Catholic Thought discussion
Mariette In Ecstasy
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Part 1
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— Was she in ecstasy, Sister Agnes?
— You ask too much of a simple woman.
— Would you please describe what you saw?
The person conducting the inquest is Pere Marriott. Who he is questioning is sometimes not clear. In this case he actually addresses Sister Agnes, but it's not always so. It doesn't seem to matter all that much, though.
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The Order itself was transplanted from France, so it may be geographic proximity to the coast?
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By the way, I had not realized how influential French Catholicism was to the United States. Growing up in NYC, Irish and Italian Catholicism was dominant, and so I have a sort of bias to seeing them in the Church. German Catholicism less so, but certainly one finds it in the names of Catholics, especially prior to the two world wars. The two world wars kind of made German-Americans (and other central European Catholics) distance themselves from that identity. Of course there's the Hispanic Catholicism in the border states on the South and now as they've made there way to the North. But French Catholicism seems to have been quietly influential in places close to the Canadian border. It seems to have been very influential.
Those are unexpected and pertinent questions, Manny. It will be interesting to see what other members think. I have no idea why Ron Hansen set his story in New York, but I will take a stab at the date of 1906. To my mind, Hansen based his book loosely on the life of St. Gemma Galgani, who died in 1903. (I know that some, recognizing the name Celine and the fact that the prioress was Mariette's older sister, connect Mariette to St. Therese of Lisieux. But, aside from those superficial details, the resemblance ends there.) Gemma Galgani was different. Like Mariette, she experienced the stigmata. Like Mariette, she was suspected of fraud. Also, like Mariette, she did not spend her last days in religious life. She was canonized rather quickly, in 1940. It's been a long time since I read her biography, but I never forgot one detail mentioned at her canonization. She was canonized, it was declared, not for the mystical experiences or the stigmata for which she became noted, but for the humility, patience and forbearance she exemplified while undergoing the strange and otherworldly phenomena. Mariette epitomized these same virtues whether one believes her story or not. But this is one person's subjective reaction to the novel. I look forward to learning others’ views.
I should have mentioned the “French Connection” between Therese of Lisieux and Mariette, also.
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Even on this hot summer day she cannot get used to the coldness of the floor.Throughout, every time a part of the building gets mentioned I wondered if she was cold.
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http://www.deoestgloria.com/us.g.ny.html
Many of them go back to the over a hundred years, so I was trying to find one that resembled the one in the novel. The list is fairly long, but I don't know if this shows NY has or had a greater number than other states. It's my impression that the remoteness of the New York State area would make it ideal. Kerstin's point about the French connection would locate the order near the Canadian border, and Arcadia is not far from Canada, along Lake Erie, which would have been part of where the French Indian War was fought a couple of hundred years earlier. French ethnic communities would have remained in the area.
This particular monastery seems to resemble the one in the book.
https://opnuns.org/
It's a Dominican monastery of Dominican Nuns. Dominican Nuns are reclusive and separated from the world, as opposed to Dominican Sisters which are actually the opposite. The monastery is in the very vicinity as the one in the novel. But the one in the novel I believe is more akin to the Benedictine Order.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_sis...
It's probably not relevant, but interestingly coincidental.
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Frances, isn't the investigation into Padre Pio's stigmata also something to consider as an allusion. He too was thought of as a hoax.
I don’t know anything about Padre Pio, Manny, I’m sorry. I tend not to pay much attention to those extraordinary phenomena. Holiness, to my mind, belongs to the exhausted mother who gets up in the middle of the night to respond to a crying child, or the firefighter carrying a ton of gear up collapsing stairs to the 60th floor of a shattered building while milling crowds dash past him to safety. I find Mariette in her humility far more saintly than she is in exhibiting her mysterious wounds.
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I see them as two different things, Mariette's personal humility and the manifestation of a miracle. Why does God choose to perform miracles? Do they help us believe or are they stumbling blocks?
I'm just thinking out loud here, I haven't worked out an answer :)
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Started this yesterday and it is flying. Interesting question about the setting. I would never have thought to question that detail, but the connection with the mystical ferver at that time and place is a great connection. I wonder if the author ever addressed this question.
I am also wondering about the choice to give Mariette such a limited family context for her formation. Celine seems to be her only sibling and she is so much older, away at college, then in the convent, for most of Mariette's life. There is no talk of any other close relatives, especially female ones such as aunts or grandparents or cousins. And, the father has a profession that would keep him away from home for most of the hours of the day and night, making house calls as the only doctor in this community. I thought it was odd when it noted her presumed discomfort with her own father having to perform the examine to prove her virginity. That was not a necessary detail, but hinted at something strange.
I was glad to see that the mystical experiences began prior to entering the convent, that it was not suggested that it was a product of extreme conditions in monastic life at the turn of the century. In fact, so far, this appears to be a happy, healthy community.
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That is a good point! Usually in a biography such as this one also learns of the people and/or life experiences that influenced the turn toward a holier life. Are her mystical experiences enough?
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That is an interesting thought Irene, about her limited family. Her mother passed away young, and her sister went into the convent when Mariette still was young, and as far as I can tell she was raised by her father as a single parent. I'll see tonight if I can piece that timeline together because I think it might be interesting to see at what age her mother dies, what age her sister leaves, and when she started having the experiences.
Personally I loved the convent life as described! I don't think I could handle it (actually I know I couldn't) but it's wonderful to day dream over it. :)
I think there was a mention that Mariette was 5 when she visited Celine early in the convent. But, even before that, it appears that Celine was away at a girl's college. So, there does not appear to be any maternal presence in her years growing up.
It is also interesting that the reason the father does not attend the ceremony welcoming Mariette into the postulant stage is that he already lost one daughter to the convent and did not think it was fair that he should lose another. So, the father does not have a positive attitude toward religious life. I wonder what his attitude was toward organized religion or the Catholic Church apart from monastic life.
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I didn't get the impression he is against religion. Lots of religious parents don't want their children to be priests or nuns, and I can see that feeling magnified with having two children, perhaps his only two, leave. It does remove them from the family and future family life. I think more pertinent is the letter he wrote to Celine about Mariette, describing her unfit for convent life. Apparently he was right about that.
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So far, I have not picked up on the father's opinion of religion or Catholicism, just a resentment to his daughters joining a cloistered convent. I don't know if more will be revealed. I agree that the letter to Celine voicing his concerns that Mariette's temperament is too high strung for religious life is significant. What I don't yet know is the place from which he writes this. Is he simply suspect of religious ferver or is he identifying a serious psychological issue in his daughter, a need for attention or some nerosis that might lead her to self harm or to psychosomatic symptoms manifesting as pseudo-mystical episodes. Of course, this seems to be the question at the heart of the novel, or at least what is presenting so far.
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(1) Medicine was finally becoming a real science. Fifty years before there were still bleeding patients to cure them of “humors.” Understanding of germs and vaccines had finally developed and implemented in the medical process to the best they could. Blood types were understood, x-rays were developed, and real medicines based on empirical experiments were being performed. So by 1906, there has to be some sort of empirical explanation for the stigmata. One could not just accept God “zapped” Mariette. A couple of hundred years earlier and people might have easily accepted it. Now there is a higher level of credibility that has to be achieved.
(2) Psychology was the rage. Freud had rocked the world with his papers. In the 1890s he had studies on hysteria published and he was linking it to sex. In 1899 he published The Interpretation of Dreams, which defined a distinction between the conscious and unconscious, so that according to him there existed unconscious thoughts that went beyond our wills. In 1905 he published Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality where he provided theories of sexual development from infancy through maturity. Now don’t get me wrong; I consider 90% of this psychoanalysis/therapy to be bunk and having no empirical basis, but the intellectual world was sold on this. But by 1906, one could point to psychological reasons for religious experiences and people were linking them to sexuality.
(3) William James, a philosopher, also started writing on psychology but with the perspective of religious experience. In 1902 he published The Varieties of Religious Experiences. Now I don’t know that much detail of James’ work (by the way he was author Henry James’ brother) but from what I could research there were both positives and negatives to his conclusions. On the positive side he gave credibility to the notion of religious experience and that it was not some disorder as Freud seems to imply. He classified different types of religious experiences and their apparent expressions and manifestations. On the negative side he does still link them to some mindful state that that one either can put oneself in or gets from experience. While ultimately I think James sees positive value to these mystical experiences, for him they are some sort of psychosomatic phenomena rather than God doing something to the mystic.
So I think Hansen has chosen 1906 because the world now looks differently on mystical experiences than in the past.
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Manny, I think this is just brilliant. And I agree with you, science has altered perceptions of religion. Yet we've lost something, too. That sense of mystery, that there are depths to experience which we cannot know. I think Ron Hansen is calling us back to that: pay attention. There is more. There is mystery. We don't understand everything, and paradoxically, we are richer for that.I want to remark here on something in my earlier post: I've read several reviews of the novel in which Mariette is compared to St. Therese of Lisieux. But the two young women couldn't have been more different: Therese's spirituality is based on her "Little Way," that holiness consists not in heroics or dramatic signs, but in the simplest and yet most difficult task of all -- doing everything, even the smallest thing, out of love. In another context, the English writer Iris Murdoch wrote (and I am paraphrasing): Love is the extremely difficult task of recognizing that the other person is real. You have to think about that for Murdoch's meaning to come through. But it's what Therese came to realize, and what Christianity, in its fullest expression, is about. I love my neighbor as I love myself. Was Mariette other-absorbed or self-absorbed? That, among many others, is a question Ron Hansen asks.
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Unfortunately Manny, much of this is a myth. People have always had the ability of keen observation. Our forbears were far more astute then we give them credit for. Medicine, then as know, has many successes, but also a lot of snake-oil salesmen. Yes, there have been a lot of advances and we all have benefited, but at the same time not everything in school medicine is sound. What do you think is better for the patient, bloodletting or a lobotomy?
In Europe, before school medicine, you had what is today called monastic medicine. It is a fascinating subject. Obviously the concept of Galen of the four humors are outdated, but the concept of the four temperaments (= body type) isn't. It is a kind of proto Myers-Briggs. Doctors used to administer medicine according to the specific to your temperament, meaning, they would treat the same illness differently with different people. This was based on a long tradition of observation. Today, if you have high blood pressure, for the first few months you're nothing but a guinea pig figuring our which one will work.
Then there is serious research going on in at least one university I know of, in Würzburg, Germany, studying monastic medicine, the precursor of school medicine. Monasteries used to have huge medicinal herbal gardens. Since they as a rule ran the hospitals and infirmaries, they also provided much of the medical care of their immediate vicinity. Much of their knowledge ("science" is Greek for "knowledge") was written down, and there are texts that survive. These are the texts that are being systematically studied. The university of Würzburg also has a huge herbal garden where they grow the plants we know were grown then. They have made astounding discoveries. One is a salve for infected eyes. When the researchers put the everyday ingredients together they were amazed they had found in essence a precursor to penicillin.
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Now the harder part to articulate. Absolutely the middle ages – and again probably all civilizations could use observation and apply reason. St. Albert the Great, one of my favorite saints, advocated empirical observation of nature back in the 13th century. (Actually there is a new bio out which I may nominate for our next read.) But observation and reason fall short when you are trying to solve a problem where one doesn’t have knowledge of the fundamental phenomena. For instance, many people observed the plague and all the deaths it caused. But it was impossible to link it to germs and microorganisms because they weren’t aware of them. When one observes an event and tries to link it to a cause, one thinks through a drop down menu of potential causes, and reason applies the most likely, and if you’re scientifically minded, you would do an experiment to prove it. But in the middle ages, as one looks through that drop down menu, for causes of plagues, there isn’t anything in the menu for microorganisms. No matter how intelligent and observant a person from the middle ages could be – and St Thomas Aquinas and St Albert the Great are two of the smartest people who ever lived – he wouldn’t be able to have reasoned microorganisms to be at the root of the plague.
Now apply this to a stigmata. The drop down menu that a person would have today would be (1) hoax, (2) psychological/psychosomatic, and (3) God. Today in 2019, I suspect most people would say it’s a hoax and very few today would say it’s from God. How many people in 1225 questioned St. Francis of Assisi’s stigmata as an act from God? I far as I can tell no one but I’m sure there were some. How about even today, how many of us believe the St. Francis’s stigmata was real? I would like to think it was real, but if someone proved it indisputably fake today, it wouldn’t surprise me. That element of skepticism has entered western culture, probably irreversibly, and at this point spread across the world. It has altered how we look at the world.
Ron Hansen, at least until the very end, is making the reader choose from that drop down menu, and 1906 is just about the year all three of what I listed for the menu have an equal weight. I also think he does not leave it ambiguous in the end, which has huge implications, and makes us re-evaluate the themes of the novel.
Amazon has a book titled A Stay Against Confusion: Essays On Faith and Fiction, published by Ron Hansen in 2002. Here is what one reviewer wrote: “In ‘Stigmata,’ perhaps the most fascinating essay in the book, Hansen looks at what made him write his novel about a stigmatic, Mariette, and if there are really such holy people in this fallen world.”
I am ordering the book and, after we finish our discussion, would love to share Hansen’s views with our group.
I look forward to reading what you learn from that essay, Frances.
Thanks so much for the encouragement, Irene. I’m looking forward to the book, too, though I don’t want to read Hansen’s essay until I have set in my mind what I want to say about the novel.
Thoughts about Mariette in Ecstasy . . .I don't know if the author Mark Salzman got the inspiration to write his novel, Lying Awake, from Mariette, for the two novels strangely complement each other. I think those who like and are intrigued by Mariette would appreciate a story at once similar to and different from it.
In Lying Awake, a Discalced Carmelite nun, Sister John, experiences radiant visions of God; however, unlike Mariette, she is revered throughout her community. But fate and modern medicine intrude. When blinding headaches force Sister John to see a neurologist, she learns that she may have temporal lobe epilepsy. She must decide if she wants medical treatment, at the risk of finding that her ecstatic experiences may turn out to be symptoms of the aura preceding an epileptic episode -- which include intense feelings of joy and seeing things that aren't
actually there -- or to remain as she is. She chooses health, and in so doing, loses all that made her special in the eyes of her Carmelite community. Paradoxically, however, she discovers what genuine sanctity is. (No spoilers)
Now, Mariette. Until Manny mentioned Freud, I had overlooked him. Certainly, Freud would have held up Mariette's story as a case study in which physical symptoms had surfaced as manifestations of repressed sexuality. One can interpret the novel that way. But I think there is another, deeper level to Ron Hansen's novel. Catholicism is a strange religion. We tend to forget that, in our modern world. There is depth and mystery to Catholicism. Our liturgy's high moment is the changing of bread and wine to flesh and blood. We worship a Crucified God. "He was liar, lunatic or Lord," C.S. Lewis famously declared. We are confronted with ambiguity, and we must make an act of faith.
Now then, imagine Mariette as a Christ figure, passing through the halls of the convent of the Sisters of the Crucifixion. He is not understood. Some greet him with awe, some with derision, some with envy, some with open love, some with apprehension. Eventually, he is put on trial. His fate is decided by others. He is rejected. Then the question becomes not whether Mariette is a fraud or not, but how she was treated by those whom she lived among. We know what should have happened; it's there in John 13:5. Jesus poured water into a basin and began to wash Peter's feet, afterward drying them with a towel. N. T. Wright says that that attitude is what distinguishes Jesus's followers: we are to be a foot-washing (humble, giving) people.
I may be reading a lot into the book that isn't there, but that's my point: this novel has nuance, depth, and to see only its surface layer may be to miss its meaning.
Irene and other members, I received A Stay Against Confusion by Ron Hansen and, because I think it is a book serious readers would love, I want to share a couple of quotations from it before I turn to Mariette in Ecstasy. For example:"A story is a fictional narrative about characters in conflict that has meaning for our own lives." (page 31)
"Willa Cather once said that first-rate writers cannot be defined, they can only be experienced. She meant that their greatness was not in the formal features of their writing but on the effect their stories have on our hearts and minds." (page 46)
In the essay titled "Stigmata," Hansen writes: "Mariette in Ecstasy concerns a seventeen-year-old woman who joins the convent . . . as a postulant in 1906. Her older sister is the prioress there and on Christmas Eve, 1906, she dies of cancer and is buried. On the next day, Christmas, Mariette is given the stigmata -- those wounds in the hands, feet, and side resembling those that Christ suffered on the cross. Whether Mariette is a sexual hysteric full of religious wishful thinking or whether her physical wounds are supernaturally caused is the subject of the novel." (page 7)
I won't reveal Hansen's conclusions until everyone has finished reading the book. I can comment on what he says about the creative process, however. To my surprise, the idea for the story came to him after reading St. Therese of Lisieux's The Story of a Soul. Touched by her innocence, her childlike faith in God the Father and her passionate love of Jesus, Hansen imagined the story of a nun with a kind of love affair with Jesus at its heart. and its physical manifestation would be Christ's wounds from the crucifixion. Researching stigmata, Hansen became acquainted with Anne Catherine Emmerich and Gemma Galgani. Parts of the letters that Mariette writes in the novel are paraphrased from the writings of Gemma Galgani.
To depict everyday life in his fictional religious order, the Sisters of the Crucifixion, Hansen turned to Thomas Merton's account of Cistercian life in The Waters of Siloe. He looked into Aldous Huxley's history, The Devils of Loudon, to study mass hysteria. Padre Pio figured into Hansen's undertaking as well. The early investigation of the fictional Mariette's stigmata is taken from documents containing the medical diagnosis of Padre Pio's stigmata.
"I felt free to try it because I knew the book would get published somewhere, even if it was a small press, and I knew that the books I liked best were . . . those that were unfashionable, refractory, insubordinate, that seem the products not of a market analysis but of a writer's obsession." (pages 9-10)
(All quotations are from A Slant Against Confusion, by Ron Hansen.)
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I was going to bring this up later, but perhaps now that the subject has risen, I might as well do so now. If one is trying to locate a non-religious reason for Mariette's stigmata, one has to rely on some form of psychosomatic cause, and frankly that's rather nebulous at best. When I researched psychosomatic conditions, one finds symptoms of aches, pains, sweating, anxiety, depression, heartbeat changes, nausea, perhaps graying of hair. But no where is there any suggestion that anyone has had major physical alterations on the level of bleeding hands and feet from a non traumatic flesh wound. You can find information on psychosomatic conditions here:
https://www.verywellmind.com/depressi...
When one really looks at Mariette's physical symptoms, one ultimately has to rule out psychosomatic link. It's just not physically possible. Which has some implications to the novel. Either Mariette's stigmata is a hoax or it is real.
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As to the seeds from which this novel sprouted, I can see the links to Thérèse of Lisieux, Anne Catherine Emmerich, Gemma Galgani, and Padre Pio. I don't know anything about the inquests into Emmerich's and Galgani's stigmatas, but the investigations into those of Padre Pio's I can see have a bearing to the novel. I think I mentioned that in one of my other comments.
By the way, does anyone know French? Can someone explain what is the difference between accenting an "e" this way "é" and this way "è"? That is, one having a forward slant to the accent mark and the other a backward slant. Some French names in the novel have it one way and some the other. I just noticed that Thérèse of Lisieux actually has both inside her name. It has no bearing on the novel, but I'm baffled by this.
Frances, thank you for those quotes from Ron Hansen. It is interesting to read of his creative process and inspiration for the book. I do not know anything aboug Gemma Galgani. I will need to do some reading about her.
This book has brought back to mind te play "Agnes of God" which I read and worked with some 30 years ago. Had not thought about that play in some time.
Manny, the forward slant (accent aigu) is pronounced "ay" as in hay, the other way is pronounced "eh" as in beg or bet. St. Therese is pronounced "Tay-rez" in French. At least that's how I remember it from my college French. Unfortunately, I haven't had the chance to use it in decades!
The second one is called the accent grave.
Madeleine, That is what I was going to say also, but did not trust my memory from high school French.
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There is more to it than meets the eye, Manny. I am not going to spend much time on this, since it is just a side discussion. What I see first and foremost is a linguistic hurdle. We use the word 'science' today differently than in the past. The word means 'knowledge,' and it used to be that one specified which science or body of knowledge was meant, natural science, philosophical science, theological science, and all the specific disciplines they contained. Today we have a reductionism to only mean the natural sciences.
The ancients may not have pursued systematic research as we do born out of the Middle Ages, but people of all ages used their ability of observation and gathered knowledge, some of it spot on, other stuff not so much - just like today. That's in essence what I was getting at.
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In writing about our upcoming short read, Pascendi Dominici gregis, the Pope Pius X papal encyclical on the modernism published in 1907, it occurs to me that Hansen could have set the novel along side it as to make an allusion to it. Certainly how one looks at mystical experiences and the stigmata concerns a modernist/anti-modernist world view.
If there is a connection to this encyclical, I have not come to any conclusions to what Hansen is suggesting.
It would be interesting to know more of Hansen's background. Would his background have made him familiar with this encyclical? If that was part of his reasoning, I suspect that the connection would be lost on most readers.
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I don't know if you know, Hansen is an ordained deacon in the Catholic Church. His brother is either a priest or professed Brother in one of the orders. I would think he is familiar with it.
I know absolutely nothing about Hansen. This was my first encounter with him.
Irene and Manny, since I have Hansen's book of essays, A Slant Against Confusion, perhaps this is a good time for me to help clear up a little confusion, and quote some from the book. I'll do that later today.Ron Hansen is a committed Catholic, Jesuit-educated, with an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Presently, he is the Gerard Manley Hopkins Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University, a Jesuit university in Santa Clara California. There are echoes of Hopkins' unique voice in Mariette in Ecstasy.
Ron Hansen has a twin brother who was for a time in the Jesuit order, studying for the priesthood.
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Catholic Thought
Books mentioned in this topic
A Stay Against Confusion: Essays on Faith and Fiction (other topics)Lying Awake (other topics)
The day of the new postulant’s entrance into the religious order of the Sisters of the Crucifixion, the chapter in Upstate New York. It is August 15, 1906, the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. Mariette Baptiste, the postulant, is in her mother’s wedding dress, since the ceremony is a spiritual wedding to Christ. Part 1 constitutes the entire first day (or perhaps it’s two, I’m not exactly sure) and we see Mariette as she learns about the convent, the rhythm of life there, the rules and norms of the place. She meets many of the Sisters and begins to build relationships.
As it turns out Prioress, Mother Celine, is her older sister, twenty years older. They have a conversation over their father, and how their father did not think Mariette suited for the convent. Mother Celine has revealed that their father secretly sent her a letter stating that Mariette has been subject to “trances, hallucinations, unnatural piety, great extremes of temperament, and, as he put it, inner wrenchings.” Mariette does not deny this when asked, and her sister tells her to not be exceptional.
Mariette meets with the other young novices, and they talk as young ladies would do of boys, gossip, life at the convent, and of the things that irritate. Mariette joins in but is noticeably different. She goes on to meet with the convent priest, Pere Marriott, and she confides in him that she since thirteen she has had “experiences,” conversations with Jesus. Marriott shrugs it off that it is common in young religious women and that he has seen it before. He gives her pen and paper and allows her to secretly write to him of her experiences. At the close of Part 1, she has written a lengthy note explaining how Jesus has told her she find herself “afflicted and empty and tempted.” She will find herself punished, humbled, abandoned, and “greatly confused.” It is not clear if she submitted this letter to Marriott or kept it in her possession.