fitzgerald, Jung) I only know what Wikipedia says. Of the WHO I read the depression fact sheet, not its bibliography. And my translations are mine. I am neither a theologian nor a doctor: this article does not discuss whether John of the Cross's religious meaning is true, and gives no health advice.

What we do with this

Anima Mundis has a frequency for those who are unwell. This Diary, at least, does not put a name to anyone's pain: it does not say it is a night with meaning, or a depression, or a trial. At the foot of every article there is a link to a helpline, and that note is not an ornament.

What the Observatory can do is count how many times someone said how they were and at what UTC hour. John of the Cross leaves us one useful thing: to distinguish. The dark night is not "any bad time", and a bad time is not a merit. If yours weighs on you, do not wait to understand it: talk to someone you trust or to a professional.