It cost Angela many struggles before she fully accepted and acted upon this truth, and attained that which she calls the “liberty of poverty.” Self-knowledge, that hard essential of the soul’s re-education which Richard of St. Victor, and afterwards St. Catherine of Siena, made the starting-point of all mysticism, she recognized from the first as the true objective towards which her hard penances and long meditations must tend.
The eighteen “steps,” then, exhibit with extraordinary honesty her gradual progress in these two arts of self-knowledge and renunciation. At the first step, as we have seen, she was by something—we know not what—startled into attention to the real, and terrified by the vision of her own naked reality stripped of its pleasant veils and self-deceits. Her first reaction to this vision was avoidance. She was ashamed to look her sins in the face, or confess them. But having prayed to St. Francis, she was led by a dream—the form under which her unconscious mind most frequently controlled her—to seek a Franciscan friar and make a general confession of her sins. She performed his penance loyally, and became increasingly contrite for her faults: the sense of Divine Mercy touching her, and evoking an ever more humble and repentant grief. By the eighth step this contrition had become love, the passion for perfection triumphing over the hatred of imperfection. By that contemplation of the Cross which was specially dear to Franciscan devotion, and is the subject of one of Jacopone’s most splendid poems, she was led into an ever deeper understanding of the mystery of redemption by pain. Angela was now definitely committed to the mystic way. “In this beholding of the Cross,” she says, “I burned with the fire of love and remorse: so that standing before that Cross I divested myself of everything and offered myself to Him ... and the aforesaid fire compelled me, and I had no power to resist.” The special form which her renunciation took—that of a vow of chastity in deed and thought—suggests the direction in which her chief temptations lay; and this deduction is made more probable by the emotional quality of her visionary experience, in which the repressed ardours of her temperament found relief.
At the ninth step, this instinct for renunciation achieved more complete expression. “Enlightened and instructed”—doubtless by some member of the spiritual group—she learned that nothing less than a total sacrifice of friends, kindred, possessions, her very self, would serve her if she wished to tread the Way of Holy Cross. But in her acceptance of this bitter truth we still see something of the vanity, self-importance and narrow egotism of the old Angela. This is the one passage in all her writings which every one knows, and by which she is generally, and most unfairly, judged.
“I elected to walk on the thorny path which is the path of tribulation. So I began to put aside the fine clothing and adornments which I had, and the most delicate food, and also the covering of my head. But as yet, to do all these things was hard, and shamed me, because I did not feel much love for God, and was living with my husband. So that it was a bitter thing to me when anything offensive was said or done to me; but I bore it as patiently as I could. In that time, and by God’s will, there died my mother, who was a great hindrance to me in following the way of God; my husband died likewise; and in a short time there also died all my children. And because I had begun to follow the aforesaid way, and had prayed God to rid me of them, I had great consolation of their deaths, although I also felt some grief; wherefore, because God had shown me this grace, I imagined that my heart was in the heart of God and His will and His heart in my heart.”
This unfortunate paragraph outweighs for many minds the whole of Angela’s subsequent life and achievements. I do not deny that, taken alone, it appears to be a monument of spiritual egotism. But we must remember that it represents, not Angela the peaceful mystic, but Angela the worried and storm-tossed penitent at the most difficult moment of her career. The emotional centre of her life had shifted. An inexorable inner voice now urged her to a total concentration on God, and she knew that the way of penance and renunciation was her only hope. Yet living in a thoroughly discordant, thoroughly unspiritual environment, hemmed in on all sides by conventional existence and unsympathetic surroundings, this way seemed impossible to follow in its completeness; for she was not one of those who are able to harmonize the demands of both worlds. Moreover, these words were written by one who had long outlived the human sorrow which, as she says here and in another place, she felt at these accumulated bereavements. Now, looking back and seeing her past existence spread out before her, she recognized even this awful and drastic series of deprivations as a necessary factor in the life to which she was called.
After all, it is fair to acknowledge that family affection is not the strongest point in the character of the mystical saints. In the interests of their vocation, they are always ready to leave father, mother, brothers, and sisters; and moreover there is evangelical authority for this attitude. They are specialists, and are therefore bound, in the interests of the race, to give up many things which other men must develop and preserve. Artists are under much the same necessity. The vitality which we diffuse amongst many interests and loves, these must concentrate on the one object of their quest. Hence St. Francis himself flung his family aside without scruple when it came to the parting of the ways. Hence Jacopone da Todi was warned that even spiritual friendships must be held lightly by the pilgrim on the way of the Cross. Angela was only following in their footsteps, though she doubtless expressed herself with unnecessary and ill-regulated vigour, when she recognized human ties and human affections as possible impediments of the spiritual life. An easy capitulation to love and friendship in their most engrossing aspects seems always to have been her standing danger. It caused her in later life to say that she “feared love more than all other things”; even regarding with suspicion the deep affection which unites teacher and disciples, or two fellow-initiates of the contemplative life.
It was after her release from the duties of family life, and her more complete concentration on the ascetic life, that her visionary powers began to develop. At first they were little more than waking dreams of a commonplace kind; imaginary pictures of the Passion, the Crucifix, the Sacred Heart, such as have been experienced by innumerable Catholic saints. These vivid symbolic presentations of Divine love moved Angela to greater and more heroic heights of penitential love; and the passion for complete evangelical poverty came on her with renewed force. Her possessions enchained her, and she knew it. She made many efforts to screw herself up bit by bit to those heights of renunciation which St. Francis seems to have reached almost without effort.
“For this cause—namely, to have the liberty of poverty—I journeyed to Rome, to pray the Blessed Peter that he would obtain for me the grace of true poverty. It seemed to me at last that I could not sufficiently do penance whilst I was possessed of worldly things ... so I determined to forsake everything. In my imagination I had a great desire to become poor, and such was my zeal, that I often feared to die before I attained this state of poverty. On the other hand, I was assailed by temptations, which whispered to me that I was still young, that begging for alms might lead me into shame and danger; that if I did this, I should die of hunger, cold, and nakedness. Moreover, all my friends dissuaded me from it. But at last Divine mercy sent a great illumination into my heart, which, as I believed then and do now, I shall never lose even in eternity.... So then I did resolve in good earnest.”
Here is the final, deliberate act of will: the turning once for all from the unreal to the real—under whatever form the charms of unreality appear to the growing self—which all mystics have to make. It was Angela’s eleventh step. Her mystical powers were now developing rapidly. They showed themselves in visions, dreams, and ecstasies. Not all of these, it is true, can be accepted as marks of spiritual growth: for some clearly represent the re-emergence under religious symbols of old emotions and desires. But the deep and vivid intuitions of spiritual realities which came to her more and more frequently, show that a steady sublimation of those emotions and desires was in progress, and that they tended more and more towards supersensual ends.
At the fifteenth step, with truly Franciscan thoroughness—though, oddly enough, the Friars Minor whom she consulted forbade her to do it—she distributed the whole of her possessions amongst the poor. “Because methought I could not keep anything for myself without greatly offending Him who did thus enlighten me.” With this crucial act she seems to have attained at last the true and full state of illumination. “Then,” she says, “I began to feel the sweetness of God in my heart”: that which other mystics have called the “sense of the Presence.” Also, “I began to have understanding of the visions and the words”; a new spiritual lucidity running side by side with the symbolic pictures and imaginary voices that she saw and heard with the inner eye and ear. This, too, is normal and characteristic. From this point, then, we must read the book of Visions and Consolations side by side with the book of Penances if we would understand Angela’s inner life; for these two forms of experience, which she has unfortunately chosen to treat separately, alternated with one another.