Abstract

The fundamental element of human knowing brought to the fore by our author is its conditioned character. Taking his departure from a notion present in Aristotle, he points out how the activity of the intellect is conditioned by the directionality of the subject established at will, as well as by the past as retained in memory. This operative principle is central to Juan de la Cruz's theories of knowing and communicating, which can be considered as two aspects of the same process. Further, this understanding of the conditionality of cognition is extensive in its pertinence, as it not only applies to the saint in his mystical ascent towards God--to whom He will be revealed according to the subject's moral and psychological predispositions--, but also to the reader who turns to the poems of Juan de la Cruz--whose experience will be an echo of the author's to the degree to which he shares his formation and affective state--, as well as to us as we read any piece of prose or poetry, even as all men acquire knowledge in their daily lives. In every case, "that which is received is received according to the mode of the receiver." ;Also discussed in the process of communication from the mystic to the reader, a process which engages them both, and is from the standpoint of the author a creative or poietic one, and from that of the reader a noetic one. Our exploration of this process of communication relies upon San Juan's own texts, as his thought contains a formulated theory of poetic communication as well as a developed epistemology. We focus primarily upon the communicating, through the instrumentality of his prose and poetry, of the mystic's own peculiar experience, his super-eminent and therefore ineffable communion with God in knowledge and love. We discuss how Juan de la Cruz turns for poetic symbols to the analogia entis, while in his prose he establishes certain correlations between mystical, immediate cognition and ordinary acts of intellection mediated through sensation. In this way we link our author's thought concerning communication between man and his surroundings, between man and God, and between man and other men through the instrumentality of the literary work of art. ;The works of Juan de la Cruz contain a well-developed epistemology dealing with ordinary as well as mystical cognition. Beginning with his analysis of the acts of knowledge common to all men, through the peculiar transformation of the rational powers undergone in the "dark night," we trace our author's presentation and justification of the mystic's knowledge in and through God. Unlike numerous commentators of mystical questions, our author recognizes consistently the substantiality as well as the limits of things. In his examination of poetic processes, he points in a scientific manner to causality and real relations among existents. San Juan's exposition relies on relationships between causes and effects in which various potentialities for knowledge are successively brought to be actual. He further brings to light a complex movement of contiguity between one and another mode of cognitive activity, and illustrates how the knowing subject gives rise to this movement by determining his field of consciousness and conditioning his cognitive powers