of an object.  We must be totally blind, “for a partially blind man will not commit himself wholly to his guide.”  Thus for St. Juan the whole content of revelation is removed from the scope of the reason, and is treated as something communicated from outside.  We have, indeed, travelled far from St. Clement’s happy confidence in the guidance of reason, and Eckhart’s independence of tradition.  The soul has three faculties—­intellect, memory, and will.  The imagination (fantasia) is a link between the sensitive and reasoning powers, and comes between the intellect and memory.[298] Of these faculties, “faith (he says) blinds the intellect, hope the memory, and love the will.”  He adds, “to all that is not God”; but “God in this life is like night.”  He blames those who think it enough to deny themselves “without annihilating themselves,” and those who “seek for satisfaction in God.”  This last is “spiritual gluttony.”  “We ought to seek for bitterness rather than sweetness in God,” and “to choose what is most disagreeable, whether proceeding from God or the world.”  “The way of God consisteth not in ways of devotion or sweetness, though these may be necessary to beginners, but in giving ourselves up to suffer.”  And so we must fly from all “mystical phenomena” (supernatural manifestations to the sight, hearing, and the other senses) “without examining whether they be good or evil.”  “For bodily sensations bear no proportion to spiritual things”; since the distance “between God and the creature is infinite,” “there is no essential likeness or communion between them.”  Visions are at best “childish toys”; “the fly that touches honey cannot fly,” he says; and the probability is that they come from the devil.  For “neither the creatures, nor intellectual perceptions, natural or supernatural, can bring us to God, there being no proportion between them.  Created things cannot serve as a ladder; they are only a hindrance and a snare.”

There is something heroic in this sombre interpretation of the maxim of our Lord, “Whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be My disciple.”  All that he hath—­“yea, and his own life also”—­intellect, reason, and memory—­all that is most Divine in our nature—­are cast down in absolute surrender at the feet of Him who “made darkness His secret place, His pavilion round about Him with dark water, and thick clouds to cover Him.[299]”

In the “third night”—­that of memory and will—­the soul sinks into a holy inertia and oblivion (santa ociosidad y olvido), in which the flight of time is unfelt, and the mind is unconscious of all particular thoughts.  St. Juan seems here to have brought us to something like the torpor of the Indian Yogi or of the hesychasts of Mount Athos.  But he does not intend us to regard this state of trance as permanent or final.  It is the last watch of the night before the dawn of the supernatural state, in which the human faculties are turned into Divine attributes, and by a complete