How does one know if he is encaptured in the Dark Night (The Dark Night explained by St John of the Cross)?
Did not saints like St Paul of the Cross and St Therese of Avila receive even a little spiritual comfort during this time i.e. emotional peace and affection for our Lord or have I misunderstood what the “Dark Night” is?
There are four parts to the night so the signs depend on what aspect you’re speaking of.
Anyone who has developed a certain faithfulness to prayer (meditation and devotions, for example) and who strives to mortify their passions, reign in their desires and change bad behaviors will certainly know something of the active night of sense. Here our exterior senses are being purified … seeing, hearing, tasting and so on.
As our way of prayer is changed by God away from meditation to simplified recollection and infused contemplation we have entered the passive night of sense. Now it’s our interior sense faculties of imagination, phantasy etc that are the object of purification.
We respond to God’s initiative in this first passive night through ever deeper mortifications … no longer of sense but now of spirit. In an effort to be faithful to the strong desire for recollection and contemplation that God has infused into us, we strive to conform our intellect, will and memory to the work He is doing. To a large degree this involves keeping check on the wanderings of mind and heart … in short reigning in our thoughts and feelings so as to remain more habitually recollected and united to God in prayer that is now becoming continuous. This is the active night of spirit … a time of deep interior joy and profound spiritual insight.
The passive night of spirit may, God willing, follow. Here our contemplation no longer consoles but assails us. It can be a time of utter desolation as we are stripped completely bare before our Lord. We are blinded in His dazzling light as our remaining imperfections are pulled up by their very roots. In short, we are being made “perfect” … at least to the degree possible in this earthly life.
Throughout each of these stages of night, God will likely bring us alternating periods of consolation and aridity. Spiritual comfort to “draw” us … where God shows us His love. And dryness to try us … where we show Him our love by remaining faithful and not giving up. There’s a real ebb and flow to this. The experience is a bit like walking up a spiral staircase … one that is wide at the bottom but narrow at the top. The alternating periods of consolation and desolation get deeper and more profound in each stage of the night as the purification becomes progressively more interior. The closer we get to God who lives in what St. John calls our “deepest center,” the more we come to realize that opposites can’t coexist.
And yes, even in this last night there are likely to be periods of respite from the passive trials and afflictions. John has a term for these times: the tranquil night. That having been said, the nights can really be viewed as “crisis points” in our spiritual life … when something old is giving way to something new. So it is the pain that’s most readily apparent to us … experienced as darkeness, torment, uncertainty, weariness etc.
Hope this helps,
Dave
