They Are Wholly Sexless, Unsocial
And Futile Beings, The Negation Of Every Masculine Or Feminine Virtue.
Their Independence Fettered By
The iron rules of the Vatican and of
their particular order, these creatures had nothing to do; and like
the
Rest of us under such conditions, became vacuously introspective.
Those honourable saintly combats of the past with external enemies and
plagues and stormy seasons were transplanted from without into the
microcosm within, taking the shape of hallucinations and
demon-temptations. They were no longer actors, but sufferers; automata,
who attained a degree of inanity which would have made their old
Byzantine prototypes burst with envy.
Yet they vary in their gifts; each one, as I have said, has his or her
strong point. Why? The reason of this diversity lies in the furious
competition between the various monastic orders of the time - in those
unedifying squabbles which led to never-ending litigation and complaints
to head-quarters in Rome. Every one of these saints, from the first
dawning of his divine talents, was surrounded by an atmosphere of
jealous hatred on the part of his co-religionists. If one order came out
with a flying wonder, another, in frantic emulation, would introduce
some new speciality to eclipse his fame - something in the fasting line,
it may be; or a female mystic whose palpitating letters to Jesus Christ
would melt all readers to pity. The Franciscans, for instance, dissected
the body of a certain holy Margaret and discovered in her heart the
symbols of the Trinity and of the Passion. This bold and original idea
would have gained them much credit, but for the rival Dominicans, who
promptly discovered, and dissected, another saintly Margaret, whose
heart contained three stones on which were engraven portraits of the
Virgin Mary. [Footnote: These and other details will be found in the
four volumes "Das Heidentum in der romischen Kirche" (Gotha, 1889-91),
by Theodor Trede, a late Protestant parson in Naples, strongly tinged
with anti-Catholicism, but whose facts may be relied upon. Indeed, he
gives chapter and verse for them.] So they ceaselessly unearthed fresh
saints with a view to disparaging each other - all of them waiting for a
favourable moment when the Vatican could be successfully approached to
consider their particular claims. For it stands to reason that a
Carmelite Pope would prefer a Carmelite saint to one of the Jesuits, and
so forth.
And over all throned the Inquisition in Rome, alert, ever-suspicious;
testing the "irregularities" of the various orders and harassing their
respective saints with Olympic impartiality.
I know that mystics such as Orsola Benincasa are supposed to have
another side to their character, an eminently practical side. It is
perfectly true - and we need not go out of England to learn it - that
piety is not necessarily inconsistent with nimbleness in worldly
affairs. But the mundane achievements, the monasteries and churches, of
nine-tenths of these southern ecstatics are the work of the confessor
and not of the saint.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 202 of 253
Words from 104269 to 104769
of 131203
