Blessed Angela of Foligno

Italian mystic

• Born: 1248
• Birthplace: Foligno, Umbria (now in Italy)
• Died: January 4, 1309
• Place of death: Foligno, Umbria (now in Italy)

Blessed Angela of Foligno, a Franciscan mystic, explored the ways to experience God within one’s soul in her works; her desire to suffer the agony of Christ’s crucifixion won widespread admiration.

Early Life

Blessed Angela of Foligno (ahn-JEHL-ah uhv foh-LEEN-yoh) was born to wealthy parents in the town of Foligno. Little is known about her childhood. She was no doubt influenced by the reputation of Saint Francis of Assisi (c. 1181-1226) who experienced a public conversion in Assisi, only a few miles from Foligno. Angela spoke in the Umbrian dialect of Italian and may have learned to read and write as well. She was married with several children.

Sometime in her late thirties, Angela began her religious conversion, moving toward a life of spiritual penitence and intense religiosity. In her later writings, she related that she underwent a spiritual crisis in which she began to fear hell and claimed to have committed sins so shameful that she could not tell her confessor, even as she continued to take Communion. Although one scholar has speculated that she may have committed a grave “sin of the flesh,” it remains highly probable that she was referring only to rich foods, fancy clothes, and intimate relations with her husband in an environment that cherished fasting, poverty, and chastity. Inspired by a vision of Saint Francis of Assisi, Angela eventually confessed to a Franciscan friar, thereby introducing herself to Franciscan ideals of poverty and the sacrament of penance to atone for one’s sins. Scholars believe this portion of her conversion may have been complete by 1285. As a symbol of her commitment to her new life, and in imitation of Saint Francis, Angela visited the Church of Saint Francis in the Foligno square, removed her status-laden clothing, and stripped naked, pledging to remain perpetually chaste. She also began to put aside food, head coverings, and her better clothes.

Angela’s account of her journey to know and experience Christ allowed her to reflect on her life as mother and wife. Modern readers are surprised by Angela’s deprecating remarks concerning her familial burdens. Feeling no love and embroiled in her husband’s “slanders and injustices,” Angela wrote that the rapid deaths of her husband, children, and mother came as a relief to her, as she had prayed to be free from them and her mother was an obstacle to her new religious life. Soon after the death of her family and after a pilgrimage around 1291, Angela sold her properties, gave away most of what she owned to the poor, and made the decision to became a Franciscan tertiary, a layperson associated with the Franciscan order.

Life’s Work

As a tertiary, Angela remained part of the lay community. Wearing a simple gray cloak, Angela lived in a Foligno house in the company of a woman, Masazuola. Her dedication to the life of Saint Francis meant imitating his compassion for the poor, lepers, and the sick.

In her early forties, Angela began to receive visions and alternately achieved bouts of ecstasy and despair. Angela’s journey to an intimate relationship with Christ was recorded by a Franciscan friar, Frater A., a relative who served as her spiritual adviser and was affiliated with the Church of Saint Francis in Foligno. Scholars frequently refer to this “Frater A.” as Fra Arnaldo, although no evidence establishes this link. As her confessor, Frater A. heard her elaborate visions and, although initially skeptical, began to record her words.

The collaboration between the friar and Angela produced the Memoriale (1296 or 1297; translated together with the Instructionum as The Book of the Visions and Instructions of Blessed Angela of Foligno, 1888; best known as Memoriale), a thirty-step account of Angela’s path to experience Christ within her soul. In her account of her experiences until around 1296, Angela depicted the arduous road that sinners such as herself must confront. Initially consumed by extraordinary sinfulness, misery, and sorrow, Angela, after numerous public confessions, ultimately succeeded in her journey to feel divine grace, rapture, and enlightenment. After she united with the Holy Trinity, God provided her with approval of her life and hoped that her life would serve as a model for others. Jesus told her in one mystical encounter:

God almighty has deposited much love in you, more than in any woman of this city. He takes delight in you and is fully satisfied with you and your companion. Try to see to it that your lives are a light for all those who wish to look on them. A harsh judgment awaits those who look at your lives but do not act accordingly.

The Memoriale served as a manual for others to achieve a mystical union with God, and for this reason, Angela related her initial lack of confidence in achieving her spiritual quest and her exposé of previously “sinful ways.” Her own struggles were intended to serve as a source of inspiration for others, and indeed they did, as this work became popular in the Middle Ages.

When Angela dictated in her Umbrian dialect, the friar took down her words as she spoke them and translated her ideas into Latin, reading back the text to check for errors. Although she admitted that all that he had written was “true and without lie,” she once scolded her scribe for not conveying the divine essence of the vision. The friar sometimes expressed shock and embarrassment over Angela’s extreme behavior. However, he was careful to point out that Angela represented the Church’s viewpoints, and even examinations by inquisitors, Franciscans, and cardinals could find no false teachings. In the medieval mind-set, the text represented a collaboration of God who sent the visions to Angela, Angela who revealed the visions, and the confessor and scribe who asked questions of Angela pressuring her to respond, listened to and copied down her responses, and then translated the responses into Latin, sometimes organizing the material for clarity.

Scholars debate the degree to which the Memoriale represents the authentic voice of Angela. While acknowledging collaboration between the friar and Angela, many scholars argue that is possible to extract Angela’s words, ideas, and meaning from the text, especially in an age in which mystics prized the oral tradition and dictation was commonplace. One scholar has noted that many of the most revered religious men and women dictated their ideas, including Jesus, Buddha, and Hildegarde of Bingen. In doing so, the sacredness and immediacy of the visionary experience is preserved.

The Memoriale began to be circulated around 1297, and after Angela’s death, hand-written and dictated letters as well as spiritual treatises were compiled to form thirty-six chapters of Instructionum. Together these two works are sometimes referred to as the Beatae Angelae de Fulginio visionum et instructionum liber (The Book of the Visions and Instructions of Blessed Angela of Foligno, 1888), and it is through these texts that Angela has come to be viewed as an author, mystic, and penitential.

Angela’s visionary experiences are unique for their vividness, their accessibility, and their focus on the crucified body of Christ. She was nicknamed the “mistress of the theologians,” and her texts remain immensely significant for understanding the religious environment of the Middle Ages. The goal of the Memoriale was to establish emotional and spiritual contact with God. As Angela stated, “What I wanted was that God would make me actually feel.” She did not want to hear a sermon about the Holy Trinity unless she felt the presence of the Trinity within herself. She described the process of “elevating the soul” in order to see Christ as one of reflecting on his suffering and crucifixion, even speaking aloud if necessary to achieve a mystical union with him. Her dialogue with God was intimate and emotional, frequently described as an amorous relationship.

The intensity of Angela’s visions allowed her to see the physicality of Christ. In various visions, Christ appeared, revealing his throat, neck, or arms, beautiful and divine. Other times, his eyes became visible in the host, and once the Christ child appeared in the host, enthroned and about twelve years in age. The vision of a wounded, bleeding Christ allowed her to drink the blood from his wounds: “He called me and said that I should put my mouth to the wound in his side. And I was given to understand that that by this he would cleanse me.” Christ embraced her, and on one visit to his tomb, she kissed his mouth, “from which, she added, a delightful fragrance emanated.” So intense was Angela’s passion for Christ that tears often burned her flesh, and she was forced to cool her body with water. This emotionalism and direct link to Christ through amorous dialogue allowed her to come to know that her soul was married to God.

In her search to imitate Jesus and experience Christ within herself, Angela frequently sought extreme measures. Self-defilement, the denial of food, and severe abjection were part of a greater plan to come to know Christ in her soul. After they had finished bathing the feet of lepers, Angela and her companion Masazuola drank the water, reflecting on its sweetness and comparing it to Holy Communion. Reflecting continuously on the suffering and torture of Christ’s passion, Angela asked to die, to be tortured, to be made to bleed, to have a rope tightened around her neck, and to be crucified “by a very vile instrument.” For Angela, this was necessary as Christ himself had been crucified because of her sinful nature.

As a spiritual mother, Angela also provided leadership within the Franciscan order, advising members of the order whom she dubbed “my sons” and “my little children.” Ubertino da Casale, a member of the Spiritual Franciscans, attributed his conversion to Angela’s “ardent virtue.” Angela died in 1309, and her tomb may be visited today in the Church of Saint Francis in Foligno. Although never canonized officially as a saint, she was revered locally, beatified in 1701, and today the Franciscan order celebrates her feast day.

Significance

Angela remains one of the greatest mystics of the Middle Ages, exerting tremendous influence on later mystics. Like other holy women of the Middle Ages, Angela of Foligno found power and status in religion, expressed herself through the oral and written word, and came to be venerated despite her lay status. Angela’s text was widely read throughout Europe, and it remains one of the earliest printed Italian texts in the vernacular. Her book was frequently read to understand the immediacy of Christ, and like other medieval mystics of the thirteenth century, her visions and accounts were seen as symbols of sanctity.

Angela is frequently included among those holy women who sought self-mortification in the extreme. Although remembered today for her desire to drink the blood of Jesus, she remains significant as an author of one of the most important texts of medieval mysticism and as a supreme example of a medieval woman admired for her religiosity and for openly living the life she desired.

Bibliography

Angela da Foligno. Complete Works. Translated by Paul Lachance. New York: Paulist Press, 1993. An English translation of Angela’s works with a detailed introduction and footnotes.

Arcangeli, Tiziana. “Re-reading a Mis-known and Mis-read Mystic: Angela da Foligno.” Annali d’italianistica 13 (1995): 41-78. A useful article for understanding the historiography of Angela and for detailing misconceptions.

Lavalva, Rosamaria. “The Language of Vision in Angela da Foligno’s Liber de vera fidelium experientia.” Stanford Italian Review 11 (1991): 103-122. Argues for the importance of the oral tradition of Angela’s visions.

Mazzoni, Christina, ed. Angela of Foligno’s Memorial. Translated by John Cirignano. Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 2000. Abridged text with insightful analysis.

Petroff, Elizabeth. “Writing the Body: Male and Female in the Writings of Marguerite D’Oingt, Angela of Foligno, and Umilt† of Faenza.” In Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. An analysis of the gendered images of body employed by medieval mystics, including Angela.

Sagnella, Mary Ann. “Carnal Metaphors and Mystical Discourse in Angela da Foligno’s Liber.” Annali d’italianistica 13 (1995): 79-90. Discusses the rigorous asceticism of Angela’s mystical union with Christ.