Part 15

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”; 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?

Good examples of what Max Nordau calls Echolalie are to be found in this biography (p. 22).

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. 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. He had been suffering and infirm for some little time previous to that event, but managed to take a short flight on the very day preceding his demise.

Forthwith the evidences of his miraculous deeds were collected and submitted to the inspired examination of the Sacred Congregation of Rites in Rome. Their conscientiousness in sifting and weighing the depositions is sufficiently attested by the fact that ninety years were allowed to elapse ere Joseph of Copertino was solemnly received into the number of the Blessed. This occurred in 1753; and though the date may have been accidentally chosen, some people will be inclined to detect the hand of Providence in the ordering of the event, as a challenge to Voltaire, who was just then disquieting Europe with certain doctrines of a pernicious nature.

XI BY THE INLAND SEA

The railway line to Grottaglie skirts the shore of the inland sea for two or three miles, and then turns away. Old Taranto glimmers in lordly fashion across the tranquil waters; a sense of immemorial culture pervades this region of russet tilth, and olives, and golden corn.

They led me, at Grottaglie, to the only convent of males now in use, San Francesco, recently acquired by the Jesuits. In the sacristy of its church, where I was told to wait, a slender young priest was praying rapturously before some image, and the clock that stood at hand recorded the flight of twenty minutes ere his devotions were ended. Then he arose slowly and turned upon me a pair of lustrous, dreamy eyes, as though awakened from another world.

This was quite a new convent, he explained; it could not possibly be the one I was seeking. But there was another one, almost a ruin, and now converted into a refuge for a flock of poor old women; he would gladly show me the way. Was I a “Germanese”? No, I replied; I came from Scotland.

Germanese or Allemanno = a German. Tedesco, hereabouts, signifies an Austrian—a detested nationality, even at this distance of time. I have wondered, since writing the above, whether this is really the place of which Rossi speaks. He calls it Grot-tole (the difference in spelling would be of little account), and says it lies not far distant from Copertino. But there may be a place of this name still nearer; it is a common appellation in these honeycombed limestone districts. This Grottaglie is certainly the birth-place of another religious hero, the priest-brigand Ciro, who gave so much trouble to Sir R. Church.

“A Calvinist,” he remarked, without bitterness.

“A Presbyterian,” I gently corrected.

“To be sure—a Presbyterian.”

As we walked along the street under the glowing beams of midday I set forth the object of my visit. He had never heard of the flying monk—it was astonishing, he said. He would look up the subject without delay. The flying monk! That a Protestant should come all the way from “the other end of the world” to enquire about a local Catholic saint of whose existence he himself was unaware, seemed not so much to surprise as positively to alarm him.

Among other local curiosities, he pointed out the portal of the parish church, a fine but dilapidated piece of work, with a large rosette window overhead. The town, he told me, derives its name from certain large grottoes wherein the inhabitants used to take refuge during Saracen raids. This I already knew, from the pages of Swinburne and Sanchez; and in my turn was able to inform him that a certain Frenchman, Bertaux by name, had written about the Byzantine wall-paintings within these caves. Yes, those old Greeks! he said. And that accounted for the famous ceramics of the place, which preserved the Hellenic traditions in extraordinary purity. I did not inform him that Hector Preconi, who purposely visited Grottaglie to study these potteries, was considerably disappointed.

At the door of the decayed convent my guide left me, with sundry polite expressions of esteem. I entered a spacious open courtyard; a well stood in the centre of a bare enclosure whereon, in olden days, the monks may have cultivated their fruit and vegetables; round this court there ran an arched passage, its walls adorned with frescoes, now dim and faded, depicting sacred subjects. The monastery itself was a sombre maze of stairways and cells and corridors—all the free spaces, including the very roof, encumbered with gleaming potteries of every shape and size, that are made somewhere near the premises.

I wandered about this sunless and cobwebby labyrinth, the old woman pensioners flitting round me like bats in the twilight. I peered into many dark closets; which of them was it—Joseph’s famous blood-bespattered cell?

“He tormented his body so continuously and obstinately with pins, needles and blades of steel, and with such effusion of blood, that even now, after entire years, the walls of his cell and other places of retirement are discoloured and actually encrusted with blood.” Which of them was it—the chamber that witnessed these atrocious macerations? It was all so gloomy and forlorn.

Then, pushing aside a door in these tenebrous regions, I suddenly found myself bathed in dazzling light. A loggia opened here, with a view over stretches of gnarled olives, shining all silvery under the immaculate sky of noonday and bounded by the sapphire belt of the Ionian. Sunshine and blue sea! Often must the monks have taken pleasure in this fair prospect; and the wiser among them, watching the labourers returning home at nightfall, the children at play, and all the happy life of a world so alien to their own, may well have heaved a sigh.

Meanwhile a crowd of citizens had assembled below, attracted by the unusual novelty of a stranger in their town. The simple creatures appeared to regard my investigations in the light of a good joke; they had heard of begging monks, and thieving monks, and monks of another variety whose peculiarities I dare not attempt to describe; but a flying monk—no, never!

“The Dark Ages,” said one of them—the mayor, I dare say—with an air of grave authority. “Believe me, dear sir, the days of such fabulous monsters are over.”

So they seem to be, for the present.

No picture or statue records the life of this flying wonder, this masterpiece of Spanish priestcraft; no mural tablet—in this land of commemorative stones—has been erected to perpetuate the glory of his signal achievements; no street is called after him. It is as if he had never existed. On the contrary, by a queer irony of fate, the roadway leading past his convent evokes the memory of a misty heathen poet, likewise native of these favoured regions, a man whose name Joseph of Copertino had assuredly never heard—Ennius, of whom I can now recall nothing save that one unforgettable line which begins “O Tite tute Tati tibi——”; Ennius, who never so much as tried to fly, but contented himself with singing, in rather bad Latin, of the things of this earth.