ARTICOLI / 2 / Giovanni Catapano /
Ecstasy and vision in Augustine
This article studies the relationship between the concepts of ecstasy and vision in Augustine’s thought. For him, ecstasy is a detachment of the mind from the bodily senses. Therefore, it is never associated with a bodily vision, but either with a spiritual vision (i.e., a vision of images of bodies) or with an intellectual vision of God himself, if the ecstatic rapture is so radical as to detach the mind even from imagination. Ecstatic visions of a spiritual kind are prophetic if the images seen mean future events and are understood simultaneously by the seer. Ecstatic intuitions of God are exceptional and involve a momentary abandonment of earthly life: Sacred Scripture attests that they were granted to Moses and Paul. The mental ascensions that Augustine reports having performed in Milan and Ostia resemble these second-level ecstasies, although they are marked by extreme brevity and a sudden relapse into ordinary experience.
