CHAPTER I.
It is no flaming lustre, made of light,
No sweet concert nor well-timed harmony,
Ambrosia, for to feast the appetite,
Of flowery odour mixed with spicery,—
No soft embrace, or pleasure bodily;
And yet it is a kind of inward feast,
A harmony that sounds within the breast,
An odour, light, embrace, in which the soul doth rest.
A heavenly feast no hunger can consume;
A light unseen yet shines in every place;
A sound no time can steal; a sweet perfume
No winds can scatter; an entire embrace
That no satiety can e’er unlace;
Engraced into so high a favour there,
The saints with all their peers whole worlds outwear,
And things unseen do see, and thing unheard do hear.
Giles Fletcher.
Gower fulfilled his promise, and read, on two successive evenings, the following paper on the Mysticism of the Counter-Reformation, as illustrated principally by its two Spanish champions, St. Theresa and St. John of the Cross:—
I. Saint Theresa.
On the revival of letters the mysticism of Alexandria reappeared in Florence. That lamp which, in the study of Ficinus, burnt night and day before the bust of Plato, proclaimed, in reality, the worship of Plotinus. The erudite feebleness of Alexandrian eclecticism lived again in Gemisthus Pletho,—blended, as of old, Platonic ideas, oriental emanations, and Hellenic legend,—dreamed of a philosophic worship, emasculated and universal, which should harmonize in a common vagueness all the religions of the world. Nicholas of Cusa re-adapted the allegorical mathematics which had flourished beneath the Ptolemies and restored the Pythagoras of the Neo-Platonists. Pico of Mirandola (the admirable Crichton of his time) sought to reconcile the dialectics of Aristotle with the oracles of Chaldæa, and to breathe into withered scholasticism the mysterious life of Cabbalistic wisdom. An age so greedy of antiquity was imposed on by the most palpable fabrications; and Greece beheld the servile product of her second childhood reverenced as the vigorous promise of her first. Patricius sought the sources of Greek philosophy in writings attributed to Hermes and Zoroaster. He wrote to Gregory XIV. proposing that authors such as these should be substituted for Aristotle in the schools, as the best means of advancing true religion and reclaiming heretical Germany.
The position of these scholars with regard to Protestantism resembles, not a little, that of their Alexandrian predecessors when confronted by Christianity. They were the philosophic advocates of a religion in which they had themselves lost faith. They attempted to reconcile a corrupt philosophy and a corrupt religion, and they made both worse. The love of literature and art was confined to a narrow circle of courtiers and literati. While Lutheran pamphlets in the vernacular set all the North in a flame, the philosophic refinements of the Florentine dilettanti were aristocratic, exclusive, and powerless. Their intellectual position was fatal to sincerity; their social condition equally so to freedom. The despotism of the Roman emperors was more easily evaded by a philosopher of ancient times than the tyranny of a Visconti or a D’Este, by a scholar at Milan or Ferrara. It was the fashion to patronise men of letters. But the usual return of subservience and flattery was rigorously exacted. The Italians of the fifteenth century had long ceased to be familiar with the worst horrors of war, and Charles VIII., with his ferocious Frenchmen, appeared to them another Attila. Each Italian state underwent, on its petty scale, the fate of Imperial Rome. The philosophic and religious conservatism of Florence professed devotion to a church which reproduced, with most prolific abundance, the superstitions of by-gone Paganism,—of that very Paganism in whose behalf the Neo-Platonist philosopher entered the lists against the Christian father. To such men, the earnest religious movement of the North was the same mysterious, barbaric, formidable foe which primitive Christianity had been to the Alexandrians. The old conflict between Pagan and Christian—the man of taste and the man of faith—the man who lived for the past, and the man who lived for the future, was renewed, in the sixteenth century, between the Italian and the German. The Florentine Platonists, moreover, not only shared in the weakness of their prototypes, as the occupants of an attitude radically false; they failed to exhibit in their lives that austerity of morals which won respect for Plotinus and Porphyry, even among those who cared nothing for their speculations. Had Romanism been unable to find defenders more thoroughly in earnest, the shock she then received must have been her deathblow. She must have perished as Paganism perished. But, wise in her generation, she took her cause out of the hands of that graceful and heartless Deism, so artificial and so self-conscious,—too impalpable and too refined for any real service to gods or men. She needed men as full of religious convictions as were these of philosophical and poetic conceits. She needed men to whom the bland and easy incredulity of such symposium-loving scholars was utterly inconceivable—abhorrent as the devil and all his works. And such men she found. For by reason of the measure of truth she held, she was as powerful to enslave the noblest as to unleash the vilest passions of our nature. It was given her, she said, to bind and to loose. It was time, she knew, to bind up mercy and to loose revenge. A succession of ferocious sanctities fulminated from the chair of St. Peter. Science was immured in the person of Galileo. The scholarship, so beloved by Leo, would have been flung into the jaws of the Inquisition by Caraffa. Every avenue, open once on sufferance, to freer thought and action, was rigorously blocked up. Princes were found willing to cut off the right hand, pluck out the right eye of their people, that Rome might triumph by this suicide of nations. But nowhere did she find a prince and a people alike so swift to shed blood at her bidding, as among that imperious race of which Philip II. was at once the sovereign and the type. In Spain was found, in its perfection, the chivalry of persecution: there dwelt the aristocracy of fanaticism. It was long doubtful whether the Roman or the Spanish Inquisition was the more terrible for craft, the more ingenious in torments, the more glorious with blood.
But Spain was not merely the political and military head of the Counter-Reformation. She contributed illustrious names to relume the waning galaxy of saints. Pre-eminent among these luminaries shine Ignatius Loyola, Theresa, and John of the Cross. The first taught Rome what she had yet to learn in the diplomacy of superstition. Education and intrigue became the special province of his order: it was the training school of the teachers: it claimed and merited the monopoly of the vizard manufacture. Rome found in Theresa her most famous seeress; in John, her consummate ascetic. It was not in the upper region of mysticism that the narrow intellect and invincible will of Loyola were to realize distinction. He had his revelations, indeed,—was rapt away to behold the mystery of the Trinity made manifest, and the processes of creation detailed. But such favours are only the usual insignia so proper to the founder of an order. Compared with St. Francis the life of Ignatius is poor in vision and in miracle. But his relics have since made him ample amends. Bartoli enumerates a hundred miraculous cures.[[263]] John and Theresa were mystics par excellence: the former, of the most abstract theopathetic school; the latter, with a large infusion of the theurgic element, unrivalled in vision—angelic and dæmoniacal.
But one principle is dominant in the three, and is the secret of the saintly honours paid them. In the alarm and wrath awakened by the Reformation, Rome was supremely concerned to enforce the doctrine of blind obedience to ecclesiastical superiors. These Spanish saints lived and laboured and suffered to commend this dogma to the Church and to all mankind. Summoned by the Rule of Obedience, they were ready to inflict or to endure the utmost misery. Their natures were precisely of the kind most fitted to render service and receive promotion at that juncture. They were glowing and ductile. Their very virtues were the dazzle of the red-hot brand, about to stamp the brow with slavery. Each excellence displayed by such accomplished advocates of wrong, withered one of the rising hopes of mankind. Their prayers watered with poisoned water every growth of promise in the field of Europe. Their Herculean labours were undertaken, not to destroy, but to multiply the monsters which infested every highway of thought. Wherever the tears of Theresa fell, new weeds of superstition sprang up. Every shining austerity endured by John gilded another link in the chain which should bind his fellows. The jubilant bells of their devotion rang the knell of innumerable martyrs.
In the fourteenth century, mysticism was often synonymous with considerable freedom of thought. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was allowed to exist only as it subserved the ecclesiastical scheme. The problem was,—how to excite the feeling and imagination of the devotee to the highest pitch, and yet to retain him in complete subjection to the slightest movement of the rein. Of this problem John and Theresa are the practical and complete solution. All their fire went off by the legitimate conducting-rod: every flash was serviceable: not a gleam was wasted. Once mysticism was a kind of escape for nature. The mystic left behind him much of the coarse externalism necessary to his Church, and found refuge in an inner world of feeling and imagination. But now the Church, by means of the confessor, made mysticism itself the innermost dungeon of her prison-house. Every emotion was methodically docketed; every yearning of the heart minutely catalogued. The sighs must always ascend in the right place: the tears must trickle in orthodox course. The prying calculations of the casuist had measured the sweep of every wave in the heaving ocean of the soul. The instant terrible knife cut off the first spray of love that shot out beyond the trimly-shaven border of prescription. Strong feelings were dangerous guests, unless they knew (like the old Romans) when to go home and slay themselves, did that Tiberius, the director, but bestow on them a frown.
In France, too, mysticism was to fall under the same yoke; but the Frenchman could never reach the hard austerity of the Spaniard. The sixteenth century produced St. Francis de Sales on the north, and St. John of the Cross on the south, of the Pyrénées. With the former, mysticism is tender, genial, graceful; it appeals to every class; it loves and would win all men. With the latter, it is a dark negation—a protracted suffering—an anguish and a joy known only to the cloister. De Sales was to John, as a mystic, what Henry IV. was to Philip as a Catholic King. Even in Italy, the Counter-Reformation was comparatively humane and philanthropic with Carlo Borromeo. In Spain alone is it little more, at its very best, than a fantastic gloom and a passionate severity.
But everywhere the principle of subserviency is in the ascendant. The valetudinarian devotee becomes more and more the puppet of his spiritual doctor. The director winds him up. He derives his spiritless semblance of life wholly from the priestly mechanism. It may be said of him, as of the sick man in Massinger’s play,
That he lives he owes
To art, not Nature; she has given him o’er.
He moves, like the fairy king, on screws and wheels
Made by his doctor’s recipes, and yet still
They are out of joint, and every day repairing.
Theresa was born at Avila, in the year 1515, just two years (as Ribadeneira reminds us) before ‘that worst of men,’ Martin Luther.[[264]] The lives of the saints were her nursery tales. Cinderella is matter of fact; Jack and the Beanstalk commonplace, beside the marvellous stories that must have nourished her infantine faculty of wonder. At seven years old she thinks eternal bliss cheaply bought by martyrdom; sets out with her little brother on a walk to Africa, hoping to be despatched by the Moors, and is restored to her disconsolate parents by a cruel matter-of-fact uncle, who meets them at the bridge. Her dolls’ houses are nunneries. These children construct in the garden, not dirt pies, but mud-hermitages; which, alas! will always tumble down.
As she grows up, some gay associates, whose talk is of ribbons, lovers, and bull-fights, secularise her susceptible mind. She reads many romances of chivalry, and spends more time at the glass. Her father sends her, when fifteen, to a convent of Augustinian nuns in Avila, to rekindle her failing devotion. A few days reconcile her to the change, and she is as religious as ever.
Then, what with a violent fever, Jerome’s Epistles, and a priest-ridden uncle, she resolves on becoming a nun. Her father refuses his consent; so she determines on a pious elopement, and escapes to the Carmelite convent. There she took the vows in her twentieth year.[[265]]
We find her presently vexed, like so many of the Romanist female saints, with a strange complication of maladies,—cramps, convulsions, catalepsies, vomitings, faintings, &c. &c. At one time she lay four days in a state of coma; her grave was dug, hot wax had been dropped upon her eyelids, and extreme unction administered; the funeral service was performed; when she came to herself, expressed her desire to confess, and received the sacrament.[[266]] It is not improbable that some of the trances she subsequently experienced, and regarded as supernatural, may have been bodily seizures of a similar kind. But at this time she was not good enough for such favours; so the attacks are attributed to natural causes. It is significant that the miraculous manifestations of the Romish Church should have been vouchsafed only to women whose constitution (as in the case of the Catharines and Lidwina) was thoroughly broken down by years of agonizing disease. After three years (thanks to St. Joseph) Theresa was restored to comparative health, but remained subject all her life, at intervals, to severe pains.[[267]]
On her recovery, she found her heart still but too much divided between Christ and the world. That is to say, she was glad when her friends came to see her, and she enjoyed witty and agreeable chat, through the grating, with ladies whose conversation was not always confined to spiritual topics. Grievously did her conscience smite her for such unfaithfulness, and bitterly does she regret the laxity of her confessors, who failed to tell her that it was a heinous crime.
In her twenty-fourth year she resumed the practice of mental prayer, and for the next twenty years continued it, with many inward vicissitudes, and alternate tendernesses and desertions on the part of the Divine Bridegroom. Her forty-fourth year is memorable as the season of her entrance on those higher experiences, which have made her name famous as the great revivalist of supernatural prayer and mystical devotion in the sixteenth century.
The Saint Bartholomew’s day of 1562 was a day of glory for our saint. Then was consecrated the new Convent of St. Joseph, at Avila, established in spite of so much uproar and opposition; that convent wherein the primitive austerity of the Carmelite Order was to be restored,—where Theresa is presently appointed prioress (against her will, as usual),—where there shall be no chats at the grating, no rich endowment; but thirteen ‘fervent virgins’ shall dwell there, discalceated (that is sandalled not shod), serge-clad, flesh-abhorring, couched on straw, and all but perpetually dumb.[[268]] The remainder of her life, from about her fiftieth year, would appear to have been somewhat less fertile in marvellous experiences. She was now recognised as the foundress of the Reformed Carmelites, and could produce warrant from Rome, authorizing her to found as many convents of the Bare-footed as she pleased. She was harassed by the jealous intrigues of the old ‘mitigated’ Order, but indefatigably befriended by John of the Cross, and other thorough-going ascetics. She lived to see established sixteen nunneries of the Reformed, and fourteen monasteries for friars of the same rule. She has left us a long history of her foundations, of all the troubles and difficulties she overcame; showing how funds were often not forthcoming, but faith was; how apathy and opposition were done away; and how busy she must have been (too busy for many visions); all of which let whomsoever read that can.
In the year 1562, when Theresa had successfully commenced the reformation of her Order, she wrote her life, at the bidding of her confessor. In this autobiography her spiritual history is laid bare without reserve. The narrative was published by her superiors, and therein the heretic may listen to what she whispered in the ear of her director during the years most prolific in extravagance. We can thus discern the working of the confessional. Commanded to disclose her most secret thoughts, we see her nervously afraid of omitting to indicate the minutest variations of the religious thermometer, of approaching the committal of that sin which Romanist devotees only can commit—concealment from a confessor. She searches for evil in herself, and creates it by the search. The filmiest evanescence of the feeling has to be detained and anatomized, and changes into something else under the scrutiny. It is as though she had let into her crucifix a piece of looking-glass, that she might see reflected every transport of devotion, and faithfully register the same in her memory against the next shrift. After some excess of rapture, she must set to work at her technical analysis; observe what faculties were dormant, and what still active—what regions of the mind were tenanted by divinity, and what still left to the possession of her sinful self. Her intellect was never strong. She confesses that she found her understanding rather in the way than otherwise.[[269]] Under this omnipresent spiritual despotism it fell prostrate utterly. When she has been favoured with a vision, she is not to know whether it has steamed up from hell or been let down from heaven, until the decision of her confessor fills her with horror or delight. The cloister is her universe. Her mind, unformed, and uninformed, is an empty room, papered with leaves from her breviary. She knew little of that charity which makes gracious inroads on the outer world; which rendered human so many of her sister-saints; which we admire and pity in Madame de Chantal, admire and love in Madame Guyon. No feet-washing do we read of, open or secret; no hospital-tending, no ministry among the poor. The greater activity of her later years brought her in contact with scarcely any but ‘religious’ persons. Her ascetic zeal was directed, not for, but against, the mitigation of suffering. It made many monks and nuns uncomfortable; but I am not aware that it made any sinners better, or any wretched happy. Peter of Alcantara is her admiration; he who for forty years never slept more than one hour and a half in the twenty-four, and then in a sitting posture, with his head against a wooden peg in the wall; who ate in general only every third day; and who looked, she says, as if he were made of the roots of trees (hecho de reyzes de arboles[[270]]). Lodged in her monastic cranny of creation, she convulses herself with useless fervours, absolutely ignorant of all things and persons non-ecclesiastical. Her highest ambition is to reduce the too-palpable reality of herself to the minutest possible compass, and to hide herself—a kind of parasitical insect or entozoön—in the personality of her confessor. Yet, complete as is this suicide, she is never sure that she is sufficiently dead, and incessantly asks him if he is quite sure that she is sincere. Such a life is an object of compassion more than blame. She was herself the victim of the wicked system to which her name was to impart a new impulse. The spasmodic energy she at last displays about her Reformation is not native strength. She was surrounded from the first by those who saw clearly what Rome needed at that time, who beheld in her first almost accidental effort the germ of what they desired, and in herself a fit instrument. A whisper from one of these guides would be translated by such an imagination into a direct commission from heaven. They had but to touch a spring, and her excitable nature was surrounded with the phantasmagoria of vision; one scene produced another, and that unfolded into more—all, the reiteration and expansion of the bent once given to her fixed idea.
Theresa experienced her first rapture while reciting the Veni Creator, when she heard these words spoken in the interior of her heart—‘I will have thee hold converse, not with men, but angels.‘[[271]] She had been conscious, on several previous occasions, of supernatural excitements in prayer, and was much perplexed thereby, as indeed were several of her confessors. Here were irresistible devotional seizures for which they had no rule ready. They suspected an evil spirit, advised a struggle against such extraordinary influences. But the more she resists, the more does the Lord cover her with sweetnesses and glories, heap on her favours and caresses. At last the celebrated Francis Borgia comes to Avila. The Jesuit bids her resist no more; and she goes on the mystical way rejoicing. The first rapture took place shortly after her interviews with the future General of the Society of Jesus.
A word on this system of spiritual directorship. It is the vital question for mystics of the Romish communion. Nowhere is the duty of implicit self-surrender to the director or confessor more constantly inculcated than in the writings of Theresa and John of the Cross, and nowhere are the inadequacy and mischief of the principle more apparent. John warns the mystic that his only safeguard against delusion lies in perpetual and unreserved appeal to his director. Theresa tells us that whenever our Lord commanded her in prayer to do anything, and her confessor ordered the opposite, the Divine guide enjoined obedience to the human; and would influence the mind of the confessor afterwards, so that he was moved to counsel what he had before forbidden![[272]] Of course. For who knows what might come of it if enthusiasts were to have visions and revelations on their own account? The director must draw after him these fiery and dangerous natures, as the lion-leaders of an Indian pageantry conduct their charge, holding a chain and administering opiates. The question between the orthodox and the heterodox mysticism of the fourteenth century was really one of theological doctrine. The same question in the sixteenth and seventeenth was simply one of ecclesiastical interests.[[273]] The condemned quietists were merely mystics imperfectly subservient—unworkable raw material, and as such flung into the fire. Out of the very same substance, duly wrought and fashioned, might have come a saint like Theresa. By the great law of Romish policy, whatever cannot be made to contribute to her ornament or defence is straightway handed over to the devil. Accordingly, the only mysticism acknowledged by that Church grows up beneath her walls, and invigorates, with herbs of magic potency, her garrison,—resembles the strip of culture about some eastern frontier town, that does but fringe with green the feet of the ramparts; all the panorama beyond, a wilderness;—for Bedouin marauders render tillage perilous and vain. Thus, O mystic, not a step beyond that shadow; or hell’s black squadrons, sweeping down, will carry thee off captive to their home of dolour!
The confessions of Theresa are a continual refutation of her counsels. She acknowledges that she herself had long and grievously suffered from the mistakes of her early directors. She knew others also who had endured much through similar incompetency. The judgment of one conductor was reversed by his successor. She exhorts her nuns to the greatest care in the selection of a confessor,—on no account to choose a vain man or an ignorant. She vindicates their liberty to change him when they deem it desirable.[[274]] John of the Cross, too, dilates on the mischief which may be done by an inexperienced spiritual guide. At one time Theresa was commanded to make the sign of the cross when Christ manifested Himself to her, as though the appearance had been the work of some deceiving spirit.[[275]] Her next guide assured her that the form she beheld was no delusion. Dreadful discovery, yet joyful! She had attempted to exorcise her Lord; but the virtue of obedience had blotted out the sin of blasphemy. Thus does each small infallibility mould her for his season, and then pass her on to another. Her soul, with despair stamped on one side and glory imaged on the other, spins dizzy in the air; and whether, when it comes down, heaven or hell shall be uppermost, depends wholly upon the twist of the ecclesiastical thumb.
But to return to her marvellous relations; and, first of all, to those of the infernal species. On one occasion, she tells us, she was favoured with a brief experience of the place she merited in hell:—a kind of low oven, pitch dark, miry, stinking, full of vermin, where sitting and lying were alike impossible; where the walls seemed to press in upon the sufferer—crushing, stifling, burning; where in solitude the lost nature is its own tormentor, tearing itself in a desperate misery, interminable, and so intense, that all she had endured from racking disease was delightful in comparison.[[276]]
At another time, while smitten for five hours together with intolerable pains, the Lord was pleased to make her understand that she was tempted by the devil; and she saw him at her side like a very horrible little negro, gnashing his teeth at her. At last she contrived to sprinkle some holy water on the place where he was. That moment he and her pains vanished together, and her body remained as though she had been severely beaten. It is as well to know that holy water will be found incomparably your best weapon in such cases. The devils will fly from the cross, but may presently return. The drops the Church has blest, do their business effectually. Two nuns, who came into the room after the victory just related, snuffed up the air of the apartment with manifest disgust, and complained of a smell of brimstone. Once the sisters heard distinctly the great thumps the devil was giving her, though she, in a ‘state of recollection,’ was unconscious of his belabouring. The said devil squatted one day on her breviary, and at another time had all but strangled her.[[277]] She once saw, with the eye of her soul, two devils, encompassing, with their meeting horns, the neck of a sinful priest; and at the funeral of a man who had died without confession, a whole swarm of devils tearing and tossing the body and sporting in the grave.
But much more numerous, though as gross as these, are her visions of celestial objects. ‘Being one day in prayer,’ she tells us, ‘our Lord was pleased to show me his sacred hands, of excessive and indescribable beauty; afterwards his divine face, and finally, at mass, all his most sacred humanity.’ At one of his appearances, he drew out with his right hand, the nail which transfixed his left, some of the flesh following it. Three times did she behold in her raptures the most sublime of all visions—the humanity of Christ in the bosom of the Father; very clear to her mind, but impossible to explain. While reciting the Athanasian Creed the mystery of the Trinity was unfolded to her, with unutterable wonderment and comfort. Our Lord paid her, one day, the compliment of saying, that if He had not already created heaven, He would have done so for her sake alone.[[278]]
Some of her ‘Memorable Relations’ are among the most curious examples on record of the materialization of spiritual truth. With all the mystics, she dwells much on the doctrine of Christ in us. But while some of them have exaggerated this truth till they bury under it all the rest, and others have authenticated by its plea every vagary of special revelation, in scarcely any does it assume a form so puerile and so sensuous as with St. Theresa. Repeatedly does she exhort religious persons to imagine Christ as actually within the interior part of their soul. The superstition of the mass contributed largely in her case to render this idea concrete and palpable. In a hymn, composed in a rapturous inspiration after swallowing the consecrated wafer, she describes God as her prisoner.[[279]] She relates in the following passage how she saw the figure of Christ in a kind of internal looking-glass.
‘When reciting the hours one day with the nuns, my soul suddenly lapsed into a state of recollection, and appeared to me as a bright mirror, every part of which, back and sides, top and bottom, was perfectly clear. In the centre of this was represented to me Christ our Lord, as I am accustomed to see him. I seemed to see him in all the parts of my soul also, distinctly as in a mirror, and at the same time this mirror (I do not know how to express it) was all engraven in the Lord himself, by a communication exceeding amorous which I cannot describe. I know that this vision was of great advantage to me, and has been every time I have called it to mind, more especially after communion. I was given to understand, that when a soul is in mortal sin, this mirror is covered with a great cloud, and grows very dark, so that the Lord cannot be seen or represented in us, though he is always present as the Author of our being. In heretics, this mirror is as it were broken, which is much worse than to have it obscured.’[[280]]
Here the simplicitas and nuditas of other mystics become a kind of concrete crystal, inhabited by a divine miniature. In a Clara de Montfaucon, this sensuous supra-naturalism goes a step further, and good Catholics read with reverence, how a Lilliputian Christ on the cross, with the insignia of the passion, was found, on a post-mortem examination, completely formed inside her heart.[[281]]
Similar in its character was a vision with which Theresa was sometimes favoured, of a pretty little angel, with a golden dart, tipped with fire, which he thrust (to her intolerable pain) into her bowels, drawing them out after it, and when thus eviscerated, she was inflamed with a sweet agony of love to God.[[282]]
A multitude more of such favours might be related:—how the Lord gave her a cross of precious stones—a matchless specimen of celestial jewellery to deck his bride withal; how, after communion one day, her mouth was full of blood, that ran out over her dress, and Christ told her it was his own—shed afresh, with great pain, to reward her for the gratification her devotion had afforded him; how (doubtless in imitation of Catherine of Siena) she saw and heard a great white dove fluttering above her head; and how, finally, she repays the attentions of the Jesuit Borgia, by repeated praises of the Order; by recording visions of Jesuits in heaven bearing white banners,—of Jesuits, sword in hand, with resplendent faces, gloriously hewing down heretics; and by predicting the great things to be accomplished through the zeal of that body.[[283]] Enough!
Note to page 159.
The dispute which agitated the Romish Church for more than half a century (1670-1730), concerning the Mistica Ciudad de Dios, attributed to Maria d’Agreda, furnishes a striking instance in proof of the character here ascribed to the controversies of the period. This monstrous book was given to the world as the performance of a Spanish nun, at the dictation of the Virgin, or of God;—both assertions are made, and the difference is not material. Its object is to establish, by pretended special revelation, all the prerogatives assigned to the Queen of Heaven, on the basis of her Immaculate Conception. It is replete with the absurdities and indecencies of prurient superstition. Dufresnoy applies to it, with justice, the words of John of Salisbury,—‘Erumpit impudens et in facie erubescentium populorum genialis thori revelat et denudat arcana.’ It states that the embryo of the Virgin was formed on a Sunday, seventeen days before the ordinary time,—relates how, at eighteen months, the infant demands a nun’s habit from St. Anna, of the colour worn by the Franciscans,—how she sweeps the house, and has nine hundred angels to wait upon her. The partizans of the book maintained, not only that the work itself was a miracle from beginning to end, but that its translation was miraculous also,—a French nun receiving instantaneously the gift of the Spanish tongue, that these disclosures from heaven might pass the Pyrenees. Such was the mass of corruption about which the gadflies and the ‘shard-borne beetles’ of the Church settled in contending swarms. This was the book on whose wholesomeness for the flock of Christ his Vicars could not venture to decide—eventually, rather evading reply than pronouncing sentence. No such scruple concerning the unwholesomeness of the Bible.
The Abbé Dufresnoy handles the question broadly, but most of the combatants are furious, this side or that, from some small party motive. The French divines censure the book, for fear it should encourage Quietism—their great bugbear at that time. The Spanish ecclesiastics, jealous of the honour done their countrywoman, retorted with a Censura Censuræ. But about the habit the battle was hottest. Every Carmelite must reject the book with indignation, for had they not always believed, on the best authority, that the Virgin wore a dress of their colour? The Franciscans again, and the religious of St. Clare, would defend it as eagerly, for did not its pages authorize anew from heaven their beloved ashen hue? Again, did not these revelations represent the Almighty as adopting the Scotist doctrine? On this great question, of course, Scotist and Thomist would fight to the death. Some account of the controversy, and an examination of the book, will be found in Dufresnoy, Traité Historique et Dogmatique sur les Apparitions, les Visions et les Révélations particulières, tom. II. chap. xi. (1751).
The same spirit betrays itself in the instance of Molinos. Even after he had written his Guida Spirituale, he was patronized by the Jesuits because he had employed his pen against Jansenism, and the Franciscans approved his book, while the Dominicans rejected it, because he had delighted the one party and disgusted the other by speaking somewhat disparagingly of Thomas Aquinas.