dark night draft 2 (not from previous draft)



dark night

it is like coming out of prison
imagination and faculties are no longer bound by meditation and anxiety

 We about to travel onward into this night -- it is like emerging from prison -- we move with greater freedom and satisfaction no longer bound by meditation and anxiety

although, as the purgation of the soul is not complete (for the principal part thereof, which is that of the spirit, is wanting, without which, owing to the communication that exists between the one part and the other,100 since the subject is one only, the purgation of sense, however violent it may have been, is not yet complete and perfect), into which, of set purpose, we go into free union 


‘The corruptible body presseth down the soul.’102 Hence comes it that the communications that are granted to these souls cannot be very strong or very intense or very spiritual, as is required for Divine union with God, by reason of the weakness and corruption of the sensual nature which has a part in them. Hence arise the raptures and trances and dislocations of the bones which always happen when the communications are not purely spiritual—



imperfection: the one kind is habitual; the other actual.
deadening of the mind and the natural roughness which every man contracts through sin, and the distraction and outward clinging of the spirit, which must be enlightened, refined and recollected by the afflictions and perils of that night. These habitual imperfections belong to all those who have not passed beyond this state of the proficient; they cannot coexist, as we say, with the perfect state of union through love.
the night of the spirit, which is purgation,  is necessary if a soul is to pass to Divine union.
the soul must needs enter into the second night of the spirit, wherein it must strip sense and spirit perfectly from all these apprehensions and from all sweetness, and be made to walk in dark and pure faith, which is the proper and adequate means whereby the soul is united with God, according as Osee says, in these words: ‘I will betroth thee—that is, I will unite thee—with Me through faith.’
THESE souls become proficients, because of the time which they have spent in feeding the senses with sweet communications, so that their sensual part, being thus attracted and delighted by spiritual pleasure, may be united with the spirit and made one with it; each part eating of one and the same spiritual food and from one and the same dish, as one person and with one sole intent, united and brought into agreement, and, thus united, prepared to endure  severe purgation which awaits them.
the spiritual and the sensual, must be completely purged,
spiritual and sensual, both outward and inward, leaving the understanding dark, the will dry, the memory empty and the affections in the deepest affliction, bitterness and constraint, taking from the soul the pleasure it had aforetime, in order to make the union of love. 
 pure and dark contemplation
Divine wisdom is not only night and darkness for the soul, but is likewise affliction and torment.
this dark contemplation is painful likewise to the soul; 
as this Divine infused contemplation has many excellences that are extremely good, and the soul that receives them,  as many miseries


the human is the subject


 the bars of the earth have shut me up for ever.’120 By these bars are here understood, in this sense, imperfections of the soul, which have impeded it from enjoying this delectable contemplation.


it feels within itself a profound emptiness and impoverishment of three kinds of good, which are ordained for the pleasure of the soul which are the temporal, the natural and the spiritual; and finds itself set in the midst of the evils contrary to these, namely, miseries of imperfection, aridity and emptiness of the apprehensions of the faculties and abandonment of the spirit in darkness. Inasmuch as God here purges the soul according to the substance of its sense and spirit, and according to the interior and exterior faculties, the soul must needs be in all its parts reduced to a state of emptiness, poverty and abandonment and must be left dry and empty and in darkness. For the sensual part is purified in aridity, the faculties are purified in the emptiness of their perceptions and the spirit is purified in thick darkness.


surrender
abandonment


consuming in it (even as fire consumes
consummation:  




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