The Franciscan tertiary Angela of Foligno (ca. 1248-1309) reports that a demon tempted her with pride and desolation, falsely claiming to be the apostle Bartholomew and that it was his feast day.
Woman’, for radical French feminist, Luce Irigaray, is a concept different from but similar to women as we know them. Woman is always outside the male structure of society, and, since this male-dominated society dictates or attempts to dictate people’s understanding of the universe and their place in it, a woman’s voice, truly expressed, is necessarily foreign and shocking. Irigaray quotes Angela of Foligno at the beginning of a chapter on female mystics. There is something true about ultimate reality Irigaray feels women like Angela (and a few men, like John of the Cross) can reveal to us.
In that chapter, Irigaray writes about the Real, the essence of our existence as divided against ourself. For each of us, she says, there exists “a gulf that opens up ahead, moves away, strains, never knowing or imagining (itself) in its unfathomable nakedness.” (Irigaray, 194)
Mystics like Angela, Irigaray seems to say, were proclaiming the terror that lies at the heart of an unjust society. Most people continue to fail to understand this message. From the perspective of society as a whole, the tendency is to look at people who, for instance, pray for God to kill their children or who sit at the door of a church during a service, screeching uncontrollably, and call them insane.
Extract source
We Dress Like Students, We Dress Like Housewives
Hampl, Patricia: Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life Ballantine Books, 1992
Irigaray, Luce. The Speculum of the Other Woman. G.C. Gill, translator. Cornell University Press, 1985.
Irigaray, Luce. The Speculum of the Other Woman. G.C. Gill, translator. Cornell University Press, 1985.
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