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Episode 368: 'Dark Night of the Soul' by St. John of the Cross
00:35:00
John J. Miller is joined by Silvina Sironi of the Word on Fire Institute to discuss 'Dark Night of the Soul' by St. John of the Cross.
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Sylvina Cerrone
FOREIGN.
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John J. Miller
Welcome to the Great Books Podcast. Today we'll talk about the Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross. I'm your host, John J. Miller of National Review, and you're listening to a production of National Review. Our guest is Sylvina Cerrone, an artist and translator who leads the Art for Evangelists community of the Word on Fire Institute. She podcasted with us early earlier this year on the Book of Judith from the Old Testament, and she joins us by zoom as we record from Hillsdale College's campus radio station, WRFH in Michigan. Sylvina, welcome back to the Great Books Podcast.
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Sylvina Cerrone
Well, thank you so much. Glad to be here.
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John J. Miller
Why is the Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross a great book?
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Sylvina Cerrone
This book is really very, very, very deep, is really a poem. So it's not very long, but it describes in the form of an allegorical poem the union of the soul with God. It is written in a time where the Spanish language was being developed, at least for the for the Spanish speaking world, is also a masterpiece of poetry and of this golden age of the Spanish culture.
- [01:24]
John J. Miller
We will talk about all of that, why this short poem has such a long history. We'll read a bunch of it, maybe the whole thing. We'll ask whether it's an example of prison literature, and also we'll discuss the tradition of visual art that surrounds it. Silvina let's start with the title, though. The Dark Night of the Soul, which is now a popular phrase almost detached from the poem. It suggests a crisis of faith, or in a more secular sense, a time of intellectual strife or confusion. Is that what this poem is about?
- [02:03]
Sylvina Cerrone
Well, not really, not in the conception of the people of the time. And this poem is not something completely new. It's part of a tradition of a mystic tradition. There's another book from the 14th century called the Cloud of Unknown, which also refers to this particular phenomena in the spiritual life, where the closer we get to God and to his light, we might perceive it as darkness just because our souls are not ready for it. The darkness, the darkness that St. John is referring to here is not a darkness of despair or a darkness of loneliness. It's more of a feeling of purgation, as they call it. It's like getting rid of everything that is not God in your soul so that you can perceive his light better. Many theologians and many other saints have tried to explain this feeling or this process. And one of the reasons why St. John of the Cross is so important is because he managed to Describe this in a short poem in a way that only someone very, very close to the process can do. His concept of this dark night of the soul is something that every soul has to go through in order to receive the light of God.
- [03:28]
John J. Miller
Let's jump into the poem itself. It is short, just 40 lines, arranged in eight stanzas of five lines each. I'm going to read the first two stanzas. 10 lines. The first 10 lines of dark night of the soul. Quote. On a dark night kindled in love with yearnings. Oh, by happy chance I went forth without being observed. My house being now at rest, in darkness and secure by the secret ladder disguised. Oh, happy chance. In darkness and in concealment. My house being now at rest, unquote. Sylvina, what's going on here? What does all that mean?
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Sylvina Cerrone
Well, a lot of people have spent many, many, many years of their life explaining this. So we can just start by talking about the fact that this is a journey of the soul. Right. The poem itself describes the journey. The two first. The four first stanzas, archellese, refer to the soul, you know, leaving, like starting this journey. So one very beautiful image that I think in other writings of St. John of the Cross has helped understand this poem in this way is he refers to this process as with this image of a damp log that you put on a fire, right? So when you put a damp log on a fire, it's not going to catch fire right away, but there's this process by which the fire will eventually remove all the moist from the log and then will start burning the log, and it will start burning anything that is not, you know, fire. So it will transform it eventually into fire. So in this poem, he's describing the same process by which the soul also has to get rid of anything that is impeding that union with God. So in the first half of this poem, we'll see the soul leaving like. Like in starting the journey. And he makes his stresses, actually, he names that. He says, I think twice about the house being all in order and in rest. And that meaning that when you start this journey, you have already acquired, maybe by your own practices, you know, a very more of a center life. Like, you have rejected sin and you have gone into this spiritual path already, but now something else is going to happen right before you get to that union with God. So this is what is starting. This is the start of the journey.
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John J. Miller
The opening line amuses me on a dark night because it reminds me of what is sometimes said to be the worst beginning of a novel ever. Written it was a dark and stormy night. Right. The old cliche that this is the worst way to begin a book. And the writer Edward Bulwer Lytton, a Victorian novelist, started a book that way once, and he's regarded, well regarded. Not much read these days. But on a dark and stormy night. This is on a dark night. The only thing we're lacking is a storm. What we do get, though, is a lot of repetition. Oh, by happy chance, My house being now at rest, of course, references to darkness. And then the poem goes on. I'll read two more stanzas. The third and the fourth. In the happy night, in secret, when none saw me, nor I beheld ought without light or guide, save that which burned in my heart. This light guided me more surely than the light of noonday to the place where he. Well, I knew who was awaiting me. A place where none appeared. So it sounds like a light that's guiding us to nothing.
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Sylvina Cerrone
Yes, it's very interesting. I think, you know, he's making a reference there to the fact that I don't think he's necessarily guiding to nothing, but it's more like it's not visible to the outside world, like this process that the soul goes through. It could be in any external circumstance and nobody would know. There's a lot of emphasis in the secrecy of it. It's in, like this very personal journey, in a way.
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John J. Miller
Let's step back and discuss the author for a moment. St. John of the Cross, born 1542, died 1591, wrote Dark Night of the Soul. We're not sure exactly when, but probably in the 1570s. Who was this guy?
- [08:09]
Sylvina Cerrone
Well, he became a Carmelite. Before that, he had a very rough life. His parents were married and very poor. He became an orphan very young, and he had a vocation to the religious life, so he became a Carmelite. But it wasn't a very hard time in general, before Catholicism in Europe. The order that he became a part of started a process of renewal, as we call it, a reformation, too, but not the external reformation of the Protestant Reformation, but an internal one. There was a movement in the order to go back to the origins of the order, to the original spirit of it, which was a spirit of penance and a spirit of prayer. This young man finds himself in the middle of this mission to renew the Carmelite order, especially after meeting Teresa Elvila, who was the real force behind that reformation of the order. Just because of the particular, you know, cultural and political characteristics of Spain. We have to remember that religious orders in Spain Were entwined or, you know, mixed up with a lot of the political power too. When we think of a reformation of an order, we might think, oh, you know, it was wonderful. You know, they were going back to their roots. You know, everybody should be on board to that. But it wasn't. So there's a lot of people within the orders that have been there because of, you know, powerful families needed, you know, the second son to be in a religious order, and they didn't really have a vocation for that. So their ideas of how the order should work were very different from the spiritual ideals.
- [10:06]
John J. Miller
And so St. John of the Cross actually wound up in prison because of all this. He's trying to reform his order with rules about dress and fasting and silence and prayer. And as you say, it sounds like, okay, let's have a conversation about all this. But he winds up in prison in Toledo. I always wanna say Toledo, because I live near Toledo, Ohio, but Toledo. What happened to him in prison then?
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Sylvina Cerrone
Well, the interesting part of it is, like, it's the order's prison. I mean, it's not a. It's not a civil prison. It's like within the convent. So he ends up in this really tiny cell and he's not treated very well there. He spends, I think, more than a year there. And the only reason he's out is because he's. You have to do the very speaking of cliches, but the very cliche. Escaping through a window with sheets knotted out.
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John J. Miller
He has a prison breakout. Basically, yes.
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Sylvina Cerrone
I mean, that's why I was trying to talk about the background of all of this, because for us in our time, it's almost impossible to imagine that that would happen. Right. Like in a regular religious order, you would have all these political push and pull and how to change his order is so essential that he, he was really ill treated and suffered a lot. You know, he. He wasn't fed.
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John J. Miller
Well, that's a kind of imposed fasting, I suppose, while you're, while you're in prison. Now, he probably wrote Dark Night of the Soul during this period of imprisonment. Is it a work of prison literature? Is this a. Is this a. A poem you only could have written while you were in prison?
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Sylvina Cerrone
I don't know. I, I don't. I mean, I, I do believe that every experience that, you know, we go through is going to influence what we write. Right. Because you can escape that. But I think he would have written this poem anyway because I think that process that he's describing, he, he lived, you know, he Had a special, I think, mystical gifts too. So it would have happened in any circumstance. I don't think the dark. I don't think he's a product of being, you know, depressed or being in a cell. But I think the circumstances probably helped him with it. But I think it was a process that was already going on in his soul.
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John J. Miller
You mentioned he had mystical gifts. And this is an important point. We often regard St John of the Cross as a mystic. When I hear the word mystic, I sometimes think of, you know, know, goofy and feverish hallucinations. I don't always think of serious divine contemplation. But what's a mystic? What does that mean?
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Sylvina Cerrone
Well, within the Catholic tradition, you know, a mystic is. Is somebody that has a special gifts. Yeah. Or special graces, we call it. But in reality, like the mystical life is. Is. Is a spiritual life that every single Christian should live. So we are living this life of spiritual progress. Right. Like, the objective, the aim of the spiritual life is the union with God. So we all have that vocation, and we all have that, you know, that spiritual path. Now, the term mystic is used because we participate in the mystery of Christ. And even the sacraments in the Catholic Church are called holy mysteries. So it's a participation in the life of Christ. It's a gradual participation, and all of us are called to that. Now, there are special people that are chosen in a way to, you know, for the sake of manifesting this gift, to make it more clear. They have extraordinary gifts. You know, they are a little bit more advanced in this path and they can show us the way. Part of the power of this poem, too, of dark night of the Soul, is that it's told from the point of view of somebody that has already arrived to that union and looks back at the past. Right. So in a sense, that is the mission of the mystic. To show what the path is and that it is possible, and it gives us hope to all of us that don't have these extraordinary gifts.
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John J. Miller
Let's go back to the poem. This product of mysticism, expression of mysticism. We've already read half of it, so we're halfway through. I'll keep going. Here are the next two standards. Numbers five and six. Quote. O night that guided me O night more lovely than the dawn O night that joined beloved with lover Lover transformed into the beloved upon my flowery breast kept holy for himself alone There he stayed sleeping and I caressed him and the fanning of the cedars made a breeze Unquote Sylveen unpack that for us, what's going on as we're moving into the final stretch of this poem.
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Sylvina Cerrone
So the first part is that going towards a journey marked by this darkness, because he's just only going, you know, guided by the love that he's feeling in his heart. In this part of the poem, that union is described, that finding the one that he's searching for, one can't help by. When we hear this poem, there's all these echoes of the Song of Songs that is really going through. And it's a very old tradition of representing this union with God, with the union of lovers. Right. The spousal love. So he's using this, too, as a way of trying to represent this union with God.
- [15:53]
John J. Miller
I'm going to read now the final two stands as we're going to wrap up this poem. I think this is the first time on the Great Books podcast in which I've read the entire work that we're discussing during the show. Here are the final two. Stances number seven and eight from Dark Night of the Soul. Quote. The breeze blew from the turret as I parted his looks with his gentle hand. He wounded my neck and caused all my senses to be suspended. I remained lost in oblivion. My face, I reclined on the beloved. All ceased and I abandoned myself, leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies, unquote. So I see where he's reclined on the beloved, and that's usually rendered with a capital B. So here he is in union with God, as you say, that's what he's headed toward. But this lost in oblivion is a peculiar line. I associate oblivion with. With nothingness, with annihilation, with the exact opposite of a spiritual life, in a sense, the denial of it, even. And that's part of the paradox of this poem, I think. It's called Dark Night of the Soul. We usually associate with darkness with. Well, not with the light. The light of God. Right. There's something else going on here. And he's suggesting. I think he's informing us, letting us know that even the most deeply faithful people can have moments of doubt and a kind of sense of abandonment. Is that true, Silvina?
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Sylvina Cerrone
Well, I think so. And I think what he's also you know, pointing to that, yes, this process of getting rid of everything that is not God doesn't feel good. It's not a process that, you know, it's going to be a company. But we usually associate with being very close to God. We associate that with the consolation, with. With feeling, you know, a sense of peace. And a sense of purpose. What he's showing here is that it's not the case, you know, and this purgation that he talks about to be able to actually attain that union with God is not something that is not without its dangers and its darkness, too. He feels secure, right? He talks a lot in this poem about walking. Even in the darkness, he knows where he's going, but that doesn't mean that he can see. So there's a lot of, you know, those two juxtaposition of these two elements of light and darkness and the paradox of it all, because even people that are very, very, very close to God might feel or think that they're not. And that's something that many other saints have talk about in their spiritual life, too. You know, since the saints live their spiritual life in a more intense way. But we all have to go through that, too. They paint for us the big strokes of what's happening in the soul.
- [18:57]
John J. Miller
One of the points may be that even in the bleakest moments, God is nearby. He may feel far away, maybe even absent, but God, in fact, is nearby. I remember the first time I encountered this idea of the dark night. It involved Mother Teresa because she died and had left a memoir where she had confessed to suffering from this idea of the dark night of the soul. And I remember the press reaction at the time was, oh, my gosh, Mother Teresa wasn't a believer. She was full of doubt and so forth. And it took some theologians to come in and say, no, no, no, no, you're missing the point. It's the exact opposite of that. But this is a difficult concept for a lot of people to understand, I think.
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Sylvina Cerrone
Well, absolutely. And I think, you know, I think that in. In the Bible, it said, you know, we walk by faith alone. I think that's part of it, right? Like, we tend to think that that faith is certainty or that faith is like. Like I was saying, we're feeling very, very close to God and we have no doubts, and we have, you know, all this consolation. Mother Teresa, you know, some people even would say, oh, well, she was, you know, an atheist or whatever. And. And that's not. That's not it at all. She just did not feel deeply in her. In her life all these constellations that she had felt before. So the minute she decided to follow God really, really close, that's when everything ceased. And it lasted years. And, you know, only a great saint can deal with that. I don't think any of us can deal with. We cannot deal with that. I mean, for A long period of time. It's really, really hard. Yes, I remember that. That you're mentioning because it was pretty intense.
- [20:41]
John J. Miller
Let's turn now to the visual tradition that surrounds St. John of the Cross. He's known for this poem and his mysticism, of course, but also a drawing of Christ. Silvina, what's special about his drawing of Christ?
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Sylvina Cerrone
Well, the. The most striking thing about that drawing is that he. Well, it is very hard to figure out what was the purpose of it. So it doesn't look like anything from the time. You know, if you see any crucifix from the time, it's. It's very conventional, like you would see. You know, you will be. The perspective will be just like being in front of the cross and looking at it. Right now, St. John drew this very, very tiny drawing. It's about two and a half inches by two inches. And he draw it while he was in the convent in Avila. Some say he had a vision, some said he had a dream. It's not really clear what the actual origin of it was, but to me and to a lot of people, it's clearly he's trying to express some image with it. It's some concept with it that is more akin to what he's trying to express in the poems. Right. Like this image that is a symbol of something. It's not a devotional thing. It's not just to pray with. It's more like an idea that can only be expressed in a drawing. Like his idea of the union with the soul could only be expressed in the poem, in the way he did it. The interesting thing about this drawing is that the perspective is very different. So it looks like you can see the cross from above, from the right side, right? So it's almost like it's the perspective of the Father looking at the Son when he died, because it's like the position of the body shows that Christ just died. In that sense, it's very, very striking and very different from anything from the time.
- [22:44]
John J. Miller
So everybody should look it up, go check out that image and see this vision of Christ from above at an angle, not directly above, but at an angle. It's like you're looking down on Christ, maybe from heaven, but certainly from above. And this little tiny illustration, because, as you say, it is very small in size, inspired one of the great artists of the 20th century, Salvador Dali, to create a painting that he called Christ of St. John of the Cross. That was in 1951. You gotta go to Glasgow to see it. It's in A museum in Scotland, of all places. But, Sylvina, what is this painting?
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Sylvina Cerrone
This painting represents, you know, Christ on the Cross, also from above, only there, you know, a. More. It's a very hard. It's hard to explain it with words because the perspective is not really from above, but it's. You cannot see his face as you see it from the top of the head down, and it's suspended over a bay. You can see on the bottom, there's a fishing village, which is the place where Dali lived. It's very striking. Very, very striking. And Salvador Dali is something that is very different from what Savado Ali was painting in general, because we tend to associate with, associate, to associate Salvador Dali with surrealism. And this is not a surrealist painting. It's much more akin to the paintings of Diego Velazquez and other paintings of the Baroque, which is, you know, the time of St. John of the Cross, too. Salvador Dali is a very interesting character. And in a sense, Salvador Dali is. Is a little bit of a summary of the 20th century, if you want, because he was born in 1904. He was born of a very rabid atheist father and a very Catholic mother. So even within the family there was this tensions that will eventually turn into war in Spain. He was. In his life, most of his life, he was not religious at all. And he shared, you know, this. This very deep dislike for the church and for priests, etc. In his old age, in a sense, he had, I wouldn't say a conversion. I don't know how to put it, but he started being more preoccupied with faith and with science and right in the 50s, we have to remember also this. All this, the atomic era, fear. He had gone as a child through the Spanish Civil War and the First World War and the Second World War. That's what I said. In a way, he's like a summary of the 20th century. And then at the end of his Life, in the 50s, he started being much more akin to the religious feeling and the religious culture of his early life.
- [25:48]
John J. Miller
And in 1951, he produced this painting, Christ of St. John of the Cross. He also painted the Last Supper, his version of the Last Supper, which you can see at the National Gallery in Washington, dc. We connect Salvador Dali softly, with surrealism, as you mentioned, you know, the melting clocks and this sort of thing. What is surrealism? I think of it as a kind of dreamy irrationalism. A lot of people use the word surreal nowadays to mean something merely offbeat or odd, but I associate it with a kind of crazed Dreamy irrationalism. So what is surrealism, and is there a connection between surrealism and mysticism? The mysticism of Saint John of the Cross, Surrealism, it's.
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Sylvina Cerrone
It's, you know, the main core. At the core, it's just they try. They try to depict the unconscious. So you're very close to it because it is, you know, the dreams are what brings the unconscious or the subconscious to. To our, you know, more conscious level. So we have to remember that this movement started in the 20s, which is roughly in the 20s, but it's a product of World War I and the shock to the system that it was for the whole of Europe. But also it's the times with psychoanalysis, it's coming up too. And the whole idea of that we have an unconscious mind, a subconscious mind, and there's a drive in there to our actions. So surrealism is trying to depict that world, trying to depict whatever is in the unconscious. So that's what is dreamy and connected to things that are not logical. And there's this irrational juxtaposition of images that don't belong together. And Salvador Dali was, you know, very, very was the protagonist of this movement for many, many years, but he ended up rejecting it at the end.
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John J. Miller
So it's interesting, the painting of Christ on the Cross by Dali was controversial when it first came out, right?
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Sylvina Cerrone
Yes. As a matter of fact, the controversy came mostly because it was too religious. Like people thought that he was going to. Into the conventional religious area, which he has not been to before. So they just thought it was a terrible painting. And even, like the art students of Glasgow, it was the Glasgow School of Art, they organized a demonstration against the museum in Glasgow buying that painting. So it might be one of the earliest examples of trying to cancel an artist, of cancel culture. Even back then.
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John J. Miller
I would hesitate to call this poem, Dark Night of the Soul, a surrealistic poem. That's an anachronism in certain ways, but it does have some surreal elements. Do you sense that as well? And is there a connection here with the idea of mysticism?
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Sylvina Cerrone
I think so. I think one of the. And that's why, even though when you look at the images, it would be hard to just figure out, oh, this is what inspires. But I think there's something in it that expresses something that happens outside of. Almost outside of the realm of time, or is time seen in another way. There is this sense that things are happening all at the same time, or that, you know, the crucifixion is not seen as a historical thing. But as something that is at the core of reality. Like it's at the center of this story that we're telling. So the story of this soul that is united with God and all these images of a night and of. Of things that seem to not be, almost seems to be like opposite of each other. Like. Right. Like light and darkness and this loneliness. But then the encounter. And then like you were saying a bit before, like the encounter look almost sounds like an oblivion, but it's not. We know that that's not what it. This is a transformation. So there is some element, I think of at least of the sensibilities of the surrealists, you know, what they were trying to look for. They were trying to look for something that is deeper in a sense that the real or the things that we perceive with our eyes. And they're there, very chronological. There's a line in a poem by T.S. eliot that says the steel point of the turning world. And for some reason this line reminds me of both the paintings of the drawing of St. John of the Cross and the painting of the leek. It's almost that they're showing that the cross is that still point of the turning world. Everything else seems to be moving around, but our center is Christ dying on the cross. Both the drawing of St. John of the Cross and Dalis painting are showing the cross as a center point of history and as the. Everything else moves around it. So that's in a sense, the change of perspective help us see that it's not just a historical thing, it's not just something that happened. Obviously it happens once, but it's not just that. It's like you have to see it almost from a 360 way of looking at things. And everything goes around that central point.
- [31:19]
John J. Miller
Let's wrap up with just a couple more questions. You're the leader of the Art for Evangelists community of the Word on Fire Institute, Silvina. What is Word on Fire? And then what is the Art for Evangelist community? How can our listeners learn more about all this?
- [31:40]
Sylvina Cerrone
Well, Word on Fire is a ministry started by Bishop Baron 25 years ago. So this is the 25th anniversary of that foundation. And the World on Fire Institute is trying to, you know, carry out that mission too. So they have this, you know, wonderful website. You can find it at institute.WordPress.org or RG. If you become a member of the Institute, you would receive, you know, the Journal. It's a quarterly journal. It's beautifully produced, beautifully printed. That is like a little treasure, you know, in itself. Then you can also with your you know, membership, you can also have access to this website of all the contents you have, you know, every digital production that has already been made by the World of Fire. It's there for you to watch. But you also have access to this area that is called the communities, where you have people that are specialized in different areas that guide these communities. And you can participate in the discussions and you can, you know, participate in live events and in teaching. So you have a writing community where you can learn to write. I mean, everything that you learn here is the aim is evangelization of the culture so that you have a writing community, theology community, art community, education community, educators community, and many more. So depending on what your interests are, you can be part of it and grow wherever the Lord is calling you.
- [33:26]
John J. Miller
Let's finish with a final question going back to the poem Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross. What's the case for reading it now? Maybe during Lent, but really any time of year. What's the case right now for reading this poem?
- [33:45]
Sylvina Cerrone
Well, I think despite the title, it's a poem that sparkles hope. You know, the Catholic Church celebrating the year of hope this year. So I've been thinking a lot about hope. Sometimes we associate hope with warm feelings, but in reality, hope is that certainty in the heart that we know what the end of the road is. So just as this poem is showing us from the end of the road how the journey is worth, because it's worth going through, even though it might be dark and hard and cold, just because, you know, we have to embrace that as part of the journey to the union with God.
- [34:31]
John J. Miller
Silvina Cerrone, thanks so much for joining us and telling us all about Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross.
- [34:39]
Sylvina Cerrone
Thank you so much.
- [34:40]
John J. Miller
You've just listened to the Great Books Podcast, a production of National Review. Please subscribe to the Great Books Podcast and leave reviews of the show that helps us keep this podcast going. Send me your ideas for future episodes. You can reach me through my website@heymiller.com on Twitter. My handle is hey Miller. Last of all, special thanks to all of you for listening. We'll be back next week the new episode of the Great Books Podcast.