BELIEFS
of time the sense of a personal presence leaves her. She
feels lonely and abandoned. It is the dark night of the
soul In the end, however, she comes to understand that
this new form of experience—the imageless and emotion-
less cognition of some great impersonal force—is superior
to the old and represents a closer approach to ultimate
reality. Marie Lataste's case is particularly interesting,
because her ignorance of mystical literature precludes the
possibility that she deliberately or unconsciously imitated
any other mystic. Her experience was wholly her own.
Brought up in the traditional belief that God is a person,
she gradually discovers by direct intuition that he is not a
person; and for a time, at least, the discovery causes her
considerable distress. For orthodox Christians, I repeat,
the dark night of the soul would seem to be an unescapable
horror.
Significantly enough this particular form of spiritual
anguish is not experienced by unorthodox Christians, nor
by those non-Christian mystics who profess a religion that
regards God as impersonal. For example, that most
remarkable of the later mediaeval mystics, the author of
The Cloud of Unknowing? makes no mention of any phase
of spiritual distress. The fact is that he has no reason to
be distressed. From the first his preoccupation is with Gpd
the Father rather than with God the Son; and from the
first he assumes that God is impersonal. He is therefore
never called upon to make any excruciating abandonment
of cherished beliefs. The doctrine with which he starts out
is actually confirmed by the direct intuition of ultimate
reality which comes to him in his moments of mystical
experience. Similarly, we never, so far as*I know, hear
anything about the dark Night of the Senses in the litera-
ture of Buddhist or Hindu mysticism. Here again the
belief with which the oriental mystic sets out is in accord
with the testimony of his own experience. He has no
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