In the time of her total acceptance of holy poverty, Angela seems to have been living in a state of almost hermit-like simplicity with one companion, the Blessed Paschalina of Foligno; whom at first she found a “weariness,” but afterwards discovered to be a fellow traveller on the Mystic Way. Some years had now passed since her conversion; and she was already accepted—perhaps indeed celebrated—as a religious teacher among the members of the Spiritual group. Definitely vowed to the service of the Franciscan Order, she seems soon to have become like St. Catherine of Siena, St. Catherine of Genoa, and many other women mystics, the centre of a group of adoring disciples or “spiritual sons.” Yet her inner life was still in a state of confusion, the remaking of her character was still in progress. She was flung perpetually to the extremes of joy and anguish. She would rise to great heights of mystical passion “filled with the fire and fervour of Divine love,” only to fall back to her old temptations. The repressed instinctive life began to take its revenge, and tortured her by vicious suggestions which she had never known before. “I would have chosen rather to be roasted than to endure such pains.” Also the great strain put upon her nervous system by the growing spiritual faculties resulted in absolute physical illness, as has been the case with many of the mystical saints. “The torments of my body,” she says, “were veritably numberless. There remained not one of my members that was not grievously tormented, nor was I ever free from pain, infirmity, or weariness.”
We need not be afraid to recognize in this struggle a reflection of the stresses and difficulties—some physical—which attend on the complete sublimation of man’s psychic life; especially in persons of a strongly emotional temperament. In Angela’s case the visions and dreams that accompanied it assure us of the character of the crisis through which she was passing. Many of her symptoms at this time were undoubtedly hysterical. She cried aloud when she heard the name of God, and fell into a fever on seeing a picture of the Passion of Christ. Her tears were perpetual, and often she longed to tear herself in pieces. Unfortunately Franciscan piety of the more extreme sort encouraged emotional extravagances of this kind, as we may see by the account of Angela’s contemporaries given in the “Little Flowers,” and failed to appreciate Jacopone’s profound distinction between ordered and disordered love. It also gave unqualified approval to those public and grotesque acts of self-abasement which play so large a part in the legend of his penitence; and here again, Angela was true to type. Still grieved by the memory of her old hypocrisies, made more poignant by the reverence she received from her disciples, she went through the city and open places with meat and fishes hanging from her neck, and crying, “I am that woman full of evil and dissembling, slave of all vices and iniquities, who did good deeds that she might obtain honour among men; and especially when I caused those bidden to my house to be told that I ate neither fish nor meat, and—being the while greedy, gluttonous, and drunken—feigned to desire nought but what was needful.”
Those familiar with the lives of the mystics will remember many parallels to this state of conflict: the ups and downs of Suso, his alternate illumination and despair, his great self-denials balanced by foolish little sins: the thirty years during which Teresa—already, like Angela, regarded as a great example—swayed between her mystical vocation and the claims of a more normal life. In Angela this inward battle culminated, she says, “some little while before the time of the pontificate of Celestino”—that is to say about 1294, when she was forty-six—and endured for more than two years. In it, in addition to bodily and mental agony, she was humiliated by recurrent temptations to sensual indulgence. Her depression was extreme, and her intellect often so clouded that she could not even recall the idea of God to her mind. It was her last lesson in humility and self-knowledge—an excellent antidote to the dangers of professional sanctity—and answered to that terrible period of final purification which other mystics have called the “Dark Night of the Soul.”
From this last purgation, in which all the elements of her character seemed flung back into the melting-pot, she emerged into that condition of spiritual equilibrium, of perfect harmony with transcendent reality, which is known to mystic writers as the Unitive Way. “A divine change,” she says, “took place in my soul, which neither saint nor angel could describe or explain. Wherefore I say again that it seems to me evil speaking or blasphemy if I try and tell of it.” Again, “I came not to this state of my own self, but was led and drawn thereto by God; so that though of my own self I should not have known how to desire or ask for it, I am now in that state continually.” Though the capacity for pain never left her, and is implied in many of her greatest revelations—for, like all the great Catholic mystics, she found the Christian paradox of joyous suffering at the very centre of truth—yet the last twelve years of her life seem to have been years of profound inward peace. “He hath placed within my soul,” she said, “a state which changes little, and I possess God in such fullness that I am no longer in the state in which I used to be; but I walk in such perfect peace of heart and mind that I am content in all things.”
It was that state of which Jacopone has written:
“La guerra è terminata
de le virtú battaglia,
de la mente travaglia
cosa nulla contende.
La mente è renovata