I think it’s fair to say that I have no small interest in the history of Catholic spirituality, primarily in the West but also in the East. Reasons for this are many; partly I’m just curious, and partly I want to have good grounds on which to supply direction for myself, which may be lacking in other sources in my life. One of the things in the history of Christian spirituality that interests me is where John of the Cross got all his wonderful, concise, universal images and ideas about prayer.

It is a common expression of Saint John of the Cross to say that, there is darkness in contemplation (1) because of our sins (actual, social, and original), and (2) because God is simply beyond our understanding.

The first of these two darknesses is much mulled over in the tradition. We sin. Of course it darkens our view. John tends to not focus on this darkness because, for the one determined to love God, the self-knowledge of our sinfulness is elementary; it is neither something new to us, nor is it something that comes as a surprise when we begin to experience contemplation and the dark night.

The second of these two darknesses is perhaps less remarked upon in general. What are some possible influences on John? Where does the tradition start to get an idea for this second darkness experienced in prayer? There are probably many sources. Among the Doctors the Church, a very good explanation of why the night is dark comes from Saint Albert the Great. According to Albert, the first thing that we should note is that

Knowledge of divine things does not follow a mode of reasoning but comes from a certain experience.

We do not have an idea of God. We have an experience of his life. This experiential nature of knowledge attained in prayer, faith, hope, love, and contemplation is a key highlight and contribute of Saint Albert the Great to epistemology (the study of knowledge). It seems strange that setting experiential knowledge up as legitimate knowledge may have required a genius of the scale of Albertus Magnus, but that’s life. ~_^

Albert elsewhere in his commentary on pseudo-Dionysius explains:

God is superluminous in himself but hidden for us… The things that are most manifest in themselves may be, for our way of thinking, like the bat blinded by the light of the sun [a reference to Aristotle]… Because of the transcendence of his nature, God is hidden, but he is a superluminous light insofar as he is rendered present to us.

In the history of the theology of Christian prayer, Albert makes a decisive step (later adhered to by John of the Cross): God is infinite, and that is the primary reason why there is such painful darkness in prayer. Something infinite will only fill a finite container by painfully expanding it. Something infinitely bright will only blind the bat. When God starts to take away our training wheels in life and in prayer, we will be overwhelmed by his light. It is nothing to be afraid of. It is perfectly “normal.”