CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Vita Sackville-West
List of Illustrations
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
Saint Teresa of Avila 1515–1582
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
St. Thérèse of Lisieux 1873–1897
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
Acknowledgments
Appendices
Copyright
Avila
The Spanish National Tourist Office
ABOUT THE BOOK
The two saints whose lives Vita Sackville-West contrasts in this double biography were recorded by very different epithets: ‘the great’ and ‘the little’. Both women were Carmelites, both canonised and both shared the same name. But whilst Teresa of Avila was aristocratic, intellectual, vigorous and humorous, a Spanish woman of the sixteenth century, Thérèse of Lisieux was a guileless and sentimental figure of the French bourgeoisie. Vita Sackville-West scrutinises the extraordinary rise of the cults of both women.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Victoria Mary Sackville-West, known as Vita, was born in 1892 at Knole in Kent, the only child of aristocratic parents. In 1913 she married diplomat Harold Nicolson, with whom she had two sons and travelled extensively before settling at Sissinghurst Castle in 1930, where she devoted much of her time to creating its now world-famous garden. Throughout her life Sackville-West had a number of other relationships with both men and women, and her unconventional marriage would later become the subject of a biography written by her son Nigel Nicolson. Though she produced a substantial body of work, amongst which are writings on travel and gardening, Sackville-West is best known for her novels The Edwardians (1930) and All Passion Spent (1931), and for the pastoral poem The Land (1926) which was awarded the prestigious Hawthornden Prize. She died in 1962 at Sissinghurst.
ALSO BY VITA SACKVILLE-WEST
Novels
Family History
Heritage
The Dragon in Shallow Waters
The Heir
Challenge
Seducers in Ecuador
The Edwardians
All Passion Spent
Grand Canyon
Non-Fiction
Passenger to Teheran
Saint Joan of Arc
English Country Houses
Pepita
Sissinghurst: The Creation of a Garden
ILLUSTRATIONS
Avila
A Letter from St Teresa
El Greco: Toledo in a Storm
Les Buissonnets, Lisieux
St Thérèse at the Convent of Lisieux
To
TERESA-MARIA
“There is a God,—the most august of all conceivable truths.”
CARDINAL NEWMAN
Saint Teresa of Avila
1515–1582
*
I
“I look down on the world as from a great height and care very little what people say or know about me. Our Lord has made my life to me now a kind of sleep, for almost always what I see seems to me to be seen as in a dream, nor have I any great sense either of pleasure or of pain.”
ST. TERESA
THE SAINTS IN general are but little known to that non-Catholic branch of Christ’s church which nevertheless and somewhat incongruously avows its belief in the Communion of Saints in its accepted creed. Half a dozen or so are vaguely familiar, but even these owe their popularity to some recognisable label: St. Anthony of Padua because he enjoys a reputation for finding lost objects; St. Francis of Assisi because he fed the birds; St. Joan of Arc because she heard voices, was burnt by the English, and saved France. We cherish also some saints to whom our insular interest attaches: St. Thomas à Beckett because he was murdered in Canterbury cathedral; St. Swithin because of his reputed influence on our climate; St. Columba because he landed in Scotland; St. Patrick because he landed in Ireland; St. George because he slew a dragon in Libya. Others have imprinted themselves on our imagination through the pictorial representations of the distressing trials they underwent: St. Sebastian because he was pierced by arrows; St. Catherine of Alexandria because she was broken on a wheel, oddly and unwittingly commemorated by us on the Fifth of November; St. Ursula because she was accompanied by eleven thousand virgins. None of these is a very profound or far-reaching reason for an acquaintance which would probably not stand up to any more extensive enquiry. Yet, whatever our beliefs may be, whether we spontaneously invoke St. Anthony when we have mislaid our keys or stalk with Puritan disapproval past the touching little shrines and statues which mean so much to a Catholic peasantry, there is a fascination to be found in the study of this life within life, this unique company, concealed but ardent, chronologically sparse but always similar in aim and often in actual detail of experience; this contradiction of all worldly values. Apparently unaccountable to many of us, to others even shocking in its suggestion of idolatry, there may yet come moments when as in any attempt to grasp a totally recondite subject (let us say Relativity), whose importance we know by repute but whose quest we have eschewed as being beyond our comprehension and certainly beyond any practical usefulness in the life we have to lead, a glimmer of understanding crosses our darkness, instantly gone again perhaps, but at least sufficient to show us that a truth is there and that our dismissal of it as meaningless, or meaningless to us, throws ourselves, not the subject, into a paltry light.
No mathematics or specialised knowledge are required for an appreciation of the saints. True, and especially in the case of the advanced mystics, we may find ourselves led sometimes into regions of theological technicalities which may appear but an otiose complication of a fundamentally simple proposition. In the matter of prayer alone, prayer, that vital means of access for the seeker after God, it may come as a surprise to discover the intricacies of systematised prayer; to discover how long a step there is between the simple, direct appeal and the instructed method of the advanced religious. There would seem to be something artificial about it; something too sophisticated; something which would interfere with the spontaneous approach of the soul to its Creator. The theologically uninformed asks himself whether he is to regard this as an unnecessary elaboration of the purely pious, worshipping, propitiating instinct, or as the advance always inevitable in the perfection of technique. Is he to regard it as comparable in poetry to the outpourings of the child or adolescent in raw verse, heartfelt but in the literary sense negligible, against the mature perfected achievement of the adult, preserving its sincerity under the control of craftsmanship? and as any form of stylised art may appear to the untrained eye, bearing no relation at all to the lower and easier function of “representation”? The refinements of the expert are always apt to provoke the annoyance of the amateur, but he will display a reasonable temper if he decides to consider with patience and tolerance the methods evolved by the informed. For, as we advance deeper into this unknown country, it grows apparent that such charts and sign-posts, far from creating confusion where none should be, do indeed serve to clarify the way and become indispensable as the pilgrim trudges along th
e labyrinthine lanes of the soul. After all “The subject,” as Teresa of Avila remarked, “is most difficult to understand without personal experience of such graces.” It is indeed. We may agree further with St. Teresa when she observes that she wonders why God has not explained such difficult, occult subjects more fully, so that we could all understand Him. But in the main we are concerned with those things familiar, even though but spasmodically, to all: the intimations of another rule of life; the desire, faint perhaps, addled or abortive, to fulfil those intimations; a desire provoked, perhaps, only by some personal misfortune, some disaster which indicates that life is neither so secure nor so well-ordered as we should like to believe; a dissatisfaction with the prevailing code; the disquieting conviction that some solution of greater and infinitely more essential value has somehow eluded most people of the generations, past and present, of dwellers on this earth. It is not reasonable to suppose that a final apprehension of either the visible or the invisible world is necessarily to be reached only by means of our own five senses or even by the conjectures of our remarkable and vaunted brain. Such a supposition is as arrogant as it is limited. Even the most materially-minded amongst us know very well, in moments of fright and incertitude when an earthquake shudders the foundation of our pitiable structure, that our facade represents in no true way the answer lying somewhere else, behind it. What that answer may be, monosyllabic, brief, plain, and tremendous, we do not know. That it exists we cannot doubt. It is reasonable, on the other hand, to contend that if we admit the aim of mankind to be, on the whole, an aspiration towards an understanding of some Absolute, a discovery of some singleness in place of the fragmentary confusion which life offers, then we must also recognise that those who have sought, thoroughly, consistently, and exclusively the life of the spirit instead of the life of the world, demonstrate no more than an exaggerated exemplification of ourselves in those dim and rudimentary stirrings which the urgency of the visible world has so quickly suppressed.
Let us mention in parenthesis that on a less exalted but most perplexing plane the saints provide us with a series of problems not usually realised by the reader hitherto uninterested in such subjects. It would be frivolous to dwell at too great a length on the merely physical phenomena which so frequently accompany holiness both during life and after death; frivolous, unless turned into a special and separate study supported by much documentation and all the available scientific, medical, and theological evidence; but we may at least indulge ourselves to the extent of touching briefly on this exceedingly curious and unexplained aspect of the mystical life. It may be suggestive enough to make a short list of some peculiarities observed in hundreds of cases, leaving them without comment and resisting the temptation to supply a confusing number of instances. Such a list must be divided into two parts, the first concerned with the living body and the second with the dead. Among the living we shall find such surprising gifts as levitation, or the involuntary rising of the body into the air;fn1 and the perhaps more notorious mystery of stigmatisation, or reproduction of the wounds of Christ, where the apparent injuries may be restricted to the hands and feet, but may also include the fifth wound, in the side; supplemented sometimes by the marks of the Crown of Thorns; and even in some rarer cases by the weals of the Flagellation and the bruises produced upon the shoulder by the weight of the Cross. (An autopsy held on St. Veronica Giuliani revealed a definite bending of the bone in the right shoulder, compatible with the carrying of such a heavy burden.) Stigmatisation, compared with levitation, is of rare occurrence, with only fifty or sixty cases worth considering on the evidence, the majority of them women. The earliest recorded case, with the possible exception of Blessed Dodo the Frisian, is that of St. Francis of Assisi, whose hands and feet “seemed pierced in the midst by nails, the heads of the nails appearing in the inner part of the hands and in the upper part of the feet and their points over against them, i.e. certain small pieces of flesh were seen like the ends of nails bent and driven back.… Moreover his right side, as if it had been pierced by a lance, was overlaid with a scar and often shed forth blood.” This shedding of blood is a recognised incident in stigmatists, and usually takes place on Fridays. Less well-known, probably, is the manifestation called incendium amoris, where the temperature is raised beyond medical experience and the oppression of physical heat is such that the sufferer bathes himself with cold water in search of relief, or tears open his clothes, as St. Philip Neri who would walk with his chest uncovered through Rome even in the snow; and St. Mary Magdalen de’ Pazzi, who was so distraught by this burning of love that she not only cut and tore her habit, but went out into the garden and tore up the plants, fanned her face with her veil, ran to the well, drank large quantities of water, poured it into her bosom, and behaved altogether in a manner indicative of the great oppression she felt. A certain Dominican nun, Maria Villani, aptly described as “a furnace of love,” was said to give forth a sizzling sound like that of water falling on a sheet of red-hot iron whenever she drank; and the same hissing sound was observed whenever a cooling drench was poured over the Venerable Agnes of Jesus. A modern example, alive in 1923 though I cannot tell whether he is still living now, is found in a young Capuchin priest at Foggia, a stigmatist, whose temperature exceeds the register of any clinical thermometer and causes it to break.
So much for the living body. There is much more that could be said, and many strange happenings have been omitted, but the psychologically-minded will maintain that all such phenomena can, or could, be explained away if only we knew more about the influence of the mind upon the material tissues. They will maintain, with truth, that extreme ardour experienced by persons violently inspired is known to produce definite physical effects; that tremblings of the limbs, palpitations of the heart, sweats and shiverings, the pains of racked joints, even loss of sensibility and similar consequences of immoderate emotion are common to us all, though perhaps in lesser degree. Suspicions of hallucination and auto-suggestion will also be advanced. Let us turn therefore to the body after death, when the mind, presumably, can no longer be operative or in any way be held responsible.
Here we shall meet in the first place with the unaccountable problem of the incorruptibility of the body. It is established beyond all doubt that the remains of certain persons, even after the lapes of centuries, have not suffered the ordinary decomposition of mortal flesh. On this point there can be no argument at all. Nor do the conditions following upon death and burial appear to affect the matter; it is influenced neither by damp, nor quicklime, nor by delay in interment (and in many cases the reluctance of the devout to be separated from the object of their devotion has led to an abnormal procrastination, St. Bernardine of Siena for instance remaining unburied for twenty-six days, St. Angela Merici, Foundress of the Ursulines, for thirty days, St. Laurence Giustiniani for sixty-seven days), nor by such exceptional circumstances as those which occurred in the case of St. Josaphat, who was murdered and thrown into the river Dwina, retrieved after spending six days in the water, found then to be fresh and beautiful, and preserved his incorruption for many years afterwards. From the moment we begin to glance, however cursorily, at this subject, the more baffling does it become. For one thing, the marvel of incorruptibility is extremely erratic in its incidence, and would seem not necessarily to be associated with the degree of sanctity. Thus, neither St. Francis, St. Bernard, St. Dominic, St. Ignatius, St. Vincent Ferrer, St. Aloysius Gonzaga, St. Gabriel the Passionist, nor the subject of the second essay in this book, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, was spared the common lot of decay. On the other hand, this remarkable favour attends some of the most famous names in the Calendar, St. Charles Borromeo for example, dying in 1584, was found almost entire in 1880 despite a damp and leaky coffin; St. John of the Cross, dying in 1591, was still incorrupt in 1859. As for St. Teresa of Avila, we shall presently have occasion to record contemporary evidence on her preservation; and, coming down to more recent times, may note the case of the renowned Curé d’Ars, Jean-Baptiste V
ianney, and that of St. Bernadette Soubirous of Lourdes, who, dying in 1879, was exhumed thirty years later and found to be without any trace of putrefaction. Erratic indeed; inconsistent, even whimsical, would appear the bestowal of this most strange dispensation. Sometimes it was inexplicably partial; St. Anthony, for instance, was allowed to disintegrate in the normal way, but his tongue remained “red, soft, and entire”—an object which aroused the veneration of Thérèse of Lisieux on a journey to Italy some six and a half centuries after his death.
Incorruptibility is not the only aberration from natural laws to be found in association with the dead body. Conspicuous among these other phenomena is the cadaveric rigidity (rigor mortis) which sets in a few hours after death and passes off within thirty-six hours, speaking approximately. Medical experience makes no exception for this law, but it is certain that the corpses of many holy persons have been known to remain supple throughout the period when rigidity was to be expected; we will quote only the case of St. Benedict Joseph Labre, who so entirely retained the flexibility and even the warmth of life for four days, that a surgeon examined his heart and lungs to make certain that he was really dead. Fragrance is yet another unexplained but well-authenticated attribute; the “odour of sanctity,” in fact; a pleasant gift not always limited to the corpse, but shared also by those who quite certainly made no use of manufactured scents. “When we wanted the Reverend Mother,” writes a nun of Blessed Maria of the Angels, “and could not find her in her cell, we used to track her by the fragrance she had left behind.” It may be objected by the sceptic that such delightful scents existed only as an illusion in the nostrils of those concerned, though the accumulation of evidence weighs strongly against this theory; but what explanation can be found for another mystery, the exudation of an oily liquid from the incorrupt body and even, in rare cases, from the skeleton? St. Walburga, an Englishwoman, has exuded this peculiar unguent for over twelve hundred years.
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