If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night, even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.”
“In me it is dark, but with you there is light.”
Introduction
When we attempt to speak of “John Wesley and Dark Faith,” reflecting terminology from John of the Cross, we remember that John Wesley himself used the “darkness metaphor” in relation to a Christian’s experience normally in a negative sense, that is, only for sin and ignorance—outward and inward sin, sins of omission, and ignorance of scriptural teaching. The apostolic declaration in 1 John,
God is light and in him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his son cleanses us from all sin (1:5-7),
characterizes Wesley’s use of the metaphors of darkness and light as would Ephesians 5:8: “For once you were in darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light.”
It was the mystical tradition, especially the apophatic strain, which for centuries had employed the darkness metaphor in their spiritual writings. John Wesley, professedly kataphatic in his spirituality, was allured for a period by mystics of various degrees. He often read them in the course of his spiritual quest, a practice that continued all his life. But he often deplored them: “So, I plunged even deeper into mysticism, still plowing with their own wicked heifer.” On January 25, 1738, just four months before Aldersgate, he wrote in his Journal that “all the other enemies of Christianity are triflers; the mystics are the most dangerous of all its enemies. They stab it in the vitals, and its most serious professors are most likely to fall by them. May I praise him who hath snatched me out of this fire.” A brief look at John Wesley’s relation to the mystical tradition of the age-long Church is in order. I. John Wesley and the Mystics: John of the Cross
Among the mystics whom Wesley read throughout his life were Macarius (d. 390), Thomas á Kempis (1380?-1471), John of Avila (1500-1569), Gregory Lopez (1542-1596), Francis de Sales (1567-1622), the life-long favorite Gaston Jean Baptiste de Renty (1611-1649), Nicholas Herman known as Brother Lawrence (1605-1691), Madame Guyon (1648-1717), and Francis Fenelon (1651-1715). In Guyon and Fenelon, as he said, he found the gold of the mystics without the dross. Although the Spanish Carmelites John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila were not among the mystics Wesley read, “it was their brand of mysticism that deeply affected the mystics of the Catholic Reformation and that Wesley relied on so heavily for extract material.”
On November 23, 1736, in a letter to his brother Samuel, John Wesley had concluded that “the rock on which I had the nearest made shipwreck of the faith was the writings of the mystics, under which term I comprehend all, and only those, who slight any of the means of grace.” Those were the “bad” mystics. As stated here, a major issue for Wesley was the use or nonuse of the means of grace as explained in the letter to Samuel. Yet, he was deeply influenced by them, especially by those Lindstrom calls the practical mystics among whom were Thomas a Kempis, Jeremy Taylor, and William Law. Wesley included extracts from many of the mystics in his Christian Library, among them the French mystics Brother Lawrence and Madam Guyon. “Mysticism,” suggests William R. Cannon, “belonged to his thought and was essential to his theology to the very end. Indeed, it was the bulwark to his doctrine of Christian Perfection.”
We turn now to the writings of the Spanish mystic John of the Cross (1542-1591) whom John Wesley apparently never read. John of the Cross is best known for his “The Dark Night” that gave birth to the well-known designation, “The Dark Night of the Soul.” I find some similarities between the two Johns in conception and in experience. The phrase that has caught my attention me in John’s writings is “the darkness of faith.” So a word about the “dark faith” of John of the Cross is in order.
A sketch of his life will put him in historical context. John was born as Juan de Yepes in 1542, the youngest of three sons. His parents lived in Fontiveros, Spain, a small town a hundred plus miles north of Madrid. John’s father, Gonzales, belonged to a wealthy family of silk merchants. His mother, Catalina, however, was a young orphan girl making her living at the humble trade of weaving. Their marriage in 1529 was truly a “love story.” But due to Catalina’s lack of proper lineage and inheritance, Gonzales was disinherited by his merchant family. Adapting to the drudgery of the poorer class, Juan’s father took up the lowly trade of weaving along with his wife.
Gonzales eventually fell sick, and after a lingering illness died when Juan was only two. Catalina was reduced to poverty with three sons to raise. In time, she made her way to her husband’s clerical brother, an archdeacon to seek help; he callously turned her and her sons away. She returned to Fontiveros, and after another move to nearby Arèvalo for three years, the family eventually settled in the larger Medina del Campo where they “found both work for their sustenance and opportunities for religious and charitable deeds.”
Juan lived there from age nine to twenty two where good providences allowed him a quality education. In his religious work, he developed a contemplative bent and entered the Carmelite monastery in Medina in 1563. In 1564, he was sent to the college of San Andres, A Carmelite house of studies in Salamanca where he studied under some of the outstanding scholars of the day. In the summer of 1567, he met Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) and a year later joined her in her Carmelite reform efforts for his life’s work. Pope Benedict XIII canonized John of the Cross as a saint in 1726, and he was declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Pius XI in 1926.
John of the Cross’s teaching on “dark faith” begins with the most intriguing religious poem ever written. Its opening profound and mysterious lines read
One dark night, fired with love’s urgent longings –ah, the sheer grace!– I went out unseen, my house being now all stilled.
For John, the theme of the “dark night” belongs to the whole of the Christian’s faith journey. He presents his analysis of the Christian’s progress with two pairs of terms, “sense” and “spirit” and “active” and “passive” in a fourfold pattern:
(1) the active night of the sense, (2) the active night of the spirit, (3) the passive night of the sense, and (4) the passive night of the spirit.
Prayer is the primary context of John’s analysis with the central interpretive themes being faith and love. The nature of “faith” is our concern in its most simplistic sense as the level at which John impacts the quest for assurance or consolation. It is at this point that the theme of “dark faith” connects with the experience of John Wesley.
“God is not the same as anything else” is the controlling theme of the writings of John of the Cross. This affirmation of God as holy--unique over against everything else—when spoken of God as infinite light by John means that the nearer we approach him the more our minds, our intellects, see him as darkness. As Evelyn Underhill, suggests, “it is in the Night of Faith that the soul draws nearest to God; and discovers the indwelling Power whose presence does not depend on vision and feeling, but only on faithfulness.” John tells us that “to journey to God the intellect must be perfected in the darkness of faith, the memory in the emptiness of hope, and the will in the nakedness and absence of every affection.”
John’s emphasis can be transforming for the spiritual journey in the realization that “faith” does not depend on rational understanding, warm feelings, or ecstatic experience; faith can be dark as well as light! Spiritual life begins in a “faith” commitment that is lived out in faithfulness, and above all, in a life of prayer. Understanding grows, certainly, feelings come and go, and ecstasy can happen! John defines contemplative prayer as “nothing else than a secret and peaceful and loving inflow of God, which, if not hampered, fires the soul in the spirit of love.” Finally, with his emphasis on contemplative prayer, John of the Cross enlarges for us a concept of a grace that “takes the initiative” with an “optimism of grace” that is radical in its possibilities of transformation all life-long! This way of grace John calls the way of the “dark night” or “the night of faith.” Eugene Peterson’s brief description has it right: Spiritual quest is bedeviled with fantasy and illusion because virtually everyone who pursues the spiritual life expects to be rewarded with ecstasy. John has no patience with what he calls our “spiritual sweet tooth.” He is a ruthless realist, stripping away the illusions, the fantasies, and the delusions, guiding us through the consequent devastations, and training us to discern the realities of faith.
II. John Wesley’s 1766 Confession
We come now to John Wesley’s relation to the darkness theme. Is there any legitimate sense in which we can apply the phrase “dark faith” to Wesley? Does he talk about or does he know in his own religious life what John of the Cross describes as “the dark night”? The place to begin is Wesley’s letter to his brother Charles on June 27, 1766. This letter, the subject of much scholarly speculation, is at the heart of our present concern. In it, at 73 years of age, John Wesley expresses his own faith experience in a fascinating way:
In one of my last I was saying I do not feel the wrath of God abiding on me; nor can I believe it does. And yet (this is the mystery) [I do not love God. I never did]. Therefore [I never] believed in the Christian sense of the word. Therefore [I am only an] honest heathen, a proselyte of the Temple, one of the phoboumenoi ton theon [fearers of God]. And yet to be so employed of God! And so hedged in that I can neither get forward nor backward! Surely there never was such an instance before, from the beginning of the world! If I [ever had had] that faith, it would not be so strange. But [I never had any] other elegchos of the eternal or invisible world that [I have] now; and that is [none at all], unless such as fairly shines from reasons glimmering ray. [I have no] direct witness. I do not say that [I am a child of God], but of anything invisible or eternal. And yet I dare not preach otherwise than I do, either concerning faith, or love, or justification, or perfection. And yet I find rather an increase than a decrease of zeal for the whole work of God and every part of it. I am pheromenos [“so swept along,”] (I know not how,” that I can’t stand still. I want all the world to come to on ouk oida [“what I do not know myself”].Neither am I impelled to this by fear of any kind. I have no more fear than love. Or if I have [any fear, it is not that of falling] into hell but of falling into nothing.
How are we to account for this outburst. Many see it as an “entirely untypical depression due to especially stressful circumstances.” These include one of Wesley’s toughest times with his wife, a looming Conference discussing the question of separation from the established church, and the ongoing controversy over his view of Christian perfection in the societies. His exasperation over Charles leaving the societies would add to it.
British pastor and scholar Henry D. Rack in a lengthy and helpful discussion in his Reasonable Enthusiast concludes that “Wesley generally lacked the kind of direct emotional experience of the presence of God, the supernatural world and an inward assurance of salvation of the kind that so many of the converts valued and about which both he and they spoke as being open to all.” In my recent reading of back issues of the Wesleyan Theological Journal prior to their disposal, from the latest issue backward, I came across two interpretations or uses of John’s letter to Charles that directly relate to our questions about John Wesley’s own religious experience.
The first is an article from the Wesleyan Theological Journal (Fall, 2006) by Laura Bartels Felleman, “John Wesley and the Servant of God.” In it she concludes that Wesley “never claimed to have had the faith of a child of God.” By his own definition, “the full sense of the word ‘faith’ included an inward perception or direct witness of one’s love for God.” But Wesley “himself did not possess this ‘direct’ witness.” What he taught to the Methodists was not based on his own religious experience. The Methodist preachers, however, “tried to convince people that if they did not know through the witness of the Holy Spirit that their sins were forgiven then they were children of the devil and not children of God.”
Felleman concludes that by 1775 Wesley’s distinction between the faith of a servant and the faith of a child (i.e., the full Christian faith) applied to himself. He had gained a new appreciation for the faith of a servant. Felleman finds support in her discussion of Wesley’s April 9, 1788, and June 11, 1788, Sermon, 106, “On Faith (Heb. 11:6),” and Sermon 117, “On the Discoveries of Faith,” both very different on this issue from his 1739 Sermon 9, “The Spirit of Bondage and Adoption (Romans 8:15).” In Sermon 117 for Wesley
the servant is called “accepted with [God” and is encouraged to press on in faith in order to attain the full privilege of faith—assurance and love of God. . . . the faith of a servant is presented as a sense of the invisible, eternal and even spiritual worlds and this faith is proof that the servant is justified and accepted by God.
Wesley at some crisis period in his journey and for some significant reason began to view his own faith-relationship to God differently. Felleman concludes that “Wesley changed his mind about the status of those with the faith of the servant, a faith experience closely resembling his own, and finally came to teach that even one who feared God was accepted and justified by faith.” Our question remains, “to what extent can we apply John of the Cross’s ‘darkness of faith’ to the religious faith of John Wesley and particularly to the meaning of his June 27, 1776, letter to his brother Charles”? As we shall see later, we need to ascertain what Wesley had in mind when he used the metaphor of darkness.
The second, more recent, and in my mind more fruitful interpretation for our purposes is that of Mark K. Olson, “Aldersgate II and the Birth of the Servant State,” Wesleyan Theological Journal (Fall, 2008). At the time of writing Olson was the pastor of the Antioch Family Church of the Nazarene in Antioch, California, and was already an accomplished Wesleyan scholar. In his article he grapples with John’s June 27, 1776, letter to his brother Charles. As he sketches the scholarly reaction to the letter, the difficult situational factors at the time proposed by interpreters do not in his mind fully “explain this unusual confession.” Following an analysis of the puzzling paragraphs, Olson proceeds into a fascinating study of Wesley’s views on his own religious experience. Although we cannot do full justice to the details of his careful research, a few of his conclusions contribute to our quest.
From an examination of Wesley’s Sermon 43, “The Scripture Way of Salvation” (1765) and his Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1776), Olson perceived that Wesley, realizes he had “previously judged his pre-Aldersgate faith journey much too harshly.” Wesley now sees himself as having been justified by faith in 1725, but was in a “pre-new birth condition” that awaited the experience of Aldersgate I in 1738. Wesley believed that “he had experienced two moments of conversion”—justification in 1725 and the new birth in 1738. Olson concludes: “Theologically, Wesley’s path is now set to embracing a gospel that celebrates more fully the universality of God’s grace by enlarging the role of prevenient grace within his ordo salutis.”
In relation to this, Wesley began to use the label of the faith of a servant defining “this lower level as the ‘common privilege of Christians fearing God and working righteousness. . . . This was substantively the same standard Wesley affirmed of himself in his letter to his brother Charles in 1776.” Thus a solution for the apparent contradiction inherent in the “paradox of Wesley’s two conversions” in 1725 and 1738 Wesley worked out in the mid-1770s: “By the late 1780s the servant state had formally become another stage in the Wesleyan ordo salutis” characterized as “a faith that fears God and pursues righteousness and goodness.” This 1770’s change Olson calls “a spiritual crisis in Wesley’s life” that he speaks of as Aldersgate II.
The crises of both Aldersgate I and Aldersgate II led to changes in Wesley’s thinking and ministry. To put Aldersgate II in perspective, Olson contrasts the two experiences:
In Aldersgate I (1738) Wesley was negative toward his early faith journey, causing him to accept a radically “new” gospel message. In Aldersgate II (1766) he frowns on his post-Aldersgate faith journey, moving him over time to reclaim much of his earlier gospel. . . . Aldersgate I led Wesley to tell seekers that salvation is received by faith alone in Christ alone, witnessed by the Spirit alone. Aldersgate II convinced him to counsel seekers who lacked the new birth to not lose hope, for God already accepts those who fear him and pursue righteousness in their lives.
This means that after Aldersgate I Wesley viewed May 24, 1738 as the beginning of his spiritual life; “by contrast, Aldersgate II led him to ground his faith journey not in 1738, but in 1725.” Olson seeks to explain why Wesley “changed his mind as to when he was saved. That he did so is certain, but why?”
Olson’s answer is that there is only one sufficient explanation, that is, “Wesley experienced a powerful spiritual upheaval in the years 1765-1767, and this crisis compelled him to change his mind about his early faith journey.” This experience “sharpened his understanding as to what really happened at Aldersgate” and “led him to embrace the faith of the servant as another stage in his ordo salutis.” As Olson concludes his study, “Aldersgate II confirms that the transition from Wesley’s middle to late periods was initiated by a spiritual crisis similar in nature and magnitude to the one he experienced nearly thirty years earlier” at Aldersgate I.
It is evident that what John experienced as he wrote to his brother Charles on June 27, 1776, contributed to Wesley’s transition in his ordo salutis for others and especially for his own faith-journey. What kind of experience was John Wesley undergoing as reflected in the 1776 letterer; how can it be viewed? Can John of the Cross help us to understand or better appreciate John Wesley at this point? This brings us to the consideration of
III. John Wesley and “the darkness of faith”
Our question has become in broad terms, “How does John Wesley relate to John of the Cross in the realm of Christian life—Wesley’s concepts and in his own religious experience and experiences?” We are interested in Wesley’s conception of progress in Christian character beyond what he labeled as entire sanctification and its possible relation to the spiritual insights of John of the Cross and the latter’s use of the “darkness” metaphor.
John Wesley’s views on entire sanctification and growth in grace are familiar to all who have an interest in our 18th century forbearer. We will concentrate briefly only on how he speaks of growth beyond sanctification. Wesley’s conception of entire sanctification was dynamic in nature from start to finish. His position was that the one who “is perfect, he hath still need to ‘grow in grace’, and daily to advance in the knowledge and love of God his Savior [2 Peter 3:18]” When one speaks of sanctification in the broad sense in Wesley, the need appears in two ways, first “as a life -long process of healing our sin-disoriented affections,” and second as “a persistent deepening of our own awareness of the deceptive motivations and prejudices remaining in our life. In a 1741 sermon on “Christian Perfection” Wesley writes simply that there is no “exemption either from ignorance or mistake, or infirmities or temptations.” Thirteen years later 1784 Wesley insists that
it is not possible for man, whose understanding is darkened, to whom mistake is as natural as ignorance, who cannot think at all but by the mediation of organs which are weakened and depraved, . . . for men always to think right, to apprehend things distinctly, and to judge truly of them. . . . The highest perfection which man can attain while the soul dwells in the body does not exclude ignorance and error, and a thousand other infirmities.
But cannot more progress be made in the direction of greater Christlikeness in our affections and actions to the greater “recovery of the divine nature; the renewal of our souls after the image of God in righteousness and true holiness, in justice, mercy, and truth”! Wesley advised Mrs. Woodhouse in a letter to her in 1766 to Wesley himself put it in 1744 (47)? As we read Wesley in the light of John of the Cross just how did Wesley propose that the entirely sanctified are to advance toward the goal of Christlikeness (49)? As we would expect, it is with the chief means of grace that he applies to all levels of growth in grace. Such will for Wesley nourish the grace that is given to us as expressed in a letter to Mrs. Woodhouse in 1766:
continually stir up the gift of God which is in you, not only by continuing to hear His word at all opportunities, but by reading, by meditation, and above all by private prayer. Though sometimes it should be a grievous cross, yet bear your cross, and it will bear you: your labor shall not be in vain. . . . Surely His grace is sufficient for you: sufficient to subdue all things to Himself. I want you to be all like Him. Wesley kept the goal of final likeness to Christ always in view as an anchor that keeps the Christian steady. With St. Paul: “This one thing I do; [. . .] I press toward the mark, for the prize of the high calling in Christ Jesus.” Wesley comments in 1774 that “’it is scarce possible to grow in grace, and in the vital knowledge of Jesus Christ’ without ‘a continual tranquility of spirit, the evenness of a mind stayed on God, a calm repose in the blood of Jesus”.
With Wesley on Prayer, the all-important means of grace for him, we come to a major area of his relation to John of the Cross. “Private prayer was uppermost” with recollection appearing as an integral part of praying. Wesley taught that “God does nothing but in answer to prayer; . . . Every new victory which a soul gains is the effect of a new prayer” A question: Although Wesley was “certain that Scripture by ‘prayer’ almost always means vocal prayer” and that “whosoever intermits this for any time will neither pray with the voice nor the heart” as he affirmed that “there are excellent things in most of the Mystic writers,” still to what extent did he make room for mental prayer, silent or in the contemplative sense?
John Wesley perceived meditation, for example, as a part of the devotional exercises: To Christopher Hopper on September 12, 1755, Wesley wrote that God “calls you to converse with him more in prayer and meditation. In the former we more directly speak to God; in the latter he speaks to us.” Prayer for Wesley was the breath of spiritual life: “he that lives cannot possibly cease breathing. So much as we really enjoy the presence of God, so much prayer and praise do we offer up without ceasing.” As he continues elsewhere.
the life of God in the soul of the believer. . . implies the continual inspiration of God’s Holy Spirit: God’s breathing into the soul, and the soul’s breathing back what it first receives from God; a continual action of God upon the soul, . . . the . . . unceasing presence of God, the loving, pardoning God, manifested to the heart, and perceived by faith; and an unceasing return of love, praise, and prayer, offering up all the thoughts of our hearts, all the words of our tongues, all the works of our hands, all our body, soul, and spirit, to be one holy sacrifice, acceptable unto God in Christ Jesus (50-51).
Wesley makes several statements in which he comes close to the contemplative mode of prayer such as “what is prayer but the desire of the soul expressed in words to God, either inwardly or outwardly?” He comments in a letter to Philothea Briggs that “a continual desire is a continual prayer” and adds, “there is a far higher sense, such an open intercourse with God, such a close, uninterrupted communion with Him,” as experienced by “not a few of our brothers and sisters now alive.” Of a nineteen year old Jane Bisson, Wesley commented on October 12, 1787, that “I think she exceeds Madame Guyon in deep communion with God.” Was not Wesley surely speaking of contemplative prayer in some degree?
A very interesting comment from this child of the Enlightenment comes from August 12, 1769, when Wesley, referring to praying with the understanding he adds, “at other times the understanding has little to do, while the soul is poured forth in passive prayer.” What did he mean by “passive” prayer? Wesley comes close to “John of the Cross when the latter speaks of contemplative prayer in the language of “dark faith” and similar metaphors. Wesley could speak of private prayer as a cross, and that there are times when it is “wisdom to force ourselves to prayer—to pray whether we can or no.” Quite instructive is his letter to Miss March, June 25, 1771:
Undoubtedly there are various kinds and degrees of communion with God . . . The most desirable prayer is that where we can quite pour out our soul and freely talk with God. But it is not this alone which is acceptable to Him. “I love one,” said an holy man, “that perseveres in dry duty.” Beware of thinking even this is labour lost. God does much work in the heart even at those seasons.
This sounds to me very much like God teaching “the soul secretly” that we find in the language of John of the Cross.
Finally we come to “John Wesley on the ‘dark night’.” Is there any similarity between Wesley and John of the Cross’ “dark night of the soul” to be found? To flesh out his antipathy to the “darkness” metaphor we read in a letter critical of the mystics naming Madame Guyon dated September 20, 1776, where Wesley assures Elizabeth Ritchie that “‘He that followeth Me . . . walketh not in darkness.’ Nothing can be more certain. Closely follow Him, and you will never come into any darkness of soul.” Wesley in Outler’s judgment made an “uncommonly sharp distinction” between heaviness and darkness of soul as he wrote to Mrs. Marston, August 11, 1770: “Heaviness you may sometimes feel; but you never need come into darkness.” Wesley was insistent that these were not equivalent terms though “nearly related.” As he wrote, “darkness is one thing; heaviness is another. There is a difference, yea a wide, an essential difference, between the former and the latter.”
Wesley’s explanation was that “darkness,” as he wrote four years later to Mary Bishop, “seldom comes upon us but by our own fault,” but “heaviness . . . may be occasioned by a thousand circumstances, such as frequently neither our wisdom can foresee nor our power prevent.” But Wesley’s definitions were not always been so distinct as he wrote in 1757 to Dorothy Furly, “You did right to pray, as you could pray; and this is the best method which can be taken in heaviness or darkness of any kind.”
The wilderness state as Wesley defined it, a loss of faith, love, joy in the Holy Ghost, peace, and power, could be laid to three causes: first sin, including sins of commission, sins of omission such as the neglect of private prayer, giving way to some kind of inward sin, giving place to anger, any vain or inordinate affection, and spiritual sloth. A second cause of this darkness is ignorance, not knowing the scriptures, imagining that that it teaches or allows that “all believers without exception must sometimes be in darkness.” To those who might say, “but is not darkness much more profitable for the soul than light?” Wesley would answer, “So the mystics teach; so it is written in their books—but not in the oracles of God.”
A third cause of this darkness is temptation, particularly that which arises from within. This temptation comes when Christians begin to think too highly of themselves, of their progress in grace, or to presume that “because we feel no sin, we have none in us, but the soul is all love!” To this Wesley adds, “and well may a sharp attack from an enemy whom we supposed to be not only conquered but slain, throw us into much heaviness of soul, yea, sometimes into utter darkness.”
In sharp distinction from a “darkness of mind” Wesley’s common “heaviness of soul” can exist as he defines it, along “with faith, with hope, with love of God and man; with the peace of God, with joy in the Holy Ghost, with inward and outward holiness.” Yet it is a “sorrow or grief” which “may sometimes be so deep as to overshadow the whole soul,” even to “have an influence over the body.” The causes are of many kinds, bodily and nervous disorders, calamity, poverty, or the death of those “near and dear unto us.” And again he absolutely denies any withdrawal of God, and affirms that even conviction of sin gained by increasing self-knowledge “need not occasion darkness of soul.”
God permits this heaviness to befall so many of his children for the sake of the “trial of their faith” (1 Peter 1:7), for their increase in faith, living hope, and love, and to “advance in holiness, holiness of heart and holiness of conversation”:
By this the blessed Spirit purifies the heart from pride, self-will, passion; from love of the world, from foolish and hurtful desires, from vile and vain affections. . . . Through the operation of his Spirit they humble more and more, and abase the soul before God. They calm and meeken our turbulent spirit, tame the fierceness of our nature, soften our obstinacy and self-will, crucify us to the world, and bring us to expect all our strength from, and to seek all our happiness in, God.
This almost reads like Wesley was quoting John of the Cross It is obvious that there are many similarities between Wesley’s “heaviness of soul” and John of the Cross’ “dark night of the soul,” and perhaps some links between the latter and Wesley’s “darkness of mind” which he called “the wilderness state.” Are they as fully distinct in experience as Wesley makes them by his rational, seemingly somewhat arbitrary definition?
What then should we make of his comments to Miss March on October 13, 1764, that “from what not only you but many others likewise have experienced, we find there is very frequently a kind of wilderness state, not only after justification, but even after deliverance from sin.” Which state is this? Wesley suggests the frequent cause of this is “evil reasoning” and the cure is to resume your confidence: “receive it freely . . . by mere grace. . . . Dare to believe! Look up and see thy Saviour near!” But surely evil reasoning is not the only possible factor. We ask, Does Wesley’s experience, his own and others, always accord with his definitions?
This brings us back to where we began, with Wesley’s letter to his brother Charles on June 27, 1766, which Outler, after quoting from it observes, “Was this a case of ‘heaviness’ or ‘darkness’ or what?” We quote the letter again in part:
I do not feel the wrath of God abiding on me; nor can I believe it does. And yet (this is the mystery) [I do not love God. I never did]. Therefore [I never] believed in the Christian sense of the word. Therefore [I am only an] honest heathen. . . . [I have no] direct witness. . . . And yet I dare not preach otherwise than I do, either concerning faith, or love, or justification, or perfection. And yet I find rather an increase than a decrease of zeal for the whole work of God and every part of it. I am pheromenos, [“so swept along”]I know not how, that I can’t stand still.
Striking is how the last part of this passage [“yet I dare not preach . . . I can’t stand still”] rings true to notes often struck by John of the Cross! If Wesley had read The Dark Night discriminatingly apart from the later mystics, he would have understood better the work of God in his own heart and been able more genuinely to help others without appealing so much to his distinctions between “darkness” and “heaviness.”
Significantly, this passage does not stand alone, for more than six years later on December 15, 1772, he wrote again to his brother Charles,
“I often cry out, Vitae me redde priori! [From Horace’s Epistles, I. vii. 95: “Give me back my former life.”] Let me be again an Oxford Methodist! I am often in doubt whether it would not be best for me to resume all my Oxford rules, great and small. I did then walk closely with God and redeem the time. But what have I been doing these thirty years?
In Mark Olson’s terms, John Wesley after Aldergate II longs to go back before Aldersgate I!
Conclusion
The times of spiritual darkness or aridity, particularly as presented by the sixteenth century John of the Cross, do not appear to be totally contrary to the mind and experience of John Wesley. Wesley’s mixed rejection of mysticism does not fit John of the Cross whom he had never read. My observation is that Wesley himself knew such dark and arid times at different stages in his spiritual journey and recognized them as such among his people.
John Wesley’s “uncommonly sharp distinction” between “darkness and heaviness” made it difficult for him to see such experiences as positive, particularly those he defined as “darkness.” Yet he does describe a positive role for “heaviness.” Wesley’s own broader definitions of sin and infirmities leave room for such times to fit positively even under his “wilderness state” or even “darkness” rubric. The dark night for John of the Cross does deal with sin often, but in the passive night of the spirit it has more to do with that sin, frailty, and wounded-ness that Wesley insists remains even after entire sanctification.
For John of the Cross the “dark night” reaches into those areas that one’s deliberate or kataphatic efforts fail to heal. Wesley’s positive role for “heaviness” does not appear to move very far in this direction. His view of prayer that apparently is no stranger to contemplative prayer is a more likely candidate. It seems to me that especially in this area there could be a place in Wesley for “dark night of the soul” as John of the Cross defines it. Wesley had very similar experiences, but lacked the ability to understand them as such due in part a least to his aversion to the “bad” mystics. We wish that he had read John of the Cross and understood the latter’s contemplative “dark night” as a kind of prayer that waits on the secret work of God beyond all one’s active efforts. Kataphatic as John Wesley was, a touch of the apophatic, which he openly opposed, would have been helpful to his own experience and in his counsel with others. But perhaps the apophatic was more in his heart and experience than his mind was able to fathom!
NOTE
I am not sure why this document came into being. It appears to be derived from the paper, “John Wesley’s Dark Night of the Soul?” that I read for Michael Lodahl’s August 4-8, 2014 class, Wesleyan Theology and Contemporary Ministry.