Note 36 — Chapter IX · PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL QUESTIONS

By the term “visionless,” I do not mean to affirm anything as to the presence or absence of ideas or mental images during the times so described, but to register the simple fact, that, for her own memory after the event, she was, at the time, without any one persistent, external-seeming image.—Note how St. Ignatius Loyola in his Testament, ed. London, 1900, pp. 91, 92, considered the profoundest spiritual experience of his life to have been one unaccompanied or expressed by any vision: “On his way” to a Church near Manresa, “he sat down facing the stream, which was running deep. While he was sitting there, the eyes of his mind were opened,” not so as to see any kind of vision, but “so as to understand and comprehend spiritual things … with such clearness that for him all these things were made new. If all the enlightenment and help he had received from God in the whole course of his life … were gathered together in one heap, these all would appear less than he had been given at this one time.”