The Problem of the Beatific Vision

Here I will only make a few comments on the debates over the beatific vision side of the equation, in order to concentrate on some of the ways that the visionary explosion influenced conceptions of what it might mean to “see” God. It is important to note, however, that the many intersecting lines of late medieval thought about seeing God, reflected in both text and image, need to be seen as part of a larger, if complex and often amorphous, whole to begin to make sense.

As in so much medieval thought, we can begin with Augustine, because the bishop of Hippo set forth a theory of visio dei, both here and hereafter, that shaped the medieval discussion.⁶

With regard to the beatific vision, Augustine insisted that the final satisfaction for all human longing is found in heaven in “the contemplation of the Good that is unchanging, eternal, always the same.”⁷ At the end of De civitate Dei he summarizes this reward as follows: “There we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise; this is what shall be in the end without end.”⁸ Later theology correctly read such statements as indicating a direct mental beholding of the divine nature or essence. With regard to what kind of seeing of God is possible in this life, Augustine, like other church fathers, wrestled with the contrasting biblical texts about whether or not God could really be seen here below. His treatise-letter De videndo deo of 413 C.E. argued against any corporeal vision of God himself, but allowed that some kind of interior vision of God as he “willed himself to be seen” could be given to the saints in this life.⁹ As he said in a sermon on Psalm 41: “With the fine point of the mind we are able to gaze upon something unchangeable, although hastily and in part.”¹⁰ The impossibility of seeing “God's fullness” in this life supports the scriptural texts claiming that God cannot be seen, while still allowing for inferior forms of vision. Like other patristic and later theologians, Augustine allowed for a few miraculous exceptions, especially in the cases of Moses and Paul, who enjoyed something close to a vision of God's very nature while still alive.¹¹ But for the vast majority of those still caught in the toils of fallen flesh any interior vision of God's nature, and any other experience of God in the spiritual senses, was always partial and fleeting.

Augustine summarized his view of the kinds of visio dei found in this life in book twelve of De genesi ad litteram written in approximately 415. Here the bishop distinguishes three kinds of seeing that can be realized either on a natural or a supernatural register—corporalis, spiritualis (that is, by interior images), and intellectualis, the mind's direct grasp of truth. God can miraculously create new external objects to be seen in a corporeal way, but most visions are either spiritualis or intellectualis. In the midst of a discussion of God-given raptures, ones in which, as he puts it, “the soul's intention is completely turned away or snatched away from the body's senses” (12.12.25), Augustine allows for both imaginative visions sent by God, such as the images given to John in the Apocalypse, as well as higher intellectual visions in which God grants an immediate perception of divine truth. “There,” he explains, “the brightness of the Lord is seen, not through a symbolic or corporeal vision … nor through a spiritual vision, but through a direct vision and not through a dark image, as far as the human mind elevated by God's grace can receive it.”¹²

Augustine's teaching about the beatific vision and the vision of God possible in via were challenged by an alternate view that took the biblical prohibitions against seeing God more literally and denied that God's essence could ever be seen, either in this life or in the world to come. This tradition, which developed in Eastern Christianity, distinguished between the divine essence that is always invisible and the divine energies, manifestations, or theophanies, that can be seen in some sense in this life and that will be beheld directly in heaven.

¹³

Gregory of Nyssa's commentary on the beatitude about seeing God is a good statement of this position,¹⁴

but it was primarily through the Dionysian corpus and its interpreters that this option became present in the West. For Dionysius the

ria, or contemplation of the manifestations of God in the hierarchies of created being, is a vital part of the ascent to God. Yet his De mystica theologia insists on the absolute invisibility of God, claiming that Moses, the exemplary mystic, did not contemplate the God who cannot be seen, but only attained a vision of the place where he dwells. Moses broke free of everything perceptible by corporeal or mental vision, “away from what sees and is seen and plunged into the truly mysterious darkness of unknowing” in order to be “supremely united to the totally Unknown by an inactivity of all knowing,” as the first chapter of De mystica theologia puts it. Dionysius effected a radical separation between all knowing and seeing and union with the Unknown God, although chapter two of the work describes a paradoxical “unknowing which itself is hidden from all those possessed of knowing” by which “we may see above being that darkness that is concealed from all the light of beings.”

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While De mystica theologia discusses this non-seeing seeing in relation to our situation in this life, the first chapter of De divinis nominibus deals with its realization in heaven. Dionysius says that when we have attained full likeness with Christ in beatitude we shall “enjoy his visible theophany in purest contemplation, illuminated by his radiant beams, just as the apostles were illuminated at the time of his divine Transfiguration.”¹⁶

In other words, heaven features a vision of the Incarnate Son, the full manifestation of God, but the super-essential divine nature remains hidden.

The ninth-century Irish scholar, John Scottus Eriugena, not only translated the Dionysian writings into Latin, but in his Periphyseon developed the Eastern option further, especially with regard to the beatific vision. In reality, if not in the same language, Eriugena accepted the distinction between God's hidden essence and his manifested energies, or theophanies. He also used the Transfiguration account of Matthew 17 as a paradigm for understanding the forms of contemplation in this life and the next.¹⁷

Elijah is the type of those who contemplate God while still in the body; Moses prefigures those few saints who see God's higher manifestations when released from the body in rapture and ecstasy. Christ himself represents those who will enjoy perfect vision after the resurrection of the body. What can never be seen, either in this life or in the next, is God's essence. God is never visible in God's self, but only in his theophanies, that is, in the illuminations that objectively are identical with God insofar as he shows himself to us, and that subjectively are the deifying graces that transform humans. At the end the saved will gaze upon “theophanies of theophanies,” things unimaginably higher than what we can see here, but these are still theophanies.¹⁸

Eriugena's translation of the Dionysian corpus and his Periphyseon were by no means unknown from the tenth through the twelfth centuries, but Dionysian theology experienced an upsurge in the second quarter of the thirteenth century. Between 1230 and 1250 C.E. three thinkers, Thomas Gallus, Robert Grosseteste, and Albert the Great, wrote commentaries on the entire Dionysian corpus. In the 1240s an unknown editor also produced a glossed version of the Dionysian writings that became a textbook at the University of Paris.¹⁹

The new Dionysianism assumed two forms. In commentaries and glosses produced between 1230 and 1246, Gallus reinterpreted Dionysian negative theology in terms of the priority of “the supreme point of affectivity” (apex affectus) over all intellectual vision or contact with God. Taken up by Franciscans, especially Bonaventure, and later by the Carthusians and such texts as the English Cloud of Unknowing, this “affective Dionysianism,” as it has been called, became a significant strand in late medieval mysticism.

A second strand emerged about a decade later. In the late 1240s Albert the Great began to study and teach the Dionysian writings, first at Paris and then at Cologne (Thomas Aquinas was among his students). Between 1248 and 1252 he produced a massive commentary that took the other side, arguing “it is necessary to be united to God through intellect.”²⁰

This “intellective Dionysianism” was to be of considerable moment in German Dominican theology and mysticism for the next century. In the mid-fifteenth century the debate over the respective roles of knowledge and love in the path to union with God in which Nicholas of Cusa took part can be seen, in part at least, as a clash between the affective and the intellective forms of Dionysianism.

Intellective Dionysianism was involved in the debates over the nature of the beatific vision during the century between ca. 1240 and 1340 C.E., disputes brought to a conclusion by Pope Benedict XII's 1336 condemnation of the view of his predecessor John XXII about the delay of the vision of God's essence until after the resurrection of the body.²¹

The first major moment came in 1241 when the bishop of Paris, William of Auvergne, and the authorities of the University attacked the view that even in heaven God will not be seen directly, but only through theophanies. The first of ten rejected articles in the condemnation document states: “The first [error is] that the divine essence in itself will be seen neither by man nor angel. We reject this error and we excommunicate its upholders and defenders by the authority of Bishop William. We firmly believe and assert that God will be seen in essence or substance by the angels and all the saints and he will be seen by glorified souls.”²² The denial of a direct vision of God in heaven was the expression of a form of Dionysianism influenced by Eriugena, as well as a challenge to the traditional Augustinian position. We are not sure who its proponents were, though they seem to have included some Dominicans, a rather scandalous fact since these mendicant preachers were the champions of orthodoxy.

The condemnation, however, did not mean the end of all differences of opinion about the nature of the beatific vision, even among the Dominicans. While it was not possible to disagree directly with a pronouncement of such doctrinal weight, there was considerable wiggle-room in how it was to be interpreted. Thomas Aquinas's treatment of the beatific vision is the classic synthesis of the Augustinian position and takes direct exception to Eriugena's view of theophany.²³

In his Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews Thomas even declares Eriugena's teaching on the need for theophanies in heaven heretical.²⁴ Albert the Great, however, worked out a solution to the nature of the beatific vision that adhered to the Paris condemnation but also managed to salvage the core of Dionysian negative theology about the limits of all seeing of God.²⁵ This is not the place to go into the details of Albert's position, but it is important to note one key difference that shows the distance between his student Thomas Aquinas and himself. Albert continued to use the language of theophany to describe the way in which God's essence is seen in heaven by means of the light of glory. In his Commentary on the Celestial Hierarchy, for example, he says: “Thus God himself is in each of the blessed as an illumination by whose participation he makes himself his own likeness. In such a likeness the vision of God is called a theophany. In this way, the same God will be illumination and object [illuminated], but object as he is in himself, illumination insofar as he is participated in by the blessed.”²⁶

Continuing in the same line, Albert's student, Meister Eckhart, although he agreed that God cannot be seen through likenesses,²⁷

tended to subvert traditional notions of what it means to see God through his teaching of what might be called ocular identity, as expressed in the formula, “The eye with which I see God is the same eye in which God sees me. My eye and God's eye is one eye and one seeing, one knowing, and one loving.”²⁸ Although Eckhart did not deny all difference between seeing here on earth and seeing in heaven, his radicalized and dialectical version of visio dei elides any essential distinction between what it means to see God in this life and the visio beatifica. For Eckhart, the eschatological vision of God becomes immanentized in the a-temporal birth of the Son of God in the soul.²⁹ On the other side, however, Eckhart's insistence on a strong apophatic theology means that all vision of God, even in heaven, is really a vision of the divine nothingness. As he says in German Sermon 71, “One must receive God as he is a mode beyond measure, a being beyond being, for he has no limited mode.”³⁰This apophaticism helps explain Eckhart's critical attitude toward the visionary explosion of his time.

Visionary Mysticism

The visionary explosion formed the other pole of the debates about seeing God present in Western Christendom from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries. The visionary impetus was part of an important shift in mysticism evident from the twelfth century on that put increasing emphasis on what Bernard of Clairvaux famously called “the book of experience” (liber experientiae).³¹

Contact with God, especially in the case of women, came to be more and more expressed in the language of personal encounter, though the many and subtle ways in which these visionary and auditory encounters were written down, both by the mystics and by their clerical advisors, preclude any simple reduction of such narratives to the category of autobiography. Indeed, it is clear that we are often dealing with what Franz Bäuml memorably called “the creation of a fiction that a fiction is not a fiction.”³² Although the appearance of innovative modes of presenting visions and of using them to convey mystical teaching argues for a new stage in the evolution of Western mysticism, we should strive to avoid simplistic notions of the emergence of what some German scholars have called a new “experiential mysticism” (Erlebnismystik).³³ Rather than straight-forward descriptions of visions and other ecstatic experience, we are dealing with sophisticated texts that require close attention to their theological, cultural, and literary contextualization and shaping in order to be properly understood.

In confronting this issue, it may be helpful to make a distinction between vision and visualization. What are presented as supernaturally-given visions breaking into the consciousness of the mystic contain important elements of visualization, that is, they are dependent both in reception and expression on the subject's power of imaginative seeing. Visionary narratives were often created, and always mediated, by the religious person's meditation on the imagery of the Bible, participation in the action of the liturgy, prayerful gazing upon artistic representations of Christ, Mary, angels and saints, as well, of course, by his or her literary skill in expressing what is presented as a gift from God. It is somewhat akin to Willa Cather's description in Death Comes for the Archbishop: “[A]n apparition is human vision corrected by divine love.”³⁴

Religious women, both nuns and beguines, were particularly adept practitioners of such modes of visualization.³⁵ How much any particular mystical vision may owe to the subject's or author's creative powers of visualization is not easy to discern, but the distinction is worth keeping in mind. Medieval believers did not doubt that God could and did grant visions to certain favored souls, but they were more concerned about the truth of the teaching found in the vision than in whether the vision was being recounted “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist.”

This is evident from the fact that some mystics were quite prepared to admit that some of their visions were literary creations for teaching purposes. An example can be found in Henry Suso (ca. 1295–1366), a student of Meister Eckhart, but one who was more open to visionary narrative to convey his message. Suso had one of the most powerful visual imaginations among the male mystics of the late Middle Ages. To quote Jeffrey Hamburger, “Suso first saw and then read.”³⁶

Suso's texts, both the four vernacular works that make up the collection he called the Exemplar and his popular Latin Horologium Sapientiae, are filled with imagistic showings, not only those ascribed to the Servant, but also to other holy “friends of God.” For the Vita, or Life of the Servant, the presentation of the story of the Servant of Eternal Wisdom as the exemplar of the mystical life (a figure who both is and is not Suso), he even commissioned twelve illustrations for some of the visions recounted in the text. In his writings Suso presents a sophisticated view of both the necessity for and the limitations of visions and images in the path to mystical union.

One of these pictures, based upon a showing recounted in the Life, provides a sense of Suso's special place in the visionary explosion of late medieval mysticism. The early chapters of the Life deal with the beginning of the mystical path and feature a plethora of descriptions of visionary and auditory experiences of supernatural beings. Chapter five recounts no less than nine examples of the “divine consolations” (goetliches trostes) God uses to attract beginners. The consolations begin with a perfectly normal form of consciousness, that of the Servant greeting the dawn in thanks to the divine Lightbringer. The following three experiences shift to a more supernatural register and involve internal music that comes partly from within the Servant himself and partly from overhearing the angels' song. The fifth consolation is both auditory and visual, as his guardian angel appears and leads the Servant to another land, embracing and consoling him. The sixth vision is the most visual and receives the actual illustration. Here the Servant is surrounded by the heavenly host “in a vision” (in einer gesiht) and asks one of the angels to show him the hidden dwelling place of God in the soul. The angel commands him to look, just as angels bade John look at heavenly scenes in the Apocalypse. The account continues: “He quickly looked inside and saw that over his heart his body was clear as crystal, and he saw in the middle of his heart Eternal Wisdom sitting quietly with a pleasing appearance. Nearby the soul of the Servant was sitting and longing for heaven. It was inclined in love at God's side, embraced by his arms, and pressed to his divine heart. There outside itself and immersed in love it lay in the arms of its beloved God.”³⁷

This is clearly an Augustinian spiritual vision, but one of a novel nature. First, it is self-referential, though in a way typical of Suso in that it places the Servant both inside and outside himself, just as the whole Life has a studied ambiguity about how far we should identify Suso with the Servant. The vision is also shaped by visual objects from Suso's religious milieu. The Servant has become a kind of reliquary, or even a monstrance, whose crystal clarity allows a view of something sacred within. The Servant's soul is inclined on the breast of Eternal Wisdom, exactly as the figure of John the Beloved is embraced by Christ in the well-known sculptural form called the “Christus-Johannes-Gruppe.”³⁸

Suso's talent for visualization has used these artistic images to create something new. The visionary narrative and its image form an effective teaching tool, not only for what they reveal about the relation between the soul of the Servant and Wisdom, but also for what they suggest about the role of visions in the beginning of the mystical life by being placed relatively early in the text.³⁹

In the Prologue to the Exemplar Suso says of the Life that “it is entirely about the life of a beginner in a figurative way (mit bildgebender wise), and in a hidden way (togenlich) it shows how a beginner should order his inner and outer self according to God's dearest will…. By way of giving examples (mit glichnusgebender wise)it describes many holy works that actually took place.”⁴⁰

The exemplary nature of the narrative is clear here, and it is important to note that Suso says that “many” but not all of the things recounted actually happened. The point is made again in the prologue to his Latin Horologium Sapientiae. Here Suso explicitly says that the visions (visiones) in the work need not all be taken literally, though many were perceived by him as such. But they are all described as figurata locutio, that is, a “speaking by way of figures,” such as we find in the biblical parables.⁴¹ “All these things are true,” he adds, “not according to the letter, but according to their true significations…. The attentive reader will easily note the hidden mysteries of this speaking through figures, if he makes a skillful effort,” that is, if he recognizes how images and visions are both necessary, but limited, in mystical praxis.⁴² As a mystagogical strategy, Suso's figurata locutio does not differentiate between visionary event and literary elaboration, not hesitating to introduce what we would call fictional visions into narratives of different forms of showings. Suso does not feel it is necessary to give clues about which visions “really” happened and which did not. What we might be tempted to separate as fact versus fiction is all part of one overarching didactic strategy. To be sure, many late medieval visionaries, especially those who were subject to challenge as so many women were, felt they needed to present all their visions as literally true; but Suso's practice may well have been more widespread than we can demonstrate.

Suso's presentation of Eternal Wisdom in his breast demonstrates something of the visual creativity of late medieval visionaries. Among the wealth of showings found in late medieval mystical literature we can also find many that call into question the standard Augustinian categories—differentiating between corporeal, spiritual, and intellectual visions. One example is the Flemish beguine Hadewijch of Antwerp, who seems to have lived in the mid-thirteenth century, though a minority view places her in the early fourteenth. Hadewijch exemplifies a new form of vision that is both highly pictorial, as well as frankly corporeal in its description of the mystic's reception of the showing. Nonetheless, many of her showings are also presented as giving Hadewijch a direct intellectual grasp of divine truths about the Trinity and other celestial matters. Her Vision Seven records a typical experience of late medieval female mystics, a powerfully erotic experience of oneness with Christ taking place in a Eucharistic setting.⁴³

It begins with a Pentecost vision at dawn while Matins are being sung. At first she experiences extreme physical symptoms, such as trembling and quaking with madness and fear lest “I did not content my Beloved and that my Beloved did not fulfill my desire.” After this description of her outer and inner troubled state, the first-person account moves to the visual register. Hadewijch says she saw an eagle flying from the altar to her with a message to prepare herself for the encounter with Christ. Then, “he came from the altar, showing himself as a child,” but bearing the eucharistic elements of bread and wine. Suddenly, Christ changes into a beautiful man, as he was at the time of the passion. He gives himself to the beguine, first sacramentally and then physically: “Then he gave himself to me in the shape of the sacrament, in its outward form, as the custom is; and then he gave me to drink from the chalice, in form and taste, as the custom is. After that he came to me, took me entirely in his arms, and pressed me to him; and all my members felt his in full felicity, in accordance with the desire of my heart and my humanity.”

This sense of full physical satisfaction, however, is not the end of the experience. Hadewijch goes on to say that she lost sight of the “manly beauty” of Christ's form so that she could no longer distinguish him within or without. She continues: “Then it was to me as if we were one without difference.” The “without difference” (sonder differentie) qualification suggests that this mystical union goes beyond the erotic model in which two persons become one in flesh without losing their personal being. Her visionary account fuses the corporeal and imaginative realms, and yet also involves an intellectual conviction of oneness with the divine nature. This kind of mingling of aspects scarcely fits the Augustinian model of vision.

Critiques of the Visionary Explosion

The proliferation of visionary narratives in the late Middle Ages, many of a new form and making strong claims to authority, initiated even more extensive debates than those over the nature of the beatific vision. The reactions fell into two broad streams. The first was the growth of interest in the discernment of spirits (discretio spirituum), that is, the rules for sorting out good from bad impulses and visions. The second was the appearance of an anti-visionary reaction among many mystics themselves.

The discernment of spirits has received a good deal of scholarly attention of late.

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The theme is rooted in scripture, especially in Paul's listing “discernment of spirits” (diakriseis pneumat

n) among the charisms the Spirit gives to the church (1 Cor 12:10) and in the warning found in 1 John 4: “Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God.” Discernment in the broad sense as a form of contemplative wisdom that issues in a life of obedience and moderation was much cultivated in monasticism. It was primarily directed toward the self as a praxis involving, if only in part, distinguishing the good and evil impulses in one's intentions and actions. This broad view was well expressed in the words God addressed to Catherine of Siena in chapter nine of her Dialogo: “Discernment is nothing else but the true knowledge a soul ought to have of herself and of me, and through this knowledge she finds her roots. It is joined to charity like an engrafted shoot.”

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Discernment of spirits in the more narrow sense is a late medieval development. This form of discernment sought to establish guidelines and rules to distinguish the good from the bad spirits in other people, especially in heretics and in those who made claims to visionary contact with God. Canonically it had its source in a letter Innocent III sent to the clergy of Mainz in 1199 about the dangers of secret conventicles, false preaching, and heresy. In this letter, which made it into canon law, Innocent lays on the clergy the obligation to distinguish good from evil in such matters: “There is need for greater discernment, because vices can secretly work their way in under the guise of virtues, and Satan's angel can pretend to be and transform himself into an angel of light” (2 Cor 11:14).⁴⁶

At the beginning of the fourteenth century, the Augustinian Henry of Friemar, a contemporary of Eckhart and member of the commission that condemned the beguine mystic Marguerite Porete to death, wrote the first formal treatise on the topic, the Tractatus de quattuor instinctibus, analyzing the four internal promptings that incline humans to action: divine, angelic, diabolical, and natural. Henry was as much worried about mistaking merely natural instincts for divine or angelic ones, as he was about the action of the devil. Henry's treatise still had a relatively broad focus, but his contemporaries Augustine ofAncona and Venturino of Bergamo were more concerned with invoking discernment, to quote the latter, in the case of “visions, revelations, or experiences that are supernatural or beyond the common ken of those who love or fear God.”⁴⁷In the troubled times of the Great Schism and its aftermath, when visionaries and prophets abounded, discernment of spirits, or at least writing treatises about it, became a growth industry. In 1383 the German theologian Henry of Langenstein wrote the first work specifically with that name. Pierre d'Ailly composed two tracts De falsis prophetibus, and his student Jean Gerson wrote no less than three works on discernment. Catherine of Siena, Birgitta of Sweden, and Joan of Arc are just some of the visionaries whose showings were subjected to discernment analysis, sometimes with fatal results.

What has not yet been systematically studied is the second reaction, that is, the criticisms of visionary claims by the mystics themselves.⁴⁸

This anti-visionary tradition originated in the thirteenth century, grew strong in the fourteenth, and continued on into the fifteenth. To be sure, opponents of the visionary explosion found it difficult to condemn revelations and visions totally, since they were wit-nessed to in the Bible and had been ascribed to many of the post-biblical saints and leaders of the church. Mystical opposition to visions, therefore, came in several varieties, ranging from those who rejected visions outright—on the basis of the argument that the age of visions belonged to the good old days and not to the evil present age—to those who sought to show that visions at best were peripheral to the real pursuit of God, and at worst a distraction and danger.

Among the earliest witnesses to the anti-visionary movement was the German Franciscan David of Augsburg (d. 1272). David's ascetical and mystical teaching is not Franciscan in the sense we know from Bonaventure and the literature about Francis. It harkens back, rather, to the Cistercian and Victorine mysticism of the twelfth century. In the 1240s he wrote a popular spiritual handbook called De exte-rioris et interioris hominis compositione secundum triplicem statum incipientium, proficientium et perfectorum (over three hundred manuscripts survive).The end of the third book of this manual for novice masters contains a treatise on prayer and concludes with the interior pure prayer that leads to union with God. It also has a treatment of visions, revelations, and ecstatic experience (Bk. 3.66–68) that takes a decidedly negative attitude. “The less we meddle in such matters,” David warns, “the less opportunity there will be for deception.”⁴⁹

Of course, David allows that God sometimes consoles his saints with visions, but he is obviously worried about the kind of vision that we have seen above in the case of Hadewijch. He specifically warns against visions involving embracing, kissing, and “being caressed in other less decent ways,” as he delicately puts it, so that both the interior and even the exterior person are affected.⁵⁰

At the turn of the fourteenth century Marguerite Porete and Meister Eckhart, two of the most important mystics of the time, also took a negative attitude toward visions of God and the saints. Porete, herself a beguine, seems even more critical than Eckhart of the dangers of desiring to see God.⁵¹

Porete had a great interest in “specularity,” or seeing in a mirror, especially the role of her book Le mirouer des simples ames as a visible image of the way in which the annihilated soul vanishes so that God can see himself in the soul as in a non-existent mirror,⁵² but the beguine does not recount any appearances of Christ or the saints in her book. The Mirror is a dialogue among various personifications rather than a visionary narrative. Porete's apophatic message about the necessity for total annihilation means that visions, even of the highest sort, are not important for her. In chapter forty-nine Love proclaims, in her usual hyperbolic way, that willing nothing in God is better than even willing good in God. To the extent that will remains in persons, everything they do is tainted, “even,” she says, “if they could be raptured into heaven each day to see the Trinity, on account of such a will, as was Saint Paul the Apostle.”⁵³ Since Paul's rapture to the third heaven in 2 Corinthians 12 was traditionally considered the highest of mystical visions, Porete's comment is startling and also helps explain her studied disregard of lower forms of vision.

Meister Eckhart's attitude toward the visionary explosion of late medieval mysticism was guarded but also negative. As a good scholastic, he was aware of the long discussion over whether or not Moses and Paul had really seen God in this life, and he several times discusses this and the nature of rapture in general in his Latin works, adhering to the Thomistic-Augustinian view.⁵⁴

But Eckhart's attitude toward the obsession with visions he found around him, especially in the Dominican nuns and beguines to whom he preached and counseled, was a part of the constructive criticism by which he sought to encourage and learn from the good aspects of female mysticism while also being ready to correct what he found suspect, such as the visionary impulse.⁵⁵ His most famous statement against visions takes an ironic tone. German Sermon 16b declares: “Some people want to see God with their own eyes, just as they see a cow; and they want to love God just as they love a cow. You love a cow for the milk and the cheese and because of your own advantage. This is how all those people act who love God because of external riches or because of internal consolation.”⁵⁶ So for Eckhart the desire for visions was just another example of the spiritual self-centeredness and refusal to detach from all that is not God that forms the fundamental barrier to a true spiritual life.

Many of the late medieval women visionaries themselves, while willing to recount their showings and to use them as didactic tools, go out of their way to emphasize the secondary status of visionary experience. The Franciscan tertiary, Angela of Foligno (d. 1309) recounts numerous appearances of Christ to her, some quite erotic, but the long and intricate path to God described in her Memoriale concludes with an apophatic plunge into the divine Nothingness “in and with a darkness” that annihilates the mystic and hence all seeing. It is not surprising then that in the Instructiones that are supposed to contain her subsequent teaching to circles of devoted followers, she says: “O my dearest sons, of what use are revela-tions, visions, feelings of God's presence, sweetnesses from him? Of what use are gifts of wisdom, elevations? Of what use even is contemplation? Indeed, all these are useless unless one has a true knowledge of God and self.”⁵⁷

Perhaps this is edi-torializing by one of her disciples, but the same point was made by an even more famous visionary, Julian of Norwich, in the long version of her Shewings, a text that does not seem to have been subject to much clerical editing. Julian's famous series of fifteen visions of Christ on the cross, given her on May 13, 1373, as she lay dying, are the source for her whole mystical teaching, expounded not once but twice in the short and long versions of the book she worked on for at least three decades. She makes it quite clear that it is the content of the visions, that is, God's overpowering salvific love and our response to it, that is important, not the visions themselves. In chapter nine of the Long Text she says: “I am not good because of the revelations, but only if I love God better; and inasmuch as you love God better, it is more to you than to me…. For I am sure that there are many who never had revelations or visions, but only the common teaching of Holy Church, who love God better than I do.”⁵⁸

The two most decisive rejections of visions come from anonymous fourteenth-century German texts: the mystical dialogue known as Schwester Katrei (Sister Katherine), perhaps from about 1330, and Buch von geistlichen Armuth (Book of Spiritual Poverty), which seems to date from the third quarter of the same century. In both these works corporeal and imaginative visions are strongly attacked. Schwester Katrei, which was sometimes ascribed to Eckhart, has two parts.⁵⁹

The first tells the story of how an anonymous beguine gives up the formal spiritual direction of her friar confessor to go off into exile (obviously an internal one) in which she experiences a transformation of decidedly Eckhartian character. After a three-day mystical death, she is “permanently established in eternity” and exchanges roles with the confessor. The enlightened beguine is now his instructor in the series of nine dialogues or instructions that makes up the long second part of the work. Sister Katherine contains much challenging and difficult material, though I do not think it is a heretical “Free Spirit” text, as some have said. The sister not only condemns false mysticism,⁶⁰ but in the eighth instruction also mounts what is perhaps the most powerful late-medieval attack on the desire for corporeal and spiritual visions.⁶¹ Christ's physical and imaginative presence needs to be removed, says the beguine, if a soul is to attain true inner understanding of the Trinity. She says: “The people… who want to see God with exterior eyes are unbelieving people. Here the devil confirms them in their wrong belief so that they stay with him eternally. In the air he takes from the elements whatever shape he wants and appears to people when and how he wants to: sometimes as a child with curly hair in the consecrated host; at other times, he appears to them as a youth of twelve or a pious man of thirty.”⁶²The author might have been reading the Hadewijch vision noted above, but he (or she) rejects such showings as diabolical forms of a dangerous external religion, concluding “since Christ has gone to his heavenly Father no one has seen him with exterior eyes.”⁶³

Book of Spiritual Poverty is a kind of textbook of basically Eckhartian mysticism.⁶⁴

Along with the better known Theologia Deutsch, it was at times ascribed to John Tauler and so had a significant impact on later mystical literature. As befits its systematic character, it takes up almost all the themes and elements of late medieval mysticism, including a section on the discernment of spirits based on the work of Henry of Friemar. It could scarcely avoid the issue of visions. Once again, we find a strongly negative view of visions as dangerous delusions. In discussing the difference between true and false freedom, the book twice attacks both the Free Spirit heretics and also the desire for visions or revelations that would uncover previously hidden secrets. Such desires are dangerous, not only because they threaten humility, but also because of the strong possibility of diabolical delusion.⁶⁵ At the end of the treatise the anonymous author summarizes: “If a person attaches importance to visions and concerns himself with images, that is a sign that his ground is not simple and pure, for in a pure and simple ground nothing is born but God and what is godlike. God is invisible and beyond all images, and so they are deceived who accept visions.” He goes on even more strongly, arguing that to seek truth in a person who claims visions or revelations has “more in common with Antichrist than with Christ.”⁶⁶

It would be easy to pursue the story of the mystical reaction to the visionary explosion into the fifteenth century, as, for example, in the case of Nicholas of Cusa.⁶⁷

Rules for discerning spirits, as well as suspicions about visions and visionary narratives, continued on into the early modern mysticism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.⁶⁸ But the point, I hope, is made. Visions and visualizations, both here on earth and even in the visio beatifica to come, were never simple, uncontroversial, and generally agreed-upon aspects of Christian belief and practice. Instead, they provide fruitful access into some of the major debates that helped shape the Christian mystical tradition.