Is a Vision from God? Discernment of Spirits & What Comes First

There’s a particular kind of hunger that draws people toward the extraordinary. A vision. A locution. A message from Heaven that promises to explain what the ordinary practice of the faith hasn’t yet made clear. If you’ve ever felt that pull, you’re not alone, and you’re not wrong to want more of God. That desire is good. But where it leads depends entirely on whether or not you can discern the fruits of it.

Here’s a question worth sitting with honestly: do you know your Bible? Not a verse here or there, but the whole of it, Genesis to Revelation. Do you know the Catechism, not just the parts that confirm what you already believe, but the parts that challenge you? Do you go to Mass, receive the sacraments, and pray with ordinary, unglamorous faithfulness every single day, even when faced with periods of dryness and silence? This is how the saints actually lived, and we are supposed to imitate them in their heroic virtue and holiness.

If the honest answer is “not really, but I’ve read three books from a self-proclaimed visionary I found online,” that’s worth pausing on. Not because mystical experience is suspect, but because you are asking it to do the work it was never meant to do.

The Test God Himself Gave Us

Scripture doesn’t leave us guessing about how to handle a claimed word from God. In Deuteronomy, the Lord gives Israel a direct test: a prophecy that doesn’t come to pass, or that leads people away from what God has already revealed, is not to be believed or feared, regardless of how convincing the messenger seems (Deuteronomy 18:20-22).

John repeats the same principle in different words: “beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God.”

1 John 4:1

This practice has a name in the Church’s own spiritual tradition: discernment of spirits. It isn’t guesswork, and it isn’t reserved for mystics, priests, or theologians. Every layperson is called to it. Now, notice what both passages assume. Private revelation is never self-authenticating. It doesn’t get to grade its own exam. It’s always measured against what God has already given us: Scripture, Tradition, the teaching of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, and it’s never the other way around. A message that asks you to set aside what you already know to be true in favor of what it claims to reveal, has already told you something important about itself. It’s false. Why? Because God cannot contradict Himself. 

The Church’s Own Current Guidance

The Church takes this seriously enough that in May 2024, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith issued new norms for how bishops evaluate claimed apparitions, visions, and locutions. It’s worth knowing the practical shape of this, because it changes how confident you should be in any claim, however sincere the seer is.

Under the new norms, a local bishop no longer declares that something is supernatural. The strongest positive judgment now available is a Nihil Obstat, “nothing stands in the way,” meaning the fruits look good so far, but the Church deliberately keeps the door open to revisit that judgment later if the fruits sour. As the Dicastery’s own Prefect put it, a Nihil Obstat “naturally leaves open the possibility that… a different response may be required in the future.”

The document lays out concrete criteria, and they’re worth internalizing as a working checklist, not just a piece of Vatican paperwork.

There are often good clues that the seer is having an authentic locution from God. We can see this by observing many initial good fruits in the seer:

• A good reputation
• Sound mental balance, sincerity, and humility
• A track record of docility toward Church authority 
• A real willingness, not a grudging one, to submit to correction
• A message free of doctrinal error
• Fruits that are healthy and constant: real conversions, deeper prayer, vocations, charity, and a strengthening (not a weakening) of unity with the Church

There are also signs that a locution may not be from God that point the other way: 

• A message with a demonstrable factual or doctrinal error
• A sectarian spirit that divides rather than unites
• Evidence the “seer” seeks profit, fame, or personal power from the claim
• Serious moral disorder around the event
• Psychological instability that could account for the phenomenon without any need to invoke the supernatural at all

Read those criteria again, and notice something: almost every one of them is really asking whether the person and the message stay small in the right way, submitted, humble, unconcerned with self-promotion, or whether they start to swell into something that points more to the wants and needs of the seer than to God, Himself.

What the Real Thing Actually Looks Like

Here’s what’s worth knowing about the mystics the Church has most confidently embraced: none of them arrived at their visions by skipping the foundational work. They arrived at them only after it, and often despite not seeking it at all. 

St. Augustine didn’t begin his Catholic faith with a mystical starting point. His Confessions book is the record of his mind wrestling with the truth of the faith for years before God ever granted him the mystical vision at Ostia in chapter IX of his book. The vision means what it means only because of everything that came before it. If you strip away St. Augustine’s wanderings into false religions before his theological formation under St. Ambrose that ultimately led to his baptism, the vision becomes an inexplicable mystical experience. With the formation he received, it becomes the fruit of a lifetime spent learning to see rightly and for the mother that prayed throughout his life for that right vision to come.

Saints are blessed with mystical visions, and these visions can only be interpreted through the light of the truth of our Catholic faith. Over the centuries, many Catholic saints’ accounts describe the devil appearing to them as a deceptive “angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14) to induce spiritual pride, despair, or a false doctrine. Key examples include St. Martin of Tours, St. Teresa of Ávila, and Padre Pio, who used humility, holy water, and testing to unmask the deceit.

One of the most well known seers of the medieval Church is St. Hildegard of Bingen, Doctor of the Church, who had one of the most rigorously formed monastic minds of the twelfth century. She spent decades steeped in the Psalms, the Rule of St. Benedict, the Church Fathers, and the Catechesis of the Church. Although she began having visions as a child at age 3, she waited until she was in her early 40s to record what she saw. And when she did, she submitted it to Church authority for examination rather than simply proclaiming it. Her visions didn’t ask anyone to bypass Scripture or Church doctrine. They captured the truths of our faith, especially the life of a soul battling vice and growing in virtue, learning to surrender to God and grow in obedience and holiness.

Another example of a well formed mind experiencing God’s presence in a mystical way is St. Thomas Aquinas. He spent his entire life producing the most rigorous, comprehensive catechesis the Church has ever seen, and only near the very end of it did he receive a mystical experience so overwhelming that he set down his pen and called everything he’d written “straw” by comparison. Notice the order. The mystical experience he had didn’t replace the Summa. It came after he had completed it.

In every case: formation first, mysticism as the fruit, never the foundation, and never as a substitute for spending years with ordinary, patient learning to create a well-formed mind and protect a soul from the devil disguised as an angel of light.

Where This Leaves You

If you feel the pull toward something extraordinary, don’t be ashamed of it. It’s often a real hunger for God. Don’t be presumptive or impatient. Before you give your trust to any message, apparition, or private revelation, ask yourself honestly where you actually stand. Have you read the whole of Scripture? Do you know the Catechism? Are you living the ordinary sacramental life (daily prayer, regular confession, attending the Mass at least weekly) with real fidelity?

That foundation isn’t the boring prerequisite to the real spiritual life. It is the real spiritual life, and it’s the only ground steady enough to help you properly test any extraordinary experience you encounter. Build that first. Everything else, if it’s genuinely from God, will still be there, and you’ll actually be able to recognize it when it comes and spot the counterfeit when it tries to pull you off course.

In Part Two of this series, we’ll look at six specific warning signs the saints themselves have given us for recognizing a message that isn’t what it claims to be.