For a long time, scholars have acknowledged that medieval theologians and mystics – beginning with Bernard of Clairvaux – advocated an aniconic spiritual ideal: necessary during the first steps of the meditative process, images were only considered as tools that had to give way to an imageless contemplation, which was devoid of sensible things. By affirming that “images must drive out images”, Suso offers a more subtle vision of the place and the role of images in mystical transformation. Indeed, it appears that he did not mean that images need to be dispensed with entirely but that each image must be replaced by another one so as to complete and correct each other. In doing so, he offers a continually changing, flexible, and dynamic alternation of images which fundamentally modifies our understanding of the meditative image theory in the Exemplar.

In this paper, I propose to focus on Suso’s discourse on images and on the drawings (more precisely on the complex depiction of Eternal Wisdom) in order to show that Suso conceived images as instruments that allow the reader to attain the best understanding of the ineffable nature of God. I will thus show that these images are not simple illustrations meant to bring his teaching within a larger audience’s reach by simplifying it. On the contrary, they are entirely embedded to his discourse, make it denser and can be considered as a visual discourse on mystical experience.