3. Interaction and mutual suggestion of her spiritual and physical states.
As to the extraordinary closeness and readiness for mutual response between her sensible impressions and her thoughts and emotions—her sensations turning, all but automatically, into religious emotions, and her thoughts and feelings translating themselves into appropriate psycho-physical states—we have a mass of interesting evidence.
Thus when, about the end of November 1509, in response to her seeing, on some wall of the Hospital, a picture of Our Lord at the Well of Samaria, and to her asking Him for one drop of that Divine water, “instantly a drop was given to her which refreshed her within and without.” The spiritual idea and emotion is here accompanied and further stimulated by the keenest psycho-physical impression of drinking. And such an impression can even become painful through its excessive suggestiveness. Thus she herself explains to Maestro Boerio, on September 2, 1510, that she cannot long bear the sight of his scarlet robe “because of what it suggests (represents) to my memory,”—no doubt the fire of divine love. Three days later, on the contrary, “she mentally saw herself lying upon a bier, surrounded by many Religious robed in black,” and greatly rejoiced at the sight. Here the very impression of black, the colour of death, will have conveyed, during this special mood of hers, a downright psycho-physical pleasure, somewhat as Boerio’s reappearance, on the former occasion, in a black gown, had been a sensible relief to her.
So also with scents. When, certainly after 1499, “she perceived, on the (right) hand of her Confessor, an odour which penetrated her very heart,” and “which abode with her and restored both mind and body for many days,” we have again a primarily mental act and state which she herself knows well to be untransferable, even to Don Marabotto himself. Here the association of ideas was, no doubt, the right hand of the Priest and her daily reception, by means of it, of the Holy Eucharist. For the latter, “the Bread from heaven, having within it all manner of delight,” is already connected in her mind with an impression of sweet odour. “One day, on receiving Communion, so much odour and sweetness came to her, that she seemed to herself to be in Paradise.” Probably the love for, and then the disgust at, the smell of wine, was also connected with her Eucharistic experiences. Certainly “one day, having received Holy Communion, she was granted so great a consolation as to fall into an ecstasy, so that when the Priest wanted to give her to drink from the Chalice (with unconsecrated wine) she had to be brought back by force to her ordinary consciousness.” Vivid memories of both sets of psycho-physical impressions are, I think, at work when she says: “If a consecrated Host were to be given to me amongst unconsecrated ones, I should be able to distinguish it by the very taste, as I do wine from water.” And as the sight of red rapidly became painful from the very excess of its mental suggestiveness, so will the smell of wine have been both specially dear and specially painful to her.[21]
Indeed her psycho-physical troubles possess, for the most part, a still traceable, most delicate selectiveness as to date, range, form, combination, and other peculiarities. Thus some of the most acute attacks coincide, in their date of occurrence and general character, as the biographers point out, with special saint’s and holy days: so in the night leading into St. Lawrence’s day, August 9 and 10, 1510; so on the Vigil of St. Bartholomew’s day, August 24; and so in the night previous to and on the Feast (August 28) of St. Augustine, special Patron of her only sister’s Order and of the Convent in which her own Conversion had taken place thirty-seven years before. Yet we have also seen how that these synchronisms did not rise to the heights which were soon desired by her biographers, for we know that she died, not (as they would have it) on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, September 14, but early on the day following.
Thus too as to her incapacity to swallow and retain food, we find that, up to the end, with the rarest exceptions of a directly physical kind, she retained the most complete facility in receiving Holy Communion: so on September 2, 1510, when “all ordinary food was returned, but the Holy Eucharist she retained without any difficulty”; and so too on September 4, when, after “lying for close upon twelve hours with closed eyes, speechless and all but immovable,” Marabotto himself feared to communicate her, but “she made a sign to him, with a joyous countenance, to have no fear, and she communicated with ease, and soon after began to speak, owing to the vigour given to her by the Sacrament.” Yet here too the abnormality is not complete: some ordinary food is retained, now and then; so, minced chicken, specially mentioned for December 1509, and on September 3, 1510.
As to her heat-attacks and the corresponding extreme—the sense of intense cold,—it is clear how close is their connection with her profound concentration upon the conception of God as Love, and upon the image of Love as fire. It is these sudden and intense psycho-physical, spiritually suggestive because spiritually suggested, heat-attacks which are, I think, always meant by the terms “assault” (assalto), “stroke” (ferita), and “arrow” (saetta): terms which already indicate the mental quality of these attacks. And these heats are mostly localized in a doctrinally suggestive manner: they centre in and around the heart, or on the tongue and lips, or they envelop the whole person “as though it were placed in a great flame of fire,” or “in a glowing furnace.” Indeed these heats are often so described, by her attendants or herself, as to imply their predominantly psycho-physical nature: “it was necessary, with a view to prolonging her life, to use many means for lightening the strain of that interior fire upon her mind”; and “I feel,” she says herself, on occasion of such an attack, “so great a contentment on the part of the spirit, as to be unutterable; whilst, on the part of my humanity, all the pains are, so to say, no pains.”
As to her boundless thirst, her inability to drink, and her sense of strangulation, their doctrinal suggestions are largely clear. Thus when “she was so thirsty as to feel able to drink up all the waters of the sea,” and when she calls out “I am suffocating” (drowning, io affogo), we are at once reminded of her great saying: “If the sea were all so much love, there would not live man or woman who would not go to drown himself in it (si affogasse).” And when, at the end of August 1510, unable to drink, she herself declares “all the water that is on earth could not give me the least refreshment,” there is, perhaps, an implied contrast to that “little drop of divine water” which had so much refreshed her a year before.
And finally, the various paralyses and death-like swoons seem, at least in part, to follow from, and to represent, the death of the spirit to the life of the senses, and to mirror the intensity with which perfection has been conceived and practised as “Love going forth out of self, and abiding all in God and separated from man.” Thus when, on August 22, 1510, “she had a day of great heat, and abode paralyzed in one hand and in one finger of the other hand for about sixteen hours, and she was so greatly occupied (absorbed), that she neither spoke, nor opened her eyes, nor could take any food.”[22]