So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Mt 5:48)

During the first year of his papacy, Pope Francis answered a question from journalist Eugenio Scalfari regarding the significance of mystics in the Church: “They have been fundamental. A religion without mystics is a philosophy.” Although Scalfari later become notorious for his untaped “reconstructions” of the Holy Father’s words and intent, this citation from La Repubblica has not been a point of any particular contention; the necessary role of mystics seems a plausible attribution.

Assuming this part of the interview is reliable, Pope Francis went on to reference his namesake, among the truly great-souled and spectacular mystics of salvation history, while laying no claim to such gift and sanctity himself. Yet the question presents itself: how is mysticism properly to be classified? Garrigou-Lagrange frames it well: “Does the mystical life belong to the category of sanctifying grace, [the habitual grace of] the virtues and the gifts [of the Holy Spirit], or the relatively inferior category of miracles and prophecy?” (Actual grace completes the list of that which is both essentially supernatural and created, in contradistinction to the uncreated essentially supernatural, namely the Trinity and the Person of the incarnate Word.)

In response, he acclaims the uncompromised superiority of even a mustard seed’s measure of sanctifying grace over and above the preternatural, which can be said to be supernatural only modally (that is, supernatural in its cause or its end, not of its very essence):

The natural knowledge of the highest angel could in its natural order grow indefinitely in intensity, yet it would never reach the dignity of the supernatural knowledge of infused faith or the gift of wisdom. It would never even obscurely attain the intimate life of God, just as the indefinite progress of the imagination would never equal the intelligence; as the indefinite multiplication of the sides of a polygon inscribed in a circle never equal the latter, for the side, no matter how small it may be, never becomes a point.

However theoretical and remote these considerations may seem, Garrigou-Lagrange makes clear their urgency and import, for, .”..all souls in the state of grace are in a general and remote manner called to the mystical life, as they are to that of heaven.” This is likewise affirmed in the fifth chapter of Lumen Gentium, On the Universal Call to Holiness in the Church, which teaches that the “holiness of the Church is unceasingly manifested, and must be manifested, in the fruits of grace which the Spirit produces in the faithful;” further, this call is predicated of “all the faithful of Christ of whatever rank or status.”

The faithful are prompted to achieve this sanctity by the Spirit of Christ from within, as Lumen Gentium specifies. We may thus derive two principles: First, anything exterior to the spontaneity of the heart cannot be directly efficacious of “the grace of the gifts and the virtues.” Second – and of absolutely monumental import! – sanctifying grace is totally congruent with its recipient, spirit, soul and body.[1] As a matter of fact, Lumen Gentium is adamant that it is “by this holiness as such a more human manner of living [emphasis mine] is promoted in this earthly society.” It is precisely the mystical life among men that fosters peace, right order, and constancy, both ecclesially and civilly. In contrast, the unholy spiritual ambition marked by pride and a penchant for grandiosity rejects nature, with disastrous results. As Fr. Lagrange emphasizes: “Whoever fails to see this admirable conformity is led to conceive a rigid supernaturalness which is contrary to nature and lacking in simplicity. This conception would lead to exaltation and the follies of false mysticism.”

In practice, the perfect union of grace and nature was realized only in Our Lord. St. Teresa of Ávila is particularly insistent that all Christian mysticism is and must be centered in the incarnate Christ; nothing that seeks to get around or “beyond” this reality can be authentic. The saints, for their part, personify the integration of grace and nature, distinct though not inherently opposed. This inner kinship between grace and nature is revealed as a result of the passive purifications which, while decidedly unglamorous, are themselves fully of the mystical order, unlike the prodigies that so impress the undiscerning. After all, sanctifying grace – a necessary precondition of these painful and arid purifications – is inchoatio vitae aeternae, eternal life begun.

With all of this firmly in place, we can once again look more closely at the varieties of extraordinary phenomena known to attend the way of perfection.

Revelations may be divided into two categories. In the proper sense, a revelation refers to the disclosure of hidden knowledge, whether of God or of creation. A derivative application of the term applies to the elucidation of what is already known by faith. The former category, revelation in its proper sense, carries far greater risk of dangers for the soul. The latter constitutes a gift having no entrance for the evil one to insinuate himself.

Revelations, properly so-called, can come by way of visions. Sensible visions are not an indicator of virtue and can become a realm of deception. As moderns, we have an empirical bias; we overvalue what can be verified externally. Yet this departs from the tradition; as Lagrange states: “If the vision is common to a great number of persons, it is a sign that the apparition is exterior, without its thereby being certain that it is of divine origin.” As for the appropriate response, St. Teresa instructs the visionary to intentionally direct his veneration (although she never would have worded it quite that way) to the subject that the vision depicts, whatever the source of the vision itself. The conditional honor given to what is actually holy finds a correlate in the proper response to sacred art or music that is aesthetically questionable or that traces to a morally bad source.

Imaginary visions can easily harbor deception. If the visionary is asleep, the vision cannot be authenticated unless the dream contains nothing contrary to faith or morals and cannot be explained by anything prior in the intellect or in the imagination. Moreover, peace attends what is of God, as does the advancement of virtue. What is divine in origin can neither be produced nor dismissed by the recipient at will, and is of short duration. If the visionary is awake, there is always at least some degree of ecstasy, as the vision absorbs one beyond the sensible realm of his natural environment. Such visions should not be desired.

An intellectual vision is an intuitive awareness of the truth, and it perfects an imaginative vision, that the seer may understand what he has experienced. An intellectual vision is not subject to the influence of imagination or the demonic; however, one may mistake some other dynamic of nature for a genuine intellectual vision. Again, the enduring fruits are decisive for discernment. Even within the state of transforming union, during which such visions are typically known to the soul, the intellectual vision necessarily falls far short of the beatific vision.

Visions are often accompanied by supernatural words, which also may be had apart from visions:

Auricular supernatural words are the counterpart to sensible visions. Of these, “Hail, full of grace!” is the most celebrated. Like sensible visions, auricular words are liable to fabrication and distortion.

Imaginary words, as with imaginary visions, may be experienced while the hearer is awake or asleep. These are not heard with bodily ears, but originate from within.

Intellectual words bypass even the imagination. They may be successive, formal, or substantial. Authentic successive words arise in the soul under the influence of the Holy Spirit, but are subject to illusion, especially as they become admixed with other influences. They should not be desired. Formal intellectual words are known by the soul to have come from another, quite apart from the will. In and of themselves, they are above deception. Yet neither should these be desired; to do so is to court deception. Nor is one to take any direct action according to their counsel, before discernment with a spiritual guide.

Substantial intellectual words are those which immediately bring about what they articulate. By now, it might seem anti-intuitive that Fr. Lagrange should excerpt the Ascent of Mount Carmel as follows:

A single one of these words instantly operates more good than the efforts of a lifetime. When the soul receives such locutions, it has only to abandon itself; it is useless to desire or not to desire them, for there is nothing to repulse, nothing to fear. The soul ought not even to seek to effect what is said, for God never utters substantial words in order that we should translate them into acts; He himself brings about their effect… Illusion is not to be feared here, for neither the understanding nor the devil can interfere in this matter.

Fr. Lagrange crowns it with this, from the Living Flame of Love: “God’s words are living flames in purified souls.”

Such represents an apex of infused contemplation – and although it may come as a surprise after all these warnings, we should positively desire infused contemplation, which is that obscure, loving knowledge of God that is supernatural essentially. (This is a topic on which I hope to write more in the future.)

What the devil cannot do, per St. Thomas, is act directly on the intellect. A faith informed by reason, docile to truth and lawful authority, offers a secure path. Indeed, Pope St. John Paul II condemns, alongside a hardened rationalism, “fideism and radical traditionalism, for their distrust of reason’s natural capacities.”

In the same spirit, drawing on a metaphor used by St. Gregory Nazianzen, Thomas Merton likens the soul to an instrument played by the Holy Spirit – organum pulsatum a Spiritu Sancto. While it is not his to produce the music, it falls to man to keep things in tune, and this he does by way of the appropriate activity of his reason. The continual, lived discernment of the mystic, the active rejection of all that is less than God himself, entails a salutary engagement and exercise of reason. As Merton writes in Ascent to Truth:

Mystical prayer is a gift of God to a soul purified by ascetic discipline. This is only achieved when all the passions and faculties are controlled by reason. Mystical prayer depends, per accidens, on the right ordering of the soul by reason. In this sense, therefore, reason is the key to the mystical life! [emphasis in original]

In the final pages of his great work on contemplation, Garrigou-Lagrange, the priest-architect of the call to universal holiness, invokes the commentary of Dom Savinien Louismet:

If such a universal writer as St. Thomas Aquinas does not speak of mystics as a peculiar class, is it not because for him, as for the Areopagite [Pseudo-Dionysius], all Christians are de jure mystics?… And if he never mentions a separate body of mystical doctrine, is it not because for him there is no mystical doctrine distinct from the common deposit of faith?

If our blessed Lord commands perfection, are we not to trust in the efficacy of his call? What greater perfection can a soul attain, than that had with the eternal glory and beatitude by which it adheres forever to God, infallibly and irrevocably? And this sets us up to better understand Pope Francis on mysticism – here in the context of a general audience, with the veracity of the source no longer in doubt:

[Becoming a saint] is the greatest gift that each one of us can give to the world. May the Lord grant us the grace to believe so deeply in Him that we become the image of Christ for the world. Our times need ‘mystics’: people who reject every form of power, who aspire to charity and fraternity. Men and women who live, also accepting a portion of suffering, because they take on themselves the struggles of others. Without these men and women the world would not have hope. That is why I hope that the Lord will grant you – and me – the gift of hoping to be saints.

As the Holy Father, in the interview with Scalfari, was quick to dissociate his gift from that of the great saints, so is he eager to seek the gift of being numbered – with all of us – among the “everyday saints.”

In closing, I want to offer the writing of a canonized saint on one of these saints less known to history, in illustration of an authentic, beautiful and deeply influential mysticism:

A very simple man… was one of those unknown saints, hidden amid the others like a marvelous light at the bottom of life, at a depth where night usually reigns. He disclosed to me the riches of his inner life, of his mystical life. He had cut short his studies to work as a tailor in his father’s workshop: this work better suited his inner life. Under the occupation he was a real master of spiritual life for many young people united in a `living rosary’ round my parish. His name was John. In his words, in his spirituality and in the example of a life given entirely to God alone, he represented a new world that I did not yet know. I saw the beauty of the soul opened up by grace. I was not yet thinking of the priesthood when he gave me, among other books, the works of St. John of the Cross, of whom he was the first to speak to me. He belonged to this school.

Later, when I was a theology student, I learnt Spanish on my own in order to be able to comment on the thought of the Mystical Doctor in my doctoral thesis, which was begun in Krakow and continued in Rome at the Angelicum. The final examination took place in two parts, in Rome and in Krakow. But that is not the important point. What counts is what I owe to the admirable person, unknown by the world, whose memory I have just evoked – the revelation of a universe. The shock was comparable to the one I felt, as I told you just now, in the depths of my soul.

(From Be Not Afraid, a 1984 book of conversations between French journalist and essayist André Frossard and Pope St. John Paul II, on Venerable Jan Tyranowski, so declared by Pope Francis in 2017.)

Note

[1] It is well worth examining more closely certain maxims of Pauline theology which might on the surface appear to contradict this principle, though that is beyond the scope of this present article.

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Image: Venerable Jan Tyranowski