A History of the Inquisition of Spain; vol. 4

by Henry Charles Lea

SOR MARIA DE AGREDA

With all the power of the Franciscan Order and of the Spanish court to sustain her claims to sanctity, the canonization of such a personage would seem almost a matter of course, and it would doubtless have been effected if she had not reduced her revelations to writing. However they might suit the appetite of Spanish piety, nourished so long on mystic extravagance, they did not appeal to the sober judgement of the rest of the Catholic world. In spite of their divine inspiration, her Letanía y nombres misteriosos de la Reina del Cielo and her Mística Ciudad de Dios were condemned in Rome, and the decree as to the latter was posted on the doors of St. Peter’s, August 4, 1681. The Mística Ciudad was eminently popular in Spain and, at the instance of the Spanish court, its prohibition was suspended. The Inquisition took advantage of this, in 1686, to issue a decree permitting its circulation, at which the Congregation of the Index was naturally offended and, in 1692, the papal decree of condemnation appeared in the Appendix to the Index of Innocent XI, in spite of which the book was formally permitted by the Spanish Inquisition.[79] When, in 1695, a translation by Père Thomas Croset appeared in France, the Sorbonne, by decree of September 27, 1696, condemned it as containing propositions contrary to the rules of ecclesiastical modesty, and many fables and dreams from the Apocrypha, exposing Catholicism to the contempt of the heretics.[80] The Spanish court labored earnestly to obtain a renewal of the suspension and finally succeeded, so that the book was omitted from the 1716 Index of Clement XI. Then in 1729, the subject was again taken up, when, after a long debate, the book was permitted, though Dr. Eusebius Amort tells us that in Rome, in 1735, he was shown a decree of Benedict XIII renewing the prohibition and asserting that its withdrawal had been obtained fraudulently; still, the book has never since reappeared in the Index.[81] There was a similar struggle over the Letanía, which was still included in the 1716 Index of Clement XI and the first Index of Benedict XIV, in 1744, but has disappeared from all succeeding issues.[82] Less successful thus far has been the persistent effort to procure the canonization of Madre María, leading to a papal decree of April 27, 1773, forbidding all future proceedings in the case. Notwithstanding this, Leo XIII, on March 10, 1884, ordered the Congregation of Rites to consider in secret whether this prohibition could be removed. To suggest such a discussion is almost equivalent to prejudging it affirmatively but, before the decision was reached, chance led to the publication in the Deutscher Merkur of December 29, 1889, of the whole secret history of the case, which has probably put an end, at least for the present, to the prospect of enrolling in the calendar of saints one whose revelations have been so repeatedly condemned as illusory or as emanating from Satan.

While, as we shall see, the pest of beatas revelanderas and more or less conscious impostors continued to afflict the land, the cases recognized as Alumbrados are comparatively few during the remainder of the seventeenth century. In a Toledo record, commencing in 1648, the first one occurs in 1679, when the Franciscan Fray Francisco de Toledo was convicted. In this the offence is treated as formal heresy, requiring reconciliation, and the punishment was extremely severe. He was to receive a circular discipline in his convent; he was to be confined in a cell for two years and for two years more was to be recluded, during which time he was to be occupied in works of humility. In addition, he was perpetually suspended from orders, deprived of active and passive voice, and reduced to lay communion. It is possibly to this, or to some movement in which Fray Francisco bore a part, that Miguel Molinos refers, in a letter of February 16, 1680, to the Jesuit General Oliva, saying that when, in 1679, Satan sought to revive the sect of Illuminists in Spain, and they had applied to him, he had given an opinion so contrary to their follies that it frightened them and stopped the attempt.[83]

ITALIAN MYSTICS

While Spain had thus been combatting Mysticism, Rome had remained comparatively indifferent, for in Italy it had not developed into a popular mania to be suppressed irrespective of the immoral extravagances to which it sometimes led. In the Edict of the Inquisition requiring denunciation of all offences subject to its jurisdiction, there is no mention of Mysticism or Illuminism.[84] The elaborate folios of the writers on the Holy Office—Carena, Del Bene, Lupo, Dandino—are silent as to its eccentricities. Yet these were by no means unknown to the Roman Holy Office, which took cognizance of them when brought to its notice. Occasionally some book too extravagant in its teachings was put upon the Index.[85] Cardinal Scaglia († 1639), a member of the Congregation of the Inquisition, in his little manual of practice, which was circulated only in MS., when treating of the troubles customary in nunneries, says that through giddiness of brain, or vain-glory, or illusion, nuns often claim to have celestial visions and revelations and intercourse with God and the saints when, if the confessor is imprudently given to spirituality, he reduces their utterances to writing and, if he is learned, he defends them, very often with propositions punishable by the Inquisition. Sometimes, he adds, sensuality is involved, leading to the assertion that carnal acts are not sinful but meritorious, when, if the confessor desires to take advantage of this, he seeks with revelations and false doctrines to prove that they are lawful. Cases of this kind have occurred in the Holy Office, when priests who so justify themselves become liable to the penalties of heresy. Such cases also occur between women assuming to be spiritual and their confessors, who so teach them, even without revelations and visions, leading their spiritual daughters to believe these to be works of merit and mortification.[86]

Bernino tells us that, early in the seventeenth century, Illuminism was widely diffused throughout Italy, where abjurations enforced by the Inquisition were frequent, but this is probably the exaggeration so frequent with heresiologists.[87] A well-marked case, however, startled Florence in 1640, when the Canon Pandolfo Ricasoli, a highly respected member of the noble house of the Barons of Trappola and a man of wide learning and handsome fortune, was arrested with his chief accomplice Faustina Mainardi, her brother Girolamo, and the Maestro Serafino de’ Servi, Dottor Carlo Scalandrini, the priest Giacomo Fantoni, Andrea Biliotti, Francesco Borgeschi and two others, Mozzetti and Cocchi. Some nuns of Santa Anna sul Prato were also implicated, but if they were prosecuted no knowledge of it was allowed to reach the public. They seem to have formed a coterie of Illuminists to whom Ricasoli taught that all manner of indecent acts conduced to purity, if performed with the mind fixed on God; they claimed special relations with heaven and were free from sin in whatever they did for the greater glory of God. This continued for eight years; rumors spread abroad and were conveyed to the Inquisition, when Ricasoli came forward and denounced himself with expressions of contrition. A public atto di fede was held, November 28, 1641, in the great refectory of the convent of Santa Croce, attended by the Grand Duke, the Cardinal de’ Medici, the nuncio and other notabilities. One of the culprits, Serafino de’ Servi, had died in prison and appeared in effigy, the rest abjured de vehementi. Ricasoli, Faustina and Fantoni were condemned to perpetual irremissible prison, others to prison with the privilege of asking for pardon, while two, Cocchi and Borgeschi, had a private atto di fede and were confined in the Stinche prison at the pleasure of the Inquisition. Ricasoli, as he was led away, declared that he had acted foolishly and ignorantly, and he asked pardon of the people for the scandal which he had caused; he lingered in his prison until July 1657, when he died at the age of 78, protesting to the end that he had erred through ignorance and not through lust; there was some question as to his interment, but finally he received Christian burial. The inquisitor, Fra Giovanni Muzzarelli, was sternly rebuked for misplaced mercy by the Roman Congregation and was speedily replaced by one of severer temper.[88]

Impostors likewise were not unknown, as appears in the career of Francesco Giuseppe Borri, a brilliant but dissolute scion of a noble Milanese house. A misadventure in Rome forced him to take asylum in a church where, in recognition of the mercy of God, he changed his life. He soon had visions and revelations, from which he constructed a new theology, showing an intimate acquaintance with the mysteries of the Trinity and of the universe. That St. Anne was conceived by the operation of the Spirit and the Virgin consequently was Deity, was one of the twenty errors set forth in his sentence. Moreover he had been selected to found the Kingdom of the Highest, in which all mankind would be brought under papal rule, and the world would live in peace for a thousand years; the philosopher’s stone, of which he had the secret, would furnish the means of raising the papal armies, in the leadership of which he would be guided by St. Michael. Rome soon became dangerous for the new prophet and, in 1655, he transferred his propaganda to Milan, where he founded a secret mystical Order, the members of which were trained in meditation and mental prayer, pledged themselves to shed their blood in the execution of the work and, what was more to the purpose, contributed all their property to the common fund. The Milanese inquisitor got wind of the new sect and arrested some of the members; Borri thought of raising a tumult but decided in favor of the safer alternative of flight. His case was transferred to the Roman Congregation, which cited him, March 20, 1659, to appear within ninety days and then tried him in absentia, with the result that his effigy, with all his impious writings, was burnt on January 3, 1661. His dupes were duly prosecuted, but seem not to have been severely punished.

ITALIAN MYSTICS

Meanwhile he was starting on a fresh career in Northern Europe, as a man possessed of all the secrets of alchemy and medicine, with a success that even Cagliostro might have envied. Strassburg and Amsterdam had reason to repent of his seductive arts. In Hamburg, Christina of Sweden furnished him with means to prosecute the work of the Grand Arcanum. Frederic III of Denmark lavished large sums on him and even made him chief political adviser, which aroused the hatred of the heir-apparent, Christian V, on whose accession, in 1670, he was obliged to save his life by flight. He sought to find refuge in Turkey, but in Moravia, when within a day’s journey of the frontier, he was arrested by mistake, on suspicion of complicity in a conspiracy in Vienna. There the papal nuncio recognized and claimed him, but Leopold I, whose favor he had speedily acquired by his chemical marvels, surrendered him only on condition that his life should be spared. Before the Inquisition he confessed his errors and attributed them to diabolical inspiration, and his sentence, September 25, 1672, was merely to perpetual prison and certain spiritual penances. Even here his good luck befriended him, for Cardinal d’Estrées, the influential ambassador of Louis XIV, in dangerous illness, asked to consult him and, on recovery, procured his transfer to easier confinement in the castle of St. Angelo, where he was allowed special privileges and sometimes to go out and visit the sick. There he remained until his death, August 20, 1695—just a century before Cagliostro came to the same end.[89]

Although the Roman Inquisition issued no general denunciations, there was a surveillance kept over the votaries of mental prayer and contemplation, in view of the extravagances to which they might be led when, abandoning themselves wholly to God, they felt themselves irresponsible for what God might cause them to do, in the rapture of Quietism. There was a little community of this kind formed in Genoa, where they were known as Sequere me, from the phrase used when addressing those whom they elected to join them. Under the lead of a Trinitarian friar, they bought a house in the suburbs, where they lived in the utmost austerity, devoting themselves to contemplation. Thus came visions and revelations that the Church was to be reformed through them by a new pope, of whom they were to be the apostles. One of them communicated this to a vicar of the Inquisition who promptly reported to the tribunal. They were all summoned before it; some went into ecstasies and, as a body, they threatened the inquisitor with the vengeance of God and were thrown into prison. The Congregation of the Inquisition ordered their prosecution, which resulted in their being adjudged to be crazy rather than evil-minded. The friar was deprived of active and passive voice in his Order and the rest were dismissed with threats of the galleys if they reassembled and continued to wear the habit which they had adopted.[90]