BELLINZAGA (Berinzaga) LOMAZZI, ISABELLA CRISTINA. – Mystic, whose doctrine exerted a broad influence on later schools of spirituality, also known as “the Milanese lady” because she was born in Milan around 1551 and died there on 26 January 1624, in a reputation for sanctity. L. was her surname, B. that of her maternal uncle, who had adopted her. We know little about her private life apart from what A. GAGLIARDI, CARLO (v.) wrote about her in the biography he composed, which remained in manuscript. In 1584 she pronounced private vows, undertaking to follow, in obedience, the spiritual direction of the Jesuits, having joined the Society as early as 1579. She possessed extraordinary administrative abilities, so that s. Carlo Borromeo repeatedly employed her in the administration of hospitals and monasteries. Although she had numerous and authoritative Jesuits of Milan among her spiritual admirers, she also had many others opposed to her, who repeatedly accused her before their superior general of interfering in the internal affairs of the Order, as though, in collaboration with Gagliardi, she wished to reform the constitutions of the Society. She was also suspected of wanting to promote the reform of the mendicant Orders. It seems that in reality there was nothing more than a holy zeal to call religious back to a more exact observance of their own rules.
In 1584 she met Achille Gagliardi and entered into a holy friendship with him, in a certain sense taking charge of his spiritual direction; he, like Vipera and other illustrious fathers, recognized in her a particular aptitude for examining and guiding souls.
The frequency of the spiritual relations between B. and Gagliardi concerned the superior general Acquaviva (1588), who in 1594 removed Gagliardi from Milan. Clement VIII imposed silence on B. concerning her divine revelations. From 1601 Isabella B. disappears from view, and almost nothing more is known of her. When she died, at the age of 72, her funeral was a triumph.
B.’s spirituality is set forth in her work Breve compendio intorno alla perfezione cristiana, composed in collaboration with A. Gagliardi, although it is impossible to determine precisely what part each played in the drafting of this classic little work. Probably B. conceived its essential idea and composed its framework and original form; Gagliardi gave it its theological refinements, preserving as far as possible for a theologian the original terminology “in order not to alter, as far as possible, the elevated style which she had employed” (M. Viller).
The little work aroused boundless admiration in many; there were even those who believed it to have been written under divine inspiration. Bremond (p. 20) rightly observes: “There is no need to attribute an almost miraculous origin to a work which contained nothing new, and whose greatest merit, indeed its only one, was to gather into luminous pages the common teaching of the mystics.”
The immediate and primary source from which B. and Gagliardi drew the doctrine with which the Breve compendio is imbued was undoubtedly the teaching of s. Caterina da Genova and of her school of pure and unmixed love. There are also many points of contact with s. Giovanni della Croce and s. Caterina da Siena. The essential means for attaining perfection are an immeasurable love of God and a profound, dismembering contempt for oneself and for all created things. All the care and effort of the soul striving toward perfection must therefore consist in the stripping and annihilation of the self.
To strip it of indifferent things, earthly consolations, divine consolations, the restless desire for perfection, and the satisfaction found in the practice of the virtues and in perfection: all this constitutes the first stage of the stripping of the self, or active annihilation, directly brought about by the soul. This is followed by a twofold degree of passive annihilation, in which God himself strips the soul of the interior acts of the virtues, working within it as he sees fit, and finally taking away from it every self-will: in place of the will completely dead to itself there is substituted the divine will, so that the will accomplishes everything as it did before, but in a quite different manner and solely for God, deprived of every “proprietorship” (cf. H. Bremond, pp. 26-52).
The Breve compendio met with the greatest favor among the devout public and multiplied its editions in Italy, especially during the last years of the sixteenth century; it also had a broad resonance in France, where it received many translations, beginning in 1589. P. De Bérulle published anonymously, together with the Bref discours de l'abnégation intérieure, a free and slightly moderated translation of the Breve compendio. Et. Binet (v.) also translated it (in Recueil des œuvres spirituelles de Binet, Rouen 1620). The doctrine of the Breve compendio, especially its teaching concerning the stripping away of self-love, exerted a notable influence on the mysticism of Lorenzo da Parigi, Capuchin (Palais de l'amour divin, 1602), and on that of Camus, Surin, Rigoleuc, Fénelon, etc.
The work was suspected of quietism and was consequently placed on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1703, where it remained until 1900. Although Fr. Gerardo da s. Giovanni della Croce, in his introduction to the Saint’s works, does not hesitate to liken the doctrine of the Breve compendio to that of Molinos, s. Francesco di Sales was rather unfavorable toward it (cf. Lettere di s. Francesco di Sales, III [XIII of the Oeuvres, Annecy 1904, pp. 334-35]). Bremond vindicates its complete orthodoxy.