| San Juan de la Cruz represents the culmination of the two primary traditions of the soul in Western Christendom and provides the greatest synthesis of each tradition from a mystical point of view.; Juan identified the relation between the infused Theological Virtues and the parts of the Neo-Platonist/Augustinian tripartite Intellective Soul that had only been implied previously. That is, that these Virtues should be applied to the soul as the means by which it may be repaired.; Juan also employed the Aristotelian/Thomist soul to show how to achieve rest in its sensitive and intellective layers. This is done by means of mystical contemplation, since the soul's imaginal way of acquiring knowledge causes movement in it through appetite.; His contribution to the history of prayer was in recognizing that the aridity preventing one from proceeding from the active to the passive stage and to mystical contemplation lay in abandoning all discursive prayer for the prayer of Loving Attentiveness. Other forms of prayer had completed their work when one experiences continual aridity.; He leaves us with two methods, equally important, but efficacious at different stages. The earlier stage is concerned with the human being as a "being," and is best expressed by the literary motif of the ascendant Augustinian soul. San Juan underscores the importance of mitigating the voracity and negating the rapacity of the sensitive and intellective souls, for the sake of an ascent of its immortal intellective portion. Subsequent to the individual's maturity, San Juan emphasizes the philosophical construct of the soul's transformation by God in a divine union in which the soul achieves rest through the experience of the fruition of amor in the center of its "essence." Caritas is the bond of love that corresponds to the first model; the more universal amor unifies in the second.; While the elimination of imagery is important to each, in the case of the Augustinian soul, Juan chose the active method of applying the Theological Virtues. With the Thomist model of the soul, he chose the passive method and to complete the perfective process through mystical contemplation. |
