ABSTRACT
Whereas up to the twelfth century, contemplation was generally considered to be a purely spiritual experience of the enlightened intellect of the soul, the so-called affective tradition that developed in the wake of Bernardine unitive mysticism engendered a focus on the humanity of Christ and on emotional and physical sensations of God’s presence.1 Recent scholarship on the senses has shown that in discourses belonging to the affective mystical tradition, the established distinction between inner sensation with the interior senses and outer sensation with the bodily senses gets blurred.2 While the Origenist and Augustinian position clearly distinguishes between these two sets of senses and considers contemplation – or “intellectual vision” as Augustine has it – a matter of the inner or spiritual senses only3, late-medieval mystics tend to describe the encounter with God as a holistic psycho-corporeal sensation which involves the whole person, soul and body, and which is perceived with what Gordon Rudy has called “a single sensorium.”4
