- erine Emmerich[22] the following description of the evidently
neurotic sickness of her heart:
"When only in her novitiate, she received as a Christmas
present from the holy Christ a very tormenting heart trouble for
the whole period of her nun's life. God showed her inwardly
the purpose; it was on account of the decline of the spirit of the
order, especially for the sins of her fellow-sisters. But what
rendered this trouble most painful was the gift which she had
possessed from youth, namely, to see before her eyes the inner
nature of man as he really was. She felt the heart trouble
physically as if her heart was continually pierced by arrows.[23]
These arrows—and this represented the still worse mental suffering—she
recognized as the thoughts, plots, secret speeches,
misunderstandings, scandal and uncharitableness, in which her
fellow-sisters, wholly without reason and unscrupulously, were
engaged against her and her god-fearing way of life."
It is difficult to be a saint, because even a patient and
long-suffering nature will not readily bear such a violation,
and defends itself in its own way. The companion
of sanctity is temptation, without which no true saint can
live. We know from analytic experience that these
temptations can pass unconsciously, so that only their
equivalents would be produced in consciousness in the
form of symptoms. We know that it is proverbial that
heart and smart (Herz and Schmerz) rhyme. It is a
well-known fact that hysterics put a physical pain in place
of a mental pain. The biographer of Emmerich has comprehended
that very correctly. Only her interpretation of
the pain is, as usual, projected. It is always the others
who secretly assert all sorts of evil things about her, and
this she pretended gave her the pains.[24] The case, how-
