the dark night of the soul

“The dark night of the soul” is the phrase used for the turbulent night skies in El Greco’s paintings that Philip Carey studies in a series of photographs shown by Thorpe Athelny. It describes both a visible feature of the pictures and the spiritually charged, difficult-to-explain feeling they awaken in Philip, giving form to an artistic yearning he recognizes retrospectively in Clutton.

The Phrase and Its Image

The phrase occurs in a description of the skies that recur across many of El Greco’s works: darkness, wild clouds driven by strange winds, and the lurid light of an uneasy moon. The setting is not a neutral backdrop. It gathers the paintings’ disturbance into a single image, one that is at once atmospheric and inward, as if the visible sky gave shape to a spiritual crisis.

Athelny offers a personal account of that landscape, imagining that the night sky over Toledo made such a forceful impression on El Greco that the painter could never escape it. His explanation connects a particular place to an enduring artistic vision. The phrase therefore belongs both to the paintings’ visual world and to the story Athelny tells about how an artist’s experience may persist in his work.

Philip’s Encounter with El Greco

Philip first sees El Greco’s work through photographs Athelny places before him. The figures’ elongated bodies, small heads, and extravagant attitudes initially trouble him because they depart from realism. Yet the photographs convey a troubling reality of their own. Philip looks in silence, reaches for more images, and feels moved before he understands what the pictures mean.

The works deepen that response in different ways. Their portraits show melancholy-eyed men whose expressions resist explanation; monks make gestures whose significance eludes Philip. In religious scenes, the Crucifixion suggests a body that is both human and divine, while the Ascension appears to lift Christ heavenward even as he stands firmly in the air. The Apostles’ raised arms and sweeping draperies give the scene exultation and holy joy. Against these charged figures, the recurring night sky makes the paintings’ spiritual intensity visible without resolving it into a single, easily stated meaning.

Clutton and the Unspoken Impulse

Looking at El Greco’s images leads Philip to remember Clutton, who had also been affected by the painter. Philip recalls the Paris artist’s sardonic manner and hostile aloofness, but now sees beneath them a tragic force that had sought expression in painting and failed to find it. Clutton’s difficulty was not a lack of inward feeling; it was an inability to give adequate form to the obscure impulses of his heart.

Philip understands Clutton’s sympathy with El Greco as a kinship between an artist’s inward yearnings and an artistic method capable of expressing them. El Greco’s unfamiliar technique appears to have answered something in Clutton that ordinary representation could not. In this recollection, “the dark night of the soul” resonates beyond the painted skies: it evokes the difficult territory of feeling that the artist struggles to bring into form, and the distance between possessing an impulse and being able to communicate it.

Artistic Value Beyond Realism

The scene sets El Greco’s art against straightforward realism without dismissing reality. Philip is unsettled by the pictures’ distortions, yet senses that they disclose a kind of truth rather than simply abandoning it. Their expressive force comes through altered proportions, charged gestures, religious imagery, and the visionary night landscape. The images do not become intelligible to Philip all at once; their effect precedes his explanation.

That experience contrasts with the blunt standards Philip has encountered in Paris. At the studio, Foinet tells Fanny Price that her drawing is wholly wrong and orders her to tear it up; later he tells Philip that industry and manual dexterity may make him a careful painter, but that he has no talent and will remain mediocre. El Greco’s work offers a different measure of artistic achievement: the capacity of a distinctive technique to give expression to spiritual and emotional material. The phrase thus marks not a supernatural event, but a meeting of visual form, troubled inwardness, and a viewer’s gradual recognition.