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A Book Review
Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your
Way Through Life's Ordeals
By Thomas Moore
New York: Gotham Books, 2004.
ISBN 1-592-40067-1
320 pp. paperback
A Review by Dennis
Patrick Slattery, Ph.D.
Dennis Patrick Slattery, Ph.D. is Core Faculty, Mythological Studies,
Pacifica Graduate Institute. The author of over 225 articles on culture,
psychology and literature, as well as author of 7 books, his most recent is
entitled Grace in the Desert: Awakening to the Gifts of Monastic Life (Jossey-Bass,
2004), which describes a spiritual pilgrimage staying in 12 monasteries and Zen
Buddhist centers in the United States over a three and a half month sojourn. He
was also a presenter at Mythic Journeys 2004, and he presented a lecture
and workshop on February 17 and 18, 2006, for the C.G. Jung Society of Atlanta,
a partner of the Mythic Imagination Institute.
Readers will know and remember Thomas Moore's reputation from previous best
sellers: Care of the Soul and Soul Mates
were enormously successful less because they carried the aura of "Self-Help"
books but because they offered the intelligent, reflective lay reader another
corridor for imagining their daily lives as opportunities for contemplation,
even for spiritual renewal.
Dark Nights of the Soul
, which I believe will be another best seller, is not a duplication of Moore's
earlier work, but a deepening spiritual exploration of the soul's need to
descend, to be emptied, to feel the dry heat of darkness. The title is taken
from the 16th century Spanish mystic, poet and theologian, St. John of the
Cross (1542-1591), who writes in his classic text that as the soul moves toward
God in love "it first feels dryness and emptiness and then begins to be cured
in suffering through purgation of all desire." Stripped of its grasping and
impulses to possess, the soul moves into and through darkness to a state of
contemplation, reflection and release from appetite.
Moore's book moves within the spirit of the Spanish mystic's thoughts in order
to begin to sketch the outlines of a spiritual psychology, to bring the
theological imagination to bear on the complex pilgrimage of each soul as it
journeys towards what more than one writer has called "a fruitful darkness."
Let me say at the outset: this book is not problem-solution oriented. Rather,
it gently and persuasively shifts our attitudes towards our common experiences
such that we can perceive them in a different light; better said, in a
different darkness.
Swimming against the common conventional currents of cure whose intention is to
rid the individual of suffering and pain, Moore instead asks: how might
conditions like melancholy and despair and emptiness and feelings of ennui not
be stigmatized as abnormal and then jettisoned for some vague notion of
normalcy? Rather, what do these conditions do to serve the soul as it moves
towards insight, deepening awareness, a fuller consciousness that "calls for a
spiritual response, not a therapeutic one"?
Pulling from literature, poetry, cultural trends, philosophy, his own personal
sufferings, music, theological writings, archetypal psychology and biography,
Moore asks the reader to entertain subtle and complex ideas, to improvise, to
dare to run riffs on conventional ways of thought in order to break out of them
and break through into fresh, original insights that one can call one's own. He
reveals for example, in the many variations of the "Dark Sea Journey" how
metaphors lead us to meanings about our own darkness, not as something negative
from which we escape to the light, but as a place "to sit, to incubate in the
belly of the whale," to prepare oneself for a birthing that cannot yet be
articulated. And this caution: psychological language "is heroic and
sentimental" which often allows "no deepening of imagination. The language we
use is important; it should reflect some intelligence about life." Therapeutic
language, in its limitations, may actually suffocate a fuller sense of
awareness than promote it. Poetic language, which values the figural quality of
our life's contents and actions, actually increases the intimacy we can
experience by reflecting on the more disturbing conditions we discover in
ourselves.
Rather than diagnoses, Moore calls for the rebirth of rituals in our lives
which can evoke the imagination's responses and treat with respect the original
and unique contours of our darkness. In a consumer-oriented culture, where the
prevailing mythos is passivity, watching, viewing, Moore's book shakes us a bit
out of our lethargy and encourages each of us to "search for a living story
that is yours and is crucial to health." Paying attention to the narrative that
one is rather than to a rational explanation of the causes for why you are a
particular way yields a fresh, more crisp and incisive vision of one's being, a
spiritual impulse in the soul that is less comfortable with dry dogmatic
assertions, and more engaged by authentic feelings wedded to vital ideas and
images.
If psychology and therapy move towards the sun, light, warmth, enlightenment,
rational causes, cures and solutions, Moore's method is moon-like, lunar, dark,
shadowy, invisible, opaque, open-ended. Needed then is another kind of
imagination, one that does not insist that all darkness become light, but that
darkening itself is a method, a mythic way of being present to the soul's
melancholy, its irony, its paradoxes and its contradictions. His book reveals
how to respect and even become a bit comfortable in the muddle of the journey
of our lives. Lingering, waiting, being patient, accepting being stuck,
stillness, meditation without a goal, breathing, being present to this moment
with an open heart, acceptance of pain and suffering - these are all
therapeutics of soul that if nurtured, reveal soul's voice that may otherwise
be muted and missed for its wisdom.
Moving in darkness is a paradox, finally, in Moore's lexicon, for it is both a
place of concealment and uncertainty and a dimension of revelation. Darkness
has its own wisdom, as does silence. His book will guide you into these nether
regions, as Virgil guides the quivering pilgrim Dante, into the farthest depths
of the unconscious realm of soul making.
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