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1. If His Majesty intends to lead the soul on, he does not put it in this dark
night of spirit immediately after its going out from the aridities and trials of
the first purgation and night of sense. Instead, after having emerged from the
state of beginners, the soul usually spends many years exercising itself in the
state of proficients. In this new state, as one liberated from a cramped prison
cell, it goes about the things of God with much more freedom and satisfaction of
spirit and with more abundant interior delight than it did in the beginning
before entering the night of sense. Its imagination and faculties are no longer
bound to discursive meditation and spiritual solicitude, as was their custom.
The soul readily finds in its spirit, without the work of meditation, a very
serene, loving contemplation and spiritual delight. Nonetheless, the purgation
of the soul is not complete. The purgation of the principal part, that of the
spirit, is lacking, and without it the sensory purgation, however strong it may
have been, is incomplete because of a communication existing between the two
parts of the soul that form only one suppositum. As a result, certain needs,
aridities, darknesses, and conflicts are felt. These are sometimes far more
intense than those of the past and are like omens or messengers of the coming
night of the spirit.1
But they are not lasting, as they will be in the night
that is to come. For after enduring the short period or periods of time, or even
days, in this night and tempest, the soul immediately returns to its customary
serenity. Thus God purges some individuals who are not destined to ascend to so
lofty a degree of love as are others. He brings them into this night of
contemplation and spiritual purgation at intervals, frequently causing the night
to come and then the dawn so that David's affirmation might be fulfilled: He
sends his crystal (contemplation) like morsels [Ps. 147:17]. These morsels of
dark contemplation, though, are never as intense as is that frightful night of
contemplation we are about to describe, in which God places the soul purposely
in order to bring it to divine union.
2. The delight and interior gratification that these proficients enjoy
abundantly and readily is communicated more copiously to them than previously
and consequently overflows into the senses more than was usual before the
sensory purgation. Since the sensory part of the soul is now purer, it can,
after its own mode, experience the delights of the spirit more easily.
But
since, after all, the sensory part of the soul is weak and incapable of vigorous
spiritual communications, these proficients, because of such communications
experienced in the sensitive part, suffer many infirmities, injuries, and
weaknesses of stomach, and as a result fatigue of spirit. The Wise Man says: The
corruptible body is a load upon the soul [Wis. 9:15]. Consequently the
communications imparted to proficients cannot be very strong or very intense or
very spiritual, as is required for divine union, because of the weakness and
corruption of the senses that have their share in them.
Thus we have raptures
and transports and the dislocation of bones, which always occur when the
communications are not purely spiritual (communicated to the spirit alone) as
are those of the perfect, who are already purified by the night of spirit. The
perfect enjoy freedom of spirit without their senses being clouded or
transported, for in them these raptures and bodily torments cease.2
3. To point out why these proficients must enter this night of spirit, we will
note some of their imperfections and some of the dangers they confront.3
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