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Extract
In entering a dark and strange room we have to depend upon external direction to find our way about it. We need some other person to speak and tell us where we are, or someone to lead us by the hand. We can rely only very meagrely upon our own powers of discretion. On entering the Cloud of Unknowing the soul needs the clear voice of some spirit other than its own to tell it where it is and whither going. There must be some interpreter near at hand to declare what the darkness means and to read the signs which appear in the experience of the soul. The minor works of the author of the Cloud are mainly concerned with the discernment of spirits, for it is the Spirit of God who is the principal interpreter while a director, such as the author, is needed to assure the soul when the Paraclete interprets and when the human or the evil spirit deceives.
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- Copyright © 1948 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Cf. E.E.T.S edition pp. lii ard liii.
2 Italics mine. The quotations are from Dom Justin McCann's Edition.
3 He relies for his description of this type of prayer on the work of Antonio de Rojas, whose book was later placed on the Index on account of its Quietist tendencies. For this reason Abbot Sweeney, who edited the modern edition of Sancte Sophia, was on tenterhooks lest Fr Baker be misunderstood.
4 Cf. Paul Philippe, O.P. ‘L'Oraison dans l'Histoire’, in the Cahier de la Vie Spirituelle ‘L'Oraison’, p. 53.
5 Sancta Sophia sect. III, c. 7. Compare especially pp. 493-4 with St Teresa's Interior Castle IV c. 3. Peers's edition II, 242.
6 For example, St Lewis Grinon de Montfort in his True Devotion—an important factor in understanding the book.