Michael Hahn reflects on the message of St Angela of Foligno, ten years on from her canonisation.
Ten years ago this month, on 9 October 2013, Pope Francis declared Angela of Foligno a saint. A decade later, she still stands as a little-known figure within and outside the Church. Who was Angela, then: how did she come to be a saint, and what does she have to say to Catholics today?
Angela was born in Foligno, a city 15km from Assisi, about 25 years after the death of St Francis. While Angela had lived a worldly life, including being married and having multiple children, as well as owning several properties and delighting in fancy clothes and delicate foods, in around 1285 she was overcome by a fear of damnation and converted to a life of poverty, humility and simplicity in dedication to Christ, whom she called “the God-Man in His Passion” (Deum hominem passionatum).
Given the huge influence with which Francis had infused Christianity a half-century before, and that Angela was living in the Franciscan heartland of Umbria, it is unsurprising that she turned to the Poor Man of Assisi as her chief exemplar in her dedication to Christ. Indeed, she prayed to him to find her a suitable confessor at the start of her spiritual journey and towards the end of her life she received a vision of Francis in which he labelled her as “the only one born of me” (Tu es sola nata de me). Angela gained many followers before her death on 4 January 1309.
Angela may have been illiterate and certainly seems not to have drawn principally from written sources. On pilgrimage to Assisi, she fell to the floor of the Basilica of St Francis screaming out of mystical desolation and garnered the attention of a blood-relative of hers, a friar of the Lesser Brothers. The friar – known to us only as Brother A or Brother Scribe – told Angela he was so ashamed of her that she was never to return to Assisi. However, when he was relocated to Foligno he sought out Angela to work out what had happened to her in Assisi.
Brother Scribe began to write down Angela’s accounts of her experiences of God’s presence, initially to see if she was possessed by the devil; he became so impressed by Angela that he continued to write. This text – which modern scholars have called the Memoriale – presents a 27-stage journey to and into God. Angela’s followers also wrote down 36 shorter texts, called the Instructiones by modern scholars, which include short hagiographical tracts and letters of spiritual advice, among other genres.
Within these texts, Angela and her followers created a rich theology which combines Franciscan tendencies to focus on the visceral remembrance of Christ’s Passion with daring mystical theology comparable to that of Angela’s near-contemporaries Johannes Tauler, Meister Eckhart or Marguerite Porete. Angela taught that the Incarnation was a process of impoverishment and that, in order to enter into salvific union with God, the human soul had to imitate Christ by itself becoming physically and spiritually poor.
The soul empties itself out of its earthly attributes so that it can be inhabited by God, and the soul deformed by the Fall is also made malleable by the heat of God’s love so that it can be remodelled and reshaped into the image of Christ on the Cross, which Angela describes as completely “upright” (rectam). This soul was wedded to Christ, and this nuptial union was then repeated and intensified upon Angela’s death, which her followers described – using the language Francis’s hagiographers had for him – as being “absorbed into the abyss of divine glory” (abyssum divinae claritatis absorpta).
Prominent scholastic theologians contemporaneous with Angela had claimed that women were incapable of teaching theology, and yet Angela was influential as a spiritual and theological teacher. Ubertino of Casale claimed to have met Angela and called her “a veritable angel”, who had “restored a thousand-fold all those spiritual gifts I had lost through my sins”. Within her own lifetime, Angela’s followers referred to her as an expert and teacher of these [spiritual] things (experta et horum magistra) and within 50 years of her death, she was called “teacher in the discipline of God” (doctrix disciplinae Dei), identifying her with the female figure of Wisdom 8:4.
Angela’s texts circulated in the 14th and 15th centuries in Italy and the Low Countries, and then more widely, both in Latin and vernacular languages. They were included in the reform efforts of Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, leading Angela to be influential for Balthasar Alvarez, Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross; further afield she also influenced the Lutheran Pietist Johann Arndt. Perhaps the headiest title to be given to Angela came in 1624 when the Dutch Jesuit Maximilianus Sandaeus called her “the Teacher of Theologians” (Magistra Theologorum), ascribing to an illiterate laywoman precisely the public pedagogical role that others would have denied her in her own lifetime. This title was then repeated by the Bollandists in 1642 in the first volume of the Acta Sanctorum, an important and influential compilation of saints’ Lives.
Angela also held significant influence in the 20th century. While the Russian Orthodox theologian Mother Maria Skobtsova criticised Angela for her performative devotion to the Passion, the Catholic Thomas Merton and the Anglican Evelyn Underhill saw Angela’s theology as impressive, although both had mixed feelings about her excessive behaviour; Merton saw it as a distraction, and Underhill wanted to diagnose it as hysteria. Angela was also very influential for French philosophers such as Georges Bataille, Simone de Beauvoir and Julia Kristeva.
Additionally, Angela has been praised by the three most recent Popes. John Paul II and Benedict XVI – in 1993 and 2010 respectively – said that Angela offered extraordinary witness to God’s presence. In 2013, Pope Francis repeated the title of Magistra Theologorum during the process of equipollent canonisation, whereby he recognised that a cult had long existed acknowledging Angela as a saint and extended this cult to the universal Church. Angela’s feast day is on the date of her death, 4 January.
There have been recent attempts to retrieve Angela’s voice for theological and ethical issues. In particular, her claim that “this world is pregnant with God” (pregnans de Deo) has been used in relation to fraternal stewardship and climate action, and linked to Pope Francis’s concept of integral ecology from Laudato Si’, a sequel to which is on the way.
Her life and theological voice have also been used to address spirituality and psychological counselling, trauma, and the treatment of marginalised people. As we celebrate the tenth anniversary of her canonisation, what can this Teacher of Theologians teach us today?
Dr Michael Hahn teaches Christian Spirituality at Sarum College, Salisbury
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