St. Teresa's visions can be understood more fully in the context of the individuation process than in the context of her progress up Mount Cannel. She herself was continually worried about whether her visions were authentic, i.e. from God. The teaching of St. John of the Cross was that no great store should be set on visions since they have nothing in common with union with God. Union with God consists of doing the will of God to the nth degree. While he was right in teaching that the visionary should be detached from his visions, St. John's teaching need not imply that the visionary should not examine them critically to discern what they indicate about himself (if not about God). The Ignatian rules for the discernment of spirits which direct the attention of the visionary to proximate effects of disturbances of consciousness, rather than to their content, might well have been more useful to St. Teresa than the blanket condemnation of these occurrences by St. John.

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This point needs to be expanded since it touches on wider issues. If mystical experience is essentially a by-product of a mystical process going on in the depths of the soul (and this is the sum of traditional mystical theology) it is not surprising that the form "experience" takes varies according to the psychological makeup and cultural experience of the mystic. The false inference that has been widely made throughout the centuries is that the "experience" can be said to be more or less "pure" inasmuch as it is imageless. Hence the talk of the common mystical "core" experience found in all religions. This is a misleading way of talking. It is more correct to assert that since all "experience" of God is indirect, no one form of that experience can be said to be purer or impurer than any other on phenomenological grounds alone. The source of the experience is indicated by its fruits not by its content and form.

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Karl Rahner makes an important point in Visions and Prophecies (Burns & Oates): "...it can be said with but little exaggeration that the history of mystical theology is a history of the theological devaluation of the prophetic element in favour of non-prophetic 'pure', infused contemplation." Prophetic messages have by necessity to be less formless than mystical prayer but it cannot be denied that God speaks to his prophets as well as to his mystics.

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The truth that God can speak to men through images as well as in a formless way has been stated most eloquently by Charles Williams. Beatrice was for Dante a living ikon, in the same way that Jesus was the living ikon of God. An incarnational religion must affirm as well as deny the utility of images in the religious life if it is not to become a kind of Platonism. Men, like Muhammad and Cromwell, who were naturally attuned to words and abstractions in their religious sensibility, have no right to deny images to those persons who find them helpful in their own way to God. The quarrel between the iconoclasts and the icon worshippers does not take its source from divine but from human nature. Renee Haynes suggests in The Seeing Eye, The Seeing I (reviewed here) the preferences for image thinking or abstract thinking have biological roots.

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St. John of the Cross, although a poet, was the great iconoclast of the inner life. Dante, Jung, and Blake are his antitheses. God Himself is beyond any image that we can affirm or deny of Him.

The argument has been designed to show that Christian mystical theology cannot advance without admitting that the way of the affirmation of images is just as genuine qua mystical path as the way of the rejection of images. Not everyone has to shut his eyes and travel in the dark as St. John of the Cross puts it); some people (and in particular poets) construct a symbolic calculus by which the infinite is expressed in finite terms as Coventry Patmore explains). However, for either type of mystic the important thing is not "experience" but obedience.