Dark Night of the Soul is a treatise by John of the Cross, a sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite friar, written as a commentary on his own eight-stanza poem that begins “On a dark night.” It continues the argument of his earlier work, the Ascent of Mount Carmel. The book describes a stage in contemplative life that John calls the “dark night”: a period in which the consolations and the felt sense of God’s presence that marked earlier prayer fall away, leaving the person in dryness and apparent abandonment. John treats this not as a failure but as a purification that God works in the soul to free it from attachment to its own feelings and ideas about God.
The treatise is divided into two parts. The first, the “night of the senses,” addresses beginners and the loss of sensory consolation in prayer. The second, the “night of the spirit,” is described as deeper and more difficult, purifying the intellect, memory, and will so the soul can move toward union with God. John writes as both a theologian and a poet, and the prose stays close to the imagery of the poem. The work was composed in the late sixteenth century, circulated in manuscript, and first printed in 1618, after his death. The commentary is unfinished and breaks off before expounding all eight stanzas. The phrase “dark night of the soul” has since passed into general English usage to describe a period of spiritual or psychological crisis, often detached from John’s specific theological meaning.
Oh, night that guided me, Oh, night more lovely than the dawn, Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover, Lover transformed in the Beloved!
Stanzas of the Soul, stanza 5
First lines
On a dark night, kindled in love with yearnings—oh, happy chance!—I went forth without being observed, my house being now at rest.
Contents
Stanzas of the Soul (the eight-stanza poem)
Book One — The Passive Night of the Senses (Chapters I–XIV)
Book Two — The Passive Night of the Spirit (Chapters I–XXIV)
Reception
John of the Cross was canonized in 1726 and named a Doctor of the Church in 1926, and Dark Night of the Soul is counted among the central texts of Western Christian mysticism, alongside his Ascent of Mount Carmel and Spiritual Canticle. E. Allison Peers’s English translation, first published in 1922 and later reissued by Image Books, made the work widely available to twentieth-century readers; on Goodreads the Peers edition holds an average rating around 4.2 across more than eleven thousand ratings. Scholars note that the treatise is unfinished, the commentary stopping before all eight stanzas of the poem are expounded. Its influence reaches beyond Catholic devotional reading: the phrase “dark night of the soul” is now used broadly in psychology and popular culture, a usage that commentators often distinguish from John’s narrower account of a God-initiated purification.
Frequently asked
What is the “dark night of the soul”?
In John of the Cross’s treatise it is a stage of contemplative life in which the felt sense of God’s presence and the consolations of earlier prayer fall away, leaving dryness and a sense of abandonment. John presents it as a purification that frees the soul from attachment to its own feelings and concepts, not as a loss of faith.
Is Dark Night of the Soul a poem or a prose work?
Both. John first wrote an eight-stanza poem beginning “On a dark night,” then wrote a prose commentary explaining it line by line. The commentary is unfinished and stops before treating all the stanzas. The treatise continues themes from his earlier work, the Ascent of Mount Carmel.
When was it written and who translated the common English edition?
It was composed in the late sixteenth century, circulated in manuscript, and first printed in 1618 after John’s death. The widely read English translation is by E. Allison Peers, first published in 1922 and later reissued by Image Books.