Alphonsus Liguori is the Doctor of Prayer. He agrees entirely and completely with other Doctors of the Church, such as Saint Catherine of Siena and Saint John of the Cross, on the intrinsic logic or necessity of what John calls “dark nights”. Alphonsus calls it “desolation”. Catherine calls it passing from the beginners’ way to the illuminative way to the unitive way. John coins the term “dark nights”. They all refer to the same thing.
The Doctors are in total agreement: there are two parts to the human soul, sensitive and spiritual (lower and higher, so to speak: the part closer to matter and the part a bit further away). Therefore, if we are to become actually united to God in love by a continuous or almost continuous contemplation in the summit of our soul and the depth of our heart, both the “sensitive” and the “spiritual” part of the soul must be refocused on God.
This is why the dark nights exist. They strip us of attachments and train us to forget the delights that God gives and let us fix our gaze (the gaze of our affections and the gaze of our will) wholly on God, through dryness and aridity. If things are sensitively arid, then our senses get trained on God if we don’t let go. If things are spiritually arid, then our spirit gets trained on God if we don’t let go. Hence the two dark nights of the Church’s Mystical Doctor: one dark night of the senses, and another dark night of the spirit. It’s simply a matter of spiritual “logic”.
It’s very easy to find this teaching in Saint John and Saint Catherine. But it actually re-occurs in Saint Alphonsus, however much more practical and active/apostolic Redemptorist and Alphonsian sprirituality is.
After quoting Saint Francis de Sales, Alphonsus lays down the logic like this (The Practice of the Love of Jesus Christ, Ch XVII, #17):
God uses times of aridity to press his most beloved souls closer to him. What hinders true union with God is attachment to our disordered inclinations. When, therefore, God wants to draw souls to his perfect love, he tries to detach them from all affection for created goods…
Then follows a short, very Alphonsian treatise about mortification. Amid this, we find a continuation of the description of the logic of dark nights (“desolation”):
Then to make them fond of spiritual things, God at first lets them taste many consolations, with an abundance of tears and tenderness… (18)
That’s at the beginning. But, though it is universal in the spiritual life of us sinners, it is insufficient and imperfect:
When souls first give themselves to God and taste the sweetness of the sensible consolations with which the Lord seeks to allure them and this win them away from earthly pleasures, they begin breaking off their attachment to creatures and become attached to God. Still, this attachment is imperfect, since they are prompted more by feelings of spiritual consolation than by the genuine will to do what is pleasing to God…
This is a universal defect in our wretched human nature… (19)
So what is God going to do to clean us up? (We skip a few paragraphs. Alphonsus’ exposition and focus is not here the same as mine; we have to ignore some of what he says to get to the point about dark nights in themselves.)
When souls are morally certain of being in the grace of God, although they may be deprived of both worldly and godly pleasures, still they are content with their state, knowing, as they do, that they love God and are loved by him. But God wishes to see them more purified and stripped of all sensory enjoyment in order to unite them entirely to himself by means of pure love. What does God do? He puts them in the crucible of desolation, which is a pain more bitter than the worst agony, internal or external, that a person can suffer. He deprives them of the knowledge that they are in the state of grace, and leaves them in darkness so thick that it seems the soul will never find God. Still worse, God will sometimes allow souls to be assaulted by violent sensual temptations… or by thoughts of unbelief, despair, and even hatred of God…
When this happens to souls that love God, they should not be dismayed…(22–23)
Although he does not emphasize different moments for the two dark nights (and this is reasonable, for we can go back and forth and by mixed roads), Alphonsus clearly tells us that both the senses and the spirit must die. And the reason he gives accords with Saint John and Saint Catherine: so that we can begin to walk the way of/to perfection, the way of/to union with God through love. He stresses that this is normal for us sinners. It is, so to speak, necessary. It’s required. It’s the typical road. His own disciple Saint Clement Hofbauer calls adversity the “destiny of all those who seek God with all their heart”. Because of our weakness and insufficiency, we must be thrown into the two “crucibles” of “desolation”. It’s normal. It’s the normal way to sanctity – and sanctity itself, or union with Jesus himself, is the “norm” of the Church – and this is a constant teaching of the saints and Doctors of the Church.
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Just a closing note… The Doctor of Prayer then (#27–29) goes on to tell us about the special and extreme case of Saint Jane Frances de Chantal, friend of Francis de Sales. Like Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta in our day, Saint Jane Frances was assaulted for years, for decades, with these kinds of “desolations”. Decades!
Now, let us be serious. Do we actually think that Blessed Mother Teresa and Saint Mother de Chantal required decades of dark nights to enter into the unitive way of quasi-continuous presence of God?
No, of course not. The normal course appears to be, in its full and utterly unleashed intensity, several days or weeks (according to Saint John of the Cross) – though this is usually spread over years (but not necessarily decades) because of distractions, duties, and occupations which God wants us to attend to as well. The total desolation experienced by some very holy saints over a prolonged period of time is not necessary to begin the way of union and the near-continuous contemplation of the saints. When certain saints are “favoured” with prolonged desolation and dark nights, it is simply so that they may earn more merit for themselves and apply more merit to others. Nothing more. It’s a grace of God for these saints and for the Mystical Body that is the Church. There comes a point in the relationship when desolation is no longer primarily purifying but becomes primarily “redemptive” and “meritorious-petitionary” for the sake of others. That is what the saints show us.
Alphonsus, not without his reasons, mixes up two things: (1) the necessity of the dark nights and (2) the special desolations applied to certain very holy souls for their good and the good of the whole Church. His aim in doing this is to provide consolation for anyone going through any desolation, either that which is universally necessary or that of special favour. That is his approach. He knows the Catholic truth; he applies it in ministry. Nothing more, nothing less. But it’s worth noting, for those of us who never are strong enough for the special favours of extreme and long-lasting desolation, but who may still endure the necessary dark nights, that there is a difference. We don’t normally need decades to get started, and neither did Jane Frances or Mother Teresa!
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