A storybook in 7 pages
A 16th-century Spanish friar wrote of a 'dark night' in which comfort is stripped away so the soul can love without expecting anything back. His phrase has since drifted far from what he meant by it.
In 1577, opponents within his own religious order imprisoned John of the Cross in a cramped monastery cell in Toledo, Spain, for helping lead a reform they resisted. He was held for roughly nine months, in near darkness, with little food. He was thirty-five years old.
With nothing to write with, John composed poetry in his cell and held it in memory. The poem later called 'Dark Night of the Soul' was written there, or very soon after he escaped in 1578. He spent years afterward writing prose commentary explaining, almost line by line, what the poem meant.
In his account, the first and milder stage is the night of the senses: the comfort a person used to feel in prayer and devotion simply stops coming. He wrote this as the ordinary beginning of a deeper maturity, not a punishment, the soul being weaned off pleasures it had mistaken for the point.
The second, harsher stage strips something further: the intellect and will themselves, the deeper faculties a person leans on for meaning and certainty. John described this as the harder passage, closer to true union, and far less common: most people, in his account, never go past the first night at all.
John insisted the dark night is not God withdrawing. It only feels that way because the felt, familiar senses of comfort can't perceive what's actually a deeper closeness. Within his account, the night is not exile: it's a harder, more demanding form of nearness than the soul has felt before.
The phrase now covers almost any hard stretch of life: grief, burnout, a bad year, with no prayer or faith required. That's a different meaning from John's, and worth knowing apart from it: what he described is a stage inside a specific spiritual discipline, not a diagnosis. Low mood that doesn't lift is a medical matter, and worth raising with a doctor.
John's own night ended: in a cell, then in writing, then in the ordinary rest of his life. He never described the darkness as the last word, only a passage through. Four centuries on, his phrase is used more loosely than he used it. What he actually wrote was quieter than the phrase became.