It should be common knowledge to regular readers of this blog that many of the Doctors of the Church teach substantially the same thing about transformation in Christ: sinners that we are, both our sensual part and our “deeper”, spiritual part have to be refocused on Jesus. Sense consolations, which can dominate the spiritual relationship in the beginning, have to be lost. Spiritual consolations, too. We must die to them like Jesus on the Cross, to rise in the baptismal promise of Easter. We must grow up. We must be fed the “solid food” (1 Cor 3:2) and no longer the baby milk of being consoled all the time.
Saint John of the Cross calls this, in his poetic language, the “dark night”. There’s a dark night of the senses and a dark night of the deeper spiritual roots of the soul. In a sense, they make one long dark night: the whole human person must be cleaned up. So two dark nights or one: we’re talking about the same Scriptural, Eucharistic, and Paschal reality of dying to self.
Contemplation begins when the there is a loss of sense consolations and the delight in images, meditations, and workings of our mind to think on Jesus and our faith. We cannot do this. Therefore something else must come in its place, if we are to retain a hold on our Jesus. There’s a purification. There’s a simplification. There’s a loss of consolation. They all initiate the same thing. They’re all related to Christian contemplation.
This is a discussion that we most commonly associate with the Church’s Mystical Doctor, John of the Cross. But the truth is, it’s a Catholic truth. It’s not just Saint John’s crazy idea. It’s not an esoteric thing for “cloistered contemplatives” only. It’s just the Catholic truth: there’s a dark night of the soul.
And there are some equally penetrating – and sometimes even more artistically engaging – descriptions of these spiritual realities in other writers. One startlingly accurate and detailed, but concise, description comes from Saint Francis de Sales. This “second” darkness of contemplation, when the deeper spiritual roots of the human person are being cleaned up and we are losing spiritual consolations, as well as having lost or losing sense consolations, the Doctor of Love tells of in these words:
Such then are the feelings of the souls which is in the midst of spiritual anguishes. These do exceedingly purify and refine love, for being deprived of all pleasure by which its love might be attached to God, it joins and unites us to God immediately, will to will, heart to heart, without any invention of satisfaction or desire.
That, says Francis, is the goal and the means. The goal: union with God, will to will, heart to heart, without an intermediary of dependence on loving consolations from him instead of his infinite self. The means: losing those very consolations through “spiritual anguish”. How does such spiritual anguish feel? What might a soul find? It goes looking for the Love which it knows to initiate, animate, sustain, and give meaning to its life:
Alas! Theotimus, how the poor heart is afflicted when being as it were abandoned by love, she seeks everywhere, and yet seems not to find it. She finds it not in the exterior senses, they not being capable of it; nor in the imagination, which is cruelly tortured by conflicting impressions; nor in the understanding, distracted with a thousand obscurities of strange reasonings and fears; and though at length she finds it in the top and supreme region of the spirit where it resides, yet the soul does not recognize it, and thinks it is not love, because the greatness of the distress and darkness hinders her from perceiving its sweetness.
Oh, soul! You look and look for your Lover, but find not! That is “anguish”.
And it’s perfectly normal.
It’s perfectly normal for us, sinners that we are who need to be cleaned up for the Church of Heaven and to make grow the Church in pilgrimage here below. We must be cleaned up. We must be refocused on God. And only by “spiritual anguish” can our will and all the deep spiritual roots of our human person be set alive, as they ought to be, in Christ the Easter King.
And that’s the Catholic truth.
Some related posts:
Contemplative in the Mud 