When the soul deprives its desire of the pleasure of all that can delight the sense of hearing, the soul remains unoccupied and in darkness with respect to this faculty.
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Christian
St. John of the Cross
Christian1542 – 1591Fontiveros, Castile (modern-day Spain)84 quotes
St. John of the Cross was a 16th-century Spanish Carmelite friar, mystic, and poet whose accounts of the Dark Night of the Soul — the painful purification the soul undergoes on the path to union with God — have become the definitive map of contemplative suffering and transformation in the Christian tradition.
Born Juan de Yepes y Álvarez in 1542 in a poor family in Castile, he joined the Carmelite order and became a close collaborator of St. Teresa of Ávila in reforming the order toward stricter contemplative practice. His reforming zeal earned him powerful enemies within the Carmelite establishment, and in 1577 he was abducted and imprisoned in a tiny cell in Toledo for nine months — an experience of darkness and suffering that became the crucible for his greatest poetry. His poems, including 'The Dark Night' and 'The Spiritual Canticle,' are considered among the finest lyric poems in the Spanish language, and his prose commentaries on them constitute a rigorous and tender psychology of the mystical path. The 'Dark Night of the Soul' — his term for the stripping away of all spiritual consolation and self-concept as a prelude to union with God — has become a universal phrase for profound spiritual crisis. He was canonized in 1726 and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1926.
Wisdom
The memory must also strip itself of all these forms and kinds of knowledge, that it may unite itself with God in hope.
Where thy hope is, thither will go thy joy and fear and grief; and, if thy hope returns, the others will return, and so of the rest.
Where there is devotion and faith, then, any image will suffice; but, if there is none, none will suffice.
All the being of creation, then, compared with the infinite Being of God, is nothing.
The more intense is the desire, the greater is the torment which it causes the soul.
Without this mortification, I make bold to say, the soul no more achieves progress on the road to perfection and to the knowledge of God of itself, however many efforts it may make, than the seed grows when it is cast upon untilled ground.
When the spiritual person cannot meditate, let him learn to be still in God, fixing his loving attention upon Him, in the calm of his understanding, although he may think himself to be doing nothing.
The strength of the soul consists in its faculties, passions and desires, all of which are governed by the will.
Attachment is an anxiety that, like a bond, ties the spirit down to the earth and allows it no enlargement of heart.
Through the ear that is purged from the joy of hearing, there comes to the soul joy most spiritual an hundredfold, directed to God in all that it hears, whether Divine or profane.
All the wealth and glory of all creation, in comparison with the wealth which is God, is supreme poverty and wretchedness.
God permits not that any other thing should dwell together with Him.
All the virtues grow through the practice of any one of them, and all the vices grow through the practice of any one of them likewise, and the remnants of each grow in the soul.
All the creatures, then, cannot serve as a proportionate means to the understanding whereby it may reach God.
Desire blinds and darkens the soul; for desire, as such, is blind, since of itself it has no understanding in itself, the reason being to it always, as it were, a child leading a blind man.
It is clear, then, that faith is dark night for the soul, and it is in this way that it gives it light; and the more the soul is darkened, the greater is the light that comes to it.
All these evils have their root and origin in one important evil of a privative kind that is contained in this joy -- namely, withdrawal from God.
It is clear, then, that for the soul to come to unite itself perfectly with God through love and will, it must first be free from all desire of the will, howsoever slight.
It is now, I think, becoming clear how faith is dark night to the soul, and how the soul likewise must be dark, or in darkness as to its own light so that it may allow itself to be guided by faith to this high goal of union.