On "Dark Nights"

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I found this passage in Vladimir Lossky's Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood, New York, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1976), pp. 225-227.

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Just because it is light grace, the source of revelation, cannot remain within us unperceived. We are incapable of not being aware of God, if our nature is in proper spiritual health. Insensibility in the inner life is an abnormal condition…Grace will make itself known as joy, peace, inner warmth and light. States or dryness, of the dark night of the soul, do not have the same meaning in the spirituality of the Eastern Church, as they have in the West. A person who enters into a closer and closer union with God, cannot remain outside the light, If he finds himself plunged in darkness, it is either because his nature is darkened by sin, or else because God is testing him to increase his ardour. We must rise above these states, by our obedience and humility to which God will respond, showing himself anew to the soul, and communicating his light to the person who was for a time forsaken. Dryness is a state of illness which must not last; it is never thought of by the mystical and ascetical writers of the Eastern tradition as a necessary and normal stage in the way of union. It is but an accident on this way, frequent indeed, but always a peril. It has too great a likeness to accidia or tedium, the coldness of heart which leads to insensibility. It is a trial which drives the human being to the verge of spiritual death. For the ascent towards holiness, the struggle for the divine light is not without danger. Those who seek the light, conscious life in God, run a great spiritual risk, but God will not let them wander in darkness…aridity is a transitory condition, which cannot become a constant attitude. In fact, both the heroic attitude of the great saints of Western Christendom, a prey to the sorrow of a tragic separation from God, and the dark night of the soul considered as a way, as a spiritual necessity, are unknown in the spirituality of the Eastern Church. The two traditions have separated on a mysterious doctrinal point [filioque], relating to the Holy Spirit, who is the source of holiness. Two different dogmatic conceptions correspond to two different experiences, to two ways of sanctification which scarcely resemble one another. Since the separation, the ways which lead to sanctity are not the same in the West as in the East. The one proves its fidelity to Christ in the solitude and abandonment of the night of Gethsemane, the other gains certainty of union with God in the light of the Transfiguration.



Footnote: In thus opposing the ways of sanctification proper to East and West, we would not wish to make any absolute distinction. This is much too delicate and subtle a matter to lend itself to any kind of schematization; thus, in the west, the experienced of the dark night is in no way characteristic of St. Bernard, for instance; on the other hand, Eastern spirituality provides us with at elast one clear enough example of the dark night, in St. Tikhon Zadonsky (eighteenth century).


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