[6] These and other details will be found in the four volumes “Das Heidentum in der romischen Kirche” (Gotha, 1889-91), by Theodor Trede, a late Protestant parson in Naples, strongly tinged with anti-Catholicism, but whose facts may be relied upon. Indeed, he gives chapter and verse for them.
And over all throned the Inquisition in Rome, alert, ever-suspicious; testing the “irregularities” of the various orders and harassing their respective saints with Olympic impartiality.
I know that mystics such as Orsola Benincasa are supposed to have another side to their character, an eminently practical side. It is perfectly true—and we need not go out of England to learn it—that piety is not necessarily inconsistent with nimbleness in worldly affairs. But the mundane achievements, the monasteries and churches, of nine-tenths of these southern ecstatics are the work of the confessor and not of the saint. Trainers of performing animals are aware how these differ in plasticity of disposition and amenability to discipline; the spiritual adviser, who knows his business, must be quick to detect these various qualities in the minds of his penitents and to utilize them to the best advantage. It is inconceivable, for instance, that the convent-foundress Orsola was other than a neuropathic nonentity—a blind instrument in the hands of what we should call her backers, chiefest of whom (in Naples) were two Spanish priests, Borli and Navarro, whose local efforts were supported, at head-quarters, by the saintly Filippo Neri and the learned Cardinal Baronius.
This is noticeable. The earlier of these godly biographies are written in Latin, and these are more restrained in their language; they were composed, one imagines, for the priests and educated classes who could dispense to a certain degree with prodigies. But the later ones, from the viceregal period onwards, are in the vernacular and display a marked deterioration; one must suppose that they were printed for such of the common people as could still read (up to a few years ago, sixty-five per cent of the populace were analphabetic). They are pervaded by the characteristic of all contemporary literature and art: that deliberate intention to astound which originated with the poet Marino, who declared such to have been his object and ideal. The miracles certainly do astound; they are as strepitosi (clamour-arousing) as the writers claim them to be; how they ever came to occur must be left to the consciences of those who swore on oath to the truth of them.
During this period the Mother of God as a local saint increased in popularity. There was a ceaseless flow of monographs dealing with particular Madonnas, as well as a small library on what the Germans would doubtless call the “Madonna as a Whole.” Here is Serafino Montorio’s “Zodiaco di Maria,” printed in 1715 on the lines of that monster of a book by Gumppenberg. It treats of over two hundred subspecies of Madonna worshipped in different parts of south Italy which is divided, for these celestial purposes, into twelve regions, according to the signs of the Zodiac. The book is dedicated by the author to his “Sovereign Lady the Gran Madre di Dio” and might, in truth, have been written to the glory of that protean old Magna Mater by one of Juvenal’s “tonsured herd” possessed of much industry but little discrimination.[[7]] Such as it is, it reflects the crude mental status of the Dominican order to which the author belonged. I warmly recommend this book to all Englishmen desirous of understanding the south. It is pure, undiluted paganism—paganism of a bad school; one would think it marked the lowest possible ebb of Christian spirituality. But this is by no means the case, as I shall presently show.
[7] The Mater Dei was officially installed in the place of Magna Mater at the Synod of Ephesus in 431.
How different, from such straightforward unreason, are the etherealized, saccharine effusions of the “Glories of Mary,” by Alfonso di Liguori! They represent the other pole of Mariolatry—the gentlemanly pole. And under the influence of Mary-worship a new kind of saintly physiognomy was elaborated, as we can see from contemporary prints and pictures. The bearded men-saints were extinct; in the place of them this mawkish, sub-sexual love for the Virgin developed a corresponding type of adorer—clean-shaven, emasculate youths, posing in ecstatic attitudes with a nauseous feminine smirk. Rather an unpleasant sort of saint.
The unwholesome chastity-ideal, without which no holy man of the period was “complete,” naturally left its mark upon literature, notably on that of certain Spanish theologians. But good specimens of what I mean may also be found in the Theologia Moralis of Liguori; the kind of stuff, that is, which would be classed as “curious” in catalogues and kept in a locked cupboard by the most broad-minded paterfamilias. Reading these elucubrations of Alfonso’s, one feels that the saint has pondered long and lovingly upon themes like an et quando peccata sint oscula or de tactu et adspectu corporis; he writes with all the authority of an expert whose richly-varied experiences in the confessional have been amplified and irradiated by divine inspiration. I hesitate what to call this literature, seeing that it was obviously written to the glory of God and His Virgin Mother. The congregation of the Index, which was severe in the matter of indecent publications and prohibited Boccaccio’s Decameron on these grounds, hailed with approval the appearance of such treatises composed, as they were, for the guidance of young priests.
Cruelty (in the shape of the Inquisition) and lasciviousness (as exemplified by such pious filth)—these are the prime fruits of that cult of asceticism which for centuries the Government strove to impose upon south Italy. If the people were saved, it was due to that substratum of sanity, of Greek sophrosyne, which resisted the one and derided the other. Whoever has saturated himself with the records will marvel not so much that the inhabitants preserved some shreds of common sense and decent feeling, as that they survived at all—he will marvel that the once fair kingdom was not converted into a wilderness, saintly but uninhabited, like Spain itself.
For the movement continued in a vertiginous crescendo. Spaniardism culminated in Bourbonism, and this, again, reached its climax in the closing years of the eighteenth century, when the conditions of south Italy baffled description. I have already (p. 212) given the formidable number of its ecclesiastics; the number of saints was commensurate, but—as often happens when the quantity is excessive—the quality declined. This lazzaroni-period was the debâcle of holiness. So true it is that our gods reflect the hearts that make them.