Meaning of “a rage of vision”?

Question

What is the meaning of “had sent him a rage of vision” in this excerpt:

The old man was in a position to know what his ideas were. He had lived for three months in the nephew's house on what he had thought at the time was Charity but what he said he had found out was not Charity or anything like it. All the time he had lived there, the nephew had secretly been making a study of him. The nephew, who had taken him in under the name of Charity, had at the same time been creeping into his soul by the back door, asking him questions that meant more than one thing, planting traps around the house and watching him fall into them, and finally coming up with a written study of him for a schoolteacher magazine. The stench of his behaviour had reached heaven and the Lord Himself had rescued the old man. He had sent him a rage of vision, had told him to fly with the orphan boy to the farthest part of the backwoods and raise him up to justify his Redemption. The Lord had assured him a long life and he had snatched the baby from under the schoolteacher's nose and taken him to live in[…]”

From the book The Violent Bear It Away, by Flannery O’Connor (ch.1, p.4).

Answer 1

O'Connor is probably alluding to Plato's enthusiasm or divine mania, of which he identifies (in the Phaedrus) four types: prophetic, ritual, poetic, and erotic. It is the prophetic or “visionary” type which would be in play here.

These madnesses are frequently referred to by their traditional Latin translations, furor propheticus, &c; and furor in turn may be (and often is) translated by English rage. Thus Arthur Symonds, in The Symbolist Movement in Literature, writes of Rimbaud:

See how completely he is conscious, and how completely he is at the mercy, of that hallucinatory rage of vision, vision to him being always force, power, creation, which, on some of his pages, seems to become sheer madness, and on others a kind of wild but absolute insight.