Composed Partly While Imprisoned by His Own Order

John of the Cross worked closely with Teresa of Avila as a leading figure of the Discalced Carmelite reform, and the resistance that reform provoked from unreformed Carmelites took a dramatic turn against John personally in 1577 and 1578, when opponents of the reform seized and imprisoned him in Toledo for several months in harsh conditions, during which he is traditionally said to have composed some of his most celebrated poetry, including material connected to the Dark Night. Whether every detail of that traditional account is precisely accurate, the imprisonment itself is well documented, and it gives the Dark Night's account of spiritual desolation a biographical weight that goes beyond abstract theological description.

The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, the standard modern critical translation, presents the Dark Night alongside its companion treatise, the Ascent of Mount Carmel, since both works comment on the same underlying poem and were composed as complementary, overlapping treatments of the same material rather than as fully independent books. John was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1926, and the Dark Night remains one of the most closely studied texts in the entire history of Christian mystical theology.