Becoming Nada: A Decolonial Approach to John of the Cross’ “Dark Night of the Soul”

This paper argues that John of the Cross’s apophatic spirituality offers a decolonial practice capable of healing the interior fractures produced by coloniality. Drawing on Christopher Lasch’s account of cultural narcissism and decolonial thinkers such as Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, Frantz Fanon, and Gloria Anzaldúa, I reinterpret “Imperial Narcissus” as the theological‑political persona formed by modernity’s colonial order—a self that mirrors its own supremacy while wounding those rendered “other.” In this context, John’s dark nights become a journey of being/not, a spiritual undoing of forms of “Being” shaped by coercive metaphysics. Composed from a carceral space, his prose and poetry reveal luminous darkness as protest and reconfiguration. Through readings of The Ascent of Mount Carmel, The Dark Night, and The Spiritual Canticle, I show how this descent disrupts colonial hierarchies while also examining the limits of feminine allegories. Ultimately, becoming nada offers a pathway of de‑linking from colonial power.