http://www.themystica.com/mystica/articles/j/john_of_the_cross_st.html :
Detachment and suffering are presented as requirements for the purification and
illumination of the soul. St. John of the Cross depicts the "dark night of the
soul" as "an inflowing of God into the soul, which purges it from its ignorances
and imperfections, habitual, natural, and spiritual, and which is called by
contemplatives infused contemplation or mystical theology." The phrase "dark
night of the soul" has since become a reference to the state of intense personal
spiritual struggle including the experience of utter hopelessness and
isolation.(see Dark
Night of the Soul)
the above descrption sounds very very dark.
you can read snippets here from Google Books: Saint John of the Cross, Dark night of the soul, where it let's you look and read inside the book!
Walter Pater http://www.subir.com/pater/renaissance/conclusion.html
as I read I grabbed this sentence out of the sencond paragraph:
Analysis goes a step further still, and assures us that those impressions of the
individual mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in
perpetual flight;that each of them is limited by time, and that as time is
infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that is
actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend
it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be
than that it is.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment