The Dark Night - St. John of the Cross

This meetup is hosted by Wisdom and Woe. For more details and to sign up for this event, go to:[ https://www.meetup.com/wisdom-and-woe/events/297429753](https://www.meetup.com/wisdom-and-woe/events/297429753)

St. John of the Cross (1542-1591) was a 16th-century Spanish mystic and poet, ranked among such great intellectual and philosophical theologians such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. After 1567, when he joined with Teresa of Ávila to institute reforms in the Carmelite order, opponents of the reform had him arrested, imprisoned, and subjected to public floggings. His ordeal lasted for nine months, but it provided the foundational experience for much of his subsequent poetry and spiritual writings.

"The Dark Night" ("Noche Oscura," c. 1577) is his poem and commentary of the same name, a masterpiece of mystical Christian literature. He coined the term "the dark night" to describe a painful series of purifications on the spiritual journey towards union with God. In the first phase (the night of sense), the soul begins to practice self-denial and detachment from worldly desires. In the second phase (the night of spirit), the divine light reveals the soul's own imperfections and sins. During this process, the soul suffers great anguish, feeling abandoned and forsaken, but perseverance promises an ultimate revelation of peace, love, and knowledge of God.

The writings of St. John have influenced centuries of theologians, philosophers, artists, poets, and psychologists. The concept of "the dark night" has been adopted to mean an intense period of personal crisis, emotional hardship, and/or deep introspection. Joseph Campbell states "The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation. When everything is lost, and all seems darkness, then comes the new life and all that is needed." Night-evoking places--e.g., the abyss, a cave, prison, or belly of the whale--are regarded as both tomb and womb, death and renewal, on the way through Campbell's hero's journey.

Wisdom and Woe is a philosophy and literature discussion group dedicated to exploring the world, work, life, and times of Herman Melville and the 19th century Romantic movement. The group is free and open to anybody with an interest in learning and growing by "diving deeper" into "time and eternity, things of this world and of the next, and books, and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters."