What is the "Dark Night of the Soul?"

[Denise]

Question: Can you explain to me just what is referred to as the “dark night of the soul” in the mystical life? Should all Christians experience these?

Answer: The question of the dark night of the soul is central to any description of the progress of the soul in prayer. To understand what the mystical authors, especially Teresa of Avila, mean by this it is important to keep in mind that it is a part of a much longer process of the ascent of the soul in prayer to experience a deeper union with God.

Catholic spirituality has traditionally divided this ascent into three great stages, called “three ages,” by analogy with physical life. Grace is spiritual life in the soul, as it is the divine indwelling of the Trinity. Scholasticism calls it a created habit in the essence of the soul by which man participates in the very nature of God. This is expressed scripturally in 2 Peter 1:4 where it is stated that by grace, man becomes: “a partaker in divine nature.” The three ages of the spiritual life in which one participates more and more psychologically in the unity of the Trinity are: the purgative way (“spiritual childhood”), the illuminative way (“spiritual adolescence”) and the unitive way (“spiritual maturity”).

The dark nights of the soul characterize the experience of the second great way of prayer, the illuminative way. They presuppose what is called “acquired contemplation” or “active purification” of the soul developed in the purgative way. This is not based, nor dependent on, methods of prayer, or strange phenomena. Spiritual authors tell us that the primary experience of the purgative way is actually the rooting out of faults, and assiduous desire to grow in the virtues of one’s state in everyday life. This culminates in meditation. This involves the understanding of something God has done for the soul, the union of love which this causes, and an accompanying action step which practically underlies the works of the virtues, common to the ordinary generosity of daily life.

Once one has experienced this, the soul is ripe for the second great way of prayer—the illuminative way. God takes the soul at its word in cooperating with grace, and begins to act in the soul through the sanctifying gifts of the Holy Spirit. This is no longer one’s acting in a human way, but in a divine way. One must emphasize that this is NOT produced by human effort, but an action on the part of God himself. The first thing that happens is that a person who has perhaps enjoyed consolation, and emotional satisfaction, finds that these end abruptly. This is called the dark night of the senses.
The person feels that their soul is a desert. Mother Teresa, for example, expressed this condition in her spiritual journal by saying: “I feel aridity, darkness, solitude, torture. I sense silence, and a deep void within.” The feeling of divine desertion is crucifying. If the person perseveres through such a state, they then enter the second dark night of the soul which is the dark night of the spirit. This is even more terrible than the first because the person realizes his/her very ideas of God, and expectations of what his mercy entails, cannot come up in any sense to who he is. Mother Teresa expressed this thusly: “I suffer because I look for Christ without finding him, because I listen without hearing.”

Some compare this to depression, or an emotional problem, but this understanding could not be further from the truth. The dark nights are not an emotional difficulty. They do not involve any of the things which take place with depression. There is no introspection in them. The soul is objective and realistic. It is cheerful. A competent explanation of this problem will clear it up easily. The person does not have any difficulty in life, except when they go to pray. They feel God is far from them. This experience increases love and humility for someone who simply goes on to pray, and practice the virtues, despite this feeling of desertion.

This is because the dark night is really not caused by an absence, but by a presence. It is compared to the darkness which is caused in the eye when a bright light is shone into it. The intellect and will are blinded by the light. The fact is that God is elevating the soul to know as God knows, and to love as God loves, which is the purpose for which it was given grace. This is so different from man’s way of knowing and loving that the soul must become used to this way of knowing and loving. One must just be patient with the way God works in him or her.

by Fr. Brian Mullady, OP
Homiletic and Pastoral Review