Ascending to the third heaven?
a missing tradition of latin mysticism
pp. 39-61
in: Enik Sepsi, Aniko Daróczi (eds), The immediacy of mystical experience in the European tradition, Berlin, Springer, 2017Abstract
The immediate experience of God, if communicated, is necessarily connected to verbal forms of expression: to metaphors, images, allegories, sometimes even to narratives. The present paper addresses a theoretical problem: namely, how a particular imagery becomes unsuitable to express personal spiritual experiences. At the first sight, the imagery of Paul's rapture into the third heaven (mentioned in 2Cor 12: 1–4) seems to be an unlikely candidate for such a purpose. I will argue that this impression is, on the one hand, justified: due to exegetical and doctrinal reasons, spiritual experiences cannot be expressed by the rapture imagery after the early thirteenth century. This condition, on the other hand, is neither necessary, nor self-evident. Outside the main line of the tradition there existed isolated interpretations which indeed considered Paul's rapture a paradigm or model of spiritual experience.