Note 134 — PART II TWO EXAMPLES OF RECENT DISCOVERIES
Reading edition
The writer of this book simply tells the story as it has been handed down and often repeated. From the clear testimony of the responsible and eminent witnesses above referred to—such men as Baronius, Bosio, and Maderno—there seems little doubt but that they had looked upon the hallowed remains resting as Maderno in his marble portrait has depicted her. De Rossi and others seem to represent the state of the body as though it had been miraculously preserved; the truth probably is that the body of Cecilia had been carefully and skilfully embalmed owing to the loving care of her friends, and laid in the peculiar position in which she breathed her last. The high rank and great wealth of her family, and the usual gentle and humane practice of the Roman Government in the case of those who had been judicially put to death, would bear out this explanation. No expense would have been deemed too great by the powerful family of Cecilia to do honour to her precious remains.
Of the enduring “popularity”—to use a commonplace expression—of S. Cecilia, the fact of Cecilia being one of the few chosen female saints daily commemorated in the canon of the Mass, may be fairly adduced. She is classed with Felicitas, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucia, Anastasia, and Agnes.
It is often asked why she is looked on as the patroness of music. Nothing but pure tradition can be alleged here, but the tradition is a very ancient one. Wordsworth writes of her as
“rapt Cecilia, seraph-haunted queen of harmony.”
Compare too references in Dryden, “Alexander’s Feast,” and Pope, “Ode on S. Cecilia.” Raffaelle paints her as wrapped in ecstasy and surrounded by instruments of music.
The tradition is that when Valerian, her husband, returned from baptism, he found her singing hymns of thanksgiving for his conversion. Angels, it is said, descended from heaven to listen to her sweet voice.
No allusion, however, to her musical power is made in the Antiphone sung at her Festival. A verse of the appointed anthem runs thus:
“While the instruments of music were playing, Cecilia sang unto the Lord and said, ‘Let my heart be undefiled, that I may never be confounded.’”
In one of the chapels of the great Church of the Oratory in London there is a beautiful replica of the dead Cecilia of Maderno.
There is another replica of Maderno’s figure now placed in the niche of the recently-discovered crypt of S. Cecilia, where the sarcophagus which contains the body of the saint originally was placed.