A field of investigation that yields much illuminating information is the biographies of the saints and of other religious characters. In many of these cases the acceptance of sexual feeling for religious illumination is very clear. Thus of St. Gertrude, a Benedictine nun of the thirteenth century, we read:—
"One day at chapel she heard supernaturally sung the words, 'Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus.' The Son of God, leaning towards her like a sweet lover, and giving to her soul the softest kiss, said to her at the second Sanctus, 'In the Sanctus addressed to My person, receive with this all the sanctity of My divinity and of
My humanity.'... And the following Sunday, while she was thanking God for this favour, behold the Son of God, more beauteous than thousands of angels, takes her to His arms as if He were proud of her, and presents her to God the Father, and in that perfection of sanctity with which He had endowed her."[101]
Of Juliana of Norwich, who was granted a revelation in 1373, we are told that she had for long 'ardently desired' a bodily sight of the Lord upon the cross; and that finally Jesus appeared to her and said, "I love thee and thou lovest Me, and our love shall never be disparted in two."[102] So, again, in the case of Sister Jeanne des Anges, Superior of the Convent of Ursulines of Loudun, and the principal character in the famous Grandier witchcraft case, we have a detailed account, in her own words, of the lascivious dreams, unclean suggestions, etc.—all attributed to Satan—and alternating with impressions of bodily union with Jesus.[103] Marie de L'Incarnation addresses Jesus as follows:—
"Oh, my love, when shall I embrace you? Have you no pity on the torments that I suffer? Alas! alas! My love! My beauty! My life! Instead of healing my pain, you take pleasure in it. Come, let me embrace you, and die in your sacred arms."[104]
Veronica Juliani, beatified by Pope Pius II., took a real lamb to bed with her, kissed it, and suckled it at her breasts. St. Catherine of Genoa threw herself on the ground to cool herself, crying out, "Love, love, I
can bear it no longer." She also confessed to a peculiar longing towards her confessor.[105]
The blessed Mary Alacoque, foundress of the Sacred Heart, was subject from early life to a number of complaints—rheumatism, palsy, pains in the side, ulceration of the legs—and experienced visions early in her career. As a child she had so vivid a sense of modesty that the mere sight of a man offended her. At seventeen she took to wearing a knotted cord drawn so tightly that she could neither eat nor breathe without pain. She compressed her arms so tightly with iron chains that she could not remove them without anguish. "I made," she says, "a bed of potsherds, on which I slept with extreme pleasure." She fasted and tortured herself in a variety of ways, and the more her physical disorders increased the more numerous became her visions. Before she was eighteen years of age, in 1671, she entered a nunnery. From the time she donned the habit of a novice she was 'blessed' with visions. "Our Lord showed me that that day was the day of our spiritual wedding; He forthwith gave me to understand that He wished to make me taste all the sweetness of the caresses of His love. In reality, those divine caresses were from that moment so excessive, that they often put me out of myself." "Once," says one of her biographers, "having retired into her chamber, she threw off the clothes with which she had bedecked herself during the day, when the Son of God showed Himself to her in the state in which He was after His cruel flagellation—that is, with His body all wounded, torn, gory—and He said to her that it was her vanities that had brought Him into that condition."
In one of these visions Jesus took the head of Mary, pressed it to His bosom, spoke to her in passionate words, opened her side and took out her heart, plunged it into His own, and then replaced it. He then explained His design of founding the Order of the Sacred Heart. Ever after, Mary was conscious of a pain in her side and a burning sensation in her chest—two plain symptoms of hysteria.[106]
Santa Teresa, who died at the early age of thirty-three, and in whose family more than one case of well-developed neurasthenia can be traced, was favoured with 'messages' at a very early age. She believed some of these were temptations from the devil suggesting an 'honourable alliance.' A nervous breakdown followed directly after entrance into a convent. She was then twenty years of age, was subject to fainting fits and longed for illness as a sign of divine favour. She was subject to convulsions, and soon after taking the veil fell into a cataleptic trance, which lasted three days. She was thought to be dead, but at the end of the time sat up and told those around that she had visited both heaven and hell, and seen the joys of the blessed and the torments of the damned. It is at least suggestive that, in spite of the longing for personal communion with Jesus, her first experience of the ecstasy of divine love was experienced after discovering a 'very realistic' picture of a martyred saint—St. Joseph. The significance of the intense contemplation of a tortured body—possibly made by one whose sexual nature was