The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

By Anne Catherine Emmerich and E. Ann Matter

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. If you have ever wondered what it would be like to be a spectator in the crowd at the Crucifixion of Christ, read this book. The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ provided the inspiration for Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ, and has been a strong influence on modern Christian spirituality. For over a century, it has attracted devout Christian readers who want to have a more concrete and explicit narrative of Jesus' suffering and death on the Cross.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Mar 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781411467804

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THE DOLOROUS PASSION OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST

ANNE CATHERINE EMMERICH

TRANSLATED BY CLEMENS MARIA BRENTANO

INTRODUCTION BY E. ANN MATTER

Introduction and Suggested Reading © 2005 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

This 2012 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

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INTRODUCTION

THE DOLOROUS PASSION OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST HAS BEEN enormously influential for modern Christian spirituality, Catholic and Protestant alike, despite the fact the nineteenth-century German visionary Anne Catherine Emmerich is a relatively minor author of the Roman Catholic tradition. This work is essentially the transcription of a series of visions Emmerich experienced in the last year of her life; visions that allowed her to observe and in some ways participate in the life of Jesus, particularly in the Passion of Christ, that is, his suffering and death on the cross. Emmerich’s spiritual disciple, the Romantic poet Clemens Brentano, copied down the visions and arranged them in the order of the events as told in the New Testament. For over a century, The Dolorous Passion has attracted devout Christian readers who want to know more about the death of Jesus, to have a more concrete and explicit narrative of his suffering, and, through an active spirituality of reading and contemplation, to place themselves in the crowd at the events of the death of Jesus. This imaginative spiritual journey has been the inspiration for some very recent expressions of Christian art, such as the Mel Gibson film The Passion of the Christ, but no one could claim that Emmerich started something new; in fact, the mimetic quality of her visions, and the way The Dolorous Passion lends itself to participatory reading, are well-established forms of the western Christian spiritual tradition.

Devotion to the life of Jesus is one of the most venerable forms of Christian spirituality. From the twelfth century on, the Imitatio Christi, the imitation of Christ, was the most important devotional tradition of Western Christianity, a focus of prayer for religious and lay, men and women, the educated and the simple, from England to Italy. At the turn of the twelfth century, Anselm of Canterbury had insisted that redemption of Adam’s sin was intrinsically linked to the boundless love of God in becoming man. In the thirteenth century, Francis of Assisi created the first Christmas manger scene, a tableaux that allows individual Christians to be present at the birth of Christ, to hold the baby Jesus, to meditate on the miracle of God taking human form. A Franciscan work entitled Meditations on the Life of Christ that gives step-by-step instructions for making the life of Jesus a model for one’s own life was widely circulated in the later Middle Ages and available in many vernacular languages, as well as in Latin.

But the Christian faith does not only teach that God was born a human being, but also that God died a human death, a cruel and painful death on the cross, and that this suffering and death were key for the redemption of the sins of mankind. Over the course of the Middle Ages, the Imitatio Christi increasingly focused on the Passion, the events at the end of the life of Jesus, including his prophetic words at the Last Supper; his agony in the Garden of Gethsemene; his arrest and trials before Pilate, Caiphas, and Herod; the way of the cross; and Jesus’ crucifixion, death, and burial. From the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, meditation on the Passion of Christ reached a cultural climax. This was a widespread tradition, evident in late medieval material objects, paintings, and crucifixes that portray Christ bathed in blood. They were especially popular in Germany and the Netherlands and were used by all types of Christians. There was also a sort of professional class of devotee who made use of traditions of prayer and physical deprivation, including mimetic imitation of the Passion, to literally suffer with Christ. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, based his Spiritual Exercises on an elaborate and dramatic imitation of the sufferings of Christ. Sometimes this imitation reached an explicitly literal level: Francis of Assisi was widely admired as the first famous stigmatist (one who miraculously bears the wounds of Jesus in his or her body), and by the sixteenth century, many Christians known for spiritual virtuosity, such as religious leaders, visionaries, and mystics, were also stigmatists. This tradition was especially vigorous among women in religious communities, and this is the tradition in which we should understand the visions of Anne Catherine Emmerich.

Anna Katharina Emmerick, as her name is spelled in German, was born on September 8, 1774, in a hamlet outside of Coesfeld, a small town near Münster, Germany. Her parents were peasants, and her family was very poor. Her biographer and amanuensis, the Romantic poet Clemens Brentano, tells us that Emmerich was gifted with a deep religious sensibility and heavenly apparitions marked her childhood. Brentano also relates Emmerich’s strong sense of the biblical narrative, something very evident in The Dolorous Passion. In 1798, while meditating before a crucifix in the Jesuit church of Coesfeld, Emmerich had a vision in which Christ offered her a choice between a crown of flowers or a crown of thorns. She chose the crown of thorns, and the next day began to suffer the physical marks of the Passion of Christ that marked her for the rest of her life.

From her adolescence on, Anne Catherine wanted to enter a religious community, but this form of life was not readily available to a young woman with no dowry. In 1802, Anne Catherine finally entered the novitiate of the Augustinian sisters of Dulmen, but only because one of her admirers would not give consent for his daughter to enter the house without her. In 1803, she made her final vows and became an Augustinian nun. Her life in the convent was difficult, especially because she was continually beset with physical sufferings. Brentano compares her to a sixteenth-century Italian Carmelite nun, Maria Maddalena de’Pazzi; but while Maria Maddalena was a source of fascination for her fellow nuns (up to four at a time were assigned to follow her around the monastery and record her mimetic raptures of Christ’s Passion), Anne Catherine was not celebrated for piety. She was most often ill, sometimes at death’s door, suffering, Brentano says, many illnesses for others. Near the end of 1811, the convent of the Augustinians of Dulmen was suppressed by Jerome Bonaparte, the King of Westphalia. Anne Catherine, too ill to return to her family, remained in the abandoned convent, cared for by a servant woman and a priest, until the spring of 1812, when she was moved to a miserable rented room in the house of a poor widow.

During this period of Anne Catherine’s life, she began to display the full-blown signs of the stigmata, bleeding from her hands, feet, side, and head, and suffering great pain. In the spring of 1812, when this phenomenon became known, she was subjected to examination by the ecclesiastical, secular, and medical authorities of the region of Münster, but was never accused of false piety. As her fame spread, Anne Catherine was championed by Count Leopold de Stolberg (a noted convert from Protestantism), Dean Bernard Overberg from Münster, and the bishop of Regensburg (in French, Ratisbonne) Michael Sailer. These patrons moved her to a more pleasant lodging where she lived until her death on February 9, 1824. Throughout this final decade of her life, she continued to have visions of the life of Christ, especially of the Passion, and to be afflicted with the signs of Christ’s suffering. Anne Catherine Emmerich may have lived out her life of mimetic devotion to the Passion in relative anonymity, as many other spiritual adepts have surely done, had she not, in September of 1818, received a visit from the Romantic poet Clemens Maria Brentano. This was the decisive event that made possible The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Brentano, whose Catholicism had been reawakened that year, was introduced to Anne Catherine by her powerful friends. There was an immediate rapport between Brentano and the visionary; she gave him every confidence right from the beginning. Perhaps this was because he recognized the ill woman as a suffering soul in the tradition of Christian redemptive suffering, and understood right away the role that he, a man of letters, could play in her story. For the next six years, Brentano spent as much time as he could at her side, keeping a chronicle of her sufferings and transcribing her visions. The Dolorous Passion is a result of that long association. It is often said that these visions were received by Anne Catherine on Holy Thursday and Good Friday of the last Easter season of her life, in 1823; but actually, as we read at the end of chapter 66, they occurred over a longer time, from February 18 to April 6, 1823. This text, then, is not simply a revelation to Anne Catherine, but also clearly the result of Brentano’s editing. In the German edition, Brentano includes long footnotes with references to some of Anne Catherine’s many other revelations. After Anne Catherine’s death in 1824, Brentano spent the rest of his life editing her visions; The Dolorous Passion, published nine years later in 1833, is only the first fruit of his labors.

The relationship between Clemens Brentano and Anne Catherine Emmerich is also part of a long history of Christian visionary experience. A number of famous women mystics are known to us because their raptures were transcribed, and so saved and made known, by others. Maria Maddalena de’Pazzi is perhaps the most extreme example of this, since she never wrote nor even dictated a word of what she saw and experienced (indeed, she is said to have burned the transcriptions of her visions whenever she had a chance). We know about her extraordinary participation in Christ’s Passion only because of fellow Carmelite nuns, who carried out a sort of sacred eavesdropping on her mystical experiences. Angela of Foligno, a Third Order (uncloistered) Franciscan of the thirteenth century, dictated her Revelations and Memorials to Brother A, a Franciscan friar, perhaps a relative. In other words, the fact that The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ is both a transcription and a composite does not make it, according to this rich spiritual tradition, any less a work of Anne Catherine Emmerich.

As is evident from his many references to holy women of past centuries whose experiences were echoed by those of Anne Catherine, Brentano knew the history of the medieval visionary tradition very well. When he gives the particular details of Anne Catherine’s suffering, he lists those who are known to have had the stigmata: famous medieval and early modern holy people like Francis of Assisi, Catherine of Siena, Angela of Foligno, Maria Maddalena de’Pazzi, as well as more recent figures like Veronica Giuliani (d. 1727) and several other, lesser-known moderns. He thus gives Anne Catherine’s visions and embodied experiences a strong theological basis in a long tradition. Brentano’s fascination with this tradition can be explained in part by his participation (along with such authors as Novalis and Goethe) in a movement of German Romanticism that idealized the Middle Ages and found both Christian truth and the depth of Germanic spirit in medieval Christian aesthetic and religious sensibility. Brentano’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1805-1808, poems based on German folk tales) and his retelling of Märchen, German fairy tales, are among his most popular writings. There is little doubt that Brentano conceived, and so portrayed, Anne Catherine as a medieval holy woman, and even as a German Gothic saint.

And yet, there is something about the literary quality of Anne Catherine’s visionary life that Brentano transmitted but did not invent, and that he must have greatly admired. Even if the specific words are his, the biblical imagination is hers, and, surely, Anne Catherine’s biblical imagination is the most compelling aspect of The Dolorous Passion. Some of Anne Catherine’s visions seem to contradict the Gospels (for example, Jesus falls six times instead of three on the way to Golgotha), but much of the narrative is made up of details that fill in silences in the biblical accounts. For instance, her lengthy and detailed descriptions of Jesus’ sufferings, far more than the Gospel accounts, are nothing short of gory. She follows this physical drama with a strange non sequitur, a description of the geography of Jerusalem that appears as an excursus in chapter 49, directly following the death of Jesus. She also explains the relationships between the protagonists of the Passion story in great detail. Sometimes these additions can be traced through Christian apocryphal stories, hagiographical legends, and other traditional material, and perhaps her description of Jerusalem was influenced by pilgrim guides to the Holy Land. She does not always get everything right (in chapter 51 she sees the Shroud of Turin in an Asian city, and as Brentano notes, the distances of her imagined Jerusalem sometimes do not compute), but the verisimilitude of her descriptions is notable, whether it comes from traditional sources or divine inspiration.

Anne Catherine’s ability to turn minor characters of the Gospel stories into protagonists makes for especially vivid reading. Three personalities in particular spring to life in her narrative. Two are Roman soldiers: Abenadar, the centurion in charge of the crucifixion, and Cassius, his assistant. Both are strongly moved by the death of Jesus and become Christians, taking new names in baptism. Cassius, who puts the spear through Jesus’ side, becomes Longinus, a well-known figure of medieval legend. Abenadar becomes an apostle immediately from the moment in chapter 45 when he calls out, in an expansion of his words in the Gospels, Blessed be the Most High God, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob; indeed this Man was the Son of God. When Abenadar is baptized, he takes the name Ctesiphon, and thus becomes associated with the medieval legend of the companion of Saint James, the evangelist of Spain.

Perhaps the most striking protagonist of The Dolorous Passion is the wife of Pontius Pilate; she is given the name Claudia Procles, and in chapter 23, has a dramatic meeting with the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene in which she gives them pieces of linen to wipe up the pools of blood left by the flagellation of Jesus. The Orthodox churches hold that the wife of Pilate became a Christian, and so celebrate her as a saint; the name Procla is associated with some of these traditions, but the addition of the name Claudia, and her particular actions during the Passion, may have originated with Anne Catherine. The character of Claudia Procles has been further explored in many genres of modern Christian literature. Most recently, she is an important character in Mel Gibson’s controversial adaptation of The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, his 2004 film, The Passion of the Christ. Much of the debate surrounding this film had to do with its violence and its portrait of first-century Jews and Judaism, but some insightful commentators also noted that much of Gibson’s artistic vision, including a sharp focus on the physical sufferings of Jesus and an unfortunate tendency to blame the Jews for the death of Jesus, came not directly from the Gospels, but from a Christian devotional tradition filtered through The Dolorous Passion of Anne Catherine Emmerich.

It was not until the twentieth century that the Roman Catholic Church officially recognized Anne Catherine Emmerich as an orthodox visionary. She was declared Venerable by Pope John Paul II in 2001, and beatified (declared Blessed, the last step before sainthood), again by John Paul II, on October 3, 2004. Some have suggested that the enormous international success of Mel Gibson’s film contributed directly to her beatification. This may be, but it is also worth noting that the beatification took place in the last year of John Paul II’s life, at a time when he, desperately ill, was stubbornly offering his sufferings for the sins of the world. It is not difficult to imagine that John Paul II saw some meaning for his own physical pain in the agonies of this German nun. In the end, this is what The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ has to offer: Anne Catherine Emmerich’s vicarious Passion as a way of understanding and sharing Christ’s suffering for humanity. This may be jarring to some modern sensibilities, but it is at the heart of the message of Christianity.

Bibliography

The edition reprinted here is the only English version of The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, an anonymous translation first printed in London in 1862. It is translated from the 1835 French edition of the Abbé de Cazalès (Edmond de Cazalès), a nineteenth-century priest and man of letters. The original 1833 German version of Clemens Brentano has been reprinted as Der Gotteskreis, edited by Anton Brieger (Munich: Manz, 1960).

E. Ann Matter is the W. R. Kenan Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She has published extensively on topics having to do with Christian spirituality, mysticism, and biblical interpretation, including The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Medieval Western Christianity.

CONTENTS

PREFACE TO THE FRENCH TRANSLATION

Foreword

PART I - MEDITATIONS ON THE LAST SUPPER

MEDITATION ONE - PREPARATIONS FOR THE PASSOVER HOLY THURSDAY, THE 13 NISAN (29 ...

MEDITATION TWO - THE SUPPER-ROOM

MEDITATION THREE - ARRANGEMENTS FOR EATING THE PASCHAL LAMB

MEDITATION FOUR - THE CHALICE USED AT THE LAST SUPPER

MEDITATION FIVE - JESUS GOES UP TO JERUSALEM

MEDITATION SIX - THE LAST SUPPER

MEDITATION SEVEN - THE WASHING OF THE FEET

MEDITATION EIGHT - INSTITUTION OF THE HOLY EUCHARIST

MEDITATION NINE - PRIVATE INSTRUCTIONS AND CONSECRATIONS

PART II - THE PASSION

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE - JESUS IN THE GARDEN OF OLIVES

CHAPTER TWO - JUDAS AND HIS BAND

CHAPTER THREE - JESUS IS ARRESTED

CHAPTER FOUR - MEANS EMPLOYED BY THE ENEMIES OF JESUS FOR CARRYING OUT THEIR ...

CHAPTER FIVE - A GLANCE AT JERUSALEM

CHAPTER SIX - JESUS BEFORE ANNAS

CHAPTER SEVEN - THE TRIBUNAL OF CAIPHAS

CHAPTER EIGHT - JESUS BEFORE CAIPHAS

CHAPTER NINE - THE INSULTS RECEIVED BY JESUS IN THE COURT OF CAIPHAS

CHAPTER TEN - THE DENIAL OF ST. PETER

CHAPTER ELEVEN - MARY IN THE HOUSE OF CAIPHAS

CHAPTER TWELVE - JESUS CONFINED IN THE SUBTERRANEAN PRISON

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - THE MORNING TRIAL

CHAPTER FOURTEEN - THE DESPAIR OF JUDAS

CHAPTER FIFTEEN - JESUS IS TAKEN BEFORE PILATE

CHAPTER SIXTEEN - DESCRIPTION OF PILATE’S PALACE AND THE ADJACENT BUILDINGS

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - JESUS BEFORE PILATE

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - THE ORIGIN OF THE WAY OF THE CROSS

CHAPTER NINETEEN - PILATE AND HIS WIFE

CHAPTER TWENTY - JESUS BEFORE HEROD

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - JESUS LED BACK FROM THE COURT OF HEROD TO THAT OF PILATE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - THE SCOURGING OF JESUS

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - MARY DURING THE FLAGELLATION OF OUR LORD

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - INTERRUPTION OF THE VISIONS OF THE PASSION BY THE ...

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - DESCRIPTION OF THE PERSONAL APPEARANCE OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - THE CROWNING WITH THORNS

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN - ECCE HOMO

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT - REFLECTIONS ON THE VISIONS

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE - JESUS CONDEMNED TO BE CRUCIFIED

CHAPTER THIRTY - THE CARRIAGE OF THE CROSS

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE - THE FIRST FALL OF JESUS

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO - THE SECOND FALL OF JESUS

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE - SIMON OF CYRENE—THIRD FALL OF JESUS

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR - THE VEIL OF VERONICA

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE - THE FOURTH AND FIFTH FALLS OF JESUS—THE DAUGHTERS OF JERUSALEM

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX - JESUS ON MOUNT GOLGOTHA—SIXTH AND SEVENTH FALLS OF JESUS

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN - THE DEPARTURE OF MARY AND THE HOLY WOMEN OF CALVARY

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT - THE NAILING OF JESUS TO THE CROSS

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE - ERECTION OF THE CROSS

CHAPTER FORTY - CRUCIFIXION OF THE THIEVES

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE - JESUS HANGING ON THE CROSS BETWEEN TWO THIEVES

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO - FIRST WORD OF JESUS ON THE CROSS

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE - ECLIPSE OF THE SUN—SECOND AND THIRD WORD OF JESUS ON THE CROSS

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR - THE FEAR FELT BY THE INHABITANTS OF JERUSALEM—FOURTH WORD ...

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE - FIFTH, SIXTH, AND SEVENTH WORDS OF JESUS ON THE CROSS—HIS DEATH

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX - THE EARTHQUAKE—APPARITIONS OF THE DEAD IN JERUSALEM

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN - THE REQUEST OF JOSEPH OF ARIMATHEA TO BE ALLOWED TO HAVE ...

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT - THE OPENING OF THE SIDE OF JESUS—DEATH OF THE TWO THIEVES

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE - A DESCRIPTION OF SOME PARTS OF ANCIENT JERUSALEM

CHAPTER FIFTY - THE DESCENT FROM THE CROSS

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE - THE EMBALMING OF THE BODY OF JESUS

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO - THE BODY OF OUR LORD PLACED IN THE SEPULCHRE

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE - THE RETURN FROM THE SEPULCHRE—JOSEPH OF ARIMATHEA IS PUT ...

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR - ON THE NAME OF CALVARY

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE - THE CROSS AND THE WINE PRESS

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX - APPARITIONS ON OCCASION OF THE DEATH OF JESUS

FIFTY-SEVEN - GUARDS ARE PLACED AROUND THE TOMB OF JESUS

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT - THE DISCIPLES OF JESUS ON HOLY SATURDAY

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE - AN ACCOUNT OF THE DESCENT INTO HELL

CHAPTER SIXTY - THE EVE OF THE RESURRECTION

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE - JOSEPH OF ARIMATHEA MIRACULOUSLY SET AT LARGE

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO - THE NIGHT OF RESURRECTION

CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE - THE RESURRECTION OF OUR LORD

CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR - THE HOLY WOMEN AT THE SEPULCHRE

CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE - THE RELATION WHICH WAS GIVEN BY THE SENTINELS WHO WERE ...

CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX - THE END OF THE LENTEN MEDITATION

ENDNOTES

SUGGESTED READING

PREFACE TO THE FRENCH TRANSLATION

BY THE ABBÉ DE CAZALES

THE WRITER OF THIS PREFACE WAS TRAVELLING IN GERMANY, WHEN HE chanced to meet with a book, entitled, The History of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, from the Meditations of Anne Catherine Emmerich, which appeared to him both interesting and edifying. Its style was unpretending, its ideas simple, its tone unassuming, its sentiments unexaggerated, and its every sentence expressive of the most complete and entire submission to the Church. Yet, at the same time, it would have been difficult anywhere to meet with a more touching and life-like paraphrase of the Gospel narrative. He thought that a book possessing such qualities deserved to be known on this side of the Rhine, and that there could be no reason why it should not be valued for its own sake, independent of the somewhat singular source whence it emanated.

Still the translator has by no means disguised to himself that this work is written, in the first place, for Christians; that is to say, for men who have the right to be very diffident in giving credence to particulars concerning facts which are articles of faith; and although he is aware that St. Bonaventure and many others, in their paraphrases of the Gospel history, have mixed up traditional details with those given in the sacred text, even these examples have not wholly reassured him. St. Bonaventure professed only to give a paraphrase, whereas these revelations appear to be something more. It is certain that the holy maiden herself gave them no higher title than that of dreams, and that the transcriber of her narratives treats as blasphemous the idea of regarding them in any degree as equivalent to a fifth Gospel; still it is evident that the confessors who exhorted Sister Emmerich to relate what she saw, the celebrated poet who passed four years near her couch, eagerly transcribing all he heard her say, and the German Bishops, who encouraged the publication of his book, considered it as something more than a paraphrase. Some explanations are needful on this head.

The writings of many Saints introduce us into a new, and, if I may be allowed the expression, a miraculous world. In all ages there have been revelations about the past, the present, the future, and even concerning things absolutely inaccessible to the human intellect. In the present day men are inclined to regard these revelations as simple hallucinations, or as caused by a sickly condition of body.

The Church, according to the testimony of her most approved writers, recognises three descriptions of ecstasy; of which the first is simply natural, and entirely brought about by certain physical tendencies and a highly imaginative mind; the second divine or angelic, arising from intercourse held with the supernatural world; and the third produced by infernal agency.¹ Lest we should here write a book instead of a preface, we will not enter into any development of this doctrine, which appears to us highly philosophical, and without which no satisfactory explanation can be given on the subject of the soul of man and its various states.

The Church directs certain means to be employed to ascertain by what spirit these ecstasies are produced, according to the maxim of St. John: Try the spirits, if they be of God. When circumstances or events claiming to be supernatural have been properly examined according to certain rules, the Church has in all ages made a selection from them.

Many persons who have been habitually in a state of ecstasy have been canonised, and their books approved. But this approbation has seldom amounted to more than a declaration that these books contained nothing contrary to faith, and that they were likely to promote a spirit of piety among the faithful. For the Church is only founded on the word of Christ and on the revelations made to the Apostles. Whatever may since have been revealed to certain saints possesses purely a relative value, the reality of which may even be disputed—it being one of the admirable characteristics of the Church, that, though inflexibly one in dogma, she allows entire liberty to the human mind in all besides. Thus, we may believe private revelations, above all, when those persons to whom they were made have been raised by the Church to the rank of Saints publicly honoured, invoked, and venerated; but even in these cases, we may, without ceasing to be perfectly orthodox, dispute their authenticity and divine origin. It is the place of reason to dispute and to select as it sees best.

With regard to the rule for discerning between the good and the evil spirit, it is no other, according to all theologians, than that of the Gospel. A fructibus eorum cognoscetis eos. By their fruits you shall know them. It must be examined in the first place whether the person who professes to have revelations mistrusts what passes within himself; whether he would prefer a more common path; whether far from boasting of the extraordinary graces which he receives, he seeks to hide them, and only makes them known through obedience; and, finally, whether he is continually advancing in humility, mortification, and charity. Next, the revelations themselves must be very closely examined into; it must be seen whether there is anything in them contrary to faith; whether they are conformable to Scripture and Apostolical tradition; and whether they are related in a headstrong spirit, or in a spirit of entire submission to the Church.

Whoever reads the life of Anne Catherine Emmerich, and her book, will be satisfied that no fault can be found in any of these respects either with herself or with her revelations. Her book resembles in many points the writings of a great number of saints, and her life also bears the most striking similitude to theirs. To be convinced of this fact, we need but study the writings or what is related of Saints Francis of Assissium, Bernard, Bridget, Ignatius, John of the Cross, Teresa, and an immense number of other holy persons who are less known. So much being conceded, it is clear that in considering Sister Emmerich to have been inspired by God’s Holy Spirit, we are not ascribing more merit to her book than is allowed by the Church to all those of the same class. They are all edifying, and may serve to promote piety, which is their sole object. We must not exaggerate their importance by holding as an absolute fact that they proceed from divine inspiration, a favour so great that its existence in any particular case should not be credited save with the utmost circumspection.

With regard, however, to our present publication, it may be urged that, considering the superior talents of the transcriber of Sister Emmerich’s narrations, the language and expressions which he has made use of may not always have been identical with those which she employed. We have no hesitation whatever in allowing the force of this argument. Most fully do we believe in the entire sincerity of M. Clement Brentano, because we both know and love him, and, besides, his exemplary piety and the retired life which he leads, secluded from a world in which it would depend but on himself to hold the highest place, are guarantees amply sufficient to satisfy any impartial mind of his sincerity. A poem such as he might publish, if he only pleased, would cause him to be ranked at once among the most eminent of the German poets, whereas the office which he has taken upon himself of secretary to a poor visionary has brought him nothing but contemptuous raillery. Nevertheless, we have no intention to assert that in giving the conversations and discourses of Sister Emmerich that order and coherency in which they were greatly wanting, and writing them down in his own way, he may not unwittingly have arranged, explained, and embellished them. But this would not have the effect of destroying the originality of the recital, or impugning either the sincerity of the nun, or that of the writer.

The translator professes to be unable to understand how any man can write for mere writing’s sake, and without considering the probable effects which his work will produce. This book, such as it is, appears to him to be at once unusually edifying, and highly poetical. It is perfectly clear that it has, properly speaking, no literary pretensions whatever. Neither the uneducated maiden whose visions are here related, nor the excellent Christian writer who has published them in so entire a spirit of literary disinterestedness, ever had the remotest idea of such a thing. And yet there are not, in our opinion, many highly worked-up compositions calculated to produce an effect in any degree comparable to that which will be brought about by the perusal of this unpretending little work. It is our hope that it will make a strong impression even upon worldlings, and that in many hearts it will prepare the way for better ideas—perhaps even for a lasting change of life.

In the next place, we are not sorry to call public attention in some degree to all that class of phenomena which preceded the foundation of the Church, which has since been perpetuated uninterruptedly, and which too many Christians are disposed to reject altogether, either through ignorance and want of reflection, or purely through human respect. This is a field which has hitherto been but little explored historically, psychologically, and physiologically;