Foreword

Dark Night of the Soul
by Saint John of the Cross, Mirabai Starr

While imprisoned in a tiny prison cell for his attempts to reform the Church, sixteenth-century Spanish mystic John of the Cross composed many of his now classic poems of the soul's longing for God. Written on a scroll smuggled to him by one of his guards, his songs are the ultimate expression of the spiritual seeker's journey from estranged despair to blissful union with the divine.

After escaping his captors, John fell into a state of profound ecstasy and wrote Dark Night of the Soul. Later, he added an important commentary to his poem to guide other searching souls along the arduous path to communion with God. Here, for the first time, a scholar unaffiliated with the Catholic Church has translated this timeless work. Mirabai Starr, who has studied Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism, lends the seeker's sensibility to John's powerful text and brings this classic work to the twenty-first century in a brilliant and beautiful rendering.

It's common today to hear people say that they're going through a dark night of the soul. As is often the case, many people know the title of John of the Cross's classic without having read a word of it. This new translation should invite people into a book that spells out, in sparkling clear language and structure, certain phases in the spiritual life and the meaning of painful periods of setback and disillusionment.

We all have our ups and downs. At the end of struggles people sometimes claim that they have gone through an ordeal and have come out happy on the other side. One senses a degree of pride in the accomplishment. But I'm not convinced that these victories signal the kind of darkness John describes so carefully. Many spiritual guides warn that we can play tricks on ourselves, bolstering a fragile ego with the thought that we have triumphed in a major rite of passage. The difference lies in the congratulatory attitude: "Look at me-I've succumbed and survived."

Certain challenges have the potential of initiating a person into a new level of experience, but not all painful transitions qualify as a dark night of the soul. It's tempting to bless a difficult period with the awesome phrase, allowing an escape from what is truly a spiritual crisis. Often what we think is the great challenge of a lifetime is only a decoy disguising the real place of transformation. A person may be faced with a difficult marriage and deal with it by escaping into the rigors of a spiritual practice. The dark night, a source of profound change in character, may be at home, while the focus of attention is at the ashram or church.

John of the Cross clearly places the dark night of the soul in the spiritual life, but, from my point of view, spirit and soul need not be separated. Spiritual processes are usually at work beneath and beyond the psychological ones. I don't want to separate these two dimensions, saying that the dark night happens during meditation, while the deep soul is undergoing its changes in ordinary life. But if that is so, how do we distinguish between depression, say, and the dark night John describes?

The key is to distinguish between the ego and the soul. The ego, of course, is the subjective world of the self, the concern of modern psychology and self-help books. Psychology helps us adjust to a difficult world, deal with passions and emotions, and clear the personality for what it might call good functioning. The soul is vast in comparison and full of mysteries. It ranges from the high mysticism of contemplation and vision to deep struggles with meaning and connection.

As I see it, John of the Cross is speaking of mysterious developments in the vast realm of the soul, which includes the psychological. He considers the emotions in relation to spiritual developments. We tend to see difficult feelings as a form of illness, which we hope to conquer, cure, and expel. He has a far greater imagination of human life: his goal is not health but union with the divine.

Here we run into trouble: Do you have to be a Christian to benefit from John's guidance? Do you have to believe in God? On both counts I would say no. Everyone has a spiritual life, even those whose ultimate concern has been deflected into money, sex, drink, or success. John's analysis applies to the human condition, not to a class of believers. On the question of God, to appreciate John's insights it would help to have a subtle idea of the divine. Without dissolving God into vague notions of a supreme power or the Force being with you, it's possible to allow a sense of the infinite and the unknowable in an intelligent philosophy of life. Such an appreciation of the divine might allow us to read this as a book about transcendence, not merely psychological development.

Do you have to be deeply involved in a spiritual practice to experience John's dark night of the soul? I think we're all called to be mystics and that the ladder of emotions John describes may be part of anyone's life. The culture in which we live, for all its religions and spiritual movements, is not inherently religious and so convinces most people that the meaning of life is financial and psychological. But in the very heart of a career decision, a painful divorce, or the memory of abuse lie questions of meaning and value. In those emotional crucibles spiritual issues are being forged. If we had the imagination for it, we would see that every day we are dealing with our spiritual processes. If we could see deeply enough into ordinary life, we might understand what John is writing about.

While I wouldn't equate the dark night with depression, I do think our depressive moods could be imagined spiritually rather than only psychologically. John might help us see that what we call depression is a kind of initiation rather than just an emotional problem. Usually we use the word "depression" for its clinical overtones, suggesting that it is a concern of health and that it can be treated. With John of the Cross in mind, we might imagine the same experience as a crossroads in our effort to make a meaningful life and to achieve a sense of union with the life coursing through us.

Depression has its physical, emotional, and psychological dimensions and is tied in with our background, personality, and experiences. It has its chemical and genetic base. But it is also spiritual and potentially valuable in making a meaningful life. John distinguishes between the dark night of the senses and that of the higher soul. He accounts for both, the deep soul and the high spirit, and he offers a sophisticated map through the full range of this darkness.

Maybe John is right in saying that only a few reach the high levels of this process, but I would still argue that everyone, no matter how confused and ill-situated in life, can have at least modest mystical experiences. They may be as simple as the beautiful stillness that settles at the sight of a sunset or a brief period of wonder at the birth of a child. Mysticism doesn't have to be a life profession. Further, I think that much of our depression, anxiety, and addiction has to do with what John writes about: the soul's need and longing for transcendence. This need is instinctual and unavoidable.

Being engaged in a process of spiritual refinement, the kind John and other mystics chart with close attention to detail, has everything to do with how we feel and how well we deal with life. Spirit and soul are distinct but inseparable. I hope this classic text will help reintroduce the spiritual into our everyday lives. Without it we lack the vision to deal with our personal and social problems effectively and make sense out of a mysterious and challenging existence.

All my life I have wanted to be a translator, partly because I enjoy working with words, but also because I find bad translations an unnecessary obstacle to some of the world's great literature. And so, I am grateful for Mirabai Starr's fluid, inviting translation of this important text. Her translation allows me to adapt John's words to my life with an immediacy I've never felt before in relation to this work. With this marvelous English version in hand, and with the idea that the book speaks about our daily, if hidden, attempts at transcendence, readers might discover their spiritual calling here and make the all-important shift from curing the personality to caring for the soul.

Copyright © February 2002, Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc. Used by permission.

About the Author

Saint John of the Cross (Juan de la Cruz) was a major figure in the Catholic Reformation, a Spanish mystic and Carmelite friar born at Fontiveros, a small village near Ávila.

Mirabai Starr is a professor of philosophy, religious studies, and Spanish at the University of New Mexico who has studied a wide variety of religious traditions including Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, and Christianity. Mirabai is an accomplished translator and fiction writer who brings the sensibilities of both seeker and scholar to her translations. Her most recent work is the translation of St. John of the Cross's mystical writings, Dark Night of the Soul.