Visions or apparitions? Mariological differences

Marian theology carefully distinguishes between interior vision, imaginary vision, and exterior apparition. This distinction, consolidated by Saint Augustine in De genesi ad litteram XII and handed on in the spirituality of Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross, is not merely academic: it determines the criteria by which the Church assesses the discernment of alleged apparitions of Mary, the credibility of the witnesses, and the theological meaning of each reported experience, from the apparitions of Lourdes (1858) to those of Fatima (1917).

Visions and Marian apparitions in the mystical tradition: Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, and the fundamental theological distinction

Saint Teresa of Ávila wrote: 

“It seems that some are frightened by visions and revelations merely at hearing their name. I do not understand where this fear comes from, nor for what reason one should believe in the danger of God’s leading in this way. […] Some are far less impressed on hearing that the devil attacks him with various kinds of temptations, with suggestions of blasphemy, with dishonest and extravagant things, than on hearing it said that he saw an angel who spoke with him, or that Our Lord Jesus Christ crucified appeared to you” (Saint Teresa of Jesus, Foundations 8,1).

For his part, Saint John of the Cross warned with supernatural prudence: 

“They believe that the mere fact of knowing that such visions are true and come from God is enough to admit them and to find reassurance in them, forgetting that the soul can find there a spirit of possessiveness, attachment, and constraint, as in the spirit of the world, if even in this case it does not know how to renounce. […] God, on the other hand, does not command them to place themselves in such a predicament and to expose humble and simple souls to dangers and uncertainties. They possess a sound and safe doctrine, that of faith. Walking by this way” (Saint John of the Cross, Ascent n. 16,14).

In our own time, so marked by the crisis of traditional values, above all religious ones, we are witnessing a growing number of charismatic events and episodes, among which, by their number and popularity, the apparitions or visions of heavenly figures stand out. Perhaps determined by the uncertainty and the fear that are the companions of a tormented faith, the phenomenon may have been sharpened, involuntarily but objectively, by the happy predominance of the renewed liturgy over all the other activities of prayer: this meant a genuine education of Christians in the truths of faith and in their celebration, but it probably entailed a decline of sensible experience and of affective participation, components of the religious fact that cannot be eliminated and that are encouraged by the Church.

Certainly, it is no accident that the multiplication of supposed apparitions is accompanied both by striking emotional manifestations on the part of broad strata of the simplest people, not only in small towns, and, more generally, by the awakening of popular religiosity, particularly at shrines: a phenomenon carefully investigated by pastoral theology and by religious sociology, and one that cannot be unrelated to the intensification of the phenomenon of the rebirth of the religious that is seen as a reaction to the process of secularization.

To these historical-sociological motivations should be added the constant suspicion that the Western soul, Latin and juridical, has always cast upon whatever goes beyond the limits of the experimental and the natural. Only in this way will we better understand both Saint Teresa’s astonishment and the prudence of St. John of the Cross. Above all, we will better understand the disorientation and the confusion that reigns among people of good will, but without adequate interpretive criteria, even among directors of conscience, who do not know how to discern the authentic from the false, the pathological from the supernatural.

Mariological criteria for discernment: corporeal, imaginary, and spiritual visions in the theological tradition

We therefore intend to offer criteria, many of them brought from mystical theology into our own day, even on the theoretical level in the light of contemporary theological tendencies. For reasons of praxis it is easier for us to be guided by the introspection of the masters of mystical experience.

Sacred Scripture attests many apparitions. In the history of the Church, from the patristic era until today, the number of documented apparitions cannot be calculated, even though it has been discussed and assessed in various ways. It is common opinion that these phenomena can have, and in fact have had, a value that cannot be underestimated both in the history of the Church (let us think of the apparitions to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque at Paray-le-Monial and to Saint Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes) and in the history of the spiritual development of privileged creatures (let us think of the apparitions to Saint Gemma Galgani at Lucca). 

By the term vision we mean the supernatural perception of an object that is naturally invisible to man. 

“Apparition” and “vision”: the typology of Saint Augustine (De genesi ad litteram XII) and the three degrees of vision

By the term apparition we mean the sensible manifestation of a person or of a being whose presence, produced in the precise circumstances in which it occurs, cannot be explained according to the normal course of nature. 

The vision, therefore, does not necessarily imply the real existence, that is, the real presence, of its object. 

The apparition presupposes the real presence, so that the fact that the object manifests itself to the external senses belongs to its notion. 

The classic division into corporeal or external visions, spiritual or imaginary visions, and intellectual visions goes back to Saint Augustine, and on it depend the writings of Saint Thomas and of the two Carmelite Doctors, Teresa and John (cf. St. Augustine, De genesi ad litteram XII, 7,16 and chaps. 8-12).

In corporeal or external visions the sense of sight perceives an object, whether a body really present or a sensible external form (for example, a luminous one), as an objective reality invisible to man by natural means. This vision is produced either by the real presence of a body which, on reaching the retina, determines the consequent physical phenomenon, or by an immediate external action (for example, the Lord), which, according to Thomistic psychology, produces in the visual organ that same impressed species which the corresponding body would produce there, if it were really present.

In spiritual or imaginary visions there is a sensible representation limited to the imagination, that is, an operation limited to the imagination, presented to the spirit in a supernatural manner and therefore with a force of transparency and clarity that external physical realities do not have. This representation can be produced either by the supernatural illumination of images previously received by the ordinary path of the senses, or by the combination, through supernatural agency, of those images with one another, or by the infusion of new images through divine agency. 

Such visions, by reason of their very genesis, are of a kind superior to corporeal ones and, unlike the latter, can contain representations not only of the present, but also of the past and of the future. Their most frequent forms are the representative (for example, the apparition of a saint) and the symbolic (for example, the exchange of hearts in the experience of many mystics).

External and imaginary visions are the least reliable. Since they present a sensible content, the intellectual interpretation on the part of the one who saw or heard introduces into the experience a principle of personal judgment, questionable or even erroneous.

In fact, when the human intellect has to interpret a given phenomenon, it is always exposed, obviously, to all the dangers of error inherent in it. Saint John of the Cross showed how easy it is to give an exaggerated or even mistaken meaning to the words heard, since man is naturally inclined to give an interpretation in accordance with his own desires and concepts. To the difficulties of interpretation are added, therefore, the difficulties concerning the origin of the visions, which can come not only from God, but also from the devil, or from one’s own spontaneity, which operates in the subconscious, breaking through and expressing itself, at certain moments, at the level of consciousness. 

This is all the more possible when one considers that, according to the teachings of modern religious psychology, the psychological mechanism of external and imaginary visions is no different from that of hallucinations, although their cause is entirely different. In the case of hallucinations, in fact, the cause is pathological. In true visions, on the other hand, the cause is divine, that is, it consists in the influence of God upon the soul.

In the opposite sense, the action of the devil has the power, which must not be underestimated, to influence the senses of the body and to simulate revelations and visions, especially about the future, to the point that one can say that the diabolical falsifications of extraordinary gifts are as numerous as the true gifts.

The action of the Spirit of evil and the criteria of ecclesial discernment of mystical experiences

The action of the spirit of evil can intersect with or be added to the subject’s psychopathological conditions. Physiological disturbances, linked to temperament, age, and sex, the natural imagination that creates pseudo-psychological phenomena, psychic depressions caused by overly absorbing intellectual activity or by an excessive meditative concentration on religious themes or by poorly regulated bodily austerities, illnesses to which are added the results of organic imbalance, are all possible causes or contributing causes of the alteration or imperfect interpretation of external and imaginary visions and, more generally, of mystical phenomenology.

The theological distinction between visions and Marian apparitions and its place in the faith of the Church is explored more deeply in the encyclical Redemptoris Mater of John Paul II, which offers a theological framework for understanding the presence and the action of Mary in the history of salvation.

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See the complete list of Marian apparitions recognized by the Church.