“BPD Art Heauxs”: the mystics of our disenchanted age?

musings on the feast of St. Rose of Lima

At Mass today for the feast of Saint Rose of Lima, the priest urged the faithful to imitate the 17th century Dominican’s devotion to Christ “in spirit” but not literally. Her extreme penances (including disfiguring her face with hot peppers in order to deter men from being tempted by her beauty) are unsound for contemporary believers…though he implied that her heavenly masochism was more noble than the earthly masochism of gymbros today who “destroy” their bodies in the name of physical strength and aesthetic appeal.

His homily called to mind the various times that the Red Scare girls have commented on mystical saints like Joan of Arc and Teresa of Avila, claiming that they were the “BPD art heauxs” of the Middle Ages. 

I once wrote in the National Catholic Reporter about how in our disenchanted age, people with neurodivergent tendencies–who in more “enchanted” times would’ve been more free to channel their inclinations toward religious and artistic vocations–are stifled by the flattened and “unimaginative” social imaginary of secular (post)modernity. People with such temperaments had more substantial options available to them as “porous selves” versus as modern “buffered selves,” to borrow (more) terms from Charles Taylor. 

Mystics like Teresa, Christina the Astonishing, and Angela of Foligno were written off as hysterical and neurotic by the likes of psychiatrists like Josef Breuer. Such a positivistic, medicalizing mentality set the precedent for people who embody this archetype today being tranquilized with psychotropic drugs, relegated to the margins of society as deviants, or forced to repress the potential gifts that they could be offering the world (Lorenzo Albacete had a GREAT bit on this as it pertains to Van Gogh).

For more on this, check out Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (his only book that’s close to being reputable…jk, but really this is the best one), as well as my pieces on

-Princess Margaret’s mental health and spirituality

-my grandmother’s schizophrenia and Marian visions

-neurodivergents being drawn to Latin Mass, and

-the new wave of “Decadent” Catholic youth (trads/Dimes Square Caths).

In the latter two pieces, I mention Huysmans’ autobiographical characters of Des Esseintes and Durtal, who represent this archetype at the cusp of the enchanted and disenchanted ages. Although his alleged “sickness of the century” was written off by some as neurotic and even autistic, his peculiar obsessions eventually opened the door to a profound and substantial religious experience (worth noting that these novels played an important role in Dorothy Day’s conversion).

I discuss this further on a soon to be released episode with Jack Mason on the Perfume Nationalist podcast. We can see other examples in literature of the tension experienced by such archetypal characters and their secular social imaginary in Ron Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy, JD Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, and Elizabeth Spencer’s The Light in the Piazza (more in this in my upcoming essay in Soft Union journal).

With that being said, might we consider the emergence of Dimes Square Catholicism and trad e-girls (as frivolous as they may be) as an attempt to recover an enchanted rendering of this archetype?

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photo taken at St. Mary’s in Newark.