Part 15

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.”

Those familiar with the lives of the mystics will remember many parallels to this state of conflict: the ups and downs of Suso, his alternate illumination and despair, his great self-denials balanced by foolish little sins: the thirty years during which Teresa—already, like Angela, regarded as a great example—swayed between her mystical vocation and the claims of a more normal life. In Angela this inward battle culminated, she says, “some little while before the time of the pontificate of Celestino”—that is to say about 1294, when she was forty-six—and endured for more than two years. In it, in addition to bodily and mental agony, she was humiliated by recurrent temptations to sensual indulgence. Her depression was extreme, and her intellect often so clouded that she could not even recall the idea of God to her mind. It was her last lesson in humility and self-knowledge—an excellent antidote to the dangers of professional sanctity—and answered to that terrible period of final purification which other mystics have called the “Dark Night of the Soul.”

From this last purgation, in which all the elements of her character seemed flung back into the melting-pot, she emerged into that condition of spiritual equilibrium, of perfect harmony with transcendent reality, which is known to mystic writers as the Unitive Way. “A divine change,” she says, “took place in my soul, which neither saint nor angel could describe or explain. Wherefore I say again that it seems to me evil speaking or blasphemy if I try and tell of it.” Again, “I came not to this state of my own self, but was led and drawn thereto by God; so that though of my own self I should not have known how to desire or ask for it, I am now in that state continually.” Though the capacity for pain never left her, and is implied in many of her greatest revelations—for, like all the great Catholic mystics, she found the Christian paradox of joyous suffering at the very centre of truth—yet the last twelve years of her life seem to have been years of profound inward peace. “He hath placed within my soul,” she said, “a state which changes little, and I possess God in such fullness that I am no longer in the state in which I used to be; but I walk in such perfect peace of heart and mind that I am content in all things.”

It was that state of which Jacopone has written:

“La guerra è terminata de le virtú battaglia, de la mente travaglia cosa nulla contende. La mente è renovata vestita a tal entaglia, de tal ferro è la maglia feruta no l’offerende.”