CATHERINE FIESCA ADORNA’S LIFE, UP TO HER CONVERSION; AND THE CHIEF
PECULIARITIES PREDOMINANT THROUGHOUT HER CONVERT YEARS
INTRODUCTORY.
_Each of the three Elements of Religion, again multiple. The two main
functions of each._
We have so far considered religion as constituted, on its human
side, by the interaction of three modalities,--the Historical, the
Intellectual, the Experimental. But it is of course clear that each of
these is again, just because it is a living force, a Multiplicity in
Unity. The first distinction we can find in each would break each up
into two parts.
The Historical modality readily gives us the function busy with the
Historical Person and the function occupied with the Historical Thing.
The former function will insist upon all the temporal and local
sayings, doings, and happenings, that together make up the picture and
memory of the Prophet or Founder; the latter will transmit certain
rites and symbols instituted or occasioned by him. And either the
suppression of these latter things, or the taking them apart from the
person from whom they issued and to whom they ever should lead back,
will turn out equally impoverishing: the very friction of this Thing,
coming from a Person, and leading to a Person, and operating within our
own personality, will be found to help to make the latter truly such.
The Intellectual modality will as readily split up into the Analytic
and the Synthetic. The former will busy itself with distinguishing
and weighing, and with reducing everything as far as possible to its
constituent elements. The latter will attempt to reconstitute the
living whole, as far as may be, in such terms of clear reason. The
former will have more affinity with the discursive reason, the second
with the contemplative; the former with religious History, and the
approaches to religious Philosophy,--Physiology and Experimental
Psychology and the Theory of Knowledge; the latter with Religious
Philosophy proper,--the Metaphysics of Religion.
The Experimental modality, finally, will as readily break up into
Intuitions and Feelings of every mental and moral kind, and Willings,
the determinations of which, close as they are to the feelings, are
not identical with them, but often exist more or less without or even
against them.
And this whole series of six movements exists only in Persons; it
begins with an at least incipient Person and ends in the fullest
self-expression of Personality, the determination of the will. And
Things--both external (Institutions) and internal (analytic and
synthetic Abstractions)--are but ever operative, necessary means
towards the firm constitution and expansion of that rich life of the
living soul within which the first apprehension and ordering of such
thinkings and doings took their rise.
I. PROPOSED STUDY OF THE MYSTICAL-VOLITIONAL ELEMENT IN A PARTICULAR,
CONCRETE INSTANCE: ST. CATHERINE OF GENOA.
Now it is the fact of the Multiplicity in Unity, to be found in each of
these modalities of religion, that makes it desirable to study each of
them, as far as may be, separately. And of these the deepest and most
near to our living selves, and hence also most far away from our clear
analysis, is the Experimental. It is this Element then that I propose
to study in a particular concrete instance: St. Catherine of Genoa.
1. _Disadvantages of such a method and of this particular instance._
The disadvantage arising from such a method of procedure is obvious: no
one life, even were it the richest and most completely knowable, can
exhaust, can indeed do more than simply suggest, the true questions,
let alone the adequate answers. But such a biographical study can hope
to arouse attention and interest in the living facts of religion, in
a manner in which no simple theory or generalization can do; and it
can stand out, in the midst of any such attempt at explanation, as an
emphatic reminder, to both writer and reader, of the inexhaustible
richness and mystery, of the awe-inspiring and yet stimulating
surplusage which is ever furnished by reality over and above all our
best endeavours at commensurate presentation or analysis.
And quite special disadvantages attach to the study of this particular
Saint. Her character, for one thing, is distinctly wanting in humour,
in that shrewd mother-wit which is so marked a feature in some of the
great Spanish Mystics, in St. Teresa especially, but which is not
quite absent even in the less varied and very austere St. John of
the Cross. There is, on the contrary, a certain monotony, a somewhat
wearying vehemence, about our Genoese. Her experience, again, is
without the dramatic vicissitudes of the reform of an Order or the
foundation of Monasteries, as with St. Teresa; or of contact and even
conflict with the temporal and spiritual officiality of her time, as
with St. Catherine of Siena. Nor is her life lit up by the beautiful
warmth of happy, requited domestic affection, nor is it varied and
extended by the rich possession of children of her own. And again
her life is obscured and complicated, at least for our comprehension
of it, by a nervous ill-health which it is impossible for us to care
about, in itself. And, finally, special difficulties attach to the
understanding of her. Unlike St. Teresa, St. John of the Cross, and
many other Saints, she did not herself write one line of her so-called
“Writings”; and yet it is these, mostly very abstruse and at times all
but insuperably difficult, “Writings,” records which did not attain
their present form and bulk till a good forty years after her death,
that contain the most original part of her legacy to the Church.
2. _The drawbacks of the instance outweighed by its rare combination of
characteristics._
Yet all this is balanced if not exceeded by a rare and stimulating
combination of characteristics. The very ordinariness of her external
lot,--a simple wife and widow, at no time belonging to any Religious
Order or Congregation; the apparently complete failure of her earthly
life, which gives occasion to the birth within her of the heavenly
one; the rich variety and contrasts of her princely birth and social
position, and the lowly, homely activity and usefulness of her forty
years of devotedness; the unusually perfect combination of a great
external action and administrative capacity with a lofty contemplation;
the apparent suddenness and whole-hearted swiftness of her Conversion,
succeeded by the long years of interior conflict and painful growth,
unhelped, practically unknown, by any one but God’s inspiring
Spirit, and these years again followed by a period of requiring and
practising the ordinary mediate docilities; the strange nervous
health of especially her later years, so carefully and truthfully
recorded for us, a psychic condition interesting if but for her own
lofty superiority to attaching any direct importance or necessarily
miraculous meaning to it: all this, even if it were all, helps to give
an extraordinary richness and instructiveness to her life.
But stimulating, transfiguring, embracing all this, appears her special
spiritual apprehension and teaching, of a quite extraordinary depth,
breadth and balance, distinction and refinement. The central oneness
of the soul’s nature and sufferings and joys here and hereafter, and
the resultant psychological character and appeal, to be found in all
true experience or forecasting of such things; the never-ceasing
difference between Spirit and Matter; the incomprehensibility, but
indefinite apprehensibleness, for the clean of heart, of God and
spiritual realities; the pure disinterestedness of His love for us,
and the corresponding disinterestedness of all true love for Him; the
universality of His light and love, and the excess of His mercy above
His justice; the innate affinity between every human soul and Him, and
the immanence of Himself within us; the absence of all arbitrary or
preternatural action in the forces and realities constitutive of the
spiritual world and life; the constant union of right suffering with
deep peace, and the final note of joy and of self-conquering triumph
issuing from complete self-renunciation: all this and much more appears
in her teaching with a spontaneity, breadth, and balance peculiarly its
own.
3. _Men who have been devoted to her spirit. Its vitality._
No wonder then that, from the contemporary circle of her devoted
friends and disciples onwards, Catherine should have attracted,
throughout the centuries and in many lands, a remarkable number of
deep minds and saintly characters. The ardent young Spaniard, St.
Aloysius Gonzaga, and the shrewd and solid Savoyard Bishop, St.
François de Sales, love to quote and dwell upon her example and
her doctrine. Mature theologians, such as Cardinal Bellarmine, the
hard-headed controversialist; Cardinal Bona, the liturgical and
devotional writer; and Cardinal de Berulle, the mystical-minded founder
of the French Oratory; and again, such varied types of devotedness
as Madame Acarie, the foundress of the French Reformed Carmelites;
the Baron de Renté, that noble Christian soldier; Bossuet, the hard
and sensible; and Fénelon, the elastic and exquisite,--all love her
well. Such thoroughly representative ascetical writers again as the
Spanish Jesuits Francisco Arias and Alfonzo Rodriguez; the French ones,
Saint-Jure and Jean Joseph Surin; the Italian, Paolo Segneri; the
Pole, Lancisius; and the German, Drexel, all drew food and flame from
her character and doctrine. Then at the beginning of the Nineteenth
Century, Friedrich von Schlegel, the penetrating, many-sided leader
of the German Romantic school, translated her _Dialogue_. In our own
time Father Isaac Hecker, that striking German-American, loved her as a
combination of contemplation and external action; Father Faber strongly
endorsed her conception of Purgatory; Cardinal Manning occasioned and
prefaced an admirable translation of her _Treatise_; and Cardinal
Newman has incorporated her Purgatorial teaching in the noblest of his
poems, “The Dream of Gerontius.” Indeed, General Charles Gordon also
can not unfairly be claimed as her unconscious disciple, since her
teaching, embodied in Cardinal Newman’s poem, was, besides the Bible
and “Imitations,” his one written source of strength and consolation,
during that noble Christian captain’s heroic death-watch at Khartoum.
And among quite recent or still living writers, Mr. Aubrey de Vere has
given us a refined poetic paraphrase of her _Treatise_, and Father
George Tyrrell has developed its theme in one of his most striking
Essays.[42]
I too have, in my own way, long cared for her example and teaching,
and for the great questions and solutions suggested by both. A dozen
times and more have I visited and lingered over the chief scenes of her
activity; and the literary sources of all our knowledge of her life
have been dwelt upon by me for twenty years and more.
I have but very few new details and combinations to offer, in so far
as her external life is concerned. It is with regard to the growth of
her historic image and the curious vicissitudes which I have been
able to trace in the complication of her “Writings”; as to her spirit
and teaching; and as to the place and function to be allotted in the
religious life to such realities and phenomena as those presented by
her, that I hope to be able to contribute something of value. For
although the substance and the primary phenomena of religion are
eternal, they appear in each soul with an individuality and freshness
pathetically unique; and their attempted analysis and apprehension, and
their relations to the other departments of human life, necessarily
grow and vary. Indeed it would be truly sad, and would rightly tempt
to disbelief in an overruling Providence and divine education of the
human race, if the four centuries that intervene between our Saint and
ourselves had taught us little or nothing of value, in such matters
of borderland and interpretation as nervous health, the psychology of
religion, and the distinguishing differences between Christian and
Neo-Platonic Mysticism. Whole Sciences, indeed the Scientific, above
all the Historic spirit itself, have arisen or have come to maturity
since her day. Hence the realities of her life, as of every religious
life, remain fresh indeed with the deathless vitality of love and
grace, and but very partially explicable still; and yet the highest
intellectual honour of each successive period should be found in an
ever-renewed attempt at an ever less inadequate apprehension and
utilization of these highest and deepest manifestations of Authority,
Reason, and Experience,--of the Divine in our poor human life.
II. THE MATERIALS AND AIDS TOWARDS SUCH A STUDY.
1. _The “Vita e Dottrina,” 1551._
All the biographies of St. Catherine, and all the editions or
translations of her “Works,” are based upon the _Vita e Dottrina_
published in Genoa, by Jacobo Genuti, in 1551. I work from the
thirteenth Genoese edition, a reprint of that of 1847 (_Tipi dei
Sordo-Muti_). All our knowledge of her mental and physical condition,
and of her spiritual doctrine, is practically restricted to this book,
and indeed, as we shall see, to its first two parts, the “Vita” and the
“Trattato.”
The _Vita_ is, in its fundamental portions, the joint production of her
devoted disciples, Cattaneo Marabotto, a Secular Priest, her Confessor;
and Ettore Vernazza, a Lawyer, her “spiritual son.” Its fifty-two
chapters (166 octavo pages) are only in small part narrative; quite
thirty-five of them are filled with discourses and contemplations of
the Saint, evidently, in the simpler of the many parallel versions
accumulated here, taken down, at the time of the Saint’s communication
of them, with quite remarkable fidelity. But the whole suffers from the
inclusion of much secondary, amplifying, repetitive matter; is badly
arranged; is kept, almost throughout, above all definite indications of
the precise successions, dates, and places; and is deficient in unity
of view and literary organization. The result is, of necessity, largely
insipid and monotonous.
The first of the “Works” is the _Treatise on Purgatory_, the seventeen
chapters of which (17 pages) are again hard reading, owing to their
evidently consisting of but a mosaic of detached, sometimes parallel
sayings, spoken on various occasions and according to the experience
and fulness of the moment, and without any reference to the previous
one. I shall show reason for holding that this little collection of
sayings was originally shorter still (consisting probably of but the
matter which now makes up the first seven of its seventeen chapters);
that the original chronicler and first redactor of these sayings was
Vernazza; and that certain obvious and formal contradictions which
appear in the present text must be theological glosses introduced some
time between 1520 (or rather 1526) and say 1530 (at latest 1547).
The second of the “Works,” the _Spiritual Dialogue between the Soul,
the Body, Self-love, the Spirit, the Natural Man, and the Lord God_, is
divided into three parts, and fills forty-five chapters (120 pages).
I hope to show conclusively that this _Dialogue_ was at first no
longer than its present Part I; that even this did not exist before
1547; that the whole was written by one and the same person, some one
who had never (at least intimately) known the Saint, and who had no
other direct material than our present _Vita_ and _Trattato_; that
this person was the Augustinian canoness, Battista Vernazza, Ettore’s
eldest daughter; and that the whole has been written for the purpose
of attempting some unification and systematization of what in the
_Vita_ appeared to the writer as wanting in unity and in correctness
of wording or of feeling. In this case we get a fairly continuous
re-statement, in part a heightening, in part a minimizing of the
historical facts of Catherine’s life, which, just because we have thus
a pragmatic, theological transfiguration of the older materials,
caused by a penetrating admiration, and resulting in some true increase
of insight into its subject-matter, forms a precious document for the
psychology and the effect of such states of mind.
The Oratorian Giacinto Parpera’s book: _B Caterina da Genova …
Illustrata_, Genova, 1682, gives, in its three parts, respectively the
opinions of Saints and Theologians concerning the Saint; a systematic
analysis of her doctrine; and an explanation of certain terms and
declarations more or less peculiar to her. It is decidedly learned and
in parts still useful; but pompously rhetorical and full of “anatomia,”
_i.e._ much wearisome numbering and indefinite sub-division. The Jesuit
Padre Maineri’s _Vita de S. Caterina di Genova_, Genova, 1737,--written
on occasion of her canonization,--contains nothing new.
2. _Later books on Catherine._
A sensible discussion of difficult or obscure points connected with her
life occurs in the Bollandists’ Life of the Saint, written by Father
Sticken in 1752 (_Acta Sanctorum_, September, Vol. V, ed. 1866, pp.
123-195). But the greater part of the discussion is vitiated by the
assumption of the independent value, indeed of Catherine herself being
the author, of the entirely secondary _Dialogo_; Sticken had not seen a
single MS. life or document; and the most important part of her entire
personality, her doctrine, had, according to the general plan of the
work, to be passed over by him.
I have also had before me Alban Butler’s accurate compilation;
Monseigneur Paul Fliche’s disappointing book, which, though he declares
that he has consulted the MSS. Lives, is but a rhetorical amplification
of the Life of 1551, with here and there a useful date or other detail
added by himself (Paris, 1881); and the Rev. Baring Gould’s hasty and
slipshod account, which completely ignores the “Works” (_Lives of the
Saints_, Vol. X, ed. 1898).
But by far the most important printed matter which has hitherto
appeared since 1551, indeed the only one which contains anything at all
significant that is not already in the _Vita ed Opere_, is Sebastiano
Vallebona’s booklet, _La Perla dei Fieschi_, Genova, 2nd ed., 1887,
109 pp. It publishes many a painstaking recovery and identification
of various dates and sites, relationships, family documents and
contemporary events; and has helped me greatly in such matters.
3. _The Manuscripts._
It is, however, to the careful analysis of the important still extant
MS. material, that I owe far more than to all the printed matter
subsequent to 1551. And indeed I can say without exaggeration that this
is the first serious attempt at a critical presentation of Catherine’s
Life and Teaching. A detailed account of my materials and method will
be given in the Appendix to this volume.
III. PECULIARITIES OF THE GENOESE CLIMATE AND GEOGRAPHICAL POSITION; OF
THE LIGURIAN CHARACTER; AND OF THE TIMES INTO WHICH CATHERINE WAS BORN.
HER FAMILY, FATHER AND MOTHER.
Catherine Fiesca was born in Genoa, towards the end of the year
1447.[43] She thus belonged to a race and a time full indeed of
violence and conflict, intrigue and cruelty, excessive in all things;
but hence full too of courage and of daring, of boundlessly expansive
energies, and of throbbing life.
1. _The Genoese country and character._
Lying at the foot of imposing mountain terraces, at the great central
bend and chief natural harbour of the rocky, sun-baked, mountain-backed
Riviera, Genoa formed, from early, pre-Roman days, the natural capital
of this thin strip of territory which, eastward from Spezia and
westward from Nice, looks all along towards the sea, and towards the
broad blue sea alone. And the natural influences of the country seem
ever to have been met and doubled by a fierce, explosive strain in the
characters of the successive races that peopled this narrow, steep,
hot sea-board. The ferocious, wild Ligurians gave the Romans trouble,
right up to the end of their dominion; and the subsequent Lombard
invasion and subjugation did little to change their character. The keen
rivals of Venice, in her trade and power in the East, and the mortal
foes of their competitor Pisa, so near to their own gates, the Genoese
did much for trade and commerce, but little for science and art, and
were feared and hated by the Tuscans, in their rich and fertile lands,
and with their large and liberal culture. Sailors, adventurers,
free-booters; great merchants and carriers and bankers; conspirators
and revolutionaries,--they have produced great admirals, such as Andrea
Doria; great administrative and warlike Popes, in the persons of the
two masterful, irascible della Roveres, from the twenty miles distant
Savona,--Sixtus IV, and Michael Angelo’s friend and patron, Julius II;
a great navigator, in Christopher Columbus; a fierce and fanatical, but
lofty and utterly disinterested revolutionary, in Mazzini; and a brave,
reckless condottiere in Garibaldi, born as far away as Nice, but whose
mother came from the near Chiavari.
2. _The times into which Catherine was born._
And our Saint was born in the midst of singularly active, changeful,
far-outward-looking, swift-onward-moving times. Columbus had been born
the year before; Fust and Gutenberg were printing the first printed
books three years later; Constantinople was taken by the Turks when she
was six years old.
The Mediaeval system was, at last, breaking up fast. That whole
conception of life and polity of peoples had rendered services too
great, indeed too unique, to civilization and religion; they had
been for too long the faithful instrument, expression and result
of a certain stage and aspect of human and Christian character and
development, for this break-up not to have been slow, reluctant, and
intermittent at first, notwithstanding the heavy blows levelled,
often unconsciously, at the system from both within and without the
Church. Pope Boniface’s Bull, _Unam Sanctam_, which stretched and
strained the Mediaeval conception to breaking-point (1302); the dreary
blank and confusion of the seventy years of the Avignon exile of the
Papacy (1309-1377); the thirty years’ distraction of the great Papal
Schism (1378-1409); the fierce revolts and tragic fates of Wycliffe
and of Hus, in 1384 and 1415; the ineffectual Council of Constance
(1414-1418),--all this had already taken place. And not even such
saintly figures as Tauler and Blessed Henry Suso in Germany, and
St. Catherine of Siena in Italy and France; or such nobly reforming
characters as the French Chancellor Gerson, who had died eighteen years
before our Saint’s birth (1429); or the bold and spiritual German
Philosopher-Cardinal Nicolas of Coes, who died when she was seventeen
(1464),--could achieve more than to announce and prepare the transition
to a great modification of Christendom, and to indicate the eternal
and necessary source from which it must spring, and the new temporal,
contingent form which it might take.
But the scandals, revolts, and repressions, on a scale and with results
which turned Reform into Revolution, and broke up Western Europe into
those two hostile camps, which, towards the end of four centuries,
we see, alas! hostile still--these things were yet to come. Roderigo
Borgia was to be Pope (1492-1503) only towards the end of her life. And
only after she had been seven years dead, was Luther to nail his theses
on the University-Church door at Wittenberg (1517), and more than a
generation later were Mary Tudor in England and Philip II in Spain
(1553-1598) to attempt, for the last time on so large a scale, the task
of keeping and winning minds and souls, by ruthless physical repression.
Catherine lived thus within a period which, in its depths, was already
modern, but not yet broken up into seemingly final, institutionalized
internecine antagonisms. And hence we can get in her a most restful
and bracing pure affirmativeness, an entire absence of religious
controversy, such as, of necessity, cannot be found in even such
predominantly interior souls as the great Post-Reformation Spanish
Mystics. Her whole religion can grow and show itself as simply
positive, and in rivalry and conflict with her own false self and with
that alone.
3. _The Fieschi family._
And the particular family from which she sprang, and the period of its
history at which she appeared, each helped to bring right into her
blood and immediate surroundings the more general conditions of her
race and time.
The Fieschi had indeed a long past story, securely traceable through
a good two centuries and a half before Catherine’s birth. They sprang
from the little seaside town of Lavagna, twenty English miles east
of Genoa, where shipbuilding is still carried on. Here it was that
Sinibaldo de’ Fieschi, the first of the two Popes of the family,
Innocent IV (1243-1254), was born, whose whole Pontificate was one long
vehement struggle with his former friend, the masterful and sceptical
Emperor Frederic II of Germany. His nephew was Pope, under the title
of Hadrian V, for but a few months (1276). It was from Pope Innocent’s
brother Robert that St. Catherine was descended.
The Fieschi were the greatest of the great Guelph families of Genoa,
such as the Grimaldi, Guarchi, and Montaldi. The great Doria family,
with the Spinola, Fregosi, and Adorni was as strongly Ghibelline. And
the endless, fierce conflict between these two factions, in Genoa
itself and along both Rivieras, led to the calling in, and to the
temporary supremacy over Genoa, of the Dukes of Milan, the Counts of
Montferrat, and of the Kings of Naples and of France. The Revolution
of 1339, which put an end to the exclusive rule of the Nobles, and
introduced elective Doges or Dukes as life-long heads of the Republic,
really altered little or nothing of all this.
Indeed the Fieschi had, just now at Catherine’s birth, reached the
full height of their power and worldly splendour. For the two Popes
of the family had already reigned two centuries before, and Cardinal
Luca Fieschi lay buried in the Cathedral for over a hundred years;
but the Fieschi now possessed numerous fiefs in Liguria, Piedmont,
Lombardy, and even in the Kingdom of Naples; Nicolò Fieschi, a cousin
of the Saint, was, in Catherine’s time, a prominent member of the
College of Cardinals; and her own father was Viceroy of Naples to King
René of Anjou. There was indeed exactly a century yet to run, up to
the beginning of the downward course of the family,--the disastrous
conspiracy of the Fieschi against the Dorias (1547), which forms the
subject of Schiller’s well-known play.
Catherine’s father had been Viceroy of Naples to that René Duc of
Anjou, Count of Provence, Duke of Lorraine, and titular King of Naples,
whose adventurous career and immensely popular character still stand
out so vividly in history. The “roi débonnaire,” the friend of the
Troubadours and father of Margaret of Anjou, Consort to King Henry VI
of England, figures life-like in Scott’s _Anne of Geierstein_; and his
strikingly _bourgeois_ profile may still be seen, as part of the vivid
portraiture of his kneeling figure which faces the corresponding one of
his Queen, upon the great contemporary triptyche picture, representing
in its central division the Madonna and Child in the branches of a tree
(in allusion to the Burning Bush and the Rod of Jesse), which hangs in
the choir of the cathedral of Aix, King René’s old wind-swept and now
sleepy Provençal capital. Since Charles I of Anjou (1265-1285), the
Angevine Kings had made Naples the capital of their Kingdom; Duke René
was the last of the Angevines to hold or seriously to claim it. He lost
it in 1442 to the Spaniards; but still in 1459 he attempted, by means
of a Genoese fleet, to repossess himself of his old kingdom, so that
Catherine’s father could, even up to the time of his death in 1462,
retain the title of Vice-Roy of Naples. Her mother, Francesca di Negro,
also belonged to an ancient and noble Genoese family.
IV. CATHERINE’S LIFE, UP TO THE PRELIMINARIES OF HER CONVERSION: AUTUMN
1447-MID-MARCH 1474.
1. _The house where she was born; her brothers and sister._
Catherine was born in one of the many palaces of the Fieschi, in the
one which stood in the Vico Filo, close to the dark grey limestone
façade of the Cathedral of San Lorenzo. The palace was hemmed in, on
its two sides and at its back, by the houses of Urbano and Sebastiano
di Negri, and was demolished when the then Piazza dei Fieschi was
enlarged and became the present Piazza di San Lorenzo. The house now
facing the Cathedral doorway occupies approximately the site of that
old palace.
She was the youngest of five children. There were three sons: Giacomo,
named after his father; and Lorenzo and Giovanni, no doubt named
respectively after the great Roman deacon, the titular saint of the
Cathedral, and who already appeared upon his gridiron, on the quaint
Mediaeval relief over its portal; and after the Baptist, whose reputed
relics lay there, in the great Chapel, rebuilt for them soon after
this time (1451-1496). Last came the two daughters: Limbania, named
after a beatified virgin and contemplative, a Genoese Augustinian Nun
of the thirteenth century, and Catherine, christened and in all the
legal documents always called by this diminutive, presumably after St.
Catherine of Alexandria, who had an altar in the Cathedral. And the
Cathedral was their Parish Church.
2. _Catherine’s physical appearance; her qualities and habits of body
and of mind._
In this house, then, Catherine grew up and lived till she was sixteen.
The beautiful, tall figure; the noble oval face with its lofty brow,
finely formed nose, and powerful, indeed obstinate chin; the winning
countenance with its delicate complexion and curling, sensitive,
spiritual mouth-line; deep grey-blue spiritual eyes; the long, tapering
fingers; the massive dark brown or black hair; still more the quickly
and intensely impressionable, nervous and extremely tense and active
physical and psychical organization; and then the very affectionate,
ardent, aspiring, impatient and absolute qualities and habits of her
mind and heart and will,--all these things we are not merely told, we
can still see them and find them, in part, even in her remains, but
more fully in her portrait, and above all, in her numerous authentic
utterances.[44]
3. _The few certain details concerning her early years. Santa Maria
delle Grazie._
We have, as only too often in such older biographies, but very few
precise and characteristic details concerning her early years. She
had in her room a Pietà, a representation of the Dead Christ in His
Mother’s arms, and we are told how deeply it affected her every time
she entered this room, and raised her eyes up to it. The other points
mentioned, her early bodily penances, silence, and gift of prayer (the
latter said to have been communicated to her at twelve years of age),
read suspiciously like simple assumptions made by her biographers,
and in any case do not help to individualize her, in these years of
uncertain, tentative, or as yet but little characteristic, forms of
goodness.
But from thirteen, for three years onwards, the young girl is very
certainly and deeply drawn to the Conventual life, as she sees it
practised by her sister Limbania, who, true to the example of her
own Genoese Augustinian Patron Saint, had become a member of the
Augustinian Canonesses of our Lady of Graces, and now lived there happy
and devoted in the midst of that very fervent and cultivated Community.
Limbania was one of the nineteen Foundresses of this Convent, who,
on August 5, 1451, received the habit of Canonesses Regular of the
Lateran, from the hands of Padre Giovanni de’ Gatti, at that time
Superior of S. Teodoro outside the walls of Genoa, a house of the same
Order. Among these Novices occur a Simonetta di Negro, no doubt a
cousin of Catherine, and Nicola and Lucia da Nove, two sisters; these
facts will have helped Catherine to hope for admission together with
her own sister Limbania.[45]
The Convent and its Chapel, both secularized, are still in existence,
at a quarter of an hour’s walk from Catherine’s palace-home. Moving
from here, along the Vico Chiabrera, up the Via dei Maruffi (now San
Bernardo), and across the latter, up one of the many steep, very
narrow little alleys, to the Piazza dei Embriaci, and again up by the
tall, slim, grey tower of the Crusader Guilielmo Embriaco, we arrive
at last at a level, all but deserted, sun-baked piazza, called, after
its Church, Sta Maria in Passione. Face this Church, and the long,
tall house on your left hand, covered with dim, faded frescoes, is
Limbania’s Convent, so loved by Catherine. The right door leads into
the Chapel, which Vallebona[46] found in 1887 in use as a wood-store,
and which I saw in May 1900 turned into a music-hall: where the altar
had stood, were a dingy stage, and tawdry wings. The pompous frescoes
and stuccos on the walls and ceiling are evidently of the seventeenth
century or even later. The adjoining Convent still retains a small
figure of St. Augustine sculptured on a corbel on the vault of the
first landing. The Byzantine, dark brown Madonna-and-Child picture,
which Catherine so often prayed before in the Chapel, can still be
seen, on the left-hand wall of the Chapel of St. Thomas Aquinas, in the
Church of S. Maria di Castello, which is close by, at a lower level
than the Piazza of the Convent.
4. _Catherine’s marriage. The Adorni family._
The Convent Chaplain was Catherine’s Confessor, and through him she
attempted to gain the permission of the Nuns to enter their Community.
But whilst they hesitated and put her off, on the very reasonable
ground of her unusual youth, her father died (end of 1461); and a
particular combination, from amongst the endless political rivalries
and intrigues of Genoa, soon closed in upon the beautiful girl, member
of the greatest of the Guelph families of that turbulent time. It was
a bad and sorry business, and one likes to think that the father,
had he lived, would not thus have sacrificed his daughter. For if in
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet we have two youthful lovers joining
hands and hearts, in spite of the secular enmity of their respective
houses; here, alas! in real life, we have the contrary spectacle, the
deep because dreary tragedy of two great rival factions making--rather,
hoping to make--peace, by the enforced union of two mutually
indifferent and profoundly unsuited young people.
Not but that socially the two were admirably matched. For Giuliano
Adorno belonged to a family hardly inferior in antiquity and splendour
to Catherine’s own. Six different Adorni had been Doges of Genoa in
1363, 1385, 1413, 1443, 1447, 1461; and the one of 1413 had been
Giuliano’s own grandfather. They were Lords of the Greek Island of
Chios (Scio), which they had helped to conquer for Genoa in 1349.
And now the last Doge of the family, Prospero Adorno, had just been
driven from the Ducal throne by Paolo Campofregoso, the strong-willed
representative of the great rival, though also Ghibelline, family of
the Fregosi. Campofregoso was now both Duke and Archbishop of Genoa. By
an alliance with the Fieschi, the most powerful of the Guelph families,
the Adorni could hope, in their turn, to oust the Fregosi, and to
reinstate themselves at the head of the great Republic. The ideals,
antipathies or indifference of a girl of sixteen were not allowed to
stand in the way; and so the contract was signed on January 13, 1463.
The marriage was celebrated soon afterwards in the Cathedral of San
Lorenzo, in the Chapel of St. John the Baptist, since the Campanaro
family, which had built it in 1299, and the Adorni, who had married
into and succeeded the Campanaro, were excepted from the rule
prohibiting the access of women to this Chapel. Since Cardinal Giorgio
Fieschi had recently died, Bishop Napoleone Fieschi, of Albenga,
presided at the ceremony.
5. _Giuliano’s character. Catherine’s pre-conversion married life._
Giuliano’s father was dead; only his widowed mother, Tobia dei Franchi,
remained. It was, however, with Catherine’s mother, in the old Palazzo
near the Cathedral, that the young couple were to live, and actually
stayed, during the first two years.
Giuliano was young and rich; his two elder brothers occupied high
naval posts; his first cousin, Agostino Adorno, was a man of noble
character and great initiative; and a descendant of this cousin, also
Agostino, was later on Beatified. But Giuliano himself did at first
worse than nothing, and never did much throughout his life. A man of
an undisciplined, wayward, impatient, and explosive temper; selfish
and self-indulgent; a lover of obscure and useless, in one instance
criminal, squandering of his time, money, health, and affections, he
did not deserve the rare woman who had been sold to him; and would
possibly indeed have managed to be a better man with a wife he had
really loved, or with one of a temperament and outlook more ordinary
and nearer to his own. As it was, he was hardly ever at home, and,
according to his own later penitent admission and testamentary
provisions, he was, some time during the first ten years of his
marriage, gravely unfaithful to his wife.
Catherine, on her part, spent the first five of these dreary years
in sad and mournful loneliness, at first in her mother’s house, and
afterwards, at least in the winter-time, in Giuliano’s own palace,
a building which stood exactly where now stands the Church of Saint
Philip Neri, in the Via Lomellina (at that time, Via Sant’ Agnese), and
near the Piazza Annunziata. In the summer-time she would stay, mostly
alone again, at Giuliano’s country seat at Prà on the Western Riviera,
just beyond Pegli, and six English miles from Genoa.
This latter property is still in existence, but was, some twenty years
ago, on the extinction of the male line of the Adorni, sold to the
Piccardo family. The present moderate-sized house, standing close to
the high-road and sea-beach, although evidently rebuilt (probably
on a considerably smaller scale) since Catherine’s time, no doubt
occupies part at least of the old site. But the Chapel which, in the
Saint’s days, adjoined the house, was described by Vallebona (in 1887)
as turned into a stable; and in April 1902 an elderly serving-man of
the Piccardo family showed me the precise spot, on a now level meadow
expanse closely adjoining the house, where he himself, some fifteen
years since, had helped to pull down this chapel-stable. He showed me
the (probably seventeenth-century) picture representing the scene of
the Saint’s conversion, which had, at that time, been still in this
building, and which is now hung up in a small Confraternity-Chapel near
by in Prà.
As to money of her own, Catherine had, as we shall see later on, her
dowry of £1,000, to which Giuliano had contributed £200. But we have no
evidence of any good works performed by her in this decade, although,
as we shall find, it must have been during these summers that she, at
least occasionally, walked or rode over the wooded hill-path to the old
Benedictine Pilgrimage Church and Monastery of San Nicolò in Boschetto,
three or four English miles away. These buildings are now secularized
and empty, but, even so, impressive still.[47]
It is but natural to suppose that she was as yet too little at one
with her true self, to be able to surmount her lot, or even seriously
to attempt such a task, by escaping from the false self and from all
attempts at finding happiness within the four corners of the demands of
her most sensitive and absolute disposition. To learn to do things well
takes time,--and even if it be but the finding out that those things to
do are _there_, ready and requiring to be done; or the seeing that we
are doing them badly. Hence above all does the learning to suffer well,
the turning pain into self-expansion and self-escape, as well as into
fruitful action, require time, special graces, and unusual fidelity of
soul. And even the noblest nature will usually begin by thinking of
getting, rather than of giving; it will simply thirst to be loved, and
to find its happiness in its own heart’s perfect “comprehendedness.”
Catherine tried to find relief, first in one attitude on her life’s sad
couch of mental suffering, and then in another; and neither brought
her any alleviation. During the first five years she had hidden
herself away, and had moped in solitude; the last five, she had given
herself to worldly gaieties and feminine amusements, short, however,
of all grave offence against the moral law. And at the end of these
experiences and experiments she, noble, deep nature that she was, found
herself, of course, sadder than ever, with apparently no escape of any
kind from out of the dull oppression, the living death of her existence
and of herself.
V. HER CONVERSION, WITH ITS IMMEDIATE PRELIMINARIES AND CONSEQUENCES,
MARCH 1474.
1. _Her prayer, March 20, 1474. Her conversion, March 22._
From after Christmas-time in 1472, Catherine’s affliction of mind had
become peculiarly intense, and a profound aversion to all the things
of this world made her fly anew from all human intercourse; and yet
her own company had become insupportable to her, as nothing whatsoever
attracted her will.
And at the end of three months, on the 20th of March 1474--it was the
eve of the Feast of St. Benedict--she was praying in his little church
still standing close to the sea, at the western end of Genoa, not far
beyond Andrea Doria’s Palace, built so soon after her death. And in her
keen distress she prayed: “St. Benedict, pray to God that He make me
stay three months sick in bed.”[48]
And two days later, when Catherine was visiting her sister at her
Convent, Limbania proposed to her, since she declared herself
indisposed to go to confession (although the Feast of the Annunciation
was at hand), at least to go and recommend herself in the Chapel to the
chaplain of the Convent, who was indeed a saintly Religious. And, at
the moment that she was on her knees before him, her heart was pierced
by so sudden and immense a love of God, accompanied by so penetrating a
sight of her miseries and sins and of His goodness, that she was near
falling to the ground. And in a transport of pure and all-purifying
love, she was drawn away from the miseries of the world; and, as it
were beside herself, she kept crying out within herself: “No more
world; no more sins!” And at that moment she felt that, had she had in
her possession a thousand worlds, she would have cast them all away.[49]
2. _Views and truths concerning this Experience._
One of the various writers who have successively, and in great part
differently, moralized upon the chief events of her life, dwells on
this great moment as achieving in her soul all the usually lengthy
and successive effects of the purgative, illuminative, and unitive
progression, and as, in that one instant, bringing her soul to that
highest state of transformation, in which the will is wholly united
to God.[50] But having regard to the fact, patent on every page of
her biography and “Works,” that, for the remaining thirty-seven years
of her life, her interior history represents one continuous widening
and deepening and moving onwards of efforts, trials and pains, of
achievements and ideals--a fact actually schematized by another writer
(who, as I shall show, is the penultimate Redactor of the Life) not
two pages lower down--it is clear that we must be careful to conceive
this perfection as relative to her previous state or even to the final
goodness of many saintly souls. We must, in a word, try to realize
vividly, and constantly to recall, certain complex truths, without
which the very greatness of the experience here considered will but
help to check or deflect our apprehension of the spiritual life.
For one thing, the deeper and the more unique the soul’s experience,
and the richer such experience is, the more entirely does all that
the soul is, and ever was, wake up and fuse itself in one indivisible
act, in which much of the old is newly seen to be dross and is so far
forth excluded; and in which the old that is retained reappears in a
fresh context, a context which itself affects and is itself affected
by all the other old and new ideas and feelings. It thus clearly bears
the stamp upon it of the profound difference between Time, conceived
as a succession of moments of identical quantity and quality, each in
juxtaposition and exterior to the other, mathematical time, such as
our clocks register on the dials,--a conception really derived from
space-perception and exterior, measurable _things_--and Duration,
with its variously rapid succession of heterogeneous qualities, each
affecting and colouring, each affected and coloured by, all the others,
and all producing together a living harmony and organic unity, all
which constitutes the essentially unpicturable experience of the
living _person_. Such a moment is thus incapable of adequate analysis,
in exact proportion as it is fully expressive of the depths of the
personality and of its experience: for each element here, whilst,
in its living context, an energy and a quality which at each moment
modifies and is modified by all the other elements, becomes, in an
intellectual analysis, when each is separated from the others, a mere
dead thing and a quantity.
And secondly, such an experience is throughout as truly a work of pure
grace, a gift, as it is a work of pure energy, an act. And here again,
the grace and the energy, the gift and the act are not juxtaposed, but
throughout they stimulate and interpenetrate each other, with the most
entirely unanalyzable, unpicturable completeness. It is indeed in exact
proportion to the fulness of this interstimulation and penetration, to
the organic oneness of the act, that such an act is this one particular
soul’s very own act and yet the living God’s own fullest gift. Grace
does not lie without, but within; it does not check or limit, but
constitutes the will’s autonomy.
And thirdly, it is an experience which leaves the soul different
forever from what it was before; which purifies her perfectly, in and
for that moment, from all her stains of actual sin committed up to
that moment; and which materially strengthens her inclinations towards
good and weakens her tendencies towards evil. But the soul herself
lives on; and she lives but in and through successive acts of all
kinds. Hence it is not an act,--there is none such, here below at
least,--which takes or can take the place of fresh acts to be produced
again and again throughout her life, The soul has not, in any sense
or any degree, been approximated to that utterly paradoxical thing,
a saintly automaton. She is not raised above the limitations and
imperfections, the obscurities and conflicts, the failings and sins
of humanity. She _could_ fall away and commit grave sin; she actually
_does_ commit minor sins of frailty and surprise. Her interior efforts
and experiences are now but on a larger, deeper scale, and on a higher
plane, and take place from a new vantage-ground, a position which has,
however, itself to be continually actively defended and reinforced.
Temptation, trial, sorrow, pain; hope, fear, self-hatred, love and joy,
with ever-renewed and increased aspiration and effort, all variously
change and deepen their combinations and qualities, outlook and
ideals. But they do not for one moment cease. All things but grow in
depth and significance, in variety within unity, in interiority and
interpenetration.
And finally, although conversions of the apparent suddenness and
profound depth and perseverance of the one here studied, are rightly
taken to be very special and rare graces of God, yet it would be but
misinterpreting and depreciating their true significance to make their
suddenness the direct proof and measure of their own supernaturalness
or the standard by which to appraise the altitude of the goodness of
other lives. God is as truly the source of gradual purification as of
sudden conversion, and as truly the strength which guards and moves us
straight on, as that which regains and calls us back. Hence such acts
as Catherine’s should not be entirely separated off from those acts
of love, contrition and self-dedication which occur, as so many free
graces of God in and with the free acts of man, more or less frequently
in the secret lives of human beings throughout the world.
3. _The Second Experience, in the Palace._
Catherine then was kneeling on, in these great moments of her true
self’s self-discovery and self-determination, with her true Life
now at last felt so divinely near and yet still so divinely far:
she was kneeling on, oblivious of time and space, incapable of
speech--throughout a deep, rich age of growth, during but some minutes
of poor clock-time--whilst the chaplain was called away by some little
momentary matter. And when he returned, she was just able to utter:
“Father, if you please, I should like to let this confession stand over
to another time.” And returning home, she was so on fire and wounded
with the love which God had interiorly manifested to her, that, as
if beside herself, she went into the most private chamber she could
find, and there gave vent to her burning tears and sighs. And, all
instructed as she had suddenly become in prayer, her lips could only
utter: “O Love, can it be that Thou hast called me with so much love,
and revealed to me, at one view, what no tongue can describe?” And
her contrition for her offences against such infinite goodness was so
great, that, if she had not been specially supported, her heart would
have been broken, and she would have died.[51]
And yet, though her biographer, no doubt rightly, represents her
feeling and dispositions as now at their uttermost,--they may well
have actually been so, at that moment for that moment,--they were
nevertheless evidently capable of indefinite subsequent increase.
Indeed it must have been on this same day, or on one of the next
three days, that, in one of the rooms of the palace in the Via S.
Agnese,--(the approximate spot is marked in the Church of St. Philip
by a fine picture representing the scene, hung over the altar of one
of the left-hand-side chapels),--“Our Lord, desiring to enkindle still
more profoundly His love in this soul, appeared to her in spirit with
His Cross upon His shoulder dripping with blood, so that the whole
house seemed to be all full of rivulets of that Blood, which she saw
to have been all shed because of love alone.” “And filled with disgust
at herself, she exclaimed: ‘O Love, if it be necessary, I am ready to
confess my sins in public.’”[52]
4. _Two peculiarities of this Experience._
Here two things are remarkable. This is, to begin with, her first and
last vision (_visione_), which I can find, in the sense of a picture
produced indeed “in the spirit,” but yet evidently apprehended with
a sense of apparently complete passivity in the perceiving mind
and of objectivity as to the perceived thing, and remembered as
such throughout her life. For the frequent subsequent “sights” or
picturings (_viste_) are avowedly only of the nature of profoundly
vivid, purely mental, more or less consciously voluntary and subjective
contemplations and intuitions; whilst her only other “visions,” those
seen during the last stage of her last illness, seem indeed to have
been of an even more sensible kind than this _visione_, but they were
entirely fitful and left no permanent impression behind them.
And again, this is the one only picture of any, even of a voluntary,
meditational kind, concerning the Passion, to be found throughout her
life; all her other contemplations and impressions of whatever kind are
of other subjects.
5. _Her general confession._
It was after these fundamental experiences that, once more in the
Chapel of the Augustinianesses, apparently four days later, on the 24th
of March, “she made her general confession, with such contrition and
compunction as to pierce her soul.”[53]
VI. THE TWO CONCEPTIONS CONCERNING THE CHARACTER AND _RATIONALE_ OF HER
PENITENTIAL PERIOD AND OF HER WHOLE CONVERT LIFE. THE POSITION ADOPTED
HERE.
At this point of the Life two successive reporters or redactors
introduce, respectively, a general reflection on the character and
_rationale_ of the period of penitence now immediately ensuing, and a
scheme and forecast as to the stages in the ascensional movement of her
entire convert life.
1. _The older conception._
The first reporter,--evidently the same who, in connection with the
Conversion scene, had described her soul as, there and then, at the
culmination of holiness,--here says: “And although God, at the moment
when,” four days before, “He had given her that love and pain, had
there and then pardoned her all her sins, consuming them in the fire
of His love; yet He, wishing her to satisfy the claims of justice,
led her by the way of satisfaction, in such wise as to cause this
special contrition, illumination, and conversion to last about fourteen
months,” and it is no doubt implied by him that frequent confession was
practised throughout this time.[54]
Thus we get an impressive instance of the rich and complex experience
on which the Catholic doctrine is built, as to how, on the one hand,
pure and perfect love ever instantly obliterates all sin; how, on the
other hand, such perfect love, in those who explicitly know and accept
the Church’s claims, involves a determination to confess all such grave
sins as may have been committed; and how, finally, such subsequent
confession is itself operative within the soul. For as between the soul
and the body, so between the Mystical and Sacramental, there is a real
and operative connection, though one which, however inadequately known
by us, we know to be one not of simple identity or coextension.
And the experiences and doctrines here specially considered appear
to require the conception of contrition and pardon as but the
necessary expression and effect of true, operative love; and to demand
the conclusion that purification participates in the essentially
positive nature of love, its cause. The removal of bodily impurity
is a negative act, and, as such, is limited and unrepeatable; but
spiritual purification would thus, as something positive, be capable of
indefinite increase and repetition. And hence the deep philosophical
justification of repeated contrition and confession for the same sins,
even though already pardoned. We shall find that such a view is also
to be found in St. Catherine’s own doctrine, though there is nothing
to show that the thought of this paragraph is derived from Catherine
herself. I take it to proceed from Cattaneo Marabotto.
2. _The later conception._
The second writer, the penultimate Redactor of the book as we now have
it, finds three successive levels in her whole life’s constant growth
and upward movement, and discovers a type of each in some love-impelled
figure or scene of the Bible. And so the writer gets his periods
symbolized respectively by the two New Testament scenes of Christ’s
feet, and the Penitent Magdalen drawn by Him to them, and of Christ’s
breast, and the Beloved Disciple reposing peacefully upon it; and by
the Old Testament poetic picture, and its allegorical interpretation,
of Christ’s (the true Solomon’s) mouth, and the Bride’s kiss. And
some four years are assigned to the first period, “many” years to the
second, and her last years to the last: 1478 and 1499 would be the
approximate dates dividing off these periods. We shall find this scheme
to proceed from Battista Vernazza.
Time-honoured though it be, this symbolism in no way fits Catherine’s
case. For, excepting during the short first period, her direct and
formal occupation with the Sacred Humanity is, throughout her convert
life, practically confined to the Eucharistic Presence; and again, her
words and contemplations are (as indeed the unhappiness of her marriage
experience would lead one to expect and as the whole temper of her mind
and devotion require) quite remarkably free from all affinity to the
Canticle of Canticles. And yet this, in so far inappropriate, framework
helps to emphasize the all-important fact of the constant growth and
deepening ever at work within her life.
Indeed, the short, general characterization of each of these successive
periods which follows after each symbol here, is derived from passages
of the _Vita_ which are doubtless based upon direct communication
by herself. Thus the detailed sight of her own particular sins and
of God’s particular graces towards herself, characteristic of the
relatively short first period, is succeeded by the second, long and
profoundly lonely, period of an apparent union of the divine and of the
human personalities, in which all distinct perception of her own acts
appears to have usually been lost,--a union which can lead her to the
point of saying: “I have no longer either soul or heart of my own; but
my soul and my heart are those of my Love.” Yet in her third and last
period, the consciousness of her own acts and of their differentiation
is described as fully reappearing within her mind. For though we are
presented here with a kind of immersion in the Divinity, in which she
appears so to lose herself interiorly and exteriorly as to be able to
say with St. Paul: “I live no longer, but Christ lives in me”; and
though we are told that she was no longer able to discern between
the good and evil of her acts, by means of any direct examination of
them: yet her acts are now again perceived to be her own; to be some
of them good and some of them faulty; and are seen, as several and
as differing, by her own self, but “in God.”[55] So did the Lady of
Shallot, all turned away though she was from the world of sight, see in
her mirror the different figures as, good and bad, they moved on their
way, more truly and clearly than she had ever seen them formerly by any
direct perception.
3. _Position adopted in this study concerning Catherine’s spiritual
growth._
Now these periods of interior, experimental, mystical vicissitude
and growth have also their corresponding variations of religious
analysis and speculation, and of external actions and events; and these
variations are not only the concomitants and expressions of the inner
growth, but are also, in part, the subject-matter and occasion for
the next stage of mystical experience. And since Catherine’s special
characteristic consists precisely in the richness and variety of
her life at any one moment, and in the successive, ever-accelerated
enrichment which it achieves almost up to the end, any obliteration of
this successive growth, or any one-sided attention to any one aspect
of her life during any one of its chief periods, will readily take all
life-likeness out of her portrait.
Yet to achieve anything like this comprehension is most difficult, if
only because it has to be attempted with the aid of materials which,
where their registration is contemporary with the events chronicled,
belong, all but the legal documents, to the last fifteen years of
her life; and because, even within this last period, they are rarely
furnished with any reference to their exact place within that period.
There is throughout the book a most natural and instructive, indeed
in its way most legitimate and even necessary, insistence upon the
apparently complete independence and aloofness, the transcendence of
her inner life. And this insistence goes so far that a self-sufficing
Eternity, a completely unchanging Here and Now, floating outside and
above even the necessary and normal affections, actions, and relations
of human life and fellowship, seems, especially from after her
conversion till up to the beginning of her physical incapacitation,[56]
to have taken the place of the characteristically human struggle in
and through time and space, with and through our fellow-creatures.
As in Leibniz we get a divinely pre-established harmony between the
dispositions and the acts of the body and those of the soul, which
appear indeed as though indestructibly interrelated, but which, in
reality, operate throughout without one instant’s direct interaction:
so here, the external is not indeed represented as neglected by her,
nor as anything but in complete harmony with her inner life, and as
indeed inspired by God, yet her own mind and soul are but reluctantly
permitted to appear as expressing themselves in it, as requiring and
affected by it. She appears as having got outside of, and away from,
all the visible and purely human, rather than deeper into and behind
it; to have achieved the ignoring of it rather than its conversion and
transfiguration and its appointment to its own intrinsic place and
function in the full economy of the soul’s new life.
And yet all this is, even in the minds of the authors, but one aspect
of this complex life, and one which, taken alone, would at once do
injustice to its other aspect, the grand depth and range of its
immanental quality. And even in as much as the transcendental aspect
is really attributable to the predominant trend of Catherine’s own
character and teaching, it in no way invalidates the fact of the actual
astonishing many-sidedness and balance of her life, especially before
her last few years, but will be found to proceed essentially from
her rare mode of achieving this many-sidedness and balance, or, more
strictly still, from her own feeling as to this mode, and her analysis
and theory of it. We have no direct concern with this her reflection at
present: what she actually did and directly was, is all we would wish
to try and sketch just now.
VII. CATHERINE AND THE HOLY EUCHARIST.
1. _A daily Communicant from May 1474 onwards._
On the following day, then, on the Feast of the Annunciation, 25th
March, 1473, “her Lord gave her the desire of Holy Communion, a
desire which never again failed her throughout the whole course of her
remaining life. And He so disposed things that Communion was given her,
without any care on her part; she was often summoned to receive it,
without any asking, by priests inspired by God to give it to her.”[57]
After trying every possible interpretation of this most annoyingly
obscure text by the light of three or four other passages, I have come
to think it to mean that, on this Lady-Day, she, for the first time
since now ten years, received Holy Communion with a keen desire for
its reception; and that this desire remained from this day forward
unintermittently with her, till the end of her life: but that this
desire, which at first may not have been set upon daily Communion,
began to be satisfied by a daily reception only some time in May 1474.
It is anyhow certain that from this latter date onwards she was a daily
communicant up to September 13, 1510, the day before her death.[58] The
exceptions were most rare,--I take it of an average of once or twice a
year,--and were always owing to some insuperable obstacle, mostly of
ill-health.
2. _Her practice as regards the Holy Eucharist, throughout her Convert
Life._
Since Holy Communion was the great source and centre of her love and
strength, and the one partially external experience and practice which
was thus renewed day by day throughout her life, and in the spiritual
apprehension and effect of which we cannot trace any distinct periods,
I shall dwell here, once for all, upon the characteristics of this
devotion of hers, which were at all special to herself.
For one thing, even her ardent love of Holy Communion did not suppress
a bashful dislike of being noticed or distinguished in the matter:
“At the beginning of her conversion she had at times a feeling as of
envy towards Priests, because they communicated on as many days as
they would, without any one wondering at it.” “Once when, for a few
days, the city was under an interdict, she went every morning a mile’s
distance outside of the city walls, so as to communicate; and she
thought that she would not be seen by any one.”[59]
Next, there is a most characteristic eagerness for interiorization, for
turning the Holy Eucharist, perceived without, into the heart’s food
within; and a corresponding intensity of consciousness and tenderness
at the moment of reception. “When she saw the Sacrament on the altar in
the hands of the priests, she would say within herself: ‘Now swiftly,
swiftly convey it to the heart, since it is the heart’s true food.’”
And “one night she dreamt that she would be unable to communicate
during the coming day, and waking up, she found that tears were
dropping from her eyes, at which she wondered, since hers was a nature
very slow to weep.” And “when at Mass, she was often so occupied with
her Lord interiorly, as not to hear one word of it; but when the time
for Communion arrived, at that instant she would become conscious of
exterior things.” And she would say: “O Lord, it seems to me, that if
I were dead, I should return to life to receive Thee; and that if an
unconsecrated host were given to me, I should recognize it to be such
by the mere taste alone, as one discerns water from wine.”[60]
Again, her Communion practice bears upon it the stamp of a staunch
virility; of a constant emulation between her own generous turning-away
from its sensible consolations and the divine action, which seems
to have maintained these consolations throughout her life; and of a
determination to abstain even from such deeply consoling Communions,
if such abstention were the more perfect practice for her. “One day,
when she had communicated, there came to her so much odour and so much
sweetness, that she felt as though in Paradise. But turning at once
towards her Love she said: ‘O Love, wouldest thou perchance draw me to
Thee with these savours (_sapori_)? I desire them not, since I desire
but Thee, and Thee whole and entire!’” And “one day a holy Friar,”--it
was probably the Observant Franciscan, Father Angelo of Chiavasso (near
Genoa), beatified later on,--“said to her: ‘You communicate every day:
what kind of satisfaction do you derive from it?’ And she answered
him simply, explaining to him all her desires and feelings. But he,
to test the purity of her intention, said: ‘There might possibly be
some imperfection in such very frequent Communion,’ and then left her.
And Catherine having heard this, fearing such imperfection, at once
suspended her Communions, but at the cost of great distress. And the
Friar, hearing a few days later of how she cared more not to do wrong
than to have all the consolation and satisfaction of Communion, sent
her word by all means to return to her daily Communions; and she did
so.”[61]
And finally, her Communions produced effects direct and indirect,
spiritual and psychical. The indirect, psycho-physical effects being
variable, and related to the varying conditions of her health, will
be noted as far as possible under the different periods of her life
and, collectively, in the chapter on such psycho-physical questions.
The spiritual effects no doubt grew, but this growth we have no
sufficient materials for pursuing in detail. Yet they have throughout
this peculiarity, that, central and all-permeating as this Eucharistic
influence no doubt was, yet it nowhere takes the form of any specially
Eucharistic devotion or directly Eucharistic meditation or doctrine,
outside of Holy Communion itself and of the immediate occupation with
_it_. Some deep indirect effects on her general tone, imagery, and
teaching will be studied in our second volume.
VIII. CATHERINE AND CONFESSION AND DIRECTION.
1. _Catherine arouses criticism in the matter of Direction._
Now if Catherine occasioned some criticism and testing of her spirit by
the (for that period) very unusual frequency of her Communions,[62] it
is equally on record that she aroused some surprise and apprehension,
by the absence of all Direction, during the many years of the second
period of her convert life. And if, in the matter of her daily
Communions, she had readily entered into the suggestion that there
might be imperfection in this her dearest habit, and yet had to
continue along her unusual way, so too, in this matter of Direction,
she evidently was from the first ever ready to proceed in the ordinary
manner, and yet found herself compelled to follow a lonely course.
“If she attempted to lean upon any one (_accostarsi ad alcuno_), Love
instantly caused her mental suffering so great that she was obliged to
desist, saying, ‘O Love, I understand Thee.’ And when she was told that
it would be well, and more secure, if she were to put herself under
obedience to another, and whilst she was in doubt as to what to do,
her Lord answered her thus within her mind: ‘Confide in Me, and doubt
not!’”[63] Such suggestions will have been made and such scruples will
have been suffered many a time, during the long years in which, in this
matter, her way was an extraordinary one.
2. _The facts concerning Catherine’s confessions. Catholic obligations._
But in this matter of Direction and Confession, the _Vita_, if we were
to take its present constituents as of uniform value, is astonishingly
vague, ambiguous, and contradictory. Let us take the facts, in the
order of their certainty, moving from the quite certain to the less and
less certain ones; and let us then try and appraise the upshot of the
whole examination.
We are then, first, absolutely certain that Catherine herself, not
later than 1499,--this date shall be justified later on,--said to Don
Marabotto, (and that he then and there, or shortly afterwards, wrote
down,) the following words: “I have persevered for twenty-five years in
the spiritual way, without the aid of any creature.” And he, in this
matter which concerns his own Confessing and Directing of her during
the last eleven years of her life (1499-1510), twice over solemnly
reaffirms and drives home the reality of the fact thus communicated
to him by herself. “She was guided and taught interiorly by her
tender Love alone, without the means of any [fellow-]creature, either
Religious or Secular”; “she was instructed and governed thus by God,
for about twenty-five years.”[64] And conformably with this, we get the
short dialogue between herself and Love, as just given, and such words
as the following, which she declared that Love itself spoke to her
mind,--evidently during, and probably at the beginning, of these many
years: “Take from the remainder of Scripture this one word ‘Love,’ with
which thou shalt ever walk straight … enlightened, without error, and
(all this) without guide or means provided by any other creature.”[65]
In the next place, it is equally certain that, with all her biographers
down to this day (_e.g._ Monseigneur Fliche, pp. 350, 351), her words
must be understood to exclude at least all Direction from those
years. And it is, moreover, practically certain that at least the
second Redactor (R. 2) of the _Vita_ understood her words to apply
to Confession also. For whereas, in the older tripartite scheme of
R. 1, the four years of Penance of her first period were filled by
her labours for “satisfying her conscience by means of contrition,
confession, and satisfaction,” R. 2 breaks up those four years into
two periods,--the first, of “a little over a year”; and the second,
of (no doubt) three years,--and does so with a view to thus making
room for the “about twenty-five years” of Catherine’s affirmation.
Now whereas R. 2 in his first period talks thus of Confession; in his
second one, he talks twice of Contrition, and twice of Sorrow, but
nowhere of Confession; and again, whereas in his third (R. 1’s second)
period “many” (no doubt twenty-one) years, there is still no reference
to Confession, indeed here not even to Sin or Contrition in general;
in the fourth (R. 1’s third) period (of eleven years), when she was
being regularly confessed and directed by Marabotto, she, it is true,
“was incapable of recognizing, by direct examination, the nature of
her acts, whether they were good or bad,” but still she was able to
see, and actually “saw all things,” hence also these acts and their
difference, “in God.”[66]
Thirdly, it is certain that some reasonable doubt can be entertained
as to whether Catherine’s words, solemnly emphatic though they are,
were not understood too literally by Marabotto and the second Redactor.
Nothing is, indeed, more obvious and striking throughout all the
authentic memorials of her, than the delightfully simple, grandly
fearless veracity of her mind. She never speaks but according to the
fulness of her conviction: like with all souls most near unto the
childlike Master, Christ, it can be said of her that “one never knows
what she is going to say next.” And we shall find her insight into
herself at any given moment, even with regard to such partly medical
matters as her psycho-physical condition, to be quite astonishing in
its depth and delicacy. Yet the fact remains, that she was as truly
a person of intense and swiftly changing feelings, exaltations, and
depressions, as she was one of a rich balanced doctrine and of a quite
heroic objectivity and healthy spiritual utilization of all such
intensities. This very heroism and objectivity of hers, so constant
and watchful in all her practical decisions and general doctrinal
statements, no doubt helped to make her feel both the need and the
licitness of giving full and truthful utterance also to the intense and
swiftly passing feelings of her heart.
One such utterance is specially to the point. She had already been
for eleven years the much-helped penitent of that utterly devoted
priest-friend Don Marabotto, when, in January 1510, he overheard her
(the extant report of the scene is certainly his own and contemporary
with the event) saying to God, shut up alone, as she thought, in
one of her rooms: “There is no creature that understands me. I find
myself alone, unknown, poor, naked, a stranger and different from
all the world.” Yet this does not prevent her finding comfort and,
indirectly, even physical improvement, in and from Marabotto’s sympathy
and words, when these are offered to her not many hours later on.[67]
The abnormally rapid and complete change of feeling depicted here, no
doubt occurred during the last eight months of her life, long after
her health had begun to break up permanently; and cannot directly
illustrate her frame of mind during the years 1474-1499, when she was
in health and relatively strong. Still, she was clearly ever of a
high-strung, intense temperament; and her health was already seriously
impaired when, in 1499, she spoke the words concerning the utter
loneliness of that whole quarter of a century. And if the emphatic
words, spoken to God Himself in 1510, were compatible with confession,
and, indeed, a certain kind of continuous direction, at the very time
and during eleven years before they were spoken: her words uttered
in 1499 to Marabotto, will have been compatible with at least some
confession during a period of years of which the first lay almost a
whole generation behind her. And we shall find at least two other cases
in which Marabotto appears, on Catherine’s own authority, as having
clearly misunderstood the nature of some phenomena connected with
herself.[68]
Yet for all this, the account which we shall have to give later on
of the characteristics of her confessions to Marabotto,--an account
directly derived from himself,--makes it practically impossible to
assume that even simple confession was practised, at all or otherwise
than quite exceptionally, during those many years.
Now we have, as a fourth point, to remember that although the Fourth
Council of the Lateran, in the year 1215, had decreed that “All
the Faithful of either sex, after coming to years of discretion,
are bound to confess all their sins at least once a year”:[69] yet
already St. Thomas Aquinas had, in his Commentary on the Sentences of
Peter Lombard, composed in 1252-1257, taught that, since the divine
institution and obligation extends, strictly speaking, only to the
confession of mortal sins, “he that has not committed any mortal sins
is not bound to confess venial sins, but it is sufficient for the
fulfilling of the Church’s precept, for him to present himself to the
priest, and to declare himself free from the consciousness of mortal
sin.”[70] And nothing has changed, as to the nature and extent of
this obligation, since Catherine’s time. The Council of Trent, the
decrees of which were confirmed by Pope Pius IV in 1564, more than
half-a-century after her death, carefully explains that “_all_ the
sins” of the decree of 1215 means all “_mortal_ sins”; and further
declares that “the Church did not, by the Lateran Council, decree that
the faithful should confess,--a thing she knew to be instituted and
necessary by divine right,” but had simply determined the circumstances
and conditions under which this obligatory confession was to take
place.[71] And Father Antonio Ballerini, S.J. (_d._ 1881), gives us
the conclusions, identical with that of St. Thomas, of those great
authorities Francis Suarez (_d._ 1617), Cardinal John de Lugo (_d._
1660), and Hermann Busenbaum (_d._ 1668),--all three, Jesuits like
himself,--and himself endorses their decision. Suarez indeed declares
this view to be the common opinion of Theologians.[72]
3. _Probable course of Catherine’s confession-practice._
With these four points before us, let us attempt to reconstruct some
outline of what really happened in her own case, and try and show what
constituted the specifically Catholic quality of this her practice, so
unusual in the middle and later ages of the Church. We shall, then, do
wisely, I think, by considering that the “twenty-five years,” alleged
by her own self, were, as a strict matter of fact, not more than
twenty-one;[73] that during the four first convert years that preceded
this middle period, just as during the last eleven which succeeded it,
she had recourse to confession with the frequency considered normal
in and for these times, in the case of a daily communicant living in
the world; but that, during the intervening period, she was allowed to
substitute that simple occasional, perhaps only annual, presentation
of herself and declaration to the priest in the place of confession
proper, which we have seen to be considered, in a case of such a purity
of soul as hers, as sufficient for fulfilling the Church’s precept, by
a practical consensus of all the great casuist authorities. And thus we
have here again a memorable, and this time a long-persisting, instance
of how the intrinsic and operative connection between the Individual
and the Social, the Mystical and the Institutional elements of Religion
is not a simple identity or coextension,--a point which we already
found exemplified during the first hours of her convert life.
And the Catholic spirit in this her present course will consist in
her full observance of all to which the Church strictly obliges; in
her readiness at all times to walk in the ordinary way, and in her
repeated attempts, even during this second period, to do so; in her
actually and fervently following the ordinary course whenever she
could, _i.e._ in the first and last period; and finally in her ever
faithfully obeying the promptings of God’s Spirit which, by various
converging spiritual peculiarities, circumstances and means, showed,
with practical plainness, the kind and degree of extraordinary interior
acts and habits which were to be, in large part, _her_ form of the
“Mind of the Church.” For it is indeed certain that the special
characteristic of the Catholic mind is not, necessarily, universally
and finally, the conception and practice of sanctity under the precise
form of the devotional spirit and habits special to the particular part
or period of the Church in which that individual Catholic’s lot may be
cast. What _is_ thus characteristic, is the continuous and sensitive
conviction that there is something far-reaching and important beyond
the Church’s bare precepts, for every soul that aims at sanctity, to
find out and to do; that this something (_sc._ the Church’s mind) is,
always and for all, _presumably_, the most fervent form and degree of
the devotional temper and habits of the Church, as practised in that
time and country; and that it is for God Himself, if He so pleases, to
indicate to the soul that He now wants its fervour to consist in an
observance of the Church’s precepts and spirit under a form and with an
application partially different from the most fervent practice of the
ordinary devotions of that time and place, though this new observance
will be no less costing or heroically self-renouncing than the other.
And this He does usually by slow, often simply cumulative and indirect,
but always solid, painful, and practically unmistakable, because
unsought, means and experiences,--all these attained to well within the
Church. For the Church’s life and spirit, which is but the extension
of the spirit of Christ Himself, is, like all that truly lives at all,
not a sheer singleness, but has a mysterious unity in and by means of
endless variety. Even at any one moment that spirit expresses itself in
numerous variations, by means of various races, rites, orders, schools,
and individuals. And yet not the sum-total of all these simultaneously
present variations is ever as rich as is the sum-total of that spirit’s
successive manifestations in the past. Nor once more can this latter
sum be taken as anticipating all the developments and adaptations which
that ever-living spirit will first occasion and then sanction in His
special organ, the Church. Catherine’s particular, divinely impelled
substitute for the ordinary devotional practice shall be described
later on.
IX. CATHERINE AND INDULGENCES.
A further peculiarity, somewhat analogous to the one just examined,
seems to have characterized her devotional practice--in this case,
throughout her convert life. It had therefore, perhaps, best be
described in this place.
1. _The assertions of the “Vita.”_
Three items of information are furnished by the _Vita_, on one and the
same half-page.
(1) “She had such a hatred of self,” says the _Vita_, “that she did not
hesitate to pronounce this sentence: ‘I would not have grace and mercy,
but justice and vengeance shown to the malefactor.…’”
(2) “For this reason it seemed that she did not even care to gain
the Plenary Indulgences. Not as though she did not hold them in great
reverence and devotion, and did not consider them to be most useful and
of great value. But she would have wished that her own self-seeking
part (_la sua propria parte_) should rather be chastized and punished
as it deserved, than to see it pardoned (_assoluta_), and, by means of
such satisfaction, liberated in the sight of God.”
(3) “She saw the Offended One to be supremely good, and the offender
quite the opposite. And hence she could not bear to see any part of
herself which was not subjected to the divine justice, with a view to
its being thoroughly chastized. And hence, so as not to give this part
any hope of being liberated from the pains due to it, she abstained
from the Plenary Indulgences and also from recommending herself to the
intercessions of others, so as ever to be subject to every punishment
and condemned as she deserved.”[74]
2. _Three points to be noted here._
Here I would note three things.
For one thing, there can be no serious doubt as to the authenticity
of the saying that opens out this group of communications and as to
the substantial accuracy of the two parallel, and (I think) mutually
independent, reports as to her practice: since the saying belongs to
the class of short declarations given in _oratio directa_, which we
shall find to be remarkably reliable throughout the _Vita_; and the
reports testify to something so unusual, so little sympathetic to the
hagiographical mind, so much in keeping with the remainder of her
doctrine and practice, that we cannot believe them misinformed. The
author of the _Dialogo_ evidently fully accepted these three passages,
when, in about 1549, she paraphrases them thus: “She therefore made no
account of her sins, with respect to their punishment, but only because
she had acted against that Immense Goodness”; “She found herself to be
her who alone had committed all the evil, and alone she wanted to make
satisfaction, as far as ever she could, without the help of any other
person.”[75]
For another thing, we have absolutely final contemporary documentary
evidence of the importance attached by herself both to Indulgences,
and the gaining of them (at least by other people), and to Masses and
prayers for the Dead, inclusive of herself when she should be gone. For
as to Indulgences, we have entries in the Cartulary of the Hospital
(under the dates of March 11, April 10, May 29, and August 23, 1510) of
various considerable sums, amounting in all to over £300, paid by the
Hospital, at the first date, for Catherine’s nephew Francesco, at all
the other dates for herself, for the withdrawal of a suspension of the
Indulgences attached to the Hospital Church, and for the transference,
in that year, of the day appointed for their acquisition. Both these
matters were carried out in Rome by means of Catherine’s second nephew,
Cardinal Giovanni Fiesco. This, it is true, is evidence that only
covers the last six months of her life.
But as to Masses and Prayers for her own soul after death, we have (1)
her second Will, of May 19, 1498, where she leaves one share in the
Bank of St. George (£100) to the Observant Franciscans of the Hospital
Church, “who shall be bound to celebrate Masses and Divine Offices for
the soul of Testatrix”; (2) her Codicil, of January 5, 1503, where she
leaves (in addition) £3 apiece to two Monasteries “for the celebration
of Masses for her own soul”; (3) her third Will, of May 18, 1506, which
confirms all this; and (4) her last Will, of March 18, 1509, where
she leaves £3 each to three Monasteries, which are each to “celebrate
thirty Masses for her soul,” £3 to a fourth Monastery for Prayers for
her soul, and £25 to the Franciscans of the Hospital Church for the
celebration of Masses to the same effect.[76]
The reader will at once perceive that these facts are fully compatible
with the attitude so emphatically ascribed to her in the _Vita_, only
if we take these latter statements as expressive of certain intense,
emotional moods; or of some relatively short penitential period; or of
what she did and felt with regard to herself alone and for whilst she
was to live here below, not of what others should do for themselves at
all times and for herself when she was gone.
And finally, we know exactly how and why the doctrine and practice
described in those passages in the _Vita_ were accepted by the
Congregation of Rites, as forming no obstacle to her canonization.
Pope Benedict XIV, in his great classical work on Beatification and
Canonization, says, “After I had ceased to hold the office of Promoter
of the Faith,” (the date will have been between 1728 and 1733,) “I
know that a controversy arose as to the doctrine of a certain _Beata_,
with regard to the truth of which it was possible to have different
opinions.” And after giving this _Beata’s_ doctrine and practice as
these are presented by Catherine’s _Vita_, and citing the arguments
used against their toleration, he proceeds: “But the Postulators
answered (1) that this _Beata_ had not omitted to gain Plenary
Indulgences from any contempt for them, since her veneration for them
was demonstrated by most unambiguous documents” (no doubt Cardinal
Fiesco’s action, in her name and at her expense, in Rome in 1510, is
meant); “(2) that it is the doctrine of very many theologians, that
those do not sin, who do not labour to gain Indulgences because they
desire to make satisfaction in their own persons in this world or
to suffer in the next; (3) that we should not confound safety with
perfection: it appears indeed to be safer to atone for one’s fault both
by one’s own good works _and_ by Indulgences; but not more perfect,
supposing that a man abstains from Indulgences because his love of
God and his detestation of having offended Him are so great that he
desires to make satisfaction to Him, by bearing the whole of the
merited punishment; and (4) that examples are not wanting of perfect
souls, that have, for a while, desired to bear, even for the sins of
others, the pains of Hell itself, although without falling away from
the friendship and grace of God. And hence the Congregation of Sacred
Rites considered that this doctrine did not militate against the
holiness of the said _Beata_ or against the approbation of her virtues
as heroic.”[77]
X. PECULIARITIES CONCERNING THE INVOCATION OF SAINTS AND INTERCESSORY
PRAYER.
And a third and last peculiarity is particularly instructive as showing
how entirely an unusual, at first sight quietistic, practice is not
restricted, in her case, to specifically Catholic habits.
1. _The facts._
This peculiarity has already appeared in part in the second of the two
accounts as to her attitude towards Indulgences. “She abstained from
recommending herself to the intercession of others.” And this is borne
out, but (as we shall find) with certain unforeseeable restrictions, by
the rest of the _Vita_. As regards even the Saints, one only invocation
of any one of them is on record,--that of St. Benedict in 1474, already
given.
And if she did not ask others for prayers for herself in her own
lifetime, her own prayers for others were evidently rare, were
apparently always concerned with their spiritual welfare, and were
generally produced only under some special interior impulsion. Hence
when asked, in 1496 or later, by Vernazza, in the name of several of
her spiritual children, to pray that God might grant them “some little
drops of His Love,” she answers that “for these I cannot ask anything
from this tender Love; I can but present them in His presence.” This
is, no doubt, because she sees them to be already full of the love of
God. Whereas in 1495 the poor working man, Marco del Sale, is dying
of a cancer in the face, and is in a state of wild impatience: so she
prays most fervently for him. It is true that the _Vita_ adds that she
did so, “having had an interior movement to this effect. For she never
could turn to pray for a particular object, unless she had first felt
herself called interiorly by her Love.” Still, this did not prevent
her, in 1497, from praying most fervently for patience for her husband,
(who was dying from a painful complaint,) simply “because she feared
that he might lose his soul,” and without any other more peculiar
incentive than this.[78]
2. _The rich variety of her life._
Evidently here again, as with the Confessions and Indulgences, her life
and practice were indefinitely varied and spontaneous, and incomparably
richer than the preconceptions and logic of at least some of her
biographers will admit, or indeed than many of her own fervent sayings,
so vividly expressive of certain moments or sides of her career or
character, suggest or even seem to leave possible. But the underlying
meaning and ultimate harmonization of these apparent inconsistencies
between her doctrine and her practice, we can only gradually hope to
find.