But to return to her marvellous relations; and, first of all, to those of the infernal species. On one occasion, she tells us, she was favoured with a brief experience of the place she merited in hell:—a kind of low oven, pitch dark, miry, stinking, full of vermin, where sitting and lying were alike impossible; where the walls seemed to press in upon the sufferer—crushing, stifling, burning; where in solitude the lost nature is its own tormentor, tearing itself in a desperate misery, interminable, and so intense, that all she had endured from racking disease was delightful in comparison.[[276]]
At another time, while smitten for five hours together with intolerable pains, the Lord was pleased to make her understand that she was tempted by the devil; and she saw him at her side like a very horrible little negro, gnashing his teeth at her. At last she contrived to sprinkle some holy water on the place where he was. That moment he and her pains vanished together, and her body remained as though she had been severely beaten. It is as well to know that holy water will be found incomparably your best weapon in such cases. The devils will fly from the cross, but may presently return. The drops the Church has blest, do their business effectually. Two nuns, who came into the room after the victory just related, snuffed up the air of the apartment with manifest disgust, and complained of a smell of brimstone. Once the sisters heard distinctly the great thumps the devil was giving her, though she, in a ‘state of recollection,’ was unconscious of his belabouring. The said devil squatted one day on her breviary, and at another time had all but strangled her.[[277]] She once saw, with the eye of her soul, two devils, encompassing, with their meeting horns, the neck of a sinful priest; and at the funeral of a man who had died without confession, a whole swarm of devils tearing and tossing the body and sporting in the grave.
But much more numerous, though as gross as these, are her visions of celestial objects. ‘Being one day in prayer,’ she tells us, ‘our Lord was pleased to show me his sacred hands, of excessive and indescribable beauty; afterwards his divine face, and finally, at mass, all his most sacred humanity.’ At one of his appearances, he drew out with his right hand, the nail which transfixed his left, some of the flesh following it. Three times did she behold in her raptures the most sublime of all visions—the humanity of Christ in the bosom of the Father; very clear to her mind, but impossible to explain. While reciting the Athanasian Creed the mystery of the Trinity was unfolded to her, with unutterable wonderment and comfort. Our Lord paid her, one day, the compliment of saying, that if He had not already created heaven, He would have done so for her sake alone.[[278]]
Some of her ‘Memorable Relations’ are among the most curious examples on record of the materialization of spiritual truth. With all the mystics, she dwells much on the doctrine of Christ in us. But while some of them have exaggerated this truth till they bury under it all the rest, and others have authenticated by its plea every vagary of special revelation, in scarcely any does it assume a form so puerile and so sensuous as with St. Theresa. Repeatedly does she exhort religious persons to imagine Christ as actually within the interior part of their soul. The superstition of the mass contributed largely in her case to render this idea concrete and palpable. In a hymn, composed in a rapturous inspiration after swallowing the consecrated wafer, she describes God as her prisoner.[[279]] She relates in the following passage how she saw the figure of Christ in a kind of internal looking-glass.
‘When reciting the hours one day with the nuns, my soul suddenly lapsed into a state of recollection, and appeared to me as a bright mirror, every part of which, back and sides, top and bottom, was perfectly clear. In the centre of this was represented to me Christ our Lord, as I am accustomed to see him. I seemed to see him in all the parts of my soul also, distinctly as in a mirror, and at the same time this mirror (I do not know how to express it) was all engraven in the Lord himself, by a communication exceeding amorous which I cannot describe. I know that this vision was of great advantage to me, and has been every time I have called it to mind, more especially after communion. I was given to understand, that when a soul is in mortal sin, this mirror is covered with a great cloud, and grows very dark, so that the Lord cannot be seen or represented in us, though he is always present as the Author of our being. In heretics, this mirror is as it were broken, which is much worse than to have it obscured.’[[280]]
Here the simplicitas and nuditas of other mystics become a kind of concrete crystal, inhabited by a divine miniature. In a Clara de Montfaucon, this sensuous supra-naturalism goes a step further, and good Catholics read with reverence, how a Lilliputian Christ on the cross, with the insignia of the passion, was found, on a post-mortem examination, completely formed inside her heart.[[281]]
Similar in its character was a vision with which Theresa was sometimes favoured, of a pretty little angel, with a golden dart, tipped with fire, which he thrust (to her intolerable pain) into her bowels, drawing them out after it, and when thus eviscerated, she was inflamed with a sweet agony of love to God.[[282]]
A multitude more of such favours might be related:—how the Lord gave her a cross of precious stones—a matchless specimen of celestial jewellery to deck his bride withal; how, after communion one day, her mouth was full of blood, that ran out over her dress, and Christ told her it was his own—shed afresh, with great pain, to reward her for the gratification her devotion had afforded him; how (doubtless in imitation of Catherine of Siena) she saw and heard a great white dove fluttering above her head; and how, finally, she repays the attentions of the Jesuit Borgia, by repeated praises of the Order; by recording visions of Jesuits in heaven bearing white banners,—of Jesuits, sword in hand, with resplendent faces, gloriously hewing down heretics; and by predicting the great things to be accomplished through the zeal of that body.[[283]] Enough!
Note to page 159.
The dispute which agitated the Romish Church for more than half a century (1670-1730), concerning the Mistica Ciudad de Dios, attributed to Maria d’Agreda, furnishes a striking instance in proof of the character here ascribed to the controversies of the period. This monstrous book was given to the world as the performance of a Spanish nun, at the dictation of the Virgin, or of God;—both assertions are made, and the difference is not material. Its object is to establish, by pretended special revelation, all the prerogatives assigned to the Queen of Heaven, on the basis of her Immaculate Conception. It is replete with the absurdities and indecencies of prurient superstition. Dufresnoy applies to it, with justice, the words of John of Salisbury,—‘Erumpit impudens et in facie erubescentium populorum genialis thori revelat et denudat arcana.’ It states that the embryo of the Virgin was formed on a Sunday, seventeen days before the ordinary time,—relates how, at eighteen months, the infant demands a nun’s habit from St. Anna, of the colour worn by the Franciscans,—how she sweeps the house, and has nine hundred angels to wait upon her. The partizans of the book maintained, not only that the work itself was a miracle from beginning to end, but that its translation was miraculous also,—a French nun receiving instantaneously the gift of the Spanish tongue, that these disclosures from heaven might pass the Pyrenees. Such was the mass of corruption about which the gadflies and the ‘shard-borne beetles’ of the Church settled in contending swarms. This was the book on whose wholesomeness for the flock of Christ his Vicars could not venture to decide—eventually, rather evading reply than pronouncing sentence. No such scruple concerning the unwholesomeness of the Bible.