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‘That in Her the Seed of the Serpent May Have no Part’: the Agredan Visions and the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin in Early Modern Spain and Germany
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
In the winter of 1755, Giacomo Casanova, doing time in the Venetian jail known as the ‘Leads’, spent a disturbing week absorbed in the only reading matter available, a volume which he judged a work of’heated imagination’ and of’chimerical and monstruous visions dressed up as revelations’. It was enough to induce repeated nightmares. ‘On sleeping’, he recorded,
I perceived the sickness that this book had communicated to my spirit, weakened by melancholy and undernourishment. My extravagant dreams made me laugh when I recalled them on waking; I had an urge to write them down, and had I had the means to do so I would perhaps have produced up there an even madder book than the one I had been given.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2004
References
1 Casanova, Giacomo, Histoire de ma fuite des prisons de la Republique de Venise qu’on appelle les Plombs (Paris, 1987), 45–8 Google Scholar.
2 Pérez, Nazario, Historia Mariana de Espana, 2 vols, 2nd edn (Toledo, 1993-5), 2:13 Google Scholar.
3 Flores, Stefano de and Meo, Salvatore, eds, Nuevo diccionario de Mariologia (Madrid, 1988), 910–41 Google Scholar.
4 See Stratton, Suzanne L., The Immaculate Conception in Spanish Art (Cambridge, 1994)Google Scholar, for a splendid analysis of the development of Immaculist iconography in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and an elegant summary of its theological and political context.
5 Kendrick, T.D., Mary of Agreda: the Life and Legend of a Spanish Nun (1967)Google Scholar; Colahan, Clark, The Visions of Sor Maria de Agreda: Writing Knowledge and Power (Tucson, AZ, and London, 1994)Google Scholar.
6 Ibid., 160.
7 I have used the standard modern edition: de Jesús de Agreda, Sor Maria, Ciudad de Dios, Mistica. Vida de Maria. Texto conforme al autόgrafo original, ed. Celestino Solaguren (Madrid, 1970) [hereafter MCD], 88, 98 Google Scholar.
8 MCD, 92.
9 MCD, 102.
10 Colahan, Clark, ‘Maria de Jesus de Agreda. The Sweetheart of the Holy Office’, in Giles, Mary E., ed., Women in the Inquisition. Spain and the New World (Baltimore, MD, and London, 1999), 155–170 Google Scholar.
11 MCD, Introduction, cii-civ.
12 Canisius, Peter, De Maria virgine incomparabili, et Dei genitrice sacrosancta, libri auinaue (Ingolstadt, 1577), 33–58 Google Scholar.
13 Saunders, Steven, ‘Der Kaiser als KÜnstler: Ferdinand III and the politicization of sacred music at the Habsburg court’, in Reinhart, Max, ed., Infinite Boundaries: Order, Disorder, and Reorder in Early Modern German Culture (Kirksville, MO, 1998), 187–208 Google Scholar.
14 Heyret, Maria, P. Marcus von Aviano O.M.Cap., apostolischer Missionar and päpstlkher Legal beim chrisllichen Heere (Munich, 1931), 150 Google Scholar. The use of exorcism to promote Immaculism persisted in Bavaria, where the notorious depossessions performed nearly a century later by Johann Joseph Gassner (1727-79) also invoked the Immaculate Conception: Manfred Eder, Teufelsglaube, “Besessenheit” und Exorzismus in Deggendorf (1785-1791)’, Beilräge zur Geschkhte des Bistums Regensburg, 26 (1992), 295-321.
15 The book was used to promote Christocentric piety as well. In Bavaria, the new devotional topos of the ‘Dominus in Carcere’, focussing on the suffering of Christ in prison, received impetus from Sor Maria’s detailed and dramatic narrative: Hubensteiner, Benno, Vom Ceist des Barock. Kultur and Frömmigkeit im alien Bayerti, 2nd edn (Munich, 1978), 93 Google Scholar.
16 On Amort, his role in the Agredan controversy, and the immediate intellectual context, see Diilmen, Richard van, Propst Franziskus Töpsl (1711-1796) und das Augustiner-Chorherretutift Polling: Ein Beilrag zur Geschkhte der katholischen Aufklärung in Bayern (Kallmiinz Opf., 1967), 23–33, 145–160 Google Scholar. A brief but lively attack on Amort by a twentieth- century Agredista can be found in Royo, Luis Garcia, La Aristocracia Espaiiola y Sor Maria de Jestis de Agreda (Madrid, 1951), 166–73 Google Scholar.
17 Van DÜlmen, Propsl Täpsl, 154.
18 Amort lists twelve indicators of ‘probable’ revelations in historical cases: (I) such reve lations lead to the conversion of the heart; (II) they are free from suspicion of demonic or human illusion; (III) they provide consolation in times of persecution; (IV) at such times they are granted to several people and not just one; (V) they are attended by miraculous cures; (VI) they strengthen the faith of Christians; (VII) they come unexpectedly to people unaccus tomed to receive them; (VIII) they come in circumstances in which fantastical or diabolical illusions are unlikely; (DC) they are granted to people for a manifestly good end; (X) they dis close the secrets of the heart for the emendation of the soul or other holy purposes; (XI) they impart an extraordinary knowledge of sacred things; and (XII) they dispose one to a good death. For Amort, Sor Maria’s visions would pass some of these tests, but principally fail to meet his second condition, for which additonal criteria for discernment were applied. Amort, Eusebius, De revelalionibus, visionibus el apparitionibus privatis reaulae tutae ex scriptura, conciliis, ss. patribus, aliisque optimis authoribus collectae, explicatae et exemplis illustratae (Augsburg, 1744), Pars II, 32–9 Google Scholar.
19 Ibid., II, 220-1,223.
20 Ibid., II, 498-516.
21 ‘Hoc totum difficile est, quia S. Hostiationdum resoluta in Chylum ordinarie non potest per venas lacteas transire in Ductum Pecqueticum, et exinde residere in corde. Circulatio sanguinis, quae a Neotericis Philosophis inventa est, evertit hoc totum Systema Residentiae Eucharisticae in corde B. Virginis et communicantium’: ibid., II, 521. The same discovery also enables Amort to rubbish Sor Maria’s claim that the compression of Mary’s heart produced three drops of blood from which Christ’s body was formed (p. 521). On the provenance of this last notion see Augustin Poulain, The Graces of Interior Prayer, 6th edn, trans. L. Smith (1950), 352.
22 Amort’s zeal could lead him onto shaky ground at times, as when he lambasts Sor Maria for asserting that the form and stature of Adam and Eve exactly matched that of Christ and Mary: ‘it is common knowledge that men in the first age of the world were of greater stature than those of the fourth or fifth millennium. This is proven by the size of the bodies of the ancients, according to the historians’: Amort, De revelationibus, II, 543.
23 Ibid., 11, 575-80.
24 Ibid., II, 561.
25 Ibid., II, 583.
26 Ibid., II, 581, 585-6. Limitations of space prohibit here a discussion of the gendered discourse of the Agredan debates. Clark Colahan makes a persuasive case for a reading of the Mystical City as feminist text (Visions of Sor Maria, esp. 147-65). Amort’s defence of patriarchal restrictions on the female religious voice is evident from his scepticism about private revelation in general, from his specific attacks against female visionaries and from his critique of passages of the Mystical City, as when he questions Sor Maria’s assertion that ‘through the descent of the Holy Spirit the gift of miracles was even imparted to women … Why is St Luke silent about this in Acts?’: Amort, De revelationibus, II, 541.
27 Ibid, II, 587.
28 Paz, Alvarez de, De inquisitione pacis she de studio oratione (Lyons, 1617)Google Scholar; Bona, G., De discretione spirituum liber unus (Brussels, 1674)Google Scholar; Scaramelli, G.B., Discernimento degli spiriti (Venice, 1753) and Direttorio mistico (Venice, 1754)Google Scholar. On Scaramelli, see Hogue, Leo A, S.J., ‘The Direttorio Mistico of J.B. Scaramelli S.I’., Archivum historicum societatis Iesu, 9 (1940), 1–39 Google Scholar.
29 Van Dölmen, Propst Täpsl, 156.
30 Benedict XIV’s views were explicit: ‘What is to be said of those private revelations which the Apostolic See has approved of, those of the Blessed Hildegard, of St Bridget and of St Catherine of Siena? We have already said that those revelations, although approved of, ought not to, and cannot, receive from us any assent of Catholic, but only of human faith, according to the rules of prudence, according to which the aforesaid revelations are probable, and piously to be believed’ (cited in Poulain, Graces, 3 20).
31 Van Diilmen, Propst Topsl, 160.
32 Ibid., 154-5.
33 On this problem, Poulain, Graces, 330.
34 Flores and Meo, Nuevo diccionario de Mariologia, 910-41.