1. An Angel cannot effectively cause anything in the Intellect of the Man whose Guardian he is

13. On the first point I say that no actual intellection or intelligible species can be caused in our intellect by an angel as by a total cause. But the reason is not because of any lack of power on the part of the angel (because he is sufficiently in first act and can cause second act in another angel [n.3; d.9 n.52]), but the reason is because of our intellect which, for this present state, is a passive thing determined to a determinate active thing, that is, to phantasm and agent intellect; and so it is prevented from being able immediately to be affected by any actual intelligible without a phantasm, because ‘phantasms are for this present state disposed to our intellect as sensibles are to the senses’ [n.4] - namely to this extent, that as the senses are only first affected by the external sensible thing, so our intellect is only affected, as to first affect, by the phantasm. Now why this is so was touched on earlier [1 d.3 n.187], namely, that it is from the order of powers - which order is not merely from the nature of man as man, because then there would not be another order in blessedness; so the order is either because of guilt, or because of this present state on account of something pertaining to guilt (let the cause of this be sought elsewhere [2 d.3 nn.289-90, Lectura 2 d.11 nn.15-16]).

14. Now from this there follows a certain corollary, namely that an intellect cannot be caught up in rapture by an angel to intellectual vision, and that any rapture -done by the power of the devil - is precisely to intensely imagining something; and so raptures by devils are rather madnesses than raptures, because intense imagination makes the mind very distracted from all other thought of anything of actual intellection which the mind seems to be seeing intellectually; and perhaps there accompanies the intense imagination of a thing an intellection of the imaginable thing, but there is there no intellection of a merely intelligible and non-imaginable thing. Thus too any rapture for which a man can by custom dispose himself in this life is not to any intellectual vision but to an imaginative one (and to an intellection concomitant with the imaginative vision), although however (perhaps) such quieting in a man from all extrinsic things by such a vision sometimes disposes him so that God may catch a mind thus tranquil up to intellectual vision.