The Book of Divine Consolation of the Blessed Angela of Foligno

[Stone]

The Book of Divine Consolation of the Blessed Angela of Foligno
by Angela, of Foligno (1248?–1309);
translated by Mary G. Steegmann; with an introduction by Algar Labouchere Thorold (1866–1936)
Published 1909
Taken from here.
[All reformatting done by The Catacombs]

Introduction

What is the secret and so potent attraction of the Saints? Renan says somewhere that he would have given everything he had to have seen St. Mary of Egypt pacing the desert in ecstasy, half-starved and turned to the semblance of Nebuchadnezzar. And Renan liberally discounted the value, not only of Theology, but also of the particular virtue, the loss of which had driven that Saint to such an unusual mode of life. The interest in sanctity evidently survives theological and ethical pre-occupations. Indeed, to-day, the Saint is perhaps an object of higher intrinsic interest to "unbelievers" than to the faithful. For to the faithful he is primarily useful, either as being efficacious in various troubles of life or, on a higher plane, as a sort of spiritual agent, obtaining graces for his clients. O admirabile commercium! But, like everything else, this celestial intercourse suffers from the defects of its qualities. I do not wish to be understood as making light of superstition. The humblest blossom of that luxuriant garden is of infinite value, nor do the roots of our most highly rationalised opinions grow outside it. Nevertheless the important position of the Saint in the Catholic economy does tend to conceal his real personality from his worshippers. He inevitably tends to be considered more as a means to an end, than as an object intrinsically worthy of contemplation. In these circumstances the actual historical value of his personality is apt to be obscured by legend and fancy. Legend, of course, if at all contemporaneous, is of the highest value as illustrating his effect on those with whom he came in contact. We could ill spare in the life of St. Francis the Wolf of Gubbio. Modern devotional fancy is less illuminative. It throws no light upon the character of St. Anthony of Padua to learn that centuries after his death he recovered some papers lost by that devout man King Charles II. What then is it that constitutes the intrinsic interest of the Saint when his supernatural value has gone?

One reason, I think, for this interest is that the Saint represents, in a quite unique manner, the satisfaction of a desire which all men more or less obscurely feel. Ever since man emerged from amid the labyrinth of irrational forces, which, until his appearance, determined the evolution of life on the planet, he has sought for power. Power at first over the hostile or indifferent nature which surrounded him, over the stream, the spark of fire, the wild bear: then over his fellow-men, and, at length, when he began to turn his gaze inwards, over himself. It is noticeable that all the really primitive myths divinised various aspects of power, celebrated the triumph of force. As the social arts began to develop, and, among them, of sheer necessity, morality, men began to attribute moral qualities to the force which they felt around them, above them, and within them. "N'ayant pas pu faire que le juste soit fort, nous avons fait que le fort soit juste," says Pascal. This attribution, however, no less than morality itself, was an afterthought unconsciously conceived in the interest of his self-preservation — for, without morality of some sort, man would soon have disappeared before the wolf and the bear. And, by giving the ultimate sanction of force to his social rule of thumb, he naively betrayed his intuition that that ultimate force was the more fundamental reality. Now the Saint represents the achievement of this longing for power, carried to the highest and most difficult point, that of complete self-mastery. For while, to the primitive savage, the conquest of external foes of one sort and another is evidently the most pressing need of his position, a need recurring so constantly as to exhaust his store of energy, and veil from his attention other possible achievements, as life gets more secure and his attention is directed inwards, man becomes aware of those other dangerous foes of his own household, the appetites and caprices of his inherited brute nature. Turning to battle with these, he dimly but surely perceives one aspect of the ideal of sainthood. For the Saints of all religions, from the most elementary to the most highly developed, are ascetics. They live sparely and chastely, and the mortification of the twin appetites of hunger and love represent to the ordinary man the acme of self-control.

The Saint is also more than the ascetic. Asceticism is a refusal, a limitation, a constraint — in a word, a negation; and the Saint is eminently positive. Moreover, although negative qualities might impose on the imagination and create interest, they would not inspire the personal devotion that is invariably felt for him. The positive quality of the Saint is love, expressing itself in joy. Thus he is a fascinating combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar, for, if few of us are ascetics, we have most of us some experience of love. But the Saint drinks from the Castalian spring of his interior life while we hand about the Divinity to each other in treacherous and remarkably "earthen vessels." His love is not as ours at the mercy of circumstances, it is not susceptible of betrayal or death, for he has found his treasure beyond time and space, where neither satiety nor caprice can corrupt, nor can rivals break through and steal.

There have been all kinds of Saints, from St. Paul, the first hermit, to Father Damian, but the "active" Saints seem less interesting than the "contemplative." Certainly the Fathers of the Desert are very seductive. They lived in caves or on the tops of pillars, supporting their existences on roots and brackish water, while they exhaled their souls in a hymn of timeless ecstasy like Shelley's skylark. Solitude was to them as water to the fish, and they preferred the society of beasts to that of men. St. Paul had his attendant lions, and St. Anthony Abbot spent twenty years in a tomb with serpents who turned into evil spirits by night, and, in these unusual circumstances, became one of the most important personalities of his generation. The external conditions of their existence were often grotesque, almost always terrible. Their inner spirit was the most precious thing humanity possesses. For when everything else has failed a man, he arrives, if his courage holds out, at the joys of the spirit. The forces manifested in his experience, which succeeded in the long run in eluding his dominating grasp, answer submissively to the call of his mind in contemplation. Like fabled Adam naming the docile beasts, he sits in their midst, assigning to each its post and due perspective in the panorama of life. For he has arrived, if without the help of metaphysical analysis, by experience, at the conviction that nothing is real but thought which is the first — and perhaps the last — word of philosophy. Mystics and contemplatives of East and West of all creeds and rites have borne substantial witness to this truth. This is no doubt the reason why alike to the popular imagination as in the treatises of theologians the contemplative life is extolled at the expense of active virtue. For, to all of us, there come moments when we are aware of a psychological need, more profound, more urgent, than the desire for action. Before certain works of art, or occasional aspects of nature, or it may be at the exquisite climax of some mood of intimate personal emotion, a delicious paralysis steals over the will: we feel that we have done enough. In the calm that follows the whirlwind and earthquake of volition now, it seems, definitely stilled, we are conscious only of the beauty of the situation on which we gaze, we have no desire to modify it, we only wish to gaze on for ever. The aesthetic sense has entirely replaced ethical striving.

Blessed Angela of Foligno was a true daughter of this ancient line. Born in 1248, she entered the family of St. Francis as a Tertiary Hermit, and became, through the spiritual autobiography, which she dedicated to her confessor Fra Arnaldo, one of its most striking illustrations. St. Francis and his "Knights of the Round Table"* seem from the first to have struck a new note in medieval religion. The Monastic Order, whether Benedictine or Cistercian, wrapped in the aloofness of its splendid cloisters, frequently governed by abbots who were great feudal lords, represented, it might be said, the aristocratic principle in spirituality. The aims of the monks were lofty, unintelligible no doubt to the villeins of the soil, who were their dependents; they fed and educated their humble neighbours, but their own life remained exclusive, a thing apart. St. Francis brought the spiritual life down to the people, the popolo minuto, and he did so — here was his splendid originality — without lowering the values of what he brought within their reach. The religious democracy that he created remained an aristocracy of the soul. His logic was amazing because so simple. In most men, thought and action move on different planes; with them action implies at least some degree of compromise; but when St. Francis, stripping himself of his father's cloak, and flying naked to the Bishop's arms, proclaimed the divine royalty of poverty, that most unusual phenomenon was seen — a man's thought and action in perfect harmony. Something of that divine simplicity, of that exquisite unison of thought and will, is what constitutes the Franciscan spirit, distinguishing all his authentic children and, not least of them, the simple woman who unfolds her wonderful experiences in this small volume.

We know little of her life. Born within thirty years of St. Francis' death, she entered on the life of penance after a youth passed in moral disorder. She lived in solitude with a religious companion in the neighbourhood of the Church of the Friars Minor at Foligno, until the year of her death in 1309. Her "Visions," which are of the most touching and beautiful description, appear to have been all of the kind described by mystical theologians as "intellectual," that is to say they were unaccompanied by any sensible manifestations. Some of them, indeed, as she notes herself, occurred during sleep. They are an extraordinary blend of naive candour and passion. They indicate, with an accuracy which I feel tempted to ascribe at times to the editing of the possibly more analytical Fra Arnaldo, the moments of what may be called the dialectical process of sanctification. The point of departure of her conversion was a purely self-regarding dread of the penalties of sin: the contemplative mood of the love of God, to which she ultimately attained, absorbed all the intervening emotional categories. This little book may in fact be called, in the Hegelian sense of the term, the Logic of sanctity. It is certainly one of the most important documents we have of medieval psychology, and illustrates in a very remarkable manner the completeness of that system of Mysticism which was at once the root and the blossom of the medieval intellect. Only in Angela the intellect is hidden under a succession of emotional moments, which develop by their own spontaneous dialectic out of the whole mood of which each of them is the passing but necessary expression. That Mysticism is the finest and, on the whole, perhaps the sanest there has ever been. It is far from being exclusively Christian. Deriving from the lecture halls of Alexandria, as well as from the hills of Galilee, it has come down to us through a series of great experimentalists, who have furnished to those of like mind with themselves its justification in their own experience. It is the classic Catholic Mysticism, as the Roman Church has always understood and still understands the term.

Few systems of thought have swayed the imagination more profoundly. Remaining a true Mysticism by nature of its goal, the "Beatific Vision," it has succeeded in incorporating in itself the ethical aspirations of Western energy. It thus mediates between the passive ecstasy of Hindu Pantheism and the restless volitional activity of the white race.

The dogma of the Incarnation has here been of the greatest service. The Unknown and Unknowable All is contemplated by the Catholic Saint in the person of Christ. The dogma gives him a lens with which he can focus the rays of Divinity and unite them in a shaft of light on which he can gaze without faltering. In this way he is provided with an inexhaustible object, adequate to his mind and will. On the one hand he can never know the tragedy of satiety, for, although he may faint with fatigue, his object is inexhaustible, and, on the other, his will is not ruled out as an illusion, but fortified by the prospect of an infinite perspective of effort and achievement. For Catholic Mysticism may perhaps be best summed up, in the phrase by which a great philosopher of our day has described life itself, as a creative evolution. The acts of Virtue, of Faith, Hope, and Charity of a Saint, are not waste of time or of merely negative use; they do not merely serve the purpose of withdrawing him from temptation, they actually constitute the spiritual life within him, like the words of consecration in the Mass, they create in his heart the Divinity which they assert. The mystic gradually passes beyond this mood into that profound and eternal rest of the soul, which theologians call the Beatific Vision, and which is, according to the teaching of Aquinas, enjoyed by some still in life with an even greater intensity than by others who literally "sleep in the Lord."

The Roman Church has ever regarded Catholic Mysticism as the kernel of the Depositum Fidei of which she is the guardian. It was for it she fought through the long and wearisome controversies which brought to the birth at Nicea the orthodox dogma of the Incarnation. For, as has been said, without that dogma, Catholic Mysticism would have missed its specific and characteristic note and would have become a mere variant of Neo-platonist theurgy. The inherent tendency that all Mysticism has to Pantheism, indeed to Nihilism, would have inevitably asserted itself. Nothing short of faith in the descent of the Infinite into the finite could have saved the wavering lines of human personality, turned inwards to gaze upon itself. All, including that personality, would have become an unstable illusion, the web of Maia woven by the fallacious dreams of human desire. And European religion, at least at the point of its highest individual development, would have been indistinguishable from Buddhism. When Schopenhauer drew his parallel between Catholic and Buddhist Mysticism, he failed to see the enormous difference made by belief in the dogma of the Man-god. It is perhaps not without significance that he dwells so much on the value in that connection of Madame Guyon, whose Quietist tendencies, resting ultimately on a Docetic view of the Incarnation, were the cause of her difficulties with Bossuet.

At first sight perhaps the visions of the Blessed Angela may seem to have only an archaic value for us. The world in which she lived seems so remote from ours, the circumstances of her life so different from anything that could possibly occur to us, that her experience seems hopelessly irrelevant to our own needs. But this is a superficial view. The human heart is always the same: there exists a law of what may be called sentimental constancy. And nothing that has ever been believed by anybody is without value. It is enough if the faith and the experience were really genuine. Angela is an authentic specimen of a clearly-defined class of human beings. Mystics are very rare, but they exist. Moreover they are only rare in the West. Oriental bazaars are crowded with them; they prophesy at the corners of streets surrounded by yellow dogs, picturesquely clad disciples, and occasional European tourists. Quite a considerable number of human beings pass their lives in a state of more or less constant inspiration. We are apt to forget this and limit the possibilities of all experience to our own. It is therefore enlarging to our minds to step sometimes into other people's worlds. In the world of Blessed Angela we shall find much to interest and astonish us, and perhaps to excite our admiration. We shall at all events enjoy the commerce of a pure and candid soul.

The translation here offered to the reader is that of the first Italian version which was made in 1510 from the Latin of Fra Arnaldo. This version is one of the rarest books in the world, and has a special value as being one of the earliest popular devotional works printed in the vernacular in Italy. It takes its place with the "Dialogo" of St. Catherine of Siena and the "Fioretti" of St. Francis, among the attempts to popularise Mysticism, which represented a too little known side of that complex movement which we call the Renaissance.

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* "Isti sunt fratres mei milites Tabulae rotondae." *Spec. Perfec.*, p. 72.