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Dark Night of the Soul (Dover Thrift Editions)

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Description

The great Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross became a Carmelite monk in 1563 and helped St. Teresa of Avila to reform the Carmelite order — enduring persecution and imprisonment for his efforts. Both in his writing and in his life, he demonstrated eloquently his love for God. His written thoughts on man’s relationship with God were literacy endeavors that placed him on an intellectual and philosophical level with such great writers as St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
In this work — a spiritual masterpiece and classic of Christian literature and mysticism — he addresses several subjects, among them pride, avarice, envy, and other human imperfections. His discussion of the “dark night of the spirit,” which considers afflictions and pain suffered by the soul, is followed by an extended explanation of divine love and the soul’s exultant union with God.
This fine translation by E. Allison Peers “is the most faithful that has appeared in any European language: it is, indeed, a lot more than a translation for [Peers] added his own valuable historical and [critically interpretive] notes.” — London Times.


Almost each believer feels forgotten by God every so often. Even Christ cried out on the cross, “Oh God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Dark Night of the Soul, a 16th-century mystical text written by the Carmelite monk St. John of the Cross, ranks among Christianity’s most helpful answers to this enduring question. In St. John’s vision of spiritual life, the pain of separation from God is to be embraced, not have shyed away from. “The dark night is about being fully present in the tender, wounded emptiness of our own souls,” explains translator Mirabai Starr–even though she grants that modern culture makes such acceptance hard to attain. “We have a tendency to see difficult feelings as a form of illness, which we are hoping to overcome, cure, and expel. [St. John of the Cross] has a far greater imagination of human life: his goal isn’t health but union with the divine.” Several fine English translations of Dark Night already exist; Starr’s, alternatively, is distinguished by its ecumenism. Minimizing the explicit scriptural references of the original text, she makes the treasures of Dark Night more accessible to readers of all religious traditions. –Michael Joseph Gross

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