Adrienne von Speyr: A Swiss Mystic

If the gift of second sight were as common as it is rare, the undeniable factual proof of the strict necessity of all that happens would be evident and accessible to everyone. We could take solace in the intuition that some transcendental force guides our lives, and in the end, perhaps, everything will turn out for the best. The ancients called his force our daemon. Christians call it our guardian angel.

If someone could foretell an event with unerring accuracy, wouldn’t that prove the existence of second sight as well as the working of God or some other transcendent force in our lives?”

Dante, it may be recalled placed soothsayers and diviners far down in Hell, in the eighth circle, because if a person knew the future that would interfere with his free choice. In accordance with the rule of contrapasso, sinners are punished by a process that resembles or contrasts with the sin itself. Thus the astrologers and fortune tellers who foretold the future have their heads twisted around and have to look backward.

Many have tried to see the future, few, if any, have succeeded.

Arthur Schopenhauer developed this idea in his remarkable essay “Transcendent Speculation on the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual.”

Someone who seems to have displayed the rare quality of second sight is the Swiss doctor. mystic, and stigmatic Adrienne von Speyr.

She was born in La Chaux-de fonds Switzerland on September 20, 1902 in a Protestant upper-middle class family . Her father was a doctor, her mother from a family of famous watchmakers. She had three siblings, a sister and two brothers, one of whom became a doctor, another a bank director.

Her mother was very strict, but her father showed her more affection and took her to hospitals to visit sick children. In primary school she began working with the poor and even formed a society devoted to that purpose.

She did very well at school. At the university she studied medicine (against her mother’s wishes) and became the first woman in Switzerland to be admitted to the medical profession. Her father (with Adrienne’s foreknowledge) had died when Adrienne was fifteen. She opened a private practice and treated the poor free of charge.

She very early began to have spiritual experiences.

At the age of six she had an encounter with St. Ignatius Loyola, at the age of nine she gave a talk at school on the Society of Jesus, indicating her readiness to move away from Protestantism. When she was seventeen she had a vision of Mary surrounded by angels and other saints. Her later work would be marked by a deeply Marian character.

She was sickly and almost died from tuberculosis in both lungs when she was in secondary school. After she recovered, she embraced the Catholic faith.

In 1927 she married a widower with two children, who died in 1934. She had several miscarriages. In 1934 she married her first husband's associate at the University of Basel.

During this time she made several failed attempts to contact Catholic priests to inform them of her desire to convert to the Catholic faith.

A turning point in her life came when she met Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar (then a Jesuit), a student chaplain at the University of Basel. She told him of her desire to become a Catholic. He baptized her on the feast of All Saints’ Day and confirmed her soon after that. Adrienne's family were shocked, and it took years before a reconciliation took place.

She formed friendships with many prominent Catholic thinkers, including Romano Guardini, Gabriel Marcel, Hugo Rahner, Henri de Lubac, and others. Her medical practice was very successful. She saw from sixty to eighty patients daily.

When she was driving home one night soon after her conversion, she saw a bright light in front of her car and heard a voice say, You will live in heaven and on earth.

The years after 1940 were filled with great pain (a heart attack, diabetes, arthritis, and eventual blindness), mystical experiences (the stigmata), and a close relationship with von Balthasar, who became her spiritual adviser and confidant.

Together they founded a secular institute, the Community of Saint John.

She began to dictate her works to von Balthasar on her interpretations of Scripture, the Johannine writings, some of Paul, the Catholic epistles, the Apocalypse, and parts of the Old Testament. There are some sixty books in all, only some of which have been translated into English.

She had the gift of translocation, and during the war experienced the suffering of soldiers on the eastern front. In 1941 she told von Balthasar that the Germans would be defeated at Kursk. How did she know, unless one of her spiritual visitors had informed her? The incident defies explanation. Is this an example of second sight, of which Schopenhauer spoke?

Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988), who was regarded as one of the most learned men of his time., admitted how much his theology owed to Adrienne. He is best known for his 7-volume work The Glory of the Lord. Pope John Paul II made him a cardinal, but Balthasar died on the very day on which he was to depart for Rome to receive his hat.

In March 2018 the Church opened Adrienne’s cause for canonization at the local level in Switzerland on account of her life of heroic virtue.

She currently holds the title "Servant of God" that is applied to a person in the first stage of the canonization process. If the Congregation for Causes of the Saints reaches a finding of nihil obstat (meaning that there is nothing objectionable about the candidate), the process will proceed to a formal review by the entire Church.

Adrienne died on September 17, 1967, the feast day of her favorite saint, Hildegard von Bingen.

"And if the years vanish in their course, they are still only successions of days that pass through us as we pass through them in order to seek constantly what You have to show us … to remain constantly in Your embrace, just as the whole of time remains in the embrace of eternity."

Adrienne von Speyr (1995)

With God and with Men. Prayers, p. 22, Ignatius Press