Part 47

He, too, could fly a little. So once, when he was nowhere to be found, the monks of the convent at last discovered him in the church, “raised so high above the ground that his head touched the ceiling.” This is not a bad performance for a mere lad, as he then was. And how useful this gift became in old age was seen when, being almost incapable of moving his legs, and with body half paralysed, he was nevertheless enabled to accompany a procession for the length of two miles on foot, walking, to the stupefaction of thousands of spectators, at about a cubit’s height above the street, on air; after the fashion of those Hindu gods whose feet—so the pagans fable—are too pure to touch mortal earth.

His love of poverty, moreover, was so intense that even after his death a picture of him, which his relatives had tried to attach to the wall in loving remembrance, repeatedly fell down again, although nailed very securely; nor did it remain fixed until they realized that its costly gilt frame was objectionable to the saint in heaven, and accordingly removed it. No wonder the infant Jesus was pleased to descend from the breast of Mary and take rest for several hours in the arms of Saint Giangiuseppe, who, on being disturbed by some priestly visitor, exclaimed, “O how I have enjoyed holding the Holy Babe in my arms!” This is an old and favourite motif; it occurs, for example, in the Fioretti of Saint Francis; there are precedents, in fact, for all these divine favours.

But his distinguishing feature, his “dominating gift,” was that of prophecy, especially in foretelling the deaths of children, “which he almost always accompanied with jocular words (scherzi) on his lips.” He would enter a house and genially remark: “O, what an odour of Paradise”; sooner or later one or more of the children of the family would perish. To a boy of twelve he said, “Be good, Natale, for the angels are coming to take you.” These playful words seem to have weighed considerably on the boy’s mind and, sure enough, after a few years he died. But even more charming—più grazioso, the biographer calls it—was the incident when he once asked a father whether he would give his son to Saint Pasquale. The fond parent agreed, thinking that the words referred to the boy’s future career in the Church. But the saint meant something quite different—he meant a career in heaven! And in less than a month the child died. To a little girl who was crying in the street he said: “I don’t want to hear you any more. Go and sing in Paradise.” And meeting her a short time after, he said, “What, are you still here?” In a few days she was dead.

The biography gives many instances of this pretty gift which would hardly have contributed to the saint’s popularity in England or any other country save this, where—although the surviving youngsters are described as “struck with terror at the mere name of the Servant of God”—the parents were naturally glad to have one or two angels in the family, to act as avvocati (pleaders) for those that remained on earth.

And the mention of the legal profession brings me to one really instructive miracle. It is usually to be observed, after a saint has been canonized, that heaven, by some further sign or signs, signifies approval of this solemn act of the Vicar of God; indeed, to judge by these biographies, such a course is not only customary but, to use a worldly expression, de rigueur. And so it happened after the decree relative to Saint Giangiuseppe had been pronounced in the Vatican basilica by His Holiness Pius VI, in the presence of the assembled cardinals. Innumerable celestial portents (their enumeration fills eleven pages of the “Life”) confirmed and ratified the great event, and among them this: the notary, who had drawn up both the ordinary and the apostolic processi, was cured of a grievous apoplexy, survived for four years, and finally died on the very anniversary of the death of the saint. Involuntarily one contrasts this heavenly largesse with the sordid guineas which would have contented an English lawyer. . . .

Or glance into the biography of the Venerable Sister Orsola Benincasa. She, too, could fly a little and raise men from the dead. She cured diseases, foretold her own death and that of others, lived for a month on the sole nourishment of a consecrated wafer; she could speak Latin and Polish, although she had been taught nothing at all; wrought miracles after death, and possessed to a heroic degree the virtues of patience, humility, temperance, justice, etc. etc. So inflamed was she with divine love, that almost every day thick steam issued out of her mouth, which was observed to be destructive to articles of clothing; her heated body, when ice was applied, used to hiss like a red-hot iron under similar conditions. As a child, she already cried for other people’s sins; she was always hunting for her own and would gladly, at the end of her long and blameless career, have exchanged her sins for those of the youthful Duchess of Aquaro. An interesting phenomenon, by the way, the theory of sinfulness which crops up at this particular period of history. For our conception of sin is alien to the Latin mind. There is no “sin” in Italy (and this is not the least of her many attractions); it is an article manufactured exclusively for export.

“Vita della Venerabile Serva di Dio Suor Orsola Benincasa, Scritta da un cherico regolare,” Rome, 1796. There are, of course, much earlier biographies of all these saints; concerning Sister Orsola we possess, for instance, the remarkable pamphlet by Cesare d’Eboli (“Caesaris Aevoli Neapolitani Apologia pro Ursula Neapolitana quæ ad urbem accessit MDLXXXIII,” Venice, 1589), which achieves the distinction of never mentioning Orsola by name: she is only once referred to as “mulier de qua agitur.” But I prefer to quote from the more recent ones because they are authoritative, in so far as they have been written on the basis of miracles attested by eye-witnesses and accepted as veracious by the Vatican tribunal. Sister Orsola, though born in 1547, was only declared Venerable by Pontifical decree of 1793. Biographies prior to that date are therefore ex-parte statements and might conceivably contain errors of fact. This is out of the question here, as is clearly shown by the author on p. 178.

Orsola’s speciality, however, were those frequent trance-like conditions by reason of which, during her lifetime, she was created “Protectress of the City of Naples.” I cannot tell whether she was the first woman-saint to obtain this honour. Certainly the “Seven Holy Protectors” concerning whom Paolo Regio writes were all musty old males. . . .

And here is quite another biography, that of Alfonso di Liguori (born 1696), the founder of the Redemptorist order and a canonized saint. He, too, could fly a little and raise the dead to life; he suffered devil-temptations, caused the clouds to rain, calmed an eruption of Vesuvius, multiplied food, and so forth. Such was his bashfulness, that even as an aged bishop he refused to be unrobed by his attendants; such his instinct for moral cleanliness that once, when a messenger had alighted at his convent accompanied by a soldier, he instantly detected, under the military disguise, the lineaments of a young woman-friend. Despite these divine gifts, he always needed a confessor. An enormous batch of miracles accompanied his sanctification.

But he only employed these divine graces by the way; he was by profession not a taumaturgo, but a clerical instructor, organizer, and writer. The Vatican has conferred on him the rare title of “Doctor Ecclesiæ,” which he shares with Saint Augustine and some others.

The biography from which I have drawn these details was printed in Rome in 1839. It is valuable because it is modern and so far authentic; and for two other reasons. In the first place, curiously enough, it barely mentions the saint’s life-work—his writings. Secondly, it is a good example of what I call the pious palimpsest. It is over-scored with contradictory matter. The author, for example, while accidentally informing us that Alfonso kept a carriage, imputes to him a degrading, Oriental love of dirt and tattered garments, in order (I presume) to make his character conform to the grosser ideals of the mendicant friars. I do not believe in these traits—in his hatred of soap and clean apparel. From his works I deduce a different original. He was refined and urbane; of a casuistical and prying disposition; like many sensitive men, unduly preoccupied with the sexual life of youth; like a true feudal aristocrat, ever ready to apply force where verbal admonition proved unavailing. . . .

In wonder-working capacities these saints were all put in the shade by the Calabrian Francesco di Paola, who raised fifteen persons from the dead in his boyhood. He used to perform a hundred miracles a day, and “it was a miracle, when a day passed without a miracle.” The index alone of any one of his numerous biographies is enough to make one’s head swim.

The vast majority of saints of this period do not belong to that third sex after which, according to some, the human race has ever striven—the constructive and purposeful third sex. 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. 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.

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.

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. Trainers of performing animals are aware how these differ in plasticity of disposition and amenability to discipline; the spiritual adviser, who knows his business, must be quick to detect these various qualities in the minds of his penitents and to utilize them to the best advantage. It is inconceivable, for instance, that the convent-foundress Orsola was other than a neuropathic nonentity—a blind instrument in the hands of what we should call her backers, chiefest of whom (in Naples) were two Spanish priests, Borli and Navarro, whose local efforts were supported, at head-quarters, by the saintly Filippo Neri and the learned Cardinal Baronius.

This is noticeable. The earlier of these godly biographies are written in Latin, and these are more restrained in their language; they were composed, one imagines, for the priests and educated classes who could dispense to a certain degree with prodigies. But the later ones, from the viceregal period onwards, are in the vernacular and display a marked deterioration; one must suppose that they were printed for such of the common people as could still read (up to a few years ago, sixty-five per cent of the populace were analphabetic). They are pervaded by the characteristic of all contemporary literature and art: that deliberate intention to astound which originated with the poet Marino, who declared such to have been his object and ideal. The miracles certainly do astound; they are as strepitosi (clamour-arousing) as the writers claim them to be; how they ever came to occur must be left to the consciences of those who swore on oath to the truth of them.

During this period the Mother of God as a local saint increased in popularity. There was a ceaseless flow of monographs dealing with particular Madonnas, as well as a small library on what the Germans would doubtless call the “Madonna as a Whole.” Here is Serafino Montorio’s “Zodiaco di Maria,” printed in 1715 on the lines of that monster of a book by Gumppenberg. It treats of over two hundred subspecies of Madonna worshipped in different parts of south Italy which is divided, for these celestial purposes, into twelve regions, according to the signs of the Zodiac. The book is dedicated by the author to his “Sovereign Lady the Gran Madre di Dio” and might, in truth, have been written to the glory of that protean old Magna Mater by one of Juvenal’s “tonsured herd” possessed of much industry but little discrimination. Such as it is, it reflects the crude mental status of the Dominican order to which the author belonged. I warmly recommend this book to all Englishmen desirous of understanding the south. It is pure, undiluted paganism—paganism of a bad school; one would think it marked the lowest possible ebb of Christian spirituality. But this is by no means the case, as I shall presently show.

The Mater Dei was officially installed in the place of Magna Mater at the Synod of Ephesus in 431.

How different, from such straightforward unreason, are the etherealized, saccharine effusions of the “Glories of Mary,” by Alfonso di Liguori! They represent the other pole of Mariolatry—the gentlemanly pole. And under the influence of Mary-worship a new kind of saintly physiognomy was elaborated, as we can see from contemporary prints and pictures. The bearded men-saints were extinct; in the place of them this mawkish, sub-sexual love for the Virgin developed a corresponding type of adorer—clean-shaven, emasculate youths, posing in ecstatic attitudes with a nauseous feminine smirk. Rather an unpleasant sort of saint.

The unwholesome chastity-ideal, without which no holy man of the period was “complete,” naturally left its mark upon literature, notably on that of certain Spanish theologians. But good specimens of what I mean may also be found in the Theologia Moralis of Liguori; the kind of stuff, that is, which would be classed as “curious” in catalogues and kept in a locked cupboard by the most broad-minded paterfamilias. Reading these elucubrations of Alfonso’s, one feels that the saint has pondered long and lovingly upon themes like an et quando peccata sint oscula or de tactu et adspectu corporis; he writes with all the authority of an expert whose richly-varied experiences in the confessional have been amplified and irradiated by divine inspiration. I hesitate what to call this literature, seeing that it was obviously written to the glory of God and His Virgin Mother. The congregation of the Index, which was severe in the matter of indecent publications and prohibited Boccaccio’s Decameron on these grounds, hailed with approval the appearance of such treatises composed, as they were, for the guidance of young priests.

Cruelty (in the shape of the Inquisition) and lasciviousness (as exemplified by such pious filth)—these are the prime fruits of that cult of asceticism which for centuries the Government strove to impose upon south Italy. If the people were saved, it was due to that substratum of sanity, of Greek sophrosyne, which resisted the one and derided the other. Whoever has saturated himself with the records will marvel not so much that the inhabitants preserved some shreds of common sense and decent feeling, as that they survived at all—he will marvel that the once fair kingdom was not converted into a wilderness, saintly but uninhabited, like Spain itself.

For the movement continued in a vertiginous crescendo. Spaniardism culminated in Bourbonism, and this, again, reached its climax in the closing years of the eighteenth century, when the conditions of south Italy baffled description. I have already (p. 212) given the formidable number of its ecclesiastics; the number of saints was commensurate, but—as often happens when the quantity is excessive—the quality declined. This lazzaroni-period was the debâcle of holiness. So true it is that our gods reflect the hearts that make them.

The Venerable Fra Egidio, a native of Taranto, is a good example of contemporary godliness. My biography of him was printed in Naples in 1876, and contains a dedicatory epistle addressed to the Blessed Virgin by her “servant, subject, and most loving son Rosario Frungillo”—a canon of the church and the author of the book.

“Vita del Venerabile servo di Dio Fra Egidio da S. Giuseppe laico professo alcantarino,” Napoli, 1876.

This “taumaturgo” could perform all the ordinary feats; I will not linger over them. What has made him popular to this day are those wonders which appealed to the taste of the poorer people, such as, for example, that miracle of the eels. A fisherman had brought fourteen hundredweight of these for sale in the market. Judge of his disappointment when he discovered that they had all died during the journey (southerners will not pay for dead eels). Fortunately, he saw the saint arriving in a little boat, who informed him that the eels were “not dead, but only asleep,” and who woke them up again by means of a relic of Saint Pasquale which he always carried about with him, after a quarter of an hour’s devout praying, during which the perspiration oozed from his forehead. The eels, says the writer, had been dead and slimy, but now turned their bellies downwards once more and twisted about in their usual spirals; there began a general weeping among the onlookers, and the fame of the miracle immediately spread abroad. He could do the same with lobsters, cows, and human beings.

Thus a cow belonging to Fra Egidio’s monastery was once stolen by an impious butcher, and cut up into the usual joints with a view to a clandestine sale of the meat. The saint discovered the beast’s remains, ordered that they should be laid together on the floor in the shape of a living cow, with the entrails, head and so forth in their natural positions; then, having made the sign of the cross with his cord upon the slaughtered beast, and rousing up all his faith, he said: “In the name of God and of Saint Pasquale, arise, Catherine!” (Catherine was the cow’s name.) “At these words the animal lowed, shook itself, and stood up on its feet alive, whole and strong, even as it had been before it was killed.”