Purification of the senses is not enough

The night of sense involves the purification of attachments to created things--a difficult task. It would be comforting to think that, once you have extricated yourself from these attachments, then the hard work is over, and from here the path to union with God is much easier. After all, haven't you done without enough pleasures to get to heaven? St. John of the Cross is very clear that progress does not involve mere purification of the sensual appetites. A further and more difficult purification awaits holy souls determined to continue.

The actions of some of the St. John's Carmelite contemporaries in the 16th Century will show why this is so. The life of these monks and nuns was austere by any standards. They slept little, and in bedchambers in which comforts and softness were in short supply. They spent long hours praying the Divine Office daily. Their food was simple and generally meatless. It was a hard life, even by the standards of the time. For us moderns, it  would seem impossible. If mortification of the senses was enough for salvation, then all these monks and nuns should have been saints. But it was not so.

When St. John of the Cross determined to follow St. Teresa of Avila in reforming the Carmelite order, neither of these saints ever said a word or committed an act that amounted to an attack on the order. All they did was to offer a path that all Carmelites were welcome to follow, but that none should feel compelled to follow. St. Teresa and St. John believed they were being directed by the Holy Spirit, and history seems to have validated their discernment. Many of the leaders of the order, however, did not agree, and they responded with terrible enmity. These two saints and future Doctors of the Church were viewed as motivated by a stubborn and rebellious temperament--a ridiculous accusation, obvious to anyone who knew them. The leaders went to friars sympathetic to the reform and cajoled them into renouncing this path, even convincing some of them to sign false accusations against St. Teresa. Others were threatened and bullied.

While these machinations were playing out, St. John of the Cross was living quietly in a small cottage near the reformed convent in Avila where St. Teresa was prioress. He served as confessor and spiritual director for the nuns there. All he desired was to be left alone in his poor cottage and to be forgotten by the world. To this humble and peaceful house, the leaders opposed to the reform sent a band of armed men in the dead of night. They burst in and seized St. John, and bound and gagged him like a criminal, leading him away to be imprisoned.

What do we see in the actions of these monastic leaders? Pride, envy, and wrath are on full display. Sloth shows in their refusal to undertake the effort of meeting the reformers and learning their true motives. One perceives a grasping and cold avarice in their use of scurrilous tactics to lure monks and nuns away from St. Teresa and St. John; they desired to increase the numbers under their own authority,  not caring how this was accomplished. Though the austerity of monastic life might have detached these men from created things, it clearly had not purified them of spiritual vice and sin. 

This is the point in the spiritual life where St. John of the Cross begins The Dark Night, the continuation of the commentary commenced in The Ascent of Mount Carmel. We must see that purification of the senses is not complete. They must be purified not only of attachment to created things but also attachment to spiritual things. Pride, envy, anger, and other deadly sins may infect even our devotions and ministries. The saint focuses on the ways these vices insinuate themselves into our prayer lives. He speaks of beginners, but he does not mean people who have no prayer life. The beginners to whom he refers are his fellow Carmelites. They are men and women already schooled in vocal prayer and intimately familiar with the Psalms through daily reading of the Divine Office. But many of them have not begun to enter the deeper life of prayer. In the opening chapters of The Dark Night, he explains the attachments they must address.

For example, "these beginners feel so fervent and diligent in their spiritual exercise and undertakings," he writes, "that a certain kind of secret pride is generated in them." Dark Night I.2.1. Perhaps you have known people who are snobbish in comparing their prayer lives with others'. Perhaps you have seen this in yourself.

Again, some souls "will hardly ever seem content with the spirit God gives them. They become unhappy and peevish owing to a lack of the consolation they desire to have in spiritual things." Ibid. I.3.1. Here we see signs of avarice, a greediness for spiritual experiences, instead of steady love of God in the absence of warm feelings.

We cannot enter into the night of spirit without also breaking these kinds of attachments. God both indirectly and directly assists: indirectly, by strengthening our resolve to progress in spite of the difficulties, humiliations, and dryness we experience; directly, by the action of grace that draws us forward, deeper into the night of abandonment to God alone. Beginners must "understand the feebleness of their state, and take courage, and desire that God place them in this night, where the soul is strengthened in virtue and fortified for the inestimable delights of the love of God." Ibid. I.1.1.

That, friends, is the path before us. Let us begin.