within the limits of one personality: the biographical facts, the
supernal vision, and the ordered conclusions drawn from those facts and
that vision, for the instruction of other men. All are of value to us in
our study of her personality; for we shall never understand her as a
mystic unless we try first to understand her as a human creature.
First as to her outward life. Angela was born of a prosperous Umbrian
family in 1248; twenty-two years after the death of St. Francis,
seventeen years before the birth of Dante. She was one year younger than
St. Margaret of Cortona, the other great Franciscan penitent and
contemplative. Her life, covering the second half of the thirteenth
century, was roughly contemporary with that of Jacopone da Todi, who was
twenty years her senior; and with those “spiritual” friars, such as
Conrad of Offida and John of La Verna, who are commemorated in the
“Little Flowers.” The period, in Italy, was one of contrasted worldly
luxury and spiritual enthusiasm, and Angela’s life-history appears to
have included experience of both extremes. She married when very young
and had children, but lived a thoroughly worldly if not an actually
immoral life: posing before society as an excellent Christian, but
actually denying herself few indulgences. We learn from the list of sins
of which she afterwards accused herself, that these “infirmities and
diseases” had included the washing of her face, the curling, braiding,
washing, combing, and anointing of her hair, wearing of “needless vain
and curious clothes,” and laced shoes adorned with cut leather. She had
also incurred the risk of hell by “vain running and dancing and walking
about for pleasure,” and even by enjoying the scent of flowers: a crime
which St. Francis could hardly have condemned. Remembering the intensely
ascetic tone of Franciscan penitence and the puritan ideals of the
Spiritual zealots, we need not take these confessions too seriously, or
interpret in the worst sense the “embraces, touches, and other evil
deeds” which she deplores. Nevertheless, the unregenerate Angela in
early womanhood was not the kind of person whom one would pick out as
likely to develop into a saint. She makes it quite clear to us that she
was a vain, self-important, and hypocritical little egotist, “painted in
false colours, a dissembler within and without.” Probably, like many
women of the world, a nominal Tertiary, she loved to make a pious
impression, but loved comfort even more. “I diligently made an outward
show of being poor, but caused many sheets and coverings to be put down
where I slept, and taken up in the morning so that none might see them.”
There was an offensive sanctimoniousness about her too. “During the
whole of my life,” she says frankly, “I have studied how that I might
obtain the fame of sanctity.”
We do not know the date of Angela’s conversion, or the circumstances
which brought it about; save that it took place under Franciscan
influence, which was of course paramount in that part of Umbria in her
day. It seems to have taken the form of a gradual awakening of
conscience to the sinfulness and hypocrisy of her life. In her mental
distress she prayed to St. Francis, and he appeared to her in a dream,
the earliest of her visionary experiences; the confessor to whom she
then went for advice was a Friar Minor, and after her husband’s death
she adopted the plain habit worn by the more fervent Tertiaries, and
remained faithful to the Order till her death. The fixed dates in her
life are few and confusing. Her own book only gives two: the date of her
final purification and the date of her death. We gather from this and
other sources, however, that after her widowhood she lived at first with
one companion in great retirement; but by about 1290, had formed a small
sisterhood in Foligno. Its members, who observed Franciscan poverty in
its full rigour, took the rule of the Third Order and the three vows of
religion, but they were not cloistered. They devoted themselves to the
care of the sick, and other works of charity.
In this community Angela spent the rest of her life; gradually becoming
known as a teacher of “Seraphic wisdom” amongst those Spiritual
Franciscans who were struggling to keep the ideals of St. Francis alive.
She seems to have been the centre of a group of Franciscan Tertiaries of
both sexes, for whom she was at once friend and prophetess, like St.
Catherine of Siena in the next century. Several of her letters to these
“sons” of hers are embedded in her book of “Evangelical Doctrine.” One
of them, the turbulent and ardent friar Ubertino da Casale, owed to her
his true initiation into the spiritual life: and his account of the
impression which she made on him helps us to understand the nature of
her influence. He came to her from Paris in 1298, when he was
twenty-five years old; a successful preacher, but already conscious of
the inward call to a life of greater perfection. “She restored,” he
says, “a thousandfold all those spiritual gifts I had lost through my
own sins; so that from that time I have not been the same man that I was
before. When I had experienced the splendour of her radiant virtue, she
changed the whole face of my mind, and so drove out the weakness and
languor from my soul and body and healed my mind that was torn with
distraction, that no one who knew me before could doubt that the Spirit
of Christ was newly begotten in me through her.” This is almost our only
glimpse of Angela as she was seen by contemporary eyes: but it indicates
the position she came to occupy among the more devout Franciscan
_zelanti_.
She died, surrounded by her spiritual children, in the octave of the
Feast of the Holy Innocents, 1309, aged sixty-one; and was buried in the
Church of the Franciscans at Foligno, where her body still lies. An
Office in her honour was approved by Gregory XIV in 1701, and her Feast
is kept throughout the Franciscan Order on March 30.
So much for the scanty outer history. Of greater interest is our
knowledge of her inner life; the real life of mystics and
contemplatives. The history of this inner life assures us that Angela
was of the stuff of which great mystics are made; though not at all of
the stuff of which many amateurs of mysticism expect them to be made.
First great necessity, she possessed a strongly romantic temperament;
like St. Francis, Suso, St. Ignatius, Mechthild, St. Teresa, her
companions on the highway of the soul. Like these, she had also an
innate simplicity and ardour, a character at once childlike and heroic;
that “all-or-none” reaction, the power of total self-giving to the
matter in hand, which distinguishes the hero, whether as man of action,
as artist, or as saint. Indeed, heroism may properly be ascribed to a
comfortable and self-indulgent married woman, who leaves all for the
lonely adventure of Sinai, however many tumbles she may have upon the
road. With this courage she combined an extreme sensibility to
impressions, great power of endurance, a strong will; all the
potentialities of a great sinner or a great saint. Further, she
evidently possessed that peculiar, unstable psychic makeup, which the
mystic shares with other types of genius; and which is seen in its full
development in the two greatest of Italian saints, Francis of Assisi and
Catherine of Siena. She experienced all the normal episodes of complete
mystical development: the phases of penitence and self-discipline,
illumination and dereliction, and at last that ecstatic union with the
Divine Nature which is the goal of the Way. Her mysticism was deeply
coloured by the Franciscan atmosphere in which it was nurtured; it
exhibited the highly emotional and enthusiastic character, the tendency
to eccentric penances, the concentration upon the Cross and Passion of
Christ, which are found in her contemporary Jacopone da Todi, and are
typical of the Franciscan mystics at their best. Indeed, the many
parallels between Angela and Jacopone suggest to us that the favourite
subjects of their contemplations were those in vogue in “Spiritual”
circles at this time; and that we have in their works the surviving
examples of a complete school of mysticism, which taught, as Ubertino da
Casale says that Cecilia of Florence did, “the whole art of the higher
contemplation.”
“As I walked,” said the Blessed Angela, “by the way of penitence, I took
eighteen spiritual steps before I came to _know_ the imperfections of my
life.” This is the first sentence of the book of _Conversion and
Penitence_ which analyses in detail the changes through which she passed
on her way to complete self-knowledge and self-adjustment. Those
“eighteen steps” extended over many years. When they began, Angela was
living luxuriously, as a married woman, in her husband’s house. When
they ended, she was a poor widow vowed to the religious life; stripped
of every superfluity, everything that would entangle her in the web of
appearance, apt in contemplation, companioned by visions, esteemed as a
teacher and an ecstatic, and the centre of a group of disciples. Her
inner life, during these years of ascent, of hard and difficult growth,
seems to have been a life of bitter and almost continuous struggle. Even
after the preliminary steps of repentance were over, and her visionary
powers had developed, the new spiritual ideals demanded of her ever more
difficult renunciations. We see her, as we read the wonderful memoirs of
her years of penitence, perpetually flung to and fro between adoration
and contrition; as first one element and then the other of her complex
personality took the upper hand. In her long and slow ascent towards the
stars, she alternately experienced the sunshine and the shade.
From the turmoil which surrounded the hard re-making of Angela’s
character, there emerged two great principles round which her subsequent
life and teaching were to be grouped. The first was poverty, the second
was self-knowledge. Naturally her instinct for poverty would be fostered
by her Franciscan environment; but it is an instinct implicit in the
mystical temperament, and not peculiar to the Poor Man of Assisi.
Mystics know that possessions dissipate the energy which they need for
other and more real things; that they must give up ownership, the verb
“to have,” if they are to attain the freedom which they seek, and all
the fullness of the verb “to be.” Thus Jacopone in his great ode
expressed a universal spiritual law:
“Povertate è nulla avere
e nulla cosa poi volere;
ed omne cosa possedere
en spirito de libertate.”
It cost Angela many struggles before she fully accepted and acted upon
this truth, and attained that which she calls the “liberty of poverty.”
Self-knowledge, that hard essential of the soul’s re-education which
Richard of St. Victor, and afterwards St. Catherine of Siena, made the
starting-point of all mysticism, she recognized from the first as the
true objective towards which her hard penances and long meditations must
tend.
The eighteen “steps,” then, exhibit with extraordinary honesty her
gradual progress in these two arts of self-knowledge and renunciation.
At the first step, as we have seen, she was by something—we know not
what—startled into attention to the real, and terrified by the vision of
her own naked reality stripped of its pleasant veils and self-deceits.
Her first reaction to this vision was avoidance. She was ashamed to look
her sins in the face, or confess them. But having prayed to St. Francis,
she was led by a dream—the form under which her unconscious mind most
frequently controlled her—to seek a Franciscan friar and make a general
confession of her sins. She performed his penance loyally, and became
increasingly contrite for her faults: the sense of Divine Mercy touching
her, and evoking an ever more humble and repentant grief. By the eighth
step this contrition had become love, the passion for perfection
triumphing over the hatred of imperfection. By that contemplation of the
Cross which was specially dear to Franciscan devotion, and is the
subject of one of Jacopone’s most splendid poems, she was led into an
ever deeper understanding of the mystery of redemption by pain. Angela
was now definitely committed to the mystic way. “In this beholding of
the Cross,” she says, “I burned with the fire of love and remorse: so
that standing before that Cross I divested myself of everything and
offered myself to Him ... and the aforesaid fire compelled me, and I had
no power to resist.” The special form which her renunciation took—that
of a vow of chastity in deed and thought—suggests the direction in which
her chief temptations lay; and this deduction is made more probable by
the emotional quality of her visionary experience, in which the
repressed ardours of her temperament found relief.
At the ninth step, this instinct for renunciation achieved more complete
expression. “Enlightened and instructed”—doubtless by some member of the
spiritual group—she learned that nothing less than a total sacrifice of
friends, kindred, possessions, her very self, would serve her if she
wished to tread the Way of Holy Cross. But in her acceptance of this
bitter truth we still see something of the vanity, self-importance and
narrow egotism of the old Angela. This is the one passage in all her
writings which every one knows, and by which she is generally, and most
unfairly, judged.
“I elected to walk on the thorny path which is the path of tribulation.
So I began to put aside the fine clothing and adornments which I had,
and the most delicate food, and also the covering of my head. But as
yet, to do all these things was hard, and shamed me, because I did not
feel much love for God, and was living with my husband. So that it was a
bitter thing to me when anything offensive was said or done to me; but I
bore it as patiently as I could. In that time, and by God’s will, there
died my mother, who was a great hindrance to me in following the way of
God; my husband died likewise; and in a short time there also died all
my children. And because I had begun to follow the aforesaid way, and
had prayed God to rid me of them, I had great consolation of their
deaths, although I also felt some grief; wherefore, because God had
shown me this grace, I imagined that my heart was in the heart of God
and His will and His heart in my heart.”
This unfortunate paragraph outweighs for many minds the whole of
Angela’s subsequent life and achievements. I do not deny that, taken
alone, it appears to be a monument of spiritual egotism. But we must
remember that it represents, not Angela the peaceful mystic, but Angela
the worried and storm-tossed penitent at the most difficult moment of
her career. The emotional centre of her life had shifted. An inexorable
inner voice now urged her to a total concentration on God, and she knew
that the way of penance and renunciation was her only hope. Yet living
in a thoroughly discordant, thoroughly unspiritual environment, hemmed
in on all sides by conventional existence and unsympathetic
surroundings, this way seemed impossible to follow in its completeness;
for she was not one of those who are able to harmonize the demands of
both worlds. Moreover, these words were written by one who had long
outlived the human sorrow which, as she says here and in another place,
she felt at these accumulated bereavements. Now, looking back and seeing
her past existence spread out before her, she recognized even this awful
and drastic series of deprivations as a necessary factor in the life to
which she was called.
After all, it is fair to acknowledge that family affection is not the
strongest point in the character of the mystical saints. In the
interests of their vocation, they are always ready to leave father,
mother, brothers, and sisters; and moreover there is evangelical
authority for this attitude. They are specialists, and are therefore
bound, in the interests of the race, to give up many things which other
men must develop and preserve. Artists are under much the same
necessity. The vitality which we diffuse amongst many interests and
loves, these must concentrate on the one object of their quest. Hence
St. Francis himself flung his family aside without scruple when it came
to the parting of the ways. Hence Jacopone da Todi was warned that even
spiritual friendships must be held lightly by the pilgrim on the way of
the Cross. Angela was only following in their footsteps, though she
doubtless expressed herself with unnecessary and ill-regulated vigour,
when she recognized human ties and human affections as possible
impediments of the spiritual life. An easy capitulation to love and
friendship in their most engrossing aspects seems always to have been
her standing danger. It caused her in later life to say that she “feared
love more than all other things”; even regarding with suspicion the deep
affection which unites teacher and disciples, or two fellow-initiates of
the contemplative life.
It was after her release from the duties of family life, and her more
complete concentration on the ascetic life, that her visionary powers
began to develop. At first they were little more than waking dreams of a
commonplace kind; imaginary pictures of the Passion, the Crucifix, the
Sacred Heart, such as have been experienced by innumerable Catholic
saints. These vivid symbolic presentations of Divine love moved Angela
to greater and more heroic heights of penitential love; and the passion
for complete evangelical poverty came on her with renewed force. Her
possessions enchained her, and she knew it. She made many efforts to
screw herself up bit by bit to those heights of renunciation which St.
Francis seems to have reached almost without effort.
“For this cause—namely, to have the liberty of poverty—I journeyed to
Rome, to pray the Blessed Peter that he would obtain for me the grace of
true poverty. It seemed to me at last that I could not sufficiently do
penance whilst I was possessed of worldly things ... so I determined to
forsake everything. In my imagination I had a great desire to become
poor, and such was my zeal, that I often feared to die before I attained
this state of poverty. On the other hand, I was assailed by temptations,
which whispered to me that I was still young, that begging for alms
might lead me into shame and danger; that if I did this, I should die of
hunger, cold, and nakedness. Moreover, all my friends dissuaded me from
it. But at last Divine mercy sent a great illumination into my heart,
which, as I believed then and do now, I shall never lose even in
eternity.... So then I did resolve in good earnest.”
Here is the final, deliberate act of will: the turning once for all from
the unreal to the real—under whatever form the charms of unreality
appear to the growing self—which all mystics have to make. It was
Angela’s eleventh step. Her mystical powers were now developing rapidly.
They showed themselves in visions, dreams, and ecstasies. Not all of
these, it is true, can be accepted as marks of spiritual growth: for
some clearly represent the re-emergence under religious symbols of old
emotions and desires. But the deep and vivid intuitions of spiritual
realities which came to her more and more frequently, show that a steady
sublimation of those emotions and desires was in progress, and that they
tended more and more towards supersensual ends.
At the fifteenth step, with truly Franciscan thoroughness—though, oddly
enough, the Friars Minor whom she consulted forbade her to do it—she
distributed the whole of her possessions amongst the poor. “Because
methought I could not keep anything for myself without greatly offending
Him who did thus enlighten me.” With this crucial act she seems to have
attained at last the true and full state of illumination. “Then,” she
says, “I began to feel the sweetness of God in my heart”: that which
other mystics have called the “sense of the Presence.” Also, “I began to
have understanding of the visions and the words”; a new spiritual
lucidity running side by side with the symbolic pictures and imaginary
voices that she saw and heard with the inner eye and ear. This, too, is
normal and characteristic. From this point, then, we must read the book
of _Visions and Consolations_ side by side with the book of _Penances_
if we would understand Angela’s inner life; for these two forms of
experience, which she has unfortunately chosen to treat separately,
alternated with one another.
In the time of her total acceptance of holy poverty, Angela seems to
have been living in a state of almost hermit-like simplicity with one
companion, the Blessed Paschalina of Foligno; whom at first she found a
“weariness,” but afterwards discovered to be a fellow traveller on the
Mystic Way. Some years had now passed since her conversion; and she was
already accepted—perhaps indeed celebrated—as a religious teacher among
the members of the Spiritual group. Definitely vowed to the service of
the Franciscan Order, she seems soon to have become like St. Catherine
of Siena, St. Catherine of Genoa, and many other women mystics, the
centre of a group of adoring disciples or “spiritual sons.” Yet her
inner life was still in a state of confusion, the remaking of her
character was still in progress. She was flung perpetually to the
extremes of joy and anguish. She would rise to great heights of mystical
passion “filled with the fire and fervour of Divine love,” only to fall
back to her old temptations. The repressed instinctive life began to
take its revenge, and tortured her by vicious suggestions which she had
never known before. “I would have chosen rather to be roasted than to
endure such pains.” Also the great strain put upon her nervous system by
the growing spiritual faculties resulted in absolute physical illness,
as has been the case with many of the mystical saints. “The torments of
my body,” she says, “were veritably numberless. There remained not one
of my members that was not grievously tormented, nor was I ever free
from pain, infirmity, or weariness.”
We need not be afraid to recognize in this struggle a reflection of the
stresses and difficulties—some physical—which attend on the complete
sublimation of man’s psychic life; especially in persons of a strongly
emotional temperament. In Angela’s case the visions and dreams that
accompanied it assure us of the character of the crisis through which
she was passing. Many of her symptoms at this time were undoubtedly
hysterical. She cried aloud when she heard the name of God, and fell
into a fever on seeing a picture of the Passion of Christ. Her tears
were perpetual, and often she longed to tear herself in pieces.
Unfortunately Franciscan piety of the more extreme sort encouraged
emotional extravagances of this kind, as we may see by the account of
Angela’s contemporaries given in the “Little Flowers,” and failed to
appreciate Jacopone’s profound distinction between ordered and
disordered love. It also gave unqualified approval to those public and
grotesque acts of self-abasement which play so large a part in the
legend of his penitence; and here again, Angela was true to type. Still
grieved by the memory of her old hypocrisies, made more poignant by the
reverence she received from her disciples, she went through the city and
open places with meat and fishes hanging from her neck, and crying, “I
am that woman full of evil and dissembling, slave of all vices and
iniquities, who did good deeds that she might obtain honour among men;
and especially when I caused those bidden to my house to be told that I
ate neither fish nor meat, and—being the while greedy, gluttonous, and
drunken—feigned to desire nought but what was needful.”