ESSAY
Vittoria Colonna
A GODSEEKER
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The timeless humanity of this unusual woman is the fascinating aspect of her Rime Spirituali. A less theological and more anthropological analysis of her so-called spiritual poetry is adequate for a poetess, who focuses her inner life as a godseeker on the way instead of estranging us with poetising mystic fulfilment, which has always been withheld from her, as it is withheld from us. In her Rime Spirituali, we experience a Renaissance poetess, who, inspired by timeless Humanism, enters with us into intimate communication, because she shares our consciousness. 

Like Petrarca, called „the genius of individuality” by Ernst Cassirer, the great Jewish-German philosopher of the Renaissance, Vittoria Colonna, the Renaissance Poetess of Spiritual Sonnets, in her religious subjectivism, orientates herself on Augustine: “Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi; in interior habitat veritas. “ 

Lifelong Unfulfilled Longing for the Divine and psychological observation of her frustrations balance each other. In her Rime Spirituali, the poetess also thematises her aversions, her ambivalences, her dichotomies, her dissents with the Reform Theologians she befriended, because, as a woman, it did not behove her to give utterance to her authenticity in conversations.

Vittoria Colonna’s Rime Spirituali are accompanied by the fundamental melody of passionate longing for the divine, which instigated her to futile God-Seeking. But, instead of divine fulfilment, her so-called spiritual sonnets document her inner struggle between This World and the Beyond and the absence of God on earth experienced by her as a heavy inner load.  

Wrathfully, she turns her back on the secularised official church petrified in rigid scholasticism and, with great enthusiasm, she poetises Inner Faith, the Core Doctrine of Reformed Theology in a great number of sonnets. 

In discourses with the leading Reform Theologians of Italy, Gasparo Contarini, Bernardino Ochino, Reginald Pole on eye level (!) she acquires first-hand theological knowledge withheld from her as a woman.

However, the proud Renaissance Princess has great problems with  Theologia Crucis as the core of Reformed Theology -crux sola est nostra theologia per maximam et profundissimam humilitatem (Luther) – because of the masochist degradation of the Godson.

Yet, as a Humanist, Vittoria Colonna finds a remedy, compensating the crucifixion of the Godson with the painless radiance of the Greek God Apollo. Not contented with comparing Jesus with Apollo, which is offensive enough, the self-defined Renaissance woman, in an act of daring experimenting with the Divine, combines the two gods. In her fascination with radiant Apollonian Godliness, she asks Jesus Christ in a sonnet: “Be my Apollo and bathe my eyes in your heavenly fountain.”

Never at a loss of ideas, in a gift-drawing for her, Vittoria Colonna makes Michelangelo draw the Crucified with the body of a Greek God to save his godliness. It is exactly this Crucified devised by Vittoria Colonna and created by Michelangelo, who, in the 19^thcentury, found his way into the living rooms of the Christian bourgeoisie.

In the concetto of a great sonnet, the poetess frees the arms of the Crucified from the cross for his godly embrace of humanity and the world. Hurrying ahead of her time, the creative theologian discards the crucifixion as an atoning act of the Godson for the sins of mankind to reconcile the wrathful Godfather passed over by Vittoria Colonna. 

She interprets the Godson’s death on the cross as a divine agape for mankind on his own decision. Astonishingly, the Humanist of the 16^th century anticipated the identical re-interpretation of the crucifixion by Wolfgang Huber, the President of the Lutheran Church of Germany, published on 23rd March 2009. Huber also questioned the crucifixion as an atoning act: „The death of Jesus is no enforced act of atonement to reconcile a wrathful God but a free act of self-abandonment from love. “

Overjoyed, the Renaissance Poetess praises the Doctrine of Justification of the Reformed Theologians in a great number of sonnets, which says that Inner Faith was enough for God, who generously dispensed with special merits. 

And yet, the erudite Humanist missed the Presence of God in This World. By giant strides the poetess would catch up with Jesus along Via Dolorosa so that Saint Peter would not be the only one, who could

see Jesus with his own eyes. If she could perceive him, she would not fall into torturing scepticism again, whether her faith was of fragile glass. 

In a Utopian life project Vittoria Colonna, in 1541, moves to Vitterbo to be accepted as the only female member in the elitist clerical community of the Spirituali under the leadership of Reginald Pole, her personal Spiritual director. According to the mysticism of Juan de Valdés, the Spirituali lived in passive expectance of the Holy Spirit, „who would inflame the icy breast as a divine flame and invisible strength. “ 

Of course, Vittoria Colonna identifies inner enlightenment by the Holy Spirit with her inspiration as a poet. However, instead of spiritual fulfilment she experienced painful states of soul-drought so that in a sonnet she proposes to the Holy Spirit to at least send a lamp into her soul „ to collect his tired, slow sparks in a focus.”

In the fascinating sonnet – Tempo e pur ch‘io – Vittoria Colonna is staging herself  as the New Woman of the Renaissance captivated in frustrating search for God. In the belted gown of the Sibyl (Michelangelo!), however, not as a prophetess, but as a God Seeker, she expects the divine bridegroom like the nine prudent virgins of the New Testament. But in her Renaissance Individualism, she is on her own, as behoves a self-reliant woman. Unlike the virgins, she is not waiting patiently but with hardly controllable impatience for the arrival of the divine bridegroom. Instead of their flickering oil-lamps the poetess is holding two blazing torches in her hands, while she is greedily peering out into the eternal night. However, the divine bridegroom keeps her waiting, endlessly, as always. Abruptly, in a U-Turn, she returns into the reality of earthly life, because a new idea has occurred to the erudite Aristocrat of the Renaissance, who had fathomed all thinkable possibilities of recognizing God in her life, the idea, Christ could meet her in her earthly life and she would overlook him.

 “There is the blind woman “, he would address her, „who among such clear rays does not recognize her beautiful sun.”