From Carmelite Theology to a Common Phrase

John of the Cross wrote the dark night as a technical stage within a specific, disciplined program of Carmelite contemplative prayer, addressed to men and women already committed to advanced spiritual practice, and his commentary is precise about what does and does not count as the dark night proper, distinguishing it from ordinary discouragement, depression or a simple lapse in devotional feeling. The phrase has since traveled far outside that context into general English usage, where dark night of the soul now commonly describes almost any period of severe personal crisis, doubt or suffering, religious or otherwise, a broadening that theologians and scholars of Christian spirituality regularly note as a loosening of John's original and much more specific meaning.

Even within Christian theology, the concept has been extended by later writers, including Mother Teresa of Calcutta, whose posthumously published letters revealed a decades long experience of interior darkness and absence of felt closeness to God that she and her spiritual directors interpreted through the Carmelite framework John established. The doctrine remains most precisely a description of a stage within contemplative progress, even as its name has become a byword for suffering in general.