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.
[Footnote: The Mater Dei was officially installed in the place of Magna
Mater at the Synod of Ephesus in 431.] 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.
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 debacle of holiness. So true it
is that our gods reflect the hearts that make them.
The Venerable Fra Egidio, a native of Taranto, is a good example of
contemporary godliness. My biography of him was printed in Naples in
1876, [Footnote: "Vita del Venerabile servo di Dio Fra Egidio da S.
Giuseppe laico professo alcantarino," Napoli, 1876.] and contains a
dedicatory epistle addressed to the Blessed Virgin by her "servant,
subject, and most loving son Rosario Frungillo" - a canon of the church
and the author of the book.
This "taumaturgo" could perform all the ordinary feats; I will not
linger over them. What has made him popular to this day are those
wonders which appealed to the taste of the poorer people, such as, for
example, that miracle of the eels. A fisherman had brought fourteen
hundredweight of these for sale in the market. Judge of his
disappointment when he discovered that they had all died during the
journey (southerners will not pay for dead eels). Fortunately, he saw
the saint arriving in a little boat, who informed him that the eels were
"not dead, but only asleep," and who woke them up again by means of a
relic of Saint Pasquale which he always carried about with him, after a
quarter of an hour's devout praying, during which the perspiration oozed
from his forehead. The eels, says the writer, had been dead and slimy,
but now turned their bellies downwards once more and twisted about in
their usual spirals; there began a general weeping among the onlookers,
and the fame of the miracle immediately spread abroad.
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