And One Marvels To Think Into What Exotic Beauties These
Southern Saints Would Have Blossomed, Had They Been At Liberty, Like
Those Greeks, Freely To Indulge Their Versatile Genius - Had They Not
Been Bound To The Wheels Of Inexorable Precedent.
If the flying monk,
for example, were an ordinary mortal, there was nothing to prevent him
from being born in an omnibus or some other of the thousand odd places
where ordinary mortals occasionally are born.
But - no! As a Franciscan
saint, he was obliged to conform to the school of Bethlehem and Assisi.
He was obliged to select a stable. Such is the force of tradition. . . .
Joseph of Copertino lived during the time of the Spanish viceroys, and
his fame spread not only over all Italy, but to France, Germany and
Poland. Among his intimates and admirers were no fewer than eight
cardinals, Prince Leopold of Tuscany, the Duke of Bouillon, Isabella of
Austria, the Infanta Maria of Savoy and the Duke of Brunswick, who,
during a visit to various courts of Europe in 1649, purposely went to
Assisi to see him, and was there converted from the Lutheran heresy by
the spectacle of one of his flights. Prince Casimir, heir to the throne
of Poland, was his particular friend, and kept up a correspondence with
him after the death of his father and his own succession to the throne.
Towards the close of his life, the flying monk became so celebrated that
his superiors were obliged to shut him up in the convent of Osimo, in
close confinement, in order that his aerial voyages "should not be
disturbed by the concourse of the vulgar." And here he expired, in his
sixty-first year, on the 18th September, 1663.
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