Chapter 5: Catherine's Last Four Years, 1506 to 1510

Catherine’s Last Four Years, 1506 To 1510--Sketch Of Her Character, Doctrine, And Spirit

I. Catherine’s External Interests And Activities Up To May 1510. Occasional Slight Deviations From Her Old Balance. Immensely Close Interconnection Of Her Whole Mental And Psycho-Physical Nature. Impressions As Connected With The Five Senses.

1. Indications of external interests.

Even during the next four years, up to May 1510, we still find various most authentic and clear indications of external interests and activities in Catherine’s life. Thus, on the 21st June 1507, the Protectors of the Hospital address a letter to Don Giacobo Carenzio (who had, as they tell him, been elected Master--Rettore--already fifteen months previously), urging him to come and take up his post; and Catherine, who, as we shall see, was later on variously helped by this Priest, and who cared so much for the Hospital, cannot have remained indifferent to that first election and to this present reminder.

Again on the 6th December 1507, the Protectors, Lorenzo Spinola, Manfredo Fornari, and Emmanuele Fiesco, met in Catherine’s room, and decided, no doubt with her advice and co-operation, to allow another widow-lady and devotee of the Hospital, Brigidina, wife of the late Giacomo Castagneto, to settle within its precincts.[155] Then on 27th November 1508 she makes a Codicil, leaving an additional £25 to Mariola, and a further article of dress to Argentina; and declaring that she is “entirely content” with Don Marabotto’s administration of her monies and charities. Don Cattaneo has then now become her Almoner, and her charitable activity continues large. The document is drawn up by Ettore Vernazza, an unimpeachable witness to Marabotto’s rectitude and exactness.[156]

Indeed as late down as 18th March 1509 her long Will of that date shows an admirable persistence of her old attachment for and interest in her surviving brother, niece (the provision for Maria’s possible marriage is particularly careful and detailed), and nephews (the youngest of the latter, Giovanni, is omitted, no doubt because he had now become a Cardinal, with a corresponding income); in Don Marabotto, who retains the same little pension; in her three maids Benedetta, Mariola, and Argentina, all of whose legacies get somewhat increased; and in the fortunes of the Hospital and of Thobia’s mother (she repeats her account of what she has already done for them).[157]

2. Occasional imperfection of judgment.

Yet now at last we can find symptoms of the final break-up of her health, and of an occasional slight or momentary deviation from, or diminution of, her old completeness of balance in both judgment, taste, and feeling,--although even now this occurs only in matters of relatively secondary importance, and but heightens the impressiveness of the still unbroken front which she maintains, in all her fully deliberate acts, with regard to all essential matters. Indeed, it is not difficult to feel, even where one cannot directly trace, in all such acts and matters, a still further deepening of the heroic watchfulness and childlike spontaneity, and of the humility and tender naïveté and creatureliness, of her general tone and attitude.

3. Close-knittedness of her psycho-physical organism: her spiritual utilization of this.

But before recounting the few instances in which we can trace an indication of partly physical depression, or of some lessening of mental alertness or volitional power in secondary matters, or of slight passing unwilled maladif impressions, let us attempt a somewhat methodic description of the extreme sensitiveness and immensely close interconnection of her whole psycho-physical nature, and of the general modifications, both in quality and in quantity, which these impressions were wont to go through; and all this, just now, on occasion of incidents closely similar to those already experienced in her past life.

It would indeed be altogether mistaken to class all this sensitiveness as necessarily but a form of illness; for the great majority, and all the most characteristic, of her apparently physical pains and troubles, are but varieties and heightenings of the always unusually swift and profound impressionableness of her whole psycho-physical organism. With the sole exception of that attack of pestilential fever (probably in the year 1493), I can nowhere, right up to three days before her death, find any trace in her life of illnesses or disturbances of any but a psycho-physical, nerve-functional type.

Indeed her psychic self is throughout so impressionable, and the mind is, ever since her Conversion, so active, dominant, and absorbed in the actual and attempted apprehension of the great realities which, though invisible, require for their vivid apprehension an imaginative pictorial embodiment: that we shall have, in a later chapter, to ask ourselves the question whether it was not the mind, or the imagination at the mind’s bidding, which thus affected the psycho-physical life, rather than the psycho-physical life which, primarily independent of the former, offered itself as but so much raw, still unrelated material, to the fashioning, transforming mind. Especially will it be necessary to consider carefully the influence upon her mind, and upon the chronicler’s accounts of her state, which may have been exercised by the writings of the Areopagite and of Jacopone. It will then become clear that these authors have undoubtedly contributed to the form in which these truths and realities were, if not actually apprehended by Catherine, at least described by her disciples.

Yet even this point remains, in Catherine’s case, (and indeed in that of all the great Saints,) of no real spiritual or moral importance, since all these great and generous souls persist in ever using these psycho-physical things, whether they be projections or “givennesses,” as but so many instruments and materials for the apprehension, illustration, acquisition, and purification of spiritual truth and of the spirit’s own fulness and depth. And Catherine’s persistence in this attitude of utilization and transcendence of what the natural man so continuously tends to make his direct aim and final limit continues practically unbroken to the end. I will group these psychic impressions according to the five senses.

4. Impressions connected with the sense of touch.

The earliest, and up to the end the most marked and general, of all such unusual impressions appears to have been one connected with the sense of touch,--that feeling of mostly interior, but later on also of exterior, warmth, indeed often of intense heat and burning, which comes to her, the first as though sunshine were bathing her within or without, the second sometimes as though a great fire were enveloping her, and sometimes as though a living flame were piercing her within.

Already in 1473, on occasion of her Conversion, we find unmistakable indications of such sensations; they are, however, of a predominantly pleasurable kind. And I take it that during her great lonely middle-period they will, in so much as present, have been of a similar nature. But later on, from after 1499 onwards, these sensations and attacks become increasingly painful,[158] and are specially described, and variously alluded to, under the terms of operation, assault, siege. When specially keen and concentrated, and accompanied by some piercing psycho-spiritual perception, they appear under the terms of arrow, wound; and the perception itself bears then the name of ray or spark (of divine love).[159]

Now we lookers-on can, of course, with more or less ease, mentally separate, in a general way, the latter, the spiritual apprehension, creation and content, from the former, the psycho-physical occasion, material and form; although it is certainly difficult, and probably impossible, to decide, at least in any one case, how far it is her mental activity that occasions her psycho-physical condition, or how far it is the latter which occasions the former. But what actually and demonstrably happened in Catherine’s case, was something incomparably beyond the range to which such psycho-physical considerations apply. For to her, psychically, a keenly sentient; rationally, a deeply thinking, feeling, and willing creature,--these experiences, howsoever classable, were most real, and, in course of time, more and more penetrating and painful; and they were, to her own consciousness, entirely prior to any interpretation or utilization of them. Hence, for the present at all events, we had better take these states as they presented themselves to her immediate and ordinary consciousness. And this very same immensely sentient soul was so firmly centred, deep down below and beyond the psycho-physical, in the Moral and Spiritual, that these experiences were welcomed and actively used but as so many means and materials for ethical purification and character-building, and for the analogical apprehension and illustration of spiritual truths.

Thus it is that these sensations of burning which, during her years of health, were themselves so pleasurable and peaceful, helped, as we shall find when we come to consider her doctrine, to suggest and illustrate for her the joys and health-giving influence of the presence of God, both here and in Paradise, and of the soul’s apprehension of God, as light for the understanding and warmth for the affections and the will. And when, with her failing health, these sensations turned into painful, in part seemingly physical attacks,--attacks which, however, left the mind in an increased and ever-increasing peace and contentment,--they again helped her to gain and develop her doctrine concerning Purgatory.

In both cases her teaching gained thus a vividness of quasi-directly sensible experience, of something in a manner actually seen and felt, since it was built up out of suggestions derived from direct sensations and psycho-physical states. And yet in both cases not all such sensations, of themselves quite valueless and uninstructive from an ethical and religious point of view, could have helped towards anything of spiritual significance, had they not been sifted, taken up, organized and transformed in and into a large and deep spiritual experience and personality. There is absolutely nothing automatic or necessary in the crowning, ethically significant stages of this whole process, however rapid and instinctive and effortless, and simply of a piece with the psycho-physical occasions, these utilizations and grace-impelled and grace-informed creations may appear. We shall, in proof of this, soon see how physical and literal and spiritually insignificant remained, during the last four months of her life, the apprehensions of her disciples as to these heats and piercing sensations: these good, indeed devoted, people seem incapable of measuring spiritual love by anything higher than thermometer-readings or other physical tangibilities. And we shall also have to record one or two momentary instances when this heat-feeling and apprehension clearly assumed a maladif character in Catherine herself.

5. Impressions connected with taste and smell.

The unusual sense-perceptions which were the next to be aroused were apparently those of taste and smell: although the one certain indication I can find of such an unusual psycho-physical taste-and-smell impression, of a pleasurable and not clearly maladif character, is not earlier than 1499.[160] It came to her in connection with the one great devotion of her whole convert life,--the Holy Eucharist. “Having on one occasion received Holy Communion, so much odour and sweetness came to her, that she seemed to be in Paradise. Whence, feeling this, she straightway turned towards her Love and said: ‘O Love, dost Thou perhaps intend to draw me to Thyself with these savours? I want them not, since I want nothing but Thee alone, and all of Thee.’”[161] Here, then, she turns away from and transcends, precisely as St. John of the Cross was soon to insist so strongly that we should do, the sensible and immediate, and reaches on to the spiritual, ultimate, and personal. And similarly some such psycho-physical experience seems presupposed in her declaration: “If a Consecrated Host and unconsecrated ones were to be given to me, I should distinguish the former from the latter as I do wine from water.”[162] Yet her biographer can truthfully insist upon love being the original cause of such recognition: “She said this, because the Consecrated Host sent forth a certain ray of love which pierced her heart.” And she herself gives a still more spiritual parallel instance and explanation of such recognition: “If I were to be shown the Court of Heaven, with all its members robed in one and the same manner, in suchwise that there would, so far, be no perceptible difference between God and the Angels: the love which I have in my heart would still recognize God, as readily as the dog recognizes his master.” This love indeed would move out to Him even more swiftly and easily, because “love, which is God Himself, finds in an instant, without any means, its own end and ultimate repose.”[163]

Clearly maladif over-sensitiveness and shiftingness of the senses of taste and scent will appear presently, during the last months of her life.

6. Hearing and Sight.

The most important and mental of the senses, hearing and sight, appear, on the contrary, with little or nothing particularly unusual about them, throughout her life.

For as to her sense of hearing, the inner voices already described as heard by her at different times, cannot fairly be classed under this or any other sense-perception, healthy or otherwise; since they appear to have been most vivid and clear thoughts presented to her mind, with in each case the consciousness that they were the suggestions of Mind,--of a Spirit other than her own. They appear to have always been described by herself as “words spoken to the mind,” “words as it were heard.”[164] Traces of any maladif affection of this sense will be difficult or impossible to find, even during her last illness.

And as to sight, always so closely akin to mental processes, anything at all really exceptional cannot, I think, be found in her life so far at all. For her evidently great impressionableness to certain religious pictures,--so as a child, in regard to the “Pietà,” and now again apparently with the “Maestà,”--and to certain sights of nature, cannot fairly be considered abnormal. And as to Visions, the only one recorded so far, that of the Bleeding Christ, was primarily a mentally mediated experience: “the Lord showed Himself to her in the spirit,” says the account, no doubt in full accordance with her own analysis of such experiences.[165] Some few disturbances of this sense will, however, appear during the course of her last illness.

II. MORE OR LESS MALADIF EXPERIENCES AND ACTIONS.

The amplest proof of the deep and delicate impressionableness of her nature is probably, however, to be found in that profound melancholy, that positive disgust with everything within her and without, and that strong desire for death which we found to have possessed her during the three months previous to her Conversion in March 1473. For we should note that that melancholy did not directly spring from spiritual motives or considerations: it was previous to all definite sorrow for sin and to all full and willed sense of things religious and eternal. Indeed, with the appearance of the religious standards and certitudes, that crushing universal feeling of melancholy and of positive disgust breaks up, and yields to contrasted joys and sorrows, and to a buoyant energy in the very midst and through the very means of suffering and of sacrifice. Thus the dawn of her spiritual re-birth was indeed dark and oppressive; but this oppression did not directly proceed from any clear consciousness of the Perfect and Eternal which arose within her only as part and parcel of this explicit Conversion. The oppression simply indicated, of itself, a nature so sensitive and claimful, as to require, in order to achieve any degree of contentment, a spiritual, regenerative, re-interpretative power capable of responding to and matching the deepest realities of life. That nature was thus full of the need of such realities and of such contact with them, but was without the power of producing, or of adequately responding to, such realities,--or indeed of imaginatively forecasting them. And similarly in 1507, the dawn of her painful, joyful-sorrowful birthday to eternity was again dark and oppressive and productive of an intense desire for death, a desire which had, apparently, been entirely absent from her soul ever since 1473. Here again this oppression was not directly religious or moral, but, taken in itself, was simply psycho-physical. Indeed this oppression marks the beginning of the special limitations, difficulties, and slightly deflecting influences now introduced into her life by henceforth steadily increasing positive illness. I propose, then, to begin with this opening depression of hers, and next to go through the main incidents of her remaining life, as far as possible, in strictly chronological order. I will group all this around six main facts and dates.

1. Desire for death, 1507.

“In the year 1507 she on one occasion was present at the recitation of the Offices for the Dead. And a desire to die came upon her. And she said: ‘O Love, I desire nothing but Thee, and Thee in Thine own manner: but, if it pleases Thee, allow me at least to go and see others die and be buried, in order that I may see in others that great good, which it does not please Thee should as yet be in myself.’ And her Love consented to this; and consequently, for a certain space of time, she went to see die and be buried all those who died in the Hospital. And as, later on, her union with this her tender Love increased, her desire for death disappeared little by little.”[166]

She is, then, still active, and moves about in the spacious Hospital and in the adjoining Church. And this desire, as it gradually disappeared, will, doubtless, not have left mere blanks in her consciousness, or have reduced the sum-total of her feelings; but, with that diminution, some of her old tenderness for and interest in others, will have reappeared. And again we see how no one set of feelings, one “psychosis,” ever simply repeats itself, in even one and the same soul: for Catherine’s positive disgust with all things, which prepared and accompanied her desire for death in 1473, is absent from the otherwise similar desire of 1507. In both cases there is the same sheer “givenness” and isolation of the feeling. Then, she did not desire death to escape temptation or sin; now, she does not desire it, directly and within her emotional nature, in order to get to God: in each case the feeling stands simply by itself, and is not immediately connected with religion at all. And finally, this incident, and its later equivalent repetitions in November 1509 and September 1510, prove once again on what a veritable bed of Procrustes those determined a-priorists, the Redactors of the Vita, have placed, pulled about and mutilated, as far as in them lay, the immensely spontaneous and rich personality of Catherine, in their determination to find her ever all-perfect, and perfect after their own fixed pattern. For it proves to demonstration, either that Catherine continued liable to human imperfections, or that not all desires are imperfect. And both these things are true, beyond the possibility of doubt.

2. The scent-impression from Don Cattaneo’s hand.

And next we get an instance of clearly abnormal sense-perception, which is deeply interesting because of the vivid, first-hand form in which the fact has come down to us, and still more on account of its impressive illustration of the two possible mental attitudes towards such matters. It will have occurred in 1508; and Don Marabotto is, in any case, the other interlocutor in the scene, and its chronicler. And if there is undoubtedly a somewhat ludicrous naïveté about his attitude at the time of the occurrence, there is also a striking simplicity and self-oblivion in the perfectly objective manner in which he chronicles the scene in all its bearings, and Catherine’s marked superiority to himself. It is this complete directness and simplicity of motive which, on the side of character, will have bound these otherwise strangely diverse souls together; and which rendered Don Marabotto, even simply as a character, not unworthy of his close intimacy with Catherine.

The abnormality here concerns the sense of smell alone; the impression here lasts a considerable time: and now she acquiesces in it, but only for the purpose of moving through it, as a mere means. “Having been infirm for many days, Catherine one day took the hand of her Confessor and smelt it: and its odour penetrated right to her heart,” so that “for many days this perfume restored and nourished her, body and soul.” Don Marabotto then asks her what kind of thing this odour is that she is smelling. And she tells him that it is an odour so penetrating and sweet, as to seem capable of bringing the dead to life; that God had sent it to her, to strengthen her soul and body, now that these were so much oppressed; and hence “since God grants me this odour, I am determined to derive strength from it, as long as He shall please that I shall do so.” But Marabotto, “thinking that he must surely be able to perceive what was being transmitted by himself, went smelling his own hand, but to no effect.” And Catherine gently rebuked his action by declaring: “The things which depend entirely upon God’s own free gift, He does not give to those that seek them. Indeed He gives such things at all, only in cases of great necessity, and as an occasion of great spiritual profit.”[167]

The impression and consolation are here still connected with the Holy Eucharist: for the hand which she smells is no doubt the right one,--the hand which was wont daily to consecrate in her presence and daily to communicate her. The declaration as to the odour’s power to raise the dead to life has occurred already in connection with the Holy Eucharist, and will have been in part suggested to her by such Johannine passages as “I am the … Life,” “I am the Living Bread,” “he that eateth this Bread shall live,” shall be made to live, “for ever.” And although the odour is here the prominent impression, and “savours” are wanting, yet “sweetness” still occurs, probably as a sort of sensation of tasting.--Marabotto’s mind has in it, on this occasion, two plausible assumptions, each strengthening the other; and Catherine controverts both. He evidently thinks: “Catherine’s states are all most valuable, hence real, hence objective: if then she says she smells this or that, others will be able to do so too.” And: “What a man transmits, that he can himself experience: hence, on this ground also, I should be able to smell this perfume.”--And Catherine’s mind evidently also contains two very different convictions: the first, that experiences, even when thus but semi-spiritual, are, for all their reality, not directly transferable from soul to soul; and the second, that all such sensible and semi-sensible experiences, whether normal or exceptional, are all but means at the disposal of the free-willing spirit, means which become limits and obstacles as soon as they are treated as ends.

Thus if this experience points to a certain abnormality of condition in the peripheral, psycho-physical regions of the soul, Catherine’s attitude towards it, and towards the whole question occasioned by it, has got a massive depth of sanity about it, perhaps unattainable by, certainly untested in, the always and simply, even peripherally, healthy soul.

3. Shifting of her burial-place.

And in her Will of March 1509 we find traces of a certain weakening of her former ample business capacity, and of her vigilance, perseverance, and balance, in spite of friendly pressure or criticism, with regard to matters of practical import. For, as to her general incapacity for business, the Will contains a clause exempting Marabotto from all future challenge of his administration of her monies, up to the date of the making of this Will. And this clause finds its explanation in the admission of the Vita, with regard to her life during these last years, that, owing to the mysterious and shifting nature of her infirmity, “there was confusion in governing her,” “confusion not on her own part, but on that of those who served her,”[168] words which will grow still clearer in our account of her last four months. For this state of her health must have rendered the administration of her affairs by another both necessary and difficult. And as to the diminution of her vigilance and perseverance in matters of not directly spiritual or moral import, we have here, for the first time, a departure from her resolution, emphatically expressed in the Wills and Codicil of 1498, 1503, 1506, of being buried beside her husband. She now orders herself to be buried in the Church of San Nicolò in Boschetto, and that so much is to be spent on the funeral as shall seem fit to Don Marabotto.

Three points should here be borne in mind. For one thing, Catherine had a long-standing affection for that beautifully situated Pilgrimage-Church, partly no doubt from associations dating back to her summer villegiatura days at the neighbouring Prà, and partly, probably, from memories connected with her sister Limbania, since, as we have already seen, Limbania’s Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie was the joint foundation of the two Genoese Monasteries of San Teodoro fuore le Mura and of San Nicolò in Boschetto. Limbania had died in that Convent in 1502, and Catherine had, in her Codicil of 1503, left a small sum for mortuary Masses for herself to the Monastery of San Nicolò.

But, next, it was doubtless the growing conviction as to her sanctity amongst her immediate friends, and their desire to keep her grave and remains, as an eventual place and object of veneration, distinct from any others, perhaps specially from those of her husband, whose defective reputation might otherwise damage or delay the growth of such a cultus of his wife, which was the determining cause of this change in the place of sepulture. These friends were able to prevail, no doubt because her interest and determination in such matters had become weakened by ill-health of now thirteen years’ duration. And they will have fixed upon this place some four English miles away, partly because it happened to be one she loved, but also because thus no question of separating her remains from those of Giuliano would formally arise. Her later Codicil will prove the presence of both these motives, and Catherine’s unconsciousness as to the situation, and the vagueness of her acquiescence.

And, finally, we must note that, if this action of her entourage offends our present-day tastes and susceptibilities, it was yet thoroughly in accordance with a quite hoary tradition and feeling in such matters, and was in no sense an idea special to, or originated by, this group of persons; and again, that the four Protectors of the Hospital (the trustees and executors of the Will), her sole surviving brother Lorenzo (the residuary legatee), and above all her closest, great-souled friend Vernazza (one of the six witnesses), are all parties to the pious stratagem, and share its responsibility with Marabatto.

4. The “scintilla”-experience; spiritual refreshment derived from a picture.

We have next an important group of experiences and convictions in November 1509. “On the 11th November 1509, there came upon her an insupportable fire of infinite love; and she declared that there had been shown to her one single spark (scintilla) of Pure Love, and that this had been but for a short moment; and that, had it lasted even a little longer, she would have expired because of its great force. She could hardly eat, nor speak so as to be heard, in consequence of this penetrating wound of love that she had received in her heart.”[169]

Few events of her life have left such profound traces, so many echoes and waves and wavelets as it were, throughout both her authentic sayings and the various secondary and tertiary imitations, re-castings, and expansions of her original account as has this scintilla-experience. I will here translate the nine varying impressions and exclamations which, proceeding from different minds and different dates, have, all but one, been worked up by the Vita into a single paragraph, which, by its very multitude of flickerings as to meaning and of experimentations as to form, gives us a striking picture of the deep and many-sided influence of this single event, so short in its clock-time duration. “This creature, all lost in her own self, found her true self in one instant in God.” “Although she reputed herself to be very poor, yet she remained rich in the divine love.” “She, knowing the grace and operation to be all from God, remained lost in herself, and living only in God.” “She gave her free-will to God, and God then restored it to her.” “She gave her free-will to God, and God thereupon worked with its means.” “O the great wonder, to see a man established in the midst of so many miseries, and yet God having so great a care of him! All tongues are incapable of expressing it, all intellects of understanding it.” “That man becomes foolish in the eyes of the world, to whom Thou, O Lord God, dost manifest even but the slightest spark of Thine unspeakable Love.” “Thou, O God, desirest to exalt man, and to make him as though another God, by means of love.” Of later date or type: “In God she saw all the operations, by means of which He had caused her to merit (in the past).” And of still later, clearly secondary, character: “God showed her in one instant the succession of His (future) operation, as though she would have to die of a great martyrdom.”[170]

And this great experience of hers led on to a scene which, whilst emphasizing the psycho-physical effect, occasion or concomitant of such spiritual experiences, also gives us the strongest instance of her impressionableness to pictures in particular. “Finding herself in such ardour, she felt herself compelled to turn to a figure of the Woman of Samaria at the well with her Lord; and in her extreme distress Catherine addressed Him thus: ‘O Lord, I pray Thee, give me a little drop of this water, which of old Thou didst give to the Samaritan woman, since I can no more bear so great a fire.’ And suddenly, in that instant, there was given her a little drop of that divine water; and by it she was refreshed within and without, and she had rest for some appreciable time.”[171] But, above all, this experience and its precursor were, if not the actual beginning, at least the culminating point in the experiences or projections which led to or articulated her doctrine on Purgatory. In a later chapter I hope to trace the connection between those experiences and this doctrine. Here we must add two other vivid interior experiences and convictions of hers which are placed by the Vita, no doubt rightly, in direct succession to, and in more or less connection with, the great “scintilla”-operation, although neither of them appears amongst the images and conceptions which make up the Trattato del Purgatorio.

“One day” (she recounted this herself) “she appeared to herself to abide suspended in mid-air. And the spiritual part wanted to attach itself to heaven; but her other part wished to attach itself to earth: yet neither the one nor the other managed to become possessed of its object, and simply abode thus in mid-air, without achieving its desire. And after abiding thus for a long time, the part which was drawing her to heaven seemed to her to be gaining the upper hand (over the other part), and, little by little, the spiritual part forcibly drew her upwards, so that at every moment she saw herself moving further and further away from earth. And although this at first seemed to be a strange thing to the part that was being drawn, and this part was ill content to be thus forced; yet when it had been so far removed, as no more to be able to see the earth, then it began to lose its earthly instinct and affection, and to perceive and to relish the things which were relished by the spiritual part. And this spiritual part never ceased from drawing it heavenward. And so at last these two parts came to a common accord.”[172] And again on another occasion: “The soul is so desirous of departing from the body to unite itself with God, that its body appears to it a veritable Purgatory, which keeps it distant from its true object.”[173]

This group of experiences straightway enforces some important spiritual laws. For one thing, this scintilla-experience, since her Conversion the deepest of her life, is clearly also the richest and most complex,--witness the numerous, mutually supplementary or critical, attempts at analysis furnished by even her immediate companions. And this experience is only simple in the sense in which white light, which combines all the prismatic colours, or a living healthy human body, composed of numberless constituents, is simple.

And next, nothing indicates that this experience was of a character essentially different from that of her older contemplations; and everything appears to show that it was, substantially, a grace addressed to, and an act performed by, her spiritual nature,--her intelligence and free will, God’s Spirit stimulating and sustaining hers in a quite exceptional degree, and hence less than ever weakening or supplanting this her spirit’s action. It was as much a gift of herself by herself to God, as if it had not been a pure grace from Him; and yet her very power and wish and determination to give herself, were rendered possible and became actual through that pure prevenient, accompanying and subsequent gift of God.

Again, it is certain that either there was no clear mental scheme, reasoning, or picture during the experience, or that, if there was, it consisted of a spacial simultaneity rather than of a temporal succession, and that it showed her, if her own soul at all, then that soul in its most universally human, typical aspects and relations. In no case was there anything historical or prophetical, strictly biographical about it.

And then we have, even though she could give no kind of definite account of it, the most solid reasons for accepting this experience as genuine, wholesome, and valuable. For she evidently fully believed in it herself; and we shall see how clearly and readily she continued, even after this experience, to distinguish between wholesome and mental, and maladif and simply psychic, states of abstraction. Again it became the occasion and material of most deep and fruitful spiritual doctrine; whereas nothing is more empty and unsuggestive than are the bare, brute “facts” of all merely nervous or hysterical hallucinations. It also demonstrably strengthened her will for the last deep sufferings and sacrifices yet to be gone through, and no doubt added a fresh stimulus to her already profound influence over Vernazza, and pricked him onwards on his career of the most solid, heroic philanthropy and self-sacrifice. And yet we can see that her psycho-physical organism is now functionally weak and ill. For great physical exhaustion now follows upon an experience substantially the same as those which used to strengthen her so markedly even in physical respects.

As to the scene with the picture, we again get a case not unlike the odour of Marabotto’s hand, in so much as here too the experience hovers between the mental and physical, and there is a sensible impression as from a physical substance with reference to a Person,--this taste of a “divine water” moving here on to Christ, to God, the Living Water, as that smell of sweetness moves on to the “Living Bread,” Christ, and God. It is, unfortunately, impossible to identify that picture, which may well have been a fresco-painting in some building or passage of the Hospital, since destroyed, or on some extant wall, white-washed since those days. The vivid picturings of the soul in mid-air, and of the soul in the purgatory of its body, will be considered in connection with her psycho-physical states and her doctrine.

But before leaving this November experience, we must give two significant conversations held by her with Vernazza at the time, and which have been no doubt handed down to us by himself. “One day, speaking of this” (the scintilla-) “event with a spiritual person (Religioso) she called it ‘a giddiness’ (vertigine). But that person said to her: ‘Mother, I beg of you that you will yourself select a person who may happen to suit your mind (soddisfaccia alla mente vestra), and will narrate to this person the graces which God has granted to you, so that, when you come to die, these graces may not remain hidden and unknown, and an opportunity for God’s praise and glory may not thus be lost.’ And she then answered that she was entirely willing (ben contenta), if this be pleasing to her tender Love; and that, in that case, she would not choose another person than himself, although she was convinced that it was impossible to describe even a small fragment of such interior experiences as occurred between God and her soul; and that as to exterior things, few or none had taken place in her case.” Here again we have evidence as to her habit of making light of and transcending all psycho-physical phenomena, however striking and mysterious; and we get a positive authorization conferred by herself upon Vernazza, such as is claimed by no other contributor to the Vita.

And “speaking with him some days later, she said: ‘Son, I have had a certain prick of conscience, of which I will tell you. The other day, when you told me that I might possibly remain dead some day during one of those giddinesses, there seemed to arise in me, at that moment, a feeling of joy, a profound aspiration which said: ”O, if that hour would but come!“ And then this feeling suddenly ceased. Now I declare to you, that I do not wish that in this matter there should be any glimpse (scintilla) of a desire of my own for earth or heaven, or for any other created thing; but that I wish to leave all things to the disposition of God.’ Then this person answered, that there was no occasion for her to have a prick of conscience, because, although joy had awaked in her mind, and a sudden exclamation had occurred there, at the mention of the word ‘death,’ yet that nothing of this had proceeded from the will, nor had it been endorsed by the reason; but that it had proceeded solely from the instinct of the pleasure-loving soul (anima), which ever, according to its nature, tends to such an end. And how the proof that this was a correct account, lay in this, that her prick of conscience had not really penetrated to the depths of her heart, but had remained on the surface, at the same slight depth at which the movement of joy had remained. And she confessed that the matter really stood thus, and remained satisfied.”[174]

Here three points are of interest. I take her impulse of deep longing to die in one of those trances, to have arisen, not simply from joy at the thought of dying, but from joy at the prospect of dying of joy,--of dying with the joy fixed in that moment in the soul for ever. For heaven itself appears here not as a synonym for God, but as a creature, as the summing up of infinite and endless consolation of all right kinds, spiritual and psycho-physical. And it is this that makes her scruple thoroughly understandable, and but one more instance of her virile fight with all direct attachment to the consequences and concomitants of devotedness.--And next we should note her deep trust in the spiritual experience and wisdom of Vernazza, the layman and lawyer, some twenty-five years her junior; and her asking his advice on a matter which we would readily suppose her to reserve for Don Marabotto, who by now had been her Confessor and Spiritual Adviser for many years.--And lastly, the depth and delicacy of Vernazza’s analysis are most striking, with their clear perception of the various levels and degrees of true selfhood and volition within the human soul: she had really had neither a full will, nor a deliberate wish, nor indeed any penetrating, spontaneous reproach of conscience; she had, in fact, been suffering from a scruple, and he was required, and was able, to make her see that this had been the case.

5. Catherine’s sense of intense cold, and her attitude towards Don Marabotto.

And in December 1509 and January 1510 we come across a group of experiences and actions, in some respects different from, and supplementary of, the set just concluded. For “in the month of December she suffered from great cold,”--I take this cold to have been, at least partially, special to her state, and not to have proceeded primarily from the winter temperature,--“but she paid no attention to it.” “And behold one night there came so great an attack (assalto) upon her, that she could not conceal it. There was a great heaving of the body, much bile was evacuated, and the nose bled. And she then sent for her Confessor, and said to him: ‘Father, it seems to me that I must die, because of the many weakenings of various sorts (accidenti) that have happened to me.’” “And this attack (assalto) lasted for about three hours,” “her body trembling like a leaf.” “And then her body became quiet again, but was now so broken and weak that it was necessary to give her minced chicken to revive her; and a good many days had to pass before she returned to her (latter-day) vigour.”[175]

And “on the 10th of January 1510, she appeared determined to see her Confessor no more, either as to help and comfort for her soul or as to her bodily health. It seemed to her that he was too indulgent to herself, in her sayings and doings. But the fact was, that he saw it to be necessary that she should do all that her instinct prompted her to say or do; and it would indeed have been well-nigh impossible to force her to act against these interior movements of hers. Yet since she was herself in cause, she did not acknowledge such necessities (ordinazioni); rather these actions of hers appeared to her but as so many disordered doings, and she went forcing herself to try and not give trouble to those who were good enough to put up with her (chi la comportava).--And when night came, she locked herself up alone into a separate room, refusing food or conversation or comfort from any one. But after a while she had to come out, with a view to rendering a certain service, and her Confessor managed to slip into the room unobserved and to hide himself there. And she, having returned and locked herself in, and thinking herself quite alone, said with a sobbing voice to her Lord: ‘O Lord, what wouldest Thou have me do further in this world? I neither see nor hear, nor eat nor sleep; I do not know what I do or what I say. I feel as though I were a dead thing. There is no creature that understands me; I find myself lonely, unknown, poor, naked, strange, and different from the rest of the world; and hence I know not any more how to live with (my fellow-) creatures upon earth.’ These and such-like words she spoke so piteously, that her Confessor could bear it no longer; and he discovered himself, and came up to and spoke to her. And God gave him grace, so that she remained comforted in mind and body by his words, and was in fair health for a good many days after.”[176]

Nevertheless “her Confessor, since his continual intercourse and close familiarity with Catherine gave occasion to murmurs on the part of some who did not fully understand his special work and its necessity, left her and was absent for three days” (probably shortly after the scene just related), “for the purpose of testing that work of his, and seeing whether it was indeed all from God, and thus to escape all scruple in the matter. But when, three days later, he returned to her house and had learnt and considered the various accidents and incidents which had occurred meanwhile, he was so entirely satisfied with the evidence afforded by experiment, that he lost all scruple in the matter, and indeed regretted having made the trial, because of the great distress which she had suffered from it.” It will have been on this occasion that she said to him: “I seem to see that God has given to you this one care of myself, and hence that you should not attend to anything else. For now I can no longer support alone so many exterior and interior oppressions (assedi). When you leave me, I go lamenting about the house, saying that you are cruel and do not understand my extreme necessity; for if you did, you would pay greater attention to it.”[177]

And it will have been later on again, in February and March, that she intimated, during two of her violent attacks (on the first occasion by signs, on the second by words), her impression that she would succumb, and her wish to receive Extreme Unction. But Don Marabotto correctly judged that she would safely get through these seizures, and the anointing was put off for the present.[178]

This group is again interesting. For it gives us evidence as to how dependent this character and career of the rarest loneliness and independence had now become upon human help and sympathy; and lets us see how illness had now introduced an excessive suddenness, absoluteness, and shiftingness into her feelings and minor actions, and an occasional slight querulousness into her remarks. It shows us her old social, altruistic instincts and standard still at work within her; for she still suffers from the consciousness, whenever she is thrown back upon herself, of being different from other people; she still longs to attend to the wants of others, regrets the trouble she gives them, and feels grateful for the services they render; and she still busies herself, in the reduced measure now possible to her, with services of her own to others,--a “certain service,” which she had to render, had sufficed to break through her self-imposed seclusion. It lets us see how watchful against and suspicious of self, and of what could flatter and indulge it, she still remained; and how independent her judgment continued, even with regard to her Confessor. And this her judgment we shall have good reason to hold to have been remarkably well-grounded, in so far as this, that had only Marabotto possessed a deeper insight into her psycho-physical state and less of a determination to treat all her states and impulses as equally solid and spiritual, or at least as equally to be yielded to, he could have helped her more; and she would then, thus helped, have been able, even now, fully to resist or to give way, in proportion to the healthiness or the morbidness of the attack. And finally we see how truly serviceable and necessary, and indeed repeatedly right where her own estimate was wrong, was the help and sympathy and judgment of her Confessor; and how difficult, entirely unselfish, and devoted was his action and attitude. It is interesting to note that Catherine was probably always right in her instinct as to matters directly affecting herself, where the will came in, or could be made to come in; and that she was wrong only in such a point of mere physical fact and determinism as whether or not, and how long, her physical strength would hold out.

6. Events from January to May 1510.

I will here try and put together, in their actual succession from January to May 1510, the chief psycho-physical phenomena and their parallel utilizations, together with such mental and spiritual experiences and actions as seem to have been only quite indirectly, or not all, occasioned by her state of health. In a later chapter I propose to study all this health matter in some detail. Here I would simply warn the reader against treating, with certainly most of her chroniclers, these psycho-physical phenomena as separately and directly spiritual or miraculous or ethically significant. Found alone, they would now, on the contrary, directly suggest simply nervous disorder of some kind or other, a thing which, in itself, is always an evil. Their interest and spiritual importance arises for us entirely from their predominantly mental qualities; from their appearance in a person of such powerful mind and large and efficient character; and from their splendidly ethico-religious utilization by that same person.

On one day “she had an impression (‘wound,’ ferita) which was so great, that she lost her speech and sight, and abode in this manner some three hours. She made signs with her hands, of feeling as it were red-hot pincers attacking her heart and other interior parts. But for all this, she did not lose her full consciousness (intelletto).” This was the second occasion on which she indicated her wish to be anointed.[179] On another day “it was impossible to keep her in bed: she seemed like a creature placed in a great flame of fire, and it was impossible to touch her skin, because of the acute pain which she felt from any such touch.”[180]

A little later on “she abode in so great a peace and interior contentment that she was” in all respects “considerably relieved and reinvigorated (ristorata). But she did not long remain in this condition. For very soon she was in a state of interior nudity and aridity, and she prayed: ‘Never hitherto, O my Lord, have I asked Thee for anything for myself: now I pray Thee with all my might, that Thou mayest not will to separate me from Thee. Thou well knowest, O Lord, that I could not bear this.’ And to her disciples she said, in connection with this desolation: ‘If a man were to take a soul from Paradise, how do you think such a soul would feel? You might give it all the pleasures in the world, and as much more as you can imagine: and yet all would be but Hell, because of the memory of that divine union’ (formerly possessed and now lost).”[181]

Again a little later on “she had another attack (assalto), when all her body trembled, especially her right shoulder. It was impossible to move her from her bed; she did not eat, drank next to nothing, and did not sleep.”[182] On another day, “she had another attack,”--this was the occasion of her third indication of a wish to receive Extreme Unction,--“a spasm in the throat and mouth, so that she could not speak, nor open her eyes, nor keep her breath except with extreme difficulty.” “They applied cupping-glasses, with a view to aiding her to find her breath and to regain speech, yet these helped but little.”[183] For another day we are told that “in her flesh were certain concavities, as though it were dough, and the thumb had been pressed into it. And she called out in a loud voice, because of the great pain.”[184]

On another day “her pains made her call out as loudly as she could, and she dragged herself about on her bed. And those that stood by were dumfounded, at seeing a body, which appeared to be healthy, in such a tormented state. And then she would laugh, speak as one in health, and say to the others, not to be sorrowful on her account, since she was very contented. And this “set of attacks” lasted four days; she then had a little rest; and, after this, those attacks returned as before.”[185]

This group is in so far particularly difficult, as we have to try and decide whether, and if so how far, these pains of hers were primarily psychical, and, in some way and degree, originally, and by force of long habits of concentrated religious thinking and picturing, suggested, or at least stimulated, by the mind itself; or whether these pains were primarily physical, although evidently only functional and preponderantly nervous. For on the answer to that question depends, if not our selection from amongst, at least our interpretation of, the largely contradictory, successively “doctored,” and more or less violently schematized evidence, of which the above passages give the most characteristic and primitive parts. If it was the mind itself which, unconsciously to its owner, suggested these pains, then we can and must accept, as quite contemporary and indeed fully exact, those passages which make her peace and even sensible consolation arise during the same moments as, and in exact proportion to, the presence of the pains. If, on the other hand, the pains arose independently of the subconscious mind, and were merely mastered by the conscious intelligence and will, then it seems reasonable to assume that we have here, as is certainly the case in other matters and places in the Vita, an ideal foreshortening, juxtaposition, and unification of what, in the actual experience, occurred more lengthily and successively.

It is certainly remarkable in this connection, that, whereas we have had a clearly marked case of mental, spiritual desolation, outside of one of these attacks, it is at least very difficult to find anything certainly of the kind during one of them; indeed the juxtaposition of, not simply profound spiritual peace, but of sensible, also psychic or quasi-psychic, consolation with those pains, is so constant and apparently spontaneous, that secondary, or at least schematic and a priori, reporting seems to have been at work rather in the passages which affirm the excessiveness of those pains, than in those which insist that those pains were, so to speak, not pains. All her own authentic sayings leave the impression of immense psycho-spiritual sensitiveness, of much actual mental and emotional suffering as well as joy, but not, I think, of purely physical suffering. “I find so much contentment on the part of my spirit and so much peace in my mind, that tongue could not tell nor reason comprehend it; but on the part of my humanity” (her psycho-physical organism) “all my pains are, so to say, not pains,” she says, shortly after a particularly violent attack, with four “accidents.” And a contributor declares that the joy and the torment ever arose together. It is true that another passage says that, during such attacks, “her disciples, seeing her suffer so much, desired that she should expire, so as no more to have to see her in such great and continuous torment”; but then this desire of theirs was evidently rather a sympathetic feeling than a deliberate judgment, for, once she has got over the attack, all this desire of theirs disappears as rapidly as it had come.[186]

III. Catherine’s History From May To September 9, 1510.

1. Catherine and the Physicians.

It is at the end of the preceding months that we are told how “the Physician” (possibly the Hospital House-Surgeon) “attempted to administer medicine to her. But it gave rise to such repeated ‘accidents’ (vomitings), that she all but died of it, and remained very weak.”[187]

“And four months before she died,” hence in mid-May, “many physicians were called together. And they saw and examined the patient, but failed to find any trace of bodily infirmity, in spite of the care and attention bestowed by them on the case. And she declared her conviction that her infirmity was not of a kind requiring physicians or bodily physic. But on the physicians persevering and ordering her, she obediently took all that they prescribed, although with great difficulty and to her hurt. Until at last those same physicians concluded that there was no remedy within the art of medicine applicable to the case, and that the infirmity was supernatural.”[188]

“But now there supervened, on his return from England, an excellent Genoese physician, Maestro Giovan Battista Boerio, who, for many years, had been in the service of the English King, Henry VII. And Boerio visited Catherine, and warned her to beware of giving scandal by refusing medical treatment. And she, in return, assured him that it grieved her much if she scandalized any one; and that she was prepared to use any remedy for her ailment, if such could be found.” And indeed “joy arose within her, at the hope of being cured by him. But in the following night much” psycho-physical “pain and trouble came upon her,” and “she then reproved her natural self (umanità), saying: ‘Thou sufferest this, because thou didst rejoice without (just) cause.’” Yet after about three weeks’ trial of every kind of remedy, a trial which left her as it found her, Boerio abandoned the task, but “henceforward held Catherine in esteem and reverence, calling her ‘Mother,’ and often visiting her.”[189]

Here we have an interesting group of facts. For one thing, we know how King Henry “had for years been visited by regular fits of the gout; his strength visibly wasted away, and every spring the most serious apprehensions were entertained of his life.” “He had also pains in the chest and difficulty of respiration.” And, “in the spring of 1509 the King sank under the violence of the disease.”[190] And thus Boerio will, a year after the death of his royal master, have been called in to the sick-bed of the Viceroy’s daughter, not simply as a court physician or as a generally skilful doctor, but as a man known to have had long experience of a case which prima facie was not all unlike Catherine’s.

Then it is impossible not to feel throughout these and other passages of the Vita which are concerned with physicians, a curious combination of contradictory feelings. There is reproof of the doctors’ presumption in venturing to begin by treating her illness as though it were a simply natural one; and there is the proud pleasure at thus getting, through the breakdown of this their presumptuous undertaking, professional testimony to the supernatural character of her infirmity. And the two motives lead to the self-contradictory over-emphasizing both of the Physicians’ moral worth and finality of testimony at the end of each experience, and of their rationalistic rashness in being willing to try again, a rashness assumed to be apparent to every one but themselves before each new attempt. For they must be represented as worthy and skilful men; else what value has their testimony? And their action must be intrinsically foolish from the outset; else what becomes of the transparently and separately supernatural character of her illness?[191]

And then we can still see fairly clearly that Catherine does not share the views of practically all her attendants, and of certainly all the later contributors to and revisers of the Vita. For even now the book still leaves intact the passages which show her as hoping to be cured by Boerio, and as then condemning herself for having rejoiced without cause,--evidently, without supernatural justification; as prepared to believe that the physicians might be able to find an appropriate remedy, and as willingly trying the remedies they actually offer her; and as indeed declaring her doubt whether any physic would do her any good, yet nowhere announcing a conviction as to the directly and separately supernatural character of her illness. “Her attendants,” says the obviously most authentic continuation of the passage concerning the cupping-glasses given further back, “let these attacks come and go, with as little damage as possible. Her body had to be and was sustained without the aid of medicine, and solely by means of great care and great vigilance.”[192]

2. Catherine and Don Carenzio, Argentina, and Ettore Vernazza.

It will have been the end of June, or the beginning of July, when these medical experiments ceased. But before them (on March 11 and twice in April), and again three times during them (in May and June), monies were paid, in Catherine’s name, by Don Giacomo Carenzio, now resident as Rettore in the Hospital, in the matter of the granting of Indulgences to the Church attached to the Hospital. And although this affair, occurring thus so late on in her illness, in which we have already found her not always to have dominated the plans of her attendants, cannot well be pressed as necessarily characteristic of her, yet I take it to be quite likely that she still took some active part in the matter.[193]

Catherine certainly still attended to business, even two months later; for, on August 3, Vernazza drew up a Codicil in her presence “in the bedroom of Argentina del Sale,” says the document itself. Since the Inventory, still extant, of the things found in Catherine’s rooms at the time of her death, gives a list of the bedclothes of only two beds, and these two beds are then both in the same room, and the one bed is Catherine’s, and the other is that of the famiglia (the servant) Argentina: it is clear that, for at least the last six weeks of her life, Catherine had only one person sleeping in her little house with her, and that this person was the navvy Marco’s little widow. I take it, with Vallebona, that the room was really Catherine’s ordinary bedroom; but that, as Argentina now slept there as regularly as her mistress herself, Catherine preferred, whether from humility or affection (the latter motive seems the more probable), to think of the room as belonging to Argentina.[194]

For some reason unknown to us, Vernazza, Catherine’s closest friend, must have left Genoa soon after drawing up this Codicil. For he did not draw up or witness her final Codicil of September 12, although, when in Genoa at all, he now lived close by, and although this final Codicil but gave effect to the plan regarding her sepulture which underlay the change introduced into the Will of March 1509, a Will which had been witnessed by himself. And, as we shall see, he was absent, indeed far away (lontano), from her death-bed, some six weeks after the date at which we have now arrived. I think we can only explain this departure by assuming that already now, before his inspirer’s death, his zeal and activity had expanded beyond the limits of the Genoese Republic; and that, dying as she already was, and devoted to her as he ever remained, he nevertheless (since there was now so little that he could hope to do for her own person, and there was so much to do elsewhere in the way of developing and applying her spirit and teachings) now rode off to Venice or to Rome, as we know him to have done, so often and for so long, during the fourteen remaining years of his life. And we have in this a fact peculiarly characteristic of these two expansive souls,--of the influence of the one, the frail woman, dying in her little sick-room, and of the execution of her world-embracing aspirations by the other, the strong man, battling, often at the risk of his very life, for the poor and oppressed, outside, on the great trysting-field of men’s passions and requirements.

3. Psycho-physical condition and its utilization, August 10 to 27.

But Catherine, lying in her sick-room, suffered on August 10 from one of her great burnings. “And next day, whilst her body was still in pain and trouble, God drew her mind upwards to Himself. And she fixed her eyes on the ceiling, and remained thus almost immovable for an hour, and spoke not but laughed joyously. And when she had returned to her more ordinary consciousness, she said this one thing only: ‘O Lord, do with me whatsoever Thou wilt.’”[195]

On August 15, she, “when about to communicate, addressed many beautiful words to the Blessed Sacrament, so that every one present was moved to tears.”[196] During the following day and night she suffered so greatly, that “all considered she would certainly die. She asked,”--this was the third or even fourth time,--“for Extreme Unction, and” this time “it was given her, and she received it with great devotion.”

“On the day following,” the 17th, “she was in a state of jubilation of heart (giubilo di cuore), which manifested itself exteriorly in merry laughter. And, having been asked as to the cause, she said that she had seen various most beautiful, merry, and joyous countenances, so that she had been unable to refrain from laughing. And this impression continued throughout several days, during which she appeared to be improved in health.”[197] But on August 22 or 23, “she again had a day of much heat and trouble. She remained maimed (paralyzed) in her right hand and in one finger of the left hand. And then she remained as though dead for about sixteen hours.”[198]

In the night of the 23rd or 24th (Feast of St. Bartholomew) she had “a great attack in mind and body; and being unable to speak, she made the sign of the Cross upon her heart. And, later on, she was understood to have been molested by a diabolical temptation.”[199]

On the 25th “she was in great weakness. And she caused her windows to be opened, so as to be able to see the sky. And, as the night came on, she had many candles lit; and she chanted, as well as she could, the ‘Veni, Creator Spiritus.’ And when she had finished she fixed her eyes upon the sky, and remained thus an hour and a half, making many gestures with her hands and eyes. And when she had resumed her ordinary consciousness (quando fù ritornata in sè), she said repeatedly: ‘Let us go’; and then added: ‘No more earth, no more earth.’ And her body remained greatly shaken from this contemplation (vista).” And on August 27 “she saw herself as though bereft of her body and of its animating soul, and her spirit alone in God above. And after this she addressed those present and said: ‘Let only those come in who may be necessary.’”[200]

This particular group is specially interesting. For it shows us Catherine’s love of the large and expansive, of the spiritually simple and interior, and of the supernatural and transcendent in her look-out into the open; in her vivid apprehension of her spirit bereft of all things except the Supreme Spirit, that spirit’s native element and home; and in her gaze into the starlit Italian August sky above. And it gives us indications, elsewhere so rare in her life, of her attachment to the visible, audible, tangible vehicles and expressions of religion, as so many helps and occasions of its immanence in our minds and hearts, in her signing her heart with the sign of the Cross, her having the candles lit and her chanting a definite traditional Church hymn, and in her fourth demand of Extreme Unction and devout reception of it. It is also noticeable how vivid and yet how undefined are her impressions of those countenances, since neither she herself anywhere, nor even her chroniclers in this place, explicitly identify them with Angels; and how still more general and indefinite remains the “diabolic temptation,” since in this case, only when it was over, was she “understood” to have been thus tempted. Indeed any directly diabolical temptation would be profoundly uncharacteristic of her special call and way: all through the records of her life and teaching it is the selfish, claimful Self that she fears “more than a demon,” “worse than the devil”; she is, in a very true sense, too busy watching, fighting, ignoring, supplanting Self, and ever putting, keeping, and replacing God, Love, in Self’s stead, to give or find occasion for what, in this her immensely strenuous inner life, would have been a remoter conflict.

4. Persistent self-knowledge and excessive impressionableness.

The Vita next gives us five most vivid but undated paragraphs as to her health. I will take them together with such other dated occurrences as will bring us down to September 10.

There is first a characteristic general fact, and a probably often repeated remark of Catherine’s. “At times she would have no pulse, and at other times she would have a good one; often she would seem to sleep; and from this state she would awake, at one time completely herself again, and at other times so limp, oppressed, and shattered as to be unable to move. And those that attended on her did not know how to distinguish one state from the other. And hence, on coming to, she would sometimes say, ‘Why did you let me remain in this quietude, from which I have almost died?’”[201] Thus Catherine’s attendants are helplessly at sea concerning her psycho-physical condition, and they identify, and directly supernaturalize, each and all of her successive and simultaneous states. But Catherine herself remains clearly conscious of different levels and values in these states: of normal, grace-impelled, freely-willed, strength-bringing contemplations and quietudes; and of sickly, weakening, more or less hysterical, lassitudes and failures. And she is thus aware of the deep difference between the two sets of states, that are externally so similar, at the very time of experiencing the one or the other of them; and is conscious, at the same time, both of being unable, by her own unaided will, to give effect, from within, to this her own knowledge, and of being able and willing, indeed anxious, to follow the lead and the pressure of wisely discriminating will-acts, proceeding from without, and, as it were, meeting her own wishes half-way, and thus turning them into effective willings. She herself has still the knowledge, but, now she is ill, she has no more the power. They have the power, but not the knowledge. And she knows all this, through God’s illumination working in and upon her own long and rich experiences, sound good sense, severe self-detachment, close self-observation, and incorruptible veracity of mind; and she knows it in spite of, and in direct opposition to, the far more flattering misconceptions, and entirely well-meant and sincere opinions (representative of the traditional and contemporary consensus of view on these obscure matters) of the servants, lawyers, physicians, relatives, and priests about her. The incident is closely parallel to her scruple as to Marabotto’s spoiling her; and one more similar detail will be mentioned later on.

But next, we get now abundant evidence that she was ill indeed. There is the rapidly shifting fancifulness of the senses of taste and smell, together with an ever-increasing difficulty of swallowing. “She would, at times, be so thirsty as to feel capable of drinking all the water of the sea, and yet she could not, as a matter of fact, manage to swallow even one little drop of water.” “Seeing on one occasion a melon, and conceiving a great desire to eat it, she had it given to her. But hardly had she a piece of it in her mouth, but she rejected it with great disgust.” “She often bathed her mouth with water, and then suddenly she would reject it.” “To-day the smell of wine would please her, and she would bathe her hands and face in it, with great relish; and to-morrow she would dislike it so much, as to be unable any longer to see or smell it in her room.”[202] And, in strict conformity with this detail, I find an entry in the Hospital account-book for this time, of money disbursed to the account of Catherine, for a cask of wine for her use.[203]

Yet her biographers are evidently only stating the simple truth when they declare that she continued to receive Holy Communion with ease and safety; for not only are there three quite unsuspicious passages, descriptive of her receptions of It, under most difficult circumstances; but we find, on counting up the incidental and bare mentions of her Communions, that, during the fourteen days from September 2 to 15, her death-day, she communicated ten times, and one or two further Communions may have been accidentally omitted.

There is, again, an occasional abnormal sensitiveness to colours, and their mental connotations, at least in connection with red. “On September 2, a Physician, a friend of hers,”--no doubt Maestro Boerio,--“came to visit her, robed in his Doctor’s ‘scarlet,’” as was no doubt the custom when visiting patients of quality. “And she bore this sight for a little, so as not to hurt his feelings. But when she could bear it no longer, she said to him: ‘Sir, I can no further bear the sight of this gown of yours, because of what it represents (suggests) to me.’ The Physician departed at once and returned clad in another,” a black “gown.” The Chronicler, probably Boerio’s priest-son, is no doubt substantially right in interpreting this as meaning that the scarlet suggested to her a seraph aflame with divine love. Yet I find, from the inventory of her final possessions, that she possessed, and doubtless used, among her bedclothes a vermilion silk coverlet and a vermilion blanket,--an undoubted indication of her love for this colour.[204] These two vicissitudes of her colour-affection no doubt mutually supplement and explain each other: when not over-impressionable and not already stimulated to the full of her capacity, this colour would suggest her central doctrine and experience, and would be pleasurable; when over-impressionable and already stimulated as much as, then and there, she could bear and utilize, the colour would but strain and disturb her.

And, finally, there are sensations and impressions of extreme heat and cold, and excessive sensibility or insensibility in tactual matters. “At one time she was cold; and at another, burning hot.” “On one day,” early in September, “she suffered great cold in her right arm, followed by acute pain”; and on September 7, “her body felt all on fire; and, since it seemed to her as though the whole world were aflame, she asked whether this were the case, and had her windows opened, so as to be reassured as to the real facts.”[205]

“At times she would be sensitive to such a degree, that it was impossible to touch her sheets or a hair of her head; she would, if this were done, cry out as though she had been grievously wounded.”[206] The temporary paralysis and anaesthetic conditions have been already described.

5. Three spiritually significant events, September 4-9.

We can next consider together three spiritually significant incidents which occurred during these penultimate days of hers.

“On September 4 she lay there in her bed, in great pain, her arms stretched out in suchwise that she appeared like a body nailed to a cross; as she was within, so did she appear without.” Here, then, she finds a certain attraction and help in an external, quasi-ritual attitude and act; for this attitude, however spontaneous and but subconscious, was doubtless not simply accidental or the mere result of pain. It is, with the Pietà-picture of her childhood and the Conversion-vision of the Bleeding Christ, one of the only three direct references to the Passion which I can find throughout her whole life and teaching. This little act gave occasion to the “Spiritual Stigmata”-legend, which is inserted here, in two paragraphs, by the Vita, on the alleged, and I think actual, authority of the credulous and long-lived Argentina. The legend is wanting in all the MSS.; its late genesis and growth is clearly traceable.[207]

“On September 5, some time after her Communion, she suddenly had a sight (vista) of herself, as dead and lying in a truckle-bed, with many Religious, robed in black, around her. And she rejoiced greatly at this sight. But afterwards, having a prick of conscience because of this rejoicing, she confessed it to her Confessor.”[208] Here we have once more a particular desire within Catherine’s soul, and a scruple consequent upon it; and all this but ten days before her death.

And on the 9th, after Communion, there was “suddenly shown her a sight of her (spiritual) miseries; and this gave great annoyance (noia) to her mind. And, as soon as she was able to tell (confess) them, she did so; and the sight then departed from her.”[209] Here, then, we have clear testimony to imperfections perceived by herself as still within her, and to her Confession of them as such; things characteristic of her third as against her second period, but which most of the contributors to the Vita try hard to obscure even here.

IV. The Last Six Days Of Catherine’s Life, September 10-15.

And now the events of real significance which occurred during the last six days of her life can be grouped under six heads.

1. A great consultation of Physicians, September 10.

On the 10th there occurred a second, and last, great consultation of Physicians. The number is this time given--they were ten: “of whom several are still alive,” writes the final Redactor of the printed Vita of 1551. And, in this case, they did not prescribe any remedies; but “examining her and inspecting everything with great diligence, they finally concluded that such a case was (must be) a supernatural and divine thing, since neither the pulse, nor any of the secretions, nor any other symptom, showed any trace of any infirmity. They were astounded, and departed recommending themselves to her prayers.” “When she was not oppressed or tormented by her attacks (accidenti), she seemed well; when she was being stifled by them (suffocata), she seemed dead: and again, suddenly, the opposite condition would be seen. And hence it was most clearly understood, that all this operation was produced (ordinata) by the divine goodness itself.”[210]

Here we have a clear exposition of the two sets of phenomena which specially impressed her entourage, and of the reasoning by which these appearances were turned into direct proofs of the Metaphysical, indeed of the Supernatural. There are three assumptions at work here. What exceeds the knowledge of the Physicians of any one period, can be safely held to exceed not only human knowledge throughout all coming ages, but the powers of nature itself. All purely natural illness is either simply physical or simply mental, and always shows traces of a simply physical or of a simply mental kind. And all purely natural illness is either slow in its transitions, or, at least, not sudden in its transitions back and up to apparent health. And these assumptions must have lain in those minds as part and parcel of their hereditary furniture, in so far as they did not energize and aspire, and did not, by moving out and up into the regions of Action and of the Spiritual, of the Dynamic and of Love, transcend all that is mechanically transmissible, and, with it, all that was bound to change and be proved inadequate in the knowledge of their time. It was their very religion which, with its strong predisposition and determination to find immediate, independent, tangible, medically certified proofs for an exceptional, indeed exclusive action of God, kept these Physicians thus, even religiously, tied down in and by the Contingent and Transitory. And it was her very religion which, by its grandly ethico-spiritual Transcendence, kept Catherine above and outside the very possibility of growing obsolete or old. We now see, with even painful clearness, how inadequate, indeed how directly suggestive of the contrary, were those Physicians’ and Redactors’ treasured proofs. For neither the absence of all symptoms of physical or of clearly mental disease, nor the presence of an astounding frequency, abruptness, and completeness of change in the psycho-physical actions and functions of the living person, nor, above all, the conjunction of these two peculiarities, are for us now, taken by themselves, anything but indications of nervous, hysterical derangement. It is in spite of these things, or at least only on occasion of them, that Catherine is great. Indeed one fails to see how, in any case, such purely psycho-physical phenomenal data could, of themselves and directly, ever compel any such metaphysical and spiritual conclusions. And, be it noted, only in proportion as men abandon such impossible enterprises, do they become sufficiently detached from these phenomena to be able accurately to gauge their nature. These attendants who build so much on these phenomena, do not see them as they are; Catherine, who builds nothing on them, and who simply uses them as fresh means and occasions of ethico-spiritual growth, sees them, to an astonishing extent, as they really are.

2. The final Codicil, September 12.

On the 12th, “she communicated as usual, but tasted no other food, and after this she remained a very long time without speaking. And after they had been bathing her mouth for some time, she exclaimed, ‘I am suffocating’ (io affogo). She said this because a little drop of water had trickled into her throat, and she could not gulp it down.” And in the evening the Notary Saccheri drew up in her presence, with her nephew Francesco Fiesco and the maid Argentina del Sale as two of the seven witnesses, a last Codicil, in which she, “although languishing in body, yet possessed of her faculties (in sua sana memoria esistente), ordained that her body should be buried in such a place and Church as should be ordained by Don Jacobo Carenzio, the present Rector of the Hospital, and Don Cattaneo Marabotto.” And “at ten o’clock at night she complained of a very great heat (fire), and then ejected from the mouth much black blood. And black spots appeared all over her body, with very severe suffering. And her sight became so weak that she could barely distinguish one person from the other.”[211]

Here at last we can plainly see the object which had moved her friends, eighteen months before, to get her to fix upon San Nicolò in Boschetto as her burial-place. They now, when she is at the point of death, and in the last moment of fairly lucid mind, get her finally to declare,--not that she is to be buried in the Hospital Church apart from her husband, though this is what they themselves intend to do, but simply that her grave is to be wheresoever Dons Marabotto and Carenzio shall decide. It is interesting to note to how late a date her friends thought it wise to postpone such a move, and in how indirect and roundabout a fashion they had to attain their end. Yet it is again plain that the whole scheme was willed and executed by her family and friends unanimously; for, if Vernazza had been a witness to the previous Will, so was Francesco Fiesco now a witness to this Codicil.--We should also note that, if the difficulty in swallowing of the early day is still entirely in keeping with her life-long psycho-physical peculiarities, the attack at night is the first in her life when the blood lost is described as of bad quality and where spots appear on her person, indeed where any symptom of definite illness is recorded. But now at last it is evident that downright physical mischief is at work.

3. Symptoms of organic lesion and delirium, September 13.

Before dawn “on the 13th, she evacuated much blood of a bad quality and great heat, so that she remained even weaker than before. Nevertheless she again communicated at her usual hour.” And later on “she fixed her gaze immovably upon the ceiling, and made many gestures with her mouth and hands. The bystanders asked her what it was that she was seeing, and she said: ‘Drive away that beast that wants to eat…,’ and the remainder of the words could not be made out.”[212]

Here two points are of pathetic interest. This great heat of her blood was considered, no doubt from the first by at least some of her attendants, and then later on more and more by the Redactors, as so directly marvellous, spiritually significant, and confirmatory of sayings of her own as to her interior ardours, that three various though parallel anecdotes and proofs as to the intensity of its heat are solemnly printed here by the Vita, only the first of which appears in the MSS. Purely secondary, physical matters are thus, with a short-sighted good faith and admiration, eagerly utilized to naturalize and obscure a soaringly spiritual personality. Truly, she was not simply mistaken as to her isolation: she too had the privilege to share some of the piercing loneliness of Christ.

And next, we have here her last coherent utterance; and the care and fearless honesty with which it has been chronicled and printed as such--and as the concluding words of a chapter (Chapter L), up to at least the fourth edition, Venice 1601--are truly admirable. The words, “that wants to eat,” appear in MSS. “A” and “B,” and are, I think, authentic. They may mean that the beast was looking about for some unspecified food, or that it was wanting to devour her (the former is, I think, the more likely meaning, for there is no indication of fright, and devorare would, in the latter case, be the more natural word). We have, in any case, a quasi-physical, distinctly maladif impression; one which, as regards at least its apparently sensible embodiment, was the simple projection of her own mind. And indeed there is nothing to show that she had any consciousness of any spiritual significance about it. It has got all the opaque, uninteresting character of mere, given, unrelated, and unsuggestive fact, which all such purely nervous projections always have; and stands thus in complete and instructive contrast to her finely suggestive and transparent, spiritually significant Viste, which contributed so largely to the volitional stimulation and moral and religious witness and truth of her life.

4. Catherine’s death, dawn of September 15, 1510.

During the early night hours of “the 14th, she again lost much blood, and she weakened much in her speech. Yet she once more, and it was the last time, communicated as usual. And throughout this day she lay there, with her pulse so slight as to be unfindable.” And “many devoted friends were present.”

And as the subsequent night ceased to be Saturday and became Sunday, the 15th, “she was asked whether she wished to communicate. But she then pointed with her right index-finger towards the sky.” And her friends understood that she wished to indicate by this that she had to go and communicate in heaven. “And at this moment, this blessed soul gently expired, in great peace and tranquillity, and flew to her tender and much desired Love.”[213]

Here three points are of interest. Catherine undoubtedly died at, or shortly before, dawn on the 15th September, as is clearly required by the older account on page 160c of the Vita. Yet a second account, sufficiently early to appear in all the MSS., is given on page 161c, according to which she died on the 14th. The reason of this latter pragmatic “correction” is obvious: the 15th is but the Octave of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, the 14th is the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. The temptation to find a final, strikingly appropriate synchronism, when, to do so, her death need only be pushed back some six hours at most, was too great to be resisted to the end; and an untrained, enthusiastic, imaginative mind like Argentina’s would, probably from the very first, have almost unconsciously helped to establish, or perhaps she single-handedly fixed, this date.

And next, the “many friends” present will no doubt have included her sole surviving brother Lorenzo and his son Francesco, who, only three days before, had witnessed her Codicil; one or other of the four “Protectors” of the Hospital; Don Carenzio, the Rector; and Argentina del Sale. But Vernazza, as we already know, was far away; and, as we shall find in a moment, Mariola, and, above all, Marabotto, though both in Genoa, were both absent from her death-bed. Now it is certain that the absence of Marabotto cannot have been accidental, for death had evidently been recognized by all to be imminent, ever since the 12th at least; and he himself would certainly not have put anything in the world before attending Catherine at the moment of her death. Nor, as we shall find, was he ill just now. Yet we must, I think, suppose him to have been (at least off and on) about her person, during the 12th, up to the drawing up of the Codicil, which directly concerns himself together with Carenzio. His own name appears second, no doubt because, as the document itself mentions, Carenzio and not he is now Rector of the Hospital in which the document is being drawn up. Marabotto will have withdrawn after the attack on that night which left Catherine hardly capable of any further distinguishing one person from another; and he will have retired because Carenzio, from some little jealousy or feeling of punctilio, cared to claim the right, as Rector, alone to attend her at the last; or for some other slight reason such as this. In any case, there is here one more indication of a certain friction and rivalry amongst her attendants and chroniclers, which, however painful, will help us in our study of the peculiarities of her biography. There is, however, nothing to show that Marabotto’s final withdrawal took place at the instigation, or even with the knowledge, of Catherine; and the cause of that withdrawal can certainly not have been a grave one.

And finally, there appeared eventually, at earliest in the fifth edition, 1615, but possibly not till the sixth, in 1645, or even later, a gloss which effectually prevents her “unedifying” remark of the 13th from being her last utterance. After the words, “and at this moment, this blessed soul,” there then appears the clause: “saying: ‘Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commend my Spirit.’” The passage occurs in the late and entirely secondary MS. “F,” which contains also other demonstrably legendary “embellishments.”

5. Intimations of her death vouchsafed to friends.

The Vita gives an account of seven intimations or apparitions, vouchsafed at the moment of her death to as many chosen friends and disciples,--so many communications of her passage and instant complete union with God. Although no names are given, it is easy to identify the first six persons as Argentina del Sale, “a spiritual daughter of hers, present at her death”; Mariola Bastarda, “another spiritual daughter of hers, who had an evil spirit upon her (il demonio adosso)”; Maestro Boerio, “a physician, her devotee”; Ettore Vernazza, “a very spiritual man and her devotee”; Tommasa Fiesca, “a holy Religious woman, most devoted to her”; and Benedetta Lombarda, “another Religious woman, who had been a member of her household (sua famigliare).” The seventh and last, “a nun” (una monaca), is so little characterized, as to be incapable of certain identification: possibly Battista Vernazza is meant, who, though but thirteen years old, was already an Augustinian Novice.[214]

The order in which the first six names appear is evidently determined partly by the degree of physical proximity to Catherine--Argentina by her bedside, comes before Boerio in another house in Genoa, and Boerio comes before Vernazza, since the latter is far away (lontano); partly by sex--Boerio and Vernazza, though simple laymen, appear before the three Religious women; and partly by the abnormal spiritual condition, and consequent increase in the value of the testimony, of the souls concerned--Mariola the Possessed comes first among all those not actually present at the death. Even this order, and still more the form of all these little notices, show plainly that the stress is laid, not so much on the intimation of the death, as on that of the immediate entrance into glory. Note that there is no reference anywhere to Don Carenzio, certainly as much present at the death as Argentina; nor, within this particular list, to Don Marabotto, as certainly absent as Ettore Vernazza.

It is disappointing to find that, whereas such intimations, or at least communications as to death at the moment of its occurrence, belong to the best authenticated of the more mysterious human experiences, and although we would expect to find some such unmistakably vivid and first-hand accounts at this point in the life of one so spiritually great and so deeply loved as was Catherine, the accounts are all, with the possible exception of that concerning Boerio, very general and colourless. As to Boerio we are told: “A Physician, her devotee, was asleep, but awoke at the moment of her passing, and heard a voice which said to him: ‘Abide with God; I am now going to Paradise.’ And he called his wife and said to her: ‘Madonna Caterina has died at this moment’; and this turned out to have been the case.”[215]

Two insipid, vague, and gossipy fragments concerning Don Marabotto strive to make up for his absence from the list of the seven recipients of synchronizing intimations. “Her Confessor during that night (14th to 15th) and throughout the following day (15th), had no notice whatever concerning her.” This is told as if it had been something spiritually remarkable, whereas it was evidently but strangely unkind on the part of the other friends of Catherine. “The next day (16th) he attempted to say a Mass for the Dead for the soul of Catherine.” He evidently had been told on the evening of the 15th, or quite early on the 16th, for there is here no claim to any supernatural intimation. “And he found himself unable to pray for her in particular. And again on the following day, whilst saying a Mass in honour of several Martyrs, his mind was suddenly, from the Introit onwards, fixed upon Catherine’s spiritual martyrdom, so that his abundant weeping made it difficult for him to finish his Mass.”[216] There is, as so often with Marabotto, something slightly comical, and yet respectable, because thoroughly genuine, loyal, and truthful, about this his eager desire to experience something unusual, the careful registration of something quite commonplace, and the wistful attempt to make it out extraordinary after all.

6. Alleged miraculous condition of Catherine’s skin and heart.

There remain two more medical details, which are, however, of some significance in connection with the spirit of her entourage.

Her skin is declared to have been, after death, of a yellow colour throughout. Indeed in various places of the Vita yellow or red colour is noted in connection with her person, but generally as localized about the region of the heart. But the accounts vary, indeed contradict each other, so much, that I shrink from finally adopting any one account.[217]

The action of her heart was often laborious or even acutely painful: “At the last, owing to the great fire of pure and penetrating love, that burnt within her heart, the skin over it became so tender as to be unable to be touched. It seemed as though she had a wound right through her heart. And she often held her hand over it; and it would pant like a pair of bellows, on one day more than on another.”[218] And how often had not Catherine spoken of the wondrous things, the spiritual joys and sufferings, that she felt within her heart! And so some of her materializing biographers, probably some of her attendants before them, doubt not that “if only her (physical) heart had been examined after death, some marvellous sign would have been found upon it.”[219] We even find a report that “this holy soul, several months before her death, left an order that, after her death, her body should be opened and her heart examined, because they would find it all consumed (burnt up) by love. Nevertheless her friends did not dare to do so.”[220] This sheer legend will have been due to Argentina, and will have become articulate long after the first deposition of Catherine’s remains. There is certainly no other, indeed no kind of authentic, evidence of any such wish or hesitation on the part of any one at the time. It is sad to note how rapidly and easily, all but inevitably, the vivid, spiritual ideas and experiences of Catherine were thus materialized and spoilt.

V. Sketch Of Catherine’s Spiritual Character And Significance.

Before proceeding further to what is really still a necessary part and elucidation of Catherine’s spiritual character and special significance,--her doctrine and the posthumous effect, extension, and application of her life and teaching upon and by means of her greatest disciples,--it may be well to pause a little, and to try and give, as far as the largely fragmentary and vague evidence permits, a short and vivid picture and summary, in part retrospective and in part prospective, of the special type, meaning and importance of Catherine’s personality and spiritual attitude, and of the interrelation of the two. In so doing I propose to move, as far as possible, from the psycho-physical and temperamental peculiarities and determinisms of her case, up to the spiritual characteristics and ethical self-determinations; and to try and note everywhere what she was not as definitely as what she was. For only thus shall we have some adequate apprehension of the “beggarly elements” which she found, and of the spiritual organism and centre of far-reaching influence which she left. And only thus too will it be possible to see at all clearly the cost, the limitations, and the special functions, temporary and permanent, of her particular kind of soul and sanctity.

1. Her special temperament.

It is clear then, first, that in her we have to do with a highly nervous, delicately poised, immensely sensitive and impressionable psycho-physical organism and temperament. It was a temperament which, had it been unmatched by a mind and will at least its equals; had these latter not found, or been found by, a definite, rich, and supernaturally powerful, historical, and institutional religion; and had not the mind and will, with this religious help, been kept in constant operation upon it, would have spelt, if not moral ruin, at least life-long ineffectualness. Yet, as a matter of fact, not only did this temperament not dominate her, with the apparently rare and incomplete exceptions of some but semi-voluntary, short impressions and acts during the last months of her life; but it became one of the chief instruments and materials of her life’s work and worth. Only together with such a mind and will, is such a temperament not a grave drawback; and even with them it is an obvious danger, and requires their constant careful checking and active shaping.

And this temperament involved an unusually large subconscious life. All souls have some amount of this life, but many have it but slight and shallow: she had it of a quite extraordinary degree and depth. A coral reef, growing up from, and just peering above, a hundred fathom-deep ocean, would be an appropriate picture of the large predominance of subconsciousness in this spacious soul. And even this circumstance alone would cause her spiritual lights and fully conscious experiences to come abruptly, and in the form of quasi-physical seizures and surprises. Continuous, and possibly long, incubations of ideas and feelings would thus be taking place in the subconscious region, and these feelings and ideas would then, when fully ripe, or on some slight stimulation from the conscious region or directly from the outer world, make sudden irruptions into that full consciousness. Nor would such natural suddenness of full consciousness really militate against the claim to supernaturalness of the ideas and feelings thus revealed. For they would still be most rightly conceived as the work of God’s Spirit in and through the action of her own spirit: not their causation and their source, but simply the suddenness of their revelation and the channel of their outlet would lose in supernaturalness.

And hers was a soul with habitually large fields of consciousness. Apparently from her conversion onwards, and certainly during the last fourteen years of her life, the moments or days of narrow fields were, till quite the last weeks or even days, comparatively rare; and their narrowness was evidently always felt as most painful and oppressive. And the interior occupation was so intense; the several fields succeeded each other with such an apparent automatism and quality of even physical seizure; and they were either so entrancing by their largeness or so depressing by their narrowness: that to souls not in tune with hers, she must, in the former moods, have appeared as egoistic, as (in a sense) too much of a man, as one absorbed in great but purely general, super-personal ideas which were making her forget both her own and her fellow-creature’s minor wants; and, in the latter moods, as downrightly egotistic, as (in a way) too much of a woman, as one engrossed in her own purely individual, small and fanciful troubles and trials. Yet the “Egoism” is not dominant during her middle period, since it is certain that her charitable and administrative activities, and close affective interest in the daily, physical and emotional lot and demands of the poor and lowly, were most real and considerable. And, in her third period, it was this very “Egoism” which, as we shall see, was the form and means of the interior apprehension and exterior elaboration of her most original and suggestive doctrines, and became the occasion for her stimulation of other intensely active souls on to great nation-wide enterprises of the most practical, permanent, and heroic kind. And the “Egotistic” moods are unapparent before the last two years or less of her life; and they then are clearly but the occasional, involuntary suspensions or partial yieldings of her normally iron will,--rare checks and intermittences which, with little or no preventible faultiness on her own part, give us pathetically vivid glimpses of what that normal life of hers cost her to achieve and to maintain, and of what she would have been, if bereft of God’s generosity ever awakening, deepening, and operating through her own.

All this sensitiveness, subconsciousness, spaciousness, variety, and suddenness of apprehension and feeling; all this largely chaotic, mutually conflicting, raw material of her spiritual life, even if it had existed alongside of but feeble and inert powers of organization and transformation, would not have failed to produce considerable suffering; although, in such a case, that suffering would have remained largely inarticulate, and would have left the soul checked and counterchecked by various tyrannous passions and fancies. The soul would thus have been less efficient and persuasive than the least subconscious and sensitive specimens of average and “common-sense” humanity. But, in her case, all this unusually turbulent raw material was in unusually close contiguity to powers of mind and of will of a rare breadth and strength. And this very closeness of apposition and width of contrast, and this great strength of mind and will, made all that disordered multiplicity, distraction, and dispersion of her clamorous, many-headed, many-hearted nature, a tyranny impossible and unnecessary to bear. And yet to achieve the actual escape from such a tyranny, the mastering of such a rabble, and the harmonization of such a chaos, meant a constant and immense effort, a practically unbroken grace-getting and self-giving, an ever-growing heroism and indeed sanctity, and, with and through all these things, a corresponding expansion and virile joy. It can thus be said, in all simple truth, that she became a saint because she had to; that she became it, to prevent herself going to pieces: she literally had to save, and actually did save, the fruitful life of reason and of love, by ceaselessly fighting her immensely sensitive, absolute, and claimful self.

2. Catherine and Marriage.

Catherine’s mind was without humour or wit; and this was, of course, a serious drawback. And her temperament was of so excessive a mentality, as to amount to something more or less abnormal. For not only is there no trace about her, at any time, of moral vulgarity of any kind, or of any tendency to it; and this is, of course, a grand strength; but she seems at all times to have been greatly lacking in that quite innocent and normal sensuousness, which appears to form a necessary element of the complete human personality. It is true that in the anecdotes of her impulsive and yet reverent affection for the pestiferous woman and the cancerous workman, with the finely self-oblivious sympathy which moves her to kiss the mouth of the first, and long to remain with her arms around the neck of the other, there is the beautiful tenderness and daring of a great positive purity, of the purity of flame and not of snow. And her love of her servants, Argentina in particular, and of poor Thobia, is exquisitely true and constant. Yet even all this can hardly be classed with the element referred to, with that love of children and of women as the bearers of them, that instinct of union with all that is pure and fruitful in the normal life of sex, such as is so beautifully present throughout St. Luke’s Gospel, but which is, at least relatively, absent from St. John’s.

Possibly her unhappy and childless marriage determined the non-development or the mortification of any tendencies to such a temper. But the absence referred to was more probably caused by her congenital psychical temperament and state themselves; and, if so, it would point to her as a person hardly intended for marriage, and as one who, through no fault of her own, could not satisfy the less purely mental of the perfectly licit requirements which make up the many-levelled wants of a normal, or at least ordinary, man’s and husband’s nature. Pompilia’s dying words, in Browning’s “Ring and the Book,” would, probably at any time after her premature involuntary marriage, have found an appropriate place upon Catherine’s lips, had she ever thought it loyal or kind to utter them: “‘In heaven there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage.’ How like Jesus Christ to say that!”

Yet it is at least as difficult to think of her as really intended for the cloister. That early wish of hers to join a religious community, sincere and keen as it no doubt was at the time, evidently faded away completely, probably already before her conversion thirteen years later, and certainly before her widowhood. Perhaps she would have been best suited, throughout her adult years, to the life of an unmarried woman living in the world,--to the kind of life which she actually led during her widowhood, with such changes in it as her earlier, robuster health would have involved for those earlier years. She would thus, throughout her life, have divided her energies, in various degrees and combinations, between attention to the multiform, practical, physico-emotional wants of the poor; the give and take of stimulation and enlightenment to and from some few large-hearted, heroically operative friends; and, as source and centre of all such actual achievements and of indefinitely greater possibilities, indeed as a life already largely eternal and creative,--contemplative prayer of various degrees and kinds. But such a life, if it would have left out much disappointment and suffering, and not for herself alone, yet would also have been without the special occasions and incentives to her sudden conversion and long patience and detailed magnanimity. Her life, in appearing on the surface as less of a failure, would at bottom have been less of a spiritual success.

Indeed the failures and fragmentarinesses of her life, even if and where more than merely apparent to us or even to herself, helped and still help to give a poignant forcefulness to her example and teaching. There is nothing pre- or post-arranged, nothing artificial or stagey, nothing, in the deliberate occupations of her convert life, that is simply brooding about this woman: when she thinks or prays, she does so; when she acts, she acts; when she suffers, she suffers; and there is an end of it. The infinitely winning qualities of a simple veracity; of a successive livingness, because ever operative occupation with the actual real moment, and not with the after-shadow of the past nor with the fore-shadow of the future; and, through all this, of a healthy creatureliness are thus spread over all she does,--over her virtues, which are never reflected as such within her own pure mind, and over her very weaknesses and failings which, summed up in their source, her false self, are ever being acknowledged, feared, and fought, with a heroism not less massive because its methods are so wisely indirect.

3. Catherine and Friendship and the Poor.

It is plain that Catherine’s temperament was naturally a profoundly sad one, although her acutest attacks of melancholy were generally succeeded by some unusually great expansion, illumination or consolidation of soul. She had, to adopt a term of recent psychology, a very low “difference-threshold”: easily and swiftly would her consciousness be affected by every kind of irritant: even a slight stimulation would at once produce pain, anxiety, or oppression of mind or soul. She was thus evidently made for a few life-long friends, for such as would deserve the privilege of giving much sympathy and patience, and of getting back helps and stimulations indefinitely greater both in quality and kind; and was not fitted for many acquaintances of the ordinary kind, with their hurry of disjointed, hand-to-mouth, half-awake thinking, feeling, and doing.

And it is very noticeable that her friendships and attachments of all kinds were of a steadiness and perseverance to which there are no real exceptions. To Giuliano, markedly inferior in nature though he evidently was to her, and positively unfaithful during the early years of their long, ill-assorted marriage, she remained faithful even during those first years which she herself never ceased to condemn as her pre-conversion period; she behaved with true magnanimity towards himself and Thobia and Thobia’s mother; and she even evinced a certain affective attachment to him and to his memory. And it would hardly be fair to quote the change in the dispositions as to her place of burial in proof of a change in her dispositions towards him. She whose affectionate interest in Thobia is shown, by irrefragable documentary proof, to have persevered, indeed increased, to the end of the poor young woman’s life, will not have changed in her feelings towards her own dead husband. Towards her brothers and sister, her nephews and nieces, her numerous Wills and Codicils show that she entertained a constant and operative affection.

These same documents prove that her affection and gratitude towards Don Marabotto were equally sincere and provident. It is true that she twice broke off relations with him, although only for a day and three days respectively; and, at the last, this devoted friend of the last eleven years of her life was no more about her. Yet we have remarked that those two former absences were but caused by reasonable fears of getting spoilt by him; and that the final absence was no doubt in no way her doing. And perhaps the most impressive of all her attachments were that to the Hospital, as representative of the sick poor whom she had served, so actively and at such cost to self, for twenty-five years and more,--all her legal dispositions and her very domicile for the last thirty years of her life proclaim the permanent prominence of this interest; and her affection towards her servants, since nothing could be more considerate, thoughtful, equable, and persevering than her care and love for Benedetta, Mariola, and Argentina. Here again I cannot find any certain exceptions: for we know nothing of the history of the servant Antoinetta except that, even on the one occasion of her mention, it appeared already doubtful whether the girl herself would care to remain with her mistress to the end.

There is but one apparent, and indeed a startling, exception to this unbroken continuity of affection. Ettore Vernazza, certainly the greatest and closest, the most docile and the most influential, of her disciples, he to whom we owe the transmission of the larger and the most precious part of her teaching and spirit, and who, as will be seen, became, after her death even more than before it, and more and more right up to his own heroic end, the living reproduction and extension of the very deepest and greatest experiences and influences of her life: Vernazza appears nowhere in her Wills, except as, on one occasion, the actual drawer of the document, and, on another, as a witness. And he was far away, and clearly not accidentally, at the time of her death. I take it to be quite certain that we have here not an exception, at the point of her fullest sympathy, to that gratitude and permanence of feeling which obtained demonstrably in the other, lesser cases; but that this silence and this departure are to be explained, the former entirely, and the latter in part, by the special character as much of Ettore as of Catherine, and by the special form which their friendship assumed in consequence. I shall return to this point in my chapter on Vernazza.

4. Her Absorptions and Ecstatic States.

Catherine’s states of absorption in prayer, such as we find ever since her conversion, were transparently real and sincere, and were so swift and spontaneous as to appear quasi-involuntary. They were evidently, together with, and largely on occasion of, her reception of the Holy Eucharist, the chief means and the ordinary form of the accessions of strength and growth to her spiritual life.

Possibly throughout the four years of the first period of her convert life, certainly and increasingly throughout the twenty-two years of the second, middle period, these absorptions occurred frequently, indeed daily; they were long, and lasted up to six hours at a stretch; and they were apparently timed by herself, and never rendered her incapable of hearing or attending to any call to acts of duty or of charity, and of breaking off then and there. And throughout these years she seems to have known but one kind of absorption, this primarily spiritual one, which appears to have been a particularly deep Prayer of Quiet; and she appears to have always been, if exercised, yet also profoundly sustained and strengthened, by it, even physically, for the large activity and numerous trials and sufferings awaiting her on her return to her ordinary life. And these were the years during which she lived with no mediate guidance.

During the last eleven, perhaps even thirteen years of her life, first one, and then, considerably later, a second change occurs in these respects. First these profound, healthy, and fruitful absorptions, and the power to occasion or effect, to bear or endorse them, diminish greatly, though apparently gradually, in length, regularity, and efficiency; indeed they do so almost as markedly as does the capacity for external work, their former complement and correlative. The spiritual life now breaks up into a greater variety of shorter and more fitful incidents and manifestations. The sympathy of friends, the sustaining counsel of priests, and the communication on her part of many spiritual thoughts and experiences take, in large part, the place of those long spells of the Prayer of Quiet or of Union, and still more of that external activity which are both now becoming more and more impossible to her. And next,--though not, as far as our evidence goes, before the last six months or so of her life,--there arises a second series of absorptions, externally closely similar, yet internally profoundly different. These latter absorptions are primarily psychical and involuntary, indeed psychopathic. And she herself shows and declares her knowledge of this their pathological character, her ability to distinguish them from their healthy rivals, her inability to throw them off unaided, her wish that others should rouse her from them, and her power to accept and second such initiation coming to her from a will-centre other than her own.

Now her attendants and biographers, possibly all of them and even during her lifetime, considered and called those healthy absorptions “ecstasies”; and though we have clear evidence of her ever having shrunk from so naming them herself, and though, here as everywhere, she habitually turned away from considering the form and psycho-physical concomitants of her spiritual experiences, and concentrated her attention on their content and ethico-religious truth and power, there seems to be no special reason for quarrelling with their application of this term. Yet it is of great importance to observe that none of her teaching can with propriety be called directly Pneumatic. For I can find nothing that even purports to have been spoken in a state of trance, nor anything authentic that claims to convey, during her times of ordinary consciousness, anything learnt during those states of absorption other than what, in a lesser degree, is probably experienced, during at least some rare moments, by all souls that have attained to the so-called Prayer of Quiet. It is quite clear, I think, that in all these authentic passages, the states of absorption are treated substantially as times when the conscious region of her soul, a region always relatively shallow, sinks down into the ever-present deep regions of subconsciousness; and hence as experiences which can only be described indirectly,--in their effects, as traced by and in the conscious soul, after its rising up again, from this immersion in subconsciousness, to its more ordinary condition of so-called “full consciousness,” i.e. as full a consciousness as is normal, for this particular soul, in the majority of moments as are not devoted to physical sleep.

But if apparently none of Catherine’s contemplations are derived directly from things learnt during these times of absorption; those contemplations are, none the less, all indirectly influenced, in the most powerful and multiform manner, by these absorptions. For these absorptions constituted the moments of the soul’s feeding and harmonization, and they enriched and concentrated it, for the service of its fellows, the occasion of further self-enlargement. And these absorptions, with their combination of experienced fruitfulness and undeniable obscurity, for the very soul that has passed through them, when this soul has returned to ordinary consciousness, give to all, even to the most lucid of her sayings, a beautiful margin of mist and mystery, a never-ceasing sense of the incomprehensibility, and yet of the soul’s capacity for an intellectual adumbration, of the realities and truths in which our whole spiritual life is rooted,--realities and truths which she is thus, without even a touch of inconsistency, ever struggling to apprehend and to communicate a little less inadequately than before.

5. Catherine’s teaching.

Catherine’s teaching, as we have it, is, at first sight, strangely abstract and impersonal. God nowhere appears in it, at least in so many words, either as Father, or as Friend, or as Bridegroom of the soul. This comes no doubt, in part, from the circumstance that she had never known the joys of maternity, and had never, for one moment, experienced the soul-entrancing power of full conjugal union. It comes, perhaps, even more, from her somewhat abnormal temperament, the (in some respects) exclusive mentality which we have already noted. But it certainly springs at its deepest from one of the central requirements and experiences of her spiritual life; and must be interpreted by the place and the function which this apparently abstract teaching occupies within this large experimental life of hers which stimulates, utilizes, and transcends it all. For here again we are brought back to her rare thirst, her imperious need, for unification; to the fact that she was a living, closely knit, ever-increasing spiritual organism, if there ever was one.

This unification tended, in its reasoned, theoretic presentation, even to overshoot the mark: for it would be impossible to press those of her sayings in which her true self appears as literally God, or her state of quiet as a complete motionlessness or even immovability. Yet in practice this unification ever remained admirably balanced and fruitful, since, in and for her actual life, it was being ever conceived and applied as but a whole-hearted, constantly renewed, continuously necessary, costing and yet enriching, endeavour to harmonize and integrate the ever-increasing elements and explications of her nature and experience. And even on the two points mentioned, her theory gives an admirably vivid presentment of the prima facie impression produced by its deepest experiences upon every devoted soul.

And on other points her theory is, even as such, admirably sober, closely knit, and stimulating. For, as to the cause of Evil, she ever restricts herself to finding it in her own nature, and to fighting it there: hence the personality of Evil, though nowhere denied, yet rarely if ever concerns her, and never does so directly in her strenuous and practical life. Yet, on the other hand, this fight takes, with her, the form not primarily of a conflict with this or that particular fault, these several conflicts then summing themselves up into a more or less interconnected warfare; but it makes straight for the very root-centre of all the particular faults, and, by constantly checking and starving that, suppresses these. And hence the Positive, Radical character of Evil is, in practice, continuously emphasized by her.

Yet this root-centre of Evil within her was most certainly not conceived by her as a merely general and abstract false self or self-seeking. Her biographers, mostly over-anxious to prove the innocence of her nature, even at the expense of the heroism of her life and of the reasonableness and truthfulness of her statements, are no doubt responsible for the constant air of would-be devout and amiable (!) exaggeration which she wears on all this self-fighting side of her. Yet we have, I think, but to take the simplest and most authentic of the rival accounts,--those which give us the smallest quantity of self-denunciation, and we can understand the quality of this self-blame, and can fix its special, entirely concrete and pressing, occasion and object. For considering the immense claimfulness, the cruel jealousy, the tyrannous fancifulness, the brooding inventiveness, the at last incurable absoluteness of the weak and bad side and tendency of a temperament and natural character such as hers, had it been allowed to have its way, there is, I think, nothing really excessive or morbid, nothing that is not most healthy and humble, and hence sensible and admirably self-cognitive and truthful, about this heroic strenuousness, this ever-watchful, courageous fear of self, and those declarations of hers that this false self was as bad as any devil. To such a temperament and attrait as hers only one master could be deliberately taken, or could be long borne, as centre of the soul: God or Self;--not two: God and Self. And hence all practice on even tolerance of, as it were, separate compartments of the soul; all “a little of this, and not too much of that” spirit; all “making the best of both worlds” temper; all treatment of religion as a means to other ends, or as so much uninterpreted inheritance and dead furniture or fixed and frozen possession of the mind, or as a respectable concomitant and condiment or tolerable parasite to other interests: all such things must have been more really impossible to her than would have been the lapse into self-sufficiency and self-idolatry, and the attempt to find happiness in such a downward unification.

And the one true divine root-centre of her individual soul is ever, at the same time, experienced and conceived as present, in various degrees and ways, simply everywhere, and in everything. All the world of spirits is thus linked together; and a certain slightest remnant of a union exists even between Heaven and Hell, between the lost and the saved. For there is no absolute or really infinite Evil existent anywhere; whilst everywhere there are some traces of and communications from the Absolute Good, the Source and Creator of the substantial being of all things that are. And to possess even God, and all of God, herself alone exclusively, would have been to her, we can say it boldly, a truly intolerable state, if this state were conceived as accompanied by any consciousness of the existence of other rational creatures entirely excluded from any and every degree or kind of such possession. It is, on the contrary, the apprehension of how she, as but one of the countless creatures of God, is allowed to share in the effluence of the one Light and Life and Love, an effluence which, identical in essential character everywhere, is not entirely absent anywhere: it is the abounding consciousness of this universal bond and brotherhood, this complete freedom from all sectarian exclusiveness and from all exhaustive appropriation of God, the Sun of the Universe, by any or all of the just or unjust, upon all of whom He shines: it is all this that constitutes her element of unity, saneness, and breadth, the one half of her faith, and the greater part of her spiritual joy.

And the other half of her faith constitutes her element of difference, multiplicity and depth, and is itself made up of two distinct convictions. No two creatures have been created by God with the same capacities; and, although they are each called by Him to possess Him to the full of their respective capability, they will necessarily, even if they all be fully faithful to their call, possess Him in indefinitely and innumerably various degrees and ways. And, so far, there is still nothing but joy in her soul. Indeed we can say that the previous element of unity and breadth calls for this second element of diversity and depth; and that only in and with the other can each element attain to its own full development and significance, and thus the two together can constitute a living whole.

But the second conviction as to difference is a sombre and saddening one. For she holds further that the diversity is not only one of degrees of goodness and a universal fulness of variously sized living vessels of life and joy; but that there is also a diversity in the degree of self-making or self-marring on the part of the free-willing, self-determining creatures of God. Here too she still, it is true, finds the omnipresent divine Goodness at work, and in a double fashion and degree. The self-marring of some, probably, in her view, of most souls, gets slowly and blissfully albeit painfully unmade by the voluntary acceptance, on the part of these souls, of the suffering rightly attaching, in a quite determinist manner, to all direct, deliberate, and detached pleasure-seeking of the false self. And this is Purgatory, which is essentially the same whether thus willed and suffered in this world or in the next. And the self-marring of other, probably the minority of, sinful souls, though no longer capable of any essential unmaking, is yet in so far overruled by the divine Goodness (which, here as everywhere, is greater than the creature’s badness), that even here there ever remains a certain residue of moral goodness, and that a certain mitigation of the suffering which necessarily accompanies the remaining and indeed preponderant evil is mercifully effected by God. And this is Hell, which is essentially the same, whether thus, as to its pain, not willed but suffered here or hereafter. Thus she neither holds an Apocatastasis, a Final Restitution of all things,--what might be called a Universal Purgatory, nor a Gradual Mitigation of the sufferings of the lost; but the eventual complete purgation and restitution applies only to some, though probably to most, souls, and the mitigation of this suffering, in the case of the lost, is not gradual but instantaneous.

Here again, then, we find her thirst for unification strikingly at work. For she discovers one single divine Goodness as active and efficient throughout the universe; and she everywhere finds spiritual pain to consist in the discordance felt by the rational creature between its actual contingent condition and its own indestructible ideal, and such pain to be everywhere automatically consequent upon deliberate acts of self-will. Hence the suffering is nowhere separately willed or separately sent by God; and, in all cases of restoration, the suffering, in proportion as it is freely willed by the sufferer, is ever medicinal and curative and never vindictive. It is these considerations which make her able to endure this sombre side of reality.

Now it is all this second set of beliefs, all this faith in diversity, multiplicity, and depth, which prevents any touch of real Pantheism or Indifferentism from defacing the breadth of her outlook, and effectually neutralizes any tendency to a sheer Optimism or Monism. She loves God’s Light and Love so much, that she is indefatigable in seeking, and constantly happy in finding, and incapable of not loving, even the merest glimpses of it, everywhere. And yet, precisely on that same account, everywhere the central passion of her soul is given to fostering the further growth of this Light and Love, to already loving it even more as it will or may be than as it already is, and thus deeply loving it already, in order that it may be still more lovable by and by. And thus the universality, and what we may call the particularity, of God’s self-communication and of the creature’s response, are equally preserved, and in suchwise that each safeguards, supplements, and stimulates the other. And thus her grace-stimulated craving, both for indefinite expansion and breadth and for indefinite concentration and depth, is met and nourished by this width and distance, this clarity and dimness of outlook on to the rich and awe-inspiring greatness of God and of His world of souls.

And union with this one Centre is, for all rational free-willing creatures, to be achieved, at any one and at every moment, by the whole-hearted willing and doing, by the full endorsing, of some one thing,--some one unique state and duty offered to the soul in that one unique moment. Thus life gets apparently broken up into so many successive steps and degrees of work, each to be attended to as though it were the first and last; and as so much special material and occasion for the practice of unification, ostensibly in the matter supplied and for the moment which supplies it, but really in the soul to which it is offered and for the totality of its life. Her soul is, even if taken at any one moment, and still more, of course, if considered in its successive history, overflowing with various acts, with (as it were) so many numberless waves and wavelets, currents and cross-currents of volition; and the warp and woof of her life’s weaving is really close-knit with numberless threads of single willings, preceded and succeeded by single perceptions, conceptions, and feelings of the soul. Yet the very fulness of this flow and the closeness of this weaving, their great and ever-increasing orderliness and spontaneity, such as we can and must conceive them to have been present during the majority of the moments of her convert and waking life, tended, during such times, to obliterate any clear consciousness of their different constituents, and to produce the impression of one single state, even one single act. And this very action, even inasmuch as thus felt to be simple and one, is furthermore experienced psychically as a surprise and seizure from without, rather than as a self-determination from within. And this psychic peculiarity is taken by her as but the occasion and emotional, quasi-sensible picturing of the ever-present and ever-growing experience and conviction that all right human action, the very self-donation of the creature, is the Creator’s best gift, and that the very act of her own mind and heart, in all its complete inalienableness and spontaneity, is yet, in the last resort, but an illumination and stimulation coming from beyond the reaches of her own mind and will, from the mind and will of God. And thus Ethics are englobed by Religion, Having by Doing, and Doing by Being: yet not so that, in her fullest life, any of the higher things suppress the lower, but so that each stimulates the very things that it transcends.

6. Catherine’s literary obligations. Her corrections of the Neo-Platonist positions.

We shall trace further on how largely and spontaneously she has, from out of the many different possible types and forms of spirituality, chosen out, assimilated and further explicated certain Platonic and especially certain Neo-Platonic conceptions. We shall be unable to suggest any likely intermediary, or to assume with certainty a direct derivation, for these conceptions from Plato, or indeed from Plotinus or Proclus; and shall nevertheless be obliged to postulate some now untraceable communication, on some most important points, between Plato and herself. Besides this, she derives one Platonic conception from the Book of Wisdom and a corresponding passage in St. Paul; and a certain general Platonic tone and imagery from the Joannine Gospel and First Epistle. Her Neo-Platonism, on the contrary, she derives, massively and all but pure, through two of the Pseudo-Dionysian books and her dearly loved Franciscan Mystic Poet, Jacopone da Todi. It is indeed to the Pauline, Joannine, Dionysian, and Jacopone writings that she owes, with the exception of a certain group of Platonic conceptions, practically all that she did not directly derive from her own psychical and spiritual experiences.

Now her assimilation of this particular strain of doctrine has remained but partial and theoretical with respect to those parts of Dionysian Neo-Platonism which were not borne out by the facts of her own Christian experience; but it has extended even to her emotional attitude and practice, in cases where the doctrine was borne out by these facts.

Thus we shall find that she often speaks theoretically of Evil as simply negative, as the varyingly great absence of Good. Yet, in practice and in her autobiographical picturings, she fights her bad self, to the very last, as a truly positive force. The force of God is everywhere conceived as indefinitely greater, as, indeed, alone infinite; yet the force of Evil is practically experienced and pictured as real and positive also, in its kind and degree.

Again, she often speaks as though her spiritual life had, at some one particular moment, simply arrived at its final culmination, and had attained God and perfection with complete finality,--such, at least, as this particular soul of hers can achieve. Yet, very shortly after, we find her unmistakably in renewed movement and conflict, and observe her mind to be now fully aware of that past “perfection” having been but imperfect, because that act or state is now seen from a height higher than that former level: hence that “perfection” was perfect, at most, in relation to its helps and opportunities in and for its own special moment.

Again, it is at times as though she conceived her body to be a sheer clog and prison-house to the soul, and as though the soul’s weakness and sinfulness were essentially due to its union with the flesh. But here especially her later commentators have amplified and systematized her teaching almost beyond recognition; the authentic sayings of this kind, though too strong to be pressed, are few, and belong exclusively to the last stages of her illness; and, above all, these declarations are checked and entirely eclipsed by her normal and constant view as to the specific nature of Moral Evil. For this Evil consists, for her, essentially in the self-idolatry, the claimful self-centredness of the natural man, ever tending, in a thousand mostly roundabout ways, to make means and ends, centre and circumference, Sun and Planet change places, and to put some more or less subtle wilfulness and pleasure-seeking in the place of Duty, Happiness, and God. Few, even amongst the Saints, can have realized and exemplified more profoundly the indelible difference between pleasure and happiness, between the false and the true self; and few have more keenly, patiently felt and taught that the soul’s true life is, even eventually, not a keeping or a getting what the lower instincts crave: but that, on the contrary, a whole world of pleasures which, however base and short and misery-productive, can be intensely and irreplaceably pleasurable while they last, has successively to be sacrificed, for good and all; and that what is retained has gradually to proceed from other motives, to be grouped around other centres, and be ever only a part and a servant, and never a master or the whole. The gulf between every kind of Auto-centricism and the Theo-centric life, between mere Eudaemonism and Religion, could not be found anywhere more constant or profound.

Again, it is at times as though the absence or suppression of even the noblest of human fellow-feelings and of particular parental and friendly, attachments, and not their purification and deepening, multiplication and harmonization, were the end and aim of perfection. But little or nothing of this belongs, I think, to any deliberate and enduring theory of hers, still less to her full and normal practice; and the impression of such inhumanity is, in so far as it is derived from authentic documents, entirely caused by and restricted to her early convert reaction, and her late over-strained or worn-out psycho-physical condition.

Again, it is sometimes as though she believed indeed in an energizing and progress of the soul, yet held this progress to be, after conversion, an absolutely unbroken, equable, necessary and automatic increase in perfection; and that such a soul’s last state is, necessarily and in all respects, better than were its previous stages.--The Redactors of her life most undoubtedly think this. Because, for instance, she was Matron from 1490 to 1496, and could no more fill the post from 1496 to 1510:--therefore “not to give part of her activity to such external work was more perfect than to give it,” is the argument that underlies their scheme for these two periods.--Yet I can find nothing in her teaching to show that she held any such view. She was, indeed, ever too much absorbed, by the experiences and duties of her successive moments, to find even the leisure of mind requisite for the manufacture of so doctrinaire a system. And indeed there is nothing in the conception of sanctity, or in that of a gradual and general increase in generosity and purity of the saintly soul’s dispositions and intentions, which requires us to hold that such a soul’s last state and efficiency is, in every respect, better than the first. For the range and volume of the efficiency, wisdom, balance, appropriateness of even our goodness is not determined by our will and the graces given to our will alone. Physical and psychical health and strength, illness and weakness; helps and hindrances from friends and foes; the changing influences and limitations of growing age; and the ever-shifting combinations of all these and of similar things,--things and combinations which are all but indirectly attainable by our wills in any way: all this is ever as truly at work upon us as our wills and God’s spiritual graces are in operation directly within ourselves. And if Catherine’s richness, breadth and balance of soul are, considering her special and successive health and circumstances, remarkable up to the very end, and probably actually grew to some extent with the growing obstacles, yet those qualities hardly grew or could grow pari passu with these obstacles. The manifold efficiency and the unity in multiplicity were distinctly greater before 1496 than after. And thus the Saints too join their lowlier brethren in paying the pathetic debt of our common mortality. They too can be called upon to survive the culmination of their many-sided power, and to retain perpetual youth only as regards their intention and the central ideas and the spiritual substance of their soul.

Once more she seems as though, to make up for this apparent suppression of the element of time, unduly to press the category of space, at least in her contemplations. We shall see how often in these contemplations God Himself, and the soul, or at least its various states, appear as places; so that the whole spiritual life and world come thus to look rather like an atomic co-ordination, a projection on to space and a static mechanism, than an interpenetrative subordination, a production in time or at least in duration, and a dynamic organism.--Yet it will be found that all this imagery is consciously, though no doubt quite naturally, used only as imagery, and that it is thus used both because it was spontaneously presented to her mind by her psychic peculiarities and because it readily adapted itself as a vehicle to express one of the deepest experiences and convictions of her spirit.

For her psychic peculiarities involved, on the one hand, a curiously rapid and complete change and difference of states of consciousness, and, on the other hand, a remarkable absence (or at least dimness) of consciousness as to this transition itself, which, however abrupt, was of course as truly a part of her inner life as were the several completed states and outlooks. Now the apparently static element and harmony in any one of these states could, of course, be at all clearly presented in no other form than that of a spacial image; whereas the changing element in all these states seems to have accumulated chiefly in the subconscious region, to have at last suddenly burst into the conscious sphere, and to have there effected the change too rapidly to permit of, or at least to require, the presentation of this element as such, a presentation which could only have taken the form of a consciousness of time or of duration. From all this it follows that, to her immediate psychic consciousness, each of her successive experiences presented itself as ever one spacial picture, as one “place.”

And the imagery, thus quasi-automatically presented to her, could not fail to be gladly used and emphasized by her to express the deepest experiences of her spiritual life. For it was the element of simultaneity, of organic interpenetration, of the God-like Totum Simul, which chiefly impressed her in these deepest moments. And hence the soul is conceived by her as, in its essence, eternal rather than an as immortal--as, in its highest reaches and moments, outside of time and not as simply wholly within it; and as, on such occasions, vividly though indirectly conscious of the fact. Heaven itself is thought of not as eventually succeeding, with its own endless succession, to the finite succession of these our fleeting earthly days; but as already forming the usually obscure, yet ever immensely operative, background, groundwork, measure and centre of our being, now and here as truly as there and then. And hence again, Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell are for her three distinct states of the soul, already effected in their essence here below, and experienced as what they are, in part and occasionally here, and fully and continuously hereafter. Thus the fundamental cleavage in the soul’s life is not between things successive,--between the Now and the Then, and at the point of death; but between things simultaneous, between the This and the That, and at the point of sin and of self-seeking.

And finally, she seems at times to speak Greek-wise, as though the soul’s life consisted essentially, or even exclusively, in an intellection, a static contemplation. Yet we have already seen how robust and constant is her ethical dualism, how essentially, here below at least, happiness consists for her in a right affection and attachment, in the continuous detaching of the true self from the false self, and the attaching of the true self unto God. And we should note how that intellection itself is conceived as ever accompanied by a keen sense of its inferiority to the Reality apprehended, and as both the result and the condition and the means of love and of an increase of love. And again we should note that this sense of inferiority does not succeed the intellection, as the result of any reasoning on the disparity between the finite and Infinite, but accompanies that intellection itself, and corresponds to the surplusage of her feelings over her mental seeings, and of her experience over her knowledge. And we should add the fact that, in the most emphatic of her sayings, she makes the essence of Heaven to consist in the union of the finite with the Infinite Will; and that this doctrine alone would seem readily to harmonize with her favourite teaching as to Heaven beginning here below.

7. Her attitude towards Historical and Institutional Religion.

If the Platonic and Neo-Platonic elements appear, at first sight, as massive and even excessive constituents of Catherine’s doctrine, Historical and Institutional Christianity seems, on a cursory survey, to contribute strangely little even to her practice. Not one of her ordinary contemplations is directly occupied with any scene from Our Lord’s life. The picture of the “Pietà,” so impressive to her in her nursery-days; the great Conversion-Vision of the Bleeding Christ; and the slighter cases of the signing of herself with the sign of the Cross and of her lying with outstretched arms, which occurred during the last stage of her illness, are the sole indications of any immediate occupation with the Passion; whilst the two cases of the Triptych “Maestà” and the painting representative of Our Lord at the well, (cases which indicate an attraction to the Infancy and to at least one incident of the Public Life,) complete the list of all direct attention to any incidents of Our Lord’s earthly existence. As to occupation with or invocation of the Saints, inclusive of the Blessed Virgin, I can find but one instance, the invocation of St. Benedict, two days before her Conversion. We have seen, as to Sacramental Confession, how little there can have been of it, throughout the long middle period of her Convert Life; and how she was, during this time, simply without any priestly guidance. And she never was a Tertiary, nor did she belong to any Confraternity, nor did she attempt to gain Indulgences, nor did she practise popular devotions, such as the Rosary or Scapular.

Nor could these facts be quite fairly met, except to a certain relatively small extent with regard to Confession, by insistence upon the changing character of the Church’s discipline, if we thus mean to assert that she did not, in these matters, act exceptionally with regard to the practice and theory of fervent souls of her own time. For, on all the points mentioned, the ordinary fervent practice was already, and had been for centuries, different; and, in the matter of priestly guidance, her chroniclers have not failed to transmit to us the wonders and murmurs of more than one contemporary.

Yet here again the prima facie impression is but very incompletely borne out by a closer study.

For first, none of these historical and institutional elements are ever formally excluded, or attacked, or slighted. Indeed, in the matter of Indulgences, we have seen how she arranged or allowed that monies of her own should be spent in procuring certain facilities for gaining them by others.

And next, special practices, more than equivalent in their irksomeness, are throughout made to take the place of ordinary practices, in so far and for so long as these latter are abstained from. An unusually severe ascetical penitential time, and then the rarest watchfulness and continuous self-renouncement, take thus, for a considerable period, the place of the sacramental forms of Penance.

And thirdly, if there is an unusual rarity in Confession there is an almost as rare frequency of Communion; and authentic anecdotes show us how she scandalized some good souls as truly-by this frequency as by that rarity. Indeed throughout her convert life, an ardent devotion to the Holy Eucharist forms the very centre of her daily life; during probably thirty-five years she only quite exceptionally misses daily Communion; and she has the deepest attraction to the Mass, and a holy envy of priests for their close relation to the Blessed Sacrament. And though there are no contemplations of hers directly occupied with the Holy Eucharist, yet we shall find this experience and doctrine to have profoundly shaped and coloured teachings and apprehensions which, at first sight, are quite disconnected with It. We can already see how all-inclusive a symbol and stimulation of her other special attractions and conceptions this central devotion could not fail to be. She found here the Infinite first condescending to the finite; so that the finite may then rise towards the Infinite; the soul’s life, a hunger and a satisfaction of that hunger, through the taste of feeling rather than through the sight of reason; God giving Himself through such apparently slight vehicles, in such short moments, and under such bewilderingly humble veils; and our poor a priori notions and a posteriori analyses thus proved inadequate to the living soul and the living God.--Extreme Unction also was highly esteemed: she spontaneously demanded it some four times and finally received it with great fervour. Church hymns too--witness the “Veni, Creator,” chanted on her death-bed--and liturgical lights are spontaneously used.

And lastly, her practice in the matter of Confession and of priestly advice became, during her last thirteen years identical in frequency with that of her devout contemporaries; and thus her life ended with the practice, on all the chief points, of the average, ordinary devotional acts and habits of her time. And this final practice of the ordinary means, together with her life-long dislike of singularity and of notice; her humble misgivings in the midst of her most peaceful originalities, and the utter absence of any tendency to think her way, inasmuch as it was at all singular, the only way or even the best way, except just now and here for her own self alone; her complete freedom from the spirit of comparing self with others, of dividing off the sheep from the goats, or of having some short, sure, and universal means or test for holiness: all this shows us plainly how Catholic and unsectarian, how truly free, not only from slavish fear and pusillanimous conformity, but also from all enthralment to merely subjective fancies, from all solipsism or conceit was her strong soul.

8. Three stages of the Spiritual Life; Catherine represents the third.

It has been well said that there are three stages of the spiritual life, and three corresponding classes of souls.

There are the souls that are characterized, even to the end of their earthly lives, by that, more or less complete, naturalistic Individualism, with which we all in various degrees begin. Catherine’s own time and country were full of such thoroughly Individualistic, unmoral or even anti-moral men, who, however gifted and cultivated as artists, scholars, philosophers, and statesmen, must yet be counted as essentially childish and as clever animals rather than as spiritual men. And she herself had, during the five years which had preceded her conversion, tended, on the surface of her being, towards something of this kind.

Next come the souls that have recognized and have accepted Duty and Obligation, that are now striving to serve God as God, and that are attempting, with a preponderant sincerity, to live the common and universal life of the Spirit. These of necessity tend to suspect, or even to suppress and sacrifice, whatever appears to be peculiar to themselves, as so much individualistic subjectivity and insidious high treason to the objective law of Him who made their souls, and who now bids them save those souls at any cost. The large majority of the souls that were striving to serve God in Catherine’s times belonged, as souls belong in these our days, and will necessarily and rightly belong up to the end, to this second, universalistic, uniformative type and class. And Catherine herself evidently belonged prominently to this type and class, during her first four convert years.

And there are, finally, an ever relatively small number of souls that are called, and a still smaller number that attain, to a state in which the Universality, Obligation, Uniformity, and Objectivity, of the second stage and class, take the form of a Spiritual Individuality, Liberty, Variety, and Subjectivity: Personality in the fullest sense of the term has now appeared. And this fullest Spiritual Personality is the profoundest opposite and foe of its naturalistic counterfeit, of those spontaneous animal liberalisms which reigned, all but unrecognized as such because all but uncontrasted by the true ideal and test of life, prior to that prostration before absolute obligation, that poignant sense of weakness and impurity, and that gain of strength and purity from beyond its furthest reaches, experienced by the soul at its conversion.

Yet that merely subjective, liberalistic Individualism of the first stage can only be kept out, even at the third stage, by retaining within the soul all the essential characteristics of the second stage,--by a continuous passing and re-passing under the Caudine Forks of the willed defeat of wayward, self-pleasing wilfulness, and of the deliberate acceptance of an objective system of ideas and experiences as interiorly binding upon the self. For if the second stage excludes the first, the third stage does not exclude the second. Yet now all this, in these rare souls, leads up to and produces a living reality bafflingly simple in its paradoxical, mysterious richness. For now the universality, obligation, and objectivity of the Law become and appear greater, not less, because incarnated in an eminently unique and unreproduceable, in a fully personal form. And at this stage only do we find a full persuasiveness.

Catherine attained unmistakably, after her four years of special penitence, to this rare third stage. For not only is she essentially as individual and unique as if she were not universal and uniform; and essentially as universal and uniform as if she were not individual: but she is indefinitely more truly original and subjective, because of her voluntary boundness and objectivity. Indeed she is solidly and really free and personal, because the continuous renunciation and expulsion of all naturalistic individuality remains, to the very end, one of the essential functions of her soul.

From all this it is clear how easy it would be to misread the lesson of her manifold life, and to turn such examples as hers from a help into a hindrance. For her melancholy temperament, her peculiar psychic health, her final external inefficiency: all this is too striking not to tempt the admiration, perhaps even, the hopeless and ruinous imitation, of such crude and inexperienced souls as know not how to distinguish between the merely given materials and untransferable determinisms of each separate soul’s psychical and temperamental native outfit, and the free, grace-inspired and grace-aided use made by each soul of these its, more or less unique, occasions and materials. Those materials were, of themselves, of no moral worth, and lent themselves only in part with any ease to the upbuilding and realization of her spirit’s ideal. And it is only this, her wise and heroic use of her materials,--though this also, of course, is not directly transferable,--that represents the spiritually valuable constituent of the life.

Similarly with the form, and the psychic occasions or accompaniments of her very prayer and spiritual absorptions, and with some of the constituents of her doctrine, if taken as speculative and analytic and final, rather than as psychological and descriptive and preliminary. These things again could easily be misused. For the former are largely quite special and, in themselves, morally indifferent peculiarities, transformed and utilized by quite special graces and life-long spiritual heroisms. And the latter, we shall find, were never intended to be systematic, complete or ultimate; and indeed they owe their true force and value to their being the occasional, spontaneous and immediate expressions and adumbrations of an experience indefinitely richer and more ultimate than themselves.

And finally, it would of course be absurd to take the limitations of her activity and interests, even if we were to restrict ourselves to those common to all the stages of her life, as necessarily admirable, or as universally inevitable. For there is, in the very nature of things, no equation between her one soul, however rich and stimulating, or even all the souls of her class and school, or of her age or country, on the one hand, and the totality of religious experience, and its means and incorporations, on the other hand, even if, by totality, we but mean that part of it already achieved and accepted by grace-impelled mankind.

9. The lessons of Catherine’s life.

And yet Catherine’s life and teaching will be found full of suggestion and stimulation, if they are taken in their interpenetration, and if due regard is paid to their fragmentary registration, to the necessary distinction between what, amongst all these facts, was mere means, occasion, and temporal setting, and what amongst them was aim and end, utilization and abiding import, and to the fact that all this experience is but one out of the indefinitely many applications, extensions, and mutually corrective and supplementary exemplifications of the spirit and life of Christ, as it lives itself out throughout the temperaments, races and ages of mankind. Above all it can teach us, I think, with a rare completeness, wherein lies the secret of a persuasive holiness. For Catherine lets us see, with unusual clearness, how this winningness lies in the pathetically dramatic spectacle and appeal presented by a life engaged in an ever-increasing ethical and spiritual energizing,--whether in a slow shifting and pushing of its actual centre, down and in from the circumference of the soul to its true centre, and from this true centre enlarging and reorganizing its whole ever-expanding being again and again; or in an apparently sudden finding itself placed, and loyally placing itself, in this true centre, and then from there prosecuting and maintaining the organization and transformation of its varyingly peripheral life, a life treated at one time as central and complete. And this persuasiveness can here be discovered to be greater or less in proportion to the thoroughness and continuousness of this centralization and purification; to the degree in which this issues in a new, spontaneously acting ethico-spiritual personality; and to the closeness and costingness of the connection between those means and this result. Such a soul will be persuasive because of its ever seeking and finding a purifying intermediacy, a river of death, to all its merely naturalistic self-seeking.

And it is this nobly ascetic requirement and search and end which no doubt explain what, at first sight, is strange, both in its presence and in its attractiveness, in her own case and more or less in that of all the mature and complete Saints,--I mean, the large predominance of an apparently Pantheistic element in her life, the strong emphasis laid upon an apparent Thing-Conception of God and of the human spirit.

It was clearly not alone because of the Neo-Platonist element and influence of the books she chiefly used that she, in true Greek fashion, finds and allows so large a place for conceptions of things, for images derived from the natural elements, and for mental abstractions, in her religious experiences and teachings: God appearing in them predominantly as Sun, Light, Fire, Air, Ocean; Beauty, Truth, Love, Goodness. For, after all, other elements could be found in these very books, and other writings were known to her besides these books: hence this her preference for just these elements still demands an explanation.

Nor was it ultimately because, nervously high-pitched and strained as she was by nature, she even physically craved and required an immense expansion for this her excessive natural concentration. She thus evidently longed first to move through, and to bathe and rest and spread out her psychic self, in an ample region, in an enduring state of quasi-unconsciousness, in an (as it were) innocently animal or even simply vegetative objectivity, indeed in an apparent bare element and mere Thing, before, thus rested, braced, and as it were now healthily reconcentrated, she more directly met the Infinite Concentration and Determination, the Personal Spirit, God. For, after all, hers was so heroic a spirit, and so self-distrustful, indeed self-suspecting, a heart, that a mere psychic affinity or requirement would have failed so permanently and deliberately to captivate her mind.

Nor, finally, was it ultimately because her domestic sorrows or inexperiences, or even her very psychic peculiarities and apparent lack of all even innocent sensuousness, left the images of Bride and Bridegroom, of Parent and Child, perhaps even of Friend, respectively painful, empty, or pale to her consciousness. For, even so, she could and did care, with a beautiful affectiveness of her own, for her brothers and sister, for Vernazza, her “spiritual son,” and for many a humble toiler or domestic. And indeed her whole tendency is ultimately to find God’s special home, the only one of His dwelling-places which we men really know, in the human heart of hearts.

The ultimate and determining reason was no doubt her deep spiritual experience and conviction (as vivid as ever was the psychic tendency which gave it form and additional emotional edge and momentum) that she must continuously first quench and drown her feverish immediacy, her clamorous, claimful false self, and must lose herself, as a merely natural Individual, in the river and ocean of the Thing, of Law, of that apparently ruthless Determinism which fronts life everywhere, before she could find herself again as a Person, in union with and in presence of an infinite Spirit and Personality.

Thus Greek Fate is here retained, but it is transformed through being transplaced. For Fate has here ceased to be ultimate and above the very gods, the poor gods who were so predominantly the mere projections of man’s Individualism: Fate is here intermediate and a way to God--the great God, the source and ideal of all Personality. And indeed this Fate is not, ultimately, simply separate from God; it is indeed omnipresent, but everywhere only as the preliminary and subaltern, expression, for us men, of the Divine Freedom that lies hidden and operating behind it. And we men attain to some of this Freedom only by the inclusion within our spiritual life of that Fate-passage and of our actual constant passing through it, on and on.

10. Three points where Catherine is comparatively original; and a fourth point where she is practically unique.

In the general tendency and form of her inner life and conviction Catherine has, of course, substantially nothing but what she shares with all the Mystics, in proportion as these retain Law, Ethics, and Personality; and she has much that forms part of the convictions of all Christians, indeed of all Theists. Yet in the degree and precise manner of her elaboration and application of those things, and again in the circumstances of their documentary transmission, Catherine will, I think, be found in three points comparatively original, and in a fourth point practically unique.

First she has, as we have seen, not only a strikingly persistent attitude of transcendence and detachment with regard to her psycho-physical state in general (this is indeed an attitude common to all ethically sound and fruitful Mystics: witness in particular St. John of the Cross); but she has also a most remarkable faculty and activity of discrimination between her own healthy and morbid states. Even this latter power she probably shares, in various degrees, with all such ethical-minded Mystics as nevertheless suffered from a partially maladif psycho-physical condition: witness especially St. Teresa.--Yet contemporary documentary evidence, for not only such actual variations between healthy and unhealthy states, but also for the Mystic’s knowledge of and witness to the existence of both and to the difference between the two, is necessarily rare. I know of no evidence more vivid and final, although of much that is larger in amount, than the evidence furnished by Catherine’s Vita.

And next she has both a constant, deep sense that religion never consists simply in ends but in means as well, and never ceases to use and practise the latter; and a concomitant keen apprehension of the difference between means and ends, and ever illustrates this sense of difference by the striking variety and liberty of the practical attitude which she is successively moved to take, and actually does take, towards this or that of the Institutional helps of the Church. Here again she but exemplifies a principle which underlies the practice of all the Saints, in proportion to their maturity and full normality. And indeed our Lord Himself, the Model and the King of Saints, when asked which was the greatest of the Commandments, did not answer that He could not and would not tell, since to distinguish at all between greater and lesser Commandments would be liberalism; but, on the contrary, fully endorsed and canonized such a distinction and discrimination, by actually pointing out two Commandments as the greatest, and by declaring that from them depended all the law and the prophets. Hence to organize, and more and more to find and give their right, relative place and influence to all the different things practised and believed, is as important as is the corresponding practice and acceptance of all these different things. Yet, here again, full evidence both for such fidelity and docility and for such variety and liberty of soul, with regard to the means of religion, is rare: the records of the modern Saints mostly give us but the docility; those of the Fathers of the desert generally give us but the liberty: Catherine’s Vita gives us both.

And thirdly, she is, amongst formally canonized Saints, a rare example of a contemplative and mystic who, from first to last, leads at the same time the common life of marriage and of widowhood in the world. Here again any misapprehension of the importance or significance of this fact would readily lead to folly. For it is undeniable that it has been the monastic life which, in however great variations of degree, form and lasting success, has furnished Christendom at large with an impersonation of self-renunciation sufficiently isolated, massive and continuous, to be deeply impressive upon the sluggish spiritual apprehension of the average man. And indeed self-renunciation is so universally necessary and so universally difficult; upon its presence and activity religion, and all and every kind of rational human life depend so largely; without its tonic presence they are so necessarily but a dilettantism, a delusion or an hypocrisy: that to body it forth for all men must ever remain an honour and a duty specially incumbent upon some kind of Monasticism. For it is but right, and indeed alone respectful, to the Spirit of God, so manifold and mysterious in its gifts and inspirations, that every degree and kind of healthy and heroic self-renunciation should be practised and embodied; and that special honour should attach to its most massive manifestations.

Yet our general knowledge of poor, rarely balanced human nature and our detailed historical experience respectively anticipate and demonstrate how easy it is, on this point also, to confound the means with the end, and a part with the whole. And by such confusion either self-renunciation, that very salt of all truly human existence, gets actually stapled up in one corner of the wide world and of multiform life; or this apparent stapling becomes but a pedantic pretence and would-be monopoly, the salt meanwhile losing all its savour. And these two abuses and errors easily coalesce and reinforce each other. The fact is that the total work and duty of collective humanity,--the production of a maximum of true recollection, rest and detachment, effected in and through a maximum of right dispersion, action, and attachment; above all a maximum of ethico-spiritual transformation of the world and, in and through such work, of each single worker,--is too high for any single soul, or even class or vocation, to hope to exhaust. Only by all and each joining hands and supplementing each other can all these numberless degrees and kinds of call and goodness, together, slowly, throughout the ages, get nearer and nearer to that inexhaustible ideal which lies so deep and ineradicable within the heart of each and all. And thus will the two fundamental movements of the soul, as it were its expiration and its inspiration, the going out to gather and the coming home to garner, be kept up, in various degrees, by every human soul, and each soul and vocation will as keenly feel the need of supplementation, as it will apprehend the beauty and importance of the special contribution it is called to make to the whole, a whole, here as everywhere, greater than any of its parts, although requiring them each and all.--Now Catherine suggests and illustrates such a doctrine with rare impressiveness: for the pure and efficient love of God and man, the one end and measure for us all, ever consciously dominates all and every means within her admirably balanced and unified mind; and the renunciative element is, under mostly quite ordinary exterior forms, as complete and constant as it could be found anywhere.

And lastly, her doctrine contains one conviction, or group of convictions, as original as, in such matters, one can expect to find. We get here the soul’s voluntary plunge into Purgatory, its seeking and finding relief, from the now painful pleasure of sin, in the now joy-producing pain of purification; and the soul’s discovery and acquisition, if and when in predominantly good dispositions, of its ever-fuller peace and bliss, because its ever-increasing harmonization, in freely willing the suffering intrinsically consequent upon its own past evil pleasures and the resulting present imperfections of its will. And this cycle of facts and laws here springs from, and begins with, the soul’s life Here and Now, and is held to extend (on the ever-present assumption of the substantial persistence of the spirit’s fundamental spiritual properties and laws) to the soul’s life Then and There. Thus these two lives differ with her rather in extent and intensity than in kind. I think that, taken just thus, and with this degree of explicitness, this group of convictions is practically unique. We shall study and illustrate this particular cycle of doctrine in full detail. But it is indeed time now to move on to a more systematic and general account of her teaching.