The essentials of mysticism, and other essaysUnderhill, Evelyn
Religion
The essentials of mysticism, and other essays
Underhill, Evelyn
Mysticism
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.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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