The Dark Night of the Soul

The Dark Night of the Soul, the masterpiece of Juan de Yepes, known as John of the Cross, is one of the jewels of sixteenth-century Christian mystical literature. Its author was a poet-mystic in love with God, a man who suffered for truth and faith, detached and utterly devoted, afflicted by the cruelty of his times — a man who, as the book's introduction tells us, wrote The Dark Night of the Soul not in the calm quiet of a well-equipped study, but in prison, facing an uncertain fate.