"La
Mamma mia" - thus he would speak, in playful-saintly fashion, of the
Mother of God - "la Mamma mia is capricious. When I bring Her flowers,
She tells me She does not want them; when I bring Her candles, She also
does not want them; and when I ask Her what She wants, She says, 'I
want the heart, for I feed only on hearts.'" What wonder if the "mere
pronouncement of the name of Maria often sufficed to raise him from the
ground into the air"?
Nevertheless, the arch-fiend was wont to creep into his cell at night
and to beat and torture him; and the monks of the convent were terrified
when they heard the hideous din of echoing blows and jangling chains.
"We were only having a little game," he would then say. This is
refreshingly boyish. He once induced a flock of sheep to enter the
chapel, and while he recited to them the litany, it was observed with
amazement that "they responded at the proper place to his verses - he
saying Sancta Maria, and they answering, after their manner, Bah!"
I am not disguising from myself that an incident like the last-named may
smack of childishness to a certain austere type of northern Puritan.
Childishness! But to go into this question of the relative hilarity and
moroseness of religions would take us far afield; for aught I know it
may, at bottom, be a matter of climatic influences, and there we can
leave it. Under the sunny sky of Italy, who would not be disposed to see
the bright side of things?
Saint Joseph of Copertino performed a variety of other miracles. He
multiplied bread and wine, calmed a tempest, drove out devils, caused
the lame to walk and the blind to see - all of which are duly attested by
eye-witnesses on oath. Though "illiterate," he had an innate knowledge
of ecclesiastical dogma; he detected persons of impure life by their
smell, and sinners were revealed to his eyes with faces of black colour
(the Turks believe that on judgment day the damned will be thus marked);
he enjoyed the company of two guardian angels, which were visible not
only to himself but to other people. And, like all too many saints, he
duly fell into the clutches of the Inquisition, ever on the look-out for
victims pious or otherwise.
There is one little detail which it would be disingenuous to slur over.
It is this. We are told that Saint Joseph was awkward and backward in
his development. As a child his boy-comrades used to laugh at him for
his open-mouthed staring habits; they called him "bocca-aperta"
(gape-mouth), and in the frontispiece to Montanari's life of him, which
depicts him as a bearded man of forty or fifty, his mouth is still
agape; he was, moreover, difficult to teach, and Rossi says he profited
very little by his lessons and was of niuna letteratura. As a lad of
seventeen he could not distinguish white bread from brown, and he used
to spill water-cans, break vases and drop plates to such an extent that
the monks of the convent who employed him were obliged, after eight
months' probation, to dismiss him from their service. He was unable to
pass his examination as priest. At the age of twenty-five he was
ordained by the Bishop of Castro, without that formality.
All this points to a certain weak-mindedness or arrested development,
and were this an isolated case one might be inclined to think that the
church had made Saint Joseph an object of veneration on the same
principles as do the Arabs, who elevate idiots, epileptics, and
otherwise deficient creatures to the rank of marabouts, and credit them
with supernatural powers.
But it is not an isolated case. The majority of these southern saints
are distinguished from the vulgar herd by idiosyncrasies to which modern
physicians give singular names such as "gynophobia," "glossolalia" and
"demonomania"; [Footnote: Good examples of what Max Nordau calls
Echolalie are to be found in this biography (p. 22).] even the founder
of the flying monk's order, the great Francis of Assisi, has been
accused of some strange-sounding mental disorder because, with touching
humility, he doffed his vestments and presented himself naked before his
Creator. What are we to conclude therefrom?
The flying monk resembles Saint Francis in more than one feature. He,
too, removed his clothes and even his shirt, and exposed himself thus to
a crucifix, exclaiming, "Here I am, Lord, deprived of everything." He
followed his prototype, further, in that charming custom of introducing
the animal world into his ordinary talk ("Brother Wolf, Sister Swallow,"
etc.). So Joseph used to speak of himself as l'asinelio - the little
ass; and a pathetic scene was witnessed on his death-bed when he was
heard to mutter: "L'asinelio begins to climb the mountain;
l'asinelio is half-way up; l'asinelio has reached the summit;
l'asinelio can go no further, and is about to leave his skin behind."
It is to be noted, in this connection, that Saint Joseph of Coper-tino
was born in a stable.
This looks like more than a mere coincidence. For the divine Saint
Francis was likewise born in a stable.
But why should either of these holy men be born in stables?
A reasonable explanation lies at hand. A certain Japanese statesman is
credited with that shrewd remark that the manifold excellencies and
diversities of Hellenic art are due to the fact that the Greeks had no
"old masters" to copy from - no "schools" which supplied their
imagination with ready-made models that limit and smother individual
initiative. 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.
