Two Darknesses, of the Senses and of the Spirit

John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul pairs a short poem with an extended prose commentary describing two successive purifications a soul undergoes on the way to union with God: the night of the senses, in which ordinary spiritual consolations and pleasures fall away, and the far more severe night of the spirit, in which even the soul's deeper faculties are stripped of felt certainty about God's presence. John insists these experiences of apparent abandonment are not signs of spiritual failure but a necessary, even a positive, stage of growth, since attachment to consolation, however holy it seems, still binds the soul to something less than God directly.

The phrase dark night of the soul has since migrated far beyond its precise theological meaning into everyday English, now used loosely for almost any period of despair or crisis, a use John's original technical, carefully staged account of spiritual purification does not straightforwardly support, since he is describing a specific and, in his account, ultimately fruitful process rather than despair as such. John draws his central image from the Song of Songs and other biblical love poetry, presenting the soul's passage through darkness as an act of love rather than an ordeal merely endured, which is part of why he pairs his prose commentary with verse rather than writing straightforward doctrinal exposition alone.