Apophatic Spirituality

  

 

APOPHATIC SPIRITUALITY 

“The Lord intends to dwell in the dark cloud.” (1 Kings 18:12)

In dark consolation, the soul is afflicted by darkness of understanding and knowledge, dryness in prayer or in the course of doing good works, or both—that is, they suffer spiritually, in their intellect, imagination, memory, and feelings—while at the same time they are drawn interiorly toward God, who consoles them with spiritual joy, which resides in the will.

“Docta ignorantia” or “learned ignorance” is a type of dark consolation, which I have described as follows:

The light of God appears as darkness to the soul because the soul in its existential imperfection is unable to see God in His utter perfection. “That which is light in God and of the loftiest clarity is dense darkness for the soul.” [Saint John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul, II, 16]

Yet this vision of God, however imperfect, is already knowledge of God, powerfully drawing the love of the heart. Cardinal Nicolas of Cusa uses the expression “learned ignorance” or “docta ignorantia” to describe this knowledge of God in darkness. “There is, therefore, in all such love, by which one is carried into God, a cognition, even though one remains unaware of what it is one loves. Thus there is a coincidence of knowledge and of ignorance, or a learned ignorance.” [Edmond Vansteenberghe, Autour de la Docte Ignorance: Une Controverse sur la Theologie Mystique au Xve Siecle (Munster: Aschendorff, 1915), 112, in Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation, edited by Jill Raitt in collaboration with Bernard McGinn and John Meyendorff (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1987), pages 171-72]

https://oddsandendsgonzalinhodacosta.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-four-types-of-consolation-and.html

The “darkness” of Saint John of the Cross stands for obscurity. God is obscure to the soul because of God’s infinite mystery.

Darkness is a way of apprehending God in faith and loving God who is known in the darkness of faith. This way has the character of trial in faith, love, and many other virtues. That is why darkness in the spiritual life is a way of journeying toward God and growing in the love of God.

https://oddsandendsgonzalinhodacosta.blogspot.com/2024/01/year-of-prayer-2024.html

There are two types of darkness in Christian spirituality—desolation and consolation.

Desolation is the darkness of separation from God resulting from sin, and it admits of varying degrees.

It is the darkness David experiences after his adultery with Bathsheba, and when afterwards, to prevent its discovery by her husband, Uriah the Hittite, David arranges the murder of his loyal soldier.

Your wrath has swept over me; your terrors have destroyed me. My only friend is darkness. (Psalm 88:17, 19)

Saint Ignatius of Loyola accounts for the darkness of desolation in the Spiritual Exercises, 322:

“Because we have been tepid and slothful or negligent in our exercises of piety, and so through our own fault spiritual consolation has been taken away from us.”

Consolation, too, is darkness—because God is a mystery, he is essentially inaccessible and fully incomprehensible even when he somehow reveals himself to us.

He made darkness his cloak around him; his canopy, water-darkened storm clouds. (Psalm 18:12)

“Dark” consolation, which varies in severity, is caused by God not as punishment but as a test of the soul. See Spiritual Exercises, 322:

“Because God wishes to try us, to see how much we are worth, and how much we will advance in his service and praise when left without the generous reward of consolations and signal favors.”

Advancing despite being afflicted by this darkness is, paradoxically, accompanied by its own particular consolation. Saint John of the Cross describes his own singular experience of dark consolation in his poem, “Dark Night”—see, for example, verses 1-5:

One dark night,

fired with love’s urgent longings

—ah, the sheer grace!—

I went out unseen,

my house being now all stilled.