chapter compare St. John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle, stanza i

(circa finem), stanza 1x; The Living Flame of Love, stanza i.
INTRODUCTORY NOTE TO CHAPTER III
BY THE EDITOR
Tue readers, especially those not well acquainted with Scholastic philosophy, will, perhaps, be glad to find here a short explanation of the various kinds of Vision and Locution, Corporal, Imaginary, and Intellectual. The senses of Taste, Touch, and Smell are not so often affected by mystical phenomena, but what we are about to say in respect of Sight and Hearing applies, mutatis mutandis, to these also.
1. A Corporat Visron is when one sees a bodily object. A Corporal Locution is when one hears words uttered by a human tongue. In both cases the respective senses are exercising their normal function, and the phenomenon differs from ordinary seeing or hearing merely by the fact that in the latter the object seen is a real body, the words perceived come from a real tongue, whereas in the Vision or Locution the object is either only apparent or at any rate is not such as it seems to be. Thus, when young Tobias set out on a journey, his companion, Azarias, was not a real human being, but an archangel in human form. Tobias did really see and hear him, and felt the grip of his hand; Sara and her parents, as well as Tobias’s parents, saw and heard him too, but all the time the archangel made himself visible and audible by means of an assumed body, or perhaps of an apparent body. It would be more correct to describe such a phenomenon as an AppariTION than asa Vision, and in fact the apparitions of our Risen Lord to the holy women and the Apostles belong to this category. For, though His was a real body, it was glorified and there- fore no longer subject to the same laws which govern purely human things. (St. Thomas, Summa theol. ITI,
qu. §4, art. 1-3). St. Teresa tells us more than once that she never
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138 THE INTERIOR CASTLE [cuap.11.
beheld a Corporal Vision, nor heard a Corporal Locution.