AGREDA (MARY D’).

Mary D’Agreda was a fanatical nun, who lived in the seventeenth century, and became famous for a work censured by the Sorbonne. Francis Coronel, her father, and Catherine d’Arena, her mother, who lived at Agreda, a town of Spain, moved by a particular revelation, founded a convent in their house the 19th of January, 1619. Mary took the nun’s habit in it at the same time with her mother and sister, the 2nd of February, 1620. She was elected superior in the year 1627, and during the first ten years of her superiority, she received divers

commands from God and the Virgin Mary to write the life of the Holy Virgin. She resisted those orders until the year 1637, when she began to write, and having finished it, she burnt it with divers writings that she had composed on other subjects, by the advice of a confessor, who directed her in the absence of her ordinary confessor. Her superiors and regular confessor reprimanded her severely for so doing, and commanded her to write the life of the Holy Virgin a second time; and God and the Holy Virgin also reiterated the same command. She began to obey on the 8th of December, 1655, and divided her work into three parts, containing eight books, which have been printed at Lisbon, at Madrid, at Perpignan, and at Antwerp. The first was translated out of Spanish into French, from the edition of Perpignan, by Father Croset, a Recollect, which translation was printed at Marseilles in the year 1696. We find there, “ That as soon as the Virgin came into the world, the Almighty ordered the angels to carry that lovely child into the empyreal heaven; which they did divers times. That God appointed an hundred of each of the nine choirs of angels, that is to say, nine hundred to serve her: and that he appointed twelve others to serve her in a visible and corporeal form, and eighteen more of the highest rank, who descended on Jacob’s ladder, to make embassies from the queen to the great king. That to conduct that invincible squadron the better, St Michael, the prince of the heavenly militia, was placed at the head of it. That the first conception of the body of the most Holy Virgin was on a Sunday, correspondent to that of the creation of angels. That if the Virgin did not speak as soon as she was born, it was not because she could not, but because she would not: that before she was three years of age, she swept the house, and the angels assisted her,&c. There are I know not how many such like imaginations in it.” These are the extracts that a Protestant journalist gave of it; and another journalist, who is a good catholic, assures us, “ that nothing is to be found in the six first chapters, but visions, by which the sister Mary of Jesus says, that God discovered the mysteries of the Holy Virgin to her, and the decrees he made to create all things.—That in the twentieth chapter, she gives an account of what happened to the Holy Virgin in the womb of St Anne; that she comes afterwards to the birth of the Holy Virgin, to the name that was given her, to the angels that were charged to guard her, to the occupations of the first eighteen months of her childhood, to the conversation she had with God at the end of those eighteen months, to her conversations with St Joachim and St Anne, and to the holy exercises wherein she employed herself until she was put into the temple of Jerusalem.” If any body should fancy that among so many visions there is nothing that concerns St John’s Revelations he would be greatly mistaken; for our Mary, not satisfied to have explained the 12 th chapter of the Revelations, enlarged very much on the 21st, which she expounds of the conception of the Holy Virgin. If you desire to know the title of her work in the translation of Thomas Croset, read what follows. “The mystical city of God, miracle of the Almighty, abyss of grace, divine history of the life of the most Holy Virgin Mary, mother of God, our queen and mistress, manifested in these last ages by the Holy Virgin to sister Mary of Jesus, abbess of the convent of the Immaculate Conception of the city of Agreda, of the order of St Francis, and written by that same sister by the command of her superiors, and of her confessors.”

There were so many follies in the work of a nature to please the passionate admirers of the Virgin,

that the faculty of Paris deemed it necessary to censure it, and they attained their end in spite of the opposition of manydoctors of the society. The censure which they published is only known tome by the “ Journal of the Learned,” wherein I have seen, 1. that the sixth condemned proposition contains, “ That God gave the Holy Virgin all that he would, and would give her all that he could, and could give her all that was not the being of God.” That the seventh proposition is conceived in these terms,—“ I declare by the force of truth, and of the light in which I see all those ineffable mysteries, that all the privileges, the graces, the prerogatives, the favours, and the gifts of the most pure Mary, comprehending the dignity of the mother of God in it, depend and take their original from having been immaculate, and full of grace in her conception, insomuch that without that privilege all the rest would appear faulty, or like a stately building without a solid and proportionable foundation.” That the ninth proposition explains literally of the Holy Virgin the words of the 8th chapter of the Proverbs, and insinuates that by her kings are raised and maintained on the throne, princes command, and the rulers of the earth administer justice. That the thirteenth proposition is, “ That if men’s eyes were penetrating enough to see the light of the Holy Virgin, it would suffice to conduct them to a blessed eternity.” That besides these propositions, divers others are comprised under the fourteenth article, all which are respectively condemned as rash, contrary to the wisdom of the rules that the church prescribes; to which is added, that most of them are like the fables and ravings of apocryphal authors, and expose the Catholic religion to the contempt of impious men and of heretics. That finally the faculty declares, that it does not pretend to approve divers other things contained in that book, and chiefly the passages where the author abuses the text of the Scripture, in applying it in her own sense, and those wherein she asserts, that some opinions that are merely scholastic, were revealed to her. Let us make some small reflections upon this That is to say, that it has neither beginning nor end. ²¹

In the first place the scholastics teach generally, that the distinctive character of God and of the creatures, is, that God has nothing that comes from elsewhere, and that the creatures have nothing but what proceeds from elsewhere. This is what they express by the barbarous wordsaseitas, andabalieitas, from whence they conclude that all the attributes of God are communicable to the creature except theaseitas; and consequently that it is possible for a creature to be eternal,à parte ante et à parte post In this article Bayle supplies a pleasant specimen of what the Sorbonne found itdifficult to condemn, and what a fanatical party in France is doing much to restore. Nor was this trashever censured in Spain, or, it is believed, out of France. In fact the gods of vulgar apprehension are uniformly, deified mortality. The imagination wants flesh and blood to rest upon: the truth of this assertion, in respect to Paganism, it is unnecessary to mention, and dropping the Virgin Mary, Christianity has much indulged in it.—Ed. ²², and infinite as to knowledge, power, local presence, goodness, justice, &c. They commonly teach, that by the obediential power creatures are susceptible of the faculty of operating all sorts of miracles, and also of the power of creating. So that if God did effectually confer on the Holy Virgin all that he could confer upon her, it follows, according to the doctrines of the school which the sister Mary of Jesus valued much, that the Holy Virgin existed from all time, that she can do all things, that she knows all things, that she fills all places, and that she is infinite in all regards. I need not suppose that our abbess of Agreda followed the doctrine of the Spanish schoolmen for I am not concerned whether she knew, or was ignorant of it. She teaches plainly, that God gave the Holy Virgin all that he could give her, and that he could give her all his attributes, except the divine essence itself. This suffices me to draw the conclusion that I have drawn, which being so, one may very

well wonder that the Sorbonne should say only, that “ that proposition is false, rash, and contrary to the doctrine of the Gospel.” Is such a censure severe enough? Ought they to have been contented with those weak qualifications? Was it sufficient to affirm that it was a rash mistake to apply the literal sense of these words of Solomon,— “ By me kings reign, and the rulers of the earth administer justice,” to the Holy Virgin?

Secondly: Those that have attentively examined all that has been said of the power of the Holy Virgin, and all the share that is given her in the government of the universe, have taken notice that the latest comers have always a mind to outdo the foregoing, until at last the utmost bounds of flattery have been found out. But as the reasons of going always forward have never ceased;—for when the people’s devotion is to produce a revenue to many persons who have a mind to live at ease, it must be quickened and reanimated from time to time with relishes of a new invention;—I say, considering this, there is reason to wonder that the barriers have not been broken, and that among so many monks and nuns, who have been so great refiners, nobody has yet said that the Holy Virgin governed the world alone. How comes’ it that Spain has not yet produced writers that have boasted to know by revelation, that a long experience having made God the Father know the infinite capacity of the Holy Virgin, and the good use she made of the power wherewith he had invested her, had resolved to abdicate the empire of the world; and that God the Son believing he could not follow a better example, had followed the same resolution; so that the Holy Ghost, always conformable to the wills of the two persons from whom he proceeds, approving this fine design, the whole Trinity had remitted the government of the

world into the hands of the Holy Virgin, and that the ceremony of the abdication, and that of the translation of the empire was solemnly made in the presence of all the angels; that an act of it had been drawn up in the most authentic form; that ever since God concerned himself with nothing, and relied altogether on the vigilancy of Mary; that orders were given to several angels, to notify that alteration of government upon earth, that men might know to whom, and in what manner they ought to have recourse for the future in their prayers; that it was no longer to God, since he had declared himselfemeritus, et rude donatus, nor to the Holy Virgin, as to a mediatrix, or to a subordinate queen, but as to the sovereign and absolute empress of all things. How comes it, once again, that such an extravagancy is yet to start? I was asked one day, if I had never heard of it? I answered no, but I would not swear that the thought did never appear, and yet less, that it will never be hatched in a brain sick of devotion; and perhaps if Mary d’Agreda had lived ten years longer, she would have brought forth the monster, and given us a copy of the act of the abdication, wherein we should have seen that the Trinity being willing to live henceforth a quiet life, and to acknowledge their obligations to the Holy Virgin, who since so many ages sustained so wisely a considerable share of the fatigues of the regency of the world, thought they could do nothing more proper, nor pitch upon a reward more suitable to her, than to divest themselves in her favour of the absolute authority of all things.

Just as was the censure of the Sorbonne, it gave offence to a great number of persons, and the apprehensions of the scandals which it might excite, obliged the faculty to make a solemn protestation, that by that censure they do not pretend to diminish any thing of the lawful worship that the Catholic

church pays to the Holy Virgin; that they honour her as the mother of God; that they have a particular confidence in her intercession; that they hold the sentiments of the fathers concerning the immaculate conception, and that they believe her assumption into heaven in body, and in soul.” The censure wherein they acknowledged the conception and the assumption of the Virgin, was made by the syndic and the deputies after the body of the faculty had finished the judgment. This shows that they had not the courage to publish the censure of the faculty, without adding some preservatives to it. and thereby we may know to what dangers persons expose themselves who disapprove the most palpable errors that amplify the honours of the Holy Virgin. They not only expose themselves to the indignation of the people, but also to that of the monks and of divers other ecclesiastics, and endeavour to ward off the blow by studied prefaces. What servitude ! and how incurable the disease ! What Livy said of the republic of Rome, agrees at present with the church of that name. It can neither endure the disease, nor the cure. The work of Mary d’Agreda is plainly full of fables, and of absurd doctrines; yet because it favours the false ideas people entertain of the high dignity and unlimited power of the Holy Virgin, they must make use of all sorts of means, to be able to censure it in Paris.

There is, however, a particular reason that may have obliged the Sorbonne to be cautious, by exposing them to the oppositions of many doctors. It is, that so many consequences have been drawn from the epithet of Mother of God, that there is scarcely any overstrained thought concerning the excellency and the power of the Virgin, that may not be maintained in some measure by the argumentsad hominem, which those consequences afford.

Your adversaries lead you by degrees where they please, you are undone by the subtilties of the schoolmen. If you recoil, they convince you of inconsequence; from whence it comes that those who pretend to argue consequently, and to favour the popular devotion all at once, had rather advance more and more, than recoil. And yet their system is not of a regular figure; the divinity of Mary is wanting in it in the literal sense, seeing the Mother of God ought to be a Goddess of course, and of the self-same nature with the Son. She would be so if they would adopt the imagination of the Chevalier Borri, but it has been condemned. Perhaps a time will come that they will know the necessity of it, and by that means square the irregular figure. It is thought that many wish for it. Such a thing might be done under certain circumstances, if there were a combination of temporal and spiritual interests. Every thing passes when princes concur with the heads of an ecclesiastical party, during certain dispositions of general affairs Voltaire, in his Philosophical Dictionary, has borrowed this argument of the Dutch ministers, and illustrated it in a pleasant dialogue, with his usual wit and humour.—Ed. ²³.—ArticleAgreda.