CHAPTER 9
Summis desiderantes affectibus… The opening words of the Papal Bull almost deafen Friar Otto as they roar and clang deep within his heart and soul—“Desiring with the most heartfelt anxiety…” He more than commiserated with the desires of Pope Innocent VII. Truly, this Age is being thrashed with heartfelt anxiety—Witches! He boldly proclaims within, “Merciful Father, surely this Age of Heartfelt Anxiety marks the End Time!”
“Desiring with the most heartfelt anxiety…” Friar Otto stands in the pulpit’s hold and repeats the Bull’s opening line, then leans, almost totters and falls, thunders it once again at them—them, there quivering, sitting with hands clasped, sweaty hands, hands fearful of all they had conjured so faithlessly, so blasphemously. Verily, he would give them to understand that it is them, they for whom the Bull is written—clerics all...bishops all...cardinals all, even for the Pope himself as standing for all Popes. Mere mortals all, who have not been yet fully wrenched by “the most heartfelt anxiety.” If they had, then the disaster of this time—“Women who bewitch!”—would not have become the plague of all Christendom. If all those who claimed that they were “faithful sons and daughters of the Church” were being deeply anxious, then they would act with heartfelt passion. “Burn the hags! Hang the heretics!” Verily, them. Here in 1488, near fifteen hundred years after the Savior, Himself, had swooned and expired in the grasp of a most heartfelt anxiety: “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” Ah, always after preaching, Friar Otto is hacked to his knees by the image—Holy Lord Savior of All, You who have Suffered for us, Suffered and Died and Expiated for our lack of heartfelt anxiety—have mercy on us!
“Benedicamus Domino!” thumped on the door. How many thumps?
Groggily, Friar Otto grumbles, “Deo Gratias.” Was it loud enough to be heard?
There was not another thump.
Until the Bull awoke him—as if the Lord Himself had written this missive just for him— up to this time his fellow friars had known a quite different Friar Otto. Over the years, the other friars had grown accustomed to his swoons and collapses—the Prior assessing them as ecstatic raptures of one most devout. Others not so kindly, they waiting for the Friar to humble himself at Culpa and confess his infatuation with the heart. That he has not so confessed in his near ten years in the Common Life, such just gave them to offer their own prayers that his frailty would be laid before the Lord. Frailty—assigned not to describe his body, for it was stout and thick and muscular, though lean and hard as all friarly bodies were from the Black Fasts...so often called for in these too worldly days of satanic temptations...but as to his frailty of soul. “Too much heart,” was once kindly said, and it was all that needed to be said. Not that these were like the monks of the Order of the Silent Ones but that they were not given—at least in brotherly discourse—to the dissecting and exploration of each other’s spiritual quest. No, for that, each had a Spiritual Director. But it has been so stated too often not to ring true—“Too much heart,” uttered as they gathered round, hovered over his motionless body. As voiced on yet another day when he had to be lifted half-frozen from the snow, almost a board, more like an oaken plank in a castle’s gate, as such did those think who had to lift him, six friars lifting. Too much heart. They all knew what was meant, that he sought the mystical meanings—in what most others were content to accept as literal, some as symbolic, few as did he, the anagogic. Blessing or curse, that was up to God’s knowing. Friar Otto was a mystical one. “Too much heart.”
Right from the start, during his novitiate year, Friar Otto, O.P.’s Spiritual Director was the Prior, himself. He who had accepted him into the Dominican Order at a young age, just twelve, after two other seasoned Directors examined and passed him along. Each expecting that the next one would confirm their decision—Too much heart!—and that the youthful postulant would best remain in the world. All knew of the material success of his extended family, the von Frakkens—burghers, professors, a few noble and political titles: a Baron here, an Elector there, even a Benedictine Abbott. More, that the family name took them back to the founding of Hannover, itself. Then, the personal factor the Prior had to weigh was that Frantz was the thirteenth child of his old friend who said, “This is my Otto!” The father not hiding his pride in giving his son a religious name in honor of the founder of the Holy Roman Empire. Thus, regardless of his peers’ advice, and somewhat modulated by his personal affections for the boy’s father, the Prior accepted Frantz and guided him during his novitiate year. Yet, he was again urged to release him before the Friar completed his Simple Vows, then also to be sent back into the world. But it was now near a full decade of Directing and Friar Otto has professed Solemn Vows and been ordained a priest. Still, patiently, somewhat stoically, the Prior dutifully listens—is waiting....waiting for?
As a Director of many others friars—young and old—he admitted to himself that he—mea culpa!—had from the start enjoyed Friar Otto’s childlike simplicity. No, not just simplicity but his inexhaustible happiness (eudaimonia). It was this boundless mirth that continued to annoy his fellow friars who yet despair and disapprove.
“Too much heart. Will he ever stop...smiling?!”
In this Age of Heartfelt Anxiety such childlike smiling was judged by many to be offensive, even heretical, especially by serious defenders of the faith such as the Order of Preachers who were specifically dedicated to wiping the wanton smiles off the faces of the sex crazed worshippers of the Great Deceiver—sorcerers all, besotted and loony males and females! It was against this characteristic of both his Order and the Age that Friar Otto, in friarly minds, offended, even sinned.
Instead of confessing about guilt-laden sins, the Friar would effuse about celebrating life! About, Loving the world the Lord has given us! Asking in humility not if he can be forgiven as a depraved sinner but, “Have I failed to rejoice deeply enough? Have I mortally sinned and failed to enjoy the world as God created it? God saw that it was good!” Given the antipodal qualities of this Friar’s soul, the Prior—mea maxima culpa!—had to admit that he looked forward to his spiritual guidance sessions, more, even welcomed the momentary relief they provided from the dreary, more soulfully disturbing sessions with other friars. For him it was almost a guilty pleasure, but he accepted that “It is my pastoral duty!” Nevertheless, he continually prayed for some divine intervention. “That this still youthful soul, although in body an adult, in heart still a child, dear Lord, open his heart to Your pain and suffering!”
It could be reasoned that it was this bit of illicit enjoyment which kept the Prior from terminating the Directing and ejecting the Friar. But more—as was his pastoral wisdom—he was waiting for his prayers to be answered...for the masks to drop! He knew, seasoned as he was, that both his own enjoyment and the Friar’s ebullience were just masks. For nothing of the joys of this Earth stood for anything but the misery for which such joys were merely devilish shadows. Resigned, he waited for his enjoyment to ebb and then for the friar to lay bare the misery of soul that hid behind his mask. This radical transformation is what he knew all Directing led to, had to become, because the Lord Himself came not to merely enjoy creation but to Suffer. More, through suffering to restore the fallen world—fallen creation! The Lord Himself—Suffering Servant!—was the harbinger of the End Time and the coming of “a new heaven and a new earth.” For this cursed Earth is Satan’s realm and all souls are lost until the Suffering begins to purify and redeem them. Via Crucis!
Masks to drop. As such, the Prior knew that it must happen, had to, yet the Friar, now long among the shadows of the Priory, remained perpetually smiling!
Ah, the divine wisdom which flowed through the Prior’s concern—masks. Truly, the Friar is masked, but he has been masked for so long that even he falsely believes it is his actual face! Satan works in perverse and mysterious ways! How else could it be but that the friar’s bright smile be haloed by a depthless darkness? As such, heartfelt anxiety was traumatically interred in hi
s soul—at the deepest depth of his being; ontologically. So anchored in sightless darkness that not even a living saint would have been able to detect or discern his struggle, his fate. The Prior had counseled many who had suffered physical traumas that left horrendous scars on minds and hearts: beatings and rapes, even mutilations, but nothing prepared him for what was soon to be found behind Friar Otto’s mask.
The mask of heartfelt anxiety. All in Friar Otto’s being and everyday life profoundly shifts on a clear and caressing summer day, an August Thursday, the day after his twenty-second birthday. It is a chance encounter. As he aimlessly strolls through town and lingers briefly outside the Prince’s chapel—Chance!? The Devil, nay! Divine Providence—not walking as with purpose, not going even anywhere in particular, just out on the street—smiling. He soon finds himself walking up the steps into the chapel and ambling somewhat robotically towards a door, one slightly ajar. What was beckoning, luring him?
God saw that it was good! the friar whispers, blessing himself, gazing upon, fascinated by—yet there echoed an unacknowledged question, God saw that it was good?—as before him is the Birth of Venus. So has he heard about this new painting. It was all the talk as the artist’s patron, Lorenzo Medici of Florence, Italy was visiting with the Prince. Although his trip was considered to be more about commerce than theology, the Venus was both esthetically praised and theologically condemned in conversations among both nobles and burghers. Friar Otto has seen a few startling paintings of Mary as young and beautiful. Ones that bordered on the sensual, which was more than a bit upsetting. Nevertheless, this “Botticelli”—almost a name that he finds himself unable to utter—causes black bile to curdle upon his lips, making him mockingly spit in contempt. He hears himself silently utter the name, his lips moving, soundlessly as—Awake!—Friar Otto does see Her “there”—She, Goddess, Mother in numinous presence through Her daughter Venus. Ah, tender of heart no more! He does not fall to his knees, he does not sweat in his palms, he does not grind his teeth. No—Hark!—it is a moment of Liberation, of mystical flight, as if of a Vision Sublime. Not of Her flesh, not of Her presence: a presence Botticelli permeates with fragrance—She, a Flower Goddess—but of a profound—“scales falling from his eyes”—insight into and understanding of the Fall. It takes but just the slightest gaze upon Her and Friar Otto finds himself suffering the burning agony of being bewitched and overcome by a most “heartfelt anxiety.”
As the captivated—spellbound!—Friar beholds Botticelli’s Venus, he, like so many who have also stood before her, is mystified—enthralled and stupefied. His heart soars to heavenly heights and hellish depths—into inky darkness and blazing sunlight. In a flash, a stunning and fascinating clarity is bestowed upon him by the blessing of an ancient hand—one that is antediluvian, patriarchal, preternatural. This ethereal hand reaches across the Starry Boundary and rests, reposes firmly upon his left shoulder, and in that instant of presence the Friar sees with enlightened eyes—quickening eyes sighting all the way back to the Garden of Eden. He now is Adam gaping at Eve’s naked body as he gazes and sees Her body…peers at what Botticelli’s Venus lies about!
“When did this happen? Where?” Has his mask truly fallen?
It has, but so to the young Friar have the masks of all those around him; friarly masks.
Blasphemy. Apostasy to The Rule.
“We are the apostates! For it is we who have withdrawn. Not come down into the flesh as our Blessed Lord did and does every day, but escaped, hid, run away. Our monasteries, priories, rectories all, all are tunneling caves!”
Then came the Suffering, the Indictment: “You have lied.”
Tender of heart no more!
With this insight, this curse, a thrust of a silver dagger into the heart of “you,” so was the Prior himself transported back into the Garden—there, you! being the Serpent! The friar’s accusation awakening the Prior to see that it was he, himself, who seduced Her, tricked Her, beguiled Her, not She, him. This, what the Prior had lied about all his religious life as all sons of Adam have for more than a millennium so lied. Claiming that, “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.” The Friar hears the Prior speak Adam’s betrayal and knows that this is the mask that hides the greatest of Satan’s lies!
What magnitude of lie? Only the friar’s mystical sight enables him to see what others, like the Prior, do not see, have never before seen. What is the Venus but a birthing story? She emerges from the sea a fully mature woman. Sacrilege! rings through his ears as the Friar recalls the many passages in pagan mythologies where the sea is a goddess, the ocean is Mother. Apostasy! Here Botticelli is announcing that females are born from females, when all in Christendom know that females, through Eve, were born from the male, Adam...molded from his precious but bent rib! Yet, there is more to the lie than the celebration of this perverse claim made manifest through the sensual allure of this painting. Why does the friar indict the Prior? You! Because he is the Spiritual Director who is misdirecting all males by describing the Discipline necessary for salvation to be one that delivers pain to the male body. Awake! The male body, as through Adam, suffered great pain—which came as Eve as rib was ripped out from his body. More, the Friar ponders deeply, Why did God the Almighty Creator—Yahweh, Elohim, Adonai—consider that Adam should not be alone and create a mate, “bone of my bone”?
This, a question which only a mystical interpretation could answer. The friar pauses to reflect upon St. Augustine, how he interpreted and preached about the reason for the Fall in the Garden of Eden, that it was a “happy fault”—Felix culpa!” While all truth remains revealed to us as “through a glass darkly” what Augustine discerned was that “For God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist.” Melius enim iudicavit de malis benefacere, quam mala nulla esse permittere....that without the Fall there would have been no need for Jesus to incarnate on Earth and redeem us. In this line of reasoning, the Friar grasps that females, women, the feminine are but such a happy fault. That they are the evil out of which good arises. But how? Here the Friar is once again transfixed by seeing what is so cleverly hidden under Botticelli’s brush of beauty and sensuality, that the good to be achieved is for the male, once again, to live alone, without women.
For what was and is the purest state of being male? Wasn’t and isn’t it being alone with our Creator Father in the Garden before Eve was molded from Adam’s bone? Awake! The lie is to claim that males are to live together and torture their bodies following a most rigorous self-punishment Discipline. No, that is a damnable lie! The truth is—the truth is...the Friar is struck by the beauty of the thought, the simplicity of the revelation...that all males should labor to restore the Earth to its condition before Eve. So, at the End Time—This Age!—the New Earth will be as before the Fall. Truly, the New Heaven will be a state of pure spiritual masculinity, whose inhabitants are solely males, all One with the Father. Isn’t this the revelation of which Jesus was harbinger? How he himself lived while on Earth? Why there were no females among the apostles?
A small comfort comes to the Friar as another—once but no longer perplexing—saying of Augustine drifts into his contemplation. It is one that has anticipated his own insight. The Bishop of Hippo had opined, “Except for the purpose of procreation, another man would have been a more suitable companion for Adam.”
Punishment of the male body was not an end in itself, although this was how the Discipline has been interpreted for over a millennium —that a monk should punish himself. No, never, not again! Punishment of the male body was only necessary because Adam had tainted himself with female flesh. The Good Father created Eve so that Adam would not be alone—as a companion, not as a sexual partner, a lover, a procreator. Ah, the wise Augustine! Eve was not created to be sexually joined with Adam. If so, why then were they expelled from the Garden? Was it that Adam seduced Eve, beguiling her, tricking her, turning her into a mate, not just
a companion? Isn’t this the blatant sin of Venus? That She is lured—by this vile Botticelli!—into being a goddess, a desirable creature for whom men lust? But...Ah! the Holy Spirit is surely about! The friar realizes...and accepts where Adam did not...that it is males who have created females as lovers, spouses, mothers. More, that the female is all and only a part of the male, a rib. Ah, ah! Verily, true punishment of the male is to rid him of this part of himself, this femininity, this mother-inside...to purge the female from his body. In a perverse sense, put the rib back into Adam’s side!
Thoughts fly like quail startled on the hunt! Why then was the Earth cursed and it became the home to the human family? Of great weight to the Friar, and a turning point of turning points in his awakening, is that the human family did not exist in the Garden—which was to be only and always the domain of the male, with a companion. To copulate and procreate, that part of Adam’s maleness that craved Eve’s sexual femaleness and sought to bodily unite with her had to be cursed and exiled! To Earth.
Could the message of Venus be any more simple and clear? As brightly evident as was the glorious beauty of the painting itself?
The Friar’s task, then, so is revealed, is solely to root out and exorcise the remnant presence of the female that so taints the male flesh. Punish the male body, yes, punish deeply, verily, punish incessantly, ever so to purify oneself, rid himself of the presence of Her in her that is in him. Wondrously, once so purified, then his mission, his Calling, will be to root out and exorcise all bewitching, enchanting Venus presences, everywhere! Since in every woman there is a Venus, and every Venus is bewitching, so it is for Friar Otto to rid the world of witches...as all women as daughters of Eve are mothers of witches, so he is called to purge the world of all women!
“Can you repent of your apostasy?” The now emboldened friar throws out at the mere mortal man he once revered. As there is no answer forthcoming from the Prior... Alas!...there was nothing else to think or say, nor wanted imagining. It is time! All that is then heard is the flapping snap of robe and swish! as Friar Otto rises, pivots with a whirl, and strides in heartfelt anxiety hurriedly out of the Prior’s chamber.
Later, from out of Friar Otto’s cell sounds strange to the ears of his brothers perplex them. Not that they themselves have not voiced these familiar sounds, they have, but out from this cell, never! They no longer are beset by the familiar and sinful sounds of happiness—giddy, tittering, raucous. No, it is the oh so familiar bloody lamentations drawn forth by the flagellant’s whip, the screeching accusations elicited by the thumbscrew crushing finger-bone, the howls of self-condemnation as flesh sizzles as brimstone tongs are applied to the chest—as ever Friar Otto would soon come to apply a specific torture to others, so he does it to himself. He knowing now as so many of his fellow friars have attested, that torture is the only way to relieve one’s heartfelt anxiety.
No more masks!
No more tender of heart!
“It is right and just.” This liturgical phrase reverberates throughout his mind and seeps through every bone of his beaten body, his confessing flesh. For—Sweet Jesus, take me!—Friar Otto has seen through that one gaze of Venus how pleasure, mere visual enjoyment chokes a soul, has drowned so many in lust. He is now awakened to how all these men—brothers, friars, all sons of Adam, who in word and praise sound out His Holy Name were themselves in actual practice, Witches! They, in fact and in deed, worshipping Her by protecting Her through their misguided focus on torturing their own bodies.
Botticelli...as all artists who make Her present...all the faithful—clerics foremost—who gaze upon Her and let her live!—sorcerers and necromancers, all. Friar Otto now knows where he has to go and what the Lord is calling him to do. Without a doubt, the Friar knows where and to whom he must go, whose knowledge he must obtain, whose Discipline he must follow. It is to those two illustrious brothers mentioned in the Bull: “our beloved sons, Henricus Institoris and Jacobus Sprenger,” both of the Order of Friars Preachers like himself, both Dominicans—Inquisitors!