Psalm 88:1-2, Matthew 27:46, Job 30:20
A Common Experience Among the Godly
The phrase "dark night of the soul" comes from the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic John of the Cross, who described his own experience of a prolonged, agonising sense of spiritual desolation — an absence of the felt presence of God, spiritual dryness, the apparent disappearance of every consolation of faith.
What makes this experience particularly confusing is that it does not happen to spiritual novices who have barely begun to seek God. It characteristically happens to serious, mature, long-committed believers. Some of the greatest saints in Christian history — Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, Thomas à Kempis, C.H. Spurgeon, Mother Teresa — have written about seasons of profound spiritual darkness.
The Biblical Record
The experience is not absent from Scripture. Psalm 88 is the darkest of the Psalms — beginning in desperate cry to God and ending in darkness with no resolution. Jesus' cry from the cross — "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46) — is the most acute expression of spiritual desolation in all of human history.
Job 30:20: "I cry to you for help and you do not answer me; I stand, and you only look at me." The sense of a God who is present but unresponsive — or absent entirely — is part of Job's experience.
What the Dark Night Is Not
The dark night of the soul should be distinguished from:
Depression — though they may coexist, clinical depression is a medical condition with its own dynamics. The dark night is a specifically spiritual phenomenon — the absence of spiritual consolation and felt fellowship with God.
Loss of faith — the dark night is characteristically not a loss of belief but the painful experience of belief without felt comfort. It is faith functioning in the dark.
Punishment for sin — God may use the dark night as a means of grace, not a tool of judgment.
Why God Allows It
John of the Cross argued that the dark night serves a purifying function — stripping away the dependence on spiritual feelings and consolations, driving the believer to seek God Himself rather than the good feelings God sometimes provides. It produces a more mature, less emotionally contingent faith.
The command is not to generate feelings but to endure faithfully, to keep praying, to keep trusting — not because we feel God's presence but because we know His promises are true regardless of feeling.