BALLINZAGA (BERINZAGA) LOMAZZI, ISABELLA CRISTINA
Mystic whose doctrine exerted wide influence on later schools of spirituality; also called “the Milanese lady” because she was born in Milan about 1551 and died there on 26 January 1624, in a reputation for holiness. L. is her surname; B. is that of her maternal uncle who adopted her. Little is known of her private life beyond what is written by A. GAGLIARDI, CARLO (v.) in the biography he composed of her, which remains in manuscript.
In 1584 she made private vows, binding herself to follow the spiritual direction of the Jesuits for obedience’s sake, having affiliated with the Society since 1579. She possessed extraordinary administrative talents, so that St Charles Borromeo several times employed her to govern hospitals and monasteries. While she had numerous and authoritative Jesuit admirers in Milan, she also had many opponents who repeatedly accused her before the General of the Society of interfering in its internal affairs, as if—together with Gagliardi—she wished to reform the Society’s constitutions. She was also suspected of seeking to bring about the reform of the mendicant orders. In reality, it seems, there was nothing more than a holy zeal to recall religious to a stricter observance of their own rules.
In 1584 she met Achille Gagliardi and formed with him a bond of holy friendship, in a certain sense taking him as her spiritual director; he, like Vipera and other notable Fathers, recognized in her a special aptitude for discerning and counselling souls.
The frequency of the spiritual exchanges between B. and Gagliardi alarmed the General Acquaviva (1588), who in 1594 removed Gagliardi from Milan. Clement VIII imposed silence on B. regarding her divine revelations. From 1601 Isabella B. withdrew from public view, and almost nothing more is known of her. When she died at the age of seventy-two, her funeral was a triumph.
Her spirituality is expounded in the work Breve compendio intorno alla perfezione cristiana, composed in collaboration with A. Gagliardi, though it cannot be precisely determined what part each had in drafting this classic little work. Probably B. conceived its essential thought, outlined its structure and original form, while Gagliardi supplied the theological refinements, preserving as far as possible the terminology of the original “so as not to alter, as far as possible, the elevated style she had employed” (M. Viller).
The little work aroused boundless admiration; some even thought it was written under divine inspiration. Bremond (p. 20) aptly remarks: “There is no need to attribute a quasi-miraculous origin to a work that brought nothing new, whose sole—and indeed greatest—merit was to gather in luminous pages the common teaching of the mystics.”
The immediate and primary source from which B. and Gagliardi drew the doctrine contained in the Breve compendio is undoubtedly the teaching of St Catherine of Genoa and her school of pure love. Many points of contact are also found with St John of the Cross and St Catherine of Siena. Essential means for the attainment of perfection are an immense love of God and a profound and purifying contempt for oneself and all created things. Hence all the care and effort of the soul striving for perfection must consist in stripping away and annihilating the self.
To divest oneself of indifferent things, earthly consolations, divine consolations, the restless desire for perfection, the taste one finds in practising the virtues and perfection—all this constitutes the first stage of stripping away the self, or active annihilation, directly effected by the soul. This is followed by a twofold degree of passive annihilation, in which God Himself strips the soul of its internal acts of virtue, operating within it as He wills, and finally takes away every vestige of its own will: when the will is completely dead to itself, the divine will takes its place, so that the will operates all things as God does, yet in a wholly different manner and solely for God, devoid of every “property” (cf. H. Bremond, pp. 26–32).
The Breve compendio enjoyed the greatest favour among the devout public and saw many editions in Italy, especially in the closing years of the sixteenth century; it also met with wide resonance in France, where it was translated several times from 1589 onwards. P. de Bérulle published anonymously, together with Bref discours de l'abnégation intérieure, a free and slightly tempered translation of the Breve compendio. Étienne Binet (v.) also translated it (in Recueil des œuvres spirituelles de Binet, Rouen 1620). The doctrine of the Breve compendio, especially that concerning the stripping away of self-love, exercised notable influence on the mysticism of Lorenzo da Parigi, a Capuchin (Palais de l'amour divin, 1602), and on that of Camus, Surin, Rigoleuc, Fénelon, and others.
The work was suspected of quietism, placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1703, and remained there until 1700. If Fr Gerardo da San Giovanni della Croce, in his introduction to the works of the Saint, did not hesitate to liken the doctrine of the Breve compendio to that of Molinos, St Francis de Sales was rather unfavourable towards it (cf. Lettere di s. Francesco di Sales, III [XIII of the Oeuvres, Annecy 1904, pp. 334–35]). Bremond vindicates its full orthodoxy.