PREFACE

who lack words will perhaps find bread for them. There are glimpses of abysses there, magnificent attempts to speak the Ineffable: that which is too great or sacred to be expressed in words, followed by a repentance more magnificent than the attempts themselves; the pardon that Saint Angela of Foligno (1248–1309), a Franciscan mystic and author of the "Memorial."Angela asks for her blasphemies, after having stammered the things of rapture, tears through the horizon like lightning in the dark night. Abysses open behind abysses; human intelligence appears short and brief, and the soul finds reassurance in its its thirst. For God declares Himself infinite, and the treasures of eternity will not be exhausted.

Father Frederick William Faber (1814–1863), a prominent English Catholic priest and theologian known for his works on the spiritual life.Father Faber speaks of this intimate life of God, this life he calls unimaginable, where attributes operate that have no name here below. Beyond, he says, what is probable, God lives His life of glory. It is the infinite union of things unknown.

If the mysteries we know, he says somewhere, are already so formidable, what must we think of those mysteries, even greater still, of which the slightest thought has never been given to man?

It is from this sublime authority that the thunderbolts flashed, whose distant reflections, dazzling Angela’s heart, threw her body to the ground motionless in her room. Striking in its superb flight against the mysteries unreveal-