On more than one occasion (but firstly here), I have been trying to offer thoughts on Saint John of the Cross’ “dark night of the soul” lived outside the cloister. One of the signs that Saint John gives that someone is being purged by God, ready to abandon (at least for a time) meditation and discursive thought, in favour of loving attention, in silence, to the love of God, is this:

The third sign we have for ascertaining whether this dryness be the purgation of sense, is inability to meditate and make reflections, and to excite the imagination… for God begins now to communicate himself, no longer through the channel of sense, as formerly, in consecutive reflections, by which we arranged and divided our knowledge, but in pure spirit…

In other words, the imagination runs dry. Images lose any appeal. Images “barely even” register. They exist only psychologically and physically, without much interest from our heart or our love. We are, in practical terms, stripped of them.

Saint John says this regarding images and imagination directed, through explicit meditation, towards God.

The reality is that, on the road, a lot of our meditation is oblique at best. Our mind may be directed to God by things in the world, but our consciousness of it is poor.

My first tentative thought is that, when the “dark night” is lived outside the cloister, in the world, the dryness of images applies, to a certain extent, to all images. John meant images used explicitly in meditation. I think the truth goes farther that that. After all, part of being a contemplative in the world is seeing Jesus in others; there are, to greater and lesser extents, imaginative images that go with this (like there are imaginative images in our concepts of Jesus and God). If we are ever to be forced to rely on “pure spirit”, as John says, while living and contemplating in the world, then clearly images as a whole may become dry for us. Not only in explicit regards to God. But also possibly on the whole.

Psychologically speaking, it is probably possible that we can undergo a “dark night” and retain certain strong images. But I think it’s a divided psychology, and images of created things do easily leave the scene during a dark night. Somehow it seems fitting (เหมาะสม as we say in Thai).

My second tentative thought is that this condition of dryness to images persists and, except in a more or less divided psychology, means greater indifference to and detachment from anything image-driven: films, photographs, websites, advertisements, etc. insofar as it is the imagination alone which is targeted. It is impossible to have no interest. But detachment to images will increase after passing through a dark night. This might mean a heightened interest in poetry or the beauty that underlies images. But it certainly means detachment to the images in themselves. After living without them for a time, images cannot control us as easily; they have lost power as an idol.

Just some tentative thoughts.