Read Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) Online
Authors: Craig Koslofsky
Scholars agree that the actual experience of the physical night shaped profoundly the development and expression of John’s mystic theology.
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In fact two very different aspects of John’s relationship
to the night emerge in his biography. Reports of his appreciation of serene nocturnal devotion (both in church before the tabernacle and outside, under the stars) contrast with the darkness of his abduction, captivity, and escape from a prison cell in the monastery of his brother Carmelites in Toledo. John’s references to “the tranquil night, / at the time of the rising of the dawn, / the silent music and sounding solitude” reflect the many accounts of his excursions outside in the middle of the night with his companions to pray and observe the beauty of the heavens, as well as many nights spent in solitary prayer.
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In violent contrast, his abduction on the night of December 2, 1577 began nine months of imprisonment in a nearly lightless cell in the fortress-like Carmelite monastery in Toledo. The period of hope and despair ended with John’s daring escape on an August night in 1578. John processed the Toledo experience in several ways, writing of the sense of being kidnapped and led away in the dark, of the dark nights of imprisonment with their attendant spiritual sorrows and joys, and of the liberation of the night of August 15–16. We can examine each in turn.
By the late 1570s the movement to reform the Carmelite order led by Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross met with increasing hostility from the unreformed (“Calced”) friars. The seizure of John by Calced fathers and armed men in Avila on the night of December 2, 1577 was not the first such abduction: in early 1576 John and another reformed Carmelite friar were taken from Avila to Medina del Campo by force at the instigation of the prior of the Calced friars in Avila. The two men were released after a short time – perhaps a few days. This first abduction may be reflected in one of his earliest poems, “I entered in – I knew not where,” dated prior to his imprisonment in Toledo. This work speaks of a “cloud of unknowing” with the power to illuminate: “however darksome was its shroud / It illuminated all the gloomy night.”
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John might have encountered this sense of “the darkness that illuminates” in a range of authors from Denys the Areopagite to Francisco de Osuna, as discussed above in
chapter 1
.
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The abduction in December 1577 led to a much longer imprisonment. All accounts of John’s cell in the Calced Carmelite monastery
in Toledo stress its darkness, lit by one narrow window high above. Physical darkness, combined with the psychological pressures exerted by the unreformed Carmelites who were his jailors, informed the works John composed there and shortly after his escape. His prison works include the poems “For I Know Well the Spring” (with its refrain “Although it is the night”), the first thirty-one stanzas of
The Spiritual Canticle
, and the
Romances
. The poem “Dark Night” was written just after his nocturnal escape.
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In eight stanzas “Dark Night” presents an account of John’s escape through the words of a secular love poem. These verses also served to describe, as John explained, “the method followed by the soul in its journey upon the spiritual road to the attainment of the perfect union with God, to the extent that it is possible in this life.”
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The first five stanzas narrate a nocturnal flight that unites beloved and lover:
These and other poems from the Toledo period were revised and expanded in the following years, then glossed by John in extensive prose commentaries for the benefit of reformed Carmelite nuns and monks. In these commentaries John became the theologian of his own experience of the night. His encounter with darkness, real and spiritual, led to a deep engagement with the night, expressed in this series of devotional writings and practices. John built his theology upon a set of terms, especially the “dark night of the soul” and the “dark night of the spirit,” which resonate with the ascetic, apophatic, and mystic metaphors of the night articulated across early modern Europe in this period.
This engagement emerges in the two separate commentaries on the poem “Dark Night” written by John:
The Ascent of Mount Carmel
(1579–85) and
Dark Night of the Soul
(1582–85). In these complementary treatises John consolidated and refined his new use of the night as
Ursymbol
for the mystic path to union with God. The Spanish Carmelite introduced
Ascent of Mount Carmel
by outlining its use of the metaphor of night: “We may say that there are three reasons for which this journey made by the soul to union with God is called night.” First, John notes that “denial and deprivation are, as it were, night to all the desires and senses of man.” Second, faith, “the road along which the soul must travel to this union” is called “as dark as night to the understanding.” Third, the destination of the soul’s journey is “God, who, equally, is dark night to the soul in this life.”
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John’s works consistently outline a threefold night: an ascetic night of purgation, an inexpressible or apophatic night, and a mystic union with God likened to the night. John elaborated this tripartite metaphor by aligning it with the lived experience of the actual night:
These three parts of the night are all one night; but, after the manner of night, it has three parts. For the first part, which is that of sense, is comparable to the beginning of the night, the point at which things begin to fade from sight. And the second part, which is faith, is comparable to midnight, which is total darkness. And the third part is like the close of night, which is God, the part which is now near to the light of day.
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In this metaphor the first part of the night, the “dark night of the soul” or “dark night of the senses,” purges the soul of its connection to the worldly aspects of devotion. In John’s experience, this could be devastating.
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The second part of the night metaphor, the dark night of the spirit, is described by John as even more profound and disturbing than the night of the senses. That dark night of the spirit, “total darkness,” serves to separate the soul from its own memory, reason, and desire so that it can be united with God.
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The third part of this night is the mystic union of the soul and the Divine. To apply the night metaphor to the mystic path, John brought together the devotional, metaphorical, and mystical uses of the night in the Christian tradition. He retained the traditional mystic sequence (
purgatio
,
illuminatio
,
unio
)
in the commentaries
Ascent of Mount Carmel
and
Dark Night of the Soul
by describing a twofold purging of the human soul (i.e., sensual nature) and spirit, moving through an ascetic night and an apophatic night to reach a mystic night of union. John’s innovation is simple and powerful: the night becomes the element common to each step of the mystic’s path.
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In this way the night becomes, as Jean Baruzi has noted, the fundamental element of John’s theology.
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Supplementing each of these metaphors of night – ascetic, apophatic, and mystic – is a deeper principle articulated by John not in direct reference to the structure and language of his work, but frequently and allusively, as for example in chapter 13 of book 1 of
Dark Night of the Soul
. Discussing the relationship between self-knowledge and knowledge of God in the night, John noted that, “As the philosophers say, one extreme can be well known by the other.” With these words John cited a principle central to the philosophical, pedagogical, and rhetorical culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: contrariety, which has been so richly described by Stuart Clark in his work on the intellectual history of witchcraft.
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The general concept of opposition in Western thought, reflected in “polarity, duality, antithesis, and contrariety” served innumerable purposes in thought and expression. Clark examines the deeply rooted “language of contraries” in early modern discourses on physics, natural magic, and medicine. Because, as Clark observes, “contrariety was thought to characterize the logic of the Creator’s own thinking,” it was used to understand and discuss “all natural, intellectual, and social phenomena” from cosmology and ethics to literature, rhetoric, and religion. John of the Cross’s use of the
todo
–
nada
theme in the
Ascent of Mount Carmel
is one of countless examples.
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In the “discovery of night” John of the Cross and his seventeenth-century successors relied on an epistemological night which illuminated through contrariety. As we will see below, Jacob Böhme elevated this device – primarily through its implications for the relationship between light and darkness – to the guiding principle of his cosmology.
Studies of John’s predecessors underscore the new role the night plays in his mystic theology.
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Although John refers to the thought of John Baconthorpe, John Tauler, and Jan van Ruysbroeck throughout
his works, John’s use of darkness and the night differs from these late medieval mystics.
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Georges Tavard argues that terms similar to John’s vocabulary of the night appear in the
Cloud of Unknowing
and in Walter Hilton (vernacular English writers whom John could not have known) and among the Rhenish mystics (translated into Latin by Lorenzo Surius in the mid sixteenth century), but that their conception of night “seems to diverge notably from his.”
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The key comparison is with Nicolas of Cusa, who placed the complementarity and inseparability of darkness and light near the center of his thought. The logical or conceptual value of darkness in Cusa contrasts with the place of the night, experiential and concrete, at the center of John’s theology, in which it is more than merely a symbol or concept. In similar terms, Cusa’s fundamental understanding of God as the “coincidentia oppositorum” in which all contradictions, including darkness and light, become one, contrasts with the irreducibility of
todo
and
nada
for John. This irreducible night seems as existential and fundamental as John’s experiences of it.
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And this night – profound and irreducible, taken without any reference to the dawn – informs a dynamic range of early modern thought and expression in the generations after John’s death.
This reading of several of the major works of John of the Cross alerts us to four kinds of night – the ascetic, apophatic, mystic, and epistemological – evoked in early modern culture. The Carmelite’s theology of the night allows us to understand the uses of the night in early modern culture in terms more precise and revealing than a simple contrast between positive and negative views of the night. As we will see, each of these four ways of thinking with the night resonated widely across European culture in the seventeenth century as never before. This resonance goes far beyond any question of influence by the relatively unknown Spanish Carmelite author, whose works were not published until 1618.
“Nothing can be revealed to itself except through contrariety [
Wiederwärtigkeit
].” So proclaimed Jacob Böhme in his “On the
Vision of the Divine” (“Von Göttlicher Beschaulichkeit”) in book 6 of the
Christosophia
(1624), one of his last writings.
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Contrariety was fundamental to early modern thought and expression, but the German philosopher-mystic elevated this principle to the essence of divine and created nature. In his expansive theosophy, developed in a flood of prose between 1619 and 1624, Böhme envisioned contrariety as a dynamic force that shaped God, the process of creation, and all aspects of human existence. No contrariety was more important to Böhme’s thought than the pair light–darkness, and a systematic, detailed cosmology of light and darkness permeates his work. In his last major work, the
Mysterium magnum
of 1623, a commentary on Genesis that elucidated “the kingdom of nature and the kingdom of grace,” Böhme emphasized the power of contrariety to create and reveal:
The darkness is the greatest enemy of the light, yet it is the means by which the light is revealed. If there were no black, then the white would not be revealed; and if there were no suffering, so also joy would not be revealed.
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A few pages later Böhme returns to this principle: “in the darkness the light is recognized, otherwise it would not be revealed,” noting that “the basest must be the origin of the best.”
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The discussion of darkness and light in the works of the shoemaker (and later cloth merchant) of Görlitz is one of the most complex and influential of the early modern period. Böhme sought no followers and remained in outward conformity with the Lutheran church all his life. Only one of his works was published during his lifetime, but his writings circulated in manuscript copies and were quickly published in German and in translation after his death. They found admirers far and wide. In 1646 Charles I of England, after reading Böhme’s
Answers to Forty Questions
(
Vierzig Fragen von der Seelen
) allegedly exclaimed, “God be praised that there are still men in existence who are able to give from their own experience a living testimony of God and His Word!”; in 1649 Oliver Cromwell’s chaplain, Peter Sterry (1613–72), influenced by Böhme, preached in Behemist terms that “Darkness, and light, are both in God; not only Representatively, but really; not in their ideas only, but their Identities.”
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Böhme’s life and work were shaped
decisively by the confessional age into which he was born. His native region, Silesia, stood on the frontlines of religious and political conflict. As a cloth merchant he traveled across the region; he witnessed the royal entry of Frederick of the Palatinate into Prague as king of Bohemia in 1619 and saw the outbreak of what would become the Thirty Years War. In his writings he consistently sought to transcend the confessional struggles raging around him.