The Eagle and the Dove

by Vita Sackville-West

  The habit had rotted into damp and mouldy rags, but the body had preserved a miraculous incorruptibility. The nuns after performing the pious task of removing the clothes, scraping away the earth with knives, and washing the face and body, were able to look their fill and without repugnance before wrapping the mortal remains of Teresa in a clean sheet and restoring her for—as they mistakenly thought—the last time to her resting-place. But before that rite could be accomplished, there remained one act in this furtive drama, an act so grisly, so repulsive, that the imagination shudders at its contemplation. The Father Provincial advanced, and cut the left hand from the rigid arm. Veneration for saintly relics inspired him; and doubtless in the minds of the performer and the onlookers no shuddering recoil occurred, but only a pride of satisfaction that a tangible trophy should be carried from their great Foundress to the world. But for us the last touch of horror is added by the fact that that Father Provincial should be no other than the Father Gracian whom Teresa had so warmly loved, fretting lest he should injure himself by tumbling from his mule.

  XVII

  IT MIGHT BE thought that the re-interred Teresa would now be left in peace, but for those suspected of sainthood there is little repose. For two years the tomb was left undisturbed in the care of the nuns of Alba, who thought themselves secure in the possession of their treasure. They little knew that at the General Chapter of the Order, convoked at Pastrana, Father Gracian was advancing the claims of Avila to the body of its holy daughter. The indignation aroused by Teresa’s first foundation at San José, when they had threatened to throw her into prison, was now quite forgotten, and even ironically reversed by the argument that San José had the right to her remains since she held the position of its Prioress at the time of her death. No one would have been more amused than Teresa at this working-out of human ways.

  The Chapter had the grace to be concerned about the feelings of the nuns of Alba. It was realised that they would bitterly resent the deprivation, and it was therefore agreed that the removal of the coffin should take place in secret, the nuns being kept in ignorance until all was over, also that what remained of the left arm should be severed and left for indemnity in their keeping. This tactful plan went slightly wrong, for they had reckoned without Teresa. At the very moment the decision was come to in distant Pastrana three loud knocks, twice repeated, were heard within the tomb, startling the nuns who at first believed that someone had got shut into the church by mistake and dispatched the portress in all haste to release the prisoner. Their misgivings were allayed by the Prioress, who told them to pay no attention as it was evidently the Devil trying to disturb them.

  The Prioress, with two of the older nuns, was taken into the secret when Father Gracian, Julian of Avila, three friars, and the Bishop of Palencia’s secretary eventually arrived on their mission at the convent. Distressed though the women may have been, they could of course make no objection to the orders of their superiors. It was thought advisable however to get the flock of the community out of the way by sending them to sing Matins in the upper choir while the friars accompanied by the Prioress and the two nuns went to their task of reopening the tomb. The mysterious fragrance was again present; and the body, although rather more dried-up than before, was still uncorrupted within the cloths that had again rotted. This time it was observed that a cloak of white bunting, which had been used on her death-bed to staunch the flow of blood from her mouth and had been buried with her, was still bright red as though soaked in fresh blood and possessed the curious property of staining any piece of linen brought into contact with it. A further marvel was observed in the condition of the flesh, for when Father Gregorio de Nacianceno most reluctantly in “the greatest sacrifice ever imposed on him by obedience” inserted his knife under the truncated arm, the blade passed through with no more difficulty than if he were cutting a piece of cheese or a melon.

  All had been carried out most clandestinely, according to intention, when the same suave and penetrating fragrance reached the upper choir and sent the nuns hurrying down in suspicion and alarm. They came too late; Father Gregorio was gone; and so, says the biographer, “they remained sadly with the arm of the Mother.” Father Gregorio was on his way to Avila, and Teresa in her shroud with him, but not for ever.

  Restless in her life, called a gad-about by a Papal Nuncio, Teresa had yet one more journey before her, the journey back from Avila to Alba. But before that could take place a flood of excitement swept over the Church and into Avila. The translation of the body had been known to few, for the wrath of the great ducal house of Alba was much dreaded, but the miracle of the incorruptibility was rumoured; it reached Madrid, it reached the ears of the King’s confessor, it reached the Bishop of Cordoba, and finally travelled back to the Bishop of Avila who learnt of it from these two dignitaries in person. Despite the rigours of the season,—it was December,—they had journeyed from Madrid to investigate the matter for themselves. Teresa’s small convent of San José’ received the Bishop, the confessor, two doctors, and a suite of twenty persons early in the morning on New Year’s Day. Teresa was carried out into the gateway and placed upon a carpet. Nearly everyone present held a flaming torch; the Bishop knelt, bareheaded; most people were in tears.It is fortunately possible to reconstruct exactly what they saw: fn14 The body is erect, though bent a little forward, as with old people. It can be made to stand upright, if someone props it with a hand between the shoulders, and this is the position in which they hold it when it is to be dressed or undressed, as though it were alive. The colour of the body is of the colour of dates; the face,darker, because the veil which was full of dust became stuck to it, and it was maltreated more than the rest; nevertheless it is intact, and even the nose is undamaged. The head has retained all its hair, as on the day of her death. The eyes having lost their vital moisture are dried-up, but the eye-lids are perfectly preserved. The moles on her face retain their little hairs. The mouth is tightly shut and cannot be opened. The flesh is that of a corpulent person, especially on the shoulders. (In the case of the severed arm, which he had held and hugged to his heart and closely examined, he had already noted that the flesh was wrinkled as in a once fat person who has grown thin.) The shoulder from which the arm has been detached exudes a moisture which clings to the touch and exhales the same scent as the body.” The devoted friar was not in the least shocked by this close confrontation with the woman he had venerated. On the contrary, to his thinking it was the best day he ever had in his life, and he could not cease from admiring these holy remains.

  Such, then, was the somewhat macabre spectacle offered to the Bishop of Avila and his suite at San José on that January morning—a withered and mummified image, the colour of dates, which could be propped upright by a hand placed between the shoulders. It lacked one arm, but the other hand was raised in the attitude of benediction. The devout and unimaginative Spaniards of course did not think it macabre at all; it was a panel that fitted only too naturally into the great composite reredos of sixteenth-century Spain; they gazed, they knelt, they wept, they adored, they felt increased and sanctified, proud and soul-stirred in their fanaticism that their land should have produced a major saint. The patron saint of Spain, as she stood there, rigid, and swaying slightly against the supporting hand.

  The Bishop of Avila tried to keep the matter quiet, and even went to the length of threatening excommunication an any who should betray the secret, for it was feared lest the rape of the body should come to the ears of the Duke of Alba. But so sensational an incident, witnessed by so many people, could not be hushed up. The news reached the convent at Alba, and tradition says that a lay sister surreptitiously slipped a note into a pie destined for presentation to the duchess. The duchess thereupon lost her head and her temper and ran frantically out into the street shrieking “They have taken Santa Teresa from me! they have taken the saint from me !”—a strange sight for the citizens of the little feudal town to behold. The imperious house of Alba was not likely to let such an insult pa
ss. The duke himself was away in Navarre, where he was the hereditary Constable, but his uncle the Prior of San Juan who was in charge of his affairs sent off a messenger to Rome, demanding an order from the Pope for the instant return of Teresa’s body.

  It came. The order came, and Teresa followed it. Again she travelled in secret and by night, miraculously curing a monk of tertian ague on the way, and enticing some peasants who were threshing corn to drop their flails and follow the mysterious and seductive smell. No festivities were allowed to take place at Alba, by command of the Father Provincial who, much annoyed by the loss to Avila, had obeyed the Pope’s order only because he could not well do otherwise. It was in the letter that he obeyed, not in the spirit. The body was merely carried into the choir, and there was uncovered and illuminated, that the nuns might acknowledge it to be the true and recognisable remains of their Foundress. They were then required to hand over a formal receipt. But although all public rejoicings had been forbidden, nothing could prevent the rapturous crowd from pressing all day against the grille, and indeed it was fortunate that the iron bars were there to prevent them from tearing the clothes to pieces in their quest for relics; and not the clothes only, it was thought, but the body itself might have been in danger from those over-ardent fingers.

  Ribera, Teresa’s Jesuit biographer, knowing the temper of his countrymen, feared always that further outrages might be inflicted on the unfortunate corpse. Events proved him horribly right. As the legend of her sanctity grew, supported by innumerable miracles, the memory of the living Teresa faded and there remained in its place only the poor dried carnal husk which could be torn into morsels, endowed each one with miraculous properties. Even a fragment, however tiny, “even of the thickness of a finger-nail” preserved its incorruptibility as surely as a fleshless bone; and not its incorruptibility only, but that same strange penetrating scent. Ribera himself, who had noticed it clinging about his hands after his examination of the severed arm, and had hesitated to wash lest it should disappear, found that in spite of washing it persisted for about a fortnight. A novice who had been born with no sense of smell at all, acquired it suddenly and permanently after sniffing the hand which had been cut off by Father Gracian. This hand could do many things. It could destroy all other scents, however powerful; even the scent of musk smeared on to it with the tip of a knife. It could cure indigestion of twenty years’ standing by merely being laid upon the stomach; it could cure the murderous jealousy of an injured husband by being laid upon the heart. Besides, many rags stained with her blood were by now widely distributed and proved no less efficacious; dying children were resuscitated, and the cracked skull of a citizen of Alba was repaired, by the application of pieces of linen which had touched her. What soul in superstitious Spain could fail to covet the possession of magical trophies such as these, or to take part in the scramble when opportunity offered? By the time Teresa was placed in her final resting-place above the High Altar in the much-rebuilt and glorified church at Alba, after the fifth opening of the coffin and public exposure of the body (in 1750), nothing but a horribly mutilated semblance remained of the once attractive girl or the humorous and alarming old reformer. It is painful to contemplate what had been done to her at various stages in the name of piety, but, shelving our cooler judgment and also the more gruesome fancies of a northern imagination, we must accept without argument that a passionate faith combined with a total lack of physical sensibility does lead men into very strange actions. A desire to possess some fragment of holy remains was of course so strong and so common as to over-ride all human queasiness or even a natural aversion to the idea of dismembering a once loved and revered person. An excessive example of ardour may be found in the case of the Portuguese lady who, on being allowed to kiss the foot of St. Francis Xavier, bit off a toe and carried it away in her mouth.

  In Teresa’s case this desire had led to what we should regard as a thorough desecration of the poor human shell. What had they done since Father Gracian started the process by cutting off one hand, and Father Gregorio de Nacianceno continued it by removing the rest of the arm? They had taken the right foot, and some fingers from the hand that was still raised in benediction; some ribs had been torn away from the side; pieces of flesh had been torn off for distribution among the crowd. Most ghastly of all, the head had been severed from the trunk, and most of the neck was missing, although they had honoured what was left of the neck by hanging around it a model of the collar of the Golden Fleece. The head itself, which now lay on a cushion of crimson satin embroidered with silver, was in a pitiable condition. Part of the jaw had been taken, and the left eye was now an empty socket. But the other eye was intact even to its lashes and its pupil, as though it could still observe with glassy amusement the antics of the devout.

  The heart, Teresa’s warm heart, had been ripped out. When it was examined by surgeons and doctors in the eighteenth century and again in the nineteenth, some inexplicable things were found to have happened to it, though perhaps no more inexplicable than many other things which occur in the name of God. It had already been noticed, by peering through the openings of the reliquary in which the heart was kept, that mysterious thorns had sprouted from the dust at the base, about twenty in number, and it was believed that a new thorn appeared every time the Church passed through some special crisis. Unfortunately for the believers, a Commission appointed by the then Bishop of Salamanca investigated the miracle only to discover that the thorns were in reality bits of the feather brush which had been used to dust the reliquary. The Bishop, very sensibly, had them taken away. This was a disappointment, but there still remained the heart itself and the accompanying phenomena which could not be accounted for. It was wounded as though by a knife-thrust about an inch and a half in length, the edges of the wound being charred as though by some burning iron.fn15 It seemed curious that those eyewitnesses who had described the exhumations should have made no mention of the gaping hole in the side which the extraction of the heart must have left, an omission which suggests that some unrecorded tampering took place later; but, whenever the robbery occurred and whatever pious interference may then have been practised in the desire to turn a unique relic into something even more striking than it already was, the faithful could find support and documentation in the fine and moving words of Teresa herself. It is the last vision we shall record of her, the vision of Crashaw’s Flaming Heart, the vision which caused the Church to bestow upon her the title of “Seraphic,” and which surely expunged from her memory all fearful recollection of the assaults of the Devil and of her descent into Hell. Satan she had seen, but now “I saw an angel close by me, on my left side, in bodily form. He was not large, but small of stature and most beautiful—his face burning, as if he were one of the highest angels, who seem to be all of fire. I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God.…”

  The physical aspect of miracles may be negligible; unexplained, though capable of some perhaps quite simple explanation, so far, on our long journey, hidden from us; the occasional frauds contemptible, practised with the best intentions by the over-eager, over-reaching, avid, fanatical devout. The true miracle is that such intimations should exist in the soul, satisfied with nothing less than God.

  St. Thérèse of Lisieux

  1873–1897

  *

  I

  IN THE MONTH of September 1843 a young Frenchman aged twenty presented himself at the monastery of the Grand St. Bernard and demanded admittance, not as an over-night guest but as a prospective inhabitant for life.

  The Prior, to whom this request was brought, decided personally
to interview the traveller. His claims and credentials were pitiably few for an aspirant to the monastic calling in the Cistercian Order. He was compelled to confess that he had not yet even completed his studies in Latin, whereupon the Prior, kindly and regretful, sent him on his way. “Do not be disheartened,” he added; “go back to your own country, work hard, and then we will receive you with open arms.”

  The young man did go back to his own country but never returned to claim the promised welcome on the Alpine pass. A different fate awaited him : he was destined to marry, to be struck by paralysis, and to lose his reason, but not before he had become the father of the most gently remarkable of Saints. Thérèse of Lisieux owed her existence to the fact that LouisJoseph-Stanislas Martin failed to get himself accepted as a postulant and returned to Alençon in Normandy to marry Marie-Zélie Guérin instead.