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Into the Dark Night and Back: The Mystical Writings of Jean-Joseph Surin

Description

Into the Dark Night and Back is the first comprehensive English language selection of the mystical writings, poems, and letters of the French mystic and exorcist Jean-Joseph Surin (/syʁˈɛ̃/), S.J. (1600-65).

pp. 29-125 (PDF pp. 37-133) are his Triomphe de l’amour divin sur les puissances de l’enfer , which gives his own account (in the third person) of his exorcisms of the Loudon Ursuline convent. Acedia was the last and worst demon he conquered; cf. pp. 99-101 (PDF pp. 107-9).

His Jesuit superior told him to exorcise an Ursuline convent in the 1630s in ½ Protestant (Huguenot), ½ Catholic Loudun (/ludˈœ̃/); he obediently, humbly, and courageously did so, in exchange for himself being possessed/obsessed for two decades. His then-novel but very effective exorcism technique was to focus on his interior life and to inspire the energumen with a love of Christian perfection. It's interesting this happened in the same decade as Galileo's second condemnation (in 1633), when skepticism, "methodological doubt," and a distrust of the senses were on the rise.