Yesterday I was doing a supervision session with a student on the topic of psychosis and spirituality. What was fascinating was how the student had really immersed themselves into the topic, refusing to accept the pure 'medicalisation' of spiritual/psychotic experiences and even going so far as to participate in a 'guided fantasy' inspired by some of the psychotic stories they had collected. As we talked I went back to the passages I wrote in my 'John of the Cross - Outstanding Christian Thinker' book on this very subject. Reading them again today I can see how perceptive and pastorally sensitive John's advice is. I think he found them helpful so I reproduce them here for your interest...
best wishes
Peter
When the original mothers and
fathers of Carmel gathered on the Palestinian mountain eight hundred years ago
they pledged themselves to enter into the mystery of God’s living presence in
the world. In this respect they stood as heirs to a spiritual lineage that can
be traced back to Christ and the first Christians – the lineage of the
so-called ‘Desert Fathers and Mothers’ - who from the fourth century onwards
had set out into the deserts of Egypt, Palestine and Syria to encounter God
through the ‘struggle with demons’ and the practice of ascesis[1]. However, as we have seen, as
well as looking backward the early Carmelites looked forward and with the fall
of Acre came to Western Europe, bringing with them a ‘desert spirituality’
which needed to be adapted to the new (often urban) circumstances within which
they found themselves. Since its inception, then, the Carmelite charism has
retained a tension between the past and the future, the desert and the city,
contemplation and action. Accordingly, the Carmelite charism is not one that
‘hides under a bushel’ but seeks to engage with the movements, ideas and
struggles of every successive generation of believers. Which is why such
important Carmelite figures as John of the Cross often feel like our
contemporaries. The Carmelite charism reinvigorates itself with each succeeding
generation, ever renewing itself.
As twenty-first century people
we are faced with new challenges in reinterpreting and embodying the Carmelite
charism for our time. We are the heirs to great changes and movements that have
swept the world and shape the world we live in today. The ideas of Marx, Freud
and Darwin, although nineteenth century in origin, have required over a hundred
years to be assimilated by secular society to an extent that they invisibly
mould our thinking and action today.
This scientific and cognitive revolution has shaped our present world
and creates what we nowadays call the ‘psychological mindset’. Today the
‘talking cure’ initiated by Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939) has spawned a whole
subsection of culture that embraces as well as Freud’s original psychoanalysis,
a whole range of transpersonal therapies, counselling, cognitive and
behavioural therapies, the psychiatric and psychological sciences and many more
too numerous to mention...
As was stated at the beginning
of this chapter, the Carmelite charism looks backward as well as forward. When
we immerse ourselves in Carmelite spirituality we inherit a great spiritual
tradition but a tradition that needs to be interpreted and explained in the
categories of today. One of these key categories is the psychological. However,
as we will be apparent by now, this can be far from straightforward. We cannot,
for example, talk about John of the Cross understanding ‘the unconscious’ or ‘personality’
as we do today – our psychological categories would have been alien to him.
Instead, as we have seen, John would have been working with medieval scholastic
categories of mind that presupposed a very different world-view. Rather than
neurons, instincts and drives John talks of ‘the mind’ in terms of ‘humours’
and the action of good and bad spirits on the anima or soul. Accordingly
when we come to apply twentieth and twenty-first century categories of mind to
the classic writings of John we have to tread cautiously and carefully. It is
possible to undertake the task but it is difficult.
Part of this
difficulty arises from the difficult and troubled interaction between ‘psyche’
and ‘spiritus’ since the inception of the psychological sciences in the middle
of the twentieth century. On the one hand there has been a tendency amongst
religious thinkers to ‘spiritualise’ away psychology and on the other hand
there has been a tendency amongst psychologists to annex ‘spirituality’ as a
suburb or province of ‘good mental health’...
In the prologue to The
Ascent he promised to give us ‘signs to recognize this
purification of the soul that we call the dark night; whether it is the
purification of the senses or of the spirit; and how we can discern whether
this affliction is caused by melancholia or some other deficiency of sense or
spirit’ (A1.6). This he does in Book One, Chapter Nine of ‘The Dark Night’[2].
John
begins this chapter by making a distinction between the ‘sensory night and
purgation’ (spiritual sense) and the dark night caused by ‘sin and
imperfection, or weakness and lukewarmness or some bad humor (algún mal humor) or bodily
indisposition’. From a psychological point of view this statement is
interesting. Often Teresa and John are dismissed as having relevance to the
sixteenth century but not to the present day with our sophisticated
developments in understanding mental pathology and illness. Their ‘ecstasies’
and ‘delights’ are dismissed as pathological ramblings of sexually deprived
celibates. Yet, here as in many passages in Teresa previously mentioned, we see
that they have a clear understanding of mental pathology – which they
ordinarily refer to as ‘bad humors’ (mal
humor) or ‘melancholia’ (humor
melancólico/melancolía)[3].
To
make his distinction between the two John proposes three guidelines.
First:
As
these souls do not get satisfaction or consolation from the things of God, they
do not get any out of creatures either. Since God puts a soul in this dark
night in order to dry up and purge its sensory appetite, He does not allow it
to find sweetness or delight in anything. (DN 1.9.2)
As part of the nature of
the ‘dark night’ John had proposed earlier that the individual seeker loses a
savour for ‘spiritual things’:
It is
at the time they are going about their spiritual exercises with delight and
satisfaction, when in their opinion the sun of divine favor is shining most
brightly on them, that God darkens all this light and closes the door and
spring of the sweet spiritual water they were tasting as often and as long as
they desired… they not only fail to receive satisfaction and pleasure from
their spiritual exercises and works, as they formerly did, but also find these
exercises distasteful and bitter. (DN 1.8.3)
According, then, to this
first ‘guideline of the dark night’ John suggests that when there is a decrease
in interest of things to do with the spirit there is not a corresponding increase
of interest of the things ‘of the world’ eg. of sensual/sensory pleasure.
However, John rightly perceives that such a distaste or lassitude towards the
things of the world may also be found with ‘melancholia’ or ‘bad humour’. So he
suggests the second guideline:
The
memory ordinarily turns to God solicitously and with painful care, and the soul
thinks it is not serving God but turning back, because it is aware of this
distaste for the things of God. (DN 1.9.3)
As we experience the
dark night of sensuality and spirituality, the one thing that distresses us
more than anything is the thought that we have somehow lost our spiritual home
in God. We could face anything if this was not the case, without this we are
lost. It is this continual return to our spiritual root in God that drives ‘the
dark night’ and it is to this that the soul ‘solicitously returns with painful
care.’ The ‘melancholia’ leads to collapse of self and self-interest, the
‘purgation of the dark night’ leads to a deepening of self and understanding in
God. The key passage in this section is:
The
reason is that now in this state of contemplation, when the soul has left
discursive meditation and entered the state of proficients, it is God who works in it… At this time
a person’s own efforts are of no avail, but an obstacle to the interior peace
and work God is producing in the spirit through that dryness of sense. (DN
1.9.7, my emphasis)
As with Teresa’s fourth
mansion of Las Moradas, this is the point where we move from the natural
to the supernatural, from our own efforts to those of God. Up to now our
efforts have brought us closer to God – our discursive meditation, going on
courses, going to church, working for peace and justice – but now that is
coming to an end, not only do our efforts no longer help, they may in fact
impede the action of God. We are entering the beauty and mystery of ‘the night’
– and very often our ego will do everything it can to resist and struggle.
The
‘sensory’ part of ourselves cannot ‘enjoy’ these spiritual ‘delights’, it is
not ready yet. So it experiences this time as a time of dryness. As with
Teresa, John emphasises the sensuality of the gustos[4]
in bringing us closer to God. And like Teresa, he employs the strategies of
embodiment of the medieval theologia mystica to stress this part of the
journey[5]:
The reason for this dryness is that God transfers
his goods and strength from sense to spirit. Since the sensory part of the soul
is incapable of the goods of spirit, it remains deprived, dry, and empty. Thus,
while the spirit is tasting, the flesh tastes nothing at all and becomes weak
in its work. But through this nourishment the spirit grows stronger and more
alert, and becomes more solicitous than before about not failing God.
If in the beginning the soul does
not experience this spiritual savor and delight, but dryness and distaste, the
reason is the novelty involved in this exchange. Since its palate is accustomed
to these other sensory tastes, the soul still sets its eyes on them. And since,
also, its spiritual palate is neither purged nor accommodated for so subtle a
taste, it is unable to experience the spiritual savor and good until gradually
prepared by means of this dark and obscure night. The soul instead experiences
dryness and distaste because of a lack of the gratification it formerly enjoyed
so readily. (DN 1.9.4)
Reflection at this
point, he tells us, is so delicate that when we try to grasp it or name it, it
is ‘like air
that escapes when one tries to grasp it in one's hand’. Which leads to the third guideline for the dark night:
The
powerlessness, in spite of one’s efforts, to meditate and make use of the
imagination, the interior sense, as was one’s previous custom. At this time God
does not communicate Himself through the senses as He did before, by means of
the discursive analysis and synthesis of ideas, but begins to communicate
Himself through pure spirit by an act of simple contemplation, in which there
is no discursive succession of thought. (DN 1.9:8)
John’s third guideline
relates to forms of prayer, meditation and contemplation. Psychologists have
recently begun to appreciate the value of meditation for good mental health and
recently many in the West have found much of interest in the great meditative
traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism. Yet, within the Christian tradition there
is an equally strong and well thought out meditative tradition, not least in
the works of John and Teresa. Here we see John applying his knowledge of prayer
and meditation to the subtle questions raised by the ‘dark night’.
Commenting
on this guideline he suggests that it allows us to distinguish ‘melancholic
states’ from authentic spiritual movements, for the former are ‘by nature
changeable’. St Ignatius Loyola in his Spiritual
Exercises suggests that we observe the ‘movements of the soul’ and note how
these movements come and go – equally, John suggests that mental pathologies
may come and go but the deeper ‘spiritual purgation’ of the dark night is
something more permanent and lasting.
In
John’s scholastic anthropology, God at this point:
Binds the interior faculties and leaves no support
in the intellect, nor satisfaction in the will, nor remembrance in the memory.
At this time a person's own efforts are of no avail, but are an obstacle to the
interior peace and work God is producing in the spirit through that dryness of
sense. Since this peace is something spiritual and delicate, its fruit is
quiet, delicate, solitary, satisfying, and peaceful, and far removed from all
the other gratifications of beginners, which are very palpable and sensory.
This is the peace that David says God speaks in the soul in order to make it
spiritual (DN 1.9.7)
Thus, John suggests, if a person is exhibiting the three signs shown
here then what they are experiencing may well be the theological ‘dark night of
the soul’ – not necessarily so but possibly so. Of course, as we suggested at
the beginning this all takes place against the background of a life of prayer
and serious dedication to the ‘things of God’. John worked with people within
this context and assumed it was the context for the sort of phenomena he is
concerned with.
[1]
See Brown (1990), Harmless (2004) and Chryssavgis (2003)
[2]
For more on the importance of this chapter see Green 2007 and Johnston 1991
[3]
See footnote 48
[4] As we saw in the previous chapter, this is an
important word for both Teresa and John, but difficult to translate. Joys,
tastes, favours and delights will all do. It is a deliberately ambiguous word
and it is noteworthy that when Teresa first uses it in the Libro de La Vida
it is in reference to sensual pleasures rather than the things of God. As she
moves through the book it becomes more associated with spiritual matters. This
studied ambiguity towards the sensual and the spiritual in both Teresa and John
may account for increased contemporary interest in their work.
[5]
See here my forthcoming article on Teresa’s use of the strategy of embodiment
in the Conceptos. See Sources of Transformation: Revitalising
Traditions of Christian Spirituality for Today. Continuum 2010.
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