Papal Palingenesis
A Prelude to Apotheosis
“Zeus lies in Ceres’ bosom
Taishan is attended of loves
under Cythera, before sunrise
and he said “Hay aquí mucho catolicismo
y muy poco reliHion.”
and he said “Yo creo que los reyes desaparecen.”
—The Cantos of Ezra Pound
“sempre suto non altrimenti periculoso trovare modi ed ordini nuovi, che si fusse cercare acque e terre incognite.”
“It has always been just as dangerous to find new ways and orders of doing things as to go in search of new lands and seas.”
—Machiavelli, Preface to
Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius
I.
The Roman Catholic Church is in essence a progressive force. A force so pervasive and powerful that it has crystallized into a principle. And the problem with all high principles is that they risk evaporating into abstraction. God gave Man organs for a reason, and for this same reason Man endowed his principles with institutions. But when these institutions become divorced from the spirit of this founding principle, they grow as fat, fetid, and vestigial as a swollen appendix. And when that organ bursts, it appears as if all of creation is but a sardonic mockery conjured by a cruel god.
The Church is not only a progressive force in history, but it was the first force to imbue history with a progressive dimension. It was Christianity that broke the wheel of cosmic repetition and flattened the hill of Sisyphus. The horizon of man’s soul became linear, the events of the cosmos irreversible, and all of time took on a soteriological character. A phosphorescent glow began to emanate from the humdrum of material causality, an omnipresent scintillation of meaning, and a martial tune whistled with the march of time. History devoid of Providence is but Herodotus without a sense of humor, taxonomies and the braggadocious stelae of the listless dead. Regardless of whether Christ cribbed eschatology from the Magi, his Spirit was the first to assert it as world principle.
Yes—a spirit asserted as world principle—the courage to claim not only universal dominance but universal necessity. A new form of spiritual authority was born, one founded on the urgent need to save the souls of the earth. Christ defeated death, and then he handed this power to his successors, the keys to bind both heaven and earth. That the layman’s faith can be uprooted by textual foibles or chronological ruptures is a failing of the Church. The creators of history have ceded their authority to tomb raiders and philologists, two thousand years of unbroken rule and now the Church hierarchy is unsure if their hierarchical authority is a justifiable principle. They have lost all awareness of their own legitimacy. It is a great tragedy and outrage to watch true power relinquished, ceded not in service of some higher principle, but ceded out of a growing ignorance of the principle behind their own power.
The church, I suspect, is ashamed of itself. And it is for this reason that a piece of God absconded from Calcata in 1983. Padre Magnioni blamed “ladri sacrileghi,” sacrilegious thieves. If this was a reference to the famous witches of Monte Soratte or a play on Bossi’s Roman slogan—God only knows. The rest of us will stick to our suspicions. But for the only relic of Christ’s flesh to miraculously survive the Northern barbarians, only to be ordered destroyed by the princes of the church, out of the most pathetic of sentiments—embarrassment—it is the ultimate self-indictment. At least the numinous mystic of Siena had the courage to record her celestial wedding, to embrace the inexplicable and spectral signs of divine authority.
“The concept of the ‘Church’ retains power only under the condition that the inspiring spirit that founded the Church still lives in, builds, and continues to build its house… Let us not forget in the end what a church is, specifically as opposed to any ‘state’. A church is above all a structure for ruling that secures the highest rank to the more spiritual human beings and that believes in the power of spirituality to the extent of forbidding itself the use of all cruder instruments of force; and on that score alone the Church is under all circumstances a nobler institution than the state.”1
What is the essence of this spirit that animates the Church? What is the latent element compelling these forces of progress that blow across the earth? It is the wisdom of God expressed in a mystery, a “wisdom that was hidden and that God had decided before the ages for our glory.” Though it “is not a wisdom of this world or of the princes of this world, who are rendered inoperative.” And as Paul of Tarsus makes clear, this wisdom is expressed to those “among the perfect [teleiois, the initiated].”
“Casel shows that in Greek mystērion does not designate a secret doctrine which could be formulated discursively but which it is prohibited to reveal. Rather the term mystērion indicates a praxis, an action or a drama in the theatrical sense of the term as well, that is, a set of gestures, acts, and words through which a divine action or passion is efficaciously actualized in the world and time for the salvation of those who participate in it. For this reason, Clement of Alexandria calls the Eleusinian mysteries drama mysticon, ‘mystical drama,’ and consequently defines the Christian message as a ‘mystery of the logos.’”2
The mystery is not a secret doctrine but an actualization; history becomes the axis of providence, upon the stage of space-time, divinity manifests as lived enigma. History becomes mystery. Inertia is overcome by faith. And this cosmic play, this constellation of symbols and signs, this drama in which all must partake to guarantee salvation and victory over death, can only be comprehended by the teleiois. And so what is the spirit of the Church? It is absolute mystery transformed into absolute authority. An authority that exerts a power beyond the force of arms.
The Catholic Church retained her authority through schisms, sacks, persecutions, and scandals. She survived Diocletian, and she survived Luther. The loss of her power on earth is due to the spiritual paucity of her Princes at the dawn of modernity. Modernity—a word that would not exist if it were not for the Church’s failure. Modernity as a historiographical concept is an admission of the Church’s failure to hold on to the motor of history. In the 19th century, the Church relinquished her role as the agent of progress, as well as losing her consciousness of mystery. She became estranged from her own nature. Her temporal power was taken by the agents of modernity, and so she winced as a broken animal into the caverns of the past. The Church repostured as a reactionary levee, and by doing so, lost her claim to the shape of history. The cry of tradition is the death knell of the damned. The “Traditional” Catholics of today scurry with tails between legs into the dusty opulence of their baroque basilicas. Upon their lips, the omnipresent whisper of “Trent.” But the cardinals of Trent were not retreating, no, they were reacting to those forces which challenged their claim to history, who challenged their hegemony upon mystery. And by all metrics, the counter reformers succeeded. The spiritual authority of the 16th and 17th centuries was the apex of Rome’s celestial power. The sheer fact that the trad cath’s “traditional” hiding hole is the Baroque church betrays an unconscious acknowledgement of a cold truth. By the dawn of the 19th century, the Church had ceded her crown. And an even colder truth: the reason the word “progress” is today a metonym for every form of sexual perversion and societal debasement, is a result of the failure of that institution that first imbued history with a sense of linear progression.
It is no wonder then, that the self-styled Traditionalists of today choose to scapegoat the Popes of the Renaissance. To ascribe institutional decline to an early modern moral failing as opposed to a recent failure of spirit. I still recall the ubiquitous refrain of the Franciscan papacy, the response to all criticisms: “Alexander VI was worse.” This reaction would be excusable if only expressed by the usual suspects, the milquetoast liberals of theology departments. But instead, the Traditionalist crowd made it their mission to dig up the graves of the giants of the Cinquecento, and spit on their names as the source of all modern ills. All possible invectives were levied, “pagans, usurers, atheists, simoniacs, murderers, sodomites!” Yes, the trad caths were in perfect alignment with the popular wisdom of the zeitgeist. Those pharisaical “defenders” of the faith, who perpetually lament the loss of the Church’s temporal holdings while scorning the men who secured those holdings. Men who idolize the brush strokes of Raphael while spitting venom upon the grave of his patron and occasional inspiration. As if high culture can be divided, safely amputated at the hip.
This article series will not be an exercise in pious apologia, but a scientific examination of the ingredients, variables, and equations required to produce a mass reaction of the spirit.
And yet it will function as an apologia in the eyes of the trad cath and neopagan, but God willing, a young priest may stumble upon it and find an exhortation.
In the words of Ezra Pound, “This much I believe to be also true: there is more civilization lying around unused in the crannies, zenanas, interstices of that dusty and baroque fabric than in all other institutions of the Occident.”3
What I am proposing is to turn an eye to the Renaissance in the same way the men of the Renaissance turned an eye to Antiquity. To approach the period as daring amateurs, as Humanists, and not as small-souled academics in search of sterile truth. There are two types of grave robbers in this world: there are the archaeologists, the sort of soul who desires to exhume the past in order to sterilize it, and then there are the antiquarians—Noble necromancers who wish to wake the dead. This was the mentality of Cyriacus of Ancona, the daring Renaissance inscription hunter, who not only wished “to wake the dead,” but to lead “the glorious things which were alive” in antiquity from the “dark tomb into the light, to live once more among living men.”4
Every profound and original thought or system emerges from an honest misreading of an earlier document. Culture itself is produced by a civilization peering into the mirror of her past and discovering a false reflection—a soteriological mirage. But a mirage to be actualized. Modern cultural creation is so cadaverous because we inhabit a world of archaeologists and not antiquarians. A paradoxical situation where, as our methodologies progress in approximating the past, our creativity in imagining a future is stifled. History is now an exercise in navel-gazing and not a pathway to power and palingenesis.
Before we can even begin to invoke the names of those giants, before we are worthy to excavate the crystalline depths of their spirits, we must first define our terms. What in God’s name is progress? What is this mysterious force of which I speak? This erotic current running through the mud of history, uprooting and rebinding, a bolt of thunder transforming everything in its path! Progress is the supersession of a set of values, for a value is nothing but an achievement, a state of rest in the dynamic process of will and becoming. A crystallization of vital forces, an attempt to enforce the high-water mark of a cultural current, to petrify a tide in place while pacifying the waves that brought the elevation. But given enough time, the values rot into stillwater, an equilibrium is reached in the levee, and fetid algae pollutes the blue. The only squall capable of then breaking the inertia is a contraction of daemonic wills—wills given a common direction, “So wrote the Florentine Secretary: Mankind lives in the few.”5 But no amount of willpower alone can surpass a society’s conceptual horizons without an alteration, a disruptive break in the equilibrium of symbol and sign. But from where do such thoughts arise? A new constellation must be imagined before man can move the stars.
How does a new thought, a new vision, enter into a closed system? How can novelty epiphanize in the consciousness of man? It can either come from that which is not man, a revelation from above, or it can come from that which man once was, a revelation from below, the forgotten past returning from the mud—the sons of Laocoon or the books of Numa. But there is a third road, the only truly human road, and that is the birth of the new through error and opaque clarity. To see both the past and the revelations of heaven through a glass darkly, through the miracle and the alchemy of auspicious misprision. Meaning itself is forged through misidentification, creative misunderstandings—the miraculous gaps in which God enters. The seeds of palingenesis are planted in the soil of the caesura. And it was this, dear reader, this confluence of superhuman will and auspicious confusion that birthed the fires of the Renaissance. Misprision, both accidental and intentional, by men in pursuit of truth, and by true lovers of lies. Was it not the Donation of Constantine that justified and directed the iron will of Julius II? Was it not this noble lie that gave the Papacy the rights to her holdings? Was this forgery not holy? Did this forgery not lead to a conflagration of creative violence? Was it not the honest mistake of the humanists, which overestimated the antiquity of the Hermetic texts, that baptized the wisdom of Egypt and Chaldea? This honest mistake, which allowed the bloom of Prisca Theologia, put the whole of the pagan past at the disposal of the Pontiff, raising the gods of all pantheons into the service of Christ’s Vicar, a once unfathomable Catholicity. For in 15th century Rome, Prisca Theologia was a metaphysical justification for a universal empire.
But auspicious misprision was not a new phenomenon of the 15th century; it was the very motor of the early Church’s hegemony on history. Noble lies, some intentional, others Providential, that cleared the path for the march of Christ’s spirit. It was only after the Church began to give credence and legitimacy to the metaphysical butchers, the philologists, men such as Valla and Casaubon, that the Church lost its power and creative potential. It was the Church’s prerogative, her holy writ and special order, to annul truth in the service of power and beauty. To relinquish such a mandate was to relinquish any claim to divine action and the shape of history.6
I will go further. I believe Providence intends for forgeries to succeed, for men to lose sight of truth in the service of a more perfect telos. Perhaps auspicious misprision is a divine course corrective, a non-Euclidean theophany, so God may save a past that manifested imperfectly.
To deny God’s touch in the temporary abrogation or the veiling of truth is to deny the divinity of Abbot Suger’s vision. For the pleroma of angels and the gothic glass were all birthed from the amniotic sap of Pseudo Dionysus, the ancient changeling. And thus the great hierarchy of cherubs and seraphs conjured from a single caesura, a misidentification, Proclus transformed into a disciple of Paul. Proclus! Last of the great pagans, hierophant and leader of the Platonic Academy, estranged from Athens in fear of the Christian, only to one day become the same city’s bishop. What force erected the first Gothic Cathedral? What divine benevolence inspired those cross ribbed vaults, lacquered in the light of fairy glass? A cascade of mistakes. A symphony of misprision. The theology of Proclus, disguised in the pen of a Christian mystic, one attributed to the Denis of Acts, from which emerged another auspicious mistake, the Denis of Acts conflated with the Apostle of France. Shall we now go tear down the Cathedrals of Gaul? Shall we mount an attack upon the hierarchies of heaven? All in the service of a philologist’s eye? To disagree, to cry “No!”, is to come face to face with a great secret, to admit that the vectors of Providence are not so easily circumscribed.
I repeat. “Values are what is felt and perceived as an ‘aspect’ in the brief moment of rest (or achievement) of Energy. The two seemingly contradictory tendencies—to preserve, safeguard, and defend values (of civilization, the state, the homeland, society, religion, a particular worldview, a Weltanschauung) and to move beyond that stage, that stagnation of Energy are altered in the Circle of Eternity.”7
But this alteration requires a false step, a mistake, or a crime. The value, the truth-aspect, cannot be violated knowingly. What is required is either a genius whose reason suffers an auspicious bout of slumber, or a divine thief who covers his tracks—like Hermes driving a herd in reverse. Pseudo-Dionysus rustles the cattle, and Suger of Saint Denis is touched by the son of Somnus.
All societal transvaluations coincide with a radical explosion or contraction of images. An artistic ripple co-manifests with every rotation or wobble of the zeitgeist. It is not a simple equation of cause and effect, and the conventional wisdom, that which casts art as a translucent medium soaking up the color of an age, may be a crude inversion. Images have a will of their own. Thus Sprach Riegl.8 Symbols carry the germ of meaning, a value, an aspect that tends—or even yearns—towards its own transformation. The occult maxims speak of an object’s latent virtue, but forms themselves are also imbued with such mystic signatures. And when the marble fossils of antiquity gushed forth from the Roman mud, they brought with them the dead values and alien virtue of Caesar to the Cinquecento. And the Cross was more than happy to bear them.
A friend of mine once explained that the essence of Machiavelli’s kerygma was love. If this strikes you as a platitude, then you will be forgiven, for as Pound once noted, centuries of derivative convention and loose usage have obscured the exact significance of such phrases and words.9 The entropic laws of verbal economy dictate the degeneration of such words of power when spoken by one too many tongues, into one too many ears, across one too many ages—thus the remedy is either a neologism or a return to the source. And since I am not feeling terribly creative, I may as well polish off a few terms like love and virtue.
In modern parlance, virtue is quite literally seen as a signal rather than an essence. But the Renaissance virtù was a potency. A luminous current that charged a man, one endowed with masculine virility, and a kind of cunning, the metis of Odysseus, who was honored Polytropos. It was the innate energy of one capable of actualizing his will into the ordering currents of the cosmos. A shifting intelligence and an interactive force, but one that contained the spark of the divine. And yet when one reads the poets of the dolce stil novo, a stranger enigma confronts them, and one begins to suspect that there is a greater mystery latent in this term. Connotations alchemical, astrological, and metaphysical, the virtù of the occultists, the signature that linked all forms and souls to their native star. It is the subtle body of Cavalcanti’s donna emerging from her soft lips, before plasmating into an ethereal double, and burning up into the fiery star of Guido’s salvation.10
Veggio ne gli occhi de la donna mia
un lume pien di spiriti d’amore
che porta uno piacer novo nel core
sì, che vi desta d’allegrezza vita.
Cosa m’avien quand’i’ le son presente
ch’i’ no la posso a lo ’ntelletto dire:
veder mi par de la sua labbia uscire
una sì bella donna, che la mente
comprender no la può; che ’nmantenente
ne nasce un’altra di bellezza nova,
da la qual par ch’una stella si mova
e dica: — la salute tua è apparita. —
Là dove questa bella donna appare
s’ode una voce che le ven davanti,
e par che d’umiltà ’l su’ nome canti
sì dolcemente, che s’i’ ’l vo’ contare
sento che ’l su’ valor mi fa tremare.
E movonsi ne l’anima sospiri
che dicon: — guarda, se tu costei miri
vedrai la sua vertù nel ciel salita.11
Here, dear reader, we are quite far from the simple dichotomy of pious moralism vs cruel and calculating projections of force. I refused to describe the latter conception of virtù as Machiavellian, for I believe the true secret to Machiavelli’s virtù can be found in the lines of his fellow Florentine. And it can be found in the whispers of the palindrome of Rome.
Once we relinquish our petty prejudices and excrete the half-digested truths of our age, only then can we attain an epiphany of the past. I will start with the most maligned. I will restore for you something of the glory of Geryon.
II.
March 9th, 1513. The five-day conclave following the death of Julius II had ended, and the great house of Florence had finally reared a Vicar of Christ. Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici, son of Lorenzo Il Magnifico, in the span of a few hours, went from a mere deacon to head of the universal church and God’s agent on earth. Six days after his election, on the 15th of March, the young deacon was consecrated a priest. Two days later, the priest was made a bishop, and two days from that, Cardinal Farnese was laying the opulent, jewel-encrusted tiara upon Pope Leo X’s head. And what a journey it had been! The 38 year old former Lord of Florence had been banished, imprisoned, liberated, and now he sat upon the throne of Peter. The men of letters looked on in awe and lauded this master of fortune, this man who had so seduced the vicissitudes of fate that Fortuna herself was now his willing mistress. Finally, on April 11th, the Feast of St Leo, as well as the anniversary of Giovanni’s past capture in Ravenna, commenced the true public coronation, the “possesso.” The procession in which the pope took possession of the Basilica of all Basilicas, the Church of the Pope, San Giovanni in Laterano. It was to be “the most splendid spectacle that Rome had witnessed since the imperial age.”12
On that spring morning, it seemed as if the great temporal schism that separated the grandeur of antiquity from the lithic bones of Rome had been stitched by a golden thread. Those long-dormant memories of imperial processions and triumphant legions, the glittering cuirass of plated Mars scintillating in the shadows of monumental marble, those glorious moments had shattered with the empire into echoes of terracotta and ink. And yet those memories of fire, those shadows of yesteryear, by some queer providence had reformed their outlines in the fantasies of the Cinquecento, and now, now the banners and the regiments had returned. An observer on that day, some descendant of a common plebe in the epoch of Augustus, must have felt that eleven hundred years were but a blink in their ancestral eye, for the virtù of their forefathers had returned in greater glory.
The procession began at the Vatican, two hundred mounted lancers led the march, filling the air with the percussion of galloping horses and the melodies of musicians, adorned in rich fabrics of white, red, and green. Behind them, the twelve Papal cursori, and the representatives of the thirteen Rioni. From their midst rose the gallant standard of Rome, SPQR, wavering in the spring wind above Giovan Cesarini. And in his immediate vicinity, the Procurator of the Teutonic Order, bearing the white banner with a black cross, accompanied by the Prior and the flag of the Knights of St John. And finally, the Gonfaloniere of the Church. Following the first wave came the Papal Marshal, with nine pale steeds and three pale mules, cloaked in rich red trappings with gold embroidery, catching the rays of the Roman sun. With them, a group of knights from the Roman and Florentine nobility, the vital blood of the peninsula’s aristocracy, all united on their stallions, the Orsini, Savelli, Colonna, Conti, Gaetani, Santa Croce, Salviati, Soderini, Strozzi, Pucci, and the Medici. This medieval aroma, a recapitulation of that which once was, marching into the future under the aura of something even older. Then came the ecclesiastical court, wave after wave, two hundred and fifty abbots and bishops preceded the cardinals. And there, under the auspices of the Swiss Guard, rode Pope Leo X on a Turkish stallion.
The residents of the Via Papalis, the processional path, had adorned the cityscape in all manner of tapestries and ancient statues, transforming the physiognomy of the city into a liminal fairyland, where the old collapsed into the new. Paolo Giovio reported that “doors were adorned with flowers and branches, windows and streets with textiles, while triumphal arches appeared at every intersection, decorated in a marvellous way, following the example of ancient grandeur, with paintings and statues.” Triumphal arches were erected, more numerous than the ancient city had ever seen, balancing banners and ancient gods. But the most impressive arches of all were erected by the bankers. For in the Cinquecento, the most maligned of men, the money changers, were still in the habit of transmuting their wealth into civic grandeur. And the grandest of them all was the arch erected by the man from Siena.
For upon his arch stood Apollo, Pallas, Mercury, and nymphs, presiding over this grand occasion as tutelary gods, receiving the presence of their new king. And there, on the arch, in great golden letters read:
“First Venus ruled; then came the God of War; Now, Great Minerva, it is thy day that dawns.”
The man from Siena was Agostino Chigi. And he, more than any other soul of the age, had a part to play in each of the three gods’ apotheosis.
III.
All men of destiny are born out of due time. Some are born too late, others, born too early. The equilibrium of a historical moment can only be offset by a force from outside the system; for the inertia of which the mundane world is drawn to can only be broken by a kairotic bolt—a mind or an idea from before or beyond.
Cesare Borgia and the other condottieri were Bronze Age souls incarnate in early modern flesh. But Agostino Chigi was not a man of the past. Agostino was a nineteenth century industrialist born with “an intuitive grasp of economic theory that was literally centuries before its time.”13 He was born with a certain innate intelligence, a metis, that allowed him to conceptualize and capitalize on the laws of supply and demand before those laws had even been formulated. By virtue of this prescient instinct, he tirelessly endeavoured to establish a monopoly on the sale and manufacturing of alum throughout the entire European continent, and in the process acquired a level of wealth and power that dwarfed all of his contemporaries. But if his life was just one of fantastic lucre, then he would have no presence in our history books. It’s what he did with this wealth, how he redirected those telluric forces, of which coin is only the crystallization, to draw out an elaborate symphony of creative transformations, one which we can only label as progress. And the chain reaction that Agostino Chigi ignited, one driven purely by a hunger for a new and audacious financial empire, would explode into the conflagration of culture and creative destruction known to us today as the High Renaissance. Behind every great man, a great woman, and behind every great Pope, a great banker. And so our series on the Renaissance papacy begins with the great banker behind it all.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff, poems trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) (Page 222)
Giorgio Agamben, The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI and the End of Days, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017) (Page 28)
Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1970)
Brian A. Curran, The Egyptian Renaissance: The Afterlife of Ancient Egypt in Early Modern Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), (Page 3)
Ezra Pound, Carta da Visita (Roma: Edizioni di Lettere d’Oggi, 1942)
A pertinent passage of Nietzsche: “The Lutheran Reformation was, in its whole breadth, the indignation of simplicity against 'multiplicity', to speak cautiously, a crude, naively narrow-minded misunderstanding in which there is much to forgive. One failed to understand the expression of a victorious church and saw only corruption; one misunderstood the noble scepticism, that luxury of scepticism and tolerance which every victorious, self-confident power permits itself… Today one overlooks easily enough how in all cardinal questions of power Luther was dangerously short-sighted, superficial, incautious — mainly as a man of the common people who lacked any inheritance from a ruling caste and instinct for power; thus his work, his will to restore that work of the Romans only became the beginning of a work of destruction, without his wanting and knowing it. With honest wrath he unravelled, he tore up what the old spider had woven so carefully for such a long time. He surrendered the holy books to everyone — thus they finally ended up in the bands of the philologists, who are the destroyers of every faith that rests on books.”
Miguel Serrano, Nietzsche e la danza di Shiva, ed. N. Oliva (Rome: Settimo Sigillo-Europa Lib. Edizioni, 2013). We thank our good friend Carlitos Schmitt for translating the text.
There are still mysteries to be probed in the kunstwollen
See Ezra Pound’s monograph on Cavalcanti
Consult both Ezra Pound’s work on Cavalcanti as well as Luigi Valli’s “Il linguaggio segreto di Dante e dei fedeli d'amore,” (I have a few translations posted on my substack of relevant passages), and Gabriele Rossetti’s (father of the Pre-Raphaelite Dante Rossetti and a man intertwined with revolutionary secret societies) works, especially, “Il mistero dell’amor platonico del medio evo.” For more on the arcanum of the Stilnovisti and the Fedeli d’amore, consult Henry Corbin’s work (in particular L'imagination créatrice dans le soufisme d'Ibn 'Arabi), and that of Don Miguel Serrano.
Pounds translation, rendered exquisite:
Light do I see within my Lady’s eyes
And loving spirits in its plenisphere
Which bear in strange delight on my heart’s careTill Joy’s awakened from that sepulchre.
That which befalls me in my Lady’s presence
Bars explanations intellectual,
I seem to see a lady wonderful
Spring forth between her lips, one whom no senseCan fully tell the mind of, and one whence
Another, in beauty, springeth marvellous,
From whom a star goes forth and speaketh thus:“Now thy salvation is gone forth from thee.”
There where this Lady’s loveliness appeareth,
Is heard a voice which goes before her ways
And seems to sing her name with such sweet praise
That my mouth fears to speak what name she beareth,
And my heart trembles for the grace she weareth,
While far in my soul’s deep the sighs astirSpeak thus: “Look well! For if thou look on her,
Then shalt thou see her virtue risen in heaven.”
This section, along with the description of the Prossesso, is drawn almost entirely from Ludwig Von Pastor. Pastor was the first truly modern church historian, and while he commits some modern sins, his research is still the standard. Any discrepancies in dating, and I default to Pastor:
Ludwig Pastor, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages: Drawn from the Secret Archives of the Vatican and Other Original Sources, vol. 7, trans. from the German (London: J. Hodges, 1891)
Ingrid D. Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), (Page 2)
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