Chapter 28

She tells of the great favours that the Lord bestowed on her, and of His first appearance to her. She defines an imaginary vision, and speaks of the great effects and signs produced by one that is from God. This is a most profitable and noteworthy chapter

TO return to our subject, I spent some few days with that vision continually before me, and it did me so much good that I never emerged from the state of prayer, and contrived to act in such a way as not to displease Him whose presence as a witness had been so clear to me. Although I was occasionally frightened by the quantity of advice that was offered to me, my fears were short-lived, for the Lord reassured me. One day when I was at prayer, He was pleased to show me His hands only; their beauty was beyond description. This put me in great fear, as does every new experience at the beginning, whatever supernatural favour the Lord may be granting me. A few days later I saw that divine face also, which seems to leave me completely entranced. I could not understand why the Lord was revealing Himself to me gradually like this, since He was afterwards to grant me the favour of seeing Him whole. But finally I realized that His Majesty was pandering to the weakness of my nature. May He be blessed for ever. So base and vile a creature as I would not have been able to bear all this glory at once and, knowing this, in His compassion, He gradually prepared me.

Your Reverence may imagine that it would have required no great effort to behold those hands and that beautiful face. But such is the beauty of glorified bodies, and such the supernatural glory which surrounds them, that it throws all who gaze upon them into confusion. I was so awe-struck, indeed, as to be completely upset and bewildered. Soon afterwards, however, I felt quite certain and secure; the effects quickly dispelled all my fears.

Once when I was at Mass on St Paul’s Day, there stood before me the most sacred Humanity, in all the beauty and majesty of His resurrection body, as it appears in paintings. Of this I gave your Reverence a particular description at the time, at your very urgent request. The writing of it very greatly distressed me, for one can say nothing without doing great violence to oneself. But I wrote the best description that I could, and so there is no reason to repeat it here. I will only remark that if there were nothing else in Heaven to delight the eye but the great beauty of glorified bodies, that alone would be a very great bliss, particularly if it were the Humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ. For if His Majesty reveals Himself on earth to the degree that our wretched state can bear, what will it be like when that blessing is enjoyed in its entirety? Although this vision was imaginary, I never saw it or any other with the eyes of the body, but only with the eyes of the soul.

Those who know better than I say that my previous vision was more perfect than this one, while this in its turn is much nearer to perfection than those that are seen with the eyes of the body. The latter, they say, is the lowest kind, and the one most open to delusions from the devil. I was not aware of this at that time, but as this favour was being granted to me, wished that I could have seen it with my physical eyes, so that my confessor should not tell me that I was imagining it. The moment the vision had passed, at the very instant of its fading, I was myself struck by the thought that these things were all imaginary. It worried me that I had spoken of them to my confessor, and I wondered if I had been deceiving him. Here was more distress. So I went to him, and talked to him about it He asked me whether I had described the vision as it had appeared to me or if I had meant to deceive him. I replied that I had told him the truth, for I did not think I had been lying. I certainly had not meant to, for I would not have told an untruth for anything in the world. He knew that very well, and so he succeeded in calming me. But it worried me so much to have to go to him over these matters that I do not know how the devil could have put it into my head that I was making them up to drive me into tormenting myself. But the Lord made such haste to bestow this favour on me and to make the reality of it plain to me, that I very soon lost my suspicion that it was all just fancy. Since then I have seen very clearly how silly I was. For if I were to spend many years imagining how I could invent anything so beautiful, I could not do it. I should not know how to begin. For in its whiteness and radiance alone it exceeds anything that we can imagine.

It is not a dazzling radiance but a soft whiteness and infused radiance, which causes the eyes great delight and never tires them; nor are they tired by the brilliance which confronts them as they look on this divine beauty. The brightness and light that appear before the gaze are so different from those of earth that the sun’s rays seem quite dim by comparison, and afterwards we never feel like opening our eyes again. It is as if we were to look at a very clear stream running over a crystal bed, in which the sun was reflected, and then to turn to a very muddy brook, with an earthy bottom, running beneath a clouded sky. Not that the sun or anything like sunlight enters into the vision; on the contrary, its light seems the natural light, and the light of this world appears artificial. It is a light that never yields to darkness and, being always light, can never be clouded. It is of such a kind, indeed, that no one, however great his intellect, could imagine its nature in the whole course of his life; and God brings it before us so swiftly that even if we needed to open our eyes in order to see it, we should not have the time. But it does not matter whether they are open or closed; if the Lord wishes us to see it, we shall do so even against our will. No distraction or effort is strong enough to resist it; no diligence or care of our own can attain it. This I have learned from thorough experience, as I shall relate.

Now I should like to say something about the Lord’s way of revealing Himself in these visions. I do not mean that I shall describe how it is that He is able to introduce this very strong light into the inner senses, or to present this picture so vividly to the mind that it really seems to be there. That is a matter for the learned: the Lord has not wished to show me how it happens. I am so ignorant and have such a poor understanding that although many attempts have been made to explain it to me, I have never managed to comprehend the way of it. Your Reverence may suppose that I have a lively intelligence, but I certainly have not; I have discovered again and again that I never grasp anything unless it is fed to me, spoonful by spoonful, as they say. Sometimes my confessor would be astounded by my ignorance, and he was never able to explain to me, nor did he even try, how God did this, or how it was possible that He could. Indeed, I have never asked such a question, although, as I have said already, for many years I have been consulting men of sound learning. If there were a question of sin or no sin, I would ask; but, for the rest, all I needed was to realize that God did everything. This made me see that I had nothing to be afraid of, but much to praise Him for. I am merely stimulated to devotion by such difficulties, and the greater they are the greater my devotion becomes.

I will describe, therefore, what my experience has shown me. Your Reverence will explain better than I can the way in which the Lord works; you will make clear all that is obscure and beyond my powers of exposition. At times it certainly seemed to me as if I were looking at a painting, but on many other occasions it appeared to be no painting but Christ Himself, such was the clarity with which He was pleased to appear to me. Yet there were times when the vision was so indistinct that I did think it was a painting, though it bore no resemblance even to the most perfect of earthly pictures, and I have seen some good ones. No, it would be absurd to speak of any resemblance; the vision was no more like a painting than a portrait is like a living man. However well a portrait is painted, it can never look completely natural, for it is plainly a dead thing. But let us pass this over, apposite and truthful though the observation is.

I have not been trying to institute comparisons, for they are never completely accurate; this is the actual truth. Here there is the difference between something living and something painted, neither more nor less. If what I see is an image, it is a living image, no dead man but the living Christ, and He reveals Himself as God and man, not as He was in the tomb, but as He was when He left it, after rising from the dead. Sometimes He comes with such majesty that no one can doubt it is the Lord Himself; this is especially so after Communion, since then we know that He is there, for the Faith says so. Then he shows Himself so much the Lord of that inn, the soul, that it seems to dissolve completely and to be consumed in Christ. O my Jesus, if only one could describe the Majesty with which You reveal Yourself! How utterly You are lord of all the world and the heavens, and of a thousand other worlds; and of countless more worlds and heavens that You have created! And from the majesty with which You appear the soul realizes that it is nothing to You to be lord of all this.

Here it is made plain how small is all the power of hell, compared with Yours, and how he who pleases You can trample all hell beneath his feet. By this we see how right the devils were to tremble when You descended into limbo, and how right they would have been to long for a thousand hells yet lower into which to flee from such a majesty. I see that You are pleased to reveal to the soul the greatness and power of Your most sacred Humanity, united with the Divinity. Here is a clear picture of what the Day of Judgement will be, when we shall see this King in His Majesty, and witness the sternness with which He will treat the wicked. Here is true humility, which allows the soul to see its wretchedness, of which it cannot be ignorant. Here is shame and genuine repentance for sins, for although the soul sees God to be revealing His love, it does not know where to hide and so is utterly confounded. I mean that when the Lord is pleased to reveal so much of His greatness and majesty to it, the vision has such great strength that I think it would be impossible to bear it, unless the Lord were pleased to help the soul in a most supernatural way. He keeps it in a rapture or ecstasy, during the enjoyment of which the sight of that Divine Presence is lost. Though it is true that this vision is afterwards forgotten, that majesty and beauty remain so deeply imprinted on the soul that they are unforgettable except when the Lord is pleased for the soul to suffer such a great dryness and loneliness as I shall later describe; then it seems to forget even God. At all other times, the soul is itself no longer; it is always intoxicated.

This, in my opinion, marks the beginning of a new and living love for God of very high order. For although the earlier vision which, as I have said, reveals God without any image, is higher, yet if the memory is to last, in spite of our weakness, and if the thoughts are to be usefully occupied, it is a great thing that the Divine Presence should be presented to, and should remain in, the imagination. These two kinds of vision almost always occur simultaneously. When they come in this second way, it is in order that the eyes of the soul may see the excellence, the beauty and the glory of the most sacred Humanity; and when they come in the other way, which I described first, we are shown how He is God, that He is powerful, and that He can do all things, command all things, rule all things, and fill all things with His love.

This vision is to be most highly prized and, in my opinion, it brings no dangers, for one can tell by its effects that the devil has no power here. Three or four times, I believe, he has attempted to make a false likeness of the Lord and to present Him to me in this way. He can manage the fleshly form but he cannot imitate the glory that is in this vision when it is from God. He makes these attempts in order to invalidate the true visions that the soul has seen; but the soul resists spontaneously, and becomes troubled, nauseated, and restless. It loses that devotion and joy that it had before, and is unable to pray. This happened to me, as I have said, three or four times, at the beginning. It is something so very different from a true vision that I think even a soul who has only experienced the prayer of quiet will recognize it by its effects, which I described when speaking of locutions. It is very easy to detect and, unless the soul wishes to be deceived, I do not think that the devil will deceive it, so long as it proceeds humbly and in simplicity Anyone who has had a true vision from God will detect a false one almost immediately. The devil may begin with consolations and favours, but the soul will push them aside. I think too that the devil’s consolations must differ from God’s, and will show no trace of pure and holy love. In fact the devil very quickly shows his hand. So, in my opinion, he can do no harm to a soul that has experience.

It is the most impossible of all impossibilities that this can be the work of the imagination. There is no way in which it could be so; the sheer beauty and whiteness of one of His hands is altogether beyond the imagination. We could not, in any case, instantaneously see things of which we have no recollection and that we have never even thought of; things that we could not invent with the imagination, even if we had plenty of time, because, as I have already said, they are far above our earthly understanding. Whether we could in any way be responsible for such a vision will clearly emerge from what I shall say next. If it proceeded from our own mind, not only would it not have the great effects that it has, but it would have none at all. One would be in the position of a man who wants to go to sleep, but is still awake because sleep has not come to him. He may need it, his brain may be tired, and he may long for it. He may settle down to doze and do all that he can to go off to sleep; and sometimes he seems to be succeeding. But if it is not real sleep, it will not restore him or refresh his brain; it will merely exhaust it. The case will be somewhat the same here; instead of being restored and fortified, the soul will become wearier; it will become exhausted and nauseated. But it is impossible to exaggerate the riches that accompany a true vision; it brings health and comfort even to the body.

I advanced this argument, amongst others, when they told me – as they often did – that my visions were of the devil and were all imaginary. I drew such comparisons as I could find and as the Lord showed me. But none of these were of much use, because there were some very holy persons in the place, compared with whom I was a lost soul; and as the Lord was not leading them by this way, they were afraid and thought that what I saw was the result of my sins. Word of it was passed from one to another, so that they all came to know, though I had spoken of it only to my confessor, and to certain others at his request.

I once said to some of these people whom I used to consult: ‘If you were to tell me that someone I knew well and to whom I had just been talking is not really himself, and that I was imagining things and you knew what the truth really was, I would believe your statement rather than my own eyes. But if this person had left me some jewels as a pledge of his great love, and if I were still holding them, and if I had possessed no jewels before and now found myself rich where I had been poor, I could not possibly believe that this was a delusion, even if I wanted to.’ I said too that I could show them these jewels, for everyone who knew me saw clearly that my soul had changed, and my confessor himself testified to the fact, since it was now very different in every respect, and this was no fancy but something that everyone could most distinctly see. Hitherto, I concluded, I had been extremely wicked; I could not believe, therefore, that if the devil were doing this in order to deceive me and drag me down to hell, he would adopt means so contrary to his purpose as to take away my vices and give me virtues and strength instead. For I clearly saw that these visions had made me a different person.

My confessor who, as I have said, was a very holy father of the Company of Jesus answered them – as I learnt – to the same effect. He was a very discreet man of great humility, and this deep humility of his brought great trials upon me; for he was a man of much prayer and learning, but he did not trust himself, since the Lord was not leading him along this path. He suffered all sorts of severe trials too, on my account. I knew that he was frequently warned to be on his guard against me, and not to let the devil deceive him into believing anything that I said; they quoted instances of others who had been deluded. All this worried me. I was afraid that I should have no one left to confess to, and that they would all avoid me. I could do nothing but weep.

Providentially, he was willing to go on hearing my confessions. So great a servant of God was he that he would have exposed himself to any danger for His sake. He told me therefore that so long as I did not offend God or disobey his injunctions, I need have no fear that he would desert me. He always encouraged me and quieted me. He commanded me also never to conceal anything from him, and in this I obeyed him. He said that if I obeyed him, even the devil himself, if it was the devil, could do me no harm, and that the Lord would turn to good effect any evil that he was trying to work on my soul. That confessor did his utmost to bring my soul to perfection. As I was so much afraid, I obeyed him in every respect, though imperfectly. In the three years and more that he was confessing me, he endured a great deal on account of these trials of mine. For all through the great persecutions that I suffered, and on the numerous occasions when the Lord permitted me to be harshly judged – often undeservedly – they referred everything to him, and he was blamed on my account, though he was utterly blameless.

If he had not been a man of such sanctity, and if the Lord had not given him courage, he could not possibly have borne all this. For he had to answer people who did not believe him and thought I was going to perdition. At the same time he had to calm me, and dispel the terrors that beset me – though sometimes he intensified them. He had also to reassure me, for after each vision that involved a new experience, God allowed me to remain in great fear. All this came from my having been, and my still being, such a great sinner. He comforted me with great compassion, and if he had trusted in himself, my suffering would have been less. For God showed him the truth of it all, and the Sacrament itself gave him light, as I believe.

Those of God’s servants who were not convinced had many conversations with me, and I talked carelessly about certain matters, which they took in the wrong sense. I was very much attached to one of them, who was a most holy man to whom my soul was deeply in debt. It greatly distressed me to see that he misunderstood me, since he so greatly desired that I should make progress and that the Lord should enlighten me. Well, as I was saying, I spoke without reflection and, as it seemed to them, with a lack of humility. Finding this one fault in me – and they must have found many more – they condemned me out of hand. They would ask me some questions, which I would answer plainly and without consideration. They then imagined that I was trying to instruct them and thought myself wise. All this went to my confessor, for they certainly desired my good, and then he would scold me.

This continued for some time, and I was afflicted in many ways. But thanks to the favours which the Lord granted me, I endured it all. I am relating all this in order to show what a great trial it is to have as a confessor someone without experience of this spiritual road. If the Lord had not shown me such favour, I do not know what would have become of me. I had enough troubles to drive me out of my mind, and sometimes I found myself in such straits that I could do nothing except lift up my eyes to the Lord. For though these good people’s opposition to a weak and wicked woman like myself – and I was fearful into the bargain – may seem nothing when described in this way, it was one of the greatest trials that I have endured in my whole life – and I have met with some severe ones. May the Lord grant that I did His Majesty some service here. For I am quite sure that those who condemned me and argued against me were serving Him and that it was all for my very great good.