Southerners love their saints, and do
not content themselves with chill verbal expressions of esteem.
So the
biographer of Saint Giangiuseppe records that "one of the deceased
saint's toes was bitten off with most regret-able devotion by the teeth
of a man in the crowd, who wished to preserve it as a relic. And the
blood from the wound flowed so copiously and so freely that many pieces
of cloth were saturated with it; nor did it cease to flow till the
precious corpse was interred." It is hard to picture such proofs of
fervid popularity falling to the lot of English deans and bishops.
He was modern, too, in this sense, that he did not torment himself with
penitences (decay of Spanish austerity); on the contrary, he even kept
chocolate, honey and suchlike delicacies in his cell. In short, he was
an up-to-date saint, who despised mediaeval practices and lived in a
manner befitting the age which gave him birth. In this respect he
resembles our English men of holiness, who exercise a laudable
self-denial in resisting the seductions of the ascetic life.
Meanwhile, the cult of the Mother of God continued to wax in favour, and
those who are interested in its development should read the really
remarkable book by Antonio Cuomo, "Saggio apologetico della belezza
celeste e divina di Maria S.S. Madre di Dio" (Castellamare, 1863). It is
a diatribe against modernism by a champion of lost causes, an
exacerbated lover of the "Singular Virgin and fecund Mother of the
Verb." His argument, as I understand it, is the consensus gentium
theory applied to the Virgin Mary. In defence of this thesis, the book
has been made to bristle with quotations; they stand out like quills
upon the porcupine, ready to impale the adventurous sceptic. Pliny and
Virgil and the Druids and Balaam's Ass are invoked as foretelling Her
birth; the Old Testament - that venerable sufferer, as Huxley called
it - is twisted into dire convulsions for the same purpose; much evidence
is also drawn from Hebrew observances and from the Church Fathers. But
the New Testamentary record is seldom invoked; the Saviour, on the rare
occasions when He is mentioned, being dismissed as "G. C." The volume
ends with a pyrotechnical display of invective against non-Catholic
heretics; a medley of threats and abuse worthy of those breezy days of
Erasmus, when theologians really said what they thought of each other.
The frank polytheism of Montorio is more to my taste. This outpouring of
papistical rhetoric gives me unwarrantable sensations - it makes me feel
positively Protestant.
Another sign of increasing popularity is that the sacred bacchanals
connected with the "crowning" of various Madonnas were twice as
numerous, in Naples, in the nineteenth as in the eighteenth century. Why
an image of the Mother of God should be decked with this worldly symbol,
as a reward for services rendered, will be obscure only to those who
fail to appreciate the earthly-tangible complexion of southern religion.
Puerility is its key-note. The Italian is either puerile or adult; the
Englishman remains everlastingly adolescent. . . .
Now of course it is open to any one to say that the pious records from
which I have quoted are a desolation of the spirit; that they possess
all the improbability of the "Arabian Nights," and none of their charm;
that all the distempered dreamings to which our poor humanity is subject
have given themselves a rendezvous in their pages. I am not for
disputing the point, and I can understand how one man may be saddened by
their perusal, while another extracts therefrom some gleams of mirth.
For my part, I merely verify this fact: the native has been fed with
this stuff for centuries, and if we desire to enter into his feelings,
we must feed ourselves likewise - up to a point. The past is the key to
the present. That is why I have dwelt at such length on the subject - in
the hope of clearing up the enigma in the national character: the
unpassable gulf, I mean, between the believing and the unbelieving
sections of the community.
An Anglo-Saxon arriving at Bagnara and witnessing a procession in honour
of that Sacred Hat of the Mother of God which has led me into this
disquisition, would be shocked at the degree of bigotry implied. "The
Hat of the Virgin Mary," he would say - "what next?" Then, accosting some
ordinary citizen not in the procession - any butcher or baker - he would
receive a shock of another kind; he would be appalled at the man's
language of contemptuous derision towards everything which he, the
Anglo-Saxon, holds sacred in biblical tradition. There is no attempt,
here, at "reconciliation." The classes calling themselves enlightened
are making a clean sweep of the old gods in a fashion that bewilders us
who have accustomed ourselves to see a providential design in everything
that exists (possibly because our acquaintance with a providentially-
designed Holy Office is limited to an obsolete statute, the genial
de haeretico comburendo). The others, the fetishists, have
remained on the spiritual level of their own saints. And there we stand
today. That section so numerous in England, the pseudo-pagans,
crypto-Christians, or whatever obscurantists like Messrs. A. J. Balfour
and Mallock like to call themselves (the men who, with disastrous
effects, transport into realms of pure intelligence the spirit of
compromise which should be restricted to practical concerns) - that
section has no representatives hereabouts.
Fully to appreciate their attitude as opposed to ours, we must also
remember that the south Italian does not trouble himself about the
objective truth of any miracle whatever; his senses may be perverted,
but his intelligence remains outside the sphere of infection. This is
his saving grace. To the people here, the affair of Moses and the
Burning Bush, the raising of Lazarus, and Egidio's cow-revival, are on
the identical plane of authenticity; the Bible is one of a thousand
saints' books; its stories may be as true as theirs, or just as untrue;
in any case, what has that to do with his own worldly conduct?
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