EARLY MEDIEVAL REFLECTIONS ON VISION

How exactly did the visionary prophets of the Hebrew Bible perceive God’s Word? What did Saint Paul mean when he described “a person being transported to the third heaven, in or out of the body, I do not know?” In chapter 12 of his treatise On the Literal Meaning of Genesis, Saint Augustine (d. 430), reflecting about such questions, develops a typology of vision that became very influential throughout the Middle Ages, not least because Saint Isidore of Seville (d. 636) reproduced it in the chapter on prophets in his extremely popular Etymologia. Augustine’s classification of vision deals not so much with seeing as knowing. He is interested in the epistemological question of how a human being can know and correctly understand the meaning of God’s Word. In line with Neo-Platonic philosophers, he uses the metaphor of vision in order to consider, in an intelligible way, the invisible process of cognition.

Augustine distinguishes three kinds of vision. The lowest form is seeing by means of the eye, the external organ of vision (visio corporalis). This material seeing is inadequate to perceive God’s eternal truth; the viewer’s position in time and in space necessarily limits his perspective. When one turns away from outer seeing to inner seeing – a turning away Augustine calls rapture (raptus) – a higher, spiritual form of vision is accessed (visio spiritualis). With the inner eye, an organ of perception of the human soul, one can see images presented to the imagination (imaginatio), which is the faculty of the human soul that stores information perceived by the individual sense organs and binds it into a coherent mental representation. Cognition at this level remains inadequate to grasp eternal ideas because it is mediated by images (enigmata or phantasmata).