Little Question Three of Question One
How many degrees there are of conversion into God through ecstatic contemplation
It is asked: how many degrees are there of ecstatic conversion into God, or of the contemplation of spiritual things?
To this it is answered that there are four.
The first is when, because of the most vehement intention and elevation of the intellectual power in that spiritual, pure, and most excellent contemplation of God, the soul suspends and leaves the body with respect to all the operations of the exterior and interior senses and the action of all the natural powers.
This first degree of ecstasy existed in Adam. Concerning it a certain gloss says that the sleep divinely sent upon him did not close his rational powers, but, when the senses of the body had been stopped up or lulled, it opened the eyes of his mind more clearly, so that he could know what the wisdom of God, the craftsman of all things, was doing concerning him; what it had done in the past; and what it would do in the most distant future.
Blessed Paul ascended this first degree. He did not know whether his soul was animating the body, or whether, when the body had been left behind, it had been rapt into Paradise, or perhaps whether it was at the same time animating the body in one place and, together with this, was really in the empyrean heaven.
The second degree of ecstasy is that in which the soul leaves the body with respect to all interior and exterior sensual operations, although the natural operations are not suspended as in the first degree.
The third degree is that in which the soul, rapt into the contemplation of intelligible things, leaves the body only with respect to the act of the interior senses.
The fourth and lowest degree is when only the exterior senses are lulled through the intense actualization together of the interior sense and of the intellect and rational affection.
Richard of Saint Victor, in his book on contemplation, reduces the causes of these ecstasies to three kinds, saying: “From three causes, as it seems to me, persons are brought into an ecstasy of the mind: either it occurs from the greatness of exultation, so that the mind sometimes does not thus contain itself and, raised above itself, the inferior powers are lulled.”
Therefore, through the greatness of devotion, the soul is elevated in proportion as it is kindled and dissolved by divine love and by the fire of the desire of charity, so that it is raised like smoke.
Through the highest greatness of wonder, indeed, the soul is rapt into ecstasy when, suspended in wonder at the highest beauty or the divine majesty, it is struck by so vehement a savor that it is shaken entirely out of its own state.
Through the greatness of joy or delight, the soul is rapt when, intoxicated by that abundance of the sweetness of inward love, it entirely forgets what it is and what it was, and is suddenly transformed into a certain supramundane effect under a certain state of our felicity.
From these things it is evident that the soul, for the state of this life, can be elevated to so great an ecstasy of purely intellectual contemplation that the intellect does not employ the service of the phantastic interior or exterior sensitive power, while the inferior animal powers are lulled and the natural powers relaxed, as is evident in ecstatic wayfarers, namely in Adam in the state of integral nature, in the Apostle Paul, and in certain others.
This is evident because their intellect is separated from phantasms, none of which possesses so great an excellence that it can represent the divine essence. Nor does any created intellectual species possess it. Indeed, in that clear vision of God the mind is so rapt that for that time it perceives nothing else, neither sensible nor intelligible.
Hence such a vision so alienated Blessed Paul and so suspended the operation of his soul upon the body that he did not know whether the soul was even animating the body or was separated from it.
For these reasons Thomas says that it is impossible for a human being in the state of the way to see God clearly through his essence without abstraction from the senses, or without ecstasy, or without a rapture in which the animal powers are lulled. Hence it is also said in Exodus: “Man shall not see me and live.”
From these things it is evident that, since Adam and Paul possessed the same first degree of ecstasy, they were therefore established as equal theologians intensively—though perhaps not extensively.
These things are from Henry of Hesse, On Genesis.