San Silvestro

I will note that her relationship with the divine was inextricably sexual. Her carnal fantasies she revealed to me, as she revealed all her sins, for I was her confessor. It is in the nature of Man to sin and then sin again. And if they are of our flock, this cycle is unconstrained by repentance, which is to the temporal almost an appurtenance and to the spiritual anything but. I once expressed bitterness to others of my calling regarding this. I was told it is arrogance, approaching blasphemy, to have higher expectations of our sheep than the Lord.Her angel would appear before her hale and calm and more beautiful than those many statues she sculpted of him, his face and body inspiring, though imperfectly, her saints and cherubim. She was adamant about that. That she could capture only a dim projection of him in her art. They would copulate; and this would both renew her infatuation and diminish her piety - you will understand that there is no contradiction in this. In every case, she insisted she was not dreaming. For if he was a dream, she reasoned, that would be proof her mind could fully contain him. And if it could do that, then so would her art.Aquinas wrote that the angels can weave a form by condensing air. Whatever aspect they take in this world is not truly them. They can appear to eat but cannot eat. They can seem to touch but do not touch. They do not multiply as men do. If they perform such base acts as she claimed hers did, it is not out of desire but of will, towards an end. Aquinas thought demons alone would attempt such trickery. That it speaks only of the perversity of the fallen. In telling her this, I made of her a diabolist. For when she next accepted his temptations, she forsook her faith, forsook me, and began to believe her lover was Lucifer.Though he spoke little (she told me, and did not give a name), Lucifer is the most beautiful of the angels. And she did not think there could be any being in heaven or hell that could match her nocturnal