IV

Catherine's soaring imagination lifted her above the circle of purely

personal interests, and made her a force of which history is cognisant in

the public affairs of her day. She is one of a very small number of women

who have exerted the influence of a statesman by virtue, not of feminine

attractions, but of conviction and intellectual power. It is impossible to

understand her letters without some recognition of the public drama of the

time.

Two great ideals of unity--one Roman, one Christian in origin--had

possessed the middle ages. In the strength of them the wandering barbaric

hordes had been reduced to order, and Western Europe had been trained into

some perception of human fellowship. Of these two unifying forces, the

imperialistic ideal was moribund in Catherine's time: not even a Dante,

born fifty years after his true date, could have held to it. Remained the

ideal of the Church universal, and to this last hope of a peaceful

commonwealth that should include all humanity, the idealists clung in

desperation.

But alas for the faith of idealists when fact gives theory the lie! What

at this time was the unity of mankind in the Church but a formal

hypothesis? The keystone of her all-embracing arch was the Papacy. But the

Pope no longer sat heir of the Caesars in the seat of the Apostles; for

seventy years he had been a practical dependant of the French king, living

in pleasant Provence. Neither the scorn of Dante, nor the eloquence of

Petrarch, nor the warnings of holy men, had prevailed on the popes to

return to Italy, and make an end of the crying scandal which was the

evident contradiction of the Christian dream. Meantime, the city of the

Caesars lay waste and wild; the clergy was corrupt almost past belief; the

dreaded Turk was gathering his forces, a menace to Christendom itself. The

times were indeed evil, and the "servants of God," of whom then, as now,

there were no inconsiderable number, withdrew for the most part into

spiritual or literal seclusion, and in the quietude of cloister or forest

cell busied themselves with the concerns of their own souls.

Not so Catherine Benincasa. She had known that temptation and conquered

it. After her reception as a Dominican Tertiary, she had possessed the

extraordinary resolution to live for three years the recluse life, not in

the guarded peace of a convent, but in her own room at home, in the noisy

and overcrowded house where a goodly number of her twenty-four brothers

and sisters were apparently still living. And these had been years of

inestimable preciousness; but they came to an end at the command of God,

speaking through the constraining impulse of her love for men. From the

mystical retirement in which she had long lived alone with her Beloved,

she emerged into the world. And the remarkable fact is that in no respect

did she blench from the situation as she found it. She "faced life

steadily and faced it whole." A Europe ravaged by dissensions lay before

her; a Church which gave the lie to its lofty theories, no less by the

hateful worldliness of its prelates than by its indifferent abandonment of

the Seat of Peter. Above this sorry spectacle the mind of Catherine soared

straight into an upper region, where only the greatest minds of the day

were her comrades. Her fellow-citizens were unable to entertain the idea

even of civic peace within the limits of their own town; but patriotic

devotion to all Italy fired her great heart. More than this--her instinct

for solidarity forced her to dwell in the thought of a world-embracing

brotherhood. Her hopes were centred, not like Dante's in the Emperor the

heir of the Caesars, but in the Pope the heir of Christ. Despite the

corruption from which she recoiled with horror, despite the Babylonian

captivity at Avignon, she saw in the Catholic Church that image of a pure

universal fellowship which the noblest Catholics of all ages have

cherished. To the service of the Church, therefore, her life was

dedicated; it was to her the Holy House of Reconciliation, wherein all

nations should dwell in unity; and only by submission to its authority

could the woes of Italy be healed.

Catherine's letters on public affairs--historical documents of recognised

importance--give us her practical programme. It was formed in the light of

that faith which she always describes as "the eye of the mind." She was

called during her brief years of political activity to meet three chief

issues: the absence of the Pope from Italy; the rebellion of the Tuscan

cities, headed by Florence, against his authority; and at a later time the

great Schism, which broke forth under Urban VI. During her last five years

she was absorbed in ecclesiastical affairs. In certain of her immediate

aims she succeeded, in others she failed. It would be hard to say whether

her success or her failure involved the greater tragedy. For behind all

these aims was a larger ideal that was not to be realised--the dream,

entertained as passionately by Catherine Benincasa as by Savonarola or by

Luther, of thorough Church-reform. Catherine at Avignon, pleading this

great cause in the frivolous culture and dainty pomp of the place;

Catherine at Rome, defending to her last breath the legal rights of a Pope

whom she could hardly have honoured, and whose claims she saw defended by

extremely doubtful means--is a figure as pathetic as heroic. Few sorrows

are keener than to work with all one's energies to attain a visible end

for the sake of a spiritual result, and, attaining that end, to find the

result as far as ever. This sorrow was Catherine's. The external successes

which she won--considerable enough to secure her a place in history--

availed nothing to forward the greater aim for which she worked. Gregory

XI., under her magnetic inspiration, gathered strength, indeed, to make a

personal sacrifice and to return to Rome, but he was of no calibre to

attempt radical reform, and his residence in Italy did nothing to right

the crying abuses that were breaking Christian hearts. His successor, on

the other hand, did really initiate the reform of the clergy, but so

drastic and unwise were his methods that the result was terrible and

disconcerting--the development of a situation of which only the Catholic

idealist could discern the full irony; no less than Schism, the rending of

the Seamless Robe of Christ.

With failing hopes and increasing experience of the complexity of human

struggle, Catherine clung to her aim until the end. There was no touch of

pusillanimity in her heroic spirit. As with deep respect we follow the

Letters of the last two years, and note their unflagging alertness and

vigour, their steady tone of devotion and self-control, we realise that to

tragedy her spirit was dedicate. Her energy of mind was constantly on the

increase. Still, it is true, she wrote to disciples near and far long,

tender letters of spiritual counsel--analyses of the religious life

tranquilly penetrating as those of an earlier time. But her political

correspondence grew in bulk. It is tense, nervous, virile. It breathes a

vibrating passion, a solemn force, that are the index of a breaking heart.

Not for one moment did Catherine relax her energies. From 1376, when she

went to Avignon, she led, with one or two brief intermissions only, the

life of a busy woman of affairs. But within this outer life of strenuous

and, as a rule, thwarted activities, another life went on--a life in which

failure could not be, since through failure is wrought redemption.

From the days of her stigmatization, which occurred in 1375 at Pisa,

Catherine had been convinced that in some special sense she was to share

in the Passion of Christ, and offer herself a sacrifice for the sins of

Holy Church. Now this conception deepened till it became all-absorbing. In

full consciousness of failing vital powers, in expectation of her

approaching death, she offered her sufferings of mind and body as an

expiation for the sins around her. By word of mouth and by letters of

heartbroken intensity she summoned all dear to her to join in this holy

offering. Catherine's faith is alien to these latter days. Yet the

psychical unity of the race is becoming matter not only of emotional

intuition, but established scientific fact: and no modern sociologist, no

psychologist who realizes how unknown in origin and how intimate in

interpenetration are the forces that control our destiny, can afford to

scoff at her. She had longed inexpressibly for outward martyrdom. This was

not for her, yet none the less really did she lay down her life on the

Altar of Sacrifice. The evils of the time, and above all of the Church,

had generated a sense of unbearable sin in her pure spirit; her constant

instinct to identify herself with the guilt of others found in this final

offering an august climax and fulfilment.

During the last months of her life--months of excruciating physical

sufferings, vividly described for us by her contemporaries--the woman's

rectitude and wisdom, her swift tender sympathies, were still, as ever, at

the disposal of all who sought them. With unswerving energy she still

laboured for the cause of truth. When we consider the conditions,

spiritual and physical, of those last months, we read with amazement the

able, clearly conceived, practical letters which she was despatching to

the many European potentates whom she was endeavouring to hold true to the

cause of Urban. But her spirit in the meantime dwelt in the region of the

Eternal, where the dolorous struggle of the times appeared, indeed, but

appeared in its essential significance as seen by angelic intelligences.

The awe-struck letters to Fra Raimondo, her Confessor, with which this

selection closes, are an accurate transcript of her inner experience. They

constitute, surely, a precious heritage of the Church for which her life

was given. Catherine Benincasa died heartbroken; yet in the depths of her

consciousness was joy, for God had revealed to her that His Bride the

Church, "which brings life to men," "holds in herself such life that no

man can kill her." "Sweetest My daughter, thou seest how she has soiled

her face with impurity and self-love, and grown puffed up by the pride and

avarice of those who feed at her bosom. But take thy tears and sweats,

drawing them from the fountain of My divine charity, and cleanse her face.

For I promise thee that her beauty shall not be restored to her by the

sword, nor by cruelty nor war, but by peace, and by humble continual

prayer, tears, and sweats poured forth from the grieving desires of My

servants. So thy desire shall be fulfilled in long abiding, and My

Providence shall in no wise fail."

V

Psychologically, as in point of time, St. Catherine stands between St.

Francis and St. Teresa. Her writings are of the middle ages, not of the

renascence, but they express the twilight of the mediaeval day. They

reveal the struggles and the spiritual achievement of a woman who lived in

the last age of an undivided Christendom, and whose whole life was

absorbed in the special problems of her time. These problems, however, are

in the deepest sense perpetual, and her attitude toward them is suggestive

still.

It has been claimed that Catherine, a century and a half later, would have

been a Protestant. Such hypotheses are always futile to discuss; but the

view hardly commends itself to the careful student of her writings. It is

suggested, naturally enough, by her denunciations of the corruptions of

the Church, denunciations as sweeping and penetrating as were ever uttered

by Luther; by her amazingly sharp and outspoken criticism of the popes;

and by her constant plea for reform. The pungency of all these elements in

her writings is felt by the most casual reader. But it must never be

forgotten that honest and vigorous criticism of the Church Visible is, in

the mind of the Catholic philosopher, entirely consistent with loyalty to

the sacerdotal theory. There is a noble idealism that breaks in fine

impatience with tradition, and audaciously seeks new symbols wherein to

suggest for a season the eternal and imageless truth. But perhaps yet

nobler in the sight of God--surely more conformed to His methods in nature

and history--is that other idealism which patiently bows to the yoke of

the actual, and endures the agony of keeping true at once to the heavenly

vision and to the imperfect earthly form. Iconoclastic zeal against

outworn or corrupt institutions fires our facile enthusiasm. Let us

recognize also the spiritual passion that suffers unflinchingly the

disparity between the sign and the thing signified, and devotes its

energies, not to discarding, but to restoring and purifying that sign.

Such passion was Catherine's. The most distinctive trait in the woman's

character was her power to cling to an ideal verity with unfaltering

faithfulness, even when the whole aspect of life and society around her

seemed to give that verity the lie. To imagine her without faith in the

visible Church and the God-given authority of the Vicar of Christ is to

imagine another woman. Catherine of Siena's place in the history of minds

is with Savonarola, not with Luther.

Catherine confronted a humanity at enmity with itself, a Church conformed

to the image of this world. Her external policy proved helpless to right

these evils. The return of the Popes from Avignon resulted neither in the

pacification of Christendom nor in the reform of the Church. The Great

Schism, of which she saw the beginning, undermined the idea of Christian

unity till the thought of the Saint of Siena was in natural sequence

followed by the thought of Luther. Outwardly her life was spent in

labouring for a hopeless cause, discredited by the subsequent movement of

history. But the material tragedy was a spiritual triumph, not only

through the victory of faith in her own soul, but through the value of the

witness which she bore. Neither of the great conceptions of unity which

possessed the middle ages was identical with the modern democratic

conception; yet both, and in particular that of the Church, pointed in

this direction. That ideal of world-embracing brotherhood to which men

have been slowly awakening throughout the Christian centuries was the

dominant ideal of Catherine's mind. She hoped for the attainment of such a

brotherhood through the instrument of an organized Christendom, reduced to

peace and unity under one God-appointed Head. History, as some of us

think, has rejected the noble dream. We seem to see that the undying hope

of the human spirit--a society shaped by justice and love--is never likely

to be gained along the lines of the centralization of ecclesiastical

power. But if our idea of the means has changed, the same end still shines

before us. The vision of human fellowship in the Name of Christ, for which

Catherine lived and died, remains the one hope for the healing of the

nations.