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The Obscure Night of The Soul

by Saint JOHN OF THE CROSS (1542 - 1591)

Book II, Chapter 12, How this Night is like Purgatory, How Divine Wisdom Illuminates Men

The Obscure Night of the Soul, better know today as The Dark Night of the Soul, is the distilled teaching of St John of the Cross, who reintroduced and revolutionized Christian Contemplation in the 16th Century. The text remains in print until this day, and has been an inspiration to seekers for centuries. St John's method is known as the Via Negativa, defined in Wikipedia as "a type of theological thinking that attempts to describe God, the Divine Good, by negation, to speak only in terms of what may not be said about the perfect goodness that is God...In brief, negative theology is an attempt to clarify religious experience and language about the Divine through discernment, gaining knowledge of what God is not (apophasis), rather than by describing what God is. The apophatic tradition is often, though not always, allied with the approach of mysticism, which focuses on a spontaneous or cultivated individual experience of the divine reality beyond the realm of ordinary perception, an experience often unmediated by the structures of traditional organized religion or by the conditioned role-playing and learned defensive behavior of the outer man." - Summary by Ed Humpal and Wikipedia

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Listen next episodes of The Obscure Night of The Soul:
Book II, Chapter 13, Other Sweet Effects of the Dark Night , Book II, Chapter 14, The Last Lines of the First Stanza Spiritually Explained , Book II, Chapter 15, Explanation of the Second Stanza , Book II, Chapter 16, How the Soul Travels Securely in Darkness , Book II, Chapter 17, Obscure Contemplation is Secret , Book II, Chapter 18, This Secret Wisdom is also a Ladder , Book II, Chapter 19, The First Five Degrees of the Mystic Ladder , Book II, Chapter 20, The Other Five Degrees , Book II, Chapter 21, The Meaning of 'Disguised' , Book II, Chapter 22, Happiness of the Soul , Book II, Chapter 23, The Wonderful Hiding Place of the Soul , Book II, Chapter 24, The Last Line of the Second Stanza Explained , Conclusion