In the 12th century, other movements for monastic and spiritual reform, such as the
Carthusians and Premon-stratensians, also developed interpretations of the mystic way. A
good example is the Scala claustralum by the Car-thusian Guigo II (d. 1188). In
analyzing what he calls “spiritual exercise,” Guigo introduces the idea of a ladder that
will raise a monk from earth to Heaven. Guigo’s ladder has four rungs: reading,
meditation, prayer, and contemplation. In this, he owed no small debt to some of the
formulations of Hugh of Saint-Victor. Reading, for Guigo, is a careful consideration of
Scripture; meditation is a focused search, by reason, for some truth; prayer is primarily
petitionary prayer seeking something of God; contemplation is “a certain elevation of the
mind above itself, suspended in God, tasting the joys of eternal sweetness.” The scheme
demonstrates again, in different language, the movement from outer, to inward, to
transcendent realities.
With the advent of the mendicant orders in the 13th century came new centers for
pursuing ascetic life and contemplative prayer. The Franciscans were influenced by the
mystic experiences of their founder, Francis of Assisi, and his devotion to the poor,
suffering, crucified Christ. Francis was an extraordinary ecstatic visionary who received,
near the end of his life, the stigmata, the presence on his body of the five wounds of
Christ, which confirmed for medieval men and women that he was totally conformed to
Christ in his life. Franciscan mysticism was given a definitive shape in one of the classics
of medieval mystical literature, Bonaventure’s Itinerarium mentis in Deum. Bonaventure
was a Franciscan master lecturing at the University of Paris when he was elected master
general of the order in 1257, which was at the time struggling over the true meaning of
poverty and other issues. He went for a time of spiritual reflection to Mount Alverna, east
of Florence in Italy, where Francis had received the stigmata. While meditating there,
Bonaventure realized that the spiritual path of return to God was adumbrated in Francis’s
vision when he received the stigmata: he had seen the Crucified (Christ) in the form of a
six-winged Seraph. Through this image, he understood that the return was accomplished
through the humility of the suffering Christ, through burning love of the Crucified, and
through six stages of “ascension” from the material world, through the inner world of the
mind, to the transcendent world of divine reality. The result of this insight was the
Itinerarium. Bonaventure here drew upon the six levels of knowing/contemplating as
outlined by Richard of Saint-Victor, infusing them with a Francis-can celebration of the
divine presence in the world, in the self (through the imago Dei), and in the realm of
spiritual reality, all considered in light of the significance of the poor, suffering Christ,
the emblem of divine self-giving love.
The other major mendicant order, the Dominicans, initially made less of mystical
experience, although personal prayer and instruction in ways of praying were both
important in the development of a Dominican spirituality. St. Dominic’s Nine Ways of
Praying, accompanied in the manuscript tradition with illustrations showing the nine
postures for prayer rooted in the founder’s practice, is an example of such instruction.
Thomas Aquinas made a theological place for mystical experience in this world and the
vision of God (visio Dei) in Heaven, but he laid little stress on the former. Just before his
death in 1274, he had a profound mystical/visionary experience of Christ, after which he
ceased dictating the text of his Summa theologica (it was completed by another
Dominican) and declared that, next to his vision, all he had written was but straw.
However, the real flourishing of mystical experience within the Dominican order
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