I'm sure KTC won't mind if I blog this (in other words, I'm violating my email policy):
There's a book called The Enemy Within by Kris Lundgaard. It's a twentieth-century synthesis and paraphrase of the writings of Puritan John Owen: namely, that you need to divide and conquer the various parts of your mind. Sometimes the devil uses your intellect to deceive you; thus, you must renew your mind with the Word (otherwise known as "CORRECTLY FORMING YOUR CONSCIENCE"). Sometimes we can be sentimentally led by emotion, or memories--"Let God be true and every man a liar." Owen and Lundgaard recommend doing what Jesus did when Satan tempted Him: use the Word to parry off the threat. And in order to know which "club" to pull out of the "bag," it helps to discern which function of your mind is being manipulated. John of the Cross was ALL ABOUT THAT. ...And, BTW, the first one to identify different "compartments" as parts of one whole mind was Thomas Aquinas.
Owen and John of the Cross were more or less contemporaries. I doubt they plagiarized each other; obviously God revealed to each information He thought important to disseminate among the earnest believers in both camps.
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