Evelyn Underhill · 32 of 40

IX. The Dark Night of the Soul · Part 2

“When the sun begins to decline in the heavens,” says Ruysbroeck, “it enters the sign Virgo; which is so called because this period of the year is sterile as a virgin.” This is the autumn season in the cycle of the soul, when the summer heat grows less. “It perfects and fulfils the yearly travail of the Sun. In the same manner, when Christ, that glorious sun, has risen to His zenith in the heart of man, as I have taught in the Third degree, and afterwards begins to decline, to hide the radiance of His divine sunbeams, and to forsake the man; then the heat and impatience of love grow less. Now that occultation of Christ, and the withdrawal of His light and heat, are the first work and the new coming of this degree. Now Christ says inwardly to this man, Go ye out in the manner which I now show you: and the man goes out and finds himself to be poor, miserable, and abandoned. Here all the storm, the fury, the impatience of his love, grow cool: glowing summer turns to autumn, all its riches are transformed into a great poverty. And the man begins to complain because of his wretchedness: for where now are the ardours of love, the intimacy, the gratitude, the joyful praise, and the interior consolation, the secret joy, the sensible sweetness? How have all these things failed him? And the burning violence of his love, and all the gifts which he felt before. How has all this died in him? And he feels like some ignorant man who has lost all his learning and his works . . . and of this misery there is born the fear of being lost, and as it were a sort of half-doubt: and this is the lowest point at which a man can hold his ground without falling into despair.”

D. This stagnation of the emotions has its counterpart in the stagnation of the will and intelligence, which has been experienced by some contemplatives as a part of their negative state. As regards the will, there is a sort of moral dereliction: the self cannot control its inclinations and thoughts. In the general psychic turmoil, all the unpurified part of man’s inheritance, the lower impulses and unworthy ideas which have long been imprisoned below the threshold, force their way into the field of consciousness. “Every vice was re-awakened within me,” says Angela of Foligno, “I would have chosen rather to be roasted than to endure such pains.” Where visual and auditory automatism is established, these irruptions from the subliminal region often take the form of evil visions, or of voices making coarse or sinful suggestions to the self. Thus St. Catherine of Siena, in the interval between her period of joyous illumination and her “spiritual marriage,” was tormented by visions of fiends, who filled her cell and “with obscene words and gestures invited her to lust.” She fled from her cell to the church to escape them, but they pursued her there: and she obtained no relief from this obsession until she ceased to oppose it. She cried, “I have chosen suffering for my consolation, and will gladly bear these and all other torments in the name of the Saviour, for as long as it shall please His Majesty.” With this act of surrender, the evil vision fled: Catherine swung back to a state of affirmation, and was comforted by a vision of the Cross.

An analogous psychological state was experienced by St. Teresa; though she fails to recognize it as an episode in her normal development, and attributes it, with other spiritual adventures for which she can find no other explanation, to the action of the Devil. “The soul,” she says, “laid in fetters, loses all control over itself, and all power of thinking of anything but the absurdities he puts before it, which, being more or less unsubstantial, inconsistent, and disconnected, serve only to stifle the soul, so that it has no power over itself; and accordingly—so it seems to me—the devils make a football of it, and the soul is unable to escape out of their hands. It is impossible to describe the sufferings of the soul in this state. It goes about in quest of relief, and God suffers it to find none. The light of reason, in the freedom of its will, remains, but it is not clear; it seems to me as if its eyes were covered with a veil. . . . Temptations seem to press it down, and make it dull, so that its knowledge of God becomes to it as that of something which it hears of far away.” This dullness and dimness extends to ordinary mental activity, which shares in the lassitude and disorder of the inner life. “If it seeks relief from the fire by spiritual reading, it cannot find any, just as if it could not read at all. On one occasion it occurred to me to read the life of a saint, that I might forget myself and be refreshed with the recital of what he had suffered. Four or five times, I read as many lines, and though they were written in Spanish, I understood them less at the end than I did when I began: so I gave it up. It so happened to me on more occasions than one.” If we are reminded of anything here, it is of the phenomenon of “dark contemplation.” That dimness of mind which we there studied, is here extended to the normal activities of the surface intelligence. The Cloud of Unknowing, rolling up, seems to envelop the whole self. Contemplation, the “way within the way,” has epitomized the greater process of the mystic life. In both, the path to Light lies through a meek surrender to the confusion and ignorance of the “Dark.” The stress and exasperation felt in this dark, this state of vague helplessness, by selves of an active and self-reliant type, is exhibited by Teresa in one of her half-humorous self-revealing flashes. “The Devil,” she says of it, “then sends so offensive a spirit of bad temper that I think I could eat people up!”

All these types of “darkness,” with their accompanying and overwhelming sensations of impotence and distress, are common in the lives of the mystics. Suso and Rulman Merswin experienced them: Tauler constantly refers to them: Angela of Foligno speaks of a “privation worse than hell.” It is clear that even the joyous spirit of Mechthild of Magdeburg knew the sufferings of the loss and absence of God. “Lord,” she says in one place, “since Thou hast taken from me all that I had of Thee, yet of Thy grace leave me the gift which every dog has by nature: that of being true to Thee in my distress; when I am deprived of all consolation. This I desire more fervently than Thy heavenly Kingdom!” In such a saying as this, the whole “value for life” of the Dark Night is revealed to us: as an education in selfless constancy, a “school of suffering love.”

E. There is, however, another way in which the self’s sense of a continued imperfection in its relation with the Absolute—of work yet remaining to be done—expresses itself. In persons of a very highly strung and mobile type, who tend to rapid oscillations between pain and pleasure states, rather than to the long, slow movements of an ascending consciousness, attainment of the Unitive Life is sometimes preceded by the abrupt invasion of a wild and unendurable desire to “see God,” apprehend the Transcendent in Its fullness: which can only, they think, be satisfied by death. As they begin to outgrow their illuminated consciousness, these selves begin also to realize how partial and symbolic that consciousness—even at its best—has been: and their movement to union with God is foreshadowed by a passionate and uncontrollable longing for ultimate Reality. This passion is so intense, that it causes acute anguish in those who feel it. It brings with it all the helpless and desolate feelings of the Dark Night; and sometimes rises to the heights of a negative rapture, an ecstasy of deprivation. St. Teresa is perhaps the best instance of this rare method of apprehending the self’s essential separation from its home; which is also the subject of a celebrated chapter in the “Traité de l’Amour de Dieu” of St. François de Sales. Thanks to her exceptionally mobile temperament, her tendency to rush up and down the scale of feeling, Teresa’s states of joyous rapture were often paid for by such a “great desolation”—a dark ecstasy or “pain of God.” “As long as this pain lasts,” she says, “we cannot even remember our own existence; for in an instant all the faculties of the soul are so fettered as to lie incapable of any action save that of increasing our torture. Do not think I am exaggerating; on the contrary, that which I say is less than the truth, for lack of words in which it may be expressed. This is a trance of the senses and the faculties, save as regards all which helps to make the agony more intense. The understanding realizes acutely what cause there is for grief in separation from God: and our Lord increases this sorrow by a vivid manifestation of Himself. The pain thus grows to such a degree that in spite of herself the sufferer gives vent to loud cries, which she cannot stifle, however patient and accustomed to pain she may be, because this is not a pain which is felt in the body, but in the depths of the soul. The person I speak of learned from this how much more acutely the spirit is capable of suffering than the body.

The intense and painful concentration upon the Divine Absence which takes place in this “dark rapture” often induces all the psycho-physical marks of ecstasy. “Although this state lasts but a short time, the limbs seem to be disjointed by it. The pulse is as feeble as if one were at the point of death; which is indeed the case, for whilst the natural heat of the body fails, that which is supernatural so burns the frame that with a few more degrees God would satisfy the soul’s desire for death. . . . You will say perhaps, that there is imperfection in this desire to see God: and ask why this soul does not conform herself to His will, since she has so completely surrendered herself to it. Hitherto she could do this, and consecrated her life to it; but now she cannot, for her reason is reduced to such a state that she is no longer mistress of herself and can think of nothing but her affliction. Far from her Sovereign Good, why should she desire to live? She feels an extraordinary loneliness, finds no companionship in any earthly creature; nor could she I believe among those who dwell in heaven, since they are not her Beloved. Meanwhile all company is torture to her. She is like a person suspended in mid-air, who can neither touch the earth, nor mount to heaven. She burns with a consuming thirst, and cannot reach the water. And this is a thirst which cannot be borne, but one which nothing will quench: nor would she have it quenched with any other water than that of which our Lord spoke to the Samaritan woman; and this water is denied her.”

All these forms of the Dark Night—the “Absence of God,” the sense of sin, the dark ecstasy, the loss of the self’s old passion, peace, and joy, and its apparent relapse to lower spiritual and mental levels—are considered by the mystics themselves to constitute aspects or parts of one and the same process: the final purification of the will or stronghold of personality, that it may be merged without any reserve “in God where it was first.” The function of this episode of the Mystic Way is to cure the soul of the innate tendency to seek and rest in spiritual joys; to confuse Reality with the joy given by the contemplation of Reality. It is the completion of that ordering of disordered loves, that trans-valuation of values, which the Way of Purgation began. The ascending self must leave these childish satisfactions; make its love absolutely disinterested, strong, and courageous, abolish all taint of spiritual gluttony. A total abandonment of the individualistic standpoint, of that trivial and egotistic quest of personal satisfaction which thwarts the great movement of the Flowing Light, is the supreme condition of man’s participation in Reality. Thus is true not only of the complete participation which is possible to the great mystic, but of those unselfish labours in which the initiates of science or of art become to the Eternal Goodness “what his own hand is to a man.” “Think not,” says Tauler, “that God will be always caressing His children, or shine upon their head, or kindle their hearts as He does at the first. He does so only to lure us to Himself, as the falconer lures the falcon with its gay hood. . . . We must stir up and rouse ourselves and be content to leave off learning, and no more enjoy feeling and warmth, and must now serve the Lord with strenuous industry and at our own cost.”

This manly view of the Dark Night, as a growth in responsibility—an episode of character-building—in which, as “The Mirror of Simple Souls” has it, “the soul leaves that pride and play wherein it was full gladsome and jolly,” is characteristic of the German mystics. We find it again in Suso, to whom the angel of his tribulation gave no sentimental consolations; but only the stern command, “Viriliter agite ”—“Be a man!” “Then first,” says Tauler again, “do we attain to the fullness of God’s love as His children, when it is no longer happiness or misery, prosperity or adversity, that draws us to Him or keeps us back from Him. What we should then experience none can utter; but it would be something far better than when we were burning with the first flame of love, and had great emotion, but less true submission.”

In Illumination, the soul, basking in the Uncreated Light, identified the Divine Nature with the divine light and sweetness which it then enjoyed. Its consciousness of the transcendent was chiefly felt as an increase of personal vision and personal joy. Thus, in that apparently selfless state, the “I, the Me, the Mine,” though spiritualized, still remained intact. The mortification of the senses was more than repaid by the rich and happy life which this mortification conferred upon the soul. But before real and permanent union with the Absolute can take place: before the whole self can learn to live on those high levels where—its being utterly surrendered to the Infinite Will—it can be wholly transmuted in God, merged in the great life of the All, this dependence on personal joys must be done away. The spark of the soul, the fast-growing germ of divine humanity, must so invade every corner of character that the self can only say with St. Catherine of Genoa, “My me is God: nor do I know my selfhood except in God.”

The various torments and desolations of the Dark Night constitute this last and drastic purgation of the spirit; the doing away of separateness, the annihilation of selfhood, even though all that self now claims for its own be the Love of God. Such a claim—which is really a claim to entire felicity, since the soul which possesses it needs nothing more—is felt by these great spirits to sully the radiance of their self-giving love. “All that I would here say of these inward delights and enjoyments,” says William Law, “is only this; they are not holiness, they are not piety, they are not perfection; but they are God’s gracious allurements and calls to seek after holiness and spiritual perfection . . . and ought rather to convince us that we are as yet but babes, than that we are ready men of God. . . . This alone is the true Kingdom of God opened in the soul when, stripped of all selfishness, it has only one love and one will in it; when it has no motion or desire but what branches from the Love of God, and resigns itself wholly to the Will of God. . . . To sum up all in a word: Nothing hath separated us from God but our own will, or rather our own will is our separation from God. All the disorder and corruption and malady of our nature lies in a certain fixedness of our own will, imagination, and desire, wherein we live to ourselves, are our own centre and circumference, act wholly from ourselves, according to our own will, imagination, and desires. There is not the smallest degree of evil in us but what arises from this selfishness because we are thus all in all to ourselves. . . . To be humble, mortified, devout, patient in a certain degree, and to be persecuted for our virtues, is no hurt to this selfishness; nay, spiritual-self must have all these virtues to subsist upon, and his life consists in seeing, knowing and feeling the bulk, strength, and reality of them. But still, in all this show and glitter of virtue, there is an unpurified bottom on which they stand, there is a selfishness which can no more enter into the Kingdom of Heaven than the grossness of flesh and blood can enter into it. What we are to feel and undergo in these last purifications, when the deepest root of all selfishness, as well spiritual as natural, is to be plucked up and torn from us, or how we shall be able to stand in that trial, are both of them equally impossible to be known by us beforehand.”

The self, then, has got to learn to cease to be its “own centre and circumference”: to make that final surrender which is the price of final peace. In the Dark Night the starved and tortured spirit learns through an anguish which is “itself an orison” to accept lovelessness for the sake of Love, Nothingness for the sake of the All; dies without any sure promise of life, loses when it hardly hopes to find. It sees with amazement the most sure foundations of its transcendental life crumble beneath it, dwells in a darkness which seems to hold no promise of a dawn. This is what the German mystics call the “upper school of true resignation” or of “suffering love”; the last test of heroic detachment, of manliness, of spiritual courage. Though such an experience is “passive” in the sense that the self can neither enter nor leave it at will it is a direct invitation to active endurance, a condition of stress in which work is done. Thus, when St. Catherine of Siena was tormented by hideous visions of sin, she was being led by her deeper self to the heroic acceptance of this subtle form of torture, almost unendurable to her chaste and delicate mind. When these trials had brought her to the point at which she ceased to resist them, but exclaimed, “I have chosen suffering for my consolation,” their business was done. They ceased. More significant still, when she asked, “Where wast Thou, Lord, when I was tormented by this foulness?” the Divine Voice answered, “I was in thy heart.”

“In order to raise the soul from imperfection,” said the Voice of God to St. Catherine in her Dialogue, “I withdraw Myself from her sentiment, depriving her of former consolations . . . which I do in order to humiliate her, and cause her to seek Me in truth, and to prove her in the light of faith, so that she come to prudence. Then, if she love Me without thought of self, and with lively faith and with hatred of her own sensuality, she rejoices in the time of trouble, deeming herself unworthy of peace and quietness of mind. Now comes the second of the three things of which I told thee, that is to say: how the soul arrives at perfection, and what she does when she is perfect. That is what she does. Though she perceives that I have withdrawn Myself, she does not, on that account, look back; but perseveres with humility in her exercises, remaining barred in the house of self-knowledge, and, continuing to dwell therein, awaits with lively faith the coming of the Holy Spirit, that is of Me, who am the Fire of Love. . . . This is what the soul does in order to rise from imperfection and arrive at perfection, and it is to this end, namely, that she may arrive at perfection, that I withdraw from her, not by grace, but by sentiment. Once more do I leave her so that she may see and know her defects, so that feeling herself deprived of consolation and afflicted by pain, she may recognize her own weakness, and learn how incapable she is of stability or perseverance, thus cutting down to the very root of spiritual self-love: for this should be the end and purpose of all her self-knowledge, to rise above herself, mounting the throne of conscience, and not permitting the sentiment of imperfect love to turn again in its death-struggle, but with correction and reproof digging up the root of self-love with the knife of self-hatred and the love of virtue.”

“Digging up the root of self-love with the knife of self-hatred”—here we see the mystical reason of that bitter self-contempt and sense of helplessness which overwhelms the soul in the Dark Night.

Such a sense of helplessness is really, the mystics say, a mark of progress: of deeper initiation into that sphere of reality to which it is not yet acclimatized, and which brings with it a growing consciousness of the appalling disparity between that Reality, that Perfection, and the imperfect soul.

The self is in the dark because it is blinded by a Light greater than it can bear—that “Divine Wisdom which is not only night and darkness to the soul, but pain and torment too.” “The more clear the light, the more does it blind the eyes of the owl, and the more we try to look at the sun the feebler grows our sight and the more our weak eyes are darkened. So the divine light of contemplation, when it beats on the soul not yet perfectly purified, fills it with spiritual darkness, not only because of its brilliance, but because it paralyses the natural perception of the soul. The pain suffered by the soul is like that endured by weak or diseased eyes when suddenly struck by a strong light. Such suffering is intense when the yet unpurified soul finds itself invaded by this cleansing light. For in this pure light, which attacks its impurities to expel them, the soul perceives itself to be so unclean and miserable that it seems as if God had set Himself against it. . . . Wonderful and piteous sight! so great are the weakness and imperfection of the soul that the hand of God, so soft and so gentle, is felt to be so heavy and oppressive, though merely touching it, and that, too, most mercifully; for He touches the soul, not to chastise it, but to load it with His graces.”

The Dark Night then, whichever way we look at it, is a state of disharmony; of imperfect adaptation to environment. The self, unaccustomed to that direct contact of the Absolute which is destined to become the Source of its vitality and its joy, feels the “soft and gentle touch” of the Following Love as unbearable in its weight. The “self-naughting” or “purification of the will,” which here takes place, is the struggle to resolve that disharmony; to purge away the somewhat which still sets itself up in the soul as separate from the Divine, and makes the clear light of reality a torment instead of a joy. So deeply has the soul now entered into the great stream of spiritual life, so dominant has her transcendental faculty become, that this process is accomplished in her whether she will or no: and in this sense it is, as ascetic writers sometimes call it, a “passive purgation.” So long as the subject still feels himself to be somewhat, he has not yet annihilated selfhood and come to that ground where his being can be united with the Being of God.

Only when he learns to cease thinking of himself at all, in however depreciatory a sense; when he abolishes even such selfhood as lies in a desire for the sensible presence of God, will that harmony be attained. This is the “naughting of the soul,” the utter surrender to the great movement of the Absolute Life, which is insisted upon at such length by all writers upon mysticism. Here, as in purgation, the condition of access to higher levels of vitality is a death: a deprivation, a detachment, a clearing of the ground. Poverty leaps to the Cross: and finds there an utter desolation, without promise of spiritual reward. The satisfactions of the spirit must now go the same way as the satisfactions of the senses. Even the power of voluntary sacrifice and self-discipline is taken away. A dreadful ennui, a dull helplessness, takes its place. The mystic motto, I am nothing, I have nothing, I desire nothing, must now express not only the detachment of the senses, but the whole being’s surrender to the All.

The moral condition towards which the interior travail is directed is that of an utter humility. “Everything depends,” says Tauler, on “a fathomless sinking in a fathomless nothingness.” He continues, “If a man were to say, ‘Lord, who art Thou, that I must follow Thee through such deep, gloomy, miserable paths?’ the Lord would reply, ‘I am God and Man, and far more God.’ If a man could answer then, really and consciously from the bottom of his heart. ‘Then I am nothing and less than nothing’; all would be accomplished, for the Godhead has really no place to work in, but ground where all has been annihilated. As the schoolmen say, when a new form is to come into existence, the old must of necessity be destroyed. . . . And so I say: ‘If a man is to be thus clothed upon with this Being, all the forms must of necessity be done away that were ever received by him in all his powers—of perception, knowledge, will, work, of subjection, sensibility and self-seeking.’ When St. Paul saw nothing, he saw God. So also when Elias wrapped his face in his mantle, God came. All strong rocks are broken here, all on which the spirit can rest must be done away. Then, when all forms have ceased to exist, in the twinkling of an eye the man is transformed. Therefore thou must make an entrance. Thereupon speaks the Heavenly Father to him: “Thou shalt call Me Father, and shalt never cease to enter in; entering ever further in, ever nearer, so as to sink the deeper in an unknown and unnamed abyss; and, above all ways, images and forms, and above all powers, to lose thyself, deny thyself, and even unform thyself.’ In this lost condition nothing is to be seen but a ground which rests upon itself, everywhere one Being, one Life. It is thus, man may say, that he becomes unknowing, unloving, and senseless.”

It is clear that so drastic a process of unselfing is not likely to take place without stress. It is the negative aspect of “deification”: in which the self, deprived of “perception, knowledge, will, work, self-seeking”—the I, the Me, the Mine—loses itself, denies itself, unforms itself, drawing “ever nearer” to the One, till “nothing is to be seen but a ground which rests upon itself”—the ground of the soul, in which it has union with God.

“Everywhere one Being, one Life”—this is the goal of mystical activity; the final state of equilibrium towards which the self is moving, or rather struggling, in the dimness and anguish of the Dark Night. “The soul,” says Madame Guyon in a passage of unusual beauty, “after many a redoubled death, expires at last in the arms of Love; but she is unable to perceive these arms. . . . Then, reduced to Nought, there is found in her ashes a seed of immortality, which is preserved in these ashes and will germinate in its season. But she knows not this; and does not expect ever to see herself living again.” Moreover, “the soul which is reduced to the Nothing, ought to dwell therein; without wishing, since she is now but dust, to issue from this state, nor, as before, desiring to live again. She must remain as something which no longer exists: and this, in order that the Torrent may drown itself and lose itself in the Sea, never to find itself in its selfhood again: that it may become one and the same thing with the Sea.”

So Hilton says of the “naughted soul,” “the less it thinketh that it loveth or seeth God, the nearer it nigheth for to perceive the gift of the blessed love. For then is love master, and worketh in the soul, and maketh it for to forget itself, and for to see and behold only how love doth. And then is the soul more suffering than doing, and that is clean love.”

The “mystic death” or Dark Night is therefore an aspect or incident of the transition from multiplicity to Unity, of that mergence and union of the soul with the Absolute which is the whole object of the mystical evolution of man. It is the last painful break with the life of illusion, the tearing away of the self from that World of Becoming in which all its natural affections and desires are rooted, to which its intellect and senses correspond; and the thrusting of it into that World of Being where at first, weak and blinded, it can but find a wilderness, a “dark.” No transmutation without fire, say the alchemists: No cross, no crown, says the Christian. All the great experts of the spiritual life agree—whatever their creeds, their symbols, their explanations—in describing this stress, tribulation, and loneliness, as an essential part of the way from the Many to the One; bringing the self to the threshold of that completed life which is to be lived in intimate union with Reality. It is the Entombment which precedes the Resurrection, say the Christian mystics; ever ready to describe their life-process in the language of their faith. Here as elsewhere—but nowhere else in so drastic a sense—the self must “lose to find and die to live.”