‘The spirit of prayer was nourished and increased from their contrivances and endeavours to disallow me any time for practising it. I loved without motive or reason for loving; for nothing passed in my head, but much in the innermost of my soul. I thought not about any recompence, gift, or favour, or anything which regards the lover. The Well-beloved was the only object which attracted my heart wholly to Himself. I could not contemplate His attributes. I knew nothing else but to love and to suffer. Oh, ignorance more truly learned than any science of the Doctors, since it so well taught me Jesus Christ crucified, and brought me to be in love with His holy cross! In its beginning I was attracted with so much force, that it seemed as if my head was going to join my heart. I found that insensibly my body bent in spite of me. I did not then comprehend from whence it came; but have learned since, that as all passed in the will, which is the sovereign of the powers, that attracted the others after it, and reunited them in God, their divine centre and sovereign happiness. And as these powers were then unaccustomed to be united, it required the more violence to effect that union. Wherefore it was the more perceived. Afterwards it became so strongly riveted as to seem to be quite natural. This was so strong that I could have wished to die, in order to be inseparably united without any interstice to Him who so powerfully attracted my heart. As all passed in the will, the imagination and the understanding being absorbed in it, in a union of enjoyment, I knew not what to say, having never read or heard of such a state as I experienced; for, before this, I had known nothing of the operations of God in souls. I had only read Philothea (written by St. Francis de Sales), with the Imitation of Christ (by Thomas à Kempis), and the Holy Scriptures; also the Spiritual Combat, which mentions none of these things.’[[318]]
In this extract she describes strange physical sensations as accompanying her inward emotion. The intense excitement of the soul assumes, in her over-strained and secluded imagination, the character of a corporeal seizure. The sickly frame, so morbidly sensitive, appears to participate in the supernatural influences communicated to the spirit. On a subsequent occasion, she speaks of herself as so oppressed by the fulness of the Divine manifestations imparted to her, as to be compelled to loosen her dress. More than once some of those who sat next her imagined that they perceived a certain marvellous efflux of grace proceeding from her to themselves. She believed that many persons, for whom she was interceding with great fervour, were sensible at the time of an extraordinary gracious influence instantaneously vouchsafed, and that her spirit communicated mysteriously, ‘in the Lord,’ with the spirits of those dear to her when far away. She traced a special intervention of Providence in the fact, that she repeatedly ‘felt a strong draught to the door’ just when it was necessary to go out to receive a secret letter from her friend, Mère Granger; that the rain should have held up precisely when she was on her road to or from mass; and that at the very intervals when she was able to steal out to hear it, some priest was always found performing, or ready to perform the service, though at a most unusual hour.[[319]]
V.
Imaginary as all this may have been, the Church of Rome, at least, had no right to brand with the stigma of extravagance any such transference of the spiritual to the sensuous, of the metaphysical to the physical. The fancies of Madame Guyon in this respect are innocent enough in comparison with the monstrosities devised by Romish marvel-mongers to exalt her saints withal. St. Philip Neri was so inflamed with love to God as to be insensible to all cold, and burned with such a fire of devotion that his body, divinely feverish, could not be cooled by exposure to the wildest winter night. For two-and-fifty years he was the subject of a supernatural palpitation, which kept his bed and chair, and everything moveable about him, in a perpetual tremble. For that space of time his breast was miraculously swollen to the thickness of a fist above his heart. On a post-mortem examination of the holy corpse, it was found that two of the ribs had been broken, to allow the sacred ardour of his heart more room to play! The doctors swore solemnly that the phenomenon could be nothing less than a miracle. A divine hand had thus literally ‘enlarged the heart’ of the devotee.[[320]] St. Philip enjoyed, with many other saints, the privilege of being miraculously elevated into the air by the fervour of his heavenward aspirations. The Acta Sanctorum relates how Ida of Louvain—seized with an overwhelming desire to present her gifts with the Wise Men to the child Jesus—received, on the eve of the Three Kings, the distinguished favour of being permitted to swell to a terrific size, and then gradually to return to her original dimensions. On another occasion, she was gratified by being thrown down in the street in an ecstacy, and enlarging so that her horror-stricken attendant had to embrace her with all her might to keep her from bursting. The noses of eminent saints have been endowed with so subtile a sense that they have detected the stench of concealed sins, and enjoyed, as a literal fragrance, the well-known odour of sanctity. St. Philip Neri was frequently obliged to hold his nose and turn away his head when confessing very wicked people. In walking the streets of some depraved Italian town, the poor man must have endured all the pains of Coleridge in Cologne, where, he says,
‘I counted two-and-seventy stenches,
All well-defined, and several stinks!’
Maria of Oignys received what theurgic mysticism calls the gift of jubilation. For three days and nights upon the point of death, she sang without remission her ecstatic swan-song, at the top of a voice whose hoarseness was miraculously healed. She felt as though the wing of an angel were spread upon her breast, thrilling her heart with the rapture, and pouring from her lips the praises, of the heavenly world. With the melodious modulation of an inspired recitative, she descanted on the mysteries of the Trinity and the incarnation—improvised profound expositions of the Scripture—invoked the saints, and interceded for her friends.[[321]] A nun who visited Catharina Ricci in her ecstasy, saw with amazement her face transformed into the likeness of the Redeemer’s countenance. St. Hildegard, in the enjoyment and description of her visions, and in the utterance of her prophecies, was inspired with a complete theological terminology hitherto unknown to mortals. A glossary of the divine tongue was long preserved among her manuscripts at Wiesbaden.[[322]] It is recorded in the life of St. Veronica of Binasco, that she received the miraculous gift of tears in a measure so copious, that the spot where she knelt appeared as though a jug of water had been overset there. She was obliged to have an earthen vessel ready in her cell to receive the supernatural efflux, which filled it frequently to the weight of several Milan pounds! Ida of Nivelles, when in an ecstasy one day, had it revealed to her that a dear friend was at the same moment in the same condition. The friend also was simultaneously made aware that Ida was immersed in the same abyss of divine light with herself. Thenceforward they were as one soul in the Lord, and the Virgin Mary appeared to make a third in the saintly fellowship. Ida was frequently enabled to communicate with spiritual personages, without words, after the manner of angelic natures. On one occasion, when at a distance from a priest to whom she was much attached, both she and the holy man were entranced at the same time; and, when wrapt to heaven, he beheld her in the presence of Christ, at whose command she communicated to him, by a spiritual kiss, a portion of the grace with which she herself had been so richly endowed. To Clara of Montfaucon allusion has already been made. In the right side of her heart was found, completely formed, a little figure of Christ upon the cross, about the size of a thumb. On the left, under what resembled the bloody cloth, lay the instruments of the passion—the crown of thorns, the nails, &c. So sharp was the miniature lance, that the Vicar-General Berengarius, commissioned to assist at the examination by the Bishop of Spoleto, pricked therewith his reverend finger. This marvel was surpassed in the eighteenth century by a miracle more piquant still. Veronica Giuliani caused a drawing to be made of the many forms and letters which she declared had been supernaturally modelled within her heart. To the exultation of the faithful—and the everlasting confusion of all Jews, Protestants, and Turks—a post-mortem examination disclosed the accuracy of her description, to the minutest point. There were the sacred initials in a large and distinct Roman character, the crown of thorns, two flames, seven swords, the spear, the reed, &c.—all arranged just as in the diagram she had furnished.[[323]] The diocese of Liège was edified, in the twelfth century, by seeing, in the person of the celebrated Christina Mirabilis, how completely the upward tendency of protracted devotion might vanquish the law of gravitation. So strongly was she drawn away from this gross earth, that the difficulty was to keep her on the ground. She was continually flying up to the tops of lonely towers and trees, there to enjoy a rapture with the angels, and a roost with the birds. In the frequency, the elevation, and the duration of her ascents into the air, she surpassed even the high-flown devotion of St. Peter of Alcantara, who was often seen suspended high above the fig-trees which overshadowed his hermitage at Badajos—his eyes upturned, his arms outspread—while the servant sent to summon him to dinner, gazed with open mouth, and sublunary cabbage cooled below. The limbs of Christina lost the rigidity, as her body lost the grossness, common to vulgar humanity. In her ecstasies she was contracted into the spherical form—her head was drawn inward and downward towards her breast, and she rolled up like a hedgehog. When her relatives wished to take and secure her, they had to employ a man to hunt her like a bird. Having started his game, he had a long run across country before he brought her down, in a very unsportsmanlike manner, by a stroke with his bludgeon which broke her shin. When a few miracles had been wrought to vindicate her aërostatic mission, she was allowed to fly about in peace.[[324]] She has occupied, ever since, the first place in the ornithology of Roman-catholic saintship. Such are a few of the specimens which might be collected in multitudes from Romanist records, showing how that communion has bestowed its highest favour on the most coarse and materialised apprehensions of spiritual truth. Extravagant inventions such as these—monstrous as the adventures of Baron Münchausen, without their wit—have been invested with the sanction and defended by the thunder of the Papal chair. Yet this very Church of Rome incarcerated Molinos and Madame Guyon as dangerous enthusiasts.
VI.
Madame Guyon had still some lessons to learn. On a visit to Paris, the glittering equipages of the park, and the gaieties of St. Cloud, revived the old love of seeing and being seen. During a tour in the provinces with her husband, flattering visits and graceful compliments everywhere followed such beauty, such accomplishments, and such virtue, with a delicate and intoxicating applause. Vanity—dormant, but not dead—awoke within her for the last time. She acknowledged, with bitter self-reproach, the power of the world, the weakness of her own resolves. In the spiritual desertion which ensued, she recognised the displeasure of her Lord, and was wretched. She applied to confessors—they were miserable comforters, all of them. They praised her while she herself was filled with self-loathing. She estimated the magnitude of her sins by the greatness of the favour which had been shown her. The bland worldliness of her religious advisers could not blind so true a heart, or pacify so wakeful a conscience. She found relief only in a repentant renewal of her self-dedication to the Saviour, in renouncing for ever the last remnant of confidence in any strength of her own.
It was about this period that she had a remarkable conversation with a beggar, whom she found upon a bridge, as, followed by her footman, she was walking one day to church. This singular mendicant refused her offered alms—spoke to her of God and divine things—and then of her own state, her devotion, her trials, and her faults. He declared that God required of her not merely to labour as others did to secure their salvation, that they might escape the pains of hell, but to aim at such perfection and purity in this life, as to escape those of purgatory. She asked him who he was. He replied, that he had formerly been a beggar, but now was such no more;—mingled with the stream of people, and she never saw him afterwards.[[325]]