" [Footnote: No. XVI.]
It is a marked characteristic of mystical literature that the
great contemplatives, in their effort to convey to us the nature
of their communion with the supersensuous, are inevitably driven
to employ some form of sensuous imagery: coarse and inaccurate as
they know such imagery to be, even at the best. Our normal human
consciousness is so completely committed to dependence on the
senses, that the fruits of intuition itself are instinctively
referred to them. In that intuition it seems to the mystics that
all the dim cravings and partial apprehensions of sense find
perfect fulfilment. Hence their constant declaration that they
see the uncreated light, they
hear the celestial
melody, they
taste the sweetness of the Lord, they know an
ineffable fragrance, they feel the very contact of love. "Him
verily seeing and fully feeling, Him spiritually hearing and Him
delectably smelling and sweetly swallowing," as Julian of Norwich
has it. In those amongst them who develop psycho-sensorial
automatisms, these parallels between sense and spirit may present
themselves to consciousness in the form of hallucinations: as the
light seen by Suso, the music heard by Rolle, the celestial
perfumes which filled St.
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