Note 91 — Chapter VII

An old doctrine which often turns up again in the Middle Ages. In the seventeenth century it prevails among the convents of France and Spain. A Norman angel, in the Louviers business, teaches a nun to despise the body and disregard the flesh, after the example of Jesus, who bared himself for a scourging before all the people. He enforces an utter surrendering of the soul and the will by the example of the Virgin, “who obeyed the angel Gabriel and conceived, without risk of evil, for impurity could not come of a spirit.” At Louviers, David, an old director of some authority, taught “that sin could be killed by sin, as the better way of becoming innocent again.”