a more direct contact with God, a loving and simple knowledge begins to replace meditation. God communes with the soul by means of loving and simple knowledge, so the soul must commune with God by receiving with a loving and simple knowledge. Instead of discursive reasoning, a simple advertence, an openness to God’s glance, a still solitude becomes more and more the rule of prayer. This is important because the supernatural cannot be received in a natural way. John states that the philosophers say that anything that is received is in the recipient according to the manner of acting of the recipient. Thus the one praying must receive the communication of God in the manner in which it is communicated, not in the natural and ponderous way in which it has been proceeding up to that point. He states: “If, as I say, and as in truth is the case, the soul receives this loving knowledge passively and after the supernatural manner of God, and not after the manner of the natural soul, it follows that, in order to receive them, this soul must be quite annihilated in its natural operations, disencumbered, at ease, quiet, peaceful, serene, and adapted to the manner of God; exactly like the air, which receives the greater clarification and heat from the sun when it is pure and cleansed from vapours and at rest. Therefore the soul must be attached to nothing—to no exercise of meditation or reasoning; to no kind of sweetness, whether it be of sense or of spirit; and to no other kind of apprehension. For the spirit needs to be so free and so completely annihilated that any kind of thought or meditation or pleasure to which the soul in this state may conceive an attachment would impede and disturb it and would introduce noise into the deep silence which it is meet that the soul should observe, according both to sense and to spirit, so that it may hear the deep and delicate voice in which God speaks to the heart in this secret place.262
The smallest part of this that God brings about in a soul is the greatest of blessings, “for they are the most secret and therefore the most delicate anointings of the Holy Spirit, which secretly fill the soul with spiritual riches and graces…. These anointings, then, and these touches, are the delicate and sublime acts of the Holy Spirit, 262
Peers, 161-162.
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