A Phrase Everyone Uses, Few Understand
“Dark night of the soul” has entered common language as a synonym for any period of spiritual suffering — depression, doubt, loss of faith, existential crisis. People use it casually. “I’m going through a dark night of the soul” can mean anything from genuine spiritual anguish to a bad week at work.
But the phrase comes from a specific saint — St John of the Cross, a sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite mystic — and it means something very precise. Understanding what he actually taught changes the phrase from a vague expression of misery into one of the most hopeful ideas in Catholic spirituality.
Who Was John of the Cross?
Juan de la Cruz was born in 1542 in Castile, Spain. He entered the Carmelite order as a young man and, together with St Teresa of Avila, undertook the reform of the order — returning it to its original austerity and contemplative focus. For this he was imprisoned by his own brother Carmelites. He spent nine months in a tiny cell in Toledo, beaten regularly, half-starved, with no light except what crept under the door.
It was in that cell — or shortly after his dramatic escape from it — that he composed some of the greatest poetry in the Spanish language, and began the prose commentaries that would become his masterworks: The Dark Night of the Soul, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, The Spiritual Canticle, and The Living Flame of Love.
He was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1926. His feast day is 14 December.
What the Dark Night Is Not
The dark night is not depression, though it may feel like it. Depression is an illness — a disorder of brain chemistry and psychology. The dark night is a spiritual process initiated by God. Depression drains meaning from everything. The dark night strips away false sources of meaning so that the true source — God Himself — can be found.
The dark night is not a punishment for sin. It does not come because you have done something wrong. It comes because you have been doing something right — praying faithfully, seeking God sincerely — and God is taking you deeper.
The dark night is not a loss of faith, though it may feel indistinguishable from one. The person in the dark night still believes. They still pray. They still go to Mass. But they feel nothing — no consolation, no warmth, no sense of God’s presence. The faith is there. The feeling is gone.
What the Dark Night Actually Is
John of the Cross describes two dark nights. The first is the dark night of the senses. The second, deeper and more painful, is the dark night of the spirit.
The dark night of the senses happens when God withdraws the consolations that accompanied your early prayer life. When you first began to pray seriously, you probably experienced some sweetness — a sense of God’s closeness, a delight in Scripture, a warmth during Mass. The dark night of the senses is when all of that stops.
Prayer becomes dry. Mass feels empty. Scripture reads like a telephone directory. You sit down to pray and nothing happens. You wonder if you are wasting your time. You wonder if God is listening. You wonder if He was ever there at all.
John says this is not abandonment. It is weaning. God is withdrawing the spiritual milk so that you can learn to eat solid food. As long as your prayer life depends on feeling — on consolation, on emotional satisfaction — it is still about you. The dark night of the senses breaks that dependency. It forces you to pray not for what you get out of it but for God alone.
The dark night of the spirit goes deeper. Here, God seems not merely absent but hostile. The soul feels not just dry but empty — stripped of every certainty, every comfort, every sense of its own goodness. You may feel that you are a fraud, that your entire spiritual life has been self-deception, that God has abandoned you or never existed.
John insists that this too is a gift — the most painful and the most transformative. God is burning away everything in the soul that is not Him. Self-love, spiritual pride, attachment to consolation, subtle reliance on your own efforts — all of it must go. The dark night of the spirit is the furnace that purifies gold.
How to Know If You Are in One
John of the Cross gives three signs that distinguish the dark night from ordinary laziness or spiritual decline.
First, you find no satisfaction in anything — not in prayer, not in worldly pleasures, not in anything at all. If you were simply losing interest in God and turning to other things for satisfaction, that would be regression, not the dark night. But if nothing satisfies — if the world is as empty as prayer — that is a sign.
Second, you are anxious about God. You worry that you are not serving Him. You fear that you have fallen away. This anxiety is itself evidence that you have not fallen away. A person who has genuinely abandoned God does not lie awake worrying about it.
Third, you cannot meditate as you used to. The imagination will not cooperate. You sit down to picture a scene from the Gospels and your mind goes blank. This is not distraction in the ordinary sense. It is a deeper shift — God is moving you from meditation (which uses the imagination) to contemplation (which does not). The old tools no longer work because you are being given new ones.
What to Do in the Dark Night
John’s advice is counterintuitive: do nothing. Or rather, do less.
Do not try to force consolation. Do not pile on more prayers, more devotions, more spiritual reading in an attempt to recover what you have lost. That is like trying to fall asleep by trying harder — it makes things worse.
Instead, sit quietly in God’s presence. You will feel nothing. That is fine. Be there anyway. Let the darkness be. Do not fight it and do not flee from it. The darkness is doing something you cannot see and cannot feel. Trust the process.
Continue the basics: go to Mass, go to Confession, say your daily prayers. But let them be simple. A short prayer, honestly said, is worth more in the dark night than an hour of anxious devotion.
And talk to someone — a spiritual director, a priest, a wise friend. The dark night can be confused with depression, and discernment matters. If you are also experiencing hopelessness, loss of appetite, inability to function, or thoughts of self-harm, you may need medical help alongside spiritual guidance. The two are not mutually exclusive. God works through doctors as well as through darkness.
Why It Is Good News
Here is the paradox at the heart of John’s teaching: the dark night is one of the best things that can happen to a soul. It feels like loss. It is actually gain. It feels like God withdrawing. It is actually God drawing closer — so close that the old ways of sensing Him no longer work, the way you cannot see the sun when you are standing inside it.
The dark night purifies. It strips away everything that is not God so that only God remains. And when it is over — when the dawn comes, as John promises it will — the soul finds itself in a union with God deeper and more real than anything the old consolations ever offered.
“In the dark night,” John wrote, “the soul travels securely, because it travels in the dark.” The darkness is not the absence of God. It is the presence of God, experienced in a way the senses cannot process and the mind cannot comprehend.
If you are in the dark night, you are not lost. You are further along than you think. And the One who brought you into the darkness is the same One who will bring you through it.