22 pages • 44 minutes read
John of the CrossDark Night of the Soul
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1583A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Function of the Soul
The dominant figure in St. John of the Cross’s allegory of salvation is the soul that acts on its own initiative to head toward the redeeming energy of God. In an era where the word “soul” has expanded to mean everything from a genre of rhythm and blues music to a kind of vague Jiminy Cricket-like conscience, John’s poem offers a very precise and doctrinally approved conception of the purpose of the soul. The soul searches out the radiant energy of God.
The soul’s purpose is that unerring need to fuse with the power of God’s love. The soul ultimately rejects the distractions of the flesh—love, power, happiness, material satisfactions—and pursues the moment of reclaiming God. The poet within this allegory sees the soul as a light that guides a person through the darkest moments of life and that directs the pilgrim Christian to the energy of God’s love. The soul then is not part of the Christian person, like some loosely understood vestigial organ. Rather, it is its own energy, its own reality, ready at the very moment when the person feels most separated from God to assert the reality of union with that same God that can seem so distant and indifferent.
The Power of God’s Love
The description the poem offers of the moment of union with God is rendered in a way that suggests the union is overwhelming, the feeling of annihilation and surrender complete, with every physical sensation shorted out. God’s gentle hand violently yet lovingly wipes out the speaker’s ability to feel. The self, however, is a faulty form liable to the temptations of sin and to the inevitable erosion over time. Giving that flawed and imperfect self happily and entirely and freely to the perfection of God’s unconditional love is the highest expression of the soul.
God’s love represents gentle destruction. The speaker uses an oxymoron—that is, a phrase that seems contradictory, even impossible, and yet is accurate—when he states that “[God] struck [him] on the neck / With His gentle hand” (Lines 33-34, emphasis added). Gently God’s love destroys the self with its ego-centric assumptions about its place within the cosmic frame. God’s love levels the ego and renders pride itself ironic. Submit, the poet says, to ravishment, submit to the joyful dependency of being the object of God’s possessive and satisfying love. It is a kind of death, sweet and total, through which the radiant energy of God’s love is felt. That condition of oblivion, losing completely the anchorage in the sorry frame of the body, allows the soul finally to feel the deepest affirmation of God’s love, the moment the speaker acknowledges he “threw all [his] cares away” (Line 40). God’s love then is expressed in terms of power and domination, albeit gently and compassionately. The soul is destroyed to be saved.
The Challenge of Woes
The poem presupposes that life itself is a difficult and painful pilgrimage, a journey through increasingly dark moments that make forsaking God and abandoning faith not only possible but logical.
The poem sets its vision of the soul’s salvation within the perception of the reality of life’s troubles, large and small. Church historians believe that the draft of the poem was composed during John’s imprisonment by his own Order not for any transgressions or sins but rather because he was deemed too pure, too focused on God’s will, and too uncompromising in his faith. For this he was chained to a prison wall for days on end, starved, humiliated, brought out, in chains, only to be flogged before other members of the Order, the order he founded, as an exemplum, ironically, of the danger of absolute faith. That dark night stretched for months, testing John’s faith, the strength of his commitment to a God that seemed so suddenly, so absolutely absent.
Far from it, John argues. For John, that suffering, the night itself, is the surest, most reliable protocol for purification of the soul, ensuring that the soul does not, cannot fall into the trap of finding the earth too comfortable, the world too reliable. It is his “happy lot” (Lines 3, 8) that he should feel so tested. The power of such woes actually (and paradoxically) comfort because they assure the soul never fails in its devotion to finding union with God who, in such darkness, is far closer than imagined.
