From St. John of the Cross and Dr. C. J. Jung, Part II, Chapter 4. Inner Growth Books, 1986.

Meditation

St. John was aware, as a well-trained scholastic philosopher, of the distinctions between the natural faculties of the soul, and he makes use of these distinctions between sense, imagination, intellect and will in the Ascent of Mount Carmel when he analyzes their limitations as proximate means of union with God. But in the practical order, when it is a question of attaining to union with God through contemplation, he groups all these faculties together under the heading of the natural working of the faculties and he equates this natural working with meditation. He clearly points out that meditation is directly dependent on the imagination and is "a discursive action wrought by means of images, forms and figures that are fashioned and imagined."(2) But imagination in its turn is dependent on the sense, for "the imagination cannot fashion or imagine anything whatsoever beyond that which it has experienced through its exterior senses."(3) But the imagination is also linked with the process of reasoning. St. John strings together "meditations, forms, and ideas", (4) and talks of "the path of meditation and reasoning".(5) He contrasts the knowledge of the soul in contemplation with the knowledge that comes through "certain intelligible forms which understanding or sense may seize upon"(6), making it clear that the soul has left the use of "particular kinds of knowledge and intelligence"(7) which is the food of the understanding and not simply just leaving images. It is "detached and removed from all intelligible forms which are objects of the understanding"(8). In speaking of contemplation he says, "For God now begins to communicate Himself to it, no longer through sense, as He did aforetime, by means of reflections which joined and sundered its knowledge, but by pure spirit, into which consecutive reflections enter not"(9).