Sine intermissione orate (I Thess, v, 17)

The following notes have been suggested to the writer by the reading of Récita sincères d’un pélerin à son père spirituel, a French translation of a MS. found on Mount Athos and published at Kazan in 1882. They are set down here as they may be not without interest to others. Of this book Professor Arseniev writes (Mysticism and the Eastern Church): The experience of the old Oriental Fathers, those guides to the ascetic mystical life, as they are collected in the Philokalia, spring into fresh life in that remarkable monument of Russian folk mysticism of the middle of the nineteenth century… The Candid Narrative of a Pilgrim to his Confessor… is by a man of great capacity for intense inward prayer. This pilgrim is possessed by the sweetness of inward prayer and thereby his life is transfigured.

Langland’s outlook is really centred in the doctrine of the Mystical Body, though he nowhere employs the term itself. He conceives of the Church and her members in this living corporate way. From the very fact of to the Incarnation, all mankind has become related to God in common brotherhood, even those outside the Church.

But my nature shall move me to be merciful to man For we are brethren of one blood though not in baptism together are words of our Lord at the harrowing of hell (Passus XVIII, 397-8). Men are not only blood brethren because they bear the same nature with the same human blood coursing through their veins, but also because they have been bought by the outpouring of that blood made precious in union with the divinity:

“They are my blood brethren”, said Piers, ‘for God bought all men”. (Passus VI, 212; cf. XVIII, 348 sqq.)

Of all the titles of Jesus this is the most mysterious, yet also it was the one most used by him, the title of his predilection.

Christ is called Son of Mary; and that is not difficult to understand. She gave him as much as any mother ever gives her child, his body, his features, temperament maybe. Mary must have given all these, for there was no human father. Thus Nestorius was indeed wrong-headed when he refused her the title of Mother of God. We do not say of our mothers ‘That is the mother of Charles’s body’, but ‘that is Charles’s mother’, i.e., the person Charles; so Mary is the mother of the Person Christ, and the Person is the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity.

Son of David, likewise we can understand; though even this is not simple, for he was not so by direct male descent. Still, he was sufficiently descended by blood through Mary, and far more deeply so by inheriting the kingdom; and yet again, not the kingdom of the earthly Jerusalem, but that of the spiritual Jerusalem.

Siena may be called the city of unusual vocations. There is St Catherine, who brought back the Pope from Avignon and was espoused to our Lord; St Bernardine, ardent Apostle of the Name of Jesus, and, very near our own time, Bl. Anna Maria Taigi, mother of a large family, mystic and confidante of Popes. She was born in the same year as Napoleon (1769) with whose family she was later brought into close relation. Unlike in this to her great compatriot, she gave no early signs of future sanctity. She was the daughter of an apothecary, a spendthrift who went to Rome with his family when Anne was six. She was sent to a convent school where she learned embroidery and afterwards her father found her a job as housemaid with a rich lady of doubtful reputation. In her house she spent three years, learning all the secrets of female vanity and becoming conscious of her own attraction for men. It was a perilous position for a poor and pretty young girl, and the dangers were not altogether removed even when, in 1790, she married Domenico Taigi, a valet in the Palazzo Chigi, considerably older than herself.