Читать книгу The Mystical Element of Religion (Vol. 1&2) - Friedrich von Hügel - Страница 143

The general tone and character of her first Confession to him are described to us, no doubt from his own contemporary record. “She said: ‘Father, I know not where I am, either as to my soul or as to my body. I should like to confess, but I cannot perceive any offence committed by me.’” “And as to the sins which she mentioned,” adds Marabotto, “she was not allowed to see them as so many sins, thought or said or done by herself. But her state of soul was like unto that of a small boy, who would have committed some slight offence in simple ignorance; and who, if some one told him: You have done evil, would at these words suddenly change colour and blush, and yet not because he has now an experimental knowledge of evil.” “And many a time she would say to her Confessor: ‘I do not want to neglect Confession, and yet I do not know to whom to give the blame of my sins; I want to accuse myself, and cannot manage it.’ And yet, with all this, she made all the acts appropriate to Confession.”[135]

We shall see, indeed, how keen, right up to the end, was her sense of her frailty and of her general and natural inclination to evil. And her teaching as to numerous positive and active imperfections remaining in the soul, in every soul, up to the very end, is so clear and constant, and so admittedly derived from her own experience, that we can explain the above only by the supplementary part of her doctrine (also derived from her own experience), which insists that some greatly advanced souls do not, at the time of committing them, as yet see these their imperfections, and that, by the time they have so far further advanced as to see these imperfections, they are no more inclined to commit them. In this way, then, there would be no fully formal sin or deliberate imperfection to confess.