La privación de los recuerdos durante la noche oscura de la memoria, en la mística de San Juan de la Cruz

Abstract

After a detailed analysis about the clear and distinct notices that soul potencies, natural and supernaturally, can receive, San Juan de la Cruz realized that none of these were a provided mean for mystical union. This finding led our saint to develop a high and difficult doctrine: in order to not avoid the infusion of theological virtues, spiritual men have to practice voluntary deprivation of that kind of intellectual notices. This article is a philosophical meditation about an essential theme of Spiritual Theology: the purification of memory, during the Active Night of the Spirit. The thesis to prove is that memory should be understood both as an inner sense and as a potency, whose operations are the principle of the existence’s unity and foundation of ethos.

Keywords

• Negation
• Dark Night
• memory
• San Juan de la Cruz
• phenomenology of mysticism