1. The Vita Aleydis
Saint Alice of Schaerbeek was a Cistercian nun who lived circa 1220-1250. Having shown purity of heart and devotion as a child, she was given to the monastery Camera Sanctae Mariae (Chamber of Saint Mary), near Brussels, when she was seven years old. Her life was short but intense. She witnessed miracles, she was visited by the dead, she worshiped with all her heart and she grew in faith even as her body was gradually ruined by leprosy. What is remarkable about Alice is that while as a young adult she was isolated, immobilized, and blinded—all grave consequences of her illness—her true, inner life was the opposite: she was never alone, she was never hindered in her progress toward God, and she was never truly blind.
The life of Saint Alice—also known as Saint Aleydis—is vividly described in the Vita Aleydis, a biography in the Acta Sanctorum, a sixty-eight-volume hagiography written over three centuries. In three chapters, the Vita explains how, over approximately ten years, her body succumbed to leprosy. Three times near the end of her life Alice endured a grave loss: the loss of sight in her right eye (Chap. 2, § 23), the loss of her ability to walk (Chap. 3, § 25), and the loss of sight in her left eye (Chap. 3, § 27). Yet, each loss brought her closer to something of the highest importance. Each loss debilitated her physically but elevated her spiritually. Her losses were not erosions of her contentment but crystallizations of her life in Christ.
Curiously, her life aligns with certain folk tales and children’s stories told and written over the centuries, as will be discussed below. This is not to say that elements of fiction have entered into the Vita; on the contrary, insofar as Alice’s life reflects the truth, her life is reflected in these stories, stories which are timeless precisely because they are truthful. We all too easily read such stories in a secular and therefore superficial sense. Likewise, we may be tempted to read Alice’s life in terms of her material and social circumstances. This is to miss the point entirely.
A skin-deep reading of the Vita Aleydis impresses us with a sad, disheartening, horribly tragic story. Not only this, but by worldly standards Alice was a failure. Though for most of her life she had the opportunity, she neither possessed nor consumed; she didn’t even strive to do so. Her life was a life of sacrifice, not consumption. Her world was the world of study, prayer, and devotion. Judging by today’s standards of “success,” many of us would be tempted to say: “Poor Alice—she was born into a world of superstition and she died in a world of superstition. Her ceaseless prayers and hymns of praise were nothing more than empty words swallowed by the void. A sad waste of time her life was. We have no need for God, no need for Christ, no need to talk to the dead. The dead are dead, and that is all.” By today’s standards, Alice was a misguided, confused soul—or rather, individual—who did not know how to succeed.
Simply put, in modern terms Alice was not by any stretch of the imagination successful. By secular standards, she was an outcast, and clearly she was an outcast by choice. As a devout sister in a Cistercian convent—a community that revolves around the three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—she was utterly and irrevocably anti-modern.
Reading Alice’sVita reminds us of how far we have fallen since her time, the time of the High Middle Ages. In Man and Technics, Oswald Spengler describes the final stages of a decaying civilization, a civilization not unlike the West today: it is a mechanized, artificial world in which “all things organic are dying in the grip of organization” (94). Similarly, in Being and Time Heidegger describes how, constantly in flight from death, we fall into “inauthentic everydayness” as we become tranquilized and alienated in Das Man—“The They.” At the same time, we falsely believe that we are “ascending” and “living concretely” (Heidegger, 223). For us, such a way of life has become par for the course.
Alice’s life was the diametric opposite. She was a fiery spirit who was anything but tranquilized, anything but artificial. While she suffered in the flesh, she thrived in the spirit. She ascended in ways that most of us do not understand; to modern eyes her ascent appears as a terrifying descent. In fact, her earthly life was a conjunction of opposites which she harmonized in faith. In the words of the Vita, her virtues and merits, visitations and miracles serve as a mirror for humankind (Chap. 1, § 7). With a careful reading we can see in her life a profound meaning which many of us have forgotten.
2. Flesh and Spirit
When she was around twenty years of age Saint Alice contracted leprosy. She was physically isolated to prevent her disease from spreading throughout her community. The first night of separation brought so severe “a wound of heart” that she collapsed, overwhelmed with sorrow (Chap. 2, § 9). She found solace in prayer and worship, but later in life her illness took another toll. Halfway home from church one day she turned back, looked toward the church and cried out: “the entrance of this way is henceforth closed to me: and once dead, I will pass through it; but living in this body, I will not be able to return to the church by this way again” (Chap. 3, § 24). Sadly, this prediction came true; soon after, she lost her ability to walk and was overwhelmed by “a singular sorrow of tears” (Chap. 3, § 25). In time, leprosy took from Alice not only her mobility but also her sight. As the end approached, she was blind and bedridden. Those who saw her on her deathbed “judged that no other creature, comparable to her in horror, could be found anywhere . . . like a corpse rotting in the earth, she was as if to be consumed by putrefaction” (Chap. 3, § 31).
Her body was a text inscribed with a dark story. Yet, each loss, each torment yielded a movement inward. Her heart became a meeting place between body and spirit. Soon after she had been isolated, the storm within her “was calmed and tranquility granted, and peace returned to her heart” (Chap. 2, § 10). In fact, the Vita Aleydis describes Alice’s heart as a land unto itself, a place of earth and rain, light and truth. When she suffered and God consoled her, the dried and cracked earth of her heart was watered by “the dew of heaven” (Chap. 2, § 11). When she took part in the Eucharist, her heart opened like a door for her Lord (Chap. 2, § 13). So much did her heart flourish with the love of God that her Vita describes it as a “garden,” a sacred place where she grew in spirit while physically she withered. Even her dreams constituted a sacred space in which she would have mystical visions. Hence, she had a living, growing world within her, an inner sanctum in which she dwelt with the One who had fashioned her.
Though in time she was rendered lame by leprosy, her entire life was a movement toward God. She did not have far to go. For her, the yellow brick road led not outward but inward. Her heart carried God’s image; as such, it shone with “the light of truth” (Chap. 1, § 4). She was immobilized physically but not spiritually. Far from being in constant flight from death, she embraced it.
Accordingly, even in the midst of great suffering, she saw her body transfigured into something beautiful and holy. Near the end of her life the skin of her hands became so contracted, so “distinguished by various wounds,” that it resembled “the bark of some tree . . . Whence she was wont to sing rejoicing: ‘My hands are turned, full of hyacinths’” (Chap. 3, § 31). The skin of her chest, head, and arms was wounded with “various cracks from excessive dryness. Her legs were most similar to a flayed calf, and they together with her feet were swollen. From her body flesh and pus abundantly flowed. From that time when she was deprived of the light of her eyes, her soul was as if clothed with Divinity. . . ” (Chap. 3, § 31). For Alice and her sisters, the world reflected this Divinity.
Throughout her life in the convent, Alice and those around her testified to miracles and visions. For example, one Holy Easter night, as the choir chanted “The Lord is risen from the tomb,” she beheld a vision in which the entire monastery was suffused in divine light (Chap. 2, § 18). On another occasion, while she was in the monastery’s oratory, a passerby looked inside and beheld Alice “all fiery, and saw the glory of God dwelling within, whose radiance seemed incomparably to surpass the splendor of all precious stones and gems” (Chap. 2, § 14). More importantly, more than once Alice was visited by the dead, lost souls whom she saw clear as day and for whom she passionately prayed—she was vividly aware of the supernatural. The world for her was transfigured just as the world is transfigured for one who is deeply in love.
Alice’s life contrasts sharply with life in the secular order. The theories of Jacques Lacan bring this contrast into sharp relief. In his lecture on “the mirror stage,” he describes how, as infants trapped in “motor impotence and nursling dependence,” we become enamored with our mirror reflections (Lacan, 76). So weak and uncontrollable are our bodies that we both assume and are subsumed by images that give us a semblance of mastery and stability. These images can carry over into adulthood and become the “armor of an alienating identity”; authenticity is supplanted by a false sense of security (Lacan, 78). Much as Narcissus was spellbound by his reflection—an illusory body double—we can become entranced by our own images. Life, then, decays into an existence mediated by representations, replicas, and reflections—a “wilderness of mirrors” in which we lose ourselves in a numb, protracted state of delirium (Eliot, “Gerontion,” lines 61-65). That which is real and authentic sinks into oblivion. Such a sorry state of affairs is alluded to in the Vita: those who become entangled in sin are “miserably ensnared” and “seduced without end” (Chap. 3, § 26). Hence, the phenomenon described by Lacan certainly is not unique to the modern era, but the age of marketing has amplified it beyond measure.
Apparatchiks of the scientific mindset would dismiss Alice’s visions and visitations as hallucinations, aberrations of a troubled and superstitious mind. Then again, nearly everything can be explained away by means of science. Today we are to believe that the soul is but a figment of the imagination; Christ risen is a fantasy for those who cannot face their own mortality. In the words of Richard Dawkins, religion itself is “redundant and irrelevant”; in fact, it hinders science by “peddling false explanations” (Belfast Telegraph, 01.01.2013). Hence, not the spiritual but the physical is the benchmark by which we measure ourselves. The life of the spirit is but a fairy tale; those who seek traces of the divine are blind to reality, a reality which is physical through and through. As a result, we long not for a vision or a visitation but for a spectacle: “shock and awe,” “the rocket’s red glare,” a war machine run amok—we witness not miracles but atrocities.
3. The Modern Age
As noted above, when Saint Alice was seven years old her life changed radically: she was entrusted to the Marian order Camera Sanctae Mariae; her life in Christ began in earnest. Reflecting a motif in the New Testament—e.g., Matthew 15:36, 18:22; Luke 2:36; Revelation 4:5, 15:1—the number seven is a recurring symbol in folk tales and children’s stories. Three such stories, all involving heroines who undergo radical transformations, will be described below.
As Carroll makes clear in Through the Looking Glass (99), Alice is seven (or nearly seven) when she falls down the rabbit hole in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. She enters a world of disorder, disorientation, and mistaken identities. In time, she escapes the hallucinatory pit into which she had fallen and rejoins her sister in waking life. Here, too, the heroine must struggle with her body, a body which tends to be uncontrollable if not antagonistic, as if it were something alien with which she contends.
In “Snowdrop,” an early version of Snow White recorded by the Brothers Grimm, when the titular character was seven years old “she was as bright as the day, and fairer than the queen herself.” As such, she inflames the envy of her mother, the queen, and becomes the object of her wrath. Once she had been poisoned, the seven dwarfs bewailed her for three days and “made a coffin of glass, so that they might still look at her, and wrote upon it in golden letters what her name was.” After being suspended in the coffin for “a long, long time,” a huntsman finds her. When he lifts the coffin to carry her home, Snowdrop wakes and consents to marry her savior (Grimm, “Snowdrop”).
In “The Snake Princess,” a Russian folk tale, a Cossack sees a beautiful maiden standing in the midst of flames. He thrusts his pike into the fire and the maiden, emerging from the flames as a snake, coils herself around him three times. She tells him to bear her for seven years, after which he must live for seven years more in the Kingdom of Tin. After seven years of imprisonment in this Kingdom—a false, barren realm, a kind of purgatory—he goes into the palace and begins smashing “the looking-glasses and mirrors, tearing up the velvet, breaking the chairs, shattering the silver. Possibly, he thought, the owner might come and let him free.” Giving up in despair, he prays to God. Soon after, the princess appears and frees him. She reveals that she had been cursed, forced into her snake form by Koshchei the Deathless, one who had achieved immortality by preserving his soul in physical objects. Having resumed her true form, a beautiful woman, the princess and her beloved savior have “a glorious wedding” (Magnus, “The Snake Princess”).
The Kingdom of Tin, the dead stillness of the glass coffin, Koshchei’s externalized and suspended soul, the absurdity of the rabbit hole—all have their parallels in the modern era. At the same time, these stories preserve a truth that we see clearly expressed in the Vita Aleydis: real change transcends the physical. Not having learned this lesson, we moderns have fabricated a false world of our own. Today we live in an age of plastic, an age of vacuity and pretense. We, the enlightened ones, the ones who have outgrown the superstitions and chimeras of medieval times, have been led inexorably to Pleasure Island’s donkey-land. For us, only the body is real; the rest is fiction. For us, the body is not our shortcoming and weakness, but our font of happiness and locus of meaning, our raison d’être. Thus, it should come as no surprise that the American Society of Plastic Surgeons boasts a plethora of treatments and surgical procedures not for healing, but for cosmetics: body contouring, facial implants, laser skin resurfacing, breast augmentation, breast reduction, breast implant revision, aesthetic genital plastic surgery, botulinum toxin, dermal fillers, eyelid surgery, body lift, arm lift, brow lift, neck lift, breast lift, thigh lift—the list goes on, and no doubt it will expand (ASPS, “Cosmetic Procedures”). These are the new sacraments. No longer must we fear the body’s decay; far rather, the body is for us an instrument which we can manipulate to our heart’s content, so long as we can afford it. The body has become the ultimate commodity.
Today, the market holds sway while the Church wanes. Entranced by financial gain and false identities, real transformation is mistaken for superstition—a savior would be seen as a hindrance at best, redundant and irrelevant. For many, not the Sacred Heart but the Sacred Heart brand is key. Hence, we have “Catholic” universities that unabashedly treat the Sacred Heart of Jesus as a brand image. One such university states: “When we use the Sacred Heart brand, our goal is to communicate one vision and speak in one voice . . . adherence to all usage instructions [of the brand] is critical for the components of our brand identity to work together so that our audiences and shareholders can understand and invest in the Sacred Heart promise . . . ” (SHU, “Brand Standards Guide”). Here we have the ultimate in branding: a brand that erases our differences, a brand that speaks for us, a brand that conforms us to the bottom line. Blind to the spirit, we behold a singular vision of the dollar sign. The Cult of Mammon reigns supreme.
We have reached rock bottom when the Sacred Heart is reduced to a brand identity. We have succumbed to a spiritual sickness which drains whatever meaning remains for us. In contrast, Alice impresses us like a single flower rising in a land of volcanic ash. When we pray to her deeply, she embodies a love that is intimate and potent. She reminds us that out of death and decay something sacred comes into being. Accordingly, the Vita Aleydis also ends with a wedding. Death for Alice was her entry into her bridal chamber (Chap. 3, § 34), a heavenly wedding with the Most Holy. The day before she died, she said to a sister of the convent: “Tomorrow around dawn I will depart from this world” (Chap. 3, § 32). The Vita describes how this prophecy was fulfilled:
After Compline the Virgin of God, like a bride adorned with jewels, and prepared for the wedding, hastened to the gate of death; and bidding farewell to her friends, she commended her soul to God with prayers. Around dawn, as if sleeping and resting, she reclined in her bed; and at sunrise, with a gentle breath, she sent out her spirit. For she put off the garment of mortality and misery, and put on the garment of immortality and glory, full of bliss and joy (Chap. 3, § 32).
Death for Alice was the beginning, not the end. To attempt to explain this scientifically would be folly. The question for us is: How is it that we fell so far?
Acknowledgement: I wish to thank Father Joseph MacNeill of Saint Thomas More Chapel (New Haven, Connecticut) for taking the time to answer my questions and, especially, for his assistance with translating Latin passages in the Acta Sanctorum.
