AUTHOR’S PREFACE

—fied is the Father who is in heaven, especially indeed when these works themselves are nothing other than goads, lessons, and exhortations to love, to praise, and to magnify the ONE LORD, and to look down upon all other things which are outside of Him and do not lead to Him.

(a) See what can also be referred to here in On Erudition, Book II, sections 55 and 56, pages 311 etc. to 317.

    However, so that any mystical writings and subjects may be read with profit, let the Readers not take it poorly if I propose one or two (a) cautions to them here, and if I point out and recommend a way of approaching and reading them more surely.

    I have more than once advised and explained, especially in the books On Erudition Referring to the author's own scholarly work, likely De Eruditione, that there are two kinds of faculties facultates; the natural powers or abilities of the soul and body within us for any objects, whether they be spiritual or physical. These are, namely, the real faculties, which actually receive the object itself or its truest outpourings original Latin: influvia; a term used to describe the "flowing in" of divine or natural energy from an object to the perceiver (if I may put it that way) in reality. Secondly, there are the shadowy faculties facultates umbratiles; capacities that deal with mental images, concepts, or "shadows" of things rather than the direct experience of the things themselves, which, when the object is absent and its outpourings are removed,