CHAPTER VIII

BATTISTA VERNAZZA’S LIFE

INTRODUCTORY.

We have, in the characters described in the previous Chapter, dwelt

upon figures remarkably unlike Catherine, on her psycho-physical side.

Yet it would be only too easy for us now-a-days, by dwelling too much

upon the foregoing contrast, to grow actually unfair to Catherine’s

kind of temperament and health, and to her mode of apprehending

truth and of attaining sanctity. We might thus come to overlook or

to underestimate the important fact that certain psycho-physical,

neural peculiarities or states most certainly constitute the general

antecedents, concomitants or consequences (probably, indeed, one of the

necessary though secondary conditions), not indeed of sanctity, but of

at least some forms of the contemplative gift, habit, and attainment.

We might, too, forget that neither this contemplative gift itself, nor

even those neural peculiarities, are at all incompatible with great

practical shrewdness and an unusually large external activity; indeed

that such rare and costly contemplative picturings and symbolizations

of the Unseen are, when true and deep, means and helps for the

contemplative, in his own life and often still more in his influence

upon others, towards a great recollection and concentration, which

would not only turn the soul away from the dispersion and feverishness

that sets in towards the close of external action, but would also bring

it back renewed to such outward-moving, joyful-humble creativeness, as

wholesome recollection itself requires. For without such contact with

the material and the opposition of external action, recollection grows

gradually empty; and without recollection, external action rapidly

becomes soul-dispersive. Hence it is plain, that the true significance

and living system of any such deep soul may be on too large a scale not

to require, for its due exhibition, that we survey it in connection

with some other supplementary life,--like unto some Gobelin design or

cloth-pattern, so large as to require two contiguous walls or two human

figures to show its totality by means of their combination.

Now Vernazza the father, who throughout his life possessed the

most robust and normal health, can fairly be taken as Catherine’s

supplementary figure, for the years when ill-health was limiting her

normal range of energies, on their operatively outgoing, philanthropic

side; and is thus a living protest against isolating Saints’ lives from

their complementary extensions and effects. But Battista, his daughter,

gives us, in her own person and up to the end of her life, an example

of the combination and stimulating interaction of the Contemplative

and the Practical, the Transcendent and the Immanental, the heroically

normal and Universal and the tenderly Personal, indeed the more or less

psycho-physically peculiar. Catherine was the greater, more original,

and more winning Contemplative, and Ettore was more massively Practical

than was Battista. Yet Battista possessed both gifts, from early

times up to the end, apparently unclouded and unbroken by any kind of

incapacitation.

I. BATTISTA’S LIFE, FROM APRIL 1497 TO JUNE 1510.

We have already seen how Ettore’s eldest child was born on April 15,

1497, and was held at the font by Catherine, receiving, however,

the name of Tommasa, after the God-father, the celebrated Doctor of

Law, Tommaso Moro. Giuliano was still alive, but already gravely

ill. Nothing could well prove more clearly Vernazza’s closeness of

friendship for the Adorna and for Moro than his making them thus his

first-born’s God-parents. And Moro’s subsequent history makes this, his

intimate collocation and spiritual affinity with Catherine a matter

suggestive of much reflection.

With her beautiful young mother still alive and living at home with

her, Tommasa, a child of precocious intelligence, took to writing

verse of various kinds, as early as at ten years of age. Vallebona

quotes, from Semeria’s _Secoli Christiani della Liguria_, ten short

lines written by her at that age, and which he apparently holds to have

been addressed to her God-mother. They are, however, too vague and

hyperbolical for one to be sure as to whom they are dedicated; her own

mother or the Blessed Virgin would, I think, fit the case respectively

as well as, or better than, Catherine. The “short days” prophesied

for herself by the little girl, were destined to amount to ninety

years![333]

On her mother dying, some time in 1508 or 1509,--Bartolommea can

hardly have been more than thirty-two years of age, and Ettore some

six years older,--Vernazza decided, as we know, against continuing an

establishment of his own and keeping his three daughters with him. It

is certain from his Wills that he had no near female relative whom he

could have asked to come and help, or to take, the children; and clear

that he was determined not to marry again, so as to remain completely

free for his philanthropic work. And hence he was driven to the

alternative of boarding the girls in the two convents that we know.

And already on June 24, 1510, on the feast of her father’s favourite

Saint and prison-work Patron, Tommasa received the habit of an

Augustinian Canoness of the Lateran, and changed her name to Battista.

Catherine had still not quite twelve weeks to live, and may well have

been deeply interested in her God-daughter’s taking of the veil in

that very Convent and at the very age where and when she herself had,

half-a-century before, desired to receive it.[334] We cannot but feel

that the Superiors were wise who, at that earlier date, had found

thirteen too young an age for even an Italian, so early physically

mature, and a Catherine, so little suited for marriage, to take even

this first and revocable step in the Religious life; and we would

doubtless have experienced some uneasiness at the time when Tommasa

was somehow allowed to take this identical step at the very same age.

Yet we have, as we shall see, full and absolutely conclusive, because

first-hand, evidence, that every one concerned in the case acted with

true insight. Rarely indeed can a woman have been more emphatically in

her right place, than Battista during her seventy-seven years at Santa

Maria delle Grazie. And this complete and comfortable appropriateness

of vocation no doubt helped her large, balanced, virile mind to feel,

with the Church, that such a vocation is but one amongst the numberless

forms of even heroic devotedness, a devotedness of which the essence is

interior and is capable of being exercised, and which requires to be

represented in every honest circumstance and calling of God’s great,

many-coloured world.

Of Catetta’s further history, beyond her reception of the veil in the

same Convent, under the name of Daniela, some time before November

1517, and of Ginevrina’s later lot, beyond her becoming a Cistercian

Nun, under the name of Maria Archangela, at Sant’ Andrea, some time

between 1517 and 1524, I have been unable to discover anything. But

as to Battista, I wish to dwell upon three characteristic episodes of

her long life; they all three throw much light both upon Catherine and

(still more) upon the whole question of Mysticism.

II. BATTISTA AND HER GOD-FATHER, TOMMASO MORO.

The first episode illustrates the rigoristic side of the

pre-Reformation Catholic temper and teaching, and the terrible

complications, perplexities and pitfalls of those strenuous, confusing

times. For we must now move on fifteen further years from that

interview with her father, a few days before his death, in June 1524,

to reach this event, the first fresh one in Battista’s life of which we

have a record.

1. _The early stages of Lutheranism and Calvinism._

The Religious Revolution had now well nigh reached its culmination.

Battista’s father had only lived to see what may rightly be termed

the first step in the Teutonic stage and element of the movement, a

stage which, in spite of its political and social, indeed religious,

violences and fanaticisms,--and even these came mostly after Vernazza’s

death,--retained, if in large part illogically yet with great practical

advantage, a considerable portion of the old Catholic convictions

and spiritual attitude. Luther had indeed, as we saw, published his

Theses in 1517, and Pope Leo X had condemned nearly one-half of them

in 1520 in his Bull of Excommunication. And Melanchthon, the mild and

deeply learned, had also broken with the Old Church, and had begun, in

1521, the publication of his _Loci_. But an earnest Catholic (in this

case a Teutonic) Reformer had become Pope, in the person of Adrian

Dedel of Utrecht (Hadrian VI), in 1522, 1523. And in the very year of

Ettore’s heroic death, Erasmus, proving, under the stress of the times,

substantially true to the Old Faith, was writing against Luther; whilst

in Italy, Vernazza’s old patron, Cardinal Caraffa, was helping to found

the Theatine Order.

But within the next fifteen years matters move on and further. For

first the Teutonic stage of the Revolution takes its second step, and

hardens, and formally and permanently organizes itself; whilst its

socially anarchical effects reach their zenith. For there are the

Peasants’ War and Luther’s marriage in 1525; and the capture and the

sack of Rome by the Imperial (largely Lutheran) troops in 1527; and the

Revolutionists’ assumption of the name of “Protestants,” at the Diet

of Speyer, in 1529. And, on the Roman Church’s part, the Capuchins are

founded in 1525, and the Barnabites in 1530. And this whole Teutonic

stage of the Revolution can be taken as closed, for the time, by the

terrible Saturnalia of the Anabaptists at Münster, 1533-1535; the

executions of the Catholic Humanists, Bishop Fisher and Chancellor

More, in England, 1535; and Erasmus’s death in 1536.

And the second element and stage, the Romanic Revolution, was now fully

and independently at work, with its indefinitely greater coldness and

logical completeness, and its systematic antagonism to the Old Faith.

And if the Saxon Mystical-minded Peasant-monk, Luther, stood at the

head and in the centre of the first movement, the Picardese bourgeois

lawyer and Humanist, Calvin, stands now at the head of this second

movement. Born in 1509, he flees, now an avowed Protestant, in 1535 to

Basle; and in the spring of 1536 publishes his _Institutio Religionis

Christianae_, which was destined to remain his chief work.

Now it was in the summer of that year that Calvin went to stay at the

Court of Renée de Valois, daughter of the French King Louis XII, and

Duchess of Ferrara, who had already been gained over to the cause of

the Lutheran Reformers; and who was now influenced, by her grim,

relentless guest, to move still further away from the Old Church. And

though the Roman Inquisition succeeded in forcing Calvin to leave

Italy, after not many weeks’ stay: yet the cases of Vittoria Colonna,

Bernardino Occhino, and of our Tommaso Moro, show us all plainly,

though each differently, how complex and difficult, how obscure and

full of pitfalls, was the situation for even permanently loyal and

indeed saintly, and still more for simply earnest and eager, souls.

For Vittoria Colonna, that truly saint-like daughter of the Church,

not only stays, during the following year, with the Duchess Renée at

Ferrara, and indeed stands God-mother to her daughter Eleonora (born

June 19, 1537), the child that, later on, became the friend of the poet

Tasso: but Vittoria is the close friend and confidante of that most

zealous preacher, that restless, ardent, absolute-minded Bernardino

Occhino, who, born in Siena in 1487, had joined the Franciscan

Reform, the later Capuchins, in 1534, and indeed, in 1539, became

their General. It is to Vittoria indeed that, on his deciding not to

obey the summons to Rome, there to defend himself against the (no

doubt, in part, unfair) attacks upon his teaching, he, in the night

of August 22, 1542, before his flight and abandonment of his Order

and of the Church, writes his still extant sad and saddening letter

of self-exculpation.[335] But this latter catastrophe was not to take

place till three years after the date at which I would now linger.

2. _Moro becomes a Calvinist: probable causes of this step._

It must, I think, have been through some influence emanating from the

not very far away Ferrara, that the Genoese Tommaso Moro was, just

about this time, carried away into Calvinism. We must not forget that,

deplorable as was such an aberration, there were two excuses for him,

which would apply no doubt, in varying degrees, to many others even of

those who were, at this time, permanently lost to the Church.

For one thing the views held, and allowably held, during two or three

generations, on points of Grace and Free-will, of Predestination and

the corruption of the natural man, by even those whom the Church

eventually raised to her Altars, were, as a matter of fact, less

removed from the Protestant Reformers’ positions, than were probably

any views (with the exception of the extreme Jansenist position) which

have prevailed in the Catholic Church since the Protestant Reformation.

St. Catherine, Moro’s fellow God-parent, had expressed herself, in

certain moods, in so rigoristic a sense on these deep matters, as to

invite the comment of the Bollandist Sticker that these passages are

_caute legenda_.[336] Yet Catherine, in speaking thus, simply resembled

probably all her really earnest contemporaries--witness the great Paris

Chancellor Jean Gerson, some time before, and the devoted Cardinals

Contarini and Morone and Vittoria Colonna, a little after Catherine’s

own zenith.[337]

Again, the practical, moral abuses were most real and often very

pressing; and whilst the numerous attempts at Reform extending now

over a century (the Council of Constance had assembled in 1414) had

emphasized this fact, they had also plainly shown, by their practical

abortiveness, how very difficult the attainment of such a universally

desired Reform persisted in appearing, if there was to be no final

breach with Rome.

And the fullest consequences of such a breach could not be present

to the experience, or even to the imagination, of the first who made

it, as they are to us, or even as they were after the second step of

the Romanic Revolution had been taken by Lelio Socino, the Sienese

and his nephew Fausto Socino, the founders of Socinianism, who died

respectively in 1562 and 1604,--the former shortly after Occhino had

died, in 1560, miserably alone and out of the Catholic Roman Church.

3. _Battista’s letter to Moro, September 1537; its effect._

Now it was on September 10, 1537, that his Augustinian God-daughter

wrote, to her now Calvinist God-father, a letter which occupies five

pages of print in the fifth, a handsome octavo, edition of her works

published in Genoa in 1755. Though the earliest of all her extant,

or at least of her printed, letters, it is evidently an answer to a

communication of his, in which he had urged certain objections against

the Roman Church. And that communication must have been provoked by

a first letter from herself--a letter which, though probably less

theologically interesting and learned, will have been more uniformly

touching than the one preserved. Yet if that first note had clearly

succeeded in getting him to state his case, this second letter also,

we shall see, completely attained its still more important object.

Moro had insisted that the Roman Church followed merely human

inventions in the matter of (1) Fasting; (2) Confession; (3) the Real

Presence; (4) Public Prayer and Psalmody; (5) Vows; and (6) Extreme

Unction.--The order is curious, but is evidently not hers but his.

Extreme Unction stands in the obvious position--at the end. The vows

of Religion immediately precede it, probably because, at this time,

they typified something not only irrevocable but sepulchral to this

ardent Calvinist. Public Prayer and Psalmody would naturally precede

these vows, as an appropriate link between the life of the cloister,

so largely given to the Divine Office, and the Real Presence, its

celebration being and requiring the most marked of all the exhibitions

of Public Prayer. Confession would stand before the Real Presence,

as being actually practised before the reception of Communion.

And Fasting, finally, would precede Confession, and would, most

characteristically, head the whole list, because the completest and

most universally binding of all Fasts is that which is antecedent to

Holy Communion; and because, in beginning thus, Moro can start his

attack on the Church by the criticism of something that is obviously

and avowedly external.

The tone of Battista’s answer is interesting throughout, for a double

reason. There is in it a successful, very difficult combination of

filial respect and of lofty reproof; and there runs through all the

argumentation a sort of legal hard-headedness, entirely in its place

on the lips of the lawyer’s daughter in dealing with her lawyer

correspondent. I give her answers to his second and fifth objections,

since the former is interesting as touching on the point of the

obligation and frequency of Sacramental Confession, which has occupied

us much in her God-mother’s life; and the latter gives a vivid insight

into Battista’s own deeply genuine and happy vocation.

As to Confession, she writes: “You hold one opinion, and the Church

holds another; and to this Church it has not appeared good to constrain

us to confess ourselves in public, nor always to manifest our whole

interior to any and every man who may reprehend us. In this latter case

we should have been left without any protection. You grudge obeying her

once a year; how then would you carry out the other plan? Certainly

the said Church would have but little authority if she could not lay

down ordinances, according to her own judgment, concerning the mode (of

administration and reception) of the Sacraments already ordained by

Christ.”

As to Vows, she finishes up by declaring: “According to my humble

judgment, that thing cannot be called slavery which a soul elects for

itself, by an act of free choice alone, and with a supreme desire. And

in this matter you really can trust me, since here I am, living under

the very test of experience, and yet I have no consciousness of being

bound to any obligation: so little indeed that, if I had full licence

from God to do all those things of which I have deprived myself by my

vows, I would do neither more nor less than what I now am actually

doing; indeed no taste for anything beyond these latter things arises

within me. How then do you come to give the name of servitude to that

which gets embraced thus with supreme delight? Perchance you will say

‘not every one is thus disposed.’ My dear Sir: he who does not find

this inclination within him, let him not execute it. Neither Christ nor

His Church constrain any one in this matter.”[338]

The effect of this homely and sensible, straightforward and firm,

first-hand witness to a strong soul’s full daily life of faith and

self-expansion in and for Christ in His extension, the Old Church, was

evidently decisive, perhaps immediate. It is at least certain that

Tommaso Moro came back to the Roman obedience; that he became and died

a Priest and Religious; and that his return is universally attributed

to the instrumentality of this letter.[339]

III. BATTISTA’S _COLLOQUIES_, NOVEMBER 1554 TO ASCENSION-DAY 1555.

Yet her letters form but a small part of the literary output of this

many-sided woman. Her printed writings fill six stout volumes, in

all some 2,400 octavo pages, and fall into four chief divisions. The

independent verses consist only of four “Canticles of Divine Love,”

twelve “Spiritual Canticles,” and five “Sonnets.” Yet even the second

division, which alone fills quite five out of the six volumes, and

consists of Spiritual Discourses or Dissertations, contains much

verse, since the Discourse (which invariably takes its title and

starting-point from some, originally or interpretatively, Mystical

Biblical text) usually finishes up with a chapter of eight verses,

in which she sums up metrically the doctrine which she has just

expounded in finely balanced and stately prose. Mostly proceeding

from some Pauline, or, more often still, some Joannine text, these

writings evince throughout a fine Christian-Platonist breadth of

outlook and concentration and expansion of devotional feeling, and

have much of that unfading freshness which appertains to the universal

experiences of religion, wherever these are experienced deeply and

anew and are communicated largely in the form and tone of their actual

experimentation. These Discourses would also, of course, furnish all

but endless parallels and illustrations to Catherine’s teachings.

Yet it is the last two divisions of Battista’s writings which are

the most entirely characteristic and suggestive--her _Colloquies_

and her _Letters_. As to the seventy-five pages of letters, I have

already given extracts from two, of the years 1581 and 1589, and shall

presently give portions of two others, of the years 1575 and 1576. But

in this section I want to translate and comment upon a considerable

portion of her _Colloquies_, so interesting for various reasons, all

directly connected with the subject of this book. These contemporary

annotations occupy only eleven pages of print, but they constitute, I

think, one of the most instructive first-hand documents of mystical and

religious psychology in existence, and have nowhere, as yet, received

any of the comparative and analytic study they so richly deserve.

It is but right to remember throughout, that even all her other

writings (including the Discourses which are so general and, in a

manner, quite public in their tone) were, with the sole exception of

her Sonnets, none of them printed with her knowledge and consent. A

certain Secular Priest, Gaspare Scotto, did indeed print some at least

of the Discourses, without her knowledge, during her long lifetime; but

the _Colloquies_ were certainly never meant for any eyes other than her

own, and were doubtless not printed, or indeed known, until after her

death. I suppose them to have first appeared in the collected edition

of her works, published in 1602, fifteen years after her demise.

Now these _Colloquies_ belong to three periods. The first set is timed

vaguely _una volta_; and the third is also but approximately fixed;

but the second, by far the longest and most important series, is, at

its main turning-points, dated with absolute precision. And since its

authenticity, the identity of the chronicler with the experiencing

person, and the complete contemporaneousness of the record, are all

beyond cavil or question (the majority of the entries were evidently

put down by her on the very day, often probably within the hour, of the

cessation of the experience thus chronicled)--the document can serve as

a simply first-hand illustration of, and commentary on, the analogous

experiences of Battista’s God-mother, experiences which, in the latter

case, were nowhere recorded by their subject, nor indeed by others till

probably, in some cases, a considerable time after their occurrence.

And if here again there can be no difficulty, for any sincere and

consistent believer, in holding that we have to do with enlightenments

of the mind and stimulations of the affections and will, proceeding

as truly from God as they led back to Him: we cannot but, here again,

find plentiful indications of the antecedent material, and of the

co-operation, response, and special colour furnished throughout by the

human subject’s special sex and age, race and period, temperament,

training, and reading. Not all the latter conditions put together would

explain even half of the total experience; yet had these conditions

been different, the total experience would have differed, not indeed in

its fundamental contents, yet in its special forms and applications. As

matters stand, these latter are often strikingly like those manifested

in the teaching of Catherine, Battista’s fellow-Genoese. I will now

take the nine most interesting days of this series,[340] stopping after

certain of them to point out parallels and peculiarities.

1. _Experience of November 17, 1554._

“On (Saturday) November 17, 1554” (Battista was now fifty-seven and a

half years old), “having, before Holy Communion, a great desire to

die to all things, I prayed with all my heart that God, in the most

perfect manner possible, would slay me and unite me with Himself.

And in so doing I renounced into His hands all myself and everything

existing under heaven, whilst electing God anew as my only Love, my

only Solace, my only Comfort, and my All. And I refused to accept

every consolation arising from such interiorness, however holy the

latter might be, except inasmuch as the consolation arises whilst the

interior is distinctly occupied with God, and does not turn its gaze

upon itself or upon any (other) belovèd object. Even if I could enjoy

all this, quite justly, till the day of judgment, I renounce it all.

Nothing pleases me, except my God. And if I were assured, which God

forbid, of going (to abide) under Lucifer, still would I will, neither

more nor less than my God alone. And it would be grievous to me to

embrace, even for one single hour, anything else but Him.--After this

Communion I remained with a most intense impression of renouncing,

with regard to all things and to all moments, all myself and every

other thing that is lower than Thee; and with a determination to keep

Forty Days of silence, depriving myself during them, as far as my

own will and inclination went, even of such reasoning as turned on

religious subjects.--And acting thus, by means of Thy grace alone, I

arrived, in my inner heart, at having no other actions left, except

those of adoring Thee and praying for all men. Whence it happened that

I experienced the most quiet and consoling week that, possibly, I have

ever had, up to this hour, in all my life.”

It is clear that even the first part of this week’s experience was

not written down later than at the end of that week; indeed it reads

more as if written down on at least two, and perhaps three, occasions.

We have here many close parallels to Catherine: to her exclamation

of “God is my Being … my Delight”; to the Divine Voice heard by her,

“I do not wish thee henceforth to turn thine eyes to right or left”;

to the question asked, and the interior answer heard, by her, as to

“love and union not being able to exist without a great contentment

of soul”; to her assertions that “the attribution to her own separate

self of even one single meritorious act, would be to her as though a

Hell,” and that “she would rather remain in eternal condemnation than

be saved by such an act of the separate self”; to her Love saying

within her, “that He wanted her to keep the Forty Days in His Company

in the Desert”; and to her declaration that she could not pray for

Vernazza and his fellow-disciples separately, but could only “present

them” collectively “in His presence.” And in Battista’s phrase of

“going under Lucifer,” we have again, if we take it together with the

renunciation of “all things lower than God,” an illustration of those

sayings of Catherine which I have grouped under the special category of

“up” and “above.”[341]

And note, in Battista’s record, how the contradiction, which appears

between her affirmation of having love for God alone, and the admission

that she loved herself and other things (since she is determined not

to let her mental gaze rest upon these latter beloved objects), is

more apparent than real. For the former love is the direct and central

object of her fully deliberate and free endeavours; the latter is

instinctive, continuous, inevitable, but, inasmuch as it now still

remains actively willed at all, it is but the consequential and

peripheral object of that willing. As in all deep religion there is

here an heroic willing at work to effect a genuine displacement of the

centre and object of interest; the system from being instinctively

man-centred, becomes a freely willed God-centredness.

2. _Experience of November 25, 1554._

“On Sunday” (November 25), “the Feast of St. Catherine” (Virgin Martyr

of Alexandria) “was being celebrated. And I communicated with new

emotion. And when I received the Host, I willed Thee, my God, alone;

renouncing all the rest into Thy hands: I but desired to die and unite

myself with Thee. And I felt within me those colloquies of Thine own

extreme love; and Thou didst say unto me, O my Joy, ‘The thing that

thou seekest is (already) produced eternally in My Divine Mind. Thou

desirest to feed on mutability, and I desire to feed thee on eternity.’

And I do not remember in what connection Thou didst say,‘ Ego ero

merces tua magna nimis’ (Gen. xv, 1).”

Here, on her God-mother’s Saint’s day, we find that act of pure love

at the moment of Holy Communion so dear to Catherine also; and we get

here, as in the previous group (but here, even on occasion of the Holy

Eucharist), prayer and aspiration directed to God pure and simple, or

to God conceived as Love and Joy, precisely as in the Fiesca’s ordinary

practice.[342] And the inner voice, if it says deeply mystical things,

also directly quotes Scripture in Latin, whilst the scrupulous care of

Battista, in registering her oblivion of the precise context in which

this quotation appeared, is interestingly characteristic of her nature

and experience.

3. _Experience of December (9?), 1554._

“On Sunday” (December 9?) “I communicated; and I experienced within

myself the most tender colloquies of Thy Majesty, which said to me,

‘The time will come when thou must be so occupied with Me--with My

Divinity, My Infinity, My Glory--that, even if thou shouldst so wish,

thou wouldest be unable to break off this preoccupation. I have elected

thee from amongst thousands. I want to make thee My very Self.’ … Then

Thou saidst unto me, ‘I do not want thee to merit, but to return the

love which I ever bear thee.’”[343]

Here we have parallels to Catherine’s practice and declarations in

Battista’s ever-growing occupation with God; in her, at first sight,

strongly pantheistic, because apparently substantial, identification

of her true self with God; and in her doctrine that God desires not

that we should merit, but that we should, by purely loving, make Him a

return of His own pure love. And, as but an apparent contrast, note how

here it is God Who chooses out Battista’s soul from amongst thousands;

whilst, with Catherine, we have herself instinctively choosing out

God, even were He, _per impossible_, like to one of the whole Court of

Heaven (the angels, “whose number is thousands of thousands,” Apoc. v,

11). For the difference consists, at bottom, only in the fact that each

dwells, in these special instances, upon the other half of the complete

mystic circle of the divine and human intercourse. The same complete

scheme is, in reality, experienced and proclaimed both by the widow

and the nun,--indeed God’s prevenient election of the soul, and His

special attention to it, is even more strongly emphasized by the older

woman: “It appears to me, indeed, that God has no other business than

myself.”[344]

Remark, too, how here again an unmistakable text of Scripture appears

as part of the words heard by Battista. But since it is a composite

quotation--“I have elected thee,” coming from Isa. xliii, 10; xliv, 1;

xlviii, 10; and “elected among thousands,” coming from Cant. v, 10,

where the elect is (as with Catherine) the Bridegroom, and not (as with

Battista) the Bride,--therefore, no doubt, it does not appear in Latin

or with any reference.

4. _Experience of December 16, 1554._

“The following Sunday” (December 16) “I communicated with a

greater desire for Union than usual, and with a more detailed sight

concerning it. And after this communion I prayed in such a state of

Union,--without any means either of thoughts or of anything else that

could be made to intervene, remaining naked in Thy bosom as I have

been from eternity. And whilst praying thus, I felt that certain words

were being spoken within me, the gist of which (_la sentenza_) seems

to me to have been, that my prayer did not reach to the reality of

Union itself. So that there then came to my mind that which Paul says,

Rom. viii (26), that ‘we do not know how to pray _sicut oportet_.’ And

Thou saidst to me that, above all understanding of mine, Thou wouldest

produce the effect; indeed the thing is already effected continuously

in Thy divine mind. And Thou saidst to me, my only Love, that Thou

didst will to make me Thyself; and that Thou wast all mine, with all

that Thou hadst and with all Paradise; and that I was all Thine. That I

should leave all, or rather the nothing; and that (then) Thou wouldst

give me the all. And that Thou hadst given me this name--at which words

I heard within me ‘dedi te in lucem gentium’--not without good reason.

And it seemed then, as though I had an inclination for nothing except

the purest Union, without any means, in accordance with that detailed

sight which Thou hadst given me. So then I said to Thee: ‘These other

things, give them to whom Thou wilt; give me but this most pure Union

with Thee, free from every means.’”

Here we again have numerous parallels. Battista’s state of Union,

without any means that could be made to intervene, compares readily

with Catherine’s declaration: “I cannot abide to see that word ‘for’

(God) and ‘in’ (God), since they denote to my mind something that can

stand between God and myself.” Battista’s description, “remaining naked

in Thy bosom, as I have been from eternity,” resembles Catherine’s

sayings: “True love wills to stand naked. This naked love sees the

truth”; “the soul in that state of cleanness in which it was created”;

“the angels and man, when disobedient, were clothed in sin”; and the

words heard by her: “I want thee naked, naked.” The answer granted to

Battista, that “possessing her Lord, her only Love, she possessed at

the same time all Paradise,” recalls Catherine’s declaration that “if

of what her heart felt but one drop were to fall into Hell, Hell itself

would become Eternal Life.” And Battista’s prayer, “these other things,

give them to whom Thou wilt; give me but this most pure Union with

Thee,” is substantially like Catherine’s answer to the Friar, “that

you should merit more than myself--I leave that in your hands; but that

I cannot love Him as much as you, is a thing that you will never by any

means get me to understand.”[345]

And we get here two further interesting particularities as to such

“locutions.” In this case Battista only “feels,” at the time of their

occurrence, that certain words are being spoken within her (once before

she has used that remarkably general term, instead of the more obvious

and specific “hear”); and she possesses, on coming (evidently soon

after) to write them down, a but approximate remembrance of them, and

a certainty as to their substance alone. And then we find here the

interesting case of two different simultaneous locutions: one voice

referring to the name which our Lord had given her, and another, at

this point, quoting the text, “dedi te in lucem gentium.” The text,

in this full form, occurs in Isaiah xlix, 6, and is there spoken by

God to His servant Israel, v. 3; but part of it, expanded to “a light

to the revelation of the Gentiles,” is, in Luke ii, 32, quoted by

Simeon of Christ. We thus, in this place, get three different, yet

simultaneous, levels of consciousness within Battista’s soul: her own

(more or less ordinary) consciousness and “voice” recognized by her own

self, as such; another, deeper, extraordinary consciousness and “voice”

proceeding, according to her apprehension, from our Lord’s presence

and action within her; and finally a third, deepest consciousness and

“voice” taken, I presume, to be directly communicated by God Himself.

It is to be noted that, though interior “locutions” seem to have been

fairly frequent with Catherine, there is no case on record in her life

of more than two levels of consciousness, two “voices,” at one and the

same moment, her own and Love’s.

5. _Experience of December 23, 24, 1554._

“The following night” (December 23 to 24), “I woke up and found

impressed upon my mind (the words): ‘comedite bonum,’ Isaiah lv

(2). And this impression remained with me (throughout the day),--an

impression of eating God, and of inviting all others to the same

Divine food.--In the evening,--it was the Vigil of the Nativity,--I

had a sight of how, God Himself having taken our nature, and having

done so as the Infinite one, the very greatest virtue must be diffused

throughout this same (human) nature: a truth which he knew who says:

‘Plena est omnis terra gloria eius,’ Isaiah vi (3). If by one man sin

entered into all, by a God-man how much good has not entered into us

all? Romans v, 15-19. If God has made Himself Flesh, what virtue is

there which He has denied to this same flesh?--And in the night of

the Nativity, after Matins, I had a sight of that extreme, eternal

and incomprehensible Love, which, unable to abide within Itself, had

become ecstatic into the thing It loved, and had indeed, by means of

Its Almighty power, become that very thing. Whence it is that, seeing

Thy Majesty gone forth out of Thyself and become me, I was determined,

in virtue of that self-same love, to go forth from myself and, in every

manner, make myself into Thy very Self. And Thou, my God, didst say

that Thou hadst descended to the same degree as that to which Thou

wantedst man to ascend.”

Here Battista’s “impression of eating God, and of inviting all

others to the same Divine food” is substantially identical with

Catherine’s doctrine as to the “One Bread, God,” and “all creatures

hungering for this One Bread.” Battista’s sight of “God being diffused

throughout human nature,” is analogous to Catherine’s teaching as to

no creature existing that does not, in some measure, participate in

His goodness,--although, with characteristic difference, Battista

dwells on the ennoblement of that nature through the Incarnation of

God, and Catherine insists upon the nobility contemporaneous with, and

intrinsic to, Man’s original Creation. And Battista’s determination to

go forth from herself is identical, in substance, with all the sayings

of Catherine which I have grouped under the “outside” “outwards”

category.[346]

And note how, in this group, Battista mentally sees, instead of

interiorly hearing, the truth of the Incarnation of the Infinite, and

of the consequent ennobling of our whole nature; how this sight then

suggests to her mind a definite text (recognized by herself as such),

and then an amplification of another text (not perhaps identified by

her as such at all): and how the transition from that sight to these

texts is so smooth and rapid that it is practically impossible to mark

off precisely where she held the simply given experience to end, and

her own action and comment to begin. The fact of the matter no doubt is

that, in both cases, though very possibly in different degrees, there

was divine and human action indistinguishably co-operant throughout.

And mark again how her “vista”--“of that extreme, eternal, and

incomprehensible Love which had become ‘ecstatic’ into the Thing it

loves”; her consequent determination to “go forth from herself,”

and the voice which told her that He wanted her “to ascend in the

same degree as He had descended”: all goes back, for its literary

suggestion, to the Dionysian “Divine Names”: “Divine Love is ecstatic,

not permitting any to be lovers of themselves but of those beloved. The

very Author of all things, through an overflow of His loving goodness,

becomes ‘out of Himself,’ and is led down from the eminence above

all, to being in all.” “He is at once moving and conducting Power to

Himself, as it were a sort of everlasting circle.” “Let us restore all

loves back to the one and enfolded Love and Father of them all.”[347]

Not the less truly did Battista’s mental lights and voluntary

determinations come from God, because they consisted, for the most

part, in a vivid realization and acceptation, in and for her particular

case, on this Christmas night in 1554, of spiritual facts and truths

which had been slowly and successively revealed, experienced, and

formulated as far back as the Hebrew Prophets and the Greek Plato, and

above all by our Lord, and in St. Paul’s writings and the Gospel of

St. John. These truths were none the less hers, because they had been

successively experienced and proclaimed, so long ago by others; and

their suggestion and realization to and in her, were as truly the work

of God in her own case as they were in that of those others.

6. _Experience of December 27, 1554._

“This morning” (December 27), “which is the Feast of the Evangelist

John, when I awoke, I suddenly heard the words being spoken within my

mind: ‘To-day I am determined to divide thy soul from thy spirit’--and

later on, when the Host was being elevated at Mass and I was praying

about this matter, I had a sight or Thou didst say unto me--I cannot

remember precisely which it was,--enough, it appeared to me that

as, when the soul is divided from the body, the soul, in so far as

immortal, flies to its destined place, and the entire body remains

dead: so also, when the almighty hand of God makes a similar division

of the soul from the spirit, the former, the animal part (of man),

remains dead, but the spirit, (truly) free (at last), flies to its

natural place, which is God, the Living Fountain.”

Here we are at once reminded of Catherine’s experience of “Love

once speaking within her mind”; of her sayings which dwell on the

separation of the soul from the body, and on the flight of the spirit

to its natural place, God; and of her sight of “the living Fountain”

of Goodness.[348] But Battista’s psychology is entirely clear and

self-consistent, as to the precise extension of, and the precise

distinction between, the terms “spirito” and “anima”; whereas, in the

authentic sayings of Catherine, “anima” is used sometimes as inclusive

of, and sometimes in contradistinction to, “spirito.” We shall see how

it is only the later systematizing _Dialogo_-writer who brings perfect

consistency, and a scheme identical with Battista’s, into Catherine’s

terminology. Yet in Catherine’s image of the assimilation of bread by

man, in illustration of the assimilation of man’s nature by God, we

find Battista’s two stages of the divisional process. For there the

body is first purified up to the actual level of the soul, and then the

soul itself is purified perfectly, its animal part being eliminated or

dominated by the spiritual part.[349]

It is interesting, too, to note how Battista cannot decide here whether

this interpretation of the short sentence she had heard was mentally

seen or interiorly heard by her; indeed, she is sure only that, whilst

she was praying to understand the meaning of that sentence, the meaning

thus sought appeared to her, by some means or other, to be so and so.

It is then abundantly clear from this, that the difference between an

interior sight and an interior voice, and again between either of these

and the admittedly normal workings of her own mind, was, at times, so

delicate, as either not to be clear to her own consciousness, even at

the very time of the experience; or, at least, to fade away from her

memory before she came to chronicle the experience.

7. _Experience of January 6, 1555._

“On the Feast of the Epiphany” (January 6, 1555), “before Communion,

I felt ineffable and most tender colloquies, and greatly I rejoiced

because of them. For I had caused Masses to be said and prayers to be

prayed, by various persons during many days, with the intention that,

if these colloquies were not from Thee, I might no more experience

them; but that, if they were Thine, they might be produced within me

more clearly and more efficaciously. And seeing that I now felt them

more than usual, and in a more admirable manner, I had and have a firm

hope that they were Thine. Whence it happened that (having, on that

same blessed day, to go up to receive Thee in the Sacrament), I felt

Thy Majesty more than once calling me within me, ‘Come, since I want

to devour thee entirely.’ … It seems to me that ‘entirely’ was one of

the words, but I have no firm remembrance of this. But I know well that

Thou saidst several times, ‘Come, since I want to devour thee.’ … To

me it seemed that I merited rather to go under Lucifer, than into the

Infinite Light (_Luce_).”

We get here a number of interesting parallels and contrasts to

Catherine’s teaching and practice. God’s devouring of the soul; God

pictured as Light; souls conceived as higher up or lower down in

space, according to their degree of goodness or of badness; even the

pleasure in a play upon words: all this finds its close counterpart

in Catherine.[350] But far more important is the difference in the

subject-matter of their scruples and in their respective attitudes

towards psychically unusual experiences. In Catherine’s case there

is no record of anxieties concerning other things than her degree

of detachment and her administrative responsibilities; indeed her

whole practice and teaching, continuously bent as they were upon the

ethico-spiritual truth and upon the practical application of her

unusual experiences, make it morally certain that her anxieties never

turned upon these forms and means themselves. She was, as it were,

too much occupied with the content of the cup, ever to be actively

perplexed as to the cup itself. Battista, on the contrary, seems to

have been quite free from scruples of Catherine’s melancholic type;

but did not, evidently, always soar as highly as her God-mother above

all anxious occupation with the form of her experiences. And, indeed,

if, in this instance, it was evidently the form of her experiences

which perplexed her, it was also the renewed and heightened experience

of this peculiar form which reassured her.--Yet the very fact of

such a perplexity, and again the moderation with which, even at the

end of it all, she but “hopes that it all comes from God,” shows a

healthy reluctance to trust too readily or too much to such tests and

indications. It would probably not be unfair to put her attitude

towards such things midway between Don Marabotto’s readiness of belief

and Catherine’s soaring ethico-spiritual transcendence.

It is noticeable too that, if the inner voice is more distinct than

before, Battista’s anxious care for accuracy is also, if possible, more

on the alert than ever: witness her remarks as to the word “all.”

8. _Experience of the Second Sunday in Lent, 1555._

“On the second Sunday (in Lent), having communicated, I felt Thine

ineffable reasonings; but, since I did not write them down at once, I

do not any more venture to write them down, having in great part lost

the memory of them. But this I remember, that the words were like those

which the Bridegroom says to the Bride in the Canticle (of Canticles).”

Here the difference between this form of apprehension and that of

ordinary vivid thinking is so faintly distinct, that she can only

declare that she “felt” (without deciding between hearing, seeing, or

any other of the more definite senses) “reasonings” (without being

sure of their “explicitation” in words or images); and she herself

recognized at the time, and later on remembers that contemporary

recognition of, their likeness to the texts of the Canticle of

Canticles. It is evidently the profound reluctance, cultivated by her

for half a century or more, to treat the deepest acts of the soul as

other than directly and exclusively the acts of God in that soul, which

makes her not see and admit here the large co-operation of her own mind.

Remark also a characteristic difference from Catherine, in that the

latter’s teaching is, we have already seen, entirely free from any

influences characteristic of the Song of Songs.

9. _Experience of Ascension Day, 1555._

“On the Lord’s Ascension Day Thou didst say to me, O my Love, that, up

to this point, I had walked by Faith, but that now Thou wast determined

to give me direct assurance (_certezza_); and that there was no

occasion for me to go on writing down Thy words, since I should read

them in my own experience. And on my asking what Thou wouldst operate

within me, Thou didst affirm to me that I should ever possess Thee in

my heart.”--“Another time I felt that I was being told: ‘I generate My

Son, having an infinite Cognition of Myself; similarly I generate thee,

by infusing into thee that same cognition. But (this) My Cognition is

without measure; and thine shall be according to that measure which

I shall, by My goodness, be impelled to give thee, in suchwise that

of this cognition and of thine intellect there shall be effected one

identical thing; so that I shall place My Word, My Concept, which I

possess within Myself, in thee, according to the capacity for it which

I shall deign to give thee; and so that, again, thy spirit shall be a

son within My Son, or rather one only son with Him: and thus will I

have generated thee.’ Hence, O Lord, according to this Thy showing,

those are generated by Thee, who, united by grace to Thy Majesty,

repose in Thy Paternal Bosom, together with Thine only Begotten. But

He is by nature one sole substance with Thee--He whom Thou art ever

ineffably generating; and we are united with Thee, through reposing in

Thy bosom by simple grace and by a singular privilege of Thy love; and

in so far as we thus abide there in Thee, Thou generatest us in more

and more light and ardour. Hence then Thou generatest him who abides in

Thee.”

We have here, in the last locution of this series, the most complicated

and seemingly original of them all. Yet here we can still find

parallels to Catherine: in the addressing of God as “my Love”; in

the fact that the locution proceeds from, and its interpretation is

submitted, not to our Lord, but to God, to Him who indeed generates His

Son without measure and directly, yet all other souls also, though in

measure and by and through His Son; and in the declaration that now she

should have a kind of direct assurance in lieu of Faith.[351]

And here especially we can trace the large Neo-Platonist (Dionysian)

element in Battista’s Mysticism. There is the first, perfect circle,

God’s perfect cognition of Himself, a cognition which produces a

fresh (though co-eternal) centre of cognition, which latter in return

perfectly cognizes Him who perfectly cognized it. And then there is

a derivative imperfect circle--since that perfect cognizedness and

cognizing, which is God’s Son, can only be imperfectly imparted to the

souls of creatures: yet again we have a circle for the very thing which

is cognized by God is, in this instance also, the same which cognizes

Him. And lastly, this distance between the perfect and imperfect

circles is, as far as possible, overcome by an attempted and momentary

identification of the perfectly cognized and cognizing circle, Christ,

with the perfectly cognized but imperfectly cognizing one, every human

soul in its potentiality and divinely intended end.

And this large Platonist scheme of a progression of Ideas appears

here coloured and Christianized, by means of four scriptural texts in

particular: Ps. cix, 31, “in the brightness (splendours) of the saints,

from the womb, before the day star (Lucifer) I begot thee”; John i,

18, “the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father”; xiii,

23, “there was leaning on Jesus’ bosom one of His disciples whom Jesus

loved”; and Luke xvi, 23, “the rich man beheld Abraham from afar, and

Lazarus in his bosom.” The first two passages give her the eternal and

continuous generation and abiding of the Son by and in the Father;

and the last two suggest a similar abiding and (interpretatively)

generation, together with that Son, of the faithful soul, in and by

God, continuously and for ever.

Note, too, the double meaning, so characteristic of mystical

utterances, contained in the sentence, “I generate My Son, having

an infinite Cognition of Myself”; which indicates both the mode of

generation (“by means of an infinite cognition”), and the nature of the

generated one (“who has an infinite cognition”). And by this literary

device, the intense close-knitness of the perfect circle is strikingly

adumbrated.

And remark how Battista finishes up this soaring flight by an

interpretation of a perfect sobriety. Indeed it is this moderation and

good sense along with so immense an Idealism and intense Interiority

which, together, constitute her noblest characteristic and should make

us overlook the comparative absence of spontaneous charm and tender

freshness, which cannot but strike us if we allow ourselves to contrast

the piety of Battista with that of Catherine.

IV. SOME FURTHER LETTERS OF BATTISTA, 1575 TO 1581.

Before the experiences and confidences of an almost painful privacy

and emotional intensity, which require, in part, a considerable amount

of patient interpretation from us, if they are to move and touch

us, we found and dwelt upon a moral attitude and a document full of

immediately understandable heroism and virile common-sense: the scene

with her father before his death-ride, and the letter to Dottore Moro.

And, somewhat similarly, three further documents succeed to these

intermediate confidences, documents full of love and esteem for the

externally ordinary vocation of the vast majority of us all, of a large

undaunted outlook, and of a shrewd and persevering public spirit.

The apparent mental contraction and subjectivity we have just passed

through with her is but the recollective movement, the, as it were,

drawing itself together for the spring of action on the part of an

already large and expansive soul, and leads on and out to fresh and

still larger horizons, and, indeed, effects them.

1. _Letter to Donna Anguisola, 1575._

We have first a letter of June 10, 1575 (Battista was now seventy-eight

years of age, and had been a Religious for sixty-five years) addressed

to a widowed noblewoman with young children--the Illustrious Lady

Andronica Anguisola.[352] The reader will note the transition,

evidently quite natural and spontaneous in the writer, from a soaring

Mysticism, full of Pauline, Joannine, and Dionysian forms, and of deep,

personally experimental content, to the most practical and shrewd,

wisely unflinching, homely heroism. There are few documents, I think,

which show with an equal impressiveness how startlingly direct and

immediate can be and is the application of such, apparently, purely

transcendental, serene contemplations and affections to the struggling,

clamorous world of our human passions, circumstances, difficulties, and

duties: and how only that transcendence and this immanence, taken and

working thus together, give to the soul a height without inflation, and

a concrete particularity without pettiness. I shall break up the long

letter into three sections, omitting only two, relatively commonplace,

passages in the middle and at the end; and shall again point out

certain parallels and peculiarities at the end of each section.

(1) _Opening of the letter._

“Most Honoured Madam in the Crucified,

“‘I have come to place (cast) fire upon the earth, and what will I

but that it be enkindled’ (Luke xii, 49). By these most divine words

we can understand, in part, to what a supreme degree such a most happy

fire is of importance, since the Eternal Word came down from Heaven to

kindle it in His so dearly-loved rational earth. And this great effect

could not but follow, since the Paternal goodness willed to communicate

to our misery the ardour which He possesses eternally in His Heart.

And what else is this communication to us of His infinite love than

the planting within our minds of His own intrinsic, incomprehensible

delights? His Majesty, in His infinite courtesy, takes His delights

in abiding with the children of men (Prov. viii, 31). But He desires

that these delights should proceed from both sides, so that, as He

takes these delights in us, by His own intrinsic natural goodness, He

similarly wills that we, by means of that same goodness which is poured

into us by that fire which Christ places upon our earth,--as Paul

demonstrates when he says (Rom. v, 5), ‘The charity of God is poured

forth in our hearts by the Holy Ghost who is given to us,’--He wills, I

say, that, set in motion by the immense potency of this infused fire,

we should place, in return, all our delights in His Majesty; and then,

to speak according to our human fashion, His unmeasured love attains

to its intent. In this correspondence lie hidden away delights beyond

all comprehension, considering that it is His own goodness that comes

down (into us), as He demonstrates when he says, ‘We will come to him,

and will make our abode with him’ (John xiv, 23); and that He raises us

up beyond all measure in suchwise that, of the Increate Heart and of

the created one, there is made, by the operation of Him who says, ‘The

Father who is in Me, worketh’ (John x, 38; v, 17), a single most secret

and inestimable union.”

Here, again, we find close parallels to Catherine in “His own

intrinsic incomprehensible delights,” “His infinite courtesy,” “the

immense virtue of this infused fire,” and “to speak according to

our human fashion.” And the whole general conception of a mutual

and corresponding action and circle between God and the soul, the

whole movement beginning in and by God, and leading back and ending

in Him, is here, once more, the common property of Battista and her

God-mother.[353] Yet “The Crucified,” with which the whole letter

opens, and “His Heart,” the “Increate Heart,” applied directly to God

Himself, are expressions we should seek in vain in Catherine. The

historical Christ, and a most legitimate anthropomorphism, find here

a place, indeed a prominence, which they have not there. And note the

sobriety with which Battista insists on the analogical character of

all this speculation, for she “speaks” only “according to our human

fashion”; and the allegorizing involved in the “His dearly-loved

rational earth,” the earth that souls dwell on having here become

simply identical with those souls themselves. And especially remark the

mystically characteristic doubleness of meaning, and the conception of

the substantiality of the divine indwelling, involved in the phrase,

“His own intrinsic, incomprehensible delights.” For this phrase means

both “the delight which, for our minds, is intrinsically bound up with

the thought of God,” and the “delight which He himself takes in His

indwelling whilst abiding within us”; and the latter idea involves

a belief in the soul’s delight in Him being but a sympathetic echo

and answer to His delight in this His own indwelling, a delight thus

actually in operation within the human soul.

Mark, too, how her opening her letter with a formally announced text

is but an instance of her life-long literary form of composition--the

homily; how saturated is the whole with (evidently first-hand)

scriptural meditation; and how wise and like her own father is her

treatment of this soul, so near to delusion in the very intemperance of

her search after perfection. A warning note of a claim about to be made

upon her correspondent’s effective self-immolation has been struck,

from the first, by the words, “the Crucified”; and yet this note is

first followed by a paragraph sufficiently soaring to satisfy even the

most lofty moods of the Signora Andronica.

(2) _Central part of the letter._

“I have taken up my pen from a desire that you may be wholly and

entirely devoted to the Lord, with a whole-hearted abandonment. I do

not mean that you should abandon the care of your children: on the

contrary, I wish that you may give the greatest care to them, both

within and without. For the within, by desiring heart-wholly that

they may be joined (cleave) to God, with all they are; and for the

without, by helping them studiously to avoid everything that leads

to sin.” She then gives the examples of SS. Felicitas and Monica,

and of St. Louis of France, and proceeds: “Now note, dear Madam, how

great is the fruit of good government on the part of parents. Indeed,

according to the little light which God deigns to give me, this alone

appears to me necessary--that your Ladyship should observe the counsel

of St. Paul, where he says (Eph. iv, 1) ‘that we should walk worthily

in the vocation in which we are called.’ Now _you_ are called to the

government of your children. Hence I pray you to study how to act,

that you may be able to render a good account of it to God. You will

remember how our Christ, on the point of going to His death, renders

an account to His eternal Father concerning those whom His Father had

given into His charge, saying, ‘of them whom Thou hast given Me (in

charge), I have not lost one’ (John xviii, 9).

“Consider, my very dear Friend, how that our great God, being

infinitely perfect, or, in better terms, perfection itself, we cannot

either add to or detract from His glory even the slightest point, as

the Prophet saw who said (Ps. ci, 13), ‘Thou, O Lord, art ever the

same’ (endurest for ever), ‘unchangeable and invariable.’ All that we

can do for Him, is to come in aid to His dear images, to His beloved

children, as the Lord shows in Matt, xxv, 40, ‘that which ye shall do

unto one of these My least, ye shall have done it unto Me.’--I know

well that you desire to withdraw yourself from all the cares of the

world, in order to be able to occupy yourself entirely with God. But

do you not know that ‘Charity seeketh not the things that are her own’

(1 Cor. xiii, 5), that is, her own utility? That desire which your

Ladyship has for herself, let her have it equally for her children.

Are we not obliged to love our neighbours as ourselves? (Matt. xix,

19). And hence, how much more our children! That step in perfection,

of entirely abandoning all things, your Ladyship cannot take, without

great damage to your neighbour,--damage, I mean, to souls. Remember how

full of perils is the period of youth; I beg of you, with all possible

insistence, for God’s sake, to have a greater care of these young souls

than of yourself, since the necessity is greater.”

Here, again, there are parallels to the God-mother: in the love of

that intensely unifying term, “si accostino,” “cleave to,” “be joined

to,” of St. Paul, so dear to Catherine also; in the love of all souls,

as God’s dear images, but specially of those bound to us by blood, so

marked in Catherine’s testamentary dispositions, as distinct from the

descriptions, possibly even from the surface-appearances, of her last

nine years; and in the greater care to be given to others than to our

own selves, when their necessity is greater than ours, so heroically

practised by Catherine in the case of the Plague.[354] The chief

difference, here again, is the prominence given by Battista to the

Historic Christ, by her quotation of the words of St. Matthew,--words

which, though so obviously applicable to Catherine’s work and

duties, nowhere occur throughout Catherine’s own contemplations or

discourses.--Note again the ambiguity of the “within and without” in

connection with the care to be bestowed, since the words are intended

to cover respectively both Donna Anguisola’s intention and exterior

action, and her children’s interior dispositions and visible acts.

(3) _Conclusion of the letter._

“But pray indeed to His Majesty that He may give you grace so great

as to enable you to abandon all things interiorly. Here is the point

in which all perfection consists. And I will pray to Him for this, in

union with yourself. I most certainly desire, for my part, that your

generous heart may have no other delight but God. And do you convert

that human consolation which men are wont to take in their children,

into a great desire that they may cleave to God; that they may not

offend Him, and that they may bear His Majesty in their hearts. And

when those things have been actually effected, do you then take the

greatest delight in them, whilst mortifying that merely human pleasure

which men take in the mutable prosperity of their children, in the most

pleasing consolation which arises from their company, and in such-like

things. And, from such a course of action, various advantages will

follow. First, you will, I think, be thus doing what is most pleasing

to God; next, you will be most useful to your neighbour; and lastly,

your Ladyship will have carried off a great victory over your own self.”

Here we can trace two close parallels to special points of Catherine’s

practice and teaching. In the doctrine that the point of all perfection

consists in the interior abandonment of all things, we get but a

re-statement of Catherine’s teaching as to God’s love being practicable

everywhere; and in the advice to practise interior mortification in

the matter of resting in the consolation of her children’s company, we

have not only a parallel to Catherine’s early and transitory convert

practice, but also an application to human intercourse of Catherine’s,

and indeed also Battista’s, continuous and ever-growing practice of

detachment from sensible consolations in the soul’s intercourse with

God.[355]

We can hardly doubt that this letter was as effectual in keeping

Donna Anguisola within the limits of family duties, as the letter of

forty-six years before had been in bringing back Dottore Moro to the

world-wide spiritual family of the Ancient Church.

2. _Letter to Padre Collino, 1576._

And we have next a letter, written in 1576, when she was seventy-nine,

to that Father Serafino Collino at Cremona, to whom, five years later,

she was to write the truly classical account of her father, which has

been the main source of our study of that heroic figure.

And indeed already in this letter she preludes, as it were, to that

outburst of filial praise, by first dwelling here upon the effects

of her father’s life as they were maturing visibly around her. “A

very spiritual, wise, and noble person,” writes Battista, “has been

visiting me; and in the course of talk she asked me, ‘Well, and what

did you think of the great miracles that God has been working during

these times of acute conflict, in this our city--miracles such as no

one ever heard of throughout the course of ancient Roman history or

in connection with any other warfare?’ And I, knowing well that this

person has three Doctors of Theology living continuously in her house,

guessed that these men must have carefully scrutinized and examined

the whole matter. So I simply asked, ‘What miracles do you mean?’ And

she answered me, ‘The city has been for so long a time in arms, a prey

to the good and to the wicked, to the wise and to the mad, and has

been affording the greatest possible opportunity for acts contrary to

justice. And yet, throughout the city within the walls, no one has ever

been offended,--no man, in his person; no woman, in her honour; and no

man or woman, in their possessions.’”

And then Battista comments on her visitor’s declaration. “As to their

persons, all men went about in the city with swords drawn and erect,

and spoke injurious words to those of the opposite party. And it really

seems as though their hands were tied, for they used their tongues

indeed but not their hands; not one drop of blood has been spilt.

Within the city two homicides were, no doubt, committed during this

time, because of a difference on a point of honour; but none on account

of party spirit. Similarly outside of Genoa the son of Signer Antonio

d’Oria was killed--not by the opposite party, but by another nobleman

like himself,--they had come to words. As to female honour, the women

went and came to visit each other, and frequented Mass, whether they

belonged to one party or to the other; and the greater number of

gentlewomen went out of Genoa, accompanied by their daughters, passing

through the very midst of the city, and going down the wharf to get on

board their boats; and yet never was any discourtesy shown to any one

of them. Similarly, with regard to possessions: quantities of these

were sent out of Genoa; great masses of them were deposited in the

Monasteries--and yet never even a trifle was ever taken. On this latter

point we of this Convent can bear direct witness. For although so much

property and money was brought to the Monastery delle Grazie, that

it became difficult to move about the house because of the quantity

of cases and stray boxes deposited there, nevertheless not even to

the poor carriers who brought them was the slightest violence done,

although they had to pass through all those drawn and raised swords;

nor was a single word said to us Nuns, who appeared in the gateway to

receive the goods.”[356]

Now the well-informed lawyer, Professore Morro, thinks that all this

was the direct result of Ettore Vernazza’s far-sighted and devoted

philanthropy. And he is no doubt right. For we still possess the

entries, in the Cartulary of St. George, of the great works carried

out by that powerful Banking Body, in conformity with and by means of

Ettore’s directions and moneys, amongst Genoa’s teeming poor and sick

and ignorant, in the years 1531 and 1553.[357] Indeed even the printed

documents bring the administration of this great, ever-growing fund

down to the year 1708.

And the points that here concern the character of Battista are this

her omnipresent and yet bashful pride in her large-hearted father; her

virile joy in the public good; her immensely sane and direct tastes

as to the city’s improvement; and her glad finding of a miracle in

things thus readily verifiable, universal, interior, and yet profoundly

operative in the visible work-a-day life of man. There is something

strikingly modern in this severely social, and already more or less

statistical, way of testing improvement, an improvement which is found

here, not in any vaguely assumed increase of impulsive or perfunctory

almsgiving in the one class, or of dependence and passivity in the

other, but in the closely scrutinized proofs of a remarkable growth in

general self-respect, self-maintenance, public spirit and sense of

social interdependence, on the part of all parties and classes.

And in the daughter’s judgment concerning all this it is again easy

to trace a likeness to her father, with his careful regulations for a

great Register of the Poor, and his provisions for harbour-works and

the embellishment of the city. But Catherine’s spirit is also present,

with its emphatic insistence upon God’s love as practicable everywhere,

and upon truth as, of its very nature, public-spirited and meant for

all.[358]

3. _Second letter to Padre Collino, 1581._

And five years later still (she was now eighty-four) Battista writes

her long account of her father’s life, which we studied in connection

with him, but which would well deserve a detailed analysis from the

standpoint of the daughter’s dispositions, so keen and large, so

tender, true and immensely operative, long after most men have died, or

are living on in a selfish second childhood.

V. BATTISTA’S DEATH, 1587.

And then at last, six years afterwards, at four o’clock in the

afternoon of May 9, 1587, Pope Sixtus V being Pope and Mary Stuart

having but six months still to live, Battista died in her Convent,

fully three generations old. During her last years she had been

allowed to communicate daily, and had thus, at the end, added one more

trait of resemblance to her God-mother, who, as we know, had, for

some thirty-five years of her life, found her greatest strength and

consolation in this the simplest, most central and deepest of all the

Christian devotions and means of Grace.[359]

One hundred and forty years had now passed since the birth of

Catherine, and seventy-seven since her death. It is indeed time that we

should, having accumulated so much material, proceed in the next volume

to an examination and exposition of the underlying spiritual facts and

laws specially brought home to us by the group of lives we have been

studying, and of which the central figure was that, for us, largely

elusive but immensely suggestive, many-sided and yet rarely beautiful,

soul and influence, which the Church venerates as St. Catherine of

Genoa.

CONCLUSION

WHEREIN LIES THE SECRET OF SPIRITUAL PERSUASIVENESS

But let us first conclude this volume by attempting an answer, however

preliminary and general, to the definite question with which it opened

out.

I. THE QUESTION.

We asked there, how any deeper, will-moving intercommunication can even

be possible amongst men? For the mere possession of, and appeal to,

the elementary forms of abstract thinking, which seem to be our only

certain common material, instrument and measure of persuasion, appear

never, of themselves, to move the will, or indeed the feelings; whereas

all that is endowed with such directly will-moving power appears, not

only as specifically concrete and as hopelessly boxed up within the

four corners of our mutually exclusive individualities, but also as

vitiated, even for each several owner, by an essentially fitful and

fanciful subjectivity.

II. THE ANSWER.

Now I think that even the survey of the three great lives, and of those

four minor ones, which has been just attempted, forcibly suggests, both

positively and negatively, at least the general outlines of the true

answer to this pressing question.

1. Only a life sufficiently large and alive to take up and retain,

within its own experimental range, at least some of the poignant

question and conflict, as well as of the peace-bringing solution and

calm: hence a life dramatic with a humble and homely heroism which, in

rightful contact with and in rightful renunciation of the Particular

and Fleeting, ever seeks and finds the Omnipresent and Eternal;

and which again deepens and incarnates (for its own experience and

apprehension and for the stimulation of other souls) this Transcendence

in its own thus gradually purified Particular: only such a life can be

largely persuasive, at least for us Westerns and in our times.

We would thus have an attempt, ever renewed, ever widening, ever

deepening, at the formation of, as it were, a concrete, living,

breathing image of the Abiding and the One; of Law, Love, and Duty;

of God: an image formed out of the seemingly shifting, shrinking

flux, and the apparently shapeless mass of our actual, bewildering

human manyfold; our flesh and sweat, and tears and blood, our joy

and laughter, our passions and petty revolts, our weariness and

isolations. Attend primarily to minimizing or eliminating all such

friction and pain; to being clear, materially simple and static, a

fixed Thing, rather than vivid, formally unified, and dynamic, a

growing Personality: or again, let the friction be so great, or the

courage and fidelity so small, as to lead to the break-up of all

genuine recollection and harmonization; and, in the former case,

such a character or outlook may be considered “safe” or “correct” or

“sensible”; and, in the latter, the character and outlook will not be

consolidated at all, or will be breaking up: but in neither case will

the life be persuasive. For to be truly winning, the soul’s life must

become and must keep itself full and true.

2. Now it is simply false that man can, even for his own self alone,

hold spiritual reality, even from the first, in a simply passive,

purely dependent, entirely automatic and painless fashion; or that he

can, even at the last, possess it in a full, continuous and effortless

harmony and simultaneousness.

God no doubt holds all Truth and Reality as one great Here and Now, or

rather He possesses them entirely outside of space and time; nor can we

attribute to Him directly any interior conflict, effort, or suffering.

And, again, we ourselves too possess within our minds an element

and an apprehension of the Abiding and the Simultaneous; and their

rudiments operate within us, if all-diffusively yet most powerfully,

from the very first. Indeed the continuous increase in definiteness

and influence of that element and of its apprehension here, and the

indefinite expansion and continuously conscious possession of this

same element hereafter, are respectively the highest aim and fullest

achievement of our spiritual life. And finally, the further the soul

advances, the more it sees and realizes the profound truth, that all it

does and is, is somehow given to it; and hence that, inasmuch as it is

permanent at all, it is grounded upon, environed, supported, penetrated

and nourished by Him who is its origin and its end. Here all the soul’s

actions tend to coalesce to simply being, and this being, in so far as

there and then acceptable to the conscience, comes more and more to be

felt and considered as the simple effect of the one direct action of

God alone.

And yet as to God, some kind and degree of Incarnational doctrine is

necessary, and is indeed (in varyingly perfect or imperfect forms) the

common property of all higher religion; and Christians have learnt

to think the profound thought, of God Himself being in a mysterious

closeness to even our most secret perplexities and inarticulate

pain.--And by ourselves, poor weaklings, that vast, continuous

Simultaneity and Harmony of God can only be more and more nearly

approached, if, upon our mostly shadowy, and (when at all clear) our

short-lived consciousness of an inchoate simultaneity and harmony of

our own, we work an orderly successiveness, and attempt a Melody: an

humble, creaturely imitation of the Eternal, Spaceless Creator, under

the deliberately accepted conditions and doubly refracting media

of time and space. Real temptation, true piercing conflict, heavy

darkness, and bewildering perplexity; the constant encountering (as

a necessary condition and occasion of all growth) of numberless and

multiform remoter risks of failing and of falling: all this forms an

essential part of this painful-joyous probation and virile, because

necessarily costing and largely gradual, self-constitution of man’s

free-willing spirit.

And the place and function, in all this spiritual growth-in-conflict,

of Science, both in its most determinist and apparently

most anti-spiritual mood, and in its subtler though no less

destructive-seeming attitudes, will turn out, we shall find,--now

that our generation is getting to know Science’s special scope and

implications,--to be of simply irreplaceable value and potency.

And though, in the other life, our earthly pain and temptation

are to be no more, we may be sure that, even there, the essential

characteristics of our nature will not be reversed. Hence we may

be able, later on in this book, to hazard some not all-ungrounded

conjecture as to the possible substitute and form in Heaven for

what is essentially noble and creaturely in our sufferings and

self-renunciations here on earth.

And lastly, though God’s action in all things in general, and in

our individual soul in particular, be more and more recognized as

all-pervasive in proportion as the soul advances: yet this action will

have to be conceived as operating in and through and with our own; as

in each case finding, in one sense, its very matter, in another, its

very form, in our own free-willings. For Spirit and spirit, God and the

creature, are not two material bodies, of which one can only be where

the other is not: but, on the contrary, as regards our own spirit,

God’s Spirit ever works in closest penetration and stimulation of our

own; just as, in return, we cannot find God’s Spirit simply separate

from our own spirit within ourselves. Our spirit clothes and expresses

His; His Spirit first creates and then sustains and stimulates our own.

The two, as regards the inner life of the human soul, rise and sink

together. But more as to this too hereafter.

3. We shall indeed, throughout the next volume, have ample

opportunities for noting how numerous, definite, far-reaching and at

all times operative, even though still but partially unfolded, are

the evidences for, and the consequences and applications of, such a

fundamental conception, as they are furnished and required by all

deeper human life; hence, above all, by Religion; and in Religion,

again, specially by its ever largely elusive, yet ever profoundly

important, constituent, the Mystical Element.

APPENDIX TO PART II

CHRONOLOGICAL ACCOUNT AND CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE MATERIALS FOR THE

RE-CONSTITUTION OF SAINT CATHERINE’S LIFE AND TEACHING.

INTRODUCTION.

The following laborious study of the growth and upbuilding of the Life

and Legend of St. Catherine is a study worth the making. For this study

will bring out fully the test and reasons which have guided the process

of documentary selection and estimation adopted throughout the second

part of this book, indicating thus the precise degree of reliability

pertaining to my narrative. But especially will it furnish a detailed,

and peculiarly instructive, example of what, with numberless

differences in degree, kind, and importance, can be traced throughout

the history of the transmission of the image and influence of great

religious personalities and teachers. These continuously recurring

phenomena can be taken as, together, constituting the general forms and

laws which regulate the growth of all religious devotional biography.

I.

These general laws appear to be as follows.

1. _Three Laws._

There is the law of _contemporary, simultaneous, spontaneous variation

of apprehension_. Vernazza and Marabotto, writing down, at the time of

their occurrence or communication, certain facts and sayings with an

equal self-oblivion, sincerity, and truthfulness, give us apprehensions

which, in great part objectively valuable, are, nevertheless, more

or less differing pictures of one and the same fact or saying, or

different selections from amongst the moods and manifestations of one

living personality observed by them.--There is the law of _posterior,

successive, reflective variation of elaboration_. The Dominican

Censor and Battista Vernazza, re-thinking Catherine and her teaching,

in other times and away from her direct influence, necessarily see

her differently again: they are, as it were, spiritual grandchildren,

who rather themselves absorb her and re-state her to their generation

than they are themselves absorbed by her.--And there is the law of

_conservation_, _juxtaposition_, and _identification_. First the

Redactor of the Book of 1528-1530, and lastly the Redactor of that

of 1551--probably, both times, Battista--with, in between, in 1547,

the Redactor who attempted a quadripartite reschematizing of the

_Life_--could not but try and soften the variations produced by the two

other laws.

2. _The third law tends to confuse the operation of the other two._

And note how it is precisely this third law and stage which largely

tends to make the effects of the two other laws into causes of

vagueness, confusion, and scepticism. For instead of conceiving

the unity and identity of the subject-matter (a deep spiritual

personality) as essentially inexhaustible, and as requiring, for its

least inadequate apprehension, precisely both those simultaneous and

spontaneous, and those successive and reflective experiences and

reproductions of it, as furnished by the two other laws, this stage

tends to confuse the identity of the apprehended subject-matter with

a sameness in the apprehension of it; and, whilst thus robbing that

subject-matter of its richness and movement, to introduce an element of

arrangement and timidity into the originally quite _naïf_, and hence

directly impressive, evidences of the observers. Yet the instinct

and object of this third law is as legitimate and elementary as are

those of the other two, since a real unity and utilization of all the

preceding variety is as necessary as the variety to be thus integrated,

and since the other two laws show a similar variety of actuation

throughout religious literature.

3. _Examples._

We find (to move in Church History back from St. Catherine) these three

tendencies at work in the constitution of the Life and Legend of St.

Francis of Assisi, A.D. 1181(?)-1226, traced for us now, with so much

sympathy and acumen by M. Paul Sabatier and the Bollandists. We get

them again in the case of St. Thomas of Canterbury, A.D. 1118-1171,

especially in that of his Death and Miracles, so carefully studied in

Dr. Edwin Abbot’s remarkable book (1898). And, once more, in those

Merovingian Saints, the great Martin of Tours in their midst, at the

end of the fourth century, whose Lives have been so interestingly

described by Bernouilli (1900). And we find them, with especial

clearness, in the growth of the Life of St. Anthony, about A.D.

250-356, as contained in Palladius’s _Historia Monachorum_, now that

Abbot Cuthbert Butler has given us his admirable analysis and edition

of that deeply instructive compiler (1898, 1904).

If we take the Bible, we find (on moving here in a contrary direction)

these laws again at work in the elucidation and elaboration of the

great figure of Moses and of his world-historic life-work. For if

here we get but little that can claim to be by his pen, or even,

as literature, to be contemporaneous with him (since the earliest

Corpus of Laws, the Book of the Covenant, reaches probably only in

its substance back to him), yet here, too, the earliest consecutive

descriptions of his life, by the Jahvist and Elohist writers, give

us two different, though probably more or less simultaneous, largely

_naïve_, accounts and impressions of his life and work. And these

simultaneous variations are followed, later on, by the successive,

increasingly reflective variations and developments of Deuteronomy

and of the Priestly Code. And lastly, these documents get constituted

(in probably two great stages), by Redactional work, into the great

composite History and Legislation of our present last four Books

of Moses.--So again with David. We have the David of some few of

the Psalms; the David of the Books of Samuel, in a double series of

most vivid and spontaneous, more or less simultaneous but somewhat

differing, accounts; the David of the greater part of the Psalter,

the result of a long process of devout successive reflection and

re-interpretation; and the David of the Books of Chronicles, where

pragmatic systematization reaches its height.--And so too with the

Maccabean Heroes, whose history appears, apprehended with varying

degrees of contemporary, simultaneous, spontaneous vividness, and of

subsequent, successive, reflective pragmatism, in the documents and

redactional settings of the First and Second Books of Maccabees.--And

the growth indicated in these three cases covered respectively some

eight hundred, seven hundred, and one hundred years.

But it is, of course, in the New Testament that the interest and

importance of these laws reaches its height. If here we once more

move backwards, the case of St. Paul (martyred A.D. 64) furnishes us

with parallel contemporary accounts of the spontaneous type, in his

own Epistles and in the six “We”-passages by the eyewitness St. Luke

in the Acts of the Apostles; whilst the remaining account in the Acts

is doubtless by a later, more reflective and pragmatic, writer.--And

in the apprehension and interpretation of Our Lord’s inexhaustible

life, character, teaching, and work, we find very plainly the three

tendencies and stages. We get the contemporary, simultaneous,

spontaneous stage, in the cases of the Aramaic annotations of

the Apostle Levi-Matthew, which we still possess, translated and

incorporated both in the larger and later book, our canonical Greek St.

Matthew, and in the corresponding parts of our St. Luke; and in the

reminiscences of another eyewitness, presumably St. Peter, given us by

a disciple in what is still the substance of our Canonical St. Mark. We

get the posterior, successive, increasingly reflective or contemplative

stage, chiefly in the two great types furnished, first by the Pauline,

and then by the Joannine writings. And we get the juxtaposing,

unifying, largely identifying stage and law operating above all in

the, partly successive, Canonization of the New Testament _Corpus_.

And these three stages can be taken as having their downward limits in

about A.D. 30, 100, 200; so that here we cover a period of some hundred

and seventy years.

4. _Three different attitudes possible._

And, in all these and countless other cases, we can take up three

different attitudes: the impoverishing, sectarian, “purity” attitude;

the destructive, sceptical, “identity” attitude; or the fruitful, truly

Catholic “approximation” and “development” attitude. The first attitude

assumes (ever in part unconsciously) the possibility and necessity of

a purely objective apprehension of Personality, of such a Personality

being a static entity, both in itself and in its effects upon, and

its apprehendedness by, other souls, and of the earliest among the

observations concerning such a Personality ever giving us such a

purely objective, exhaustive picture and experience, or at least the

nearest approach (in all respects) to such an exhaustive objectivity.

The third attitude would so understand the admitted identity of the

Personality observed as practically to identify also the simultaneous

and successive observers and observations, and to eliminate all variety

and growth in that spirit’s own inner life and in its apprehension

by other minds. Only the second attitude would, by recognizing both

the constant, necessary presence of a subjective element in all these

simultaneous and successive apprehensions, and the indefinite richness

and many-sided apprehensibleness of all great spiritual Personalities,

welcome and draw out all the difference in unity of these many

“reactions,” as so many means, for a growing soul, towards a growing

knowledge of that life and character, whose very greatness is, in part,

measurable by the depth, variety, and persistence of these several

effects, pictures, and embodiments of itself in different races, times,

and souls.

Let us, then, betake ourselves to a systematic examination of one

example of these world-wide three laws: the trouble taken will be well

spent.

II.

Had I found room to print my notes in justification of the text

adopted by me, the reader would have gained some idea of the exceeding

complexity of the materials furnished by the printed _Vita e Dottrina_.

Indeed the original Preface to that book (1551) finds it necessary to

conclude with the words “we therefore” (because of the book’s utility,

indeed necessity, “in these turbulent times”) “beg the devout reader

not to be disturbed” (_stomacharsi_ now changed to _meravigliarsi_)

“if he finds here matters which appear to be out of their proper

order” (_non ben ordinate_), “and which are sometimes repeated; since

attention has been given, neither to much precision” (_distinzione_),

“nor to the order of events, nor to elegance of form, but only to that

truth and simplicity with which its facts and discourses were gathered

by devout spiritual persons” (“her Confessor and a Spiritual Son of

hers”) “from the very lips of that Seraphic Woman.” Both the praise

and the blame of this pregnant sentence will appear to be most fully

deserved.

In our Second Part we have, in imitation of all experience in life

itself, been thrown _in medias res_, and have thus gained some general

idea and curiosity as to the sources of our knowledge; in this Appendix

we will now, without repeating details already given, take this

evidence, as much as possible, in its chronological order. And at each

stage I shall attempt so to analyze the evidence of that stage, as

to be able to use it as a check and test of the evidence of the next

stage.--We shall, however, have to bear in mind that this method has

necessarily, at each earlier stage, somewhat to beg the question; for,

in order to make its meaning everywhere sufficiently clear, it has from

the first to assume a confidence of tone, which can be justified only

by the whole argument, and which therefore has its logical place only

at the very end.

This Appendix shall consist of two Divisions, of seven stages and eight

sections respectively. The first Division gives the dated Documents,

or such as can readily be restricted to within certain years; and the

second Division analyses the remaining, undated Corpus and attempts to

fix its origin and value.

FIRST DIVISION: ACCOUNT AND ANALYSIS OF THE DOCUMENTS PREVIOUS,

AND IMMEDIATELY SUBSEQUENT TO, THE “VITA E DOTTRINA” WITH THE

“DICCHIARAZIONE.”

I. FIRST STAGE, 1456 TO SEPTEMBER 12, 1510, ALL LEGAL.

The documents of the first stage are all legal papers, and entirely

contemporary and authentic. They have to furnish the skeleton which

receives its clothing of flesh from the other documents. I shall here

describe only those not described in Part II, and shall refer back to

that Part for those already described there.

1. _Deed of 1456._

There is, first, a deed of August 27, 1456. From amongst the shares

belonging to Pomera (formerly) wife to (the late) Bartolommeo de Auria

(Doria), but now (Sister) Isabella, in the convent of St. David; at the

instance of Andrea de Auria, her only son, her heir, and of Francesca,

the mother of Catherine, daughter of Jacobo de Fiesco: two shares of

the Bank of St. George (£200) are set apart, for the benefit of the

said Catherine, for her marriage, if she marries according to her

Mother’s advice.[360] Note how early (Catherine is not yet nine years

old) her mother, Francischetta (so a note to the copy of this document,

no doubt correctly, calls her, and suspects Pomera to have been

her sister), is thinking of Catherine’s marriage; and how, although

Catherine’s father is still alive, nothing is said as to his consent,

perhaps simply because, this money coming from a maternal aunt and

cousin, only the mother’s wishes are considered to be important here.

2. _Catherine’s Marriage Settlement, January 1463._

There is, next, Catherine’s marriage settlement, made “at Genoa, in

the quarter of St. Laurence, to wit in the sitting-room (_caminata_)

of the residence of Francisca, formerly wife to the late Don Jacobo

de Fiescho,” “with the public street in front, the house of Urbano de

Negro at its right, and that of Sebastiano de Negro at its left and

back”; “in the evening of Thursday, January 13, 1463”; between Giuliano

Adorno, son of the late Don Jacobo, on the one hand, and Francisca,

mother of Caterinetta and Jacobo and Giovanni de Fiesco, brothers of

the same. Giuliano thereby pledges himself to give Catherine on their

marriage, £1,000, and he “mortgages to her,” up to this amount, “a

certain house of his own, situate in Genoa in the quarter of St. Agnes,

with the public street in front, the house of Baldassare Adorno at the

right hand” (it belonged before this to Don Georgio Adorno), “and on

the other hand the public street.” And Francesca, Jacobo, and Giovanni

promise to pay Giuliano, in bare money and in wedding outfit for

Catherine, £400 on completion of the marriage, and another £400 in the

course of the following two years; and they mortgage to him, up to this

amount, the house in which the settlement is being made. Giuliano is to

be free to live with his wife and her family in this same house, for

these first two years after his marriage, without any payment.

At this date, then, Giuliano is already fatherless, and Catherine’s

brother Lorenzo is still too young to have any legal voice in the

matter. Although Catherine is, after the first two years, not

guaranteed anything beyond £1,000 capital, or say £40 a year income,

her outfit is a handsome one.

3. _Catherine’s first Will, June 1484._

Then there is Catherine’s first Will, June 23, 1484, after twenty-one

years of marriage. She is “lying” although “fully herself in mind,

intellect, and memory,” yet “languid in body and weighted down by

bodily infirmity, in the room, her residence, in the women’s quarters

of the Hospital of the Pammatone,” which “she has inhabited for a

considerable time (_jamdiu_).” “And knowing herself to be without

children, and without hope of future offspring,” she leaves the

life-interest in her marriage-dowry of £1,000 to her husband, Giuliano;

bids divide up, at his death, the bulk of this capital between the

Hospital and her eldest brother Jacobo (£300 to each), and her two

younger brothers Giovanni and Lorenzo (£150 to each); and orders her

body to be buried in the Hospital Church.[361]

Ten years, then, after her Conversion, Catherine had already been

living for a considerable time within the Hospital. They do not as

yet occupy a separate building, or even a set of rooms within the

Hospital; and, though both live within it, they evidently occupy

separate rooms in different parts of the great complex of buildings;

for the room here mentioned is simply Catherine’s (_camera residentiae

testatricis_, where _residentiae_ must be a descriptive and not a

partitive genitive), and forms part and parcel of the women’s wards

(_in domibus mulierum_). Her absence of hope as to offspring evidently

arises primarily from the life of continence she is leading. Yet this

latter determination is clearly not caused by any specific knowledge

of her husband’s past infidelity: for Thobia must have been now some

ten years old, yet there is no kind of mention of her; whilst, later

on, Catherine never fails to remember her, with one exception to

be presently explained. There is no mention of nephews and nieces,

doubtless because her brothers were, as yet, either unmarried or

childless, or, at least, daughterless. She is fairly well off, for

besides this possession of £1,000 she gets her room and board free,

and Giuliano has still some property of his own more considerable than

hers. And the share left by her to relations is large--£600--as over

against £300 to a public charity (the Hospital), and £100, presumably,

for the funeral, minor charities, and Masses. If she says nothing, as

yet, as to burial in the same grave with her husband, this is doubtless

because she herself appears now to be the one likely to die first.

4. _Giuliano’s Will, October 1494._

There is, fourthly, the first and last Will, October 20, 1494, of

“the Reverend Sir, Brother Giuliano Adorno, professing the Third

Order of St. Francis, under the care of the Friars Minor Observants,”

already described on pages 151, 152. The will is drawn up in the

“sitting-room” (_caminata_) of the “habitation” of the Testator. Now

the Notary, Battista Strata, in a foot-note to a first draft of an

(unfinished) Will of Catherine, writes: “On the day on which I drew up

Don Giuliano’s”; which words (owing to a multiplicity of converging

indications) can only refer to this Will of October 2, 1494. And

in this draft Catherine leaves legacies to the servants Benedetta

(Lombarda) and Mariola Bastarda, as “abiding with, and dwelling in the

house with, Testatrix.” It is clear then that, by now, Catherine and

Giuliano are living under the same roof, in a distinct house within the

hospital precincts, with two personal attendants for their common use.

They will have moved, out of their separate single rooms, into this

house, upon Catherine becoming Matron, in 1490. In this draft there

appear also, for the first time, her brother Jacobo’s two daughters

(£100 each); and her sister, the Augustinianess Limbania (£10).

5. _Four minor documents, 1496-1497._

There are, next, certain minor documents of 1496-1497, which modify

points of previous Wills and clear up details of her life. Thus,

on June 17, 1496 Catherine signs a deed of consent to the sale of

the Palace in the S. Agnese (Adorni) quarter.--On January 10, 1496,

Giuliano, “sane in mind although languid in body,” orders, in a

Codicil, that Catherine shall carry out, according to the directions

of a certain Friar Minor, a vow made by himself to St. Anthony of

Padua; notes that the Palace has been sold; and declares that she is

to be free to annul, amend or diminish, according to her own judgment,

his legacy of £500 to the Hospital.[362] And, in the Cartulary of the

Bank of St. George, Catherine’s name appears as an Investor: on July

14, 1497 as “wife of Giuliano Adorno”; but on October 6 as “wife and

testamentary heiress of the late Giuliano Adorno.”[363] These entries

were considered on page 149 note. On the second occasion she orders

that the Bank shall, after her death, annually pay over the interest

of the fourteen shares (£1,400), now bought by her, to the Hospital of

the Pammatone, in return for “the enjoyment and usufruct of a house and

a greenhouse (_viridario_) of (within) the said Hospital,” which had

been conceded to her for her lifetime. The sum (about £56 a year) thus

ceded by her is a handsome one, as she had, by now, well earned the use

of this house by her constant labours for the Hospital, including her

matronship from 1490 to 1496. I take it that she was again thinking of

Thobia; so that this relatively large sum would cover at least part of

the Hospital’s expenses incurred for this poor girl.

6. _Catherine’s second Will, May 1498._

This has been studied on pages 152-154.

7. _Deed of Cession, September 18, 1499; and Codicil of January 1503._

These have been studied on pages 155, and 168, 169.

8. _Third Will, May 21, 1506; and Codicil of November 1508._

These have been described on pages 172-174; and 175, 176.

9. _Fourth and last Will, March 18, 1509; and two last Codicils, August

3 and September 12, 1510._

These have been described on pages 185-187; 202, 203; and 212-214,

respectively.

We have thus described all the fifteen documents which alone still

bear dates within the range of Catherine’s lifetime, and whose

contemporaneousness is above all challenge. They all have the pedantic,

at first sight unmoving, indeed repulsive, form of legal documents.

Yet the substance of quite ten of them undoubtedly proceeds from

Catherine; and they all give us a most precious, precise certainty

with regard to many cardinal points of locality, date, sequence, and

self-determination in her life. True, neither the day, nor even the

month, of her Birth or Baptism; nor the year of her Conversion; nor

the date of the beginning of her Daily Communions; nor the facts

as to the rarity or frequency of her Confessions; nor the day or

month of Giuliano’s death, have been recoverable by any contemporary

attestations. But on other points we thus possess a series of

absolutely reliable documents, ranging from 1456 to 1510, whose

testimony nothing can be allowed to shake.

II. SECOND STAGE: FIVE FURTHER OFFICIAL AND LEGAL DOCUMENTS, 1511-1526;

AND FOUR MORTUARY DATES, 1524-1587.

And this first stage of the evidence is followed by a second, as dry

and legal, and as absolutely reliable, as the other; yet which still

does not refer to any chronicle or notes of her life, (as either

already extant or as in process of registration or radaction), but only

to the fate of her remains and to certain turning-points in the lives

of her disciples and eyewitnesses. I note here only those documents

which fix for us the dates of the beginning of her Cultus, and which

give us the latest contemporary proof for those persons being still

alive.

1. We get thus the Hospital Account for the Moneys spent on the

Religious Clothing of the Maid-Servant Mariola Bastarda, July 7, 1511;

the entry in the Hospital Cartulary of the expenses incurred for the

transport of stone and for a picture, in connection with the first

opening of Catherine’s Deposito, July 10, 1512; the account, in the

same book, concerning the funeral of Don Jacobo Carenzio, who had died

occupying Catherine’s little house within the Hospital precincts, on

January 7, 1513; a Will of the little widow-attendant Argentina del

Sale, of January 15, 1522; and the Will of Don Cattaneo Marabotto,

still “in good bodily and mental health,” May 11, 1526,--a document

drawn up in his dwelling-place, the house belonging to his friends, the

Salvagii.[364]

2. And to this group we can add four further dates, the first and

last two of which are completely certain. Ettore Vernazza died on

June 26 or 27, 1524; the year is fixed by the great plague epidemic

which carried him off, and the month and day, by his daughter’s

letter. Cattaneo Marabotto died, there is no reason to doubt, in 1528.

Catherine’s Dominican cousin and close friend, Suor Tommasa Fiesca,

died, eighty-six years of age, in 1534. And Battista Vernazza died,

aged ninety, on May 9, 1587.[365]

Hence, up to eighteen years after her death, the two closest of

Catherine’s confidants were alive; whilst one who had known her, and

had been thirteen at the time of Catherine’s death, was still alive

seventy-seven years after that event.

III. THIRD STAGE: BISHOP GIUSTINIANO’S ACCOUNT OF CATHERINE’S LIFE,

REMAINS, AND BIOGRAPHY, 1537.

Our third stage is in strikingly manifold contrast to the other two.

It is represented by but one single, largely vague and rhetorical, but

human and directly psychological, document; and is the first that tells

us of a Life.

1. _The text._

Monsignore Agostino Giustiniano, Bishop of Nibio, published his

_Castigatissimi Annali … della Republica di Genova_, in Genoa, in

1537. There, on p. 223, he tells us that he was born (of socially

distinguished parents) in that city in 1470. And under the date of 1510

(p. 266) he writes: “And in the month of September, it pleased God to

draw to Himself Madonna Catarinetta Adorna, who was daughter of Giacobo

di Flisco, Vice-Roy of Naples for King René, and wife to Giuliano

Adorno, with whom she lived many years in marital chastity. And her

life, after the Divine goodness had touched her heart in the years

of her youth, was all charity, love, meekness, benignity, patience,

incredible abstinence, and a mirror of every virtue, so that she can be

compared to St. Catherine of Siena. And all the city has participated

in, and has perceived, the odour of the virtues of this holy matron,

who, when rapt in the spirit, spoke, amongst other matters, of the

state of the souls that are in Purgatory, things excellent and rare

and worthy of being attended to by such persons as have a taste for

the religious and spiritual life. Her body is deposited in the Oratory

of the larger Hospital, and offers a spectacle no less admirable than

venerable, appearing (_come che sia_) all entire with its flesh, so

that she looks alive,--as though she had been placed there to-day; and

yet full twenty-five years have passed since she began to lie there

dead. The great consciousness of God, the special virtues, the saintly

deeds, accompanied by an immense love, which were manifested by this

venerable matron, would furnish matter well worthy of being recorded

here. Yet we shall pass them over, for the sake of brevity; especially

since a book worthy of respect (_un digno libro_) has been composed,

concerning these things exclusively, by persons worthy of confidence

(_digne di fede_).”

2. _Its testimony._

Now this is a statement which we have every reason to trust. For Bishop

Giustiniano, himself a native of Genoa, forty years of age at the

time of Catherine’s death, was a man of education, of solid character,

and of social position; who, throughout his long book, is uniformly

truthful and generally accurate; and who had here no conceivable reason

for inventing or seriously misstating the few facts alleged by him.

These facts, as regards the matter in hand, are three: that she spoke

of various (evidently various spiritual) matters, and, amongst these,

of the state of the souls in Purgatory; that a Book was extant at the

end of 1535, which concerned itself exclusively with Catherine; and

that persons worthy of trust had produced this Book.

(1) Giustiniano knows of no writings of hers: she had not written, but

had only “spoken excellent and rare things,” and she had done so “when

rapt in the spirit.” The exaggeration here (for when in ecstasy, she

spoke nothing, or but a few broken words at most) is interesting, since

it probably grew up as an explanation of, and consolation for, her not

having herself written anything; since during the ecstasy she would be

incapable of anything but speech, and out of the ecstasy she would not

remember the sights and sounds perceived during the trance. And yet,

thus, what had to be written down by others, whilst she was in ecstasy,

would be more precious, because more immediately “inspired,” than what

she herself could have thought, remembered, and written down, in her

ordinary psycho-physical condition.

(2) The Book, in existence at the end of 1535, not only contained

sayings concerning the state of the souls in Purgatory, but must have

contained these sayings already collected together in a separate

chapter or division. For her sayings concerning this matter by no

means form the larger, or the most immediately striking, part of her

authentic teaching, taken as a whole; and only if already collected

into a more or less separate _corpus_ would they have been singled

out in this manner.--But, if this reasoning is sound and proves

the existence of the _Trattato_, already more or less separate as

at present, similar reasoning will prove the non-existence of the

_Dialogo_. For the _Trattato_, even in its present length, fills but

fifteen large-print octavo pages; while the _Dialogo_ fills ninety. It

is practically inconceivable that the latter document, which can never

have existed otherwise than more or less separately, should have been

overlooked here, where another, so much shorter, and at first sight

less authoritative, is dwelt on with emphasis.

(3) More than one hand had participated in the production of the Book.

It is characteristic of the rhetorically loose phraseology of the times

that the word “composto” is so used as to leave it quite uncertain

whether several original contributors of materials and but one Redactor

who constituted these materials into a Book are meant, or whether a

succession of Redactors is already implied.

3. _Surviving eyewitnesses._

Certainly by this time the three chief eyewitnesses of her later

earthly existence, Carenzio, Vernazza, and Marabotto were all dead,

since respectively twenty-two, eleven, and seven years. Tommasa Fiesca

had died in the previous year. Only Mariola Bastarda and Argentina del

Sale, her old maid-servants, were probably still alive, from among

the circle of Catherine’s constant companions; and Battista Vernazza,

who was but thirteen when her God-mother died, had still fifty-two

years to live. Yet we have to come still later down amongst extant

documents before we can get any further evidence, whether external

or internal, as to which of these persons, or who else (probably or

certainly) wrote down the original contemporary notes; and as to who

constituted these notes, (on one or on successive occasions) into this

“Giustiniano-book,” as I shall call the manuscript “Vita e Dottrina,”

extant in 1535.

IV. FOURTH STAGE: THE TWO OLDEST EXTANT MANUSCRIPTS OF THE “VITA E

DOTTRINA” WITH THE “DICCHIARAZIONE.”

The fourth stage of evidence is, as to its contents, the most

important of all: but it is, as we shall see, twelve years younger: it

belongs to the years 1547, 1548. It consists of two Manuscripts, the

duodecimo-volume B. 1. 29 of the University Library; and the square

octavo-volume of the Archives of the Cathedral Chapter, both in Genoa.

Here, at last, we are face to face with an actual _Life_ of our Saint.

I have carefully collated them both upon the ninth Genoese Edition of

the _Vita ed Opere_, Genova, Sordi Muti: the first MS., throughout, and

the second one, sufficiently to make sure of its entire dependence upon

the first. I have named them MS. A and MS. B respectively.

1. MANUSCRIPT A.

1. _Its date and scribe._

Manuscript A is very interesting. It opens out as follows: “Jesus. Here

beginneth the book in which is contained the admirable life and holy

conversation of Madonna Catherinetta Adorna.… This book was begun and

written at the request of her Magnificent Ladyship, the Lady Orientina,

Consort to the most magnificent and generous, illustrious Lord Adam

Centurione, when she was being vexed by a grave and well-nigh incurable

infirmity, during now already thirteen months, by a Religious of the

Observance … on the 7th of October of the year fifteen hundred and

forty-seven.”--And Catherine’s Life concludes with the words: “_Laus

Deo semper._ This book was written at the request of the Consort, of

happy memory, of the … Lord Adam Centurione, who lay vexed by a most

grave infirmity, during now two years. Many a time she would sit and

find consolation, in her most painful torments, by reading of the

burnings (_incendii_) which were suffered, for so long a time, by this

holy woman.… At the thirteenth hour of the fourth of February God took

her to Himself. She, a few days before she passed away, begged me with

tears, in the presence of the Magnificent Lady, the Lady Ginetta, her

most beloved daughter, to finish that which I had undertaken to produce

for her own self. And so it will be of use to the latter, and will help

her to bear her pains and travails, which may the Lord alleviate, by

giving her good patience.”--After this follow thirty pages; containing

an Italian version of St. Bernard’s Sermon on the death of his Brother

Gerard, (Chapter XXVI of his _Sermons on the Canticle of Canticles_).

And the whole concludes with the words: “Finished in the year Fifteen

hundred and forty-eight, on the thirteenth of February.”

We have here, then, very precise dates: this _Life_ was written between

October 7, 1547, and February 4-13, 1548, by a Franciscan Observant,

first for the wife, and then for the daughter, of a Doge of Genoa.

2. _Comparison with the Printed “Life.”_

Now the whole forty-two chapters of this _Life_, together with the

Sermon, are engrossed throughout, in a careful and upright uncial

script. On close comparison with the Printed _Life_ the differences

turn out to consist, either of vocabulary and dialect, of a simply

formal kind; or of additions and variations in the subject-matter,

of an exceedingly trite and would-be edifying character; or of a

very few additional passages of genuine importance; or of divisions,

transpositions, and _lacunae_--the latter mostly of a significant and

primitive kind; or, finally, of one highly interesting change, effected

in his own copy, by the copyist himself.

(i) _Vocabulary._

The Observant’s vocabulary is a curious mixture of downright (late)

Latin, old French, and modern Italian. So “pagura” (_paura_); “in

si” (_se_, Fr. _soi_); “despecto” (_dispetto_); “alchuna,” “anchora”

(_alcuna_, _ancora_); “lingeriare” (_ligare_, Fr. _lier_); “summissa”

(_sommessa_, Fr. _soumise_); “una fiata” (_una volta_, Fr. _une fois_);

“dido” (_digito_, o. Fr. _doight_).[366] Some of these and such-like

forms no doubt stood in his Prototype. Thus, whilst he simply copies,

he writes--“pecto” and “licet”; when he makes up sentences of his

own, he writes “petto” and “abenchè.” And his single Chapter XIII

has, on two pages, “per il che”; but, on its last two pages, it has

the elsewhere universal “perochè” (_perchè_).--Yet his language is,

upon the whole, so uniform, whilst his sources (as we shall see) are

so varied; and again his uniform language is in such marked contrast

to Giustiniano’s educated Genoese Italian of 1535, and to that of the

Printed _Vita_ of 1551: that much of it, even where he is copying the

substance of his Prototype, must be his own.

(ii) _Worthless additions and variations, of two kinds._

The additions and variations are mostly of two kinds. They are either

of a directly edificatory character. So the three pages descriptive of

the devotion of the crowd, on occasion of the opening of the coffin,

in the spring of 1512; the very general statement as to the miracles

that occurred on that occasion; and, further back, the expansion (by

this Franciscan scribe) of Catherine’s comments on (the Franciscan)

Jacopone da Todi’s “la superbia in cielo c’è.”[367] And in one place,

to produce edification by a sense of contrast, he adopts a touch of

(doubtless legendary) gossip against Giuliano, for the heading of his