vestita a tal entaglia,
de tal ferro è la maglia
feruta no l’offerende.”
Angela has two claims to the title of a great mystic: that of her life, which we have briefly considered, and that of the revelations and experiences which she reports; our chief evidence of the unique nature of her consciousness. What then was the nature of these visions and revelations? There are signs in her book that she ran through the whole gamut of mystical experience. She practised, and described, all those degrees of contemplative prayer which are analyzed by St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross. She heard interior voices. She saw visions. She was an ecstatic. Moreover, at least after her achievement of spiritual equilibrium—for it would be unfair to take into account the morbid states from which she suffered during the period of readjustment—her ecstasies were of that rare and supernal kind which, far from being signs of mental or nervous disease, actually renew and invigorate the physical life of those who experience them. There is a beautiful passage in the life of St. Catherine of Genoa in which she is described as coming joyous and rosy-faced from the ecstatic encounter with God’s love. So Angela says: “Because of the change in my body, therefore I was not able to conceal my state from my companion, or from other people with whom I consorted; because at times my face was all resplendent and rosy, and my eyes shone like candles. When the soul is assured of God and refreshed by His presence, the body also receives health, satisfaction, and nobility.”
Her revelations were of two kinds. First we have a long series of “imaginary visions”: pictures, no doubt representing deep and imageless intuitions, resulting as it were from some communion with reality, but taking their form—as distinct from their content—from the memory and imagination of the visionary. Though many of these must be classed as dreams, and some indeed were received in sleep, others were definite experiences; seen, as she says, with the eyes of the mind, far more clearly than anything can be seen with the eyes of the body. Nevertheless we are bound to consider them less as objective revelations than as vivid artistic reconstructions; symbols of something that she has felt and known. Angela’s religious beliefs and romantic leanings are both clearly reflected in them. Some deal with the physical accidents of the Passion—always a favourite subject of the mediæval visionary—and these closely resemble the series of Passion-pictures seen by Julian of Norwich. Others are inspired by her devotion to the Eucharist. One or two seem, like the Visions of St. Gertrude, to anticipate the later cult of the Sacred Heart. In virtue of these visions Angela belongs to the great family of women Catholic mystics; women possessing a rich emotional life, and, largely by means of that emotional life, actualizing and expressing their communion with the spiritual world.
We see this emotional character clearly in one of Angela’s most celebrated experiences; the one of all others which seems to have set the seal on her career as a religious teacher, and which is placed at the beginning of her book of visions and revelations, though there was no vision involved in it. I mean the beautiful scene in which she talked with the Holy Ghost, walking on “the narrow road which leads upward to Assisi, and is beyond Spello.” That sense of heavenly intimacy, of divine communion, of a destiny pressed upon her from the spiritual sphere, which then took possession of her consciousness, was translated by the surface-mind of the natural Angela—whose nearest parallels to such an experience were found amongst the emotional incidents of human love—into the wonderful imaginary conversation in which, as she climbs the path between the vineyards, she is wooed by the Holy Spirit, and assured of His peculiar interest and affection. “I will bear thee company and speak with thee all the way,” He says to her. “I will make no end to My speaking, and thou wilt not be able to attend to anything save Me.” “Then did He begin to speak the following words to me, which persuaded me to love after this manner, ‘My daughter, who art sweet to Me, My daughter who art My temple, My beloved daughter, do thou love Me, for I love thee greatly, and much more than thou lovest Me.’ And very often He said to me, ‘Bride and daughter! sweet art thou to Me; I love thee better than any other in the valley of Spoleto.’ These and other similar things did He say to me. Then when I heard these words, I counted my sins, and I considered my faults; how that I was unworthy of so great a love. And I began to doubt these words; for which cause, my soul said to Him who had spoken to it, ‘If thou wert indeed the Holy Spirit, thou wouldest not speak thus; for it is not right or proper, because I am weak and frail and might grow vainglorious thereat.’ He answered, ‘Think and see if thou couldst become vainglorious because of the things for which thou art now made glad....’ Then I tried to grow vainglorious, that I might prove if He spoke truth; and I began to look at the vineyards, that I might learn the folly of my words. And wherever I looked, He said to me, ‘Behold and see! this is My creation’: and at this I felt ineffable delight.”
This is the poetry of mysticism, an artistic reduction of supernal intuitions, and is to be interpreted in poetic terms. But there is another, and rarer, form of spiritual perception: that imageless intuition of pure truth, which St. Teresa and other mystics call intellectual, but which would be better named metaphysical vision. Angela’s real importance amongst the mystics comes from the fact that she possessed this power in a high degree of development. In virtue of her immediate apprehensions of transcendent reality, she belongs to the rarest and highest type of mystic seer: a class in which Plotinus holds perhaps the first place, and of which Ruysbroeck is the most conspicuous mediæval example. The poetry of Jacopone da Todi shows us that he too knew the secret of those strange astounding regions, “beyond the polar circle of the mind,” where Angela tasted of unconditioned reality, and the language in which he describes them often reminds us of her. It is an interesting question, whether these two great Franciscan contemplatives directly influenced one another, or must be regarded as the twin stars of a school of “Seraphic wisdom” which taught the deepest mysteries of the spiritual life.
There are eight of these great visionary experiences recorded in Angela’s book. In them she says that she apprehended God successively under the attributes of Goodness, Beauty, Power, Wisdom, Love, Justice; and that after this she beheld the totality of the Godhead “darkly”—a way of describing her perceptions which is of course traceable to the “Divine darkness” of Dionysius the Areopagite. Finally she beheld it, “as clearly as is possible in this life.” All these visions seem to have come to her when she was in a state of ecstasy or trance. She speaks of being “exalted in spirit,” “rapt to the first elevation”; lifted to wholly new levels of consciousness. She describes them as well as she can, yet plainly she is only able to tell us a fraction of her experience. Over and over again she declares the hopeless inadequacy of human speech, the impossibility of “speaking as she saw.” Her state is like that of Dante at the end of the Paradiso, save that her wings were fitted for these flights.
“I beheld the ineffable fullness of God; but I can relate nothing of it, save that I have seen the fullness of Divine Wisdom, wherein is all goodness.” Again, “inasmuch as this was a supernatural thing, I cannot express it in words.” “Many other things were clearly set forth to me; but I neither can nor will relate them.” “All that I say of this, seems to me to be nothing. I feel as though I offended in speaking of it, for so greatly does the Good exceed all my words that my speech seems to be but blasphemy.”
Those things, however, which she does contrive to relate, have an astonishing suggestive quality, a great philosophic sweep, combined with an intimate appeal to our own deepest intuitions, which place them, so far as mystical history is concerned, on a level with some of the greatest passages in Jacopone da Todi and in Ruysbroeck; and in my opinion far beyond the more celebrated intellectual visions of St. Teresa.