PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL QUESTIONS
INTRODUCTORY.
1. _Plan of Part Three._
The picture of Catherine’s life and teaching which was attempted in the
previous volume will, I hope, have been sufficiently vivid to stimulate
in the reader a desire to try and go deeper, and to get as near as may
be to the driving forces, the metaphysical depths of her life. And
yet it is obvious that, if we would understand something of these, we
must proceed slowly and thoroughly, and must begin with comparatively
superficial questions. Or rather, we must begin by studying her
temperamental and psycho-physical endowment and condition, and then the
literary influences that stimulated and helped to mould these things,
as though all this were not secondary and but the material and occasion
of the forces and self-determinations to be considered later on.
2. _Defects of ancient psycho-physical theory._
Now as to those temperamental and neural matters, to which this chapter
shall be devoted, the reader will, no doubt long ago, have discovered
that it is precisely here that not a little of the _Vita e Dottrina_
is faded and withered beyond recall, or has even become positively
repulsive to us. The constant assumption, and frequent explicit
insistence, on the part of more or less all the contributors, upon the
immediate and separate significance, indeed the directly miraculous
character, of certain psycho-physical states--states which, taken
thus separately, would now be inevitably classed as most explicable
neural abnormalities,--all this atmosphere of nervous high-pitch and
tremulousness has now become a matter demanding a difficult historical
imagination and magnanimity, if we would be just to those who held such
views, and would thus benefit to the full from these past positions and
misconceptions.
Thus when we read the views of perhaps all her educated attendants:
“this condition, in which her body remained alive without food or
medicine, was a supernatural thing”; “her state was clearly understood
to be supernatural when, in so short a time, so great a change was
seen”; and “she became yellow all over,--a manifest sign that her
humanity was being entirely consumed in the fire of divine love”:[1]
we feel indeed that we can no more follow. And when we read, as part
of one of the late additions, the worthless legends gathered from, or
occasioned by, the uneducated Argentina: “in proof that she bore the
stigmata within her,--on putting her hands in a cup of cold water, the
latter became so boiling hot that it greatly heated the very saucer
beneath it”:[2] we are necessarily disgusted. And when, worst of all,
she is made, by a demonstrable, probably double misinterpretation of an
externally similar action, to burn her bare arm with a live charcoal
or lighted candle, with intent to see which fire, this external one or
that interior one of the divine love, were the greater:[3] we can, even
if we have the good fortune of being able, by means of the critical
analysis of the sources, to put this absurd story to the discredit of
her eulogists, but feel the pathos of such well-meant perversity, which
took so sure a way for rendering ridiculous one who, take her all in
all, is so truly great.[4]
3. _Slow growth of Neurology._
We should, of course, be very patient in such matters: for
psycho-physical knowledge was, as yet, in its very infancy, witness
the all-important fact that the nerves were, in our modern sense of
the term, still as unknown as they were to the whole of Graeco-Roman
antiquity, with which “neuron” and “nervus” ever meant “muscle” or
“ligament” and, derivatively, “energy,” but never consciously what
they now mean in the strict medical sense. Thus the _Vita_ (1551)
writes: “There remained no member or muscle (nervo) of her body that
was not tormented by fire within it”; “one rib was separated from
the others, with great pains in the ligaments (_nervi_) and bones”;
and “all her body was excruciated and her muscles (_nervi_) were
tormented”:[5] where, in the first and last case, visible muscular
convulsive movements are clearly meant. St. Teresa, in her own _Life_
(1561 or 1562), writes: “Nervous pains, according to the physicians,
are intolerable; and all my nerves were shrunk”; and “if the rapture
lasts, all the nerves are made to feel it.”[6] Even Fénelon (died
1715) can still write of the human body: “The bones sustain the flesh
which envelops them; the nerves” (ligaments, minor muscles) “which
are stretched along them, constitute all their strength; and the
muscles, by inflation and elongation at the points where the nerves
are intertwined with them, produce the most precise and regular
movements.”[7] Here the soul acts directly upon the muscles, and,
through these and their dependent ligaments, upon the bones and the
flesh.
4. _Permanent values of the ancient theory._
And yet that old position with regard to the rarer psycho-physical
states has a right to our respectful and sympathetic study.
For one thing, we are now coming again to recognize, more and more,
how real and remarkable are certain psycho-physical states and facts,
whether simply morbid or fruitfully utilized states, so long derided,
by the bulk of Scientists, as mere childish legend or deliberate
imposture; and to see how natural, indeed inevitable it was, that
these, at that time quite inexplicable, things should have been
attributed to a direct and discontinuous kind of Divine intervention.
We, on our part, have then to guard against the Philistinism both
of the Rationalists and of the older Supernaturalists, and will
neither measure our assent to facts by our ability to explain them,
nor postulate the unmediated action of God wherever our powers of
explanation fail us. On this point we have admirable models of
sympathetic docility towards facts, in the works of Prof. Pierre Janet,
in his medico-psychological investigations of present-day morbid
cases; of Hermann Gunkel and Heinrich Weinel, in their examination of
mostly healthy psycho-physical phenomena in early Christian times and
writings; and of William James, in his study of instances of various
kinds, both past and present.[8]
And next, these (at first sight physical) phenomena are turning out,
more and more, to be the direct or indirect consequence of the action
of mind: no doubt, in the first instance, of the human mind, but still
of mind, both free-willing and automatically operative. And at the same
time this action is, more and more, seen to be limited and variously
occasioned by the physical organism, and to be accompanied or followed,
in a determinist fashion, by certain changes in that organism. Yet if
we have now immeasurably more knowledge than men had, even fifty years
ago, of this latter ceaselessly active, limiting, occasioning influence
of the body upon the mind, we have also immeasurably more precise and
numerous facts and knowledge in testimony of the all but boundless
effect of mind over body. Here, again, Prof. Janet’s writings, those
of Alfred Binet, and the Dominican Père Coconnier’s very sensible book
register a mass of material, although of the morbid type.[9]
And further, such remarkable peripheral states and phenomena are
getting again to be rightly looked for in at least some types of
unusual spiritual insight and power (although such states are found to
be indicative, in exact proportion to the spiritual greatness of their
subject, of a substantially different mental and moral condition of
soul). Witness again the Unitarian Prof. James’s _Varieties_, and the
Church-Historical works of the Broad Lutheran German scholars Weinel,
Bernoulli, and Duhm.[10]
And lastly, the very closeness with which modern experimental and
analytical psychology is exploring the phenomena of our consciousness
is once more bringing into ever-clearer relief the irrepressible
metaphysical apprehensions and affirmations involved and implied by
the experience of every human mind, from its first dim apprehension
in infancy of a “something,” as yet undifferentiated by it into
subjective and objective, up to its mature and reflective affirmation
of the trans-subjective validity of its “positions,” or at least of its
negations--pure scepticism turning out to be practically impossible.
Here we have, with respect to that apprehension, such admirable workers
as Henri Bergson in France, and Professors Henry Jones and James
Ward in England; and, for this affirmation, such striking thinkers
as the French Maurice Blondel, and the Germans Johannes Volkelt and
Hugo Münsterberg. And Mgr. Mercier of Louvain, now Cardinal Mercier,
has contributed some valuable criticism of certain points in these
positions.[11]
5. _Difficulties of this inquiry._
Now here I am met at once by two special difficulties, the one
personal to myself and to Catherine, and the other one of method.
For, with regard to those three first sets of recent explorations of
a psycho-physical kind, I am no physician at all, and not primarily
a psychologist. And again, in Catherine’s instance, the evidence as
to her psycho-physical states is not, as with St. Teresa and some few
other cases, furnished by writings from the pen of the very person who
experienced them, and it is at all copious and precise only for the
period when she was admittedly ill and physically incapacitated.--And
yet these last thirteen years of her life occupy a most prominent
place in her biography; it is during, and on occasion of, those
psycho-physical states, and largely with the materials furnished by
them, that, precisely in those years, she built up her noblest legacy,
her great Purgatorial teaching; the illness was (quite evidently) of a
predominantly psychical type, and concerns more the psychologist than
the physician, being closely connected with her particular temperament
and type of spirituality, a temperament and type to be found again and
again among the Saints. All this and more makes it simply impossible
for me to shrink from some study of the matter, and permits me to hope
for some success in attempting, slowly and cautiously, to arrive at
certain general conclusions of a spiritually important kind.
But then there is also the difficulty of method. For if we begin
the study of these psycho-physical peculiarities and states by
judging them from the temperamental and psychological standpoint,
we can hardly escape from treating them, at least for the moment,
as self-explanatory, and hence from using these our preliminary
conclusions about such neural phenomena as the measure, type, and
explanation of and for all such other facts and apprehensions as our
further study of the religious mind and experience may bring before
us. In this wise, these our psychological conclusions would furnish
not only a negative test and positive material, but also the exclusive
standard for all further study. And such a procedure, until and unless
it were justified in its method, would evidently be nothing but a
surreptitious begging of the question.--Yet to begin with the fullest
analysis of the elementary and normal phenomena of consciousness and
of its implications and inviolable prerequisites, would too readily
land us in metaphysics which have themselves to operate in and with
those immediate and continuous experiences; and hence these latter
experiences, whether normal and healthy, or, as here, unusual and in
part _maladif_, must be carefully studied first. We have, however,
to guard most cautiously against our allowing this, our preliminary,
analysis and description of psycho-physical states from imperceptibly
blocking the way to, or occupying the ground of, our ultimate analysis
and metaphysical synthesis and explanation. Only this latter will be
able, by a final movement from within-outwards, to show the true place
and worth of the more or less phenomenal series, passed by us in review
on our previous movement from outside-inwards.
6. _Threefold division._
I propose, then, in this chapter, to take, as separately as is
compatible with such a method, the temperamental, psycho-physical side
of Catherine’s life. I shall first take those last thirteen years
of admitted illness, as those which are alone at all fully known to
us by contemporary evidence.--I shall then make a jump back to her
first period,--to the first sixteen years up to her marriage, with
the next ten years of relaxation, and the following four years of
her conversion and active penitence. I take these next, because,
of these thirty years, we have her own late memories, as registered
for us by her disciples, at the time of her narration of the facts
concerned.--And only then, with these materials and instruments thus
gathered from after and before, shall I try to master the (for us
very obscure) middle period, and to arrive at some estimate of her
temperamental peripheral condition during these twenty years of her
fullest expansion.--I shall conclude the chapter by taking Catherine
in her general, lifelong temperament, and by comparing and contrasting
this type and modality of spiritual character and apprehension with the
other rival forms of, and approaches to, religious truth and goodness
as these are furnished for us by history.
The ultimate metaphysical questions and valuation are reserved for the
penultimate chapter of my book.
I. CATHERINE’S THIRD PERIOD, 1497 TO 1510.
1. _Increasing illness of Catherine’s last years._
Beginning with her third and last period (1497-1510), there can be no
doubt that throughout it she was ill and increasingly so. Her closest
friends and observers attest it. It is presumably Ettore Vernazza who
tells us, for 1497, “when she was about fifty years of age, she ceased
to be able to attend either to the Hospital or to her own house, owing
to her great bodily weakness. Even on Fast-days she was obliged, after
Holy Communion, to take some food to sustain her strength.” Probably
Marabotto it is who tells us that, in 1499, “after twenty-five years
she could no further bear her spiritual loneliness, either because of
old age or because of her great bodily weakness.” We hear from a later
Redactor that, “about nine years before her death (_i.e._ about 1501),
there came to her an infirmity.” And then, especially from November
1509, May 1510, and August 1510 onwards, she is declared and described
as more and more ill.[12] Indeed she herself, both by her acts and by
her words, emphatically admits her incapacitation. For it is clearly
ill-health which drives her to abandon the Matronship and even all
minor continuous work for the Hospital. In her Wills we find indeed
that, as late as May 21, 1506, she was able to get to the neighbouring
Hospital for Incurables; and that even on November 27, 1508 she was
“healthy in mind and body.” But her Codicil of January 5, 1503, was
drawn up in the presence of nine witnesses at midnight,--a sure sign of
some acute ill-health. Indeed already on July 23, 1484, she is lying
“infirm in bed, in her room in the Women’s quarter of the Hospital,
oppressed with bodily infirmity.”[13]
2. _Abnormal sensations, impressions and moods._
Her attendants are all puzzled by the multitude and intensity, the
mobility and the self-contradictory character of the psycho-physical
manifestations. Perhaps already before 1497 “she would press thorny
rose-twigs in both her hands, and this without any pain”; and so
late as about three weeks before her death “she remained paralyzed
(_manca_),” and no doubt anaesthetic “in one (the right) hand and in
one finger of the other hand.”--Probably again before 1497 “her body
could not,” at times, “be moved from the sitting posture without the
application of force.” In February or March 1510 “she could not move
out of her bed”; in August, “on some occasions she could not move
the lips or the tongue, or the arms or legs, unless helped to do
so,--especially on the left side,--and this would, at times, last three
or four hours.”--In December 1509 “she suffered from great cold,” as
part of her peculiar condition; on September 4, 1510, “she suffered
from great cold in the right arm.”[14]
On other occasions she is, on the contrary, intensely hyper-aesthetic.
Some time in February or March 1510, “for a day and a night, her flesh
could not be touched, because of the great pain that such touching
caused her.” At the end of August “she was so sensitive, that it was
impossible to touch her very bedclothes or the bedstead, or a single
hair on her head, because in such case she would cry out as though she
had been grievously wounded.”--These states seem to have been usually
accompanied by sensations of great heat: for on the former occasion
“she seemed like a creature placed in a great flame of fire”; whilst on
the latter “she had her tongue and lips so inflamed, that they seemed
as though actual fire.”
And movement appears to have been more often increased than diminished.
In the last case indeed “she did not move nor speak nor see; but, when
thus immovable, she suffered more than when she could cry out and
turn about in her bed.” But in the former instance “she could not be
kept in bed”; and in April 1510 “she cried aloud, and could not keep
herself from moving about, on her bed, on hands and feet.”--There
are curious localizations of apparently automatic movements. During
an attack somewhere in March 1510 “her flesh was all in a tremble,
particularly the right shoulder”; on later occasions “an arm, a leg, a
hand would tremble, and she would seem to have a spasm within her, with
all-but-unbroken acute pains in the flanks, the shoulders, the abdomen,
the feet and the brain.” On an earlier occasion “her body writhed in
great distress.” On another day “she seemed all on fire and lost her
power of speech, and made signs with her head and hands.” On one day
in February or March 1510 “she lost both speech and sight, though not
her intelligence”; and on September 12 “her sight was so weak, that she
could hardly any further distinguish or recognize her attendants.”--The
heat is liable to be curiously localized. Early in September 1510 “she
had a great heat situated in and on her left ear, which lasted for
three hours; the ear was red and felt very hot to the touch of others.”
Various kinds of haemorrhage are not uncommon. On the last-mentioned
occasion bloody urine is passed; bleeding of the nose, with loss of
bile, occurs in December 1509; very black blood is lost by the mouth,
whilst black spots appear all over her person, on September 12, 1510;
and more blood is evacuated on the following day. In February or March
1510 “there were in her flesh certain places which had become concave,
like as paste looks where a finger has been put into it.” At the end of
August 1510 “her skin became saffron-yellow all over.”
Troubles of breathing and of heart-action are frequently acute.
Somewhere about March 1510 “she had such a spasm in her throat and
mouth as to be unable, for about an hour, to speak or to open her
eyes, and that she could hardly regain her breath.” “Cupping-glasses
were applied to her side, to ease her heart, and lung-action, but with
little effect.” On one occasion “she made signs indicative of feeling
as though burning pincers were seizing her heart”; and on a day soon
after “she felt like a hard nail at her heart.”[15]
Disturbances of the power of swallowing and of nutrition are often
grave and sudden, and in curious contradiction to her abnormally acute
and shifting longing for and revulsion from certain specific kinds of
food. On August 22, 1510, “she was so thirsty that she felt as though
she could drink up the very ocean”; “yet she could not,” in fact,
“manage to swallow even one little drop of water.” On September 10
“her attendants continuously gave her drinking water; but she would
straightway return it from her mouth.” And on September 12, “whilst
her mouth was being bathed, she exclaimed, ‘I am suffocating,’--and
this because a drop of water had trickled down her throat--a drop which
she was unable to gulp down.” And on a day in August “she saw a melon
and had a great desire to eat it; but hardly did she have some of it
in her mouth, when she rejected it with intense disgust.” So too with
odours. A little later, “on one day the smell of wine would please
her, and she would bathe her hands and face in it with great relish;
and next day she would so much dislike it, that she could not bear to
see or smell it in her room.”--And so too with colours. On September
2 “a physician-friend came to visit her in his scarlet robes; and she
bore the sight a little, so as not to pain him.” But she then declared
that she could no longer bear it; and he went, and returned to her in
his ordinary black habit. And yet we have seen, from the Inventory of
her effects, that she loved to have vermilion colour upon her bed and
person.[16]
And her emotional moods are analogously intense and rapidly shifting.
In the spring of 1510 “she cried aloud because of the great pain: this
attack lasted a day and a night”; in the night of August 10 “she tossed
about with many exclamations”; and at the beginning of September “she
cried out with a loud voice.” At other times, she laughs for joy. So at
the end of April “she would laugh without speaking”; on August 11 “she
fixed her eyes steadily on the ceiling; and for about an hour she abode
all but immovable, and spoke not, but kept laughing in a very joyous
fashion”; on August 17 great interior jubilation “expressed itself in
merry laughter”; and on the evening of September 7 “her joy appeared
exteriorly in laughter which lasted, with but small interruptions,
for some two hours.”--And her entire apparent condition would shift
from one such extreme to the other with extraordinary swiftness. In
the autumn of 1509 “she many times remained as though dead; and at
other times she would appear as healthy,--as though she had never had
anything the matter with her.” Already in December 1509 she herself,
after much vomiting and loss of blood, had sent for her Confessor and
had declared that “she felt as though she must die in consequence of
these many accidents.” Yet even on September 10, 1510, “when she was
not being oppressed and tormented by her accidents (attacks), she
seemed to be in good health; but when she was being suffocated by them,
she seemed as one dead.”[17]
II. CONCLUSIONS CONCERNING CATHERINE’S PSYCHO-PHYSICAL CONDITION DURING
THIS LAST PERIOD.
1. _Her illness not primarily physical. Her self-diagnosis._
Now we saw, at the beginning of this chapter, how readily her
attendants concluded, from all these extreme, multiple, swift-changing
and self-contradictory states, to their directly and separately
supernatural origin.--And indeed the diagnosis and treatment of her
case showed clearly that it was not primarily physical. So in the
case, probably in November 1509, of the cupping-glasses, when “she got
medically treated for a bodily infirmity, whilst her real trouble was
fire of the spirit”; so with a medicine given to her by the resident
Hospital physician, some time in April 1510, “from taking which she
nearly died”; so with Giovanni Boerio’s three-weeks’ treatment of her,
in May 1510, a treatment which led to no other results than momentary
additional distress; and so with the declaration of the ten Physicians
who, even on September 10, four days before her death, “could find no
trace of disease in her pulse, secretions, or any other symptom,” and
who consequently abstained from prescribing anything. And hence, more
or less throughout her last nine years, “there was confusion in the
management of her, not on her own part, but on that of those who served
her.”[18]
For--and these two further points are of primary importance--the
tending of her, as distinct from physic, was throughout held by herself
to be of great importance; and yet this care was declared by her to
be often useless or harmful, owing to the powers of discrimination
possessed by her attendants being as much below their good-will, as her
own knowledge as to the differences between her healthy and _maladif_
states exceeded her power of herself acting upon this knowledge against
these sickly conditions. “She would often appear to be asleep; and
would awake from such a state, at one time, quite refreshed, and, at
another time, so limp and broken down as to be unable to move. Those
that served her knew not how to distinguish one state from the other;
and on recovering from an attack of the latter sort, she would say to
them: ‘Why did you let me continue in that state of quiet, from which
I have all but died?’” So, on September 5, “she cried aloud on waking
from a state of quiet, which had appeared to be (healthy) quietude, but
had not been so.” And indeed, already on January 10 previous, she had
shut herself off from her Confessor, “because it seemed to her that he
bore with her too much in her sayings and doings.”
Yet, at least after this time, Marabotto does oppose her sometimes.
Thus on two, somewhat later, occasions she respectively makes signs,
and asks, that Extreme Unction be given her; but only some four months
later did she actually receive it. In these cases, then, she either
had not, even at bottom, a correct physical self-knowledge; or her
requests had been prompted, at the time, by her secondary, _maladif_
consciousness alone.--When first visited by Boerio, she takes pleasure
in the thought of getting possibly cured by him; but “in the following
night, when great pain came upon her, she reproved herself, saying,
‘You are suffering this, because you allowed yourself to rejoice
without cause.’” But this declaration distinctly falls short of
any necessary implication of a directly supernatural origin of her
malady, as the _Vita_ here will have it, and but refers, either to the
continuance of earthly existence not deserving such joy, or to her
persistent fundamental consciousness that the phenomena were partly
the fruitful, profitable occasions, and partly the price paid, for the
mind’s close intercourse with things divine.
Indeed her (otherwise unbroken) attitude is one, both of quiet
conviction that physic cannot help her, and of gentle readiness to let
the physicians try whatever they may think worth the trying: so with
the cupping-glasses, and the various examinations and physickings.
Especially is this disposition clear in her short dialogue with Boerio,
where, in answer to his assertion that she ought to beware of giving
scandal to all the world by saying that her infirmity had no need of
remedies, and that she ought to look upon such an attitude as “a kind
of hypocrisy,” she declares: “I am sorry if any one is scandalized
because of me; and I am ready to use any remedy for infirmity,
supposing that it can be found.”[19]
2. _Her preoccupation with the spiritual suggestions afforded by the
phenomena._
It would, indeed, be a grave misreading of her whole character
and habits of mind to think of her as at all engrossed in her
psycho-physical states as such, and as having ever formally considered
and decided that they must either come directly from God or be
amenable to medicine. On the contrary, she is too habitually absorbed
in the consideration and contemplation of certain great spiritual
doctrines and realities, to have the leisure or inclination for any
such questions.--Indeed it is this very absorption in those spiritual
realities which has ended by suggesting, with an extraordinary
readiness, frequency and vividness, through her mind to her senses,
and by these back to her mind, certain psycho-physical images and
illustrations for those very doctrines, until her whole psycho-physical
organism has been, all but entirely, modified and moulded into an apt
instrument and manifestation for and of that world unseen.
Thus, after her greatest psycho-physical and spiritual experience
in November 1509, she declares to Vernazza, when he urges her to
let him write down the graces she has received from God, that “it
would, strictly speaking, be impossible to narrate those interior
things; whilst, of exterior ones, few or none have happened to
me.” And she never entirely loses her mental consciousness in any
state not recognized by herself as _maladif_. So, on a day of great
psycho-physical trouble in February or March 1510, “they thought she
must expire; but, though she lost both sight and speech, she never
lost her intelligence.” And even on September 11 and 12, amidst
foodlessness and suffocations, her intelligence still persists.--In
the March previous “her mind appeared to grow daily in contentment.”
Some days later, her attendants “saw how, after an hour of spasm and
breathlessness, and then a great restriction of all her being, she
returned to her normal condition, and addressed many beautiful words
to them.” And later on, “her attendants were amazed at seeing a body,
which seemed to be healthy, in such a tormented condition.” But “soon
after she laughed and spoke as one in health, and told them not to
distress themselves about her, since she was very contented; but that
they should see to it that they did much good, since the way of God is
very narrow.”[20]
3. _Interaction and mutual suggestion of her spiritual and physical
states._
As to the extraordinary closeness and readiness for mutual response
between her sensible impressions and her thoughts and emotions--her
sensations turning, all but automatically, into religious emotions,
and her thoughts and feelings translating themselves into appropriate
psycho-physical states--we have a mass of interesting evidence.
Thus when, about the end of November 1509, in response to her seeing,
on some wall of the Hospital, a picture of Our Lord at the Well of
Samaria, and to her asking Him for one drop of that Divine water,
“instantly a drop was given to her which refreshed her within and
without.” The spiritual idea and emotion is here accompanied and
further stimulated by the keenest psycho-physical impression of
drinking. And such an impression can even become painful through
its excessive suggestiveness. Thus she herself explains to Maestro
Boerio, on September 2, 1510, that she cannot long bear the sight
of his scarlet robe “because of what it suggests (represents) to my
memory,”--no doubt the fire of divine love. Three days later, on the
contrary, “she mentally saw herself lying upon a bier, surrounded by
many Religious robed in black,” and greatly rejoiced at the sight. Here
the very impression of black, the colour of death, will have conveyed,
during this special mood of hers, a downright psycho-physical pleasure,
somewhat as Boerio’s reappearance, on the former occasion, in a black
gown, had been a sensible relief to her.
So also with scents. When, certainly after 1499, “she perceived, on
the (right) hand of her Confessor, an odour which penetrated her very
heart,” and “which abode with her and restored both mind and body for
many days,” we have again a primarily mental act and state which she
herself knows well to be untransferable, even to Don Marabotto himself.
Here the association of ideas was, no doubt, the right hand of the
Priest and her daily reception, by means of it, of the Holy Eucharist.
For the latter, “the Bread from heaven, having within it all manner
of delight,” is already connected in her mind with an impression of
sweet odour. “One day, on receiving Communion, so much odour and
sweetness came to her, that she seemed to herself to be in Paradise.”
Probably the love for, and then the disgust at, the smell of wine, was
also connected with her Eucharistic experiences. Certainly “one day,
having received Holy Communion, she was granted so great a consolation
as to fall into an ecstasy, so that when the Priest wanted to give
her to drink from the Chalice (with unconsecrated wine) she had to be
brought back by force to her ordinary consciousness.” Vivid memories
of both sets of psycho-physical impressions are, I think, at work
when she says: “If a consecrated Host were to be given to me amongst
unconsecrated ones, I should be able to distinguish it by the very
taste, as I do wine from water.” And as the sight of red rapidly became
painful from the very excess of its mental suggestiveness, so will the
smell of wine have been both specially dear and specially painful to
her.[21]
Indeed her psycho-physical troubles possess, for the most part, a
still traceable, most delicate selectiveness as to date, range, form,
combination, and other peculiarities. Thus some of the most acute
attacks coincide, in their date of occurrence and general character, as
the biographers point out, with special saint’s and holy days: so in
the night leading into St. Lawrence’s day, August 9 and 10, 1510; so
on the Vigil of St. Bartholomew’s day, August 24; and so in the night
previous to and on the Feast (August 28) of St. Augustine, special
Patron of her only sister’s Order and of the Convent in which her own
Conversion had taken place thirty-seven years before. Yet we have also
seen how that these synchronisms did not rise to the heights which
were soon desired by her biographers, for we know that she died, not
(as they would have it) on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross,
September 14, but early on the day following.
Thus too as to her incapacity to swallow and retain food, we find that,
up to the end, with the rarest exceptions of a directly physical kind,
she retained the most complete facility in receiving Holy Communion:
so on September 2, 1510, when “all ordinary food was returned, but
the Holy Eucharist she retained without any difficulty”; and so too
on September 4, when, after “lying for close upon twelve hours with
closed eyes, speechless and all but immovable,” Marabotto himself
feared to communicate her, but “she made a sign to him, with a joyous
countenance, to have no fear, and she communicated with ease, and
soon after began to speak, owing to the vigour given to her by the
Sacrament.” Yet here too the abnormality is not complete: some ordinary
food is retained, now and then; so, minced chicken, specially mentioned
for December 1509, and on September 3, 1510.
As to her heat-attacks and the corresponding extreme--the sense of
intense cold,--it is clear how close is their connection with her
profound concentration upon the conception of God as Love, and upon the
image of Love as fire. It is these sudden and intense psycho-physical,
spiritually suggestive because spiritually suggested, heat-attacks
which are, I think, always meant by the terms “assault” (_assalto_),
“stroke” (_ferita_), and “arrow” (_saetta_): terms which already
indicate the mental quality of these attacks. And these heats are
mostly localized in a doctrinally suggestive manner: they centre in and
around the heart, or on the tongue and lips, or they envelop the whole
person “as though it were placed in a great flame of fire,” or “in a
glowing furnace.” Indeed these heats are often so described, by her
attendants or herself, as to imply their predominantly psycho-physical
nature: “it was necessary, with a view to prolonging her life, to
use many means for lightening the strain of that interior fire upon
her mind”; and “I feel,” she says herself, on occasion of such an
attack, “so great a contentment on the part of the spirit, as to be
unutterable; whilst, on the part of my humanity, all the pains are, so
to say, no pains.”
As to her boundless thirst, her inability to drink, and her sense of
strangulation, their doctrinal suggestions are largely clear. Thus
when “she was so thirsty as to feel able to drink up all the waters
of the sea,” and when she calls out “I am suffocating” (drowning, _io
affogo_), we are at once reminded of her great saying: “If the sea
were all so much love, there would not live man or woman who would
not go to drown himself in it (_si affogasse_).” And when, at the end
of August 1510, unable to drink, she herself declares “all the water
that is on earth could not give me the least refreshment,” there is,
perhaps, an implied contrast to that “little drop of divine water”
which had so much refreshed her a year before.
And finally, the various paralyses and death-like swoons seem, at least
in part, to follow from, and to represent, the death of the spirit
to the life of the senses, and to mirror the intensity with which
perfection has been conceived and practised as “Love going forth out
of self, and abiding all in God and separated from man.” Thus when, on
August 22, 1510, “she had a day of great heat, and abode paralyzed in
one hand and in one finger of the other hand for about sixteen hours,
and she was so greatly occupied (absorbed), that she neither spoke, nor
opened her eyes, nor could take any food.”[22]
4. _Only two cases of spiritually unsuggestive impressions._
It is indeed profoundly instructive to note how that, in exact
proportion as a human-mental mediation and suggestion of a religious
kind is directly traceable or at least probable in any or all of
these things, is that thing also worthy of being considered as having
ultimately the Divine Spirit Itself for its first cause as well as last
end; and that, in exact proportion as this kind of human mediation
and suggestion is impossible or unlikely, the thing turns out to be
unworthy of being attributed, in any special sense, to the spirit of
God Himself.
Of such spiritually opaque, religiously unused and apparently
unuseable, hysteriform impressions, I can, even during the last
days of these nine years of admitted infirmity, find but two clear
instances,--instances which, by their very unlikeness to the mass of
her spiritually transparent, readily used impressions, strongly confirm
our high estimate of the all but totality of her psycho-physical
states, as experienced and understood and used by herself. On September
7, 1510, after having seen and wisely utilized the spiritually
suggestive image of “a great ladder of fire,” she ends by having so
vivid an hallucination of the whole world being on fire “that she asked
whether it were not so, and caused her windows to be opened that the
facts might be ascertained;” and “she abode the whole night, possessed
by that imagination,” as the _Vita_ itself calls this impression. At
night, on September 11, she complained of a very great heat, and cast
forth from her mouth very black blood; and black spots came out all
over her body. And on the 13th, “she was seen with her eyes fixed upon
the ceiling, and with much movement of the lips and hands; and she
answered her attendants’ queries as to what she was seeing with ‘Drive
away that beast.…’ the remaining words being inaudible.”[23]
Here we have, I think, the only two merely factual, unsuggestive, and
hence simply delusive, impressions really experienced by herself and
recorded in the _Vita_, a book whose very eagerness to discover things
of this kind and readiness to take them as directly supernatural is a
guarantee that no other marked instances of the kind have been omitted
or suppressed. And these two impressions both take place within a week
of her death, and respectively four days before, and two days after,
the first clear case of organic disease or lesion to be found anywhere
in the life.
III. CATHERINE’S PSYCHO-PHYSICAL CONDITION, ITS LIKENESS AND UNLIKENESS
TO HYSTERIA.
Only by a quite unfair magnifying or multiplying of the two incidents
just described could we come to hold, with Mr. Baring-Gould, that
Catherine was simply a sufferer from hysteria, and that the Roman
Church did well to canonize her on the ground of her having, in spite
of this malady, managed to achieve much useful work amongst the sick
and poor.[24] Here we shall do well to consider three groups of facts.
1. _Misapprehensions as to hysteria._
The first group gives the reasons why we should try and get rid of the
terror and horror still so often felt in connection with the very name
of this malady. This now quite demonstrably excessive, indeed largely
mythical, connotation of the term springs from four causes.
First, the very name still tends to suggest, as the causes or
conditions of the malady, things fit only for discussion in medical
reviews. But then, ever since 1855, all limitation to, or special
connection with, anything peculiarly female, or indeed generally
sexual, has been increasingly shown to be false, until now no serious
authority on the matter can be found to espouse the old view. The
malady is now well known to attack men as well as women, and to have no
special relation to things of sex at all.[25]
Next, probably as a consequence from the initial error, this disorder
was supposed to predominantly come from, or to lead to, moral impurity,
or at least to be ordinarily accompanied by strong erotic propensions.
But here the now carefully observed facts are imperatively hostile:
of the 120 living cases most carefully studied by Prof. Janet, only
four showed the predominance of any such tendencies, a proportion
undoubtedly not above the percentage to be found amongst non-hysterical
persons.[26]
And again, the term was long synonymous with untruthfulness and deceit.
But here again Prof. Janet shows how unfounded is this prejudice, since
it but springs from the misplaced promptitude with which the earlier
observers refused to believe what they had not as yet sufficiently
examined and could not at all explain, and from the malady being itself
equivalent to a more or less extensive breaking-up of the normal
inter-connection between the several, successive or simultaneous
states, and, as it were, layers of the one personality. He is convinced
that real untruthfulness is no commoner among such patients than it is
among healthy persons.[27]
And, finally, it is no doubt felt that, apart from all such
specifically moral suspicions, the malady involves all kinds of fancies
and inaccuracies of feeling and of perception, and that it frequently
passes into downright insanity. And this is no doubt the one objection
which does retain some of its old cogency. Still, it is well to note
that, as has now been fully established, the elements of the human mind
are and remain the same throughout the whole range of its conditions,
from the sanest to the maddest, whilst only their proportion and
admixture, and the presence or absence and the kind of synthesis
necessary to hold them together differentiate these various states of
mind. In true insanity there is no such synthesis; in hysteria the
synthesis, however slight and peculiar, is always still traceable
throughout the widespread disgregation of the elements and states.[28]
And it is this very persistence of the fundamental unity, together with
the strikingly different combination and considerable disaggregation
of its elements, that makes the study of hysteria so fruitful for
the knowledge of the fully healthy mind and of its unity; whilst the
continuance of all the elements of the normal intelligence, even in
insanity, readily explains why it is apparently so easy to see insanity
everywhere, and to treat genius and sanctity as but so much degeneracy.
2. _Hysteriform phenomena observable in Catherine’s case._
The second group of facts consists in the phenomena which, in
Catherine’s case, are like or identical to what is observable in cases
of hysteria.
There is, perhaps above all else, the anaesthetic condition, which was
presumably co-extensive with her paralytic states. “Anaesthesia,” says
Prof. Janet, “can be considered as the type of the other symptoms of
hysteria; it exists in the great majority of cases, it is thoroughly
characteristic of the malady. In its most frequent localization
(semi-anaesthesia) it affects one of the lateral halves of the body,
and this half is usually the left side.” Or, “a finger or hand will be
affected.” Such “insensibility can be very frequent and very profound”;
but “it disappears suddenly” and even “varies from one moment to
another.”[29]
Then there is the corresponding counter-phenomenon of hyper-aesthesia.
“The slightest contact provokes great pains, exclamations, and spasms.
The painful zones have their seat mostly on the abdomen or on the
hips.” And “sensation in these states is not painful in itself, by its
own intensity, but by its quality, its characteristics; it has become
the signal, by association of ideas, for the production of a set of
extremely painful phenomena.” So, with the colour-sense: “one patient
adores the colour red, and sees in its dullest shade ‘sparkling rays
which penetrate to her very heart and warm her through and through.’”
But “another one finds this ‘a repulsive colour and one capable
of producing nausea.’” And similarly with the senses of taste and
odour.[30]
Then, too, the inability to stand or walk, with the conservation,
at times, of the power to crawl; the acceptance, followed by the
rejection, of food, because of certain spasms in the throat or stomach,
and the curious, mentally explicable, exceptions to this incapacity;
the sense, even at other times, of strangulation; heart palpitations,
fever heats, strange haemorrhages from the stomach or even from the
lung; red patches on the skin and emotional jaundice all over it, and
one or two other peculiarities.[31]
Then, as to a particular kind of quietude, from which Catherine warns
her attendants to rouse her, we find a patient who “ceases her reading,
without showing any sign of doing so. She gets taken to be profoundly
attentive; it is, however, but one of her attacks of ‘fixity.’ And she
has promptly to be shaken out of this state, or, in a few minutes,
there will be no getting her out of it.”
As to Catherine’s consciousness of possessing an extraordinary fineness
of discrimination between sensibly identical objects, we see that
“if one points out, to some of these patients, an imaginary portrait
upon a plain white card, and mixes this card with other similar ones,
they will almost always find again the portrait on the same card.” And
similarly as to her attaching a particular quasi-sensible perception
to Marabotto’s hand alone, we find that, if M. Janet touches Léonie’s
hand, he having suggested a nosegay to her, she will henceforth, when
he touches the hand, see that nosegay; whereas, if another person
touches that same hand, Léonie will see nothing special.
As to Catherine’s feelings of criminality and of being already dead, M.
Janet quotes M., who says, “I am like a criminal about to be punished”;
and R., who declares, “It seems to me that I am dead.” As to the
hallucination of a Beast, Marcelle suffers from the same impression.[32]
And,--perhaps the most important of all these
surface-resemblances,--there is Catherine’s apparent freedom from all
emotion at the deaths of her brothers and sister, and her extraordinary
dependence upon, and claimfulness towards, her Confessor alone. “These
patients rapidly lose the social feelings: Berthe, who for some time
preserved some affection for her brother, ends by losing all interest
in him; Marcelle, at the very beginning of her illness, separates
herself from every one.” “It is always their own personality which
dominates their thoughts.” Yet these patients have “an extraordinary
attachment to their physician. For him they are resolved to do all
things. In return, they are extremely exacting,--he is to occupy
himself entirely with each one alone. Only a very superficial observer
would ascribe this feeling to a vulgar source.”[33]
3. _Catherine’s personality not disintegrated._
But a third group of facts clearly differentiates Catherine’s case,
even in these years of avowed ill-health, from such patients; and these
facts become clearer and more numerous in precise proportion as we move
away from peripheral, psycho-physical phenomena and mechanisms, and
dwell upon her practically unbroken mental and moral characteristics,
and upon the use and meaning, the place and context of these things
within her ample life.
For as to her relations with her attendants, even now it is still she
who leads, who suggests, who influences; a strong and self-consistent
will shows itself still, under all this shifting psycho-physical
surface. Thus Don Marabotto now administers, it is true, all her money
and charitable affairs for her. But it is she who insists, alone and
unaided, upon the true spiritual function of that impression of odour
on his hand.--Vernazza, no doubt, has now to help her in the fight
against subtle scruples, on occasion of her deepest depressions. But
her far more frequent times of light and joy are in nowise occasions
of a simply subjective self-engrossment or of a purely psycho-physical
interest, for her mind is absorbed if in but a few, yet in
inexhaustibly fruitful and universally applicable ideas and experiences
of a spiritual kind, such as helped to urge this friend on to his
world-renewing impulses and determinations.--Her closest relations and
friends, one must admit, succeed by their action, taken eighteen months
and then again two days before her death, in getting her to desist
from ordering her burial by the side of her husband. But we have seen,
in the one case, how indirectly, and, in the other case, how suddenly
and even then quite informally, they had to gain their point.--Her
attendants in general, and Marabotto in particular, certainly paid her
an engrossed attention, and the all but endlessness of her superficial
fancies and requirements have been chronicled by them with a naïve and
wearisome fulness. But then she herself is well aware that, had they
but the requisite knowledge as to how and when to apply them, some
sturdy opposition and a greater roughness of handling would, on their
part, be of the greatest use to her, in this her psychical infirmity;
indeed her shutting herself away from Marabotto, as late as January
1510, is directly caused by her sense and fear of being spoilt by him.
It is true again that, already in 1502, we hear, in a probably
exaggerated but still possibly semi-authentic account, of her
indifference of feeling with regard to the deaths of two brothers and
of her only sister; and that, from January 1510 onwards, she gradually
excludes all her attendants from her sick-room, with, eventually, the
sole exceptions of Marabotto or Carenzio and Argentina. But her Wills
show conclusively how persistent were her detailed interest in, and
dispositions for, the requirements of her surviving brother, nephews,
and nieces; of poor Thobia and the girl’s hidden mother; of her
priest-attendants, and of each and all of her humblest domestics; of
the natives in the far-away Greek Island of Scios; and, above all, of
the Hospital and its great work which she had ever loved so well.
We have indeed found two cases, both from within the last week of her
life, of mentally opaque and spiritually unsuggestive and unutilized
impressions which are truly analogous to those characteristic of
hysteria. But we have also seen how forcibly these two solitary cases
bring out, by contrast, the spiritual transparency and fruitfulness of
her usual, finely reflective picturings of these last years. For here
it is her own deliberate and spiritual mind which joyously greets, and
straightway utilizes and transcends, the psycho-physical occurrences;
and it does so, not because these occurrences are, or are taken to be,
the causes or requisites or objects of her faith and spiritual insight,
but because, on the contrary, they meet and clothe an already exuberant
faith and insight--spiritual certainties derived from quite another
source.
And finally, if the monotony and superficial pettiness of the sick-room
can easily pall upon us, especially when presented with the credulities
and hectic exaggerations which disfigure so much of the _Vita’s_
description of it; we must, in justice, as I have attempted to do in my
seventh and eighth chapters, count in, as part of her biography, her
deep affection for and persistent influence with Ettore and Battista
Vernazza, and the exemplification of her doctrine by these virile
souls, makers of history in the wide, varied world of men.[34]
In a word, it is plain at once that, given the necessarily limited
number of ways in which the psycho-physical organism reacts under
mental stimulations, certain neural phenomena may, in any two cases,
be, in themselves, perfectly similar, although their respective mental
causes or occasions may be as different, each from the other, as
the Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven, or the working out of the Law of
Gravitation by Newton, or the elaboration of the implications of the
Categorical Imperative by Kant, are different from the sudden jumping
of a live mouse in the face of an hysterically-disposed young woman, or
as the various causes of tears and laughter throughout the whole world.
IV. FIRST PERIOD OF CATHERINE’S LIFE, 1447 TO 1477, IN ITS THREE STAGES.
If we next go back to the first period of her life, in its three stages
of the sixteen years of her girlhood, 1447-1463, the first ten years
of her married life, 1463-1473, and the four years of her Conversion
and active Penitence, 1473-1477, we shall find, I think, in the matter
of temperament and psycho-physical conditions, little or nothing
but a rare degree of spiritual sensitiveness, and an extraordinary
close-knittedness of body and mind.
1. _From her childhood to her conversion._
Thus, already in her early childhood, that picture of the Pietà seems
to have suggested religious ideas and feelings with the suddenness
and emotional solidity of a physical seizure--an impression still
undimmed when she herself recounted it, some fifty years later, to her
two intimates.--It is true that during those first, deeply unhappy
ten years of marriage, we cannot readily find more than indications
of a most profound and brooding melancholy, the apparent result of
but two factors,--a naturally sad disposition and acutely painful
domestic circumstances. Yet it is clear, from the sequel, that more
and other things lay behind. It is indeed evident that she possessed
a congenitally melancholy temperament; that nothing but the rarest
combination of conditions could have brought out, into something like
elastic play and varied exercise, her great but few and naturally
excessive qualities of mind and heart; that these conditions were not
only absent, but were replaced by circumstances of the most painful
kind; and that she will hardly, at this time, have had even a moment’s
clear consciousness of any other sources than just those conditions for
her deep, keen, and ever-increasing dissatisfaction with all things,
her own self included: all peace and joy, the very capacity for either
seemed gone, and gone for ever. But it is only the third stage, with
its sudden-seeming conversion on March 20, 1473, and the then following
four years of strenuously active self-immolation and dedication to the
humblest service of others, which lets us see deep into those previous
years of sullen gloom and apparently hopeless drift and dreary wastage.
The two stages really belong to one another, and the depth of the
former gloom and dreariness stood in direct proportion and relation to
the capacities of that nature and to the height of their satisfaction
in the later light and vigour brought to and assimilated by them. It
was the sense, at that previous time still inarticulate, but none the
less mightily operative, of the insufficiency of all things merely
contingent, of all things taken as such and inevitably found to be
such, that had been adding, and was now discovered to have added, a
quite determining weight and poignancy to the natural pressure of her
temperament and external lot. And this temperament and lot, which had
not alone produced that sadness, could still less of themselves remove
it, whatever might be its cause. Her sense of emptiness and impotence
could indeed add to her sense of fulness and of power, once these
latter had come; but of themselves the former could no more give her
the latter, than hunger, which indeed makes bread to taste delicious,
can give us real bread and, with it, that delight.
And it was such real bread of life and real power which now came to
her. For if the tests of reality in such things are their persistence
and large and rich spiritual applicability and fruitfulness,
then something profoundly real and important took place in the
soul of that sad and weary woman of six-and-twenty, within that
Convent-chapel, at that Annunciation-tide. Her four years of heroic
persistence; her unbroken Hospital service of a quarter of a century;
her lofty magnanimity towards her husband, Thobia and Thobia’s
mother; her profound influence upon Vernazza, in urging him on to
his splendid labours throughout Italy, and to his grand death in
plague-stricken Genoa; her daringly original, yet immensely persuasive,
doctrine,--nearly all this dates back, completely for her consciousness
and very largely in reality, to those few moments on that memorable day.
2. _Her conversion not sudden nor visionary._
But two points, concerning the manner and form of this experience,
are, though of but secondary spiritual interest, far more difficult
to decide. There is, for one thing, the indubitable impression, for
her own mind and for ours, of complete suddenness and newness in her
change. Was this suddenness and newness merely apparent, or real as
well? And should this suddenness, if real, be taken as in itself and
directly supernatural?
Now it is certain that Catherine, up to ten years before, had been
full of definitely religious acts and dispositions. Had she not,
already at thirteen, wanted to be a Nun, and, at eight or so, been
deeply moved by a picture of the dead Christ in His Mother’s lap?
Hence, ideas and feelings of self-dedication and of the Christ-God’s
hatred of sin and love for her had, in earlier and during longer times
than those of her comparative carelessness, soaked into and formed her
mental and emotional bent, and will have in so far shaped her will,
as to make the later determination along those earlier lines of its
operation, comparatively easy, even after those years of relaxation and
deviation. Yet it is clear that there was not here, as indeed there
is nowhere, any mere repetition of the past. New combinations and an
indefinitely deeper apprehension of the great religious ideas and facts
of God’s holiness and man’s weakness, of the necessity for the soul to
reach its own true depth or to suffer fruitlessly, and of God having
Himself to meet and feed this movement and hunger which He has Himself
implanted; new combinations and depths of emotion, and an indefinite
expansion and heroic determination of the will: were all certainly
here, and were new as compared with even the most religious moments in
the past.
As to the suddenness, we cannot but take it as, in large part, simply
apparent,--a dim apprehension of what then became clear having been
previously quite oppressively with her. And, in any case, this
suddenness seems to belong rather to the temperamental peculiarities
and necessary forms of her particular experiences than to the essence
and content of her spiritual life. For, whatever she thinks, feels,
says or does throughout her life, she does and experiences with actual
suddenness, or at least with a sense of suddenness; and there is
clearly no more necessary connection between such suddenness and grace
and true self-renouncement, than there is between gradualness and mere
nature; both suddenness and gradualness being but simple modes, more or
less fixed for each individual, yet differing from each to each, modes
in which God’s grace and man’s will interact and manifest themselves in
different souls.[35]
And then there is the question as to whether or not this
conversion-experience took the form of a vision. We have seen, in
the Appendix, how considerable are the difficulties which beset the
account of the Bleeding Christ Vision in the Palace; and how the story
of the previous visionless experience in the Chapel is free from all
such objections. But, even supposing the two accounts to be equally
reliable, it is the first, the visionless experience, which was
demonstrably the more important and the more abidingly operative of the
two. More important, for it is during those visionless moments that
her conversion is first effected; and more abiding, for, according to
all the ancient accounts, the impression of the Bleeding Christ Vision
disappeared utterly at the end of at longest four years, whereas the
memory of the visionless conversion moments remained with her, as an
operative force, up to the very last. Witness the free self-casting of
the soul into painful-joyous Purgation, into Love, into God (without
any picturing of the historic Christ), which forms one of the two
constituents of her great latter-day teaching; and how entirely free
from directly historic elements all her recorded visions of the middle
period turn out to be.[36]
3. _Peculiarities of her Active Penitence._
As to the four years of Active Penitence, we must beware of losing
the sense of the dependence, the simple, spontaneous instrumentality,
in which the negative and restrictive side of of her action stood
towards the positive and expansive one. An immense affirmation, an
anticipating, creative buoyancy and resourcefulness, had come full
flood into her life; and had shifted her centre of deliberate interest
and willing away from the disordered, pleasure-seeking, sore and
sulky lesser self in which her true personality had for so long been
enmeshed. Thus all this strenuous work of transforming and raising her
lower levels of inclinations and of habit to the likeness and heights
of her now deliberate loftiest standard was not taking place for the
sake of something which actually was, or which even seemed to be, less
than what she had possessed or had, even dimly, sought before, nor with
a view to her true self’s contraction. But, on the contrary, the work
was for the end of that indefinite More, of that great pushing upwards
of her soul’s centre and widening out of its circumference, which she
could herself confirm and increase only by such ever-renewed warfare
against what she now recognized as her false and crippling self.
And it is noticeable how soon and how largely, even still within this
stage, her attitude became “passive.” She pretty early came to do these
numerous definite acts of penance without any deliberate selection
or full attention to them. As in her third period her absorption in
large spiritual ideas spontaneously suggests certain corresponding
psycho-physical phenomena, which then, in return, stimulate anew the
apprehensions of the mind; so here, towards the end of the first
period, penitential love ends by quite spontaneously suggesting
divers external acts of penitence, which readily become so much fresh
stimulation for love.
I take this time to have been as yet free from visions or ecstasies--at
least of the later lengthy and specific type. For the Bleeding Christ
experience, even if fully historical, occurred within the first
conversion-days, and only its vivid memory prolonged itself throughout
those penitential years; whilst all such other visions, as have been
handed down to us, do not treat of conversion and penance, at least in
any active and personal sense. And only towards the end of these years
do the psycho-physical phenomena as to the abstention from food begin
to show themselves. The consideration of both the Visions and the Fasts
had, then, better be reserved for the great central period.
V. THE SECOND, GREAT MIDDLE PERIOD OF CATHERINE’S LIFE, 1477 TO 1499.