Conclusion: Anthropological lessons for the twentyfirst century from middle Dutch mystical literature?

We began our exploration with the question that Ambroise Gardeil asked in 1926, namely how one might comprehend – i.e. take serious intellectually – that mystical authors claim to have a “direct experience of the divinity in the ground of their soul.” Gardeil wondered how “such an experience is possible?” In other words, his question did not concern so much the content of such an experience, but its very possibility. This question is certainly understandable, especially since over a century earlier, in 1793, Immanuel Kant had affirmed:
A delusion is called enthusiastic (schwärmerisch) when the imagined means themselves, being supersensible, are not within the human being’s power, even without considering the unattainability of the supersensible end intended through them; for this feeling of the immediate presence of the highest being, and distinguishing of it from any other . . . would constitute the receptivity of an intuition (Anschauung) for which there is no sense (Sinn, i.e. faculty) in human nature