With a special section on how to tell genuine mystic phenomena from fraud, delusion, and the devil, this is the only comprehensive book that puts supernatural events clearly in their Biblical context and explains how they touch our lives every day. Take a swim at Tiber River . This article will deal not with natural but with supernatural visions, that is, visions due to the direct intervention of a power superior to man. There is an apparition when we do not know that the figure which we see relates to a real being, a vision when we connect it with a real being. With most mystics we shall consider these terms as synonymous.
Corporeal vision is a supernatural manifestation of an object to the eyes of the body.
But the presence of an external figure may be understood in two ways. The first may be true of living persons and even, it would seem, of the now glorious bodies of Christ and the Blessed Virgin , which by the eminently probable supernatural phenomenon of multilocation may become present to men without leaving the abode of glory . The second is realized in the corporeal apparition of the unresurrected dead or of pure spirits. Imaginative vision is the sensible representation of an object by the act of imagination alone, without the aid of the visual organ. Sometimes the subject is aware that the object exists only in his imagination, that it is a purely reproduced or composite image.