The Dark Night Becomes a Subscale: Głaz Operationalizes What Mystical Theology Could Only Narrate

Stanisław Głaz’s construction of the Intensity of Religious Experience Scale accomplishes something that eluded the psychology of religion for over a century: it gives the experience of God’s absence its own positive psychometric identity. Where William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience catalogued states of divine encounter as primarily affirmative — the “something more,” the sense of presence, the feeling of union — Głaz insists that absence is not the mere negation of presence but a distinct experiential factor with its own internal structure, its own factor loadings, and its own measurable consequences for personality and meaning-making. Item 10 on the IRES captures this with striking precision: “Although in my life the experience of God’s absence appears, I see God as the one who releases creative anxiety in me.” This is not a deficit item. It is a statement about generative withdrawal. The factor analysis bears this out: the God’s Absence subscale (AG) accounts for 22.3% of total variance, correlates positively with conscientiousness, openness, and — critically — with the Purpose in Life Test. High scores on the absence subscale indicate not spiritual desolation but deepened trust, greater openness to others, and intensified religious seeking. Głaz has, in effect, translated Saint John of the Cross’s La Montée du Carmel — which he cites — into the language of Likert scales and confirmatory factor analysis.

Religious Experience as Impact Rather Than Content: A Methodological Reorientation That Depth Psychology Needs

What distinguishes the IRES from instruments like Underwood and Teresi’s Daily Spiritual Experiences Scale or Hall and Edwards’ Spiritual Assessment Inventory is its refusal to measure religious experience directly. Głaz states this with unusual clarity: the tool “does not examine experience, but a sense of the influence of the presence of God and absence of God on one’s own life.” This is a critical methodological move. The IRES measures the perceived impact of subjective religious conviction on cognitive, emotional, and behavioral dimensions — not the experience itself. This sidesteps the epistemological trap that Richard Tarnas identifies in Cosmos and Psyche when he observes that depth psychology’s insights “could be regarded only as an expression of the human psyche and its intrinsic structures” and therefore reveal nothing certain about the constitution of reality. Głaz does not claim to measure God’s presence or absence as ontological facts. He measures what happens to a person who believes they have felt such presence or absence. The scale thereby remains agnostic about metaphysics while being maximally sensitive to psychological consequences — precisely the stance Jung advocated in Psychology and Religion when he wrote that “if there is any numinous experience at all, it is the experience of the psyche.” The IRES is thus more Jungian than it initially appears, despite its explicitly Catholic theological scaffolding.

Catholic Anthropology as Structural Constraint — and Unexpected Bridge to Frankl

Głaz grounds his instrument in a specific tripartite Catholic anthropology drawn from Viktor Frankl: the biological-physiological, the psychological, and the spiritual dimensions. This is not decorative framing. It determines item construction. Each statement on the IRES addresses the spiritual dimension’s downward influence on the psychological and behavioral — how the experience of presence or absence reshapes self-knowledge, interpersonal openness, emotional states, and existential orientation. The correlation data confirm this architecture: PG (God’s presence) correlates at .32 with meaning in life, while AG (God’s absence) correlates at .18. Both are positive. The scale thus operationalizes Frankl’s core thesis from logotherapy — that the spiritual dimension directs the person toward meaning — while specifying the mechanism: it is not abstract spirituality but the concrete subjective sense of divine presence or absence that activates existential orientation. This is why Głaz employs Crumbaugh and Maholick’s Purpose in Life Test as a criterion validity measure. The IRES and the PIL are not measuring the same thing, but they share a common root in Frankl’s anthropology. James Hillman, writing in Insearch, argued that “the deep need of the individual remains… less for mental health than for guidance of soul.” Głaz’s instrument quietly agrees: the highest factor loadings on the presence subscale (.868, .842, .838) cluster around trust in God, deepening of faith, and better self-understanding — guidance functions, not health outcomes.

The Asymmetry Between Presence and Absence Reveals the Scale’s Deepest Finding

The most theoretically significant result in Głaz’s data is the asymmetry between the two subscales. God’s presence (PG) consistently produces higher mean scores (M=5.3 vs. M=4.0), higher reliability coefficients (α=.93 vs. α=.86), and stronger correlations with every external criterion — religiosity dimensions, personality traits, meaning in life, relationship to God. The presence factor explains 33.1% of variance; absence explains 22.3%. Głaz interprets this straightforwardly: “the experience of the presence of God is more important than the experience of God’s absence.” But from a depth psychological perspective, the asymmetry carries a different implication. The experience of absence, though weaker in saturation, is the more psychologically complex factor — it requires the individual to hold paradox, to maintain trust and openness in the face of withdrawal, to find creative anxiety generative rather than destructive. It is, in Jungian terms, closer to the experience of the ego confronting the Self’s apparent withdrawal — a confrontation that catalyzes individuation precisely because it cannot be resolved through the ego’s usual strategies of mastery and comprehension. That this more complex, more paradox-laden experience nonetheless achieves respectable reliability (.86), significant positive correlations with meaning in life, and clear factor separation from presence is the scale’s most important empirical contribution.

For anyone working at the intersection of empirical psychology and the study of religious interiority, Głaz’s IRES offers something no other instrument currently provides: a validated means of tracking how the felt absence of the divine functions as a positive developmental force. This is not a general spirituality measure. It is a precision tool for investigating a specific and paradoxical claim — that God’s silence speaks — and finding, in the data, that it does.