Dark Night of the Soul: The Stages and How Long It Lasts
The dark night of the soul is a term from sixteenth-century Carmelite theology, and it has drifted a long way since. This guide sets out what St John of the Cross actually wrote, the four stages his two commentaries describe, how the night of the senses differs from the night of the spirit, how long each is reported to last, and where the modern usage parted company with the original.
What is the dark night of the soul?
The dark night of the soul is a period in which the felt presence of God withdraws, prayer goes dry, and the practices that once carried a person stop working, described by the sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite John of the Cross as God's own purifying work rather than a failure of devotion. That last part is the whole of the original claim. On his reading the dryness is not evidence of wrongdoing, and not a withdrawal of God himself; it is what a mind reports when it has been handed something it cannot process with the equipment it has been using. Whether that reading is true is a theological question, and this article describes it rather than argues for it. John called it night for three reasons he lists near the start of The Ascent of Mount Carmel. The point of departure is dark, because the appetites are being denied. The road is dark, because faith is dark to the intellect. The destination is dark, because God exceeds what a person can grasp. In ordinary modern speech the phrase has widened until it covers almost any long stretch of meaninglessness. Both uses are current, and they describe different things, which is why the question of how long it lasts gets such wildly different answers.
John's account has a mechanism behind it. He holds that a beginner prays by thinking: reading a scene from the gospels, picturing it, drawing conclusions, making acts of the will. That method depends on the senses and the imagination, and it works for a while. Infused contemplation, which he describes as a secret, peaceful and loving inflow of God, does not work that way, and once it begins to be given the older method stops producing anything. The person keeps reaching for images and finds none. John names Pseudo-Dionysius, the anonymous author of The Mystical Theology, four times across his works, and takes from that tradition a divine dark that is dark by excess of light rather than by absence of it. Scholars disagree about whether he read the Dionysian texts directly or absorbed the language through later writers who had, so the debt is clear while the route is not. Read that way, night names a mode of perception rather than a verdict. Nothing in John's writing treats the experience as punishment, and he is repeatedly annoyed with directors who tell people otherwise.
Where does the phrase dark night of the soul come from?
The phrase comes from the Spanish Carmelite friar John of the Cross, who died in 1591, and specifically from his poem beginning En una noche oscura and the prose commentary published as Noche Oscura. The familiar English wording, Dark Night of the Soul, is not his. His own heading is simply Noche Oscura, and the words of the soul were supplied by the editors and translators who came after him, so the phrase reached wide English circulation through the Carmelite corpus in translation rather than through his own coinage.
Is the dark night the same as losing your faith?
No. In John's account the person keeps believing and keeps practicing; what disappears is the pleasure and the sense of contact, not the assent. Loss of faith removes the object. The night removes the feeling and leaves the wanting behind, which is why people in it usually describe the pain as longing rather than doubt. The two can overlap in one person, and often do.
What does the word night actually refer to?
Night in John's usage names darkness of the faculties, not a mood and not a season of life. The intellect gets nothing it can hold, the memory finds no useful images, and the will is left without the affection it used to draw on. Each faculty is then given something it cannot see by, which is the argument of book two, chapter six of The Ascent: faith to the intellect, hope to the memory, charity to the will. Darkness there is a property of the light, not a shortage of it.
What are the stages of the dark night of the soul?
The stages of the dark night of the soul, as John of the Cross set them out, are four rather than the five or seven that circulate online: the active night of the senses, the active night of the spirit, the passive night of the senses, and the passive night of the spirit. The division runs along two axes. Sense and spirit name the level being purified, the outer appetites in the first case and the deep habits of intellect, memory and will in the second. Active and passive name who is doing the work. In an active night the person cooperates deliberately, refusing consolations and disciplining desire. In a passive night the work is done to them, and effort makes no difference. John divided his own books along the same line. The Ascent of Mount Carmel covers the active nights, book one on sense and books two and three on spirit. The Dark Night covers the passive ones, book one on the night of sense and book two on the night of the spirit. Almost everything people now mean by the phrase falls inside that last pair, and mostly inside the passive night of sense.
The four are not four steps on a staircase. John says the passive night of sense is entered by many people who have prayed seriously for a while, and that most of them will go no further than it. He never calls the four stages, either. The word in his titles is noche, and book one, chapter one of The Ascent of Mount Carmel divides that night into two parts, sense and spirit, rather than into a numbered series. The tidy stage lists that appear in modern articles, with names like dissolution, the void and rebirth, are twentieth-century inventions grafted onto his vocabulary. They may describe something real about how a long crisis feels from inside, but they are not his, and they usually import a framework of personal growth that John would not recognize. What his sequence stages is purification directed toward union, which is a different question with a different answer.
What is the difference between an active and a passive night?
An active night is the part a person can be instructed in; a passive night is not. Book one, chapter thirteen of The Ascent of Mount Carmel gives the counsels for the active work: prefer the harder thing to the easier, and go by the road on which you have no pleasure. John set the same doctrine down as a drawing as well, a sketch of Mount Carmel with the direct path to the summit marked nada at every step. The original is lost, and the versions reproduced today descend from later copies, so the drawing is credited to him on the strength of the Carmelite tradition rather than of a surviving sheet in his hand. No such instruction exists for the passive night, because no effort brings one on, shortens it, or ends it.
Are the popular five-stage or seven-stage lists from John of the Cross?
No. Lists with headings such as awakening, resistance, dissolution and rebirth come from twentieth-century popular spirituality rather than from John. He named two nights in two modes and wrote about interior movement rather than a timeline. If a stage list you are reading includes anything about manifesting or attracting a better life, it has no connection to the Carmelite material at all.
Do the stages have to happen in order?
Broadly yes, since in John's scheme the night of sense prepares the ground for the night of the spirit. The boundaries blur in practice, though. He is explicit that the second night reaches very few, so most people who go through the first one never see the second at all and the sequence is not a ladder everyone climbs to the top of. The active and passive nights also overlap rather than queue, so a person can be working the counsels of The Ascent while the passive night is being done to them. What he set out is a logic of purification, not a schedule.
What did St John of the Cross actually write about the dark night?
John of the Cross wrote one short poem and two unfinished prose commentaries on it, and the entire doctrine of the dark night comes from those. The poem, eight stanzas beginning En una noche oscura, describes a lover slipping out of a sleeping house at night to meet the beloved. The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night are both commentaries on that same poem, taken from different angles. He was born Juan de Yepes y Alvarez at Fontiveros in Old Castile in 1542, entered the Carmelite order in 1563, and met Teresa of Avila at Medina del Campo in 1567, who recruited him into her reform of the order. On the night of 2 December 1577 friars of the unreformed branch seized him and held him in a cell in the Carmelite house at Toledo for about eight months, during which he composed the first thirty-one stanzas of the Spiritual Canticle. He escaped on 15 August 1578 and died at Ubeda in 1591. Benedict XIII canonized him in 1726 and Pius XI declared him a Doctor of the Church in 1926. The prose is technical, written for friars and nuns under his direction, and it assumes a reader already praying daily.
Both commentaries break off. The Ascent stops partway through its third book, and The Dark Night stops in the second, having explained the poem's first two stanzas and no more than the opening line of the third, which leaves five of the eight stanzas without a commentary and the fullest treatment of the night of the spirit an argument abandoned in the middle. What he finished is uneven in another way. He wrote at length about what has to be given up and comparatively little about what a reader should do in the meantime, which is one reason the tradition leans so heavily on a handful of chapters. None of it appeared in print in his lifetime. The first edition came out at Alcala in 1618, twenty-seven years after his death, and it left the Spiritual Canticle out altogether, so for generations readers met the dark night without the poem cycle that sits closest to it. English readers usually meet all of it through the Kavanaugh and Rodriguez translation of the collected works.
Which of his books should you read first?
The Dark Night is the shorter and more direct of the two commentaries, and book one, chapter nine, on the signs by which the dryness is recognized, is the single passage most often handed to someone in the middle of it. The Ascent of Mount Carmel is longer and more systematic, and it reads badly as a first encounter. The poem takes two minutes and repays rereading more than either.
Did John describe his imprisonment as a dark night?
Not in those terms. He composed a large part of the Spiritual Canticle during the eight months in Toledo, and the biographical tradition connects the cell to the poetry, but his prose never presents the imprisonment as the night he is analyzing. The night in his writing is interior and is caused by God acting on the soul, not by circumstances, however cruel the circumstances happen to be.
What does the poem itself describe?
The poem describes an escape rather than a torment. The speaker leaves a quiet house by a secret ladder, in darkness, guided by a light burning in the heart, and reaches the beloved. One stanza calls the night more lovely than the dawn. Read on its own, without the commentaries beside it, the poem works as a love lyric about a night that helped rather than hurt.
What is the difference between the night of the senses and the night of the spirit?
The night of the senses removes the pleasure a person takes in religious practice and in created things, while the night of the spirit goes after the deeper habits of intellect, memory and will, and John describes it as incomparably more severe. In the first, prayer goes flat, meditation stops working, favorite devotions turn tedious, and food, company and entertainment lose their savor as well. The person usually concludes they have gone backwards and are at fault. In the second, what is stripped is the sense of being acceptable to God at all. John writes about souls who feel abandoned, who see their own poverty with a clarity they cannot look away from, and who find no support in anything, human or divine. He compares that state to purgatory and does not soften the comparison. He also says plainly that the two are not equally common. The night of sense, he writes, happens to many, and to beginners in particular. The night of the spirit falls to very few. Anyone applying the phrase to a difficult year is almost certainly describing the first, if they are describing anything in John's sense at all.
John gives a test, and it is the most practical page he wrote. In book one, chapter nine of The Dark Night he lists three signs by which a director can tell whether dryness is the passive night of sense or something else. First, the person finds no satisfaction in the things of God and none in created things either, which rules out simple boredom with religion. Second, the memory turns anxiously toward God, with a painful sense of not serving him and of slipping backwards, which rules out indifference, since the tepid person does not much care. Third, the person cannot meditate discursively however hard they try, and trying harder makes it worse. All three have to be present together. John insists on the third precisely because an inability to think one's way through prayer looks exactly like laziness from the outside, and he says the failure to tell them apart ruins people.
Which night is harder?
The night of the spirit, by a wide margin, in John's own account. He describes the night of sense as bitter and frightening but essentially a weaning, while the night of the spirit involves a felt conviction of being rejected, and he says souls in it would sooner die. The comparison he reaches for is purgatory, and he means the comparison seriously rather than as emphasis.
What image does John use for the night of the spirit?
A log being burned. In book two, chapter ten of The Dark Night he describes fire acting on damp wood: the wood blackens first, gives off smoke, hisses out its moisture and looks worse than it did before, until it stops resisting and becomes fire itself. The ugliness of the middle stage is the fire working rather than the fire failing. He applies the image directly to the soul.
Can someone be in both nights at once?
Rarely, on John's own account. The Dark Night, book two, chapter one, puts years between the two, spent in what he calls the state of the proficients, where prayer comes easily again and the person assumes the hard part is behind them. He allows an overlap at the seam, with remnants of the first night still present as the second opens.
How long does a dark night of the soul last?
There is no fixed duration for a dark night of the soul, and John of the Cross refuses to give one: he says God leads each soul differently and that the night lasts as long as the purification requires. What the literature offers instead is a range. He describes the passive night of sense as something some people pass through fairly quickly and others remain in for years, and he says a long interval, sometimes years again, can separate the first night from the second. Contemporary direction manuals describe the same spread, from a few months to a decade or more, and they rest on accumulated casework rather than on any count. The best documented long case is Teresa of Calcutta, whose letters were published in 2007 as Come Be My Light, edited by Brian Kolodiejchuk. They show a felt absence of God running from around 1948 until close to her death in 1997, with one brief interruption, and both she and her directors used the Carmelite vocabulary for it. No population-level data exists on any of this. Nobody has counted how many people enter such a period or how long it typically runs, and any specific figure quoted at you has no study behind it.
John does say what makes it longer, and the answers are unwelcome. Resistance extends it: fighting to keep the old method of prayer, hunting for a technique that will restore the earlier feeling, changing directors, changing traditions, or piling on practices in the hope of forcing something loose. So does poor direction. The third stanza of The Living Flame of Love carries his longest sustained attack on that, where he likens a director who cannot leave a person in the quiet they have been given to a blacksmith who knows nothing but how to hammer, and says the damage such a man does is hard to undo afterwards. Reframing does not shorten it either, since on John's account the person is not the one producing the state and so cannot argue their way out of it. What he recommends is continuing, quietly, with less rather than more.
Can a dark night last for decades?
Yes, on the documented evidence. The letters of Teresa of Calcutta describe roughly fifty years of felt absence, and Carmelite and Jesuit direction literature holds other long cases, though few are as thoroughly recorded. Long cases look like the exception. Most accounts that reach a spiritual director run from months to a few years, and even that impression rests on anecdote rather than on any counting.
What makes it last longer?
Two things, mostly. The first is treating the state as a verdict on yourself, which turns dryness into self-accusation and stacks a second problem on the first. The second is isolation. Carmelite direction literature treats concealment as a burden of its own, since a person carrying the dryness alone has nobody to tell them it is not a fault. An untreated depression or thyroid disorder sitting underneath can keep someone flat for as long as it goes untreated, which is why a medical check belongs early rather than late.
Is there any research on how long it lasts?
Not for the Christian dark night specifically. The nearest body of work is the Varieties of Contemplative Experience project by Jared Lindahl, Willoughby Britton and colleagues at Brown University, published in PLOS ONE in 2017, which documented difficult and sometimes long-lasting meditation-related states among Western Buddhist practitioners. That is a different tradition and a different phenomenon, and no comparable work on Carmelite desolation exists.
What does spiritual desolation feel like day to day?
Spiritual desolation, day to day, is mostly ordinary and quiet. A person keeps the same schedule, sits down to pray at the same hour, and gets nothing: no warmth, no sense of being heard, no thread of thought that goes anywhere. Scripture that used to open reads like a phone bill. The practices that once produced something now produce a stretch of dead time to be sat through. Outside prayer, the flattening usually spreads. Food is fine, work is fine, nothing is exactly wrong, and none of it lands. What distinguishes the state in the contemplative accounts is what survives underneath, because the wanting does not go. People describe missing God with an intensity that makes the absence worse instead of better, alongside a low background guilt about going through motions they no longer feel. Many keep it hidden for a long time, since saying it out loud sounds like ingratitude or like an announcement that they have stopped believing. Anger comes and goes. Boredom is far more common than anguish. The single most frequent description is of talking to a wall and continuing to talk anyway.
The Jesuit tradition mapped the same territory and used a different word for it. Ignatius of Loyola's rules for the discernment of spirits for the first week, in the Spiritual Exercises, define desolation as darkness of soul, turmoil, restlessness and a pull toward what is low and earthly, set against consolation. His practical rules are specific, and they run in order: change nothing you decided in consolation, act against the desolation by adding a little to prayer or self-examination rather than cutting back, and hold on to the knowledge that it passes. The ninth rule in that set names three causes, which are one's own negligence, a test of what a person is worth without felt support, and instruction that consolation was always a gift rather than a wage. That list is where the two traditions part. Ignatian desolation may come from tepidity or from the enemy, so it can be resisted. John's passive night is God's own work, so it cannot. A director who confuses the two hands out exactly the wrong instruction.
Is dryness in prayer always a dark night?
No. Treating every dry stretch as the dark night is the usual mistake. Exhaustion, grief, burnout, an untreated illness, a new baby, alcohol and plain neglect of the practice all produce the same flatness. John's three signs exist precisely because he expected most cases to be something else, and he wanted directors to have a way of saying so out loud. A few weeks of feeling nothing after a hard month is ordinary and needs no theology attached to it.
Does it affect life outside prayer?
Usually. John says so directly, since the withdrawal of pleasure covers created things along with spiritual ones. People report work going gray and conversations arriving as though heard through a wall. Relationships often hold up better than the person expects, because obligations still get met even when nothing behind them is felt. Once the flattening reaches the point of not functioning at work or at home, it has crossed into territory a clinician should look at.
Do people report physical symptoms?
Fatigue, disturbed sleep and appetite changes come up often, and they are the same nonspecific symptoms low mood produces in anyone. Heat moving up the spine, involuntary movements, internal sound and sensory overload are a different phenomenon with a literature of its own, covered here in Kundalini Awakening: Signs, Stages and Risks. Persistent physical symptoms deserve a medical opinion before anyone interprets them spiritually.
How did Carmelite directors tell the night apart from melancholy?
Carmelite directors told the night apart from melancholy by watching what survived in a person rather than by adding up symptoms. John of the Cross describes desolation with positive marks, and those marks carry his whole argument. The person can no longer meditate by thinking, yet wants to sit still in a quiet, general attention with nothing particular in it, and would rather be left alone in that quiet than given something to do. Underneath the dryness there is a settled peace the misery does not reach. The anxious, painful care about God that he lists as his second sign is what directors leaned on hardest here, since the melancholic person, on his description, is not turned toward God at all but simply flattened. Effort makes the state worse instead of better. Melancholy, in the sixteenth-century reading, drains the wanting along with everything else, and it answers to food, sleep and rest, which the night does not. None of that separates the two in a modern clinical sense, and it was never built to. For the general differential between an awakening, depression, burnout and an ordinary life crisis, see The Stages of Spiritual Awakening: Which Map You Are On and Where People Stall.
The problem is older than the Carmelites by twelve centuries. Evagrius Ponticus, writing in the Egyptian desert in the fourth century, put acedia among the eight thoughts that assail a monk and called it the noonday demon, a listlessness arriving in the heat of the day with an argument that the cell is unbearable. John Cassian carried the category into Latin monasticism, and the medieval West folded it together with tristitia and later with the physicians' melancholia, black bile in the Galenic scheme of four humors. By John's lifetime a director had three competing explanations for the same flat prayer: a fault to be resisted, a bodily condition to be treated, or God working under the appearance of loss. In The Dark Night, book one, chapter nine, he tells directors to weigh sin, lukewarmness and bad humor or bodily indisposition before concluding anything about God. Teresa of Avila was blunter about the bodily case. Her Book of the Foundations gives a chapter to melancholy in the convent and tells prioresses to govern it with food, occupation and shortened hours rather than with more prayer.
What did melancholy mean in John's century?
A bodily condition rather than a moral failing. Galenic medicine explained it by an excess of black bile, one of the four humors, and prescribed diet, sleep, warmth and rest. The category was wide, covering what a clinic would now sort into several different diagnoses, and Robert Burton gathered the whole of it, religious melancholy included, in The Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621.
Is acedia the same thing as the night?
No, and the prescribed remedies are opposite. Acedia in Evagrius and Cassian is a temptation to be resisted, worked off by staying in the cell, keeping the hours and doing manual labor until it passes. John's passive night is done to the person and cannot be resisted, and pushing against it with extra effort is the response he spends most of his pages telling directors to stop.
What did a director do when the signs were unclear?
Treat the body first and wait. Teresa's instructions to prioresses ran that way: restore food and sleep, cut the penances, shorten the hours of prayer, give the person work, then watch for some weeks. A state that lifts under rest was never the night. That sequence now starts with a doctor, and thoughts of suicide, not eating, or weeks without sleep mean one today.
How does the modern use of the term differ from the Carmelite original?
Modern usage applies dark night of the soul to any prolonged crisis of meaning, while the Carmelite original names one specific stage inside a Catholic contemplative life, caused by God, aimed at union, and identified by three signs. Divorce, burnout, bereavement, addiction, the collapse of a career or a belief system: all of it now takes the phrase, and none of it requires prayer, a director, or God to be anywhere in the picture. The drift happened in stages. Evelyn Underhill's Mysticism, published in 1911, lifted the term out of Carmelite direction and placed it as one stage in a general mystical way applicable across traditions. F. Scott Fitzgerald borrowed it for a secular purpose in The Crack-Up in 1936, with the line about it always being three o'clock in the morning in a real dark night of the soul, and that sentence probably did more for the phrase in English than the commentaries ever did. Self-help and popular psychology took it from there. Western vipassana teachers later applied it to the difficult insight stages of Theravada practice, a usage now widespread in meditation circles.
Something specific is lost in the widening. In John, the night is passive, and the passivity carries an instruction: stop trying to fix it, stay where you are, keep the practice small and regular. The modern usage keeps the misery and drops the instruction, then often replaces it with advice to do more, which is the one thing John says makes matters worse. The direction of travel goes as well. His night points somewhere, toward union, and the pain has a stated function; a secular dark night has no destination attached, which changes what it is like to be inside one. Something is gained too. The phrase gives people a name for a state that ordinary vocabulary handles badly, and it carries the reassurance that the state was described centuries ago by someone who did not think it was pathology. The loss-of-self quality that shows up in the deeper accounts overlaps with Ego Death: What It Means, What Triggers It and How to Integrate It, which is a distinct event with its own literature.
Is the Buddhist dark night the same thing?
No, though the borrowed name causes constant confusion. Western vipassana teachers use dark night for the dukkha nanas, the stages in the Theravada progress-of-insight map where practice produces fear, misery and disgust before equanimity arrives. The map, the cause and the goal are all different from John's. The two get compared because both describe practice getting worse before anything changes.
Who made the phrase popular in English?
No single person, and the English wording predates the popularizers. It is a translator's rendering of Noche Oscura del Alma, already circulating in English devotional writing after David Lewis published the first English version of the complete works in 1864. What the twentieth century added was reach. E. Allison Peers's translation of the complete works, issued in three volumes in the middle 1930s, kept them available, and after Fitzgerald the phrase detached from them and traveled on through popular psychology and the recovery movement.
Does the loose modern usage do any harm?
Mostly it is harmless, and it sometimes helps by naming a state people cannot otherwise describe. The harm is specific and worth watching for. Calling a depressive episode a dark night can delay treatment, and framing a difficult stretch as a spiritual promotion can flatter someone into staying in it longer. Both happen often enough that directors warn about them.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you have a dark night of the soul if you are not religious?
Not in John of the Cross's sense, since his night is defined by its cause, God acting on someone who has been praying, and by the loss of a contact that was there before. In the loose modern sense, plainly yes: people with no religion describe long periods in which meaning drains out of everything they valued and nothing replaces it. The experience can be real and severe. What the Carmelite framework offers such a person is a description rather than a diagnosis, and its advice about not forcing a change travels reasonably well.
Does everyone go through a dark night of the soul?
No. John is explicit that the passive night of sense is common among people who pray seriously, not universal among people generally, and that the night of the spirit reaches very few. Plenty of committed believers report decades of steady, undramatic practice with no such episode at all. Outside the religious framing, prolonged crises of meaning are common but not universal either. Nobody has counted, so anyone quoting you a percentage of people who go through one is making the number up.
How do you know when your dark night of the soul is over?
It usually ends quietly rather than with an event. The signs people report are practical: prayer stops feeling like an ordeal, ordinary things regain some savor, the self-accusation drops away, and a settled sense arrives of not needing the old consolations back. John describes what follows the night of sense as a calmer, less effortful attentiveness rather than a return to the earlier warmth, which catches people out, since they expect the old feelings and get something plainer. Looking back and finding the anxiety gone is often the first evidence.
Can a dark night of the soul happen more than once in a life?
Yes. In John's account the passive night of sense recurs, with dryness giving way to consolation and then returning, sometimes repeatedly across years, and he treats the two nights as separate passages that a long interval can divide. Later episodes are often reported as easier to bear, because the person recognizes the pattern and stops reading it as failure. A second episode is not evidence of progress, though, and treating one as a spiritual milestone tends to make it last longer.
Should you keep praying or meditating when nothing is happening?
Yes, but differently and usually less. The standard Carmelite advice is to stay in prayer without forcing the method that has stopped working: sit, keep the time short and regular, and remain quietly attentive instead of trying to think, picture or produce a feeling. John sets that out in book one, chapter ten of The Dark Night, where he tells the person to stay in peace, content with a loving attentiveness, and not to fret about apparently doing nothing. He is emphatic that hunting for the old experience makes matters worse. Consistency matters more than duration here.
Is a dark night of the soul the same thing as a spiritual awakening?
No. Evelyn Underhill's map in Mysticism puts the two at opposite ends of one sequence: awakening opens it, and the dark night arrives late, between illumination and union. Awakening language points to an opening, an influx, a sense of expanded contact. The dark night names the withdrawal of everything felt. In John's account the darkness is caused by an inflow too large for the faculties to handle, so the two are related in mechanism while being opposite in experience. Energetic accounts of awakening, with their vocabulary of centers and currents, come from a different framework than the Carmelite one.
Should you see a therapist during a dark night of the soul?
See a clinician if the state is impairing daily life, if it includes thoughts of self-harm, or if you cannot tell what you are dealing with. An assessment commits you to nothing and forecloses no interpretation, and a treatable physical cause turns up often enough that ruling one out counts as basic care. Gerald May, a psychiatrist and senior fellow at the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation, whose book The Dark Night of the Soul appeared in 2004, argued for treating the depression and taking the spiritual reading seriously at once rather than choosing between them. Plenty of people see a therapist and a spiritual director together, and the arrangement works best when each knows about the other.
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