Art of living Well

St. John of the Cross and Neuroscience

Traditionally, the dark night of sense has been understood as the decisive transition from the purgative way to the illuminative way. It is the moment in which God begins to wean the soul from its dependence on sensible consolations, discursive meditation, and the more accessible forms of affective prayer, so that the person may be prepared for a higher mode of receptivity. In the classical mystical tradition, this is not a rejection of lower prayer, but a purification of the soul’s attachment even to good things. The soul is not being punished; it is being prepared. St. John of the Cross gives this doctrine its most penetrating expression, but the broader tradition already points in this direction: St Thomas Aquinas grounds perfection in charity and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, St. Teresa of Avila describes the transition from active recollection toward infused recollection.¹

Yet this traditional account can also be illuminated by principles drawn from neuroscience. Such an approach must be handled carefully. Neuroscience cannot explain grace, nor can it reduce infused contemplation to brain states. Grace remains supernatural, and the indwelling of the Trinity is not a neural event. But neuroscience can help us understand some of the human material through which grace works. It can describe how habits of attention, emotional regulation, interoception, reward, and self-referential processing are reordered when a person is led from active, effortful forms of prayer toward a more simplified, receptive form of awareness. In that sense, neuroscience does not replace mystical theology; it helps clarify the natural substratum being purified and elevated.²

This is especially important in an age in which many souls misread the dark night psychologically, morally, or pastorally. Some interpret it merely as depression. Others treat it as a romantic badge of spiritual depth. Still others assume that because prayer has become dry, they must have done something wrong, or perhaps that they should simply return to multiplying methods, words, and techniques. But the tradition suggests something more subtle. There are times when God removes the felt sweetness of prayer precisely because the soul has begun to cling to the sweetness rather than to God Himself. There are moments when discursiveness itself becomes an obstacle, not because reason is bad, but because grace is drawing the person beyond a mode of prayer dominated by the lower operations of imagination and discursive thought.³

This fits very naturally with a point I have often returned to in other contexts: there are stages of life in which overanalysis becomes counterproductive. One can become trapped “in the head,” not only psychologically but spiritually. A soul may be sincere, disciplined, orthodox, and serious, yet still subtly attached to managing its own prayer, producing its own states, tracking its own progress, and stabilizing itself through methods that once were helpful but now become limiting. In this sense, the dark night of sense is not simply about losing consolation; it is about losing control. Or more precisely, it is about losing the illusion of control over one’s relationship with God. The soul that has relied on pious effort, sensible devotion, and structured meditation now begins to discover that the next stage cannot be engineered. It must be received.⁴

Aquinas gives us the basic framework for understanding this transition. For him, the perfection of the Christian life consists principally in charity, not in extraordinary experiences. He also teaches that the gifts of the Holy Spirit dispose the soul to be moved by God in a higher way than the acquired virtues alone can accomplish. The virtues perfect us according to the mode of human reason; the gifts perfect us for receptivity to divine motion. Contemplation, in turn, belongs chiefly to the loving adherence of the mind to divine truth. This is crucial, because it means that the transition into higher prayer is not fundamentally about achieving altered states. It is about the deepening of charity and the increased docility of the soul under grace. The dark night of sense therefore involves a purification not merely of emotion, but of the whole human mode of approaching God. One passes gradually from doing to receiving, from constructing to consenting, from discursiveness to a more unified and loving gaze.⁵

John of the Cross then radicalizes this insight by describing how God places beginners into the night of sense when they are no longer to be fed chiefly through the breast of sensible devotion. The beginner, he says, often clings to spiritual sweetness in ways analogous to how the immature cling to pleasure elsewhere. God therefore withdraws this sweetness, not to destroy prayer, but to purify love. John’s three classic signs are especially important: the person finds no pleasure in the things of God nor in created things; the imagination and discursive faculties are unable to operate as before; and yet there remains a habitual desire to remain turned toward God, even in dryness. This is one of the great safeguards of the tradition. The dark night is not mere sterility. Beneath the surface poverty, there remains an orientation toward God. The soul would stay with Him even when it can no longer feel Him.⁶

Teresa of Avila describes a similar transition, though in her own language. In the early mansions, the faculties are still more dispersed, and prayer involves considerable active effort. But as the soul is drawn inward, there emerges a recollection that is less manufactured and more given. In the Fourth Mansions, she speaks of a recollection in which God begins to gather the soul more deeply into itself, preparing it for higher favors. Teresa remains practical here, as always. She does not advise abandoning fidelity, humility, or ordinary prayer. Rather, she suggests that when God begins to draw the faculties inward in a more simple way, the soul should not resist by frantic overactivity. One must cooperate without trying to seize what can only be received. That insight alone already anticipates an important neurocognitive principle: the highest forms of integration are often blocked by excessive self-monitoring and compulsive effort.⁷

Aumann and Garrigou-Lagrange are especially helpful because they synthesize the Thomistic and Carmelite lines. Aumann explains the dark night of sense as a passive purification through which beginners are dispossessed of dependence on sensible devotion and prepared for the illuminative way. Garrigou-Lagrange presents it as the normal transition from ascetical effort to the beginning of infused contemplation, or at least to a life more deeply permeated by the gifts of the Holy Spirit. In both, the point is not elitism. This purification is not reserved to the spectacular mystic. It belongs to the ordinary logic of sanctity, though it unfolds differently according to vocation, temperament, generosity, and divine providence.⁸

Now, if we shift to the level of neuroscience, the parallels become striking, even though the two orders must never be confused. In the early stages of prayer, much depends on effortful attention. One uses images, words, reflections, and methods to direct the mind toward God. This resembles what cognitive neuroscience would call top-down regulation: deliberate control of attention, suppression of distractions, and sustained task engagement. Such effort is good and necessary. But advanced contemplative traditions, including those studied outside the Catholic world, have repeatedly noted that there comes a point where effort itself can become too coarse. A person who constantly monitors whether he is recollected, whether he is peaceful, whether the technique is “working,” actually destabilizes the very simplicity he seeks. Modern neuroscience describes something analogous in studies of attention, meditation, and self-referential processing: excessive self-monitoring and rumination correlate with stronger activation and dysregulation within networks associated with mind-wandering and self-referential thought, often called the default mode network. Experienced contemplative practice, by contrast, is associated with reduced mind-wandering and greater functional differentiation between attention networks and default-mode activity.⁹

This is useful because one of the hallmarks of the dark night of sense is the frustration of the old machinery of prayer. The imagination no longer yields easily. Discursive reasoning feels forced. Emotional sweetness is absent. The person can no longer “get traction” in the old way. On the surface, this feels like regression. But on another level, it may reflect the dismantling of an overreliance on forms of cognition that had previously mediated prayer. The person is being trained away from compulsive production toward sustained, simplified presence. In neural terms, one might say that the brain is no longer being rewarded in the same way for effortful spiritual performance. The reward loops tied to novelty, sweetness, success, and self-confirmation are being interrupted. The person cannot “feel” progress as before. This can produce instability, agitation, and the temptation to return to lower supports. But it can also open the way for a more stable and less self-referential mode of awareness.¹⁰

A second neuroscientific theme is interoception, the perception and interpretation of signals arising from within the body. Contemporary work suggests that the quality of attention one brings to bodily and affective states significantly shapes how those states are regulated. In less mature forms, a person may become reactive to inner fluctuations: dryness, heaviness, restlessness, aridity, fatigue. These become interpreted as threats or failures. In more mature forms of awareness, the person can sustain contact with inner poverty without panic or compulsive interpretation. This maps well onto the dark night. God permits the lower appetites to experience deprivation; the body-mind system protests; but grace trains the soul not to absolutize these signals. The soul learns to abide before God without demanding immediate affective resolution. In ordinary language: the head is gradually brought down into the heart, and the heart into God.¹¹

This also fits with a distinction I have often drawn between authentic depth and nervous intensity. A person can mistake agitation for spiritual seriousness. He can be constantly analyzing his state, diagnosing others, measuring outcomes, replaying failures, or chasing peak experiences. But this sort of interior noise is precisely what many contemplative and neuroscientific models identify as counterproductive. Rumination narrows perception, strengthens self-referential loops, and can reduce flexibility of attention. If so, then the dark night of sense may often feel worse to the modern person precisely because modernity has trained us into compulsive cognitive management. We do not simply lose consolation; we lose the illusion that we can manage our consciousness into holiness. That is a deeper humiliation.¹²

Here one sees why the tradition insists on discernment. Not every dryness is a dark night. There is dryness caused by sin, by dissipation, by burnout, by poor sleep, by unhealed trauma, by major depression, or by simple physiological exhaustion. John of the Cross is careful here, and so are later theologians. But when the classical signs are present, the proper response is not to panic, nor to multiply techniques, nor to seek constant stimulation. The proper response is fidelity, simplification, detachment, and surrender. Teresa would say: do not abandon prayer. John would say: remain in loving attention to God as best you can. Garrigou-Lagrange would say: let the passive purification do its work. Aquinas would remind us that the measure is not felt sweetness but charity.¹³

This point matters pastorally. Many active, intense, intellectually serious Catholics are excellent at meditation in the lower sense. They can think, analyze, compare texts, generate insights, even move themselves affectively. But when God begins to strip that down, they often interpret the loss as collapse. In reality, it may be the beginning of a more profound form of prayer. This is especially true for personalities inclined toward control, conceptual precision, and interior vigilance. Such souls are often very strong in the purgative stage and very clumsy at receiving. They can renounce obvious sins and take on demanding disciplines, but they do not yet know how to be poor before God. The dark night of sense teaches precisely this poverty. It is a school of helplessness, but a fruitful helplessness. It is the moment where one learns that holiness is not manufactured intensity, but surrendered charity.¹⁴

Neuroscience can only take us so far, but it does help explain why this transition is so destabilizing. The human organism likes predictability. It likes familiar forms of reward and cognitive control. When those are removed, it often interprets the situation as danger. But spiritual maturation frequently requires the destabilization of previously adaptive patterns. One might say that grace does not simply console the nervous system; at times it reorders it through deprivation. Not deprivation for its own sake, but deprivation of dependence. The soul had been leaning on images, methods, sweetness, understanding, and the felt sense of progress. God removes the crutches so that charity may walk more nakedly.¹⁵

And this is where the traditional doctrine retains its full force. The dark night of sense is not the replacement of theology by psychology, nor of grace by neuroscience. It is the purification of the whole person for a more profound mode of union. Theology tells us what is happening formally: the soul is being detached from lower satisfactions and prepared for deeper receptivity to divine motion. Neuroscience can describe some of the correlates on the natural plane: attention becomes less dependent on effortful control, self-referential rumination is exposed, reward expectations are frustrated, and embodied awareness must be retrained. But only mystical theology can say why this is happening in the order of salvation. It is happening because God wants the soul Himself. He therefore removes even the spiritual things by which the soul had subtly possessed itself.¹⁶

In the end, the dark night of sense is a mercy. It does not feel like mercy because it wounds our spiritual vanity. It wounds the part of us that wants to succeed at prayer, to be someone advanced, to feel stable, to grasp what God is doing, to maintain a satisfying religious identity. But that is exactly why it is healing. The purgative way is dominated by effort, vigilance, renunciation, and discipline. The illuminative way requires all those still, but now transfigured by a greater passivity before God. The soul must be weaned from lower forms of prayer, not because they were bad, but because they were preparatory. The child is not despised because he is taken from milk to stronger food. So too the soul is not abandoned when sensible devotion dries up. Rather, God may be drawing it into a more mature mode of love, one in which charity becomes more purified, attention more simple, and the person more capable of bearing the quiet action of grace.¹⁷

If we understand this well, we can preserve both poles that matter so much: the theological and the experiential, doctrine and interiority. The doctrine tells us that the transition from purgative to illuminative life is real, normal, and governed by grace. The analysis of experience, including neuroscience, helps us understand how deeply this grace penetrates the human organism. But the final truth remains the same as it was in the masters: God strips the senses so that the spirit may learn to live more by faith, hope, and love. The soul loses the lower supports of prayer in order to discover that God is present more deeply than feeling, more deeply than imagery, and more deeply than method. That discovery is painful. It is also the beginning of freedom.¹⁸

Endnotes

  1. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 184, a. 1, on the perfection of the Christian life consisting principally in charity; II-II, q. 180, on the contemplative life; St. John of the Cross, Dark Night, bk. I; St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, Fourth Mansions; Jordan Aumann, Spiritual Theology; Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, The Three Ages of the Interior Life. Aquinas texts:  John of the Cross:  Teresa:  Aumann:  Garrigou-Lagrange:  
  2. On the limits of neuroscientific explanation and the usefulness of neuroscience for attention, self-regulation, and contemplative practice, see K. J. Devaney et al., “Attention and Default Mode Network Assessments of Meditation Experience during Active Cognition and Rest,” 2021; Yi-Yuan Tang et al., “Effortless Training of Attention and Self-Control,” 2022; Vinod Menon, “Saliency, Switching, Attention and Control,” 2010.  
  3. John of the Cross describes beginners’ attachment to spiritual sweetness and the divine withdrawal of these consolations in Dark Night, bk. I. Teresa likewise marks a transition from more active to more infused modes of recollection in the Fourth Mansions.  
  4. This emphasis on the loss of control follows from the broader Carmelite account of passive purification and from the Thomistic principle that higher perfection consists in deeper docility to divine motion through charity and the gifts.  
  5. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 68, on the gifts of the Holy Spirit; II-II, q. 180, on contemplation; II-II, q. 184, a. 1, on charity as the essence of perfection.  
  6. John of the Cross, Dark Night, bk. I, especially the sections on the signs by which one may discern the night of sense.  
  7. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, Fourth Mansions, ch. 3, on recollection preparing the soul for higher favors and on the need not to resist God’s inward drawing by excessive activity.  
  8. Jordan Aumann, Spiritual Theology, on the passive purifications and the normal development of the spiritual life; Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, The Three Ages of the Interior Life, on the dark night of sense as the transition from beginners to proficients.  
  9. Devaney et al., “Attention and Default Mode Network Assessments of Meditation Experience,” 2021; Judson A. Brewer et al., “Meditation Experience Is Associated with Differences in Default Mode Network Activity and Connectivity,” 2011; Menon, “Saliency, Switching, Attention and Control,” 2010. These studies and reviews connect contemplative training with reduced mind-wandering, altered default-mode activity, and more efficient engagement of attention networks.  
  10. Tang et al., “Effortless Training of Attention and Self-Control,” 2022, on the transition from effortful control toward more effortless regulation in advanced contemplative training; Yoshida et al., “Focused Attention Meditation Training Modifies Neural Activity,” 2020.  
  11. V. Joshi et al., “The Role of Interoceptive Attention and Appraisal,” 2021; Wenjie G. Chen et al., “Sensing, Integrating, Interpreting, and Regulating Signals in the Body,” 2021. These help frame the role of bodily awareness and appraisal in emotional regulation.  
  12. On rumination and default-mode dysregulation, see J. P. Hamilton et al., “Depressive Rumination, the Default-Mode Network, and the Dark Matter of Clinical Neuroscience,” 2015; T. Chou et al., “The Default Mode Network and Rumination,” 2023 review.  
  13. John of the Cross distinguishes genuine purgation from other causes of dryness; Aquinas gives the higher criterion of charity rather than felt devotion; Aumann and Garrigou-Lagrange provide systematic discernment of passive purifications.  
  14. This application to intensely analytical temperaments is an inference drawn from the theological tradition and from contemporary neuroscience on self-monitoring, rumination, and effortful control.  
  15. On the brain’s preference for familiar reward and control patterns, and on the way contemplative practice can alter these patterns, see Brewer et al., 2011; Menon, 2010; Tang et al., 2022.  
  16. Garrigou-Lagrange and Aumann both insist that these purifications are ordered to deeper charity and contemplative receptivity, not to extraordinary experience as such.  
  17. John of the Cross, Dark Night, bk. I; Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, Fourth Mansions; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 184, a. 1.  
  18. For the theological structure of the transition and the role of charity, contemplation, and passive purification, see Aquinas, John of the Cross, Teresa, Aumann, and Garrigou-Lagrange throughout the works cited above. For the neuroscience parallels regarding attention, rumination, and interoceptive regulation, see Devaney et al. 2021; Tang et al. 2022; Joshi et al. 2021; Hamilton et al. 2015.