Of the benefits which the night of sense brings to the soul.Of the benefits which the night of sense brings to the soul.
This night and purgation of the appetite is full of happiness to the soul, involving grand benefits, though, as I have said, it seems to it as if all were lost. As Abraham made a great feast on the day of Isaac's weaning, so there is joy in heaven when God takes a soul out of its swaddling clothes; when He takes His arms from under it, and makes it walk alone; when He denies it the sweet milk of the breast and the delicate food of children, and gives it bread with the crust to eat; when it begins to taste the bread of the strong, which, in the aridities and darkness of sense, is given to the spirit emptied and dried of all sensible sweetness; namely, the bread of infused contemplation, of which I have spoken. This is the first and chief benefit which the soul gains here, and from which almost all the others flow.
Of these, the first is the knowledge of self and its own vileness. For over and above that those graces which God bestows on the soul, are ordinarily included in this knowledge of self, these aridities and the emptiness of the faculties as to their former abounding, and the difficulty which good works present, bring the soul to a knowledge of its own vileness and misery, which in the season of prosperity it saw not. This truth is vividly shadowed forth in the book of Exodus. There we read that God, about to humble the children of Israel and bring them to a knowledge of themselves, commanded them to lay aside their ornaments and festival attire, which they ordinarily wore in the wilderness, saying, 'Now, lay aside thy ornaments;' that is, lay aside thy festival attire, and put on thy working dress, that thou mayest know what treatment thou hast deserved.
It is as if He said to the people: 'Inasmuch as the ornaments you wear, being those of joy and festivity, are the cause why you think not meanly of yourselves - you really are mean - lay them aside; so that henceforth clad in vile garments, you may acknowledge that you deserve nothing better, and also who and what you are.'
Hereby the soul learns the reality of its own misery, which before it knew not. For in the day Of festivity when it found great sweetness, comfort, and help in God, it was highly satisfied and pleased, thinking that it rendered some service to God. For though it may not then explicitly say so, yet, on account of the satisfaction it finds, it is not wholly free from feeling it. But when it has put on the garments of heaviness, of aridity and abandonment, when its previous lights have become darkness, it possesses and retains more truly that excellent and necessary virtue of self-knowledge, counting itself for nothing, and having no satisfaction in itself, because it sees that of itself it does and can do nothing.
This diminished satisfaction with self, and the affliction it feels because it thinks that it is not serving God, God esteems more highly than all its former delights and all its good works, however great they may have been; for they were occasions of many imperfections and ignorances. But in this garb of aridity, not only these, of which I am speaking, but other benefits also of which I shall presently speak, and many more than I can speak of, flow as from their proper source and fount, that of self-knowledge.
In the first place, the soul learns to commune with God with more respect and reverence; always necessary in converse with the Most High. Now, in its prosperous days of sweetness and consolation, the soul was less observant of reverence, for the favours it then received, rendered the desire somewhat bold with God, and less reverent than it should have been. Thus it was with Moses, when he heard the voice of God; for carried away by the delight he felt, he was venturing, without further consideration, to draw near, if God had not commanded him to stop, and put off his shoes, saying, 'Come not nigh hither; put off the shoes from thy feet.' This teaches us how reverently and discreetly in spiritual detachment we are to converse with God. When Moses had become obedient to the voice, he remained so reverent and considerate, that not only did he not venture to draw near, but, in the words of Scripture, 'durst not look at God.' For having put off the shoes of desire and sweetness, he recognized profoundly his own wretchedness in the sight of God, for so it became him when about to listen to the words of God.
The condition to which God brought Job in order that he might converse with God, was not that of delight and bliss, of which he there speaks, and to which he had been accustomed. God left him in misery, naked on a dung-hill, abandoned and even persecuted by his friends, filled with bitterness and grief, covered with worms: then it was that the Most High, Who lifts up 'the poor out of the dung-hill,' was pleased to communicate Himself to Job in greater abundance and sweetness, revealing to him 'the deep mysteries of His wisdom,': as He had never done before in the days of Job's prosperity.
And now that I have to speak of it, I must here point out another great benefit of the dark night and aridity of the sensual appetite; the fulfillment of the words of the prophet, 'Thy light shall rise up in darkness,'s God enlightens the soul, making it see not only its own misery and meanness, as I have said, but also His grandeur and majesty. When the desires are quelled, and sensible joy and consolation withdrawn, the understanding remains free and clear for the reception of the truth, for sensible joy and the desire even of spiritual things darken and perplex the mind, but the trials and aridities of sense also enlighten and quicken the understanding in the words of Isaias, 'Vexation alone shall give understanding in the hearing.' Vexation shall make us understand how God in His divine wisdom proceeds to instruct a soul, emptied and cleansed - for such it must be before it can be the recipient of the divine inflowing - in a supernatural way, in the dark and arid night of contemplation, which He did not do, because it was given up to its former sweetness and joy.
The same prophet Isaias sets this truth before us with great clearness, saying, 'Whom shall he teach knowledge and whom shall he make to understand the thing heard Them that are weaned from the milk, that are plucked away from the breasts.' The temper of mind, then, meet for the divine inflowing is not so much the milk of spiritual sweetness, nor the breasts of sweet reflections in the powers of sense, which the soul once had, as a failure of the first and withdrawal from the other. Therefore, if we would listen to the voice of the great King with due reverence, the soul must stand upright, and not lean on the affections of sense for support. As the prophet Habacuc said of himself, 'I will stand upon my watch, and fix my step upon the munition, and I will behold to see what may be said to me.' To stand upon the watch, is to cast off all desires; to fix the step, is to cease from reflections of sense, that I may behold and understand what God will speak to me. Thus out of this night springs first the knowledge of a one's self, and on that, as on a foundation, is built up the knowledge of God. 'Let me know myself,' says Saint Augustine, 'and I shall then know Thee, O my God,' for, as the philosophers say, one extreme is known by another.
In order to show more fully how effectual is the night of sense, in its aridity and desolation, to enlighten the soul more and more, I produce here the words of the Psalmist, which so clearly explain how greatly efficacious is this night in bringing forth the knowledge of God: 'In a desert land, and inaccessible, and without water; so in the holy have I appeared to Thee, that I might see Thy strength and Thy glory.' The Psalmist does not say here - and it is worthy of observation - that his previous sweetness and delight were any dispositions or means whereby he might come to the knowledge of the glory of God, but rather that aridity and emptying of the powers of sense spoken of here as the barren and dry land.
Moreover, he does not say that his reflections and meditations on divine things, with which he was once familiar, had led him to the knowledge and contemplation of God's power, but, rather, his inability to meditate on God, to form reflections by the help of his imagination; that is the inaccessible land. The means, therefore, of attaining to the knowledge of God, and of ourselves, is the dark night with all its aridities and emptiness; though not in the fulness and abundance of the other night of the spirit; for the knowledge that comes by this is, as it were, the beginning of the other.
Amid the aridities and emptiness of this night of the desires, the soul acquires also spiritual humility, which is the virtue opposed to the first capital sin, which, I said, is spiritual pride. The humility acquired by self-knowledge purifies the soul from all the imperfections into which it fell in the day of its prosperity. For now, seeing itself so parched and miserable, it does not enter into its thoughts, even for a moment, to consider itself better then others, or that it has outstripped them on the spiritual road, as it did before; on the contrary, it acknowledges that others are better.
Out of this grows the love of our neighbour, for it now esteems them, and no longer judges them as it used to do, when it looked upon itself as exceedingly fervent, and upon others as not. Now it sees nothing but its own misery, which it keeps so constantly before its eyes that it can look upon nothing else. This state is admirably shown by David himself, when in this dark night, saying, 'I was dumb, and was humbled, and kept silence from good things, and my sorrow was renewed.' All the good of his soul seemed to him so mean that he could not speak of it; he was silent as to the good of others, because of the pain of the knowledge of his own wretchedness.
In this state, too, men are submissive and obedient in the spiritual way, for when they see their own wretchedness they not only listen to instruction, but desire to have it from any one who will guide their steps and tell them what they ought to do. That presumption which sometimes possessed them in their prosperity is now gone; and, finally, all those im perfections are swept clean away to which I referred when I was treating of spiritual pride.
- from The Dark Night of the Soul, by Saint John of the Cross