Active and Passive Nights

There is something that usually escapes my own notice, because it sometimes seems obvious to me; but it is worth mentioning: in Saint John of the Cross, there are “active” dark nights (primarily in the Ascent of Mount Carmel) and there are “passive” dark nights (for example, in the Dark Night itself).

Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity discuses the difference very succinctly:

Be rooted in Him; this implies being uprooted from self, or doing everything as if you were, by denying self each time you meet it. Be built up on Him, high above everything that is passing, there where everything is pure, everything is luminous.

The first sentence is about our own activity; the second sentence is about God’s activity. The first sentence corresponds to Saint John’s “active” nights, and the second corresponds to his “passive” nights.

What is another way to address the difference?

• In the active nights (of either the senses or the spirit), we are actively, aided by grace, taking steps to curb our sense appetites or to curb our will so that “nothing” but God himself is wanted.
• In the passive nights (of either the senses or the spirit), God takes the steps that we ourselves cannot take aided by grace and throws us a step further ahead than our own efforts aided by grace could ever take us, if we accept it and do not fight. The passive nights normally presuppose the active ones. We could not normally handle God removing something from us, unless we had struggled to and wanted to remove it ourselves.

In other words, sensible or spiritual dryness may be to some extent self-induced or it may be purely and entirely a motion of God.

As far as I’m aware, Christians naturally believe in the active nights, or, if they deny them, are openly heretical. Efforts at detachment and conformity with God’s will are necessary even to prevent a fall into mortal sin. Of course they are more necessary to advance in virtue and truth! This is why I don’t spend much time talking about “active nights”, and I don’t think most people who read Saint John of the Cross find anything especially new or well put in that regard (except to see clearly how much we lack!). Many masters teach on this in very clear detail.

The passive nights, although they are of course founded on Scripture and Tradition, are a bit less obvious. Saint John of the Cross himself says that souls experiencing them don’t really know what is going on, unless they are told. When I normally say “dark night”, I think of “passive dark night”: I think of the work that the Trinity alone can effect in us without any effort of our own other than acceptance and trust. There are things that no ascetical practice will correct, renew, and make alive again; those are corrected in the “dark nights” or “passive dark nights”.

It’s also possible, especially in the crucible of action in the world, that the active and passive nights can be mixed. Both may manifest at the same time. For, in fact, both presuppose lived faith and are experienced as a darkness in which it appears, to the soul, that only faith persists, without certain delights (sensible or spiritual). But sometimes it may be more or one or more of the other, more self-induced or more divine.