This book is a collection of all the crucial writings and recorded ecstasies of St. Gemma, along with some essays providing background, the story of her canonization, and commentary. Gemma's writings are quite fascinating and spiritually valuable reading, whether she's recording her life, her visions, or corresponding with her confessor, Father Germano. Her absolute devotion to Jesus sets a daunting standard for any Christian. She is certainly a child-like saint, a kind of angsty counterpart to Therese of Lisieux, and many modern believers may have a hard time seeing an easily imitable example in her playful relationship with her guardian angel, whom she believes in so strongly that she actually tries to get him to deliver mail! She is utterly immature by worldly standards, even that of her own time (the turn of the 20th century), but not by the standards of Christianity. Her radical detachment from the world, her agonizing sense of her existence as a sinner, and her unrestricted erotic passion for Jesus mark her out as an extraordinary religious figure, especially considering that she lived so close to the so-called "post-Christian" era when all three traits are more likely to be regarded as mental illness, even within the Church. While most of her writing is simple, her ecstasies occasionally verge on sublime poetry of mystical love. There were many times reading her writings when I felt almost like crying just because it was so beautiful and so true.
The editors and authors of the additional material, Rudolph M. Bell and Cristina Mazzoni, are generally quite respectful, even venerate, of Gemma, but I found their style, especially Mazzoni's, obnoxious and purple in a distinctly academic way, unnecessarily laboring under the sway of identity politics, which were still ascendant in the early 90's, when this book was written. As secular scholars, Bell and Mazzoni are interested ultimately not in Gemma's piety and sanctity but about what her biography can contribute to feminism and gender studies. Gemma becomes a "marginalized" figure whose writings can help us "reclaim" "voices" that have been suppressed-- as if Gemma's canonization wasn't enough of a reclamation for these two!
Despite the awkward, silly conceit of Mazzoni's essay "A Saint's Alphabet," she does provide valuable insights into Gemma's mind from feminist theology and psychology, among other perspectives, but she keeps intruding on it with personal anecdotes (we don't need to know you're a foodie or that you named your daughter Gemma) and the sort of paranoia about perspectives, and whose perspective "wins" and whose "loses," that makes so much modern literary criticism difficult to take seriously. Mazzoni screens everyone, including herself, for bias, thinking this to be a sign of her own wisdom as a scholar. But any critical reader takes for granted that any author is going to be biased toward his or her worldview and experience. Mazzoni seems to think her intrusions of personal anecdotes lay her biases bare, but all they do is draw attention to her, something she claims to be aware of but obviously isn't. I came to read about Gemma!
Feminist critics tend to turn everything political, and even though in the book's introduction the authors point out how utterly uninvolved with anything remotely political Gemma was, by the end Mazzoni has managed to re-shape Gemma in her own image, as some kind of unconscious feminist heroine, instinctively reaching out to reclaim the feminine element in Catholicism that had been stuffed down by all the mean old patriarchs. But whether she's convinced anyone aside from herself of this is another question. "Are we able to recover Gemma's journey toward God," she writes in the introduction to the Alphabet, "without at the same time boxing her into a discourse which is not hers?" The answer is a flat-out no, because Gemma's journey toward God doesn't need recovery-- it's there for everyone to see and think about in the writings collected in this very book-- and the only discourse that is hers is the discourse of the soul with God, and to understand that we don't need historical context, psychoanalysis, or a "hermeneutics of suspicion" nearly as much as we need faith.
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