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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 March 2023
Et dixi: Forsitan tenebrae conculcabunt me; Et nox illuminatio mea in deliciis meis
(Psalmus 138.11 [St. Jerome's Vulgate])The notion of “the dark night of the soul,” the subject of the two mystical poems under consideration here, has passed itself through a remarkable metamorphosis. The phrase is generally understood to have originated in Plotinus (?205–270? CE), who used it to describe the radiant darkness that characterizes the final phases of mystical union (Underhill 15). San Juan de la Cruz made the expression famous in his eight-stanza poem “Noche oscura,” whose subject Kieran Kavanaugh describes as “the painful passage through the night, and the unspeakable joy of encountering God” (353). From this celestial height, the same expression has suffered something of a fall into popular discourse, and is used today to describe any difficult circumstance. For example, on a website for a software company recently in financial distress, one finds “The Dark Night of the Soul” heading a page that opens, “The last quarter of Autodesk's fiscal year has always been the most difficult” (Autodesk).
This leap illustrates the ability of certain powerful signifiers to remain fixed while what they signify crosses large semantic distances, particularly over long expanses of time. What follows is a consideration of a similar leap, at work not along the axis of geography or time, rather of gender. The lexical and anecdotal similarities between Juan de la Cruz's “Noche oscura” and Cecilia del Nacimiento's “Canciones de la unión y transformación del alma en Dios” (hereafter “Canciones,” I) point to some kind of a relationship between the two: both employ apophatic tropes of darkness and cast the human soul as a lover whose desire for her beloved leads her to seek him out and become one with him in joy. The fact that Cecilia del Nacimiento's “Canciones” were actually attributed to Juan de la Cruz for several hundred years is testimony of both the high quality of her poem and its apparent kinship with his work.
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