Intellectual visions

Intellectual visions

These are the supernatural events produced in the intelligence without any real dependence on sensible images. The object manifested to the intelligence depends either on acquired ideas, but coordinated and modified in a supernatural manner, or on infused ideas. Such visions are therefore purely spiritual and passive, because external imaginative representations do not intervene in them.

This supernatural knowledge is distinguished from natural knowledge. Its object, which cannot go beyond the cognitive domain of the ordinary intellect, generally surpasses that common sphere in intrinsic luminosity, supra-rational certainty, agility in the process of learning, stability in the mind, and lasting effects in the soul: an intellectual light full of love, peace, desire for God, and absolute detachment from what is not He and does not concern Him directly.

These visions have God Himself as their principal cause and exclude the action, even mediated, of angels and demons. Their characteristic sign is certainty,

(St. Teresa of Ávila, Book of Her Life 27,5).

“because the Lord imprints on the soul a knowledge so clear that, even without having seen Him, it is not possible to doubt. It is engraved within the intellect, and one is far more certain of it than if one saw Him with one’s own eyes, because in that case one can always doubt that one is being deceived. At the beginning, this doubt can also exist here. But then the soul comes away so certain that the doubt has no force”

Intellectual visions, which must not be separated from the infused gift of wisdom, are sometimes obscure and indistinct, sometimes clear and distinct. The obscure intellectual vision certainly manifests the presence of the object, but not the particulars of its nature:

(Saint Teresa of Ávila, Book of Her Life 27,2).

“It seemed to me that Jesus Christ was always walking at my side, but I did not see in what form, because it was not an imaginary vision. I felt that He was at my right side, a witness of everything I did”

The clear intellectual vision is a rapid intuition of divine truth, which cannot be found anywhere else since, according to the experience of the Apostle:

(2 Cor 12:2-4).

“I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body, I do not know. Whether out of the body, I also do not know. God knows. And I know that this man — whether in the body or out of the body, I do not know, God knows — was caught up into paradise and there heard ineffable words that a man is not permitted to repeat”

Therefore, there is no formulation adequate to human language:

(St. Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle VI 10,1).

“since these are very hidden things, it is not very easy to speak of them, unlike imaginary visions, which are explained more easily”

The theological understanding of intellectual visions and their role in the spiritual itinerary of the seers is illuminated in the encyclical Redemptoris Mater of John Paul II, which reflects on faith as a higher form of knowledge and of encounter with the divine.

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