CHAPTER IX

THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL
We return to a study of the mystical life-process—The swing-back from illumina- tion—The Dark Night—(r1) Its psychological character—A period of psychic fatigue— Reaction from the strain of mystical lucidity—The sorting-house of the spiritual life— Its on-set is gradual—Madame Guyon—A state of mental chaos—The transition to new levels of consciousness—Mystical adolescence—Psycho-spiritual parallelism— Augustine Baker—(2) Its mystical character—Takes many forms—Emotional, Intellectual, Volitional—A completion of Purgation—The final purification of self- hood—The passage from Luna to Sol—Always painful—Its principal forms—(a) The loss of the presence of God—St. John of the Cross—Madame Guyon—Extinction of the transcendental consciousness—(6) The acute sense of imperfection—St. John of the Cross—(c) Loss of mystic feeling—Spiritual ennui—Ruysbroeck—(d) Intellec- tual impotence—Loss of will-power—St. Teresa—(e) The pain of God, or dark ecstasy—St. Teresa—All these are aspects of one state—The purification of the whole Personality—An episode in character building—Essential to the attain- ment of Reality—William Law—Surrender—St. Catherine of Siena—Adaptation to environment—St. John of the Cross—A process beyond the selfs control—Self- naughting—Spiritual Poverty—Tauler—The Dark an incident of the movement to union—Its gradual disappearance—Madame Guyon—An ‘‘ example from life”— Suso—Reasons for this choice—His entrance on the night—The Vision of the Upper School—The Vision of Knighthood—His education in manliness—The ideal o. spiritual chivalry—The final trial—Its human characteristics—Suso and the Baby— The last crisis—The act of surrender—The passing of the Dark Night
N x i have wandered during the last few chapters from our study of the mystical life-process in man, the organic growth of his transcendental consciousness, in order to examine the by-products of that process, its cha- racteristic forms of self-expression: the development of its normal art of contemplation or introversion, and the visions and voices, ecstasies and raptures which are frequent—though not essential—accompaniments of its activity, of the ever-increasing predominance of its genius for the Real. But the mystic, like other persons of genius, is man first and
artist afterwards. We shall make a grave though common 453
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mistake if we forget this and allow ourselves to be deflected from our study of his growth in personality by the wonder and interest of his art. Being, not Doing, is the first aim of the mystic ; and hence should be the first interest of the student of mysticism. We have considered for convenience’ sake all the chief forms of mystical activity at the half-way house of the transcendental life: but these activities are not, of course, peculiar to any one stage of that life. Ecstasy, for instance, is as common a feature of mystical conversion as of the last crisis, or “mystic marriage” of the soul :! whilst visions and voices—in selves of a visionary or auditory type—accompany and illustrate every phase of the inward development. They lighten and explain the trials of Purgation as often as they express the joys of Illumination, and frequently mark the crisis of transition from one mystic state to the next. |
One exception, however, must be made to this rule. The most intense period of that great swing-back into darkness which usually divides the “first mystic life,” or Illuminative Way, from the “second mystic life,” or Unitive Way, is generally a period of utter blankness and stagnation, so far as mystical activity is concerned. The “Dark Night of the Soul,” once fully established, is seldom lit by visions or made homely by voices. It is of the essence of its miseries that the once-possessed power of orison or contemplation is now wholly lost. The self is tossed back from its hard won point of vantage. Impotence, blankness, solitude, are the epithets by which those immersed in this dark fire of purification describe their pains. It is this extraordinary episode in the life-history of the mystic type to which we have now come.
We have already noticed? the chief psychological cha- racteristics of all normal mystical development. We have seen that the essence of this development consists in the effort to establish a new equilibrium, to get, as it were, a firm foothold upon transcendent levels of reality; and that in its path towards this consummation the self experiences a series of oscillations between “states of pleasure” and “states of pain.” Put in another way it is an orderly movement of the whole consciousness towards higher centres, in which each intense and
t Vide supra, pp. 225-229, the cases of Suso and Pascal. * Pt. II. Cap. I.
THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL 455
progressive affirmation fatigues the immature transcendental powers, and is paid for by a negation ; either a swing-back of the whole consciousness, a stagnation of intellect, a reaction of the emotions, or an inhibition of the will.
Thus the exalted consciousness of Divine Perfection which the self acquired in its “mystical awakening” was balanced by a depressed and bitter consciousness of its own inherent imper- fection, and the clash of these two perceptions spurred it to that laborious effort of accommodation which constitutes the “ Purga- tive Way.” The renewed and ecstatic awareness of the Absolute which resulted, and which was the governing cha- racteristic of Illumination, brings with it of necessity its own proper negation: the awareness, that is to say, of the self’s continued separation from and incompatibility with that Absolute which it has perceived. During the time in which the illuminated consciousness is fu'ly established, the self, as a rule, is perfectly content : believing that in this sublime vision of Eternity, this intense and loving consciousness of God, it has reached the goal of its quest. Sooner or later, however, psychic fatigue sets in; the state of illumination begins to break up, the complementary negative consciousness appears, and shows itself as an overwhelming sense of darkness and deprivation. This sense is so deep and strong that it breaks all communica- | tion set up between the self and the Transcendent ; swamps its intuitions of Reality ; and plunges that self into the state of negation and unutterable misery which is called the Dark ° Night.
Now. we may look at the Dark Night, as at most other incidents of the Mystic Way, from two points of view: (1) We may see it, with the psychologist, as a moment in the history of mental development, governed by the more or less mechanical laws which so conveniently explain to him the psychic life . of man: or (2) with the mystic himself, we may see it in its spiritual aspect as contributing to the remaking of character, the growth of the “ New Man” ; his “transmutation in-God:”—--~
(1) Psychologically tombideréd, ‘the Dark Night is an ex- ample of the operation of the law of reaction from stress. It is a period of fatigue and lassitude following a period of sustained mystical activity. “It is one of the best established laws of the nervous system,” says Starbuck, “that it has
456 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
periods of exhaustion if exercised continuously in one direc- tion, and can only recuperate by having a period of rest.” ? However spiritual he may be, the mystic—so long as he is -in the body—cannot help using the machinery of his nervous ‘and cerebral system in the course of his adventures. His development, on its psychic side, consists in the taking over of this nervous machinery, the capture of its centres of conscious- ness, in the interests of his growing transcendental life. In so far, then, as this is so, that transcendental life will be partly conditioned by psychic necessities, will be amenable to the laws of reaction and of fatigue. Each great step forward will entail a period of lassitude and exhaustion in that men- tal machinery which he has pressed into service and probably overworked. When the higher centres have become exhausted under the great strain of a developed illuminated life, with its accompanying periods of intense lucidity, of deep con- templation, perhaps of visionary and auditory phenomena, the swing-back into the negative state occurs almost of necessity.
This is the psychological explanation of those strange and painful episodes in the lives of great saints, and also of lesser initiates of the spiritual sphere: when, perhaps after a long life passed in close contact with the transcendental order, of full and growing consciousness of the “presence of God,” the whole inner experience is suddenly swept away, and only a blind reliance on past convictions saves them — from unbelief? The great contemplatives, those destined to attain the full stature of the mystic, emerge from this period of destitution, however long and drastic it may be, as from a new purification. It is for them the gateway to a higher state. But persons of lesser genius cannot pass this way. If they enter the Night at all, it is to succumb to its dangers and pains. This “great negation” is the sorting-house of the spiritual life. Here we part from the “nature mystics,” the mystic poets, and all who shared in and were contented with the illuminated vision of reality. Those who go on are the great and strong spirits, who do not seek to &£xow, but are driven to de.
t ¢ Psychology of Religion,” p. 24.
* An example of this occurred in the later life of Ste. Jeanne Francoise de Chantal. See ‘‘ The Nuns of Port Royal,” by M. E. Lowndes (1909), p. 284.
THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL 457
We are to expect, then, as a part of the conditions under which human consciousness appears to work, that for every affirmation of the mystic life there will be a negation waiting for the unstable self. This rule is of universal application. The mystic’s progress in orison, for instance, is marked by just such an alternation of light and shade: of “dark con- templation”’ and sharp intuitions of Reality. So too in selves of extreme nervous instability, each separate joyous ecstasy entails a painful or negative ecstasy. The states of darkness and illumination coexist over a long period, alternating sharply and rapidly. Many seers and artists pay in this way, by agonizing periods of impotence and depression, for each violent outburst of creative energy.
The periods of rapid oscillation between a joyous and a painful consciousness occur most often at the beginning of a new period of the mystic way: between Purgation and _ IIlu- mination, and again between Illumination and the Dark Night: for these mental states are, as a rule, gradually not abruptly established. Mystics call such oscillations the “Game of Love” in which God plays, as it were, “hide and seek” with the questing soul. I have already quoted a characteristic instance from the life of Rulman Merswin,t who passed the whole intervening period between his conversion and entrance on the Dark Night or “school of suffering love” in such a “ state of disequilibrium. Thus too Madame Guyon, who has described at great length and with much elaboration of detail all her symptoms and sufferings during the oncoming and duration of the Night—or, as she calls its intensest period, the Mystic Death—traces its beginning in short recurrent states of pri- vation, or dullness of feeling, such as ascetic writers call “aridity”: in which the self loses all interest in and affec- tion for those divine realities which had previously filled its life. This privation followed upon, or was the reaction from, an “illuminated” period of extreme joy and security, in~ which, as she says, “the presence of God never left her for an instant” ; so that it seemed to her that she already enjoyed the Beatific Vision. “ But how dear I paid for this time of happiness ! For this possession, which seemed to me entire and perfect; and the more perfect the more it was secret, and foreign to the
* Vide supra, p. 274.
458 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
senses, steadfast and exempt from change; was but the pre- paration for a total deprivation, lasting many years, without any support or hope of its return.”! Between this state of happiness and the “total deprivation” or true “dark night” comes the intermediate condition of alternating light and darkness. As Madame Guyon never attempted to control any of her states, but made a point of conforming to her own description of the “resigned soul” as “God’s weather- cock,” we have in her an unequalled opportunity of studying the natural sequence of development.
“T endured,” she says, “long periods of privation, towards the end almost continual: but still I had from time to time inflowings of Thy Divinity so deep and _ intimate, so vivid and so penetrating, that it was easy for me to judge that Thou wast but hidden from me and not lost. For although ‘during the times of privation it seemed to me that I had utterly lost Thee, a certain deep support remained, though the soul knew it not: and she only became aware of that support by her subsequent total deprivation thereof. Every time that Thou didst return with more. goodness and strength, Thou didst return also with greater splendour; so that in a few hours Thou didst rebuild all the ruins of my unfaithfulness and didst make good to me with profusion all my loss. But it was not thus in those times of which I am going to speak.” 2
Here we have, from the psychological point of view, a singularly perfect example of the violent oscillations of con- sciousness on the threshold of a new state. The old equilibrium, the old grouping round a centre characterized by pleasure- affirmation has been lost; the new grouping round a centre characterized by pain-negation is not yet established. Madame Guyon is standing, or rather swinging, between two worlds, the helpless prey of her own shifting and uncontrollable psychic and spiritual states. But slowly the pendulum approaches its limit: the states of privation, as she says, “become almost continual,” the reactions to illumination become less and less. At last they cease entirely, the new state is established, and the Dark Night has really set in.
The theory here advanced that the “ Dark Night ” is, on its
* Vie, pt. i. cap. xx. * Op. cit., cap. xxi.
THE DARK NIGHT OF THE- SOUL 459
psychic side, partly a condition of fatigue, partly a state of transition, is borne out by the mental and moral disorder which seems, in many subjects, to be its dominant character. When they are in it everything seems to “go wrong” with them. They are tormented by evil thoughts and abrupt temptations, lose grasp not only of their spiritual but also of their worldly affairs. Their health often suffers, they become “odd” and their friends forsake them ; their intellectual life is ata low ebb. In their own words “trials of every kind,” “exterior and interior crosses,” abound,
Now “trials,” taken ex 4/oc, mean a disharmony between the self and the world with which it has to deal. Nothing is a trial when we are able to cope with it efficiently. Things try us when we are not adequate to them: when they are abnormally hard or we abnormally weak. This aspect of the matter becomes prominent when we look further into the history of Madame Guyon’s experiences. Thanks to the unctuous and detailed manner in which she has analyzed her spiritual griefs, this part of her autobiography is a psychological document of unique importance for the study of the “ Dark Night.”
As her consciousness of God was gradually extinguished, a sort of mental and moral chaos seems to have invaded Madame Guyon, and to have accompanied the more spiritual destitution and miseries of her state. “So soon as I perceived the happiness of any state, or its beauty, or the necessity of a virtue, it seemed to me that I fell incessantly into the contrary vice: as if this perception, which though very rapid was always accompanied by love, were only given to me that I might experience its opposite, in a manner which was all the more terrible because of the horror which I still felt for it. It was then, O my God, that the evil which I hated, that I did: and the good which I loved, that I did not.t I was given an intense perception of the purity of God; and so far as my feelings went, I became more and more impure: for in reality this state is very purifying, but I was then very far from understanding this. . . . My imagination was in a state of appalling confusion, and gave me no rest. I could not speak of Thee, oh my God, for I became utterly stupid; nor could I even grasp what was
* Apparently Romans vii. 15, paraphrase; Madame Guyon’s quotations of Scripture seldom agree with the Vulgate.
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said when I heard Thee spoken of. Instead of that heavenly peace in which my soul had been as it were confirmed and established, there was nothing but the sorrow of hell.... 1 found myself hard towards God, insensible to His mercies; I could not perceive any good thing that I had done in my whole life. The good appeared to me evil; and—that which is terrible—it seemed to me that this state must last for ever. For I did not believe it to be a state, but a true falling away. For if I had been able to believe that it was a state, or that it was necessary or agreeable to God, I should not have suffered from it at all.”
In the midst of all this wretchedness she felt, she says, that this world as well as the next was now leagued against her. “ External crosses” of every kind, loss of health and friendship, domestic vexations, increased and kept pace with her interior griefs. Self-control and power of attention were diminished. She seemed stupefied and impotent, unable to follow or understand even the services of the Church, in- capable of all orison and all good works; perpetually attracted by those worldly things which she had renounced, yet quickly wearied by them. The neat edifice of her first mystic life was in ruins, the state of consciousness which accompanied it was disintegrated, but nothing arose to take its place.
“Tt is an amazing thing,” says Madame Guyon naively, “ for a soul that believed herself to be advanced in the way of perfection, when she sees herself thus go to pieces all at once.” 2
So, too, Suso, when he had entered the “ upper school ” of the spiritual life, was tormented not only by temptations and desolations, but by outward trials and disabilities of every kind: calumnies, misunderstanding, difficulties, pains. “It seemed at this time as if God had given permission both to men and demons to torment the Servitor,” he says.3 This sense of a generally inimical atmosphere, and of the dimness and heipless- ness of the Ego oppressed by circumstance, is like the vague distress and nervous sensibility of adolescence, and comes in part from the same cause: the intervening period of chaos between the break-up of an old state of equilibrium and the establishment of the new. The self in its necessary movement
® Of. ctt., cap. Xxill. ? ** Les Torrents,” pt. i. cap. vii. § 2. 3 Leben, cap. xxii.
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THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL 461
towards higher levels of reality, loses and leaves behind certain elements of its world, long loved but now outgrown: as children must make the hard transition from nursery to school. Destruc- tion and construction here go together: the exhaustion and ruin of the illuminated consciousness is the signal for the onward movement of the self towards other centres: the feeling of deprivation and inadequacy which comes from the loss of that consciousness, is an indirect stimulus to new growth. The self is being pushed into a new world where it does not feel at home; has not yet reached the point at which it enters into conscious possession of its second, or adult life.
“Thou hast been a child at the breast, a spoiled child,” said the Eternal Wisdom to Suso. “Now I will withdraw all this.” In the resulting darkness and confusion, when the old and known supports are thus withdrawn, the self can do little but surrender itself to the inevitable process of things: to the opera- tion of that unresting Spirit of Life which is pressing it on towards a new and higher state, in which it shall not only see Reality but de real. |
Psychologically, then, the “ Dark Night of the Soul” is due to the double fact of the exhaustion of an old state, and the growth towards a new state of consciousness, It is a “ growing pain” in the great organic process of the self’s attainment of the Absolute. The great mystics, creative geniuses in the realm of character, have known instinctively how to turn these psychic disturbances to spiritual profit. Parallel with the mental oscillations, upheavals and readjustments, through which an unstable psycho-physical type moves to new centres of con- sciousness, run the spiritual oscillations of a striving and ascend- ing spiritual type. Gyrans gyrando vadit spiritus. The * machinery of consciousness, over-stretched, breaks up, and - seems to toss the self back to an old and lower level, where it loses its apprehensions of the transcendental world; as the child, when first it is forced to stand alone, feels weaker than it did in its mother’s arms.
“For first He not only withdraws all comfortable observable infusions of light and grace, but also deprives her of a power to exercise any perceptible operations of her superior spirit and of all comfortable reflections upon His love, plunging her into the depth of her inferior powers,” says Augustine Baker, the skilled
462 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
director of souls, here anticipating the modern psychologist. “Here consequently,” he continues, “her former calmness of passions is quite lost, neither can she introvert herself; sinful motions and suggestions do violently assault her, and she finds as great difficulty (if not greater) to surmount them as at the beginning of a spiritual course. .. . If she would elevate her spirit, she sees nothing but clouds and darkness. She seeks God, and cannot find the least marks or footsteps of His Presence ; something there is that hinders her from executing _ the sinful suggestions within her, but what that is she knows not, for to her thinking she has no spirit at all, and, indeed, she is now in a region of all other most distant from spirit and spiritual operations—I mean, such as are perceptible.” ! Such an interval of chaos and misery may last for months,
-or even for years, before the consciousness again unifies itself
and a new centre is formed. Moreover, the negative side of this new centre, this new consciousness of the Absolute, often discloses itself first. The self realizes, that is to say, the inadequacy of its old state, long before it grasps the possibility of a new and higher state. This realization will take two forms: (a) Objective: the distance or absence of the Absolute which the self seeks; (4) Subjective: the self’s weakness and imper- fection. Both apprehensions constitute a direct incentive to action. They present, as it were, a Divine Negation which the self must probe, combat, resolve.
The Dark Night, therefore, largely the product of natural causes, is the producer in its turn of mystical energy; and hence of supernatural effects.
(2) So much for psychology. We now turn from a con- sideration of purely psychic processes to study the mystical or transcendental aspects of the Dark Night: to see what it has meant for those mystics who have endured it, and for those spiritual specialists who have studied it in the interests of other men.
As in other departments of mystical activity, so here, we must beware of any generalization which tempts us to look upon the “Dark Night” as a uniform experience, a neatly-defined — state which appears under the same conditions, and attended by the same symptoms, in all the selves who have passed
* «Holy Wisdom,” Treatise iii. § iv. cap. v.
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through its pains. It is a name for the painful and negative state which normally intervenes between the Illuminative and the Unitive Life—no more. Different types of contemplatives have interpreted it to themselves and to us in very different ways; each type of illumination being in fact balanced by its own appropriate type of “dark.”
In some temperaments it is the emotional aspect—the anguish of the lover who has suddenly lost the Beloved—which predominates : in others, the intellectual darkness and confusion overwhelms everything else. Some have felt it, with Madame Guyon and St. John of the Cross, as a “passive purification,” a state of limp misery, in which the self does nothing, but lets Life have its way with her. Others, with Suso and the virile mysticism of the German school, have put a more manly inter- pretation on its pains; finding in it a period of strenuous activity running counter to all the inclinations of the naturai man. Those elements of character which were unaffected by the first purification of the self—left as it were in a corner when the consciousness moved to the level of the illuminated life— are here roused from their sleep, purged of illusion, and forced to join the growing stream ; the “torrent” in Madame Guyon’s imagery, which sets towards the Infinite Sea.
The Dark Night, then, is really a deeply human process, in which the self which thought itself so spiritual, so firmly estab- lished upon the supersensual plane, is forced to turn back, to leave the Light, and pick up those qualities which it had left behind. Only thus, by the transmutation of the whole man, not by a careful and departmental cultivation of that which we like to call his “spiritual” side, can Divine Humanity be formed: and the formation of Divine Humanity—the remaking of man “according to the pattern showed him in the mount ”—is the -mystic’s only certain ladder to the Real. “My humanity,” said the Eternal Wisdom to Suso, “is the road which all must tread who would come to that which thou seekest.”! This “hard saying” might almost be used as a test by which to distinguish the true and valid mystical activity of man from its many and specious imitations. The self in its first purgation has cleansed the mirror of perception; hence, in its illuminated life, has seen Reality. In so doing it has transcended the normal perceptive
* “© Buchlein von der ewigen Weisheit,” cap. ii.
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powers of “natural” man, immersed in the illusions of sense. Now, it has got to Je reality: a very different thing. For this, a new and more drastic purgation is needed—not of the organs of perception, but of the very shrine of self: that “heart” which is the seat of personality, the source of its love and will. In the stress and anguish of the Night, when it turns back from the vision of the Infinite to feel again the limitations of the finite, the self loses the power to Do; and learns to surrender its will to the operation of a larger Life, that it may Be. As the alchemist, when he has found Luna, or Silver, is not con- tent, but tosses it back into the crucible in order that he may complete the “great work” and transmute it into Philosophic Gold: so that Indwelling Spirit which is the Artist of man’s destinies, labouring at his transmutation from unreal to real, tosses back the illuminated self into the melting-pot that it may become the raw material of Divine Humanity, the “ noble stone.”
We must remember, in the midst of this cold-blooded analysis, that the mystic life is a life of love: that the Object of the mystic’s final quest and of his constant intuition is an object of wild adoration and supreme desire. “With Thee a prison would be a rose garden, oh Thou ravisher of hearts: with Thee Hell would be Paradise, oh Thou cheerer of souls,” said Jalalu ’d ‘Din.t | Hence forthe mystic who has-once known the Beatific Vision, there can be no greater grief than the with- drawal of this Object from his field of consciousness; the loss of this companionship, the extinction of this Light. Therefore, whatever form the “Dark Night” assumes, it must entail bitter suffering: far worse than that endured in the Purgative Way. Then the self was forcibly detached from the imperfect. Now ’ the Perfect is withdrawn, leaving behind an overwhelming yet ‘ impotent conviction of something supremely wrong, some final Treasure lost. We will now look at a few of the characteristic forms under which this conviction is translated to the surface- consciousness.
A. To those temperaments in which consciousness of the Absolute took the form of a sense of divine companionship, and for whom the objective idea “God” had become the central fact | of life, it seems as though that God, having shown Himself, has
* From the “‘ Mesnevi.” Quoted in the Appendix to ‘The Flowers or Rose Garden of Sadi.”
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now deliberately withdrawn His Presence, never perhaps to manifest Himself again. “ He acts,” says Eckhart, “as if there were a wall erected between Him and us.”! The “eye which looked upon Eternity ” has closed, the old dear sense of intimacy and mutual love has given place to a terrible blank.
“The greatest affliction of the sorrowful soul in this state,” says St. John of the Cross, “is the thought that God has abandoned it, of which tt has no doubt; that He has cast it away into dark- ness as an abominable thing ... the shadow of death and the pains and torments of hell are most acutely felt, that is, the sense of being without God, being chastised and abandoned in His wrath and heavy displeasure. All this and even more the soul feels now, for a fearful apprehension has come upon it that . thus it will be with it for ever. It has also the same sense of abandonment with respect to all creatures and that it is an object of contempt to all, especially to its friends.” 2
So, too, Madame Guyon felt this loss of her intuitive appre- hension of God as one of the most terrible characteristics of the “night.” “After Thou hadst wounded me so deeply as I have described, Thou didst begin, oh my God, to withdraw Thyself from me: and the pain of Thy absence was the more bitter to me, because Thy presence had been so sweet to me, Thy love so strong in me.... That which persuaded me, oh my God, that 1 had lost Thy love, was that instead of finding new strength in that strong and penetrating love, I had become more feeble and more impotent ... for I knew not then what it is to lose one’s own strength that we may enter into the strength of God. I have only learned this by a terrible and long experi- ence... . Thy way, oh my God, before Thou didst make me enter into the state of death, was the way of the dying life: sometimes to hide Thyself and leave me to myself in a hundred - weaknesses, sometimes to show Thyself with more sweetness and love. The nearer the soul drew to the state of death, the more her desolations were long and weary, her weaknesses increased, and aiso her joys became shorter, but purer and more intimate, until the time in which she fell into total privation,” 3
* Meister Eckhart, pred. lvii. So too St. Gertrude in one of her symbolic visions saw a thick hedge erected between herself and Christ. ? “*Noche Escura del Alma’’ (Lewis’s translation), 1. ii. cap. vi. 3 Vie, pt. i, cap. Xxill. HH ; . '
466 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
When this total privation, this “mystic death,” as Madame Guyon calls it—describing its episodes with much imagery of a macabre and even revolting type—is fully established it involves not only the personal “Absence of God,” but the apparent withdrawal or loss of that impersonal support, that transcen- dent Ground or spark of the soul, on which the self has long felt its whole real life to be based. Hence, its last medium of - contact with the spiritual world is broken; and: as regards all — that matters, it does indeed seem to be “dead.” “That Some- — what which supports us in our ground is that which it costs us most to lose, and which the soul struggles with most violence to retain: because, the more delicate it is, the more divine and necessary it appears. .. . For what else does a soul desire in her labours, but to have this witness in her ground that she is a child of God? And the goal of all spirituality is this experience. Nevertheless, she must lose this with the rest ... and this is what works the true ‘death of the soul,’ for whatever miseries she might have, if this Somewhat in which the soul’s life consists were not lost, she would be able to support herself and never die. ... It is then the loss of this imperceptible thing, and the experience of this destitution, which causes the ‘death.’”+ Contact, that is to say, between consciousness and the “spark | of the soul” is here broken off: and the transcendental faculties retreating to their old place “below the threshold,” are “dead” so far as the surface-mind is concerned.
B. In those selves for whom the subjective idea “ Sanctity” —the need of conformity between the individual character and the Transcendent—has been central, the pain of the Night is less a deprivation than a new and dreadful kind of lucidity. The vision of the Good brings to the self an abrupt sense of her own hopeless and helpless imperfection: a black “convic- tion of sin,’ far more bitter than that endured in the Way of Purgation, which swamps everything else. “That which makes her pain so terrible is that she is, as it were, overwhelmed by the purity of God, and this purity makes her see the least atoms of her imperfections as if they were enormous sins, because of the infinite distance there is between the purity of God and the -creature.” 2
* “Les Torrents,” pt. i. cap. vii. * Madame Guyon, of. cé¢., pt. i. cap. vii.
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“This,” says St. John of the Cross again, “is one of the chief sufferings of this purgation. The soul is conscious of a profound emptiness, and destitution of the three kinds of goods, natural, temporal, and spiritual, which are ordained for its comfort ; it sees itself in the midst of the opposite evils, miserable imperfections and aridities, emptiness of the under- standing and abandonment of the spirit in darkness.” !