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But if you wish to know how these things come about,
ask grace not instruction,
desire not understanding,
the groaning of prayer not diligent reading,
the Spouse not the teacher,
God not man,
darkness not clarity,
not light but fire
that totally inflames and carries us into God
by ecstatic unctions and burning affections.
This fire is God,
and his furnace is in [the inner] Jerusalem;
and Christ enkindles it
in the heat of his burning passion,
which only he truly perceives who says:
My soul chooses hanging and my bones death.
*Bonaventure [The Soul's Journey into God], Trans. and Ed. Ewert Cousins, in "The Classics of Western Spirituality."
The human species is comprised of persons in three capacities. The capacities entail capability to "see" and "act."
1)Prerational: The Domain of Myth
Myth here means forms of regressive religion that claim an enlightened paradise of spirituality before development of the religions of reason or the emergence of reason in established religions. Mythic devotees blame progress for separating us from an original paradise; they want us to regress--not progress--to before differentiation of logical thought from instinctual nature, as though being prelogical and instinctual means spiritual. This is like telling an adult she is more mature if she cries to be breast fed rather than milking a cow or getting her milk from the grocery store and pouring her own milk. Basically, this is like telling an adult to go back to crawling in order to be the original adult she was. However, much of this myth is presented as a wonderful maturity lost to a later infantilism. Not so! If you want to crawl, feel free, but I want to walk.
This is where the newborn child is. An infant is not evil; the infant is prerational: even as many adults never grow out of this development stage. She does not see the world from a logical, or rational, perspective. So, she cannot act rationally. Her "rational" action is unintentional; that is, it is not rationally determined, but its determination is instinctual. The newborn is a bundle of instinct-determined seeing and behaving.
The process of growth of the newborn is not the recovery of some deeply spiritual state, as though life begins as a paradise of enlightenment lost after birth: life begins as an instinct-driven claim for other persons to serve us--this is not bad, rather, simply a manifestation of early dependence. The process of growth is for the person to outgrow the original instinct-driven, dependent, and prerational determination.
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