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Natural pain

The third form of pain that Maria Maddalena experienced was natural. Shortly after joining the monastery she became extremely ill and was not expected to recover. She was hit with a sharp burning fever and a "vehement" cough that was accompanied by extreme pain. Puccini's description has the young woman suffering gravely from her illness, but then she seemed to have discovered a valuable secret that transformed her pain into something else. The biographer quotes Maria as she points at the crucifix: "I contemplate the great sufferings which that cordial and incomprehensible love endured for my salvation; he sees my weakness, and with that sight of his I am comforted, since all the pains and grief which all the chosen children of God have endured did pass through that most holy Humanity of Christ, where they grew to be sweet, and to be desired by his members."(20) By means of Christ, the pain of her illness, she discovered, could be transformed into a desirable sweetness, like the sweet pain of Teresa of Avila. Pain became a meaningful experience rather than a problem one had to resist and reject. What this profoundly important theological observation means in neuropsychological terms remains to be seen. But, at the very least, a theory of sacred pain must take its subject as a complex and ambiguous phenomenon.

* Psychologizing Religious Pain

Maria Maddalena's self-tortures were not always gladly tolerated by her superiors, but they were ultimately accepted as part of her extraordinary rigor in visiting penance and discipline on herself. This reluctant abidance by the singularity of a precocious nun would gradually erode in church history, and the conceptualization of the meaning of religious self-torture would change dramatically with the rise of psychological sciences. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a strong tendency developed to link some phenomena of mystical ecstasies with psychological pathology. The church itself had struggled for centuries to distinguish between mystical experience and various forms of "insanity," such as epilepsy and hysteria.(21) Previously, women who had possibly been suffering from a variety of traumas and other forms of mental disorders sought outlet in self-destructive behavior that, if not sanctioned, had at least been recognized in religious terms. Maria Maddalena's superiors certainly gave up fighting against her self-torments and after her death even left the nail-studded corset on display. But with the rise of psychological sciences, the religious hysteric was "stripped of her borrowed halo, she has lost her rights to the stake or to canonization. She has the honor today of being a sick person and depends directly on the doctor."(22)

Later, the emergence of Jungian depth psychology produced less reductive, but more influential, explanations of religious self-tortures. Carl Gustav Jung himself differentiated between "pathological" self-hurt and religious forms of self-sacrifice. On the first type he was not particularly insightful and regarded self-destructive behavior as a form of manipulating others. In contrast, self-sacrifice is a sacramental act, a surrender of the ego that also attains to a mastery of the ego. In the denial of ego implied by self-sacrifice, one makes conscious the forces of society, forces that, according to Sigmund Freud, are identical with the superego and are a source of constant moral conflict. A potential Self is thus actualized, transformed into a conscious Self. In Christian terms, the model is Christ as the original man, the goal is imitation of Christ, and the means is the mass, which corresponds to the individuation process.(23)

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