And next, we have here her last coherent utterance; and the care and

fearless honesty with which it has been chronicled and printed as

such--and as the concluding words of a chapter (Chapter L), up to at

least the fourth edition, Venice 1601--are truly admirable. The words,

“that wants to eat,” appear in MSS. “A” and “B,” and are, I think,

authentic. They may mean that the beast was looking about for some

unspecified food, or that it was wanting to devour her (the former is,

I think, the more likely meaning, for there is no indication of fright,

and _devorare_ would, in the latter case, be the more natural word). We

have, in any case, a quasi-physical, distinctly _maladif_ impression;

one which, as regards at least its apparently sensible embodiment, was

the simple projection of her own mind. And indeed there is nothing

to show that she had any consciousness of any spiritual significance

about it. It has got all the opaque, uninteresting character of mere,

given, unrelated, and unsuggestive fact, which all such purely nervous

projections always have; and stands thus in complete and instructive

contrast to her finely suggestive and transparent, spiritually

significant _Viste_, which contributed so largely to the volitional

stimulation and moral and religious witness and truth of her life.

4. _Catherine’s death, dawn of September 15, 1510._

During the early night hours of “the 14th, she again lost much blood,

and she weakened much in her speech. Yet she once more, and it was

the last time, communicated as usual. And throughout this day she lay

there, with her pulse so slight as to be unfindable.” And “many devoted

friends were present.”

And as the subsequent night ceased to be Saturday and became Sunday,

the 15th, “she was asked whether she wished to communicate. But she

then pointed with her right index-finger towards the sky.” And her

friends understood that she wished to indicate by this that she had to

go and communicate in heaven. “And at this moment, this blessed soul

gently expired, in great peace and tranquillity, and flew to her tender

and much desired Love.”[213]

Here three points are of interest. Catherine undoubtedly died at, or

shortly before, dawn on the 15th September, as is clearly required by

the older account on page 160_c_ of the _Vita_. Yet a second account,

sufficiently early to appear in all the MSS., is given on page 161_c_,

according to which she died on the 14th. The reason of this latter

pragmatic “correction” is obvious: the 15th is but the Octave of the

Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, the 14th is the Feast of the Exaltation

of the Cross. The temptation to find a final, strikingly appropriate

synchronism, when, to do so, her death need only be pushed back some

six hours at most, was too great to be resisted to the end; and an

untrained, enthusiastic, imaginative mind like Argentina’s would,

probably from the very first, have almost unconsciously helped to

establish, or perhaps she single-handedly fixed, this date.

And next, the “many friends” present will no doubt have included her

sole surviving brother Lorenzo and his son Francesco, who, only three

days before, had witnessed her Codicil; one or other of the four

“Protectors” of the Hospital; Don Carenzio, the Rector; and Argentina

del Sale. But Vernazza, as we already know, was far away; and, as we

shall find in a moment, Mariola, and, above all, Marabotto, though both

in Genoa, were both absent from her death-bed. Now it is certain that

the absence of Marabotto cannot have been accidental, for death had

evidently been recognized by all to be imminent, ever since the 12th

at least; and he himself would certainly not have put anything in the

world before attending Catherine at the moment of her death. Nor, as

we shall find, was he ill just now. Yet we must, I think, suppose him

to have been (at least off and on) about her person, during the 12th,

up to the drawing up of the Codicil, which directly concerns himself

together with Carenzio. His own name appears second, no doubt because,

as the document itself mentions, Carenzio and not he is now Rector of

the Hospital in which the document is being drawn up. Marabotto will

have withdrawn after the attack on that night which left Catherine

hardly capable of any further distinguishing one person from another;

and he will have retired because Carenzio, from some little jealousy

or feeling of punctilio, cared to claim the right, as Rector, alone

to attend her at the last; or for some other slight reason such as

this. In any case, there is here one more indication of a certain

friction and rivalry amongst her attendants and chroniclers, which,

however painful, will help us in our study of the peculiarities of her

biography. There is, however, nothing to show that Marabotto’s final

withdrawal took place at the instigation, or even with the knowledge,

of Catherine; and the cause of that withdrawal can certainly not have

been a grave one.

And finally, there appeared eventually, at earliest in the fifth

edition, 1615, but possibly not till the sixth, in 1645, or even later,

a gloss which effectually prevents her “unedifying” remark of the 13th

from being her last utterance. After the words, “and at this moment,

this blessed soul,” there then appears the clause: “saying: ‘Into Thy

hands, O Lord, I commend my Spirit.’” The passage occurs in the late

and entirely secondary MS. “F,” which contains also other demonstrably

legendary “embellishments.”

5. _Intimations of her death vouchsafed to friends._

The _Vita_ gives an account of seven intimations or apparitions,

vouchsafed at the moment of her death to as many chosen friends and

disciples,--so many communications of her passage and instant complete

union with God. Although no names are given, it is easy to identify the

first six persons as Argentina del Sale, “a spiritual daughter of hers,

present at her death”; Mariola Bastarda, “another spiritual daughter of

hers, who had an evil spirit upon her (_il demonio adosso_)”; Maestro

Boerio, “a physician, her devotee”; Ettore Vernazza, “a very spiritual

man and her devotee”; Tommasa Fiesca, “a holy Religious woman, most

devoted to her”; and Benedetta Lombarda, “another Religious woman, who

had been a member of her household (_sua famigliare_).” The seventh

and last, “a nun” (_una monaca_), is so little characterized, as to

be incapable of certain identification: possibly Battista Vernazza is

meant, who, though but thirteen years old, was already an Augustinian

Novice.[214]

The order in which the first six names appear is evidently determined

partly by the degree of physical proximity to Catherine--Argentina by

her bedside, comes before Boerio in another house in Genoa, and Boerio

comes before Vernazza, since the latter is far away (_lontano_); partly

by sex--Boerio and Vernazza, though simple laymen, appear before the

three Religious women; and partly by the abnormal spiritual condition,

and consequent increase in the value of the testimony, of the souls

concerned--Mariola the Possessed comes first among all those not

actually present at the death. Even this order, and still more the form

of all these little notices, show plainly that the stress is laid, not

so much on the intimation of the death, as on that of the immediate

entrance into glory. Note that there is no reference anywhere to Don

Carenzio, certainly as much present at the death as Argentina; nor,

within this particular list, to Don Marabotto, as certainly absent as

Ettore Vernazza.

It is disappointing to find that, whereas such intimations, or at least

communications as to death at the moment of its occurrence, belong

to the best authenticated of the more mysterious human experiences,

and although we would expect to find some such unmistakably vivid and

first-hand accounts at this point in the life of one so spiritually

great and so deeply loved as was Catherine, the accounts are all,

with the possible exception of that concerning Boerio, very general

and colourless. As to Boerio we are told: “A Physician, her devotee,

was asleep, but awoke at the moment of her passing, and heard a voice

which said to him: ‘Abide with God; I am now going to Paradise.’ And

he called his wife and said to her: ‘Madonna Caterina has died at this

moment’; and this turned out to have been the case.”[215]

Two insipid, vague, and gossipy fragments concerning Don Marabotto

strive to make up for his absence from the list of the seven recipients

of synchronizing intimations. “Her Confessor during that night (14th to

15th) and throughout the following day (15th), had no notice whatever

concerning her.” This is told as if it had been something spiritually

remarkable, whereas it was evidently but strangely unkind on the part

of the other friends of Catherine. “The next day (16th) he attempted

to say a Mass for the Dead for the soul of Catherine.” He evidently

had been told on the evening of the 15th, or quite early on the 16th,

for there is here no claim to any supernatural intimation. “And he

found himself unable to pray for her in particular. And again on the

following day, whilst saying a Mass in honour of several Martyrs, his

mind was suddenly, from the Introit onwards, fixed upon Catherine’s

spiritual martyrdom, so that his abundant weeping made it difficult for

him to finish his Mass.”[216] There is, as so often with Marabotto,

something slightly comical, and yet respectable, because thoroughly

genuine, loyal, and truthful, about this his eager desire to experience

something unusual, the careful registration of something quite

commonplace, and the wistful attempt to make it out extraordinary after

all.

6. _Alleged miraculous condition of Catherine’s skin and heart._

There remain two more medical details, which are, however, of some

significance in connection with the spirit of her _entourage_.

Her skin is declared to have been, after death, of a yellow colour

throughout. Indeed in various places of the _Vita_ yellow or red colour

is noted in connection with her person, but generally as localized

about the region of the heart. But the accounts vary, indeed contradict

each other, so much, that I shrink from finally adopting any one

account.[217]

The action of her heart was often laborious or even acutely painful:

“At the last, owing to the great fire of pure and penetrating love,

that burnt within her heart, the skin over it became so tender as to be

unable to be touched. It seemed as though she had a wound right through

her heart. And she often held her hand over it; and it would pant like

a pair of bellows, on one day more than on another.”[218] And how

often had not Catherine spoken of the wondrous things, the spiritual

joys and sufferings, that she felt within her heart! And so some of

her materializing biographers, probably some of her attendants before

them, doubt not that “if only her (physical) heart had been examined

after death, some marvellous sign would have been found upon it.”[219]

We even find a report that “this holy soul, several months before her

death, left an order that, after her death, her body should be opened

and her heart examined, because they would find it all consumed (burnt

up) by love. Nevertheless her friends did not dare to do so.”[220] This

sheer legend will have been due to Argentina, and will have become

articulate long after the first deposition of Catherine’s remains.

There is certainly no other, indeed no kind of authentic, evidence of

any such wish or hesitation on the part of any one at the time. It is

sad to note how rapidly and easily, all but inevitably, the vivid,

spiritual ideas and experiences of Catherine were thus materialized and

spoilt.

V. SKETCH OF CATHERINE’S SPIRITUAL CHARACTER AND SIGNIFICANCE.

Before proceeding further to what is really still a necessary part

and elucidation of Catherine’s spiritual character and special

significance,--her doctrine and the posthumous effect, extension,

and application of her life and teaching upon and by means of her

greatest disciples,--it may be well to pause a little, and to try and

give, as far as the largely fragmentary and vague evidence permits, a

short and vivid picture and summary, in part retrospective and in part

prospective, of the special type, meaning and importance of Catherine’s

personality and spiritual attitude, and of the interrelation of the

two. In so doing I propose to move, as far as possible, from the

psycho-physical and temperamental peculiarities and determinisms

of her case, up to the spiritual characteristics and ethical

self-determinations; and to try and note everywhere what she was not as

definitely as what she was. For only thus shall we have some adequate

apprehension of the “beggarly elements” which she found, and of the

spiritual organism and centre of far-reaching influence which she left.

And only thus too will it be possible to see at all clearly the cost,

the limitations, and the special functions, temporary and permanent, of

her particular kind of soul and sanctity.

1. _Her special temperament._

It is clear then, first, that in her we have to do with a highly

nervous, delicately poised, immensely sensitive and impressionable

psycho-physical organism and temperament. It was a temperament which,

had it been unmatched by a mind and will at least its equals; had

these latter not found, or been found by, a definite, rich, and

supernaturally powerful, historical, and institutional religion; and

had not the mind and will, with this religious help, been kept in

constant operation upon it, would have spelt, if not moral ruin, at

least life-long ineffectualness. Yet, as a matter of fact, not only

did this temperament not dominate her, with the apparently rare and

incomplete exceptions of some but semi-voluntary, short impressions

and acts during the last months of her life; but it became one of the

chief instruments and materials of her life’s work and worth. Only

together with such a mind and will, is such a temperament not a grave

drawback; and even with them it is an obvious danger, and requires

their constant careful checking and active shaping.

And this temperament involved an unusually large subconscious life. All

souls have some amount of this life, but many have it but slight and

shallow: she had it of a quite extraordinary degree and depth. A coral

reef, growing up from, and just peering above, a hundred fathom-deep

ocean, would be an appropriate picture of the large predominance of

subconsciousness in this spacious soul. And even this circumstance

alone would cause her spiritual lights and fully conscious experiences

to come abruptly, and in the form of quasi-physical seizures and

surprises. Continuous, and possibly long, incubations of ideas and

feelings would thus be taking place in the subconscious region, and

these feelings and ideas would then, when fully ripe, or on some slight

stimulation from the conscious region or directly from the outer world,

make sudden irruptions into that full consciousness. Nor would such

natural suddenness of full consciousness really militate against the

claim to supernaturalness of the ideas and feelings thus revealed. For

they would still be most rightly conceived as the work of God’s Spirit

in and through the action of her own spirit: not their causation and

their source, but simply the suddenness of their revelation and the

channel of their outlet would lose in supernaturalness.

And hers was a soul with habitually large fields of consciousness.

Apparently from her conversion onwards, and certainly during the last

fourteen years of her life, the moments or days of narrow fields

were, till quite the last weeks or even days, comparatively rare;

and their narrowness was evidently always felt as most painful and

oppressive. And the interior occupation was so intense; the several

fields succeeded each other with such an apparent automatism and

quality of even physical seizure; and they were either so entrancing

by their largeness or so depressing by their narrowness: that to souls

not in tune with hers, she must, in the former moods, have appeared as

egoistic, as (in a sense) too much of a man, as one absorbed in great

but purely general, super-personal ideas which were making her forget

both her own and her fellow-creature’s minor wants; and, in the latter

moods, as downrightly egotistic, as (in a way) too much of a woman, as

one engrossed in her own purely individual, small and fanciful troubles

and trials. Yet the “Egoism” is not dominant during her middle period,

since it is certain that her charitable and administrative activities,

and close affective interest in the daily, physical and emotional lot

and demands of the poor and lowly, were most real and considerable.

And, in her third period, it was this very “Egoism” which, as we shall

see, was the form and means of the interior apprehension and exterior

elaboration of her most original and suggestive doctrines, and became

the occasion for her stimulation of other intensely active souls on

to great nation-wide enterprises of the most practical, permanent,

and heroic kind. And the “Egotistic” moods are unapparent before the

last two years or less of her life; and they then are clearly but

the occasional, involuntary suspensions or partial yieldings of her

normally iron will,--rare checks and intermittences which, with little

or no preventible faultiness on her own part, give us pathetically

vivid glimpses of what that normal life of hers cost her to achieve

and to maintain, and of what she would have been, if bereft of God’s

generosity ever awakening, deepening, and operating through her own.

All this sensitiveness, subconsciousness, spaciousness, variety, and

suddenness of apprehension and feeling; all this largely chaotic,

mutually conflicting, raw material of her spiritual life, even if it

had existed alongside of but feeble and inert powers of organization

and transformation, would not have failed to produce considerable

suffering; although, in such a case, that suffering would have

remained largely inarticulate, and would have left the soul checked

and counterchecked by various tyrannous passions and fancies. The soul

would thus have been less efficient and persuasive than the least

subconscious and sensitive specimens of average and “common-sense”

humanity. But, in her case, all this unusually turbulent raw material

was in unusually close contiguity to powers of mind and of will of a

rare breadth and strength. And this very closeness of apposition and

width of contrast, and this great strength of mind and will, made

all that disordered multiplicity, distraction, and dispersion of her

clamorous, many-headed, many-hearted nature, a tyranny impossible and

unnecessary to bear. And yet to achieve the actual escape from such a

tyranny, the mastering of such a rabble, and the harmonization of such

a chaos, meant a constant and immense effort, a practically unbroken

grace-getting and self-giving, an ever-growing heroism and indeed

sanctity, and, with and through all these things, a corresponding

expansion and virile joy. It can thus be said, in all simple truth,

that she became a saint because she had to; that she became it,

to prevent herself going to pieces: she literally had to save, and

actually did save, the fruitful life of reason and of love, by

ceaselessly fighting her immensely sensitive, absolute, and claimful

self.

2. _Catherine and Marriage._

Catherine’s mind was without humour or wit; and this was, of course, a

serious drawback. And her temperament was of so excessive a mentality,

as to amount to something more or less abnormal. For not only is there

no trace about her, at any time, of moral vulgarity of any kind, or of

any tendency to it; and this is, of course, a grand strength; but she

seems at all times to have been greatly lacking in that quite innocent

and normal sensuousness, which appears to form a necessary element of

the complete human personality. It is true that in the anecdotes of

her impulsive and yet reverent affection for the pestiferous woman and

the cancerous workman, with the finely self-oblivious sympathy which

moves her to kiss the mouth of the first, and long to remain with her

arms around the neck of the other, there is the beautiful tenderness

and daring of a great positive purity, of the purity of flame and not

of snow. And her love of her servants, Argentina in particular, and

of poor Thobia, is exquisitely true and constant. Yet even all this

can hardly be classed with the element referred to, with that love of

children and of women as the bearers of them, that instinct of union

with all that is pure and fruitful in the normal life of sex, such as

is so beautifully present throughout St. Luke’s Gospel, but which is,

at least relatively, absent from St. John’s.

Possibly her unhappy and childless marriage determined the

non-development or the mortification of any tendencies to such a

temper. But the absence referred to was more probably caused by her

congenital psychical temperament and state themselves; and, if so,

it would point to her as a person hardly intended for marriage, and

as one who, through no fault of her own, could not satisfy the less

purely mental of the perfectly licit requirements which make up the

many-levelled wants of a normal, or at least ordinary, man’s and

husband’s nature. Pompilia’s dying words, in Browning’s “Ring and the

Book,” would, probably at any time after her premature involuntary

marriage, have found an appropriate place upon Catherine’s lips, had

she ever thought it loyal or kind to utter them: “‘In heaven there is

neither marriage nor giving in marriage.’ How like Jesus Christ to say

that!”

Yet it is at least as difficult to think of her as really intended for

the cloister. That early wish of hers to join a religious community,

sincere and keen as it no doubt was at the time, evidently faded

away completely, probably already before her conversion thirteen

years later, and certainly before her widowhood. Perhaps she would

have been best suited, throughout her adult years, to the life of an

unmarried woman living in the world,--to the kind of life which she

actually led during her widowhood, with such changes in it as her

earlier, robuster health would have involved for those earlier years.

She would thus, throughout her life, have divided her energies, in

various degrees and combinations, between attention to the multiform,

practical, physico-emotional wants of the poor; the give and take of

stimulation and enlightenment to and from some few large-hearted,

heroically operative friends; and, as source and centre of all such

actual achievements and of indefinitely greater possibilities, indeed

as a life already largely eternal and creative,--contemplative prayer

of various degrees and kinds. But such a life, if it would have left

out much disappointment and suffering, and not for herself alone, yet

would also have been without the special occasions and incentives to

her sudden conversion and long patience and detailed magnanimity. Her

life, in appearing on the surface as less of a failure, would at bottom

have been less of a spiritual success.

Indeed the failures and fragmentarinesses of her life, even if and

where more than merely apparent to us or even to herself, helped and

still help to give a poignant forcefulness to her example and teaching.

There is nothing pre- or post-arranged, nothing artificial or stagey,

nothing, in the deliberate occupations of her convert life, that is

simply brooding about this woman: when she thinks or prays, she does

so; when she acts, she acts; when she suffers, she suffers; and there

is an end of it. The infinitely winning qualities of a simple veracity;

of a successive livingness, because ever operative occupation with the

actual real moment, and not with the after-shadow of the past nor with

the fore-shadow of the future; and, through all this, of a healthy

creatureliness are thus spread over all she does,--over her virtues,

which are never reflected as such within her own pure mind, and over

her very weaknesses and failings which, summed up in their source, her

false self, are ever being acknowledged, feared, and fought, with a

heroism not less massive because its methods are so wisely indirect.

3. _Catherine and Friendship and the Poor._

It is plain that Catherine’s temperament was naturally a profoundly

sad one, although her acutest attacks of melancholy were generally

succeeded by some unusually great expansion, illumination or

consolidation of soul. She had, to adopt a term of recent psychology,

a very low “difference-threshold”: easily and swiftly would her

consciousness be affected by every kind of irritant: even a slight

stimulation would at once produce pain, anxiety, or oppression of mind

or soul. She was thus evidently made for a few life-long friends,

for such as would deserve the privilege of giving much sympathy and

patience, and of getting back helps and stimulations indefinitely

greater both in quality and kind; and was not fitted for many

acquaintances of the ordinary kind, with their hurry of disjointed,

hand-to-mouth, half-awake thinking, feeling, and doing.

And it is very noticeable that her friendships and attachments of

all kinds were of a steadiness and perseverance to which there are

no real exceptions. To Giuliano, markedly inferior in nature though

he evidently was to her, and positively unfaithful during the early

years of their long, ill-assorted marriage, she remained faithful even

during those first years which she herself never ceased to condemn as

her pre-conversion period; she behaved with true magnanimity towards

himself and Thobia and Thobia’s mother; and she even evinced a certain

affective attachment to him and to his memory. And it would hardly

be fair to quote the change in the dispositions as to her place of

burial in proof of a change in her dispositions towards him. She whose

affectionate interest in Thobia is shown, by irrefragable documentary

proof, to have persevered, indeed increased, to the end of the poor

young woman’s life, will not have changed in her feelings towards her

own dead husband. Towards her brothers and sister, her nephews and

nieces, her numerous Wills and Codicils show that she entertained a

constant and operative affection.

These same documents prove that her affection and gratitude towards

Don Marabotto were equally sincere and provident. It is true that she

twice broke off relations with him, although only for a day and three

days respectively; and, at the last, this devoted friend of the last

eleven years of her life was no more about her. Yet we have remarked

that those two former absences were but caused by reasonable fears of

getting spoilt by him; and that the final absence was no doubt in no

way her doing. And perhaps the most impressive of all her attachments

were that to the Hospital, as representative of the sick poor whom

she had served, so actively and at such cost to self, for twenty-five

years and more,--all her legal dispositions and her very domicile for

the last thirty years of her life proclaim the permanent prominence of

this interest; and her affection towards her servants, since nothing

could be more considerate, thoughtful, equable, and persevering than

her care and love for Benedetta, Mariola, and Argentina. Here again I

cannot find any certain exceptions: for we know nothing of the history

of the servant Antoinetta except that, even on the one occasion of her

mention, it appeared already doubtful whether the girl herself would

care to remain with her mistress to the end.

There is but one apparent, and indeed a startling, exception to this

unbroken continuity of affection. Ettore Vernazza, certainly the

greatest and closest, the most docile and the most influential, of

her disciples, he to whom we owe the transmission of the larger and

the most precious part of her teaching and spirit, and who, as will

be seen, became, after her death even more than before it, and more

and more right up to his own heroic end, the living reproduction and

extension of the very deepest and greatest experiences and influences

of her life: Vernazza appears nowhere in her Wills, except as, on one

occasion, the actual drawer of the document, and, on another, as a

witness. And he was far away, and clearly not accidentally, at the time

of her death. I take it to be quite certain that we have here not an

exception, at the point of her fullest sympathy, to that gratitude and

permanence of feeling which obtained demonstrably in the other, lesser

cases; but that this silence and this departure are to be explained,

the former entirely, and the latter in part, by the special character

as much of Ettore as of Catherine, and by the special form which their

friendship assumed in consequence. I shall return to this point in my

chapter on Vernazza.

4. _Her Absorptions and Ecstatic States._

Catherine’s states of absorption in prayer, such as we find ever since

her conversion, were transparently real and sincere, and were so swift

and spontaneous as to appear quasi-involuntary. They were evidently,

together with, and largely on occasion of, her reception of the Holy

Eucharist, the chief means and the ordinary form of the accessions of

strength and growth to her spiritual life.

Possibly throughout the four years of the first period of her convert

life, certainly and increasingly throughout the twenty-two years of the

second, middle period, these absorptions occurred frequently, indeed

daily; they were long, and lasted up to six hours at a stretch; and

they were apparently timed by herself, and never rendered her incapable

of hearing or attending to any call to acts of duty or of charity, and

of breaking off then and there. And throughout these years she seems

to have known but one kind of absorption, this primarily spiritual

one, which appears to have been a particularly deep Prayer of Quiet;

and she appears to have always been, if exercised, yet also profoundly

sustained and strengthened, by it, even physically, for the large

activity and numerous trials and sufferings awaiting her on her return

to her ordinary life. And these were the years during which she lived

with no mediate guidance.

During the last eleven, perhaps even thirteen years of her life, first

one, and then, considerably later, a second change occurs in these

respects. First these profound, healthy, and fruitful absorptions, and

the power to occasion or effect, to bear or endorse them, diminish

greatly, though apparently gradually, in length, regularity, and

efficiency; indeed they do so almost as markedly as does the capacity

for external work, their former complement and correlative. The

spiritual life now breaks up into a greater variety of shorter and

more fitful incidents and manifestations. The sympathy of friends,

the sustaining counsel of priests, and the communication on her part

of many spiritual thoughts and experiences take, in large part, the

place of those long spells of the Prayer of Quiet or of Union, and

still more of that external activity which are both now becoming more

and more impossible to her. And next,--though not, as far as our

evidence goes, before the last six months or so of her life,--there

arises a second series of absorptions, externally closely similar, yet

internally profoundly different. These latter absorptions are primarily

psychical and involuntary, indeed psychopathic. And she herself shows

and declares her knowledge of this their pathological character, her

ability to distinguish them from their healthy rivals, her inability

to throw them off unaided, her wish that others should rouse her from

them, and her power to accept and second such initiation coming to her

from a will-centre other than her own.

Now her attendants and biographers, possibly all of them and even

during her lifetime, considered and called those healthy absorptions

“ecstasies”; and though we have clear evidence of her ever having

shrunk from so naming them herself, and though, here as everywhere, she

habitually turned away from considering the form and psycho-physical

concomitants of her spiritual experiences, and concentrated her

attention on their content and ethico-religious truth and power, there

seems to be no special reason for quarrelling with their application

of this term. Yet it is of great importance to observe that none of

her teaching can with propriety be called directly Pneumatic. For I

can find nothing that even purports to have been spoken in a state

of trance, nor anything authentic that claims to convey, during

her times of ordinary consciousness, anything learnt during those

states of absorption other than what, in a lesser degree, is probably

experienced, during at least some rare moments, by all souls that have

attained to the so-called Prayer of Quiet. It is quite clear, I think,

that in all these authentic passages, the states of absorption are

treated substantially as times when the conscious region of her soul,

a region always relatively shallow, sinks down into the ever-present

deep regions of subconsciousness; and hence as experiences which can

only be described indirectly,--in their effects, as traced by and in

the conscious soul, after its rising up again, from this immersion in

subconsciousness, to its more ordinary condition of so-called “full

consciousness,” _i.e._ as full a consciousness as is normal, for this

particular soul, in the majority of moments as are not devoted to

physical sleep.

But if apparently none of Catherine’s contemplations are derived

directly from things learnt during these times of absorption; those

contemplations are, none the less, all indirectly influenced, in

the most powerful and multiform manner, by these absorptions. For

these absorptions constituted the moments of the soul’s feeding and

harmonization, and they enriched and concentrated it, for the service

of its fellows, the occasion of further self-enlargement. And these

absorptions, with their combination of experienced fruitfulness and

undeniable obscurity, for the very soul that has passed through them,

when this soul has returned to ordinary consciousness, give to all,

even to the most lucid of her sayings, a beautiful margin of mist and

mystery, a never-ceasing sense of the incomprehensibility, and yet of

the soul’s capacity for an intellectual adumbration, of the realities

and truths in which our whole spiritual life is rooted,--realities and

truths which she is thus, without even a touch of inconsistency, ever

struggling to apprehend and to communicate a little less inadequately

than before.

5. _Catherine’s teaching._

Catherine’s teaching, as we have it, is, at first sight, strangely

abstract and impersonal. God nowhere appears in it, at least in so

many words, either as Father, or as Friend, or as Bridegroom of the

soul. This comes no doubt, in part, from the circumstance that she

had never known the joys of maternity, and had never, for one moment,

experienced the soul-entrancing power of full conjugal union. It comes,

perhaps, even more, from her somewhat abnormal temperament, the (in

some respects) exclusive mentality which we have already noted. But it

certainly springs at its deepest from one of the central requirements

and experiences of her spiritual life; and must be interpreted by the

place and the function which this apparently abstract teaching occupies

within this large experimental life of hers which stimulates, utilizes,

and transcends it all. For here again we are brought back to her rare

thirst, her imperious need, for unification; to the fact that she was a

living, closely knit, ever-increasing spiritual organism, if there ever

was one.

This unification tended, in its reasoned, theoretic presentation, even

to overshoot the mark: for it would be impossible to press those of

her sayings in which her true self appears as literally God, or her

state of quiet as a complete motionlessness or even immovability.

Yet in practice this unification ever remained admirably balanced

and fruitful, since, in and for her actual life, it was being ever

conceived and applied as but a whole-hearted, constantly renewed,

continuously necessary, costing and yet enriching, endeavour to

harmonize and integrate the ever-increasing elements and explications

of her nature and experience. And even on the two points mentioned,

her theory gives an admirably vivid presentment of the prima facie

impression produced by its deepest experiences upon every devoted soul.

And on other points her theory is, even as such, admirably sober,

closely knit, and stimulating. For, as to the cause of Evil, she ever

restricts herself to finding it in her own nature, and to fighting it

there: hence the personality of Evil, though nowhere denied, yet rarely

if ever concerns her, and never does so directly in her strenuous and

practical life. Yet, on the other hand, this fight takes, with her, the

form not primarily of a conflict with this or that particular fault,

these several conflicts then summing themselves up into a more or less

interconnected warfare; but it makes straight for the very root-centre

of all the particular faults, and, by constantly checking and starving

that, suppresses these. And hence the Positive, Radical character of

Evil is, in practice, continuously emphasized by her.

Yet this root-centre of Evil within her was most certainly not

conceived by her as a merely general and abstract false self or

self-seeking. Her biographers, mostly over-anxious to prove the

innocence of her nature, even at the expense of the heroism of her life

and of the reasonableness and truthfulness of her statements, are no

doubt responsible for the constant air of would-be devout and amiable

(!) exaggeration which she wears on all this self-fighting side of

her. Yet we have, I think, but to take the simplest and most authentic

of the rival accounts,--those which give us the smallest quantity

of self-denunciation, and we can understand the quality of this

self-blame, and can fix its special, entirely concrete and pressing,

occasion and object. For considering the immense claimfulness, the

cruel jealousy, the tyrannous fancifulness, the brooding inventiveness,

the at last incurable absoluteness of the weak and bad side and

tendency of a temperament and natural character such as hers, had

it been allowed to have its way, there is, I think, nothing really

excessive or morbid, nothing that is not most healthy and humble,

and hence sensible and admirably self-cognitive and truthful, about

this heroic strenuousness, this ever-watchful, courageous fear of

self, and those declarations of hers that this false self was as bad

as any devil. To such a temperament and _attrait_ as hers only one

master could be deliberately taken, or could be long borne, as centre

of the soul: God _or_ Self;--not two: God _and_ Self. And hence all

practice on even tolerance of, as it were, separate compartments of

the soul; all “a little of this, and not too much of that” spirit; all

“making the best of both worlds” temper; all treatment of religion as

a means to other ends, or as so much uninterpreted inheritance and

dead furniture or fixed and frozen possession of the mind, or as a

respectable concomitant and condiment or tolerable parasite to other

interests: all such things must have been more really impossible to her

than would have been the lapse into self-sufficiency and self-idolatry,

and the attempt to find happiness in such a downward unification.

And the one true divine root-centre of her individual soul is ever,

at the same time, experienced and conceived as present, in various

degrees and ways, simply everywhere, and in everything. All the world

of spirits is thus linked together; and a certain slightest remnant

of a union exists even between Heaven and Hell, between the lost and

the saved. For there is no absolute or really infinite Evil existent

anywhere; whilst everywhere there are some traces of and communications

from the Absolute Good, the Source and Creator of the substantial

being of all things that are. And to possess even God, and all of

God, herself alone exclusively, would have been to her, we can say it

boldly, a truly intolerable state, if this state were conceived as

accompanied by any consciousness of the existence of other rational

creatures entirely excluded from any and every degree or kind of such

possession. It is, on the contrary, the apprehension of how she, as

but one of the countless creatures of God, is allowed to share in the

effluence of the one Light and Life and Love, an effluence which,

identical in essential character everywhere, is not entirely absent

anywhere: it is the abounding consciousness of this universal bond and

brotherhood, this complete freedom from all sectarian exclusiveness and

from all exhaustive appropriation of God, the Sun of the Universe, by

any or all of the just or unjust, upon all of whom He shines: it is all

this that constitutes her element of unity, saneness, and breadth, the

one half of her faith, and the greater part of her spiritual joy.

And the other half of her faith constitutes her element of difference,

multiplicity and depth, and is itself made up of two distinct

convictions. No two creatures have been created by God with the same

capacities; and, although they are each called by Him to possess Him

to the full of their respective capability, they will necessarily,

even if they all be fully faithful to their call, possess Him in

indefinitely and innumerably various degrees and ways. And, so far,

there is still nothing but joy in her soul. Indeed we can say that the

previous element of unity and breadth calls for this second element

of diversity and depth; and that only in and with the other can each

element attain to its own full development and significance, and thus

the two together can constitute a living whole.

But the second conviction as to difference is a sombre and saddening

one. For she holds further that the diversity is not only one of

degrees of goodness and a universal fulness of variously sized living

vessels of life and joy; but that there is also a diversity in the

degree of self-making or self-marring on the part of the free-willing,

self-determining creatures of God. Here too she still, it is true,

finds the omnipresent divine Goodness at work, and in a double fashion

and degree. The self-marring of some, probably, in her view, of most

souls, gets slowly and blissfully albeit painfully unmade by the

voluntary acceptance, on the part of these souls, of the suffering

rightly attaching, in a quite determinist manner, to all direct,

deliberate, and detached pleasure-seeking of the false self. And this

is Purgatory, which is essentially the same whether thus willed and

suffered in this world or in the next. And the self-marring of other,

probably the minority of, sinful souls, though no longer capable of

any essential unmaking, is yet in so far overruled by the divine

Goodness (which, here as everywhere, is greater than the creature’s

badness), that even here there ever remains a certain residue of

moral goodness, and that a certain mitigation of the suffering which

necessarily accompanies the remaining and indeed preponderant evil is

mercifully effected by God. And this is Hell, which is essentially

the same, whether thus, as to its pain, not willed but suffered here

or hereafter. Thus she neither holds an _Apocatastasis_, a Final

Restitution of all things,--what might be called a Universal Purgatory,

nor a Gradual Mitigation of the sufferings of the lost; but the

eventual complete purgation and restitution applies only to some,

though probably to most, souls, and the mitigation of this suffering,

in the case of the lost, is not gradual but instantaneous.

Here again, then, we find her thirst for unification strikingly at

work. For she discovers one single divine Goodness as active and

efficient throughout the universe; and she everywhere finds spiritual

pain to consist in the discordance felt by the rational creature

between its actual contingent condition and its own indestructible

ideal, and such pain to be everywhere automatically consequent upon

deliberate acts of self-will. Hence the suffering is nowhere separately

willed or separately sent by God; and, in all cases of restoration,

the suffering, in proportion as it is freely willed by the sufferer,

is ever medicinal and curative and never vindictive. It is these

considerations which make her able to endure this sombre side of

reality.

Now it is all this second set of beliefs, all this faith in diversity,

multiplicity, and depth, which prevents any touch of real Pantheism

or Indifferentism from defacing the breadth of her outlook, and

effectually neutralizes any tendency to a sheer Optimism or Monism.

She loves God’s Light and Love so much, that she is indefatigable in

seeking, and constantly happy in finding, and incapable of not loving,

even the merest glimpses of it, everywhere. And yet, precisely on that

same account, everywhere the central passion of her soul is given

to fostering the further growth of this Light and Love, to already

loving it even more as it will or may be than as it already is, and

thus deeply loving it already, in order that it may be still more

lovable by and by. And thus the universality, and what we may call

the particularity, of God’s self-communication and of the creature’s

response, are equally preserved, and in suchwise that each safeguards,

supplements, and stimulates the other. And thus her grace-stimulated

craving, both for indefinite expansion and breadth and for indefinite

concentration and depth, is met and nourished by this width and

distance, this clarity and dimness of outlook on to the rich and

awe-inspiring greatness of God and of His world of souls.

And union with this one Centre is, for all rational free-willing

creatures, to be achieved, at any one and at every moment, by the

whole-hearted willing and doing, by the full endorsing, of some one

thing,--some one unique state and duty offered to the soul in that

one unique moment. Thus life gets apparently broken up into so many

successive steps and degrees of work, each to be attended to as though

it were the first and last; and as so much special material and

occasion for the practice of unification, ostensibly in the matter

supplied and for the moment which supplies it, but really in the soul

to which it is offered and for the totality of its life. Her soul

is, even if taken at any one moment, and still more, of course, if

considered in its successive history, overflowing with various acts,

with (as it were) so many numberless waves and wavelets, currents

and cross-currents of volition; and the warp and woof of her life’s

weaving is really close-knit with numberless threads of single

willings, preceded and succeeded by single perceptions, conceptions,

and feelings of the soul. Yet the very fulness of this flow and the

closeness of this weaving, their great and ever-increasing orderliness

and spontaneity, such as we can and must conceive them to have been

present during the majority of the moments of her convert and waking

life, tended, during such times, to obliterate any clear consciousness

of their different constituents, and to produce the impression of

one single state, even one single act. And this very action, even

inasmuch as thus felt to be simple and one, is furthermore experienced

psychically as a surprise and seizure from without, rather than as a

self-determination from within. And this psychic peculiarity is taken

by her as but the occasion and emotional, quasi-sensible picturing of

the ever-present and ever-growing experience and conviction that all

right human action, the very self-donation of the creature, is the

Creator’s best gift, and that the very act of her own mind and heart,

in all its complete inalienableness and spontaneity, is yet, in the

last resort, but an illumination and stimulation coming from beyond the

reaches of her own mind and will, from the mind and will of God. And

thus Ethics are englobed by Religion, Having by Doing, and Doing by

Being: yet not so that, in her fullest life, any of the higher things

suppress the lower, but so that each stimulates the very things that it

transcends.

6. _Catherine’s literary obligations. Her corrections of the

Neo-Platonist positions._

We shall trace further on how largely and spontaneously she has, from

out of the many different possible types and forms of spirituality,

chosen out, assimilated and further explicated certain Platonic and

especially certain Neo-Platonic conceptions. We shall be unable to

suggest any likely intermediary, or to assume with certainty a direct

derivation, for these conceptions from Plato, or indeed from Plotinus

or Proclus; and shall nevertheless be obliged to postulate some now

untraceable communication, on some most important points, between Plato

and herself. Besides this, she derives one Platonic conception from the

Book of Wisdom and a corresponding passage in St. Paul; and a certain

general Platonic tone and imagery from the Joannine Gospel and First

Epistle. Her Neo-Platonism, on the contrary, she derives, massively

and all but pure, through two of the Pseudo-Dionysian books and her

dearly loved Franciscan Mystic Poet, Jacopone da Todi. It is indeed

to the Pauline, Joannine, Dionysian, and Jacopone writings that she

owes, with the exception of a certain group of Platonic conceptions,

practically all that she did not directly derive from her own psychical

and spiritual experiences.

Now her assimilation of this particular strain of doctrine has

remained but partial and theoretical with respect to those parts of

Dionysian Neo-Platonism which were not borne out by the facts of her

own Christian experience; but it has extended even to her emotional

attitude and practice, in cases where the doctrine was borne out by

these facts.

Thus we shall find that she often speaks theoretically of Evil as

simply negative, as the varyingly great absence of Good. Yet, in

practice and in her autobiographical picturings, she fights her bad

self, to the very last, as a truly positive force. The force of God

is everywhere conceived as indefinitely greater, as, indeed, alone

infinite; yet the force of Evil is practically experienced and pictured

as real and positive also, in its kind and degree.

Again, she often speaks as though her spiritual life had, at some one

particular moment, simply arrived at its final culmination, and had

attained God and perfection with complete finality,--such, at least, as

this particular soul of hers can achieve. Yet, very shortly after, we

find her unmistakably in renewed movement and conflict, and observe her

mind to be now fully aware of that past “perfection” having been but

imperfect, because that act or state is now seen from a height higher

than that former level: hence that “perfection” was perfect, at most,

in relation to its helps and opportunities in and for its own special

moment.

Again, it is at times as though she conceived her body to be a sheer

clog and prison-house to the soul, and as though the soul’s weakness

and sinfulness were essentially due to its union with the flesh. But

here especially her later commentators have amplified and systematized

her teaching almost beyond recognition; the authentic sayings of this

kind, though too strong to be pressed, are few, and belong exclusively

to the last stages of her illness; and, above all, these declarations

are checked and entirely eclipsed by her normal and constant view as

to the specific nature of Moral Evil. For this Evil consists, for her,

essentially in the self-idolatry, the claimful self-centredness of

the natural man, ever tending, in a thousand mostly roundabout ways,

to make means and ends, centre and circumference, Sun and Planet

change places, and to put some more or less subtle wilfulness and

pleasure-seeking in the place of Duty, Happiness, and God. Few, even

amongst the Saints, can have realized and exemplified more profoundly

the indelible difference between pleasure and happiness, between

the false and the true self; and few have more keenly, patiently

felt and taught that the soul’s true life is, even eventually, not a

keeping or a getting what the lower instincts crave: but that, on the

contrary, a whole world of pleasures which, however base and short

and misery-productive, can be intensely and irreplaceably pleasurable

while they last, has successively to be sacrificed, for good and all;

and that what is retained has gradually to proceed from other motives,

to be grouped around other centres, and be ever only a part and a

servant, and never a master or the whole. The gulf between every kind

of Auto-centricism and the Theo-centric life, between mere Eudaemonism

and Religion, could not be found anywhere more constant or profound.

Again, it is at times as though the absence or suppression of even

the noblest of human fellow-feelings and of particular parental and

friendly, attachments, and not their purification and deepening,

multiplication and harmonization, were the end and aim of perfection.

But little or nothing of this belongs, I think, to any deliberate and

enduring theory of hers, still less to her full and normal practice;

and the impression of such inhumanity is, in so far as it is derived

from authentic documents, entirely caused by and restricted to her

early convert reaction, and her late over-strained or worn-out

psycho-physical condition.

Again, it is sometimes as though she believed indeed in an

energizing and progress of the soul, yet held this progress to be,

after conversion, an absolutely unbroken, equable, necessary and

automatic increase in perfection; and that such a soul’s last state

is, necessarily and in all respects, better than were its previous

stages.--The Redactors of her life most undoubtedly think this.

Because, for instance, she was Matron from 1490 to 1496, and could no

more fill the post from 1496 to 1510:--therefore “not to give part of

her activity to such external work was more perfect than to give it,”

is the argument that underlies their scheme for these two periods.--Yet

I can find nothing in her teaching to show that she held any such

view. She was, indeed, ever too much absorbed, by the experiences and

duties of her successive moments, to find even the leisure of mind

requisite for the manufacture of so doctrinaire a system. And indeed

there is nothing in the conception of sanctity, or in that of a gradual

and general increase in generosity and purity of the saintly soul’s

dispositions and intentions, which requires us to hold that such a

soul’s last state and efficiency is, in every respect, better than the

first. For the range and volume of the efficiency, wisdom, balance,

appropriateness of even our goodness is not determined by our will and

the graces given to our will alone. Physical and psychical health and

strength, illness and weakness; helps and hindrances from friends and

foes; the changing influences and limitations of growing age; and the

ever-shifting combinations of all these and of similar things,--things

and combinations which are all but indirectly attainable by our wills

in any way: all this is ever as truly at work upon us as our wills and

God’s spiritual graces are in operation directly within ourselves. And

if Catherine’s richness, breadth and balance of soul are, considering

her special and successive health and circumstances, remarkable up

to the very end, and probably actually grew to some extent with the

growing obstacles, yet those qualities hardly grew or could grow _pari

passu_ with these obstacles. The manifold efficiency and the unity in

multiplicity were distinctly greater before 1496 than after. And thus

the Saints too join their lowlier brethren in paying the pathetic debt

of our common mortality. They too can be called upon to survive the

culmination of their many-sided power, and to retain perpetual youth

only as regards their intention and the central ideas and the spiritual

substance of their soul.

Once more she seems as though, to make up for this apparent suppression

of the element of time, unduly to press the category of space, at least

in her contemplations. We shall see how often in these contemplations

God Himself, and the soul, or at least its various states, appear as

places; so that the whole spiritual life and world come thus to look

rather like an atomic co-ordination, a projection on to space and a

static mechanism, than an interpenetrative subordination, a production

in time or at least in duration, and a dynamic organism.--Yet it will

be found that all this imagery is consciously, though no doubt quite

naturally, used only _as_ imagery, and that it is thus used both

because it was spontaneously presented to her mind by her psychic

peculiarities and because it readily adapted itself as a vehicle to

express one of the deepest experiences and convictions of her spirit.

For her psychic peculiarities involved, on the one hand, a curiously

rapid and complete change and difference of states of consciousness,

and, on the other hand, a remarkable absence (or at least dimness) of

consciousness as to this transition itself, which, however abrupt,

was of course as truly a part of her inner life as were the several

completed states and outlooks. Now the apparently static element and

harmony in any one of these states could, of course, be at all clearly

presented in no other form than that of a spacial image; whereas the

changing element in all these states seems to have accumulated chiefly

in the subconscious region, to have at last suddenly burst into the

conscious sphere, and to have there effected the change too rapidly to

permit of, or at least to require, the presentation of this element

as such, a presentation which could only have taken the form of a

consciousness of time or of duration. From all this it follows that, to

her immediate psychic consciousness, each of her successive experiences

presented itself as ever one spacial picture, as one “place.”

And the imagery, thus quasi-automatically presented to her, could

not fail to be gladly used and emphasized by her to express the

deepest experiences of her spiritual life. For it was the element of

simultaneity, of organic interpenetration, of the God-like _Totum

Simul_, which chiefly impressed her in these deepest moments. And hence

the soul is conceived by her as, in its essence, eternal rather than an

as immortal--as, in its highest reaches and moments, outside of time

and not as simply wholly within it; and as, on such occasions, vividly

though indirectly conscious of the fact. Heaven itself is thought

of not as eventually succeeding, with its own endless succession,

to the finite succession of these our fleeting earthly days; but as

already forming the usually obscure, yet ever immensely operative,

background, groundwork, measure and centre of our being, now and here

as truly as there and then. And hence again, Heaven, Purgatory, and

Hell are for her three distinct states of the soul, already effected

in their essence here below, and experienced as what they are, in part

and occasionally here, and fully and continuously hereafter. Thus

the fundamental cleavage in the soul’s life is not between things

successive,--between the Now and the Then, and at the point of death;

but between things simultaneous, between the This and the That, and at

the point of sin and of self-seeking.

And finally, she seems at times to speak Greek-wise, as though

the soul’s life consisted essentially, or even exclusively, in an

intellection, a static contemplation. Yet we have already seen how

robust and constant is her ethical dualism, how essentially, here

below at least, happiness consists for her in a right affection and

attachment, in the continuous detaching of the true self from the false

self, and the attaching of the true self unto God. And we should note

how that intellection itself is conceived as ever accompanied by a

keen sense of its inferiority to the Reality apprehended, and as both

the result and the condition and the means of love and of an increase

of love. And again we should note that this sense of inferiority

does not succeed the intellection, as the result of any reasoning on

the disparity between the finite and Infinite, but accompanies that

intellection itself, and corresponds to the surplusage of her feelings

over her mental seeings, and of her experience over her knowledge. And

we should add the fact that, in the most emphatic of her sayings, she

makes the essence of Heaven to consist in the union of the finite with

the Infinite Will; and that this doctrine alone would seem readily to

harmonize with her favourite teaching as to Heaven beginning here below.

7. _Her attitude towards Historical and Institutional Religion._

If the Platonic and Neo-Platonic elements appear, at first sight,

as massive and even excessive constituents of Catherine’s doctrine,

Historical and Institutional Christianity seems, on a cursory survey,

to contribute strangely little even to her practice. Not one of her

ordinary contemplations is directly occupied with any scene from Our

Lord’s life. The picture of the “Pietà,” so impressive to her in her

nursery-days; the great Conversion-Vision of the Bleeding Christ; and

the slighter cases of the signing of herself with the sign of the Cross

and of her lying with outstretched arms, which occurred during the

last stage of her illness, are the sole indications of any immediate

occupation with the Passion; whilst the two cases of the Triptych

“Maestà” and the painting representative of Our Lord at the well,

(cases which indicate an attraction to the Infancy and to at least one

incident of the Public Life,) complete the list of all direct attention

to any incidents of Our Lord’s earthly existence. As to occupation with

or invocation of the Saints, inclusive of the Blessed Virgin, I can

find but one instance, the invocation of St. Benedict, two days before

her Conversion. We have seen, as to Sacramental Confession, how little

there can have been of it, throughout the long middle period of her

Convert Life; and how she was, during this time, simply without any

priestly guidance. And she never was a Tertiary, nor did she belong to

any Confraternity, nor did she attempt to gain Indulgences, nor did she

practise popular devotions, such as the Rosary or Scapular.

Nor could these facts be quite fairly met, except to a certain

relatively small extent with regard to Confession, by insistence upon

the changing character of the Church’s discipline, if we thus mean

to assert that she did not, in these matters, act exceptionally with

regard to the practice and theory of fervent souls of her own time.

For, on all the points mentioned, the ordinary fervent practice was

already, and had been for centuries, different; and, in the matter of

priestly guidance, her chroniclers have not failed to transmit to us

the wonders and murmurs of more than one contemporary.

Yet here again the prima facie impression is but very incompletely

borne out by a closer study.

For first, none of these historical and institutional elements are ever

formally excluded, or attacked, or slighted. Indeed, in the matter of

Indulgences, we have seen how she arranged or allowed that monies of

her own should be spent in procuring certain facilities for gaining

them by others.

And next, special practices, more than equivalent in their irksomeness,

are throughout made to take the place of ordinary practices, in so

far and for so long as these latter are abstained from. An unusually

severe ascetical penitential time, and then the rarest watchfulness and

continuous self-renouncement, take thus, for a considerable period, the

place of the sacramental forms of Penance.

And thirdly, if there is an unusual rarity in Confession there is an

almost as rare frequency of Communion; and authentic anecdotes show us

how she scandalized some good souls as truly-by this frequency as by

that rarity. Indeed throughout her convert life, an ardent devotion

to the Holy Eucharist forms the very centre of her daily life; during

probably thirty-five years she only quite exceptionally misses daily

Communion; and she has the deepest attraction to the Mass, and a holy

envy of priests for their close relation to the Blessed Sacrament.

And though there are no contemplations of hers directly occupied with

the Holy Eucharist, yet we shall find this experience and doctrine

to have profoundly shaped and coloured teachings and apprehensions

which, at first sight, are quite disconnected with It. We can already

see how all-inclusive a symbol and stimulation of her other special

attractions and conceptions this central devotion could not fail to

be. She found here the Infinite first condescending to the finite; so

that the finite may then rise towards the Infinite; the soul’s life,

a hunger and a satisfaction of that hunger, through the taste of

feeling rather than through the sight of reason; God giving Himself

through such apparently slight vehicles, in such short moments, and

under such bewilderingly humble veils; and our poor _a priori_ notions

and _a posteriori_ analyses thus proved inadequate to the living soul

and the living God.--Extreme Unction also was highly esteemed: she

spontaneously demanded it some four times and finally received it with

great fervour. Church hymns too--witness the “Veni, Creator,” chanted

on her death-bed--and liturgical lights are spontaneously used.

And lastly, her practice in the matter of Confession and of priestly

advice became, during her last thirteen years identical in frequency

with that of her devout contemporaries; and thus her life ended with

the practice, on all the chief points, of the average, ordinary

devotional acts and habits of her time. And this final practice of the

ordinary means, together with her life-long dislike of singularity and

of notice; her humble misgivings in the midst of her most peaceful

originalities, and the utter absence of any tendency to think her way,

inasmuch as it was at all singular, the only way or even the best

way, except just now and here for her own self alone; her complete

freedom from the spirit of comparing self with others, of dividing

off the sheep from the goats, or of having some short, sure, and

universal means or test for holiness: all this shows us plainly how

Catholic and unsectarian, how truly free, not only from slavish fear

and pusillanimous conformity, but also from all enthralment to merely

subjective fancies, from all solipsism or conceit was her strong soul.

8. _Three stages of the Spiritual Life; Catherine represents the third._

It has been well said that there are three stages of the spiritual

life, and three corresponding classes of souls.

There are the souls that are characterized, even to the end of

their earthly lives, by that, more or less complete, naturalistic

Individualism, with which we all in various degrees begin. Catherine’s

own time and country were full of such thoroughly Individualistic,

unmoral or even anti-moral men, who, however gifted and cultivated as

artists, scholars, philosophers, and statesmen, must yet be counted as

essentially childish and as clever animals rather than as spiritual

men. And she herself had, during the five years which had preceded her

conversion, tended, on the surface of her being, towards something of

this kind.

Next come the souls that have recognized and have accepted Duty and

Obligation, that are now striving to serve God as God, and that are

attempting, with a preponderant sincerity, to live the common and

universal life of the Spirit. These of necessity tend to suspect, or

even to suppress and sacrifice, whatever appears to be peculiar to

themselves, as so much individualistic subjectivity and insidious high

treason to the objective law of Him who made their souls, and who now

bids them save those souls at any cost. The large majority of the souls

that were striving to serve God in Catherine’s times belonged, as souls

belong in these our days, and will necessarily and rightly belong up to

the end, to this second, universalistic, uniformative type and class.

And Catherine herself evidently belonged prominently to this type and

class, during her first four convert years.

And there are, finally, an ever relatively small number of souls that

are called, and a still smaller number that attain, to a state in which

the Universality, Obligation, Uniformity, and Objectivity, of the

second stage and class, take the form of a Spiritual Individuality,

Liberty, Variety, and Subjectivity: Personality in the fullest sense

of the term has now appeared. And this fullest Spiritual Personality

is the profoundest opposite and foe of its naturalistic counterfeit,

of those spontaneous animal liberalisms which reigned, all but

unrecognized as such because all but uncontrasted by the true ideal and

test of life, prior to that prostration before absolute obligation,

that poignant sense of weakness and impurity, and that gain of strength

and purity from beyond its furthest reaches, experienced by the soul at

its conversion.

Yet that merely subjective, liberalistic Individualism of the first

stage can only be kept out, even at the third stage, by retaining

within the soul all the essential characteristics of the second

stage,--by a continuous passing and re-passing under the Caudine Forks

of the willed defeat of wayward, self-pleasing wilfulness, and of the

deliberate acceptance of an objective system of ideas and experiences

as interiorly binding upon the self. For if the second stage excludes

the first, the third stage does not exclude the second. Yet now all

this, in these rare souls, leads up to and produces a living reality

bafflingly simple in its paradoxical, mysterious richness. For now

the universality, obligation, and objectivity of the Law become and

appear greater, not less, because incarnated in an eminently unique and

unreproduceable, in a fully personal form. And at this stage only do we

find a full persuasiveness.

Catherine attained unmistakably, after her four years of special

penitence, to this rare third stage. For not only is she essentially

as individual and unique as if she were not universal and uniform; and

essentially as universal and uniform as if she were not individual: but

she is indefinitely more truly original and subjective, because of her

voluntary boundness and objectivity. Indeed she is solidly and really

free and personal, because the continuous renunciation and expulsion

of all naturalistic individuality remains, to the very end, one of the

essential functions of her soul.

From all this it is clear how easy it would be to misread the lesson

of her manifold life, and to turn such examples as hers from a help

into a hindrance. For her melancholy temperament, her peculiar psychic

health, her final external inefficiency: all this is too striking

not to tempt the admiration, perhaps even, the hopeless and ruinous

imitation, of such crude and inexperienced souls as know not how to

distinguish between the merely given materials and untransferable

determinisms of each separate soul’s psychical and temperamental native

outfit, and the free, grace-inspired and grace-aided use made by each

soul of these its, more or less unique, occasions and materials.

Those materials were, of themselves, of no moral worth, and lent

themselves only in part with any ease to the upbuilding and realization

of her spirit’s ideal. And it is only this, her wise and heroic use

of her materials,--though this also, of course, is not directly

transferable,--that represents the spiritually valuable constituent of

the life.

Similarly with the form, and the psychic occasions or accompaniments

of her very prayer and spiritual absorptions, and with some of the

constituents of her doctrine, if taken as speculative and analytic and

final, rather than as psychological and descriptive and preliminary.

These things again could easily be misused. For the former are largely

quite special and, in themselves, morally indifferent peculiarities,

transformed and utilized by quite special graces and life-long

spiritual heroisms. And the latter, we shall find, were never intended

to be systematic, complete or ultimate; and indeed they owe their

true force and value to their being the occasional, spontaneous and

immediate expressions and adumbrations of an experience indefinitely

richer and more ultimate than themselves.

And finally, it would of course be absurd to take the limitations of

her activity and interests, even if we were to restrict ourselves to

those common to all the stages of her life, as necessarily admirable,

or as universally inevitable. For there is, in the very nature of

things, no equation between her one soul, however rich and stimulating,

or even all the souls of her class and school, or of her age or

country, on the one hand, and the totality of religious experience,

and its means and incorporations, on the other hand, even if, by

totality, we but mean that part of it already achieved and accepted by

grace-impelled mankind.

9. _The lessons of Catherine’s life._

And yet Catherine’s life and teaching will be found full of suggestion

and stimulation, if they are taken in their interpenetration, and if

due regard is paid to their fragmentary registration, to the necessary

distinction between what, amongst all these facts, was mere means,

occasion, and temporal setting, and what amongst them was aim and

end, utilization and abiding import, and to the fact that all this

experience is but one out of the indefinitely many applications,

extensions, and mutually corrective and supplementary exemplifications

of the spirit and life of Christ, as it lives itself out throughout

the temperaments, races and ages of mankind. Above all it can teach

us, I think, with a rare completeness, wherein lies the secret of

a persuasive holiness. For Catherine lets us see, with unusual

clearness, how this winningness lies in the pathetically dramatic

spectacle and appeal presented by a life engaged in an ever-increasing

ethical and spiritual energizing,--whether in a slow shifting and

pushing of its actual centre, down and in from the circumference of

the soul to its true centre, and from this true centre enlarging

and reorganizing its whole ever-expanding being again and again; or

in an apparently sudden finding itself placed, and loyally placing

itself, in this true centre, and then from there prosecuting and

maintaining the organization and transformation of its varyingly

peripheral life, a life treated at one time as central and complete.

And this persuasiveness can here be discovered to be greater or

less in proportion to the thoroughness and continuousness of this

centralization and purification; to the degree in which this issues in

a new, spontaneously acting ethico-spiritual personality; and to the

closeness and costingness of the connection between those means and

this result. Such a soul will be persuasive because of its ever seeking

and finding a purifying intermediacy, a river of death, to all its

merely naturalistic self-seeking.

And it is this nobly ascetic requirement and search and end which no

doubt explain what, at first sight, is strange, both in its presence

and in its attractiveness, in her own case and more or less in that of

all the mature and complete Saints,--I mean, the large predominance of

an apparently Pantheistic element in her life, the strong emphasis laid

upon an apparent Thing-Conception of God and of the human spirit.

It was clearly not alone because of the Neo-Platonist element and

influence of the books she chiefly used that she, in true Greek

fashion, finds and allows so large a place for conceptions of

things, for images derived from the natural elements, and for mental

abstractions, in her religious experiences and teachings: God appearing

in them predominantly as Sun, Light, Fire, Air, Ocean; Beauty, Truth,

Love, Goodness. For, after all, other elements could be found in these

very books, and other writings were known to her besides these books:

hence this her preference for just these elements still demands an

explanation.

Nor was it ultimately because, nervously high-pitched and strained

as she was by nature, she even physically craved and required an

immense expansion for this her excessive natural concentration. She

thus evidently longed first to move through, and to bathe and rest and

spread out her psychic self, in an ample region, in an enduring state

of quasi-unconsciousness, in an (as it were) innocently animal or even

simply vegetative objectivity, indeed in an apparent bare element and

mere Thing, before, thus rested, braced, and as it were now healthily

reconcentrated, she more directly met the Infinite Concentration and

Determination, the Personal Spirit, God. For, after all, hers was so

heroic a spirit, and so self-distrustful, indeed self-suspecting, a

heart, that a mere psychic affinity or requirement would have failed so

permanently and deliberately to captivate her mind.

Nor, finally, was it ultimately because her domestic sorrows or

inexperiences, or even her very psychic peculiarities and apparent

lack of all even innocent sensuousness, left the images of Bride and

Bridegroom, of Parent and Child, perhaps even of Friend, respectively

painful, empty, or pale to her consciousness. For, even so, she could

and did care, with a beautiful affectiveness of her own, for her

brothers and sister, for Vernazza, her “spiritual son,” and for many a

humble toiler or domestic. And indeed her whole tendency is ultimately

to find God’s special home, the only one of His dwelling-places which

we men really know, in the human heart of hearts.

The ultimate and determining reason was no doubt her deep spiritual

experience and conviction (as vivid as ever was the psychic tendency

which gave it form and additional emotional edge and momentum) that

she must continuously first quench and drown her feverish immediacy,

her clamorous, claimful false self, and must lose herself, as a merely

natural Individual, in the river and ocean of the Thing, of Law, of

that apparently ruthless Determinism which fronts life everywhere,

before she could find herself again as a Person, in union with and in

presence of an infinite Spirit and Personality.

Thus Greek Fate is here retained, but it is transformed through being

transplaced. For Fate has here ceased to be ultimate and above the very

gods, the poor gods who were so predominantly the mere projections of

man’s Individualism: Fate is here intermediate and a way to God--the

great God, the source and ideal of all Personality. And indeed this

Fate is not, ultimately, simply separate from God; it is indeed

omnipresent, but everywhere only as the preliminary and subaltern,

expression, for us men, of the Divine Freedom that lies hidden and

operating behind it. And we men attain to some of this Freedom only by

the inclusion within our spiritual life of that Fate-passage and of our

actual constant passing through it, on and on.

10. _Three points where Catherine is comparatively original; and a

fourth point where she is practically unique._

In the general tendency and form of her inner life and conviction

Catherine has, of course, substantially nothing but what she shares

with all the Mystics, in proportion as these retain Law, Ethics, and

Personality; and she has much that forms part of the convictions of

all Christians, indeed of all Theists. Yet in the degree and precise

manner of her elaboration and application of those things, and again in

the circumstances of their documentary transmission, Catherine will, I

think, be found in three points comparatively original, and in a fourth

point practically unique.

First she has, as we have seen, not only a strikingly persistent

attitude of transcendence and detachment with regard to her

psycho-physical state in general (this is indeed an attitude common

to all ethically sound and fruitful Mystics: witness in particular

St. John of the Cross); but she has also a most remarkable faculty

and activity of discrimination between her own healthy and morbid

states. Even this latter power she probably shares, in various degrees,

with all such ethical-minded Mystics as nevertheless suffered from

a partially _maladif_ psycho-physical condition: witness especially

St. Teresa.--Yet contemporary documentary evidence, for not only such

actual variations between healthy and unhealthy states, but also for

the Mystic’s knowledge of and witness to the existence of both and

to the difference between the two, is necessarily rare. I know of no

evidence more vivid and final, although of much that is larger in

amount, than the evidence furnished by Catherine’s _Vita_.

And next she has both a constant, deep sense that religion never

consists simply in ends but in means as well, and never ceases to use

and practise the latter; and a concomitant keen apprehension of the

difference between means and ends, and ever illustrates this sense

of difference by the striking variety and liberty of the practical

attitude which she is successively moved to take, and actually does

take, towards this or that of the Institutional helps of the Church.

Here again she but exemplifies a principle which underlies the

practice of all the Saints, in proportion to their maturity and full

normality. And indeed our Lord Himself, the Model and the King of

Saints, when asked which was the greatest of the Commandments, did

not answer that He could not and would not tell, since to distinguish

at all between greater and lesser Commandments would be liberalism;

but, on the contrary, fully endorsed and canonized such a distinction

and discrimination, by actually pointing out two Commandments as

the greatest, and by declaring that from them depended all the law

and the prophets. Hence to organize, and more and more to find and

give their right, relative place and influence to all the different

things practised and believed, is as important as is the corresponding

practice and acceptance of all these different things. Yet, here again,

full evidence both for such fidelity and docility and for such variety

and liberty of soul, with regard to the means of religion, is rare:

the records of the modern Saints mostly give us but the docility;

those of the Fathers of the desert generally give us but the liberty:

Catherine’s _Vita_ gives us both.

And thirdly, she is, amongst formally canonized Saints, a rare example

of a contemplative and mystic who, from first to last, leads at the

same time the common life of marriage and of widowhood in the world.

Here again any misapprehension of the importance or significance of

this fact would readily lead to folly. For it is undeniable that it has

been the monastic life which, in however great variations of degree,

form and lasting success, has furnished Christendom at large with an

impersonation of self-renunciation sufficiently isolated, massive

and continuous, to be deeply impressive upon the sluggish spiritual

apprehension of the average man. And indeed self-renunciation is so

universally necessary and so universally difficult; upon its presence

and activity religion, and all and every kind of rational human life

depend so largely; without its tonic presence they are so necessarily

but a dilettantism, a delusion or an hypocrisy: that to body it forth

for all men must ever remain an honour and a duty specially incumbent

upon some kind of Monasticism. For it is but right, and indeed alone

respectful, to the Spirit of God, so manifold and mysterious in its

gifts and inspirations, that every degree and kind of healthy and

heroic self-renunciation should be practised and embodied; and that

special honour should attach to its most massive manifestations.

Yet our general knowledge of poor, rarely balanced human nature

and our detailed historical experience respectively anticipate and

demonstrate how easy it is, on this point also, to confound the means

with the end, and a part with the whole. And by such confusion either

self-renunciation, that very salt of all truly human existence, gets

actually stapled up in one corner of the wide world and of multiform

life; or this apparent stapling becomes but a pedantic pretence and

would-be monopoly, the salt meanwhile losing all its savour. And these

two abuses and errors easily coalesce and reinforce each other. The

fact is that the total work and duty of collective humanity,--the

production of a maximum of true recollection, rest and detachment,

effected in and through a maximum of right dispersion, action, and

attachment; above all a maximum of ethico-spiritual transformation of

the world and, in and through such work, of each single worker,--is

too high for any single soul, or even class or vocation, to hope to

exhaust. Only by all and each joining hands and supplementing each

other can all these numberless degrees and kinds of call and goodness,

together, slowly, throughout the ages, get nearer and nearer to that

inexhaustible ideal which lies so deep and ineradicable within the

heart of each and all. And thus will the two fundamental movements of

the soul, as it were its expiration and its inspiration, the going

out to gather and the coming home to garner, be kept up, in various

degrees, by every human soul, and each soul and vocation will as keenly

feel the need of supplementation, as it will apprehend the beauty and

importance of the special contribution it is called to make to the

whole, a whole, here as everywhere, greater than any of its parts,

although requiring them each and all.--Now Catherine suggests and

illustrates such a doctrine with rare impressiveness: for the pure and

efficient love of God and man, the one end and measure for us all, ever

consciously dominates all and every means within her admirably balanced

and unified mind; and the renunciative element is, under mostly quite

ordinary exterior forms, as complete and constant as it could be found

anywhere.

And lastly, her doctrine contains one conviction, or group of

convictions, as original as, in such matters, one can expect to find.

We get here the soul’s voluntary plunge into Purgatory, its seeking

and finding relief, from the now painful pleasure of sin, in the now

joy-producing pain of purification; and the soul’s discovery and

acquisition, if and when in predominantly good dispositions, of its

ever-fuller peace and bliss, because its ever-increasing harmonization,

in freely willing the suffering intrinsically consequent upon its

own past evil pleasures and the resulting present imperfections of

its will. And this cycle of facts and laws here springs from, and

begins with, the soul’s life Here and Now, and is held to extend (on

the ever-present assumption of the substantial persistence of the

spirit’s fundamental spiritual properties and laws) to the soul’s life

Then and There. Thus these two lives differ with her rather in extent

and intensity than in kind. I think that, taken just thus, and with

this degree of explicitness, this group of convictions is practically

unique. We shall study and illustrate this particular cycle of doctrine

in full detail. But it is indeed time now to move on to a more

systematic and general account of her teaching.