Chapter I

It is no flaming lustre, made of light,
No sweet concert nor well-timed harmony,
Ambrosia, for to feast the appetite,
Of flowery odour mixed with spicery,—
No soft embrace, or pleasure bodily;
And yet it is a kind of inward feast,
A harmony that sounds within the breast,
An odour, light, embrace, in which the soul doth rest.

A heavenly feast no hunger can consume;
A light unseen yet shines in every place;
A sound no time can steal; a sweet perfume
No winds can scatter; an entire embrace
That no satiety can e’er unlace;
Engraced into so high a favour there,
The saints with all their peers whole worlds outwear,
And things unseen do see, and thing unheard do hear.

GILES FLETCHER.

Gower fulfilled his promise, and read, on two successive evenings, the following paper on the Mysticism of the Counter-Reformation, as illustrated principally by its two Spanish champions, St. Theresa and St. John of the Cross:—

I. _Saint Theresa._

On the revival of letters the mysticism of Alexandria reappeared in
Florence. That lamp which, in the study of Ficinus, burnt night and
day before the bust of Plato, proclaimed, in reality, the worship of
Plotinus. The erudite feebleness of Alexandrian eclecticism lived
again in Gemisthus Pletho,—blended, as of old, Platonic ideas,
oriental emanations, and Hellenic legend,—dreamed of a philosophic
worship, emasculated and universal, which should harmonize in a
common vagueness all the religions of the world. Nicholas of Cusa
re-adapted the allegorical mathematics which had flourished beneath
the Ptolemies and restored the Pythagoras of the Neo-Platonists.
Pico of Mirandola (the admirable Crichton of his time) sought to
reconcile the dialectics of Aristotle with the oracles of Chaldæa,
and to breathe into withered scholasticism the mysterious life of
Cabbalistic wisdom. An age so greedy of antiquity was imposed on by
the most palpable fabrications; and Greece beheld the servile
product of her second childhood reverenced as the vigorous promise
of her first. Patricius sought the sources of Greek philosophy in
writings attributed to Hermes and Zoroaster. He wrote to Gregory
XIV. proposing that authors such as these should be substituted for
Aristotle in the schools, as the best means of advancing true
religion and reclaiming heretical Germany.

The position of these scholars with regard to Protestantism
resembles, not a little, that of their Alexandrian predecessors when
confronted by Christianity. They were the philosophic advocates of a
religion in which they had themselves lost faith. They attempted to
reconcile a corrupt philosophy and a corrupt religion, and they made
both worse. The love of literature and art was confined to a narrow
circle of courtiers and literati. While Lutheran pamphlets in the
vernacular set all the North in a flame, the philosophic refinements
of the Florentine dilettanti were aristocratic, exclusive, and
powerless. Their intellectual position was fatal to sincerity; their
social condition equally so to freedom. The despotism of the Roman
emperors was more easily evaded by a philosopher of ancient times
than the tyranny of a Visconti or a D’Este, by a scholar at Milan or
Ferrara. It was the fashion to patronise men of letters. But the
usual return of subservience and flattery was rigorously exacted.
The Italians of the fifteenth century had long ceased to be familiar
with the worst horrors of war, and Charles VIII., with his ferocious
Frenchmen, appeared to them another Attila. Each Italian state
underwent, on its petty scale, the fate of Imperial Rome. The
philosophic and religious conservatism of Florence professed
devotion to a church which reproduced, with most prolific abundance,
the superstitions of by-gone Paganism,—of that very Paganism in
whose behalf the Neo-Platonist philosopher entered the lists against
the Christian father. To such men, the earnest religious movement of
the North was the same mysterious, barbaric, formidable foe which
primitive Christianity had been to the Alexandrians. The old
conflict between Pagan and Christian—the man of taste and the man of
faith—the man who lived for the past, and the man who lived for the
future, was renewed, in the sixteenth century, between the Italian
and the German. The Florentine Platonists, moreover, not only shared
in the weakness of their prototypes, as the occupants of an attitude
radically false; they failed to exhibit in their lives that
austerity of morals which won respect for Plotinus and Porphyry,
even among those who cared nothing for their speculations. Had
Romanism been unable to find defenders more thoroughly in earnest,
the shock she then received must have been her deathblow. She must
have perished as Paganism perished. But, wise in her generation, she
took her cause out of the hands of that graceful and heartless
Deism, so artificial and so self-conscious,—too impalpable and too
refined for any real service to gods or men. She needed men as full
of religious convictions as were these of philosophical and poetic
conceits. She needed men to whom the bland and easy incredulity of
such symposium-loving scholars was utterly inconceivable—abhorrent
as the devil and all his works. And such men she found. For by
reason of the measure of truth she held, she was as powerful to
enslave the noblest as to unleash the vilest passions of our nature.
It was given her, she said, to bind and to loose. It was time, she
knew, to bind up mercy and to loose revenge. A succession of
ferocious sanctities fulminated from the chair of St. Peter. Science
was immured in the person of Galileo. The scholarship, so beloved by
Leo, would have been flung into the jaws of the Inquisition by
Caraffa. Every avenue, open once on sufferance, to freer thought and
action, was rigorously blocked up. Princes were found willing to cut
off the right hand, pluck out the right eye of their people, that
Rome might triumph by this suicide of nations. But nowhere did she
find a prince and a people alike so swift to shed blood at her
bidding, as among that imperious race of which Philip II. was at
once the sovereign and the type. In Spain was found, in its
perfection, the chivalry of persecution: there dwelt the aristocracy
of fanaticism. It was long doubtful whether the Roman or the Spanish
Inquisition was the more terrible for craft, the more ingenious in
torments, the more glorious with blood.

But Spain was not merely the political and military head of the
Counter-Reformation. She contributed illustrious names to relume the
waning galaxy of saints. Pre-eminent among these luminaries shine
Ignatius Loyola, Theresa, and John of the Cross. The first taught
Rome what she had yet to learn in the diplomacy of superstition.
Education and intrigue became the special province of his order: it
was the training school of the teachers: it claimed and merited the
monopoly of the vizard manufacture. Rome found in Theresa her most
famous seeress; in John, her consummate ascetic. It was not in the
upper region of mysticism that the narrow intellect and invincible
will of Loyola were to realize distinction. He had his revelations,
indeed,—was rapt away to behold the mystery of the Trinity made
manifest, and the processes of creation detailed. But such favours
are only the usual insignia so proper to the founder of an order.
Compared with St. Francis the life of Ignatius is poor in vision and
in miracle. But his relics have since made him ample amends. Bartoli
enumerates a hundred miraculous cures.[263] John and Theresa were
mystics _par excellence_: the former, of the most abstract
theopathetic school; the latter, with a large infusion of the
theurgic element, unrivalled in vision—angelic and dæmoniacal.

But one principle is dominant in the three, and is the secret of the
saintly honours paid them. In the alarm and wrath awakened by the
Reformation, Rome was supremely concerned to enforce the doctrine of
blind obedience to ecclesiastical superiors. These Spanish saints
lived and laboured and suffered to commend this dogma to the Church
and to all mankind. Summoned by the Rule of Obedience, they were
ready to inflict or to endure the utmost misery. Their natures were
precisely of the kind most fitted to render service and receive
promotion at that juncture. They were glowing and ductile. Their
very virtues were the dazzle of the red-hot brand, about to stamp
the brow with slavery. Each excellence displayed by such
accomplished advocates of wrong, withered one of the rising hopes of
mankind. Their prayers watered with poisoned water every growth of
promise in the field of Europe. Their Herculean labours were
undertaken, not to destroy, but to multiply the monsters which
infested every highway of thought. Wherever the tears of Theresa
fell, new weeds of superstition sprang up. Every shining austerity
endured by John gilded another link in the chain which should bind
his fellows. The jubilant bells of their devotion rang the knell of
innumerable martyrs.

In the fourteenth century, mysticism was often synonymous with
considerable freedom of thought. In the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, it was allowed to exist only as it subserved the
ecclesiastical scheme. The problem was,—how to excite the feeling
and imagination of the devotee to the highest pitch, and yet to
retain him in complete subjection to the slightest movement of the
rein. Of this problem John and Theresa are the practical and
complete solution. All their fire went off by the legitimate
conducting-rod: every flash was serviceable: not a gleam was wasted.
Once mysticism was a kind of escape for nature. The mystic left
behind him much of the coarse externalism necessary to his Church,
and found refuge in an inner world of feeling and imagination. But
now the Church, by means of the confessor, made mysticism itself the
innermost dungeon of her prison-house. Every emotion was
methodically docketed; every yearning of the heart minutely
catalogued. The sighs must always ascend in the right place: the
tears must trickle in orthodox course. The prying calculations of
the casuist had measured the sweep of every wave in the heaving
ocean of the soul. The instant terrible knife cut off the first
spray of love that shot out beyond the trimly-shaven border of
prescription. Strong feelings were dangerous guests, unless they
knew (like the old Romans) when to go home and slay themselves, did
that Tiberius, the director, but bestow on them a frown.

In France, too, mysticism was to fall under the same yoke; but the
Frenchman could never reach the hard austerity of the Spaniard. The
sixteenth century produced St. Francis de Sales on the north, and
St. John of the Cross on the south, of the Pyrénées. With the
former, mysticism is tender, genial, graceful; it appeals to every
class; it loves and would win all men. With the latter, it is a dark
negation—a protracted suffering—an anguish and a joy known only to
the cloister. De Sales was to John, as a mystic, what Henry IV. was
to Philip as a Catholic King. Even in Italy, the Counter-Reformation
was comparatively humane and philanthropic with Carlo Borromeo. In
Spain alone is it little more, at its very best, than a fantastic
gloom and a passionate severity.

But everywhere the principle of subserviency is in the ascendant.
The valetudinarian devotee becomes more and more the puppet of his
spiritual doctor. The director winds him up. He derives his
spiritless semblance of life wholly from the priestly mechanism. It
may be said of him, as of the sick man in Massinger’s play,

That he lives he owes
To art, not Nature; she has given him o’er.
He moves, like the fairy king, on screws and wheels
Made by his doctor’s recipes, and yet still
They are out of joint, and every day repairing.

Theresa was born at Avila, in the year 1515, just two years (as
Ribadeneira reminds us) before ‘that worst of men,’ Martin
Luther.[264] The lives of the saints were her nursery tales.
Cinderella is matter of fact; Jack and the Beanstalk commonplace,
beside the marvellous stories that must have nourished her infantine
faculty of wonder. At seven years old she thinks eternal bliss
cheaply bought by martyrdom; sets out with her little brother on a
walk to Africa, hoping to be despatched by the Moors, and is
restored to her disconsolate parents by a cruel matter-of-fact
uncle, who meets them at the bridge. Her dolls’ houses are
nunneries. These children construct in the garden, not dirt pies,
but mud-hermitages; which, alas! will always tumble down.

As she grows up, some gay associates, whose talk is of ribbons,
lovers, and bull-fights, secularise her susceptible mind. She reads
many romances of chivalry, and spends more time at the glass. Her
father sends her, when fifteen, to a convent of Augustinian nuns in
Avila, to rekindle her failing devotion. A few days reconcile her to
the change, and she is as religious as ever.

Then, what with a violent fever, Jerome’s Epistles, and a
priest-ridden uncle, she resolves on becoming a nun. Her father
refuses his consent; so she determines on a pious elopement, and
escapes to the Carmelite convent. There she took the vows in her
twentieth year.[265]

We find her presently vexed, like so many of the Romanist female
saints, with a strange complication of maladies,—cramps,
convulsions, catalepsies, vomitings, faintings, &c. &c. At one time
she lay four days in a state of coma; her grave was dug, hot wax had
been dropped upon her eyelids, and extreme unction administered; the
funeral service was performed; when she came to herself, expressed
her desire to confess, and received the sacrament.[266] It is not
improbable that some of the trances she subsequently experienced,
and regarded as supernatural, may have been bodily seizures of a
similar kind. But at this time she was not good enough for such
favours; so the attacks are attributed to natural causes. It is
significant that the miraculous manifestations of the Romish Church
should have been vouchsafed only to women whose constitution (as in
the case of the Catharines and Lidwina) was thoroughly broken down
by years of agonizing disease. After three years (thanks to St.
Joseph) Theresa was restored to comparative health, but remained
subject all her life, at intervals, to severe pains.[267]

On her recovery, she found her heart still but too much divided
between Christ and the world. That is to say, she was glad when her
friends came to see her, and she enjoyed witty and agreeable chat,
through the grating, with ladies whose conversation was not always
confined to spiritual topics. Grievously did her conscience smite
her for such unfaithfulness, and bitterly does she regret the laxity
of her confessors, who failed to tell her that it was a heinous
crime.

In her twenty-fourth year she resumed the practice of mental prayer,
and for the next twenty years continued it, with many inward
vicissitudes, and alternate tendernesses and desertions on the part
of the Divine Bridegroom. Her forty-fourth year is memorable as the
season of her entrance on those higher experiences, which have made
her name famous as the great revivalist of supernatural prayer and
mystical devotion in the sixteenth century.

The Saint Bartholomew’s day of 1562 was a day of glory for our
saint. Then was consecrated the new Convent of St. Joseph, at Avila,
established in spite of so much uproar and opposition; that convent
wherein the primitive austerity of the Carmelite Order was to be
restored,—where Theresa is presently appointed prioress (against her
will, as usual),—where there shall be no chats at the grating, no
rich endowment; but thirteen ‘fervent virgins’ shall dwell there,
discalceated (that is sandalled not shod), serge-clad,
flesh-abhorring, couched on straw, and all but perpetually
dumb.[268] The remainder of her life, from about her fiftieth year,
would appear to have been somewhat less fertile in marvellous
experiences. She was now recognised as the foundress of the Reformed
Carmelites, and could produce warrant from Rome, authorizing her to
found as many convents of the Bare-footed as she pleased. She was
harassed by the jealous intrigues of the old ‘mitigated’ Order, but
indefatigably befriended by John of the Cross, and other
thorough-going ascetics. She lived to see established sixteen
nunneries of the Reformed, and fourteen monasteries for friars of
the same rule. She has left us a long history of her foundations, of
all the troubles and difficulties she overcame; showing how funds
were often not forthcoming, but faith was; how apathy and opposition
were done away; and how busy she must have been (too busy for many
visions); all of which let whomsoever read that can.

* * * * *

In the year 1562, when Theresa had successfully commenced the
reformation of her Order, she wrote her life, at the bidding of her
confessor. In this autobiography her spiritual history is laid bare
without reserve. The narrative was published by her superiors, and
therein the heretic may listen to what she whispered in the ear of
her director during the years most prolific in extravagance. We can
thus discern the working of the confessional. Commanded to disclose
her most secret thoughts, we see her nervously afraid of omitting to
indicate the minutest variations of the religious thermometer, of
approaching the committal of that sin which Romanist devotees only
can commit—concealment from a confessor. She searches for evil in
herself, and creates it by the search. The filmiest evanescence of
the feeling has to be detained and anatomized, and changes into
something else under the scrutiny. It is as though she had let into
her crucifix a piece of looking-glass, that she might see reflected
every transport of devotion, and faithfully register the same in her
memory against the next shrift. After some excess of rapture, she
must set to work at her technical analysis; observe what faculties
were dormant, and what still active—what regions of the mind were
tenanted by divinity, and what still left to the possession of her
sinful self. Her intellect was never strong. She confesses that she
found her understanding rather in the way than otherwise.[269] Under
this omnipresent spiritual despotism it fell prostrate utterly. When
she has been favoured with a vision, she is not to know whether it
has steamed up from hell or been let down from heaven, until the
decision of her confessor fills her with horror or delight. The
cloister is her universe. Her mind, unformed, and uninformed, is an
empty room, papered with leaves from her breviary. She knew little
of that charity which makes gracious inroads on the outer world;
which rendered human so many of her sister-saints; which we admire
and pity in Madame de Chantal, admire and love in Madame Guyon. No
feet-washing do we read of, open or secret; no hospital-tending, no
ministry among the poor. The greater activity of her later years
brought her in contact with scarcely any but ‘religious’ persons.
Her ascetic zeal was directed, not for, but against, the mitigation
of suffering. It made many monks and nuns uncomfortable; but I am
not aware that it made any sinners better, or any wretched happy.
Peter of Alcantara is her admiration; he who for forty years never
slept more than one hour and a half in the twenty-four, and then in
a sitting posture, with his head against a wooden peg in the wall;
who ate in general only every third day; and who looked, she says,
as if he were made of the roots of trees (_hecho de reyzes de
arboles_[270]). Lodged in her monastic cranny of creation, she
convulses herself with useless fervours, absolutely ignorant of all
things and persons non-ecclesiastical. Her highest ambition is to
reduce the too-palpable reality of herself to the minutest possible
compass, and to hide herself—a kind of parasitical insect or
entozoön—in the personality of her confessor. Yet, complete as is
this suicide, she is never sure that she is sufficiently dead, and
incessantly asks him if _he_ is quite sure that she is sincere. Such
a life is an object of compassion more than blame. She was herself
the victim of the wicked system to which her name was to impart a
new impulse. The spasmodic energy she at last displays about her
Reformation is not native strength. She was surrounded from the
first by those who saw clearly what Rome needed at that time, who
beheld in her first almost accidental effort the germ of what they
desired, and in herself a fit instrument. A whisper from one of
these guides would be translated by such an imagination into a
direct commission from heaven. They had but to touch a spring, and
her excitable nature was surrounded with the phantasmagoria of
vision; one scene produced another, and that unfolded into more—all,
the reiteration and expansion of the bent once given to her fixed
idea.

Theresa experienced her first rapture while reciting the _Veni
Creator_, when she heard these words spoken in the interior of her
heart—‘I will have thee hold converse, not with men, but
angels.‘[271] She had been conscious, on several previous occasions,
of supernatural excitements in prayer, and was much perplexed
thereby, as indeed were several of her confessors. Here were
irresistible devotional seizures for which they had no rule ready.
They suspected an evil spirit, advised a struggle against such
extraordinary influences. But the more she resists, the more does
the Lord cover her with sweetnesses and glories, heap on her favours
and caresses. At last the celebrated Francis Borgia comes to Avila.
The Jesuit bids her resist no more; and she goes on the mystical way
rejoicing. The first rapture took place shortly after her interviews
with the future General of the Society of Jesus.

A word on this system of spiritual directorship. It is the vital
question for mystics of the Romish communion. Nowhere is the duty of
implicit self-surrender to the director or confessor more constantly
inculcated than in the writings of Theresa and John of the Cross,
and nowhere are the inadequacy and mischief of the principle more
apparent. John warns the mystic that his only safeguard against
delusion lies in perpetual and unreserved appeal to his director.
Theresa tells us that whenever our Lord commanded her in prayer to
do anything, and her confessor ordered the opposite, the Divine
guide enjoined obedience to the human; and would influence the mind
of the confessor afterwards, so that he was moved to counsel what he
had before forbidden![272] Of course. For who knows what might come
of it if enthusiasts were to have visions and revelations on their
own account? The director must draw after him these fiery and
dangerous natures, as the lion-leaders of an Indian pageantry
conduct their charge, holding a chain and administering opiates. The
question between the orthodox and the heterodox mysticism of the
fourteenth century was really one of theological doctrine. The same
question in the sixteenth and seventeenth was simply one of
ecclesiastical interests.[273] The condemned quietists were merely
mystics imperfectly subservient—unworkable raw material, and as such
flung into the fire. Out of the very same substance, duly wrought
and fashioned, might have come a saint like Theresa. By the great
law of Romish policy, whatever cannot be made to contribute to her
ornament or defence is straightway handed over to the devil.
Accordingly, the only mysticism acknowledged by that Church grows up
beneath her walls, and invigorates, with herbs of magic potency, her
garrison,—resembles the strip of culture about some eastern frontier
town, that does but fringe with green the feet of the ramparts; all
the panorama beyond, a wilderness;—for Bedouin marauders render
tillage perilous and vain. Thus, O mystic, not a step beyond that
shadow; or hell’s black squadrons, sweeping down, will carry thee
off captive to their home of dolour!

The confessions of Theresa are a continual refutation of her
counsels. She acknowledges that she herself had long and grievously
suffered from the mistakes of her early directors. She knew others
also who had endured much through similar incompetency. The judgment
of one conductor was reversed by his successor. She exhorts her nuns
to the greatest care in the selection of a confessor,—on no account
to choose a vain man or an ignorant. She vindicates their liberty to
change him when they deem it desirable.[274] John of the Cross, too,
dilates on the mischief which may be done by an inexperienced
spiritual guide. At one time Theresa was commanded to make the sign
of the cross when Christ manifested Himself to her, as though the
appearance had been the work of some deceiving spirit.[275] Her next
guide assured her that the form she beheld was no delusion. Dreadful
discovery, yet joyful! She had attempted to exorcise her Lord; but
the virtue of obedience had blotted out the sin of blasphemy. Thus
does each small infallibility mould her for his season, and then
pass her on to another. Her soul, with despair stamped on one side
and glory imaged on the other, spins dizzy in the air; and whether,
when it comes down, heaven or hell shall be uppermost, depends
wholly upon the twist of the ecclesiastical thumb.

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.

The Abbé Dufresnoy handles the question broadly, but most of the combatants are furious, this side or that, from some small party motive. The French divines censure the book, for fear it should encourage Quietism—their great bugbear at that time. The Spanish ecclesiastics, jealous of the honour done their countrywoman, retorted with a _Censura Censuræ_. But about the habit the battle was hottest. Every Carmelite must reject the book with indignation, for had they not always believed, on the best authority, that the Virgin wore a dress of _their_ colour? The Franciscans again, and the religious of St. Clare, would defend it as eagerly, for did not its pages authorize anew from heaven their beloved ashen hue? Again, did not these revelations represent the Almighty as adopting the Scotist doctrine? On this great question, of course, Scotist and Thomist would fight to the death. Some account of the controversy, and an examination of the book, will be found in Dufresnoy, _Traité Historique et Dogmatique sur les Apparitions, les Visions et les Révélations particulières_, tom. II. chap. xi. (1751).

The same spirit betrays itself in the instance of Molinos. Even after he had written his _Guida Spirituale_, he was patronized by the Jesuits because he had employed his pen against Jansenism, and the Franciscans approved his book, while the Dominicans rejected it, because he had delighted the one party and disgusted the other by speaking somewhat disparagingly of Thomas Aquinas.

Footnote 263:

Alban Butler, July 31.

Footnote 264:

Ribadeneira, _Flos Sanctorum_, Appendix, p. 35 (Ed. 1659).

Footnote 265:

_Los Libros de la B. M. Teresa de Jesus_, _Vida_, capp. i. iii. This
edition of 1615 contains the _Camino de la Perfecion_, and the
_Castillo espiritual_, with the _Life_. The _Foundations_, at which I
have only glanced in the French, are devoted to business, not
mysticism.

Footnote 266:

_Vida_, cap. v. p. 26.

Footnote 267:

Teresa confesses that during the first year of her seizure her
disorder was such as sometimes completely to deprive her of her
senses:—Tan grave, que casi me privava el sentido siempre, y algunas
vezes del todo quedava sin el.—Pp. 17.

Footnote 268:

_Vida_, cap. xxxvi.

Footnote 269:

_Vida_, p. 83.

Footnote 270:

_Vida_, cap. xxvii. p. 196.

Footnote 271:

_Vida_, cap. xxiv. p. 171.

Footnote 272:

_Vida_, cap. xxvi. p. 186. Siempre que el Señor me mandava alguna cosa
en la oracion, si el confessor me dezia otra, me tornava el Señor a
dezir que le obedeciesse: despues su Magestad le bolvia para que me lo
tornasse a mandar. She speaks in the very same page of bad advice
given her by one of her confessors.

Footnote 273:

See Note on p. 164.

Footnote 274:

_Vida_, p. 85; _Camino de Perfecion_, capp. 4 and 5.

Footnote 275:

_Vida_, cap. xxix., p. 209.

Footnote 276:

_Vida_, cap. xxxii.

Footnote 277:

_Ibid._, cap. xxxi.

Footnote 278:

_Vida_, pp. 198, 301, 209, 321. This last communication is not related
by herself: we have it on the authority of Ribadeneira:—Itidem ei
rursus apparens dixit: Cœlum nisi creassem, ob te solam crearem.—_Vita
Teresiæ_, p. 41.

Footnote 279:

Originally:

Mas causa en mi tal passion
Ver à Dios mi prisionero
Que muero porque no muero.

Footnote 280:

_Vida_, cap. xl. p. 324.

Footnote 281:

The biographers of the saints differ both as to the time of her death
(1308, 1299, 1393, are dates assigned), and as to the number and
nature of the miraculous formations discovered within her heart.
Ribadeneira’s account is by no means the most extravagant. He
says:—Aperto ejus corde amplo et concavo, eidem repererunt impressa
Dominicæ passionis insignia, nempe crucifixum cum tribus clavis,
lancea, spongia, et arundine hinc, et illinic flagris, virgis,
columna, corona spinea; atque hæc insignia Dominicæ Passionis, nervis
validis durisque constabant.—_Vida S. Claræ_, p. 161.

Footnote 282:

_Vida_, cap. xxix, p. 213. Speaking of the delicious anguish, she
says:—No es dolor corporal, sino espiritual, aunque no dexa de
participar el cuerpo algo, y aun harto. Es un requiebro tan suave que
passa entre el almo y Dios que suplico yo a su bondad lo dè a gustar a
quien pensare que miento.

Footnote 283:

_Vida_, cap. xxxviii. pp. 300, 301; and xl. 328.