And, as to the inadequacy of these impressions, the classical authority on such things, St. John of the Cross, declares: “He that will rely on the letter of the divine locutions or on the intelligible form of the vision, will of necessity fall into delusion; for he does not yield to the Spirit in detachment from sense.” “He who shall give attention to these motes of the Spirit alone will, in the end, have no spirituality at all.” “All visions, revelations, and heavenly feelings, and whatever is greater than these, are not worth the least act of humility, bearing the fruits of that charity which neither values nor seeks itself, which thinketh well not of self but of all others.” Indeed “virtue does not consist in these apprehensions. Let men then cease to regard, and labour to forget them, that they may be free.” For “spiritual supernatural knowledge is of two kinds, one distinct and special,” which comprises “visions, revelations, locutions, and spiritual impressions”; “the other confused, obscure, and general,” which “has but one form, that of contemplation which is the work of faith. The soul is to be led into this, by directing it thereto through all the rest, beginning with the first, and detaching it from them.”
Hence “many souls, to whom visions have never come, are incomparably more advanced in the way of perfection than others to whom many have been given”; and “they who are already perfect, receive these visitations of the Spirit of God in peace; ecstasies cease, for they were only graces to prepare them for this greater grace.” Hence, too, “one desire only doth God allow and suffer in His Presence: that of perfectly observing His law and of carrying the Cross of Christ. In the Ark of the Covenant there was but the Book of the Law, the Rod of Aaron, and the Pot of Manna. Even so that soul, which has no other aim than the perfect observance of the Law of God and the carrying of the Cross of Christ, will be a true Ark containing the true Manna, which is God.” And this perfected soul’s intellectual apprehensions will, in their very mixture of light and conscious obscurity, more and more approach and forestall the eternal condition of the beatified soul. “One of the greatest favours, bestowed transiently on the soul in this life, is to enable it to see so distinctly and to feel so profoundly, that it cannot comprehend Him at all. These souls are herein, in some degree, like the Saints in Heaven, where they who know Him most perfectly perceive most clearly that He is infinitely incomprehensible; for those who have the less clear vision do not perceive so distinctly as the others how greatly He transcends their vision.”[50]
3. Second special difficulty in testing ecstasies.
The second special difficulty is this. Have not at least some of the saints of this definitely ecstatic type shown more psycho-physical abnormality than spiritually fruitful origination or utilization of such things, so that their whole life seems penetrated by a fantastic spirit? And have not many others, who, at their best, may not have been amenable to this charge, ended with shattered nerve- and will-power, with an organism apparently incapable of any further growth or use, even if we restrict our survey exclusively to strength-bringing ecstasy and to a contemplative prayer of some traceable significance?
(1) As a good instance of the apparent predominance of psycho-physical and even spiritual strangeness, we can take the Venerable Sister Lukardis, Cistercian Nun of Ober-Weimar, born probably in 1276. Her life is published from a unique Latin MS. by the Bollandists (Analecta, Vol. XVIII, pp. 305-367, Bruxelles, 1899), and presents us with a mediaevally naïve and strangely unanalytic, yet extraordinarily vivid picture of things actually seen by the writer. “Although,” say the most competent editors, “we know not the name nor profession of the Author, whether he belonged to the Friars or to the Monks,[51] it is certain that he was a contemporary of Lukardis, that he knew her intimately, and that he learnt many details from her fellow-nuns. And though we shall be slow to agree with him when he ascribes all the strange things which she experienced in her soul and body to divine influence, yet we should beware of considering him to be in bad faith. For, though he erred perchance in ascribing to a divine operation things which are simply the work of nature, such a vice is common amongst those who transmit such things.”[52] I take the chief points in the order of their narration by the Vita.
“Soon after Lukardis had, at twelve years of age, taken the Cistercian habit, her mother died,” over twelve English miles away, at Erfurt, yet Lukardis “saw the scene” in such detail “in the spirit,” that, when her sister came to tell her, she, Lukardis, “anticipated her with an account of the day, the place and hour of the death, of the clothes then being worn by their mother, of the precise position of the bed and of the hospital, and of the persons present at the time.”
She soon suffered from “stone” in the bladder; “quartan, tertian, and continuous fevers,” and from fainting fits; also from contraction of the muscles (nervi) of the hands, so that the latter were all but useless and could not even hold the staff on which she had to lean in walking, till they had been “tightly wrapped round in certain clothes.” Yet “she would, at times, strike her hands so vehemently against each other, that they resounded as though they had been wooden boards.” “When lying in bed she would sometimes, as it were, plant her feet beneath her, hang her head down” backwards, “and raise her abdomen and chest, making thus, as it were, a highly curved arch of her person.” Indeed sometimes “she would for a long while stand upon her head and shoulders, with her feet up in air, but with her garments adhering to her limbs, as though they had been sewn on to them.” “Often, too, by day or night, she was wont to run with a most impetuous course;—she understood that, by this her course, she was compensating Christ for His earthly course of thirty-three years.”[53]
“On one occasion she had a vision of Christ, in which He said to her: ‘Join thy hands to My hands, and thy feet to My feet, and thy breast to My breast, and thus shall I be aided by thee to suffer less.’ And instantly she felt a most keen pain of wounds,” in all three regions, “although wounds did not as yet appear to sight.” But “as she bore the memory of the hammering of the nails into Christ upon the Cross within her heart, so did she exercise herself in outward deed. For she was frequently wont, with the middle finger of one hand, impetuously to wound the other in the place appropriate to the stigmata; then to withdraw her finger to the distance of a cubit, and straightway again impetuously to wound herself. Those middle fingers felt hard like metal. And about the sixth and ninth hour she would impetuously wound herself with her finger in the breast, at the appropriate place for the wound.”—After about two years “Christ appeared to her in the night of Blessed Gregory, Pope” (St. Gregory VII, May 26?), “pressed her right hand firmly in His, and declared, ‘I desire thee to suffer with Me.’ On her consenting, a wound instantly appeared in her right hand; about ten days later a wound in the left hand; and thus successively the five wounds were found in her body.” “The wounds of the scourging were also found upon her, of a finger’s length, and having a certain hard skin around them.”[54]
“At whiles she would lie like one dead throughout the day; yet her countenance was very attractive, owing to a wondrous flushed look. And even if a needle was pressed into her flesh, she felt no pain.”—“On one occasion she was carried upon her couch by two sisters into the Lady Chapel, to the very spot where her body now reposes. After having been left there alone for about an hour, the Blessed Virgin appeared to her, with her beloved Infant, Jesus, in her arms, and suckling Him. And Lukardis, contrary to the law of her strength”—she had, by now, been long confined to a reclining posture—“arose from her couch and began to stand upright. And at this juncture one of the Sisters opened the Chapel door a little, and, on looking in, marvelled at Lukardis being able to stand, but withdrew and forbade the other Sisters from approaching thither, since she feared that, if they saw her standing thus, they might declare her to be quite able, if she but chose, to arise and stand at any time. Upon the Blessed Virgin twice insisting upon being asked for some special favour, and Lukardis declaring, ‘I desire that thou slake my thirst with that same milk with which I now see thee suckling thy beloved Son,’ the Blessed Virgin came up to her, and gave her to drink of her milk.” And when later on Lukardis was fetched by the Sisters, she was “found reclining on her couch. And for three days and nights she took neither food nor drink, and could not see the light of day. And as a precaution, since her death was feared, Extreme Unction was administered to her. And, later on, the Sister who had seen her standing in the Chapel, gradually drew the whole story from her.”[55]