From St. John of the Cross and Dr. C. J. Jung, Part II, Chapter 4. Inner Growth Books, 1986.

A Revolution in Mystical Consciousness

When St. Teresa and St. John wrote, they drew on the age-old mystical traditions of Western Christianity.(1) At the same time they transcended their sources and inaugurated a revolution of mystical consciousness. It was one of those privileged moments in the history of thought where things that had been formerly joined and intermixed in a lived unity, and thus lived out but not differentiated, now became articulated in their own right. When St. John carefully distinguished contemplation from ordinary prayer and all accidental phenomena whether natural or supernatural, he posed the issue of contemplation with a sharpness and decisiveness it never had before. Those who came after him could ask, were even compelled to ask, "Am I a contemplative?" "Do I find in myself the three signs that St. John gives?" Since the two great Carmelite saints depicted contemplation as the full flowering of the interior life, the spiritual writers who came after them tried to reconcile this perspective with their own inner experiences. They had to say to themselves, "Since I am devoting myself to the interior life, in what way am I a contemplative?"

The 17th century became a veritable spiritual laboratory in which men and women tried to assimilate this new awareness of the centrality of contemplation in the life of prayer. People then, just like people today, faced the dilemma of the dark night of sense in the wider meaning of the term. They had embraced the life of prayer, seriously devoted themselves to spiritual exercises, experienced satisfaction and consolation in this new way of life and, in short, fulfilled St. John's description of fervent beginners. Then, either gradually or suddenly, they lost this sense of well-being and inner spiritual progress. They found within themselves St. John's first two signs. They could not meditate like they did before, nor did they have a new interest in worldly things. Were they not, they asked themselves, in the dark night that St. John described, and therefore on their way to contemplation?

Unfortunately (for many), the dark night seemed to go on and on without ending in the perception of this new experience of contemplation, and in the light of this experience of darkness they began to reread St. John's writings. Since they found within themselves these two signs, they were encouraged by this confirmation to unwittingly reinterpret his third and most vital sign, which was the presence of contemplation itself. The relatively brief time of transition that St. John had envisioned became extended to cover months, or even years, and to form a distinct state or stage of the spiritual life. The loving attentiveness that in St. John's mind was an amalgamation of infused contemplation itself and the attitude of receptivity on the part of the contemplative in the face of the actual experience became reduced to an active exercise of faith by which someone believed God to be present and tried to be attentive to this presence by faith, not by experience. St. John's challenge to contemplation and the heights of the mystical life was reduced to a much more lowly human scale. His view of the spiritual life which found infused contemplation as the natural flowering of the life of prayer was met by attempts to change his doctrine into one of active or acquired contemplation. These changes do not appear to have been deliberate. The men who created the various schools of acquired contemplation sincerely believed they were faithfully following in St. John's footsteps. For St. John the ideal solution to the problem of the dark night was the beginning of infused contemplation, but for these men of the 17th century who never arrived at this gift, their own predicament dictated new answers, and these new answers resonated with the times and echoed down the generations and effect the way we view contemplation today. Thus, the answer to the challenge of contemplation of the 17th century is important not only because it is still being lived out today, but it had a profound influence on the way contemplation is understood and viewed as a viable activity.