THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
are superior to such discipline and have no need of meritorious works in the common sense; the contortions, convulsions, and faintings, which accompany their inner devotion, are to them sufficient tokens of the divine grace. In the state of perfection the secret of the Holy Trinity is beheld while here below, and all that should be done or left undone is communicated directly by the Holy Spirit. When perfection is attained it is no longer necessary to look to images of the saints, or to hear sermons or religious conversations of the common kind " (J. A. Llorente, Geschichte der spanischen Inquisition, Germ, ed., ii., Stuttgart, 1824, pp. 3-4). A still fuller record of Illuminatic errors is given by Malvasia (Catalogue omnium hceresium et conciliorum, Rome, 1661, xvi. century, pp. 269-274), who enumerates fifty heretical propositions, including besides those already mentioned the following: " In the state of perfection the soul can neither go forward nor backward, for its own faculties have all been abolished by grace. The perfect has no more need of the intercession of the saints, even devotion to the humanity of Jesus is superfluous for him; he has no more need of the sacraments or to do good works. A perfect man can not sin; even an act which, outwardly regarded, must be looked upon as vicious, can not contaminate the soul which lives in mystical union with God."
The ecclesiastical annalist Spondanus records in the year 1623 an inquisitorial process against Illuminatic mystics in the dioceses of Seville and Granada, in which the grand inquisitor Andreas Pacheco mentions no less than seventy-six heretical propositions, many of them antinomian. Like things are told of the French sect of Illumines (called also Gucrinets from their leader the Abb6 Gudrin) who were prosecuted in 1634 in Flanders and Picardy. Another sect of Illumines which appeared about 1722 in southern France has more resemblance to the freemasons, and seems to have been a precursor of the Order of Illuminati in south Germany, especially in Bavaria (see Illuminati).
O. ZocklerI".
Bibliography: H. Heppe, Geschichte der quietistischen Mystik in tier katholischen Kirche, 41 sqq., Berlin, 1875; M. Menendez y Pelayo, Historia de los heterodoxos Espaiioles, ii. 521, iii. 403, Madrid, 1880; H. C. Lea, Chapters from the Religious History of Spain Connected with the Inquisition, passim, Philadelphia, 1890; E. Gothein, Ignatius von Loyola und die Gegenreformation, pp. 61-62, 224 sqq., Halle, 1895.
ALOYSIUS, al"ei"shius', SAINT, OF GONZAGA (LUIGI GONZAGA): Jesuit; b. in the castle of Castiglione (22 m. n.w. of Mantua), the ancestral seat of the Gonzaga family, Mar. 9, 1568; d. in Rome June 21, 1591. His father was Marquis of Castiglione and a prince of the Holy Roman Empire, but the boy turned away from the pleasures of courts and devoted himself early to a life of asceticism and piety. In 1585 he renounced his claim to the succession in order to join the Society of Jesus, and took the vows in 1587. His death was due to his self-sacrificing labors in the care of the sick during the prevalence of the plague in Rome. He was beatified by Gregory XV in 1621, and canonized by Benedict XIII. in 1726. Devo-
tion to him is wide-spread in the modern Roman Catholic Church, in which he is regarded as a model of the virtue of purity, and an especial patron of young men, particularly those who enter the ecclesiastical state.
Bibliography: V. Cepari, De vita beati Aloysii Gonzaace, Cologne, 1608, Eng. transl. by F. Goldie, London, 1891; C. Papencordt, Der heilige Aloysius, Paderborn, 1889.
ALPHA AND OMEGA (A, Q): The first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. They are used in a symbolic sense in three places in the Book of Revelation. In i. 8 God describes himself as " Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty." The expression is similarly used in xxi. 6 (cf. Isa. xliv. 6, xlviii. 12). In xxii. 13 the name " Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last " is the designation adopted for himself by Christ, who is also called " the first and the last " in ii. 8. If, as is apparent from the context, these passages express the same symbolic meaning, that of eternity as unlimited duration, it is plain that the use of this name is intended to guarantee the fulfilment of the prophecies mentioned in the passages. Commentators have referred, in explanation of the expression, to the use of the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet (N J1) in rabbinical literature, though the parallelism is not acknowledged by all scholars. A long line of early and medieval writers discuss the passages cited from Revelation. Thus Clement of Alexandria has one or more of them in mind when he says (Stromata, iv. 25): " For he [the Son] is the circle of all powers rolled and united into one unity. Wherefore the Word (Gk. Logos) is called the Alpha and the Omega, of whom alone the end becomes the beginning, and ends again at the original beginning without any break." As in this passage, so in Stromata, vi. 16, he explains the prophecies with reference to Christ alone. Tertullian (De monogamia, v.) makes a similar use of the name. Ambrose (In septem visiones, i. 8) says that Christ calls himself the beginning because he is the creator of the human race and the author of salvation, and the end because he is the end of the law, of death, and so on. Prudentius, in his hymn Corde natus ex parentis, paraphrases the words of Revelation. The Gnostics extracted from the letters their characteristic mystical play on numbers; the fact that A and O stood for 801, and the sum of the letters in the Greek word for dove (peristera) amounted to the same, was used by the Gnostic Marcus to support the assertion that Christ called himself Alpha and Omega with reference to the coming of the Spirit at his baptism in the form of a dove (Irenseus, I. xiv 6, xv. 1). Later, Primasius played on the numbers in the same way to prove the essential identity of the Holy Ghost with the Father and the Son (on Rev. xxii. 13). An evidence of the place which these letters held in Gnostic speculation is afforded by a piece of parchment and one of papyrus preserved in the Egyptian Museum at Berlin, both originally used as amulets. On the former the letters are found together with Coptic magical formulas and a cross of St. Andrew; the latter also contains Coptic