BELLINZAGA (Berinzaga) Lomazzi, Isabella Cristina. - Mystic, whose doctrine had a wide influence on the later school of spirituality, also called "the Milanese lady" because she was born in Milan around 1551 and died there on 26 January 1624, in a reputation for holiness. L. is her surname, B. that of her maternal uncle who had adopted her. We know little of her private life beyond what A. Gagliardi (v.) writes in the biography he composed of her, which remained in manuscript. In 1584 she pronounced private vows, committing herself to follow in obedience the spiritual direction of the Jesuits, having been affiliated with the Company since 1579. She had extraordinary aptitudes for governance, so much so that St. Charles Borromeo several times made use of her for the governance of hospitals and monasteries. If she had numerous and authoritative Jesuits of Milan as her spiritual admirers, she also had many others opposed to her, who accused her several times before their general of meddling in the internal affairs of the Order, as though she wished, in collaboration with Gagliardi, to reform the constitutions of the Company. She was also suspected of wishing to bring about the reform of the mendicant Orders. It appears that in reality there was nothing there but a holy zeal in calling religious back to a more exact observance of their own rules.
In 1584 she met Achille Gagliardi and bound herself to him in holy friendship, in a certain sense taking him as her spiritual director; he, like Vipera and other illustrious fathers, recognized in her a particular aptitude for scrutinizing and counseling souls.
The frequency of the spiritual relations between B. and Gagliardi worried 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. disappears from view, and almost nothing more is known of her. When she died, at the age of 72, her funeral was a triumph.
The spirituality of B. is set forth in her work Breve compendio intorno alla perfezione cristiana, composed in collaboration with A. Gagliardi, without its being possible to determine precisely what part each of the two had in the drafting of this classic little work. Probably B. conceived its substantial thought, drafted its outline and its primitive form; Gagliardi gave it theological touches, preserving as far as was possible for a theologian the primitive terminology "so as not to alter as far as possible the elevated style of which she had made use" (M. Viller).
The little work aroused in many an boundless admiration; there were even those who thought it was composed under divine inspiration. Bremond (p. 20) well observes: "There is no need to attribute an almost miraculous origin to a work that brought 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 nourished, is undoubtedly the teaching of St. Catherine of Genoa and of her school of pure and unmixed love. There are also many points of contact in it with St. John of the Cross and St. Catherine of Siena. Essential means for the acquisition of perfection are a boundless love of God, and a profound and mortifying contempt for oneself and for all created things. All the care and effort of the soul that tends toward perfection must therefore consist in the denuding and annihilation of the self.
Stripping it of indifferent things, of earthly consolations, of divine consolations, of the restless desire for perfection, of the relish one has in the practice of the virtues and of perfection—all this constitutes the first stage of the denuding of the self, or active annihilation, wrought directly by the soul. There follows a twofold degree of passive annihilation, in which God himself strips the soul of the interior acts of the virtues, working in it as seems to him, and finally taking from it every will of its own: to the will totally dead to itself the divine will is substituted, so that the will does everything as it did before, but in a very different way and solely for God, deprived of every "property" (cf. H. Bremond, pp. 26-52).
The Breve compendio met with the greatest favor from the devout public and multiplied its editions in Italy, especially in the last years of the 16th century, and had wide resonance in France, where it had many translations, from as early as 1589. P. De Bérulle published anonymously, together with the Bref discours de l'abnégation intérieure, a free and slightly tempered 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 that concerning the stripping away of self-love, exercised a notable influence on the mysticism of Lorenzo da Parigi the Capuchin (Palais de l'amour divin, 1602), on that of Camus, Surin, Rigoleuc, Fénelon, etc.
The work was suspected of quietism, and was therefore placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1703, and remained there until 1900. If p. Gerardo da s. Giovanni della Croce, in his introduction to the works of the Saint, does not hesitate to liken the doctrine of the Breve compendio to that of Molinos, St. Francis de Sales was rather unfavorable to it (cf. Lettere di s. Francesco di Sales, III [XIII of the Oeuvres, Annecy 1904, pp. 334-35]). Bremond vindicates its full orthodoxy.
Bibliography8 works
Umile Bonzi da Genova