As is the case with many great letter-writers, though not with all,
Catherine reveals herself largely through her relations with others. Some
of her letters, indeed, are elaborate religious or political treatises,
and seem at first sight to have little personal colouring; yet even these
yield their full content of spiritual beauty and wisdom only when one
knows the circumstances that called them forth and the persons to whom
they were addressed. A mere glance at the index to her correspondence
shows how widely she was in touch with her time. She was a woman of
personal charm and of sympathies passionately wide, and she gathered
around her friends and disciples from every social group in Italy, not to
speak of many connections formed with people in other lands. She wrote to
prisoners and outcasts; to great nobles and plain business men; to
physicians, lawyers, soldiers of fortune; to kings and queens and
cardinals and popes; to recluses pursuing the Beatific Vision, and to men
and women of the world plunged in the lusts of the flesh and governed by
the pride of life. The society of the fourteenth century passes in review
as we turn the pages.
Catherine wrote to all these people in the same simple spirit. With one
and all she was at home, for all were to her, by no merely formal phrase,
"dearest brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus." One knows not whether to
be more struck by the outspoken fearlessness of the woman or by her great
adaptability. She could handle with plain directness the crudest sins of
her age; she could also treat with subtle insight the most elusive phases
of spiritual experience. No greater distance can be imagined than that
which separates the young Dominican with her eyes full of visions from a
man like Sir John Hawkwood, reckless free-lance, selling his sword with
light-hearted zeal to the highest bidder, and battening on the disorder of
the times. Catherine writes to him with gentlest assumption of fellowship,
seizes on his natural passions and tastes, and seeks to sanctify the
military life of his affections. With her sister nuns the method changes.
She gives free play to her delicate fancy, drawing her metaphors from the
beauty of nature, from tender, homely things, from the gentle arts and
instincts of womanhood. Does she speak to Pope Gregory, the timid? Her
words are a trumpet-call. To the harsh Urban, his successor? With finest
tact she urges self-restraint and a policy of moderation. Temperaments of
every type are to be met in her pages--a sensitive poet, troubled by
"confusion of thought" deepening into melancholia; a harum-scarum boy, in
whose sunny joyousness she discerns the germ of supernatural grace;
vehement sinners, fearful saints, religious recluses deceived by self-
righteousness, and men of affairs devoutly faithful to sober duty.
Catherine enters into every consciousness. As a rule we associate with
very pure and spiritual women, even if not cloistered, a certain deficient
sense of reality. We cherish them, and shield them from harsh contact with
the world, lest the fine flower of their delicacy be withered. But no one
seems to have felt in this way about Catherine. Her "love for souls" was
no cold electric illumination such as we sometimes feel the phrase to
imply, but a warm understanding tenderness for actual men and women. It
would be hard to exaggerate her knowledge of the world and of human
hearts.
Yet sometimes Catherine appears to us austere and exacting; unsparing in
condemnation, and unrelenting in her demands on those she loves. Many of
her letters are in a strain of exhortation that rises into rebuke. The
impression at first is unpleasant. We are tempted to feel this unfailing
candour captious; to resent the note of authority, equally clear whether
she write to Pope or Cardinal; to suspect Catherine, in a word, of
assuming that very judicial attitude which she constantly deprecates as
unbecoming to us poor mortals. And perhaps the very frequency of her plea
for tolerance and forbearance suggests a conscious weakness. Like most
brilliant and ardent people, she was probably by nature of a critical and
impatient disposition; she was, moreover, a plebeian. At times, when she
is quite sure that men are on the side of the devil, she allows her
instinctive frankness full scope; it must be allowed that the result is
astounding. Yet even as we catch our breath we realise that her remarks
were probably justified. It is hard for us moderns to remember how crudely
hideous were the sins which she faced. In these days, when we are all
reduced to one apparent level of moral respectability, and great
saintliness and dramatic guilt are alike seldom conspicuous, we forget the
violent contrasts of the middle ages. Pure "Religious," striving after the
exalted perfection enjoined by the Counsels, moved habitually among moral
atrocities, and bold vigour of speech was a practical duty. Catherine
handled without evasion the grossest evils of her time, and the spell
which she exercised by simple force of direct dealing was nothing less
than extraordinary.
It is easy to see why Catherine's plain speaking was not resented. She
rarely begins with rebuke. The note of humility is first struck; she is
always "servant and slave of the servants of Jesus Christ." Thence she
frequently passes into fervent meditation on some special theme: the
exceeding wonder of the Divine Love, the duty of prayer, the nature of
obedience. We are lifted above the world into a region of heavenly light
and sweetness, when suddenly--a blow from the shoulder!--a startling sense
of return to earth. From the contemplation of the beauty of holiness,
Catherine has swiftly turned us to face the opposing sin. "Thou art the
man!" A few trenchant sentences, charged with pain, and the soul which has
been raised to celestial places awakes to see in itself the contradiction
of all that is so lovely. Into the region of darkness Catherine goes with
it. It is not "thou" but "we" who have sinned. She holds that sinful heart
so near her own that the beatings are confounded; her words now and again
express a shuddering personal remorse for sins of which she could have had
no personal knowledge. Her sense of unity with her fellow-men lies deeper
than any theory of brotherhood; she feels herself in sober truth guilty of
the sins of her brothers: her experience illustrates the profound truth
that only purity can know perfect penitence.
Catherine is then saved from any touch of Pharisaism by her remarkable
identification of herself with the person to whom she writes. But to
understand her attitude we must go further. For she never pauses in
reprobation of evil. Full of conviction that the soul needs only to
recognise its sin to hate and escape it for ever, she passes swiftly on to
impassioned appeal. Her words breathe a confidence in men that never fails
even when she is writing to the most hardened. She succeeded to a rare
degree in the difficult conciliation of uncompromising hatred toward sin
with unstrained fellowship with the sinner, and invincible trust in his
responsiveness to the appeal of virtue. When we consider the times in
which she lived, this large and touching trustfulness becomes to our eyes
a victory of faith. That it was no mere instinct, but an attitude
resolutely adopted and maintained, is evident from her frequent
discussions of charity and tolerance, some of which will be found in these
selections. She constantly urges her disciples to put the highest possible
construction on their neighbours' actions; nor is any phase of her
teaching more constantly repeated than the beautiful application of the
text: "In My Father's House are many mansions," to enjoin recognition of
the varieties in temperament and character and practice which may coexist
in the House of God.
Catherine had learned a hard lesson. She saw in human beings not their
achievements, but their possibilities. Therefore she quickened repentance
by a positive method, not by morbid analysis of evil, not by lurid
pictures of the consequences of sin, but by filling the soul with glowing
visions of that holiness which to see is to long for. She never despaired
of quickening in even the most degraded that flame of "holy desire" which
is the earnest of true holiness to be. We find her impatient of mint and
cummin, of over-anxious self-scrutiny. "Strive that your holy desires
increase," she writes to a correspondent; "and let all these other things
alone." "I, Catherine--write to you--with desire": so open all her
letters. Holy Desire! It is not only the watchword of her teaching: it is
also the true key to her personality.