First Division: Account and Analysis of the Documents previous, and immediately subsequent to, the “Vita e Dottrina” with the “Dicchiarazione.”
I. First Stage, 1456 to September 12, 1510, all Legal.
The documents of the first stage are all legal papers, and entirely contemporary and authentic. They have to furnish the skeleton which receives its clothing of flesh from the other documents. I shall here describe only those not described in Part II, and shall refer back to that Part for those already described there.
1. Deed of 1456.
There is, first, a deed of August 27, 1456. From amongst the shares belonging to Pomera (formerly) wife to (the late) Bartolommeo de Auria (Doria), but now (Sister) Isabella, in the convent of St. David; at the instance of Andrea de Auria, her only son, her heir, and of Francesca, the mother of Catherine, daughter of Jacobo de Fiesco: two shares of the Bank of St. George (£200) are set apart, for the benefit of the said Catherine, for her marriage, if she marries according to her Mother’s advice.[360] Note how early (Catherine is not yet nine years old) her mother, Francischetta (so a note to the copy of this document, no doubt correctly, calls her, and suspects Pomera to have been her sister), is thinking of Catherine’s marriage; and how, although Catherine’s father is still alive, nothing is said as to his consent, perhaps simply because, this money coming from a maternal aunt and cousin, only the mother’s wishes are considered to be important here.
2. Catherine’s Marriage Settlement, January 1463.
There is, next, Catherine’s marriage settlement, made “at Genoa, in the quarter of St. Laurence, to wit in the sitting-room (caminata) of the residence of Francisca, formerly wife to the late Don Jacobo de Fiescho,” “with the public street in front, the house of Urbano de Negro at its right, and that of Sebastiano de Negro at its left and back”; “in the evening of Thursday, January 13, 1463”; between Giuliano Adorno, son of the late Don Jacobo, on the one hand, and Francisca, mother of Caterinetta and Jacobo and Giovanni de Fiesco, brothers of the same. Giuliano thereby pledges himself to give Catherine on their marriage, £1,000, and he “mortgages to her,” up to this amount, “a certain house of his own, situate in Genoa in the quarter of St. Agnes, with the public street in front, the house of Baldassare Adorno at the right hand” (it belonged before this to Don Georgio Adorno), “and on the other hand the public street.” And Francesca, Jacobo, and Giovanni promise to pay Giuliano, in bare money and in wedding outfit for Catherine, £400 on completion of the marriage, and another £400 in the course of the following two years; and they mortgage to him, up to this amount, the house in which the settlement is being made. Giuliano is to be free to live with his wife and her family in this same house, for these first two years after his marriage, without any payment.
At this date, then, Giuliano is already fatherless, and Catherine’s brother Lorenzo is still too young to have any legal voice in the matter. Although Catherine is, after the first two years, not guaranteed anything beyond £1,000 capital, or say £40 a year income, her outfit is a handsome one.
3. Catherine’s first Will, June 1484.
Then there is Catherine’s first Will, June 23, 1484, after twenty-one years of marriage. She is “lying” although “fully herself in mind, intellect, and memory,” yet “languid in body and weighted down by bodily infirmity, in the room, her residence, in the women’s quarters of the Hospital of the Pammatone,” which “she has inhabited for a considerable time (jamdiu).” “And knowing herself to be without children, and without hope of future offspring,” she leaves the life-interest in her marriage-dowry of £1,000 to her husband, Giuliano; bids divide up, at his death, the bulk of this capital between the Hospital and her eldest brother Jacobo (£300 to each), and her two younger brothers Giovanni and Lorenzo (£150 to each); and orders her body to be buried in the Hospital Church.[361]
Ten years, then, after her Conversion, Catherine had already been living for a considerable time within the Hospital. They do not as yet occupy a separate building, or even a set of rooms within the Hospital; and, though both live within it, they evidently occupy separate rooms in different parts of the great complex of buildings; for the room here mentioned is simply Catherine’s (camera residentiae testatricis, where residentiae must be a descriptive and not a partitive genitive), and forms part and parcel of the women’s wards (in domibus mulierum). Her absence of hope as to offspring evidently arises primarily from the life of continence she is leading. Yet this latter determination is clearly not caused by any specific knowledge of her husband’s past infidelity: for Thobia must have been now some ten years old, yet there is no kind of mention of her; whilst, later on, Catherine never fails to remember her, with one exception to be presently explained. There is no mention of nephews and nieces, doubtless because her brothers were, as yet, either unmarried or childless, or, at least, daughterless. She is fairly well off, for besides this possession of £1,000 she gets her room and board free, and Giuliano has still some property of his own more considerable than hers. And the share left by her to relations is large—£600—as over against £300 to a public charity (the Hospital), and £100, presumably, for the funeral, minor charities, and Masses. If she says nothing, as yet, as to burial in the same grave with her husband, this is doubtless because she herself appears now to be the one likely to die first.
4. Giuliano’s Will, October 1494.
There is, fourthly, the first and last Will, October 20, 1494, of “the Reverend Sir, Brother Giuliano Adorno, professing the Third Order of St. Francis, under the care of the Friars Minor Observants,” already described on pages 151, 152. The will is drawn up in the “sitting-room” (caminata) of the “habitation” of the Testator. Now the Notary, Battista Strata, in a foot-note to a first draft of an (unfinished) Will of Catherine, writes: “On the day on which I drew up Don Giuliano’s”; which words (owing to a multiplicity of converging indications) can only refer to this Will of October 2, 1494. And in this draft Catherine leaves legacies to the servants Benedetta (Lombarda) and Mariola Bastarda, as “abiding with, and dwelling in the house with, Testatrix.” It is clear then that, by now, Catherine and Giuliano are living under the same roof, in a distinct house within the hospital precincts, with two personal attendants for their common use. They will have moved, out of their separate single rooms, into this house, upon Catherine becoming Matron, in 1490. In this draft there appear also, for the first time, her brother Jacobo’s two daughters (£100 each); and her sister, the Augustinianess Limbania (£10).
5. Four minor documents, 1496-1497.
There are, next, certain minor documents of 1496-1497, which modify points of previous Wills and clear up details of her life. Thus, on June 17, 1496 Catherine signs a deed of consent to the sale of the Palace in the S. Agnese (Adorni) quarter.—On January 10, 1496, Giuliano, “sane in mind although languid in body,” orders, in a Codicil, that Catherine shall carry out, according to the directions of a certain Friar Minor, a vow made by himself to St. Anthony of Padua; notes that the Palace has been sold; and declares that she is to be free to annul, amend or diminish, according to her own judgment, his legacy of £500 to the Hospital.[362] And, in the Cartulary of the Bank of St. George, Catherine’s name appears as an Investor: on July 14, 1497 as “wife of Giuliano Adorno”; but on October 6 as “wife and testamentary heiress of the late Giuliano Adorno.”[363] These entries were considered on page 149 note. On the second occasion she orders that the Bank shall, after her death, annually pay over the interest of the fourteen shares (£1,400), now bought by her, to the Hospital of the Pammatone, in return for “the enjoyment and usufruct of a house and a greenhouse (viridario) of (within) the said Hospital,” which had been conceded to her for her lifetime. The sum (about £56 a year) thus ceded by her is a handsome one, as she had, by now, well earned the use of this house by her constant labours for the Hospital, including her matronship from 1490 to 1496. I take it that she was again thinking of Thobia; so that this relatively large sum would cover at least part of the Hospital’s expenses incurred for this poor girl.
6. Catherine’s second Will, May 1498.
This has been studied on pages 152-154.
7. Deed of Cession, September 18, 1499; and Codicil of January 1503.
These have been studied on pages 155, and 168, 169.
8. Third Will, May 21, 1506; and Codicil of November 1508.
These have been described on pages 172-174; and 175, 176.
9. Fourth and last Will, March 18, 1509; and two last Codicils, August 3 and September 12, 1510.
These have been described on pages 185-187; 202, 203; and 212-214, respectively.
We have thus described all the fifteen documents which alone still bear dates within the range of Catherine’s lifetime, and whose contemporaneousness is above all challenge. They all have the pedantic, at first sight unmoving, indeed repulsive, form of legal documents. Yet the substance of quite ten of them undoubtedly proceeds from Catherine; and they all give us a most precious, precise certainty with regard to many cardinal points of locality, date, sequence, and self-determination in her life. True, neither the day, nor even the month, of her Birth or Baptism; nor the year of her Conversion; nor the date of the beginning of her Daily Communions; nor the facts as to the rarity or frequency of her Confessions; nor the day or month of Giuliano’s death, have been recoverable by any contemporary attestations. But on other points we thus possess a series of absolutely reliable documents, ranging from 1456 to 1510, whose testimony nothing can be allowed to shake.
II. Second Stage: Five further Official and Legal Documents, 1511-1526; and Four Mortuary Dates, 1524-1587.
And this first stage of the evidence is followed by a second, as dry and legal, and as absolutely reliable, as the other; yet which still does not refer to any chronicle or notes of her life, (as either already extant or as in process of registration or radaction), but only to the fate of her remains and to certain turning-points in the lives of her disciples and eyewitnesses. I note here only those documents which fix for us the dates of the beginning of her Cultus, and which give us the latest contemporary proof for those persons being still alive.
1. We get thus the Hospital Account for the Moneys spent on the Religious Clothing of the Maid-Servant Mariola Bastarda, July 7, 1511; the entry in the Hospital Cartulary of the expenses incurred for the transport of stone and for a picture, in connection with the first opening of Catherine’s Deposito, July 10, 1512; the account, in the same book, concerning the funeral of Don Jacobo Carenzio, who had died occupying Catherine’s little house within the Hospital precincts, on January 7, 1513; a Will of the little widow-attendant Argentina del Sale, of January 15, 1522; and the Will of Don Cattaneo Marabotto, still “in good bodily and mental health,” May 11, 1526,—a document drawn up in his dwelling-place, the house belonging to his friends, the Salvagii.[364]
2. And to this group we can add four further dates, the first and last two of which are completely certain. Ettore Vernazza died on June 26 or 27, 1524; the year is fixed by the great plague epidemic which carried him off, and the month and day, by his daughter’s letter. Cattaneo Marabotto died, there is no reason to doubt, in 1528. Catherine’s Dominican cousin and close friend, Suor Tommasa Fiesca, died, eighty-six years of age, in 1534. And Battista Vernazza died, aged ninety, on May 9, 1587.[365]
Hence, up to eighteen years after her death, the two closest of Catherine’s confidants were alive; whilst one who had known her, and had been thirteen at the time of Catherine’s death, was still alive seventy-seven years after that event.
III. Third Stage: Bishop Giustiniano’s Account of Catherine’s Life, Remains, and Biography, 1537.
Our third stage is in strikingly manifold contrast to the other two. It is represented by but one single, largely vague and rhetorical, but human and directly psychological, document; and is the first that tells us of a Life.
1. The text.
Monsignore Agostino Giustiniano, Bishop of Nibio, published his Castigatissimi Annali … della Republica di Genova, in Genoa, in 1537. There, on p. 223, he tells us that he was born (of socially distinguished parents) in that city in 1470. And under the date of 1510 (p. 266) he writes: “And in the month of September, it pleased God to draw to Himself Madonna Catarinetta Adorna, who was daughter of Giacobo di Flisco, Vice-Roy of Naples for King René, and wife to Giuliano Adorno, with whom she lived many years in marital chastity. And her life, after the Divine goodness had touched her heart in the years of her youth, was all charity, love, meekness, benignity, patience, incredible abstinence, and a mirror of every virtue, so that she can be compared to St. Catherine of Siena. And all the city has participated in, and has perceived, the odour of the virtues of this holy matron, who, when rapt in the spirit, spoke, amongst other matters, of the state of the souls that are in Purgatory, things excellent and rare and worthy of being attended to by such persons as have a taste for the religious and spiritual life. Her body is deposited in the Oratory of the larger Hospital, and offers a spectacle no less admirable than venerable, appearing (come che sia) all entire with its flesh, so that she looks alive,—as though she had been placed there to-day; and yet full twenty-five years have passed since she began to lie there dead. The great consciousness of God, the special virtues, the saintly deeds, accompanied by an immense love, which were manifested by this venerable matron, would furnish matter well worthy of being recorded here. Yet we shall pass them over, for the sake of brevity; especially since a book worthy of respect (un digno libro) has been composed, concerning these things exclusively, by persons worthy of confidence (digne di fede).”
2. Its testimony.
Now this is a statement which we have every reason to trust. For Bishop Giustiniano, himself a native of Genoa, forty years of age at the time of Catherine’s death, was a man of education, of solid character, and of social position; who, throughout his long book, is uniformly truthful and generally accurate; and who had here no conceivable reason for inventing or seriously misstating the few facts alleged by him. These facts, as regards the matter in hand, are three: that she spoke of various (evidently various spiritual) matters, and, amongst these, of the state of the souls in Purgatory; that a Book was extant at the end of 1535, which concerned itself exclusively with Catherine; and that persons worthy of trust had produced this Book.
(1) Giustiniano knows of no writings of hers: she had not written, but had only “spoken excellent and rare things,” and she had done so “when rapt in the spirit.” The exaggeration here (for when in ecstasy, she spoke nothing, or but a few broken words at most) is interesting, since it probably grew up as an explanation of, and consolation for, her not having herself written anything; since during the ecstasy she would be incapable of anything but speech, and out of the ecstasy she would not remember the sights and sounds perceived during the trance. And yet, thus, what had to be written down by others, whilst she was in ecstasy, would be more precious, because more immediately “inspired,” than what she herself could have thought, remembered, and written down, in her ordinary psycho-physical condition.
(2) The Book, in existence at the end of 1535, not only contained sayings concerning the state of the souls in Purgatory, but must have contained these sayings already collected together in a separate chapter or division. For her sayings concerning this matter by no means form the larger, or the most immediately striking, part of her authentic teaching, taken as a whole; and only if already collected into a more or less separate corpus would they have been singled out in this manner.—But, if this reasoning is sound and proves the existence of the Trattato, already more or less separate as at present, similar reasoning will prove the non-existence of the Dialogo. For the Trattato, even in its present length, fills but fifteen large-print octavo pages; while the Dialogo fills ninety. It is practically inconceivable that the latter document, which can never have existed otherwise than more or less separately, should have been overlooked here, where another, so much shorter, and at first sight less authoritative, is dwelt on with emphasis.
(3) More than one hand had participated in the production of the Book. It is characteristic of the rhetorically loose phraseology of the times that the word “composto” is so used as to leave it quite uncertain whether several original contributors of materials and but one Redactor who constituted these materials into a Book are meant, or whether a succession of Redactors is already implied.
3. Surviving eyewitnesses.
Certainly by this time the three chief eyewitnesses of her later earthly existence, Carenzio, Vernazza, and Marabotto were all dead, since respectively twenty-two, eleven, and seven years. Tommasa Fiesca had died in the previous year. Only Mariola Bastarda and Argentina del Sale, her old maid-servants, were probably still alive, from among the circle of Catherine’s constant companions; and Battista Vernazza, who was but thirteen when her God-mother died, had still fifty-two years to live. Yet we have to come still later down amongst extant documents before we can get any further evidence, whether external or internal, as to which of these persons, or who else (probably or certainly) wrote down the original contemporary notes; and as to who constituted these notes, (on one or on successive occasions) into this “Giustiniano-book,” as I shall call the manuscript “Vita e Dottrina,” extant in 1535.
IV. Fourth Stage: The Two Oldest Extant Manuscripts of the “Vita e Dottrina” with the “Dicchiarazione.”
The fourth stage of evidence is, as to its contents, the most important of all: but it is, as we shall see, twelve years younger: it belongs to the years 1547, 1548. It consists of two Manuscripts, the duodecimo-volume B. 1. 29 of the University Library; and the square octavo-volume of the Archives of the Cathedral Chapter, both in Genoa. Here, at last, we are face to face with an actual Life of our Saint. I have carefully collated them both upon the ninth Genoese Edition of the Vita ed Opere, Genova, Sordi Muti: the first MS., throughout, and the second one, sufficiently to make sure of its entire dependence upon the first. I have named them MS. A and MS. B respectively.
1. Manuscript A.
1. Its date and scribe.
Manuscript A is very interesting. It opens out as follows: “Jesus. Here beginneth the book in which is contained the admirable life and holy conversation of Madonna Catherinetta Adorna.… This book was begun and written at the request of her Magnificent Ladyship, the Lady Orientina, Consort to the most magnificent and generous, illustrious Lord Adam Centurione, when she was being vexed by a grave and well-nigh incurable infirmity, during now already thirteen months, by a Religious of the Observance … on the 7th of October of the year fifteen hundred and forty-seven.”—And Catherine’s Life concludes with the words: “Laus Deo semper. This book was written at the request of the Consort, of happy memory, of the … Lord Adam Centurione, who lay vexed by a most grave infirmity, during now two years. Many a time she would sit and find consolation, in her most painful torments, by reading of the burnings (incendii) which were suffered, for so long a time, by this holy woman.… At the thirteenth hour of the fourth of February God took her to Himself. She, a few days before she passed away, begged me with tears, in the presence of the Magnificent Lady, the Lady Ginetta, her most beloved daughter, to finish that which I had undertaken to produce for her own self. And so it will be of use to the latter, and will help her to bear her pains and travails, which may the Lord alleviate, by giving her good patience.”—After this follow thirty pages; containing an Italian version of St. Bernard’s Sermon on the death of his Brother Gerard, (Chapter XXVI of his Sermons on the Canticle of Canticles). And the whole concludes with the words: “Finished in the year Fifteen hundred and forty-eight, on the thirteenth of February.”
We have here, then, very precise dates: this Life was written between October 7, 1547, and February 4-13, 1548, by a Franciscan Observant, first for the wife, and then for the daughter, of a Doge of Genoa.
2. Comparison with the Printed “Life.”
Now the whole forty-two chapters of this Life, together with the Sermon, are engrossed throughout, in a careful and upright uncial script. On close comparison with the Printed Life the differences turn out to consist, either of vocabulary and dialect, of a simply formal kind; or of additions and variations in the subject-matter, of an exceedingly trite and would-be edifying character; or of a very few additional passages of genuine importance; or of divisions, transpositions, and lacunae—the latter mostly of a significant and primitive kind; or, finally, of one highly interesting change, effected in his own copy, by the copyist himself.
(i) Vocabulary.
The Observant’s vocabulary is a curious mixture of downright (late) Latin, old French, and modern Italian. So “pagura” (paura); “in si” (se, Fr. soi); “despecto” (dispetto); “alchuna,” “anchora” (alcuna, ancora); “lingeriare” (ligare, Fr. lier); “summissa” (sommessa, Fr. soumise); “una fiata” (una volta, Fr. une fois); “dido” (digito, o. Fr. doight).[366] Some of these and such-like forms no doubt stood in his Prototype. Thus, whilst he simply copies, he writes—“pecto” and “licet”; when he makes up sentences of his own, he writes “petto” and “abenchè.” And his single Chapter XIII has, on two pages, “per il che”; but, on its last two pages, it has the elsewhere universal “perochè” (perchè).—Yet his language is, upon the whole, so uniform, whilst his sources (as we shall see) are so varied; and again his uniform language is in such marked contrast to Giustiniano’s educated Genoese Italian of 1535, and to that of the Printed Vita of 1551: that much of it, even where he is copying the substance of his Prototype, must be his own.
(ii) Worthless additions and variations, of two kinds.
The additions and variations are mostly of two kinds. They are either of a directly edificatory character. So the three pages descriptive of the devotion of the crowd, on occasion of the opening of the coffin, in the spring of 1512; the very general statement as to the miracles that occurred on that occasion; and, further back, the expansion (by this Franciscan scribe) of Catherine’s comments on (the Franciscan) Jacopone da Todi’s “la superbia in cielo c’è.”[367] And in one place, to produce edification by a sense of contrast, he adopts a touch of (doubtless legendary) gossip against Giuliano, for the heading of his Chapter XXIV runs: “How she comported herself towards her husband, who was very contrary to her temperament; and concerning her indefatigable patience in bearing with him, and even with the beatings which he gave her”;[368]—where the end marked off by me is no doubt the Observant’s own addition,—possibly, as we shall see, on the authority of Argentina del Sale.—Or these additions are introduced to minimize or ward off scandal. So when, after expanding the parallel between the conversions of St. Paul and Catherine, he adds: ‘“For He spoke, and they were (re-)made’ (Ps. xxxii, 9). But we must not curiously seek for the reason of this action”; and then proves his point by three further Biblical texts. So too when, after giving an abbreviated account of the contrast between Thommasina’s and Catherine’s rate of spiritual advancement, he again adds some Bible text and some moralizing of his own. And so again where, after reproducing the passage as to her being linked to God with a thread of gold, he expatiates, once more in Scriptural words, on the presence of filial fear and the absence of all servile fear within her. And so where, after following his Prototype (as still preserved in the Printed Life), and declaring his belief that it is reasonable and licit to believe her soul to have entered Heaven immediately after death, he continues: “Hence he who does believe this, does not lose in merit” (non demerita; an obvious litotes for “merits”), “and he who believes it not, does not offend.” In all these cases the Biblical texts appear in the Vulgate Latin.[369]
There can be no doubt that it is this slight recasting of the language, and this insertion of trite and timid moralizing of his own, which, together with the careful engrossing of his copy throughout, and its occasional pretty decoration and illumination, permitted the Observant to talk (although, even thus, in a manner most misleading for our present habits of language) of having “written this Book.”
(iii) Two genuine dates and accounts.
Yet, even amongst the passages which appear in his MS. as additional to the later texts, are two evidently genuine and suggestive dates and accounts. There is a description of Catherine’s great attack of “fire at her heart,” more full and primitive, and more definitely dated than any one of its many variants and echoes to be found in the Printed Life: the slip in the date (he writes November 11, 1506, when his own age-indications, and the position of the anecdote, clearly require 1509) will have had something to do with the strangely uncertain position of this episode in the Printed Life.[370]—And further back, in opening out the beautiful story of Marco and Argentina, he writes: “There being in the quarter of the Quay (contrada del Molo) one Marco del Sale, suffering from a cancer in the nose, who, fourteen months before his infirmity, had taken to wife a virtuous young woman named Argentina, spiritual daughter of Madonna Catherinetta, as is said above.”[371] This very precise distance of time, between that humble wedding and the poor navvy’s illness, will have been derived by the Observant from Argentina herself, probably still living at the time of his writing, even now hardly sixty years old.—Hence his long-winded addition, as to the mediation of the “spiritual daughter” (certainly Argentina), in the matter of our knowledge of Catherine’s prayer for the dying Giuliano,[372] may also have been derived from that gossipy little woman.
(iv) Divisions and transpositions.
As to the divisions and transpositions, the chief of these consist in the first six chapters of the Printed Vita appearing here broken up into (the first) ten chapters; in the MS. Chapters XI to XVI being gradually caught up by the Printed series,—indeed the MS. Chapter XVI corresponds to Chapters XVI to XVIII of the published book; in the Chapters XVII to XIX of the MS. corresponding to Chapters XX and XXI of the Print; and Chapters XX, XXI, and XXII of the MS., corresponding respectively to Chapters XXIV, XXV, and XXVII of the Print. Then for three Chapters follows considerable variation: the MS. Chapters XXIII, XXIV, and XXV hold the positions respectively of the Printed Chapters XXXVII, XLV and XLVI there. And then again there is likeness for three Chapters—MS. Chapters XXVI to XXVIII corresponding to Printed Chapters XXVIII and XXIX there. And once more three MS. Chapters (XXIX to XXXI), quite different in sequence to anything there, are followed by two Chapters (XXXII and XXXIII) corresponding to the Printed Chapters XXIX and XXX. Four more MS. Chapters (XXXIV to XXXVII), without any match, as to order, in the Printed book, are followed by two Chapters (XXXVIII and XXXIX), corresponding, respectively, to the beginning and end of Chapter XXXI there; and by Chapter XL, identical with the opening of Chapter XL and with Chapter XLI there. And, above all, Chapter XLI here, corresponds to the Dicchiarazione (Trattato) there; and is followed here by a final Chapter (XLII), made up of a bewilderingly different succession of paragraphs,—paragraphs which, in the Printed Life, stand in Chapters XLIX; XVII; and XLVIII to LII. And, whereas the first forty Chapters of this MS. average six or seven pages in length, Chapters XLI and XLII are respectively forty-five and forty-eight pages long.
(v) Lacunae.
These transpositions would alone suffice to show how complicated is the textual history of the Vita: we may have to consider some of them later on. But it is the lacunae which are especially interesting. One of these is quite certainly right, as against the printed text. Paragraphs 23 to 25 of Chapter L of the Print are wanting here. Those pages give an entirely fantastic, and formally vague, account of a supposed interior stigmatization of Catherine, and of a preposterous elongation of one of her arms,—both “facts” based explicitly upon the authority of Argentina.[373] And the circumstance of the scribe being a disciple of the stigmatized St. Francis, and the probability that Argentina was still accessible, conjoin to render the absence of these paragraphs from this MS. simply decisive against their historical character.—The longest of all the omissions, that of the Dialogo, must, even more, be explained on the ground of its non-existence at this time, or, at least, of its not being known to the Scribe, or again, of its having as yet no kind of authority. For not only does he make no use of, or allusion to this, very long, and (were it primitive) simply supreme document, but, as we shall find, quite a number of his facts contradict the Dialogo’s version of them; and we shall soon see that, had he known and esteemed the document, he would not have allowed such a defiance of it to remain without correction.
Over against these two non-appearances of spurious or secondary matter, we have to set three omissions of highly valuable material. The two interconnected, obviously entirely historical, paragraphs concerning Maestro Boerio,—his attempt to cure Catherine, and the excessive impression made upon her by his scarlet robes,[374]—are both wanting here. But we shall see that they were probably not incorporated in any Vita, till the preparation of the Printed Life of 1551.—Matters stand differently with respect to the third omission,—the beautifully vivid, inimitably daring and characteristic, Chapter XIX, containing Catherine’s dialogue with the Friar, who, according to the well-informed Parpera, was a Franciscan Observant.[375] It is impossible to hold that this, most historical and well-preserved, story did not stand in the Observant’s Prototype, or that it was otherwise unknown to him; its omission is doubtless deliberate and “prudential.”—An interesting instance of demonstrable omission on his part, is indeed furnished also by his version of the beautiful story of Suor Tommasa’s life: his abbreviation of it is so obvious and yet so unintelligent, that only a reference to the full account, which lay certainly before him and is still preserved in the Printed Life, makes any satisfactory sense of what he has retained.[376]
3. Modification from a tripartite scheme to a quatripartite one.
But the most interesting of all the differences between this MS. A of 1547 and the Printed Life of 1551 is another group of omissions, connected, as these are, with the one single modification introduced into his own text by the Scribe himself. The whole of the matter corresponding to the Printed Life’s Chapter XLIV (all but the first seven lines) and that corresponding to the first three paragraphs of its Chapter XLIX, which treat consecutively, and with an inimitable vividness and a daring, unreflective truthfulness, of her most unusual self-revelations to her Confessor Don Marabotto,[377] is omitted—possibly, again, in part at least, from fear of scandal; but more probably because, even at this time, this (the most private and consecutive) contribution to the Life, still existed separately, perhaps from all, and presumably from most, copies of the Vita then in circulation. And such a copy will have been the Observant’s Prototype.—Only when he had finished copying out his manuscript, will he have discovered that, if he would take any, even though silent, account of that contribution, which, by now, will have become known to him, he must, at all costs, break up and seriously modify one of his chapters. We have already studied the treble, most solemn affirmation, by Catherine and her Confessor themselves, in that Printed Chapter XLIV, as to her twenty-five years of spiritual loneliness and guidance by God alone;[378] and we have seen that (since we cannot place her Conversion before 1474, nor the beginning of her later practice of Confession after 1499) we are forced (if we take her words in their obvious sense, as applying to Confession as well as to Direction, and assume her First Convert-Period, the penitential time, to have been accompanied throughout by repeated Confessions) to make this first Period very short.
Now the volume of 1547, 1548, consists throughout of paper, all but the first three leaves and the tenth leaf, which are of parchment. The first leaf remains blank; the second contains the Observant’s Preface on its obverse; the third holds, on its two sides, the first two pages of the Vita. That Preface was certainly written before all the rest, or at least certainly during the lifetime of Donna Orientina Centurione, i.e. before February 4, 1548; nor does anything in those first two (parchment and paper) pages of text suggest that they are an insertion subsequent to the following (paper) pages. At first, then, the copy will have consisted of three parchment leaves, and then of nothing but paper leaves; and the Observant will have made the last of these parchment leaves the sole and opening parchment leaf of the text of the Book.
But matters stand differently with the tenth leaf, pp. 19, 20 of the MS., which begins with the words “bisogna, sono apparecchiata a confessar”—“(if) necessary, I am prepared to confess my sins in public” (Catherine’s words, on occasion of her Conversion); and ends with “(abru) savano insino al core. Poi fù tirata al Petto”—“Love, with those penetrating rays of its own, which burnt her, even to the heart. She was then drawn to the Breast” (narrative words which, in the scheme of her Life that follows upon the Conversion-story, mark the transition from one of this scheme’s stages to another).
Now here we have clear indications that these two parchment pages hold a modified text. For that last parchment-leaf word “Petto” is picked up, on the paper continuation, by “Pecto,” the ordinary form of the Observant’s Prototype: see his page 81. And the whole book (all but this parchment leaf and its highly restricted effects), still attributes four years to her First Convert-Period, her Penitential, Purgative Stage.
Indeed, this solitary parchment leaf itself still allows us to trace, (as though the leaf were a Palimpsest), both this, the original, length of that Period, and the fact of that Period having then been the first of three, and not, as now, of four such periods.—For this leaf, in finishing up the manuscript’s fourth chapter, the history of her Conversion,[379]—declares that “this sight (of her sins) and this contrition (for them) lasted fourteen months, during which she went on confessing herself, continually increasing her self-accusation (aggravando la colpa); after the passing of which months, all sadness was lifted from her, nor did she have any memory of her sins,—as though she had cast them into the depths of the sea.” And then, in the opening of the fifth chapter,[380] the scheme and conspectus of her Convert Life runs as follows. She is first “drawn to the feet of Christ” and abides there “one year until she had satisfied her conscience by Contrition, Confession, and Satisfaction.”—“She next felt herself drawn, with St. John, to repose on the Breast of her Loving Lord.… The sight of the sins committed by her against God would come to her, so that she would be, as it were, wild (arrabbiava) with grief, and would lick the ground with her tongue; and in this wise she appeared to derive relief for her tempestuous feelings (affannato cuore). And she abode thus for three years, during which she was, as it were, wild with grief and love, with those penetrating rays of its own, which burned her to the very heart.[381] She was then drawn to the Breast”—which last parchment-leaf word is taken up by the next, ordinary paper-leaf: “Breast; and here she was shown the Heart of Christ.… And she abode many years with this impression of His burning Heart.—And then she was drawn (still) further up, that is, to the Mouth; and there she was found worthy of being kissed by the true Solomon.… And she no more (directly) recognized her human acts, whether they had been done well or evilly; but she saw all in God.”[382]
We see here how the original four years of her First Period, which are still retained elsewhere by the Printed Vita,[383] have been broken up by the scribe of this Manuscript into two shorter (first and second) Periods, of fourteen months (one year), and three years respectively; how the copyist, both in his first apportionment of length to his new First Period, “fourteen months,” and in his second assignment, now of one year (since he has to divide up the original Four years so as to get them again by addition, “one year” and “three years”), leaves us two curious echoes of the “Four” of his Prototype; how his amended description of his new second Period is still largely the old Penitential description, for she still sees her sins (a sight which is here an anachronism), and she is still prostrate on the ground (a prostration which exactly suits the Feet, but in no way the Breast of Christ); how the Observant has been half-hearted and clumsy, for he has now left two successive Breast-Periods, hardly differentiated from each other; and how he was able to shift (though not to change) the original single Breast-Period (now his second Breast-Period), because of its conveniently vague time-note of “many years.” All this laborious, yet timid, incomplete and ineffectual change, thus forced upon an evidently long-established, toughly resisting composition, can only have taken place under some severe pressure of evidence; and the root-causes of the change are somehow connected with the question as to the duration, in her life, of the perception and Confession of her sins. For the Confession of her sins, which (in the old scheme) extended over four years, is now restricted to fourteen months or one year; and if contemplative and restful love are now anticipated (from the original second Period) in the new second Period of three years, yet an intense sight of her particular sins, piercing contrition for them, and a complete prostration on the ground, are all indeed retained, from the original Feet-Period, for this new second Period, but Confession has disappeared from these three years.
Now we have precisely such absolutely constraining evidence in Marabotto’s treble chronicle of Catherine’s own words, with regard to the twenty-five years during which she was led by God’s spirit alone. It is clear then that the most important of Marabotto’s notes did not exist incorporated with, or at least had not originally formed part of, and did not dominate, the scheme of the Vita which the Observant had before him; and that, upon his later knowledge of, or pondering over them, he understood Catherine’s words to have applied, not simply to Direction but to (at least at all habitual) Confession as well.
2. Manuscript B.
1. Its very primitive heading.
Manuscript B starts indeed with a heading demonstrably older than that of MS. A. For its “De la Mirabile Conversione et Vita de la q(uondam) donna Catherinetta Adorna” is more primitive, because of its “the late,” which indicates a time of writing not yet far removed from the date of her death; its “Donna,” less honorific than the “Madonna” of the other MSS.; and, above all, its giving “Conversione” before “Vita,” instead of “Conversatione” after “Vita,” since thus we are assured of “Conversione” being no slip of the pen for “Conversatione,”—Conversion coming necessarily before, and holy Conversation coming after, in consequence of, an admirable life.—And this title will originally have headed a booklet containing simply the story of her Conversion and early Convert life, say, up to the end of Chapter VI of the Printed Vita, p. 17b; or, since even the “et Vita” of this title reads like a later addition, only up to the end of the present printed Chapter II, p. 6c. I think there is no doubt that we have here the original heading of a tract put together on occasion of the first public Cultus, in the summer of 1512.
2. Body of MS. B dependent upon MS. A.
But the body of MS. B is demonstrably later than, indeed dependent upon, MS. A; for here the scribe silently adopts the modification, effected by the writer of MS. A in his own text, with regard to doubling the Breast-Period; and yet, even here, we have still the Observant’s “Petto” for the first period, and the “Pecto” of the Observant’s Prototype for the second period.[384] “Come” now appears throughout, in lieu of MS. A’s “Como.” And Giuliano’s name is omitted (all but once, in Catherine’s mouth) in the Husband-Chapter.[385]
3. Order, division, numeration of the Chapters.
The order, division, and numeration of the Chapters is identical with those of MS. A, all but that Chapter XXXIX of MS. A (equivalent to the unimportant pp. 82b-83a of Chapter XXXI in the Printed Life) is here omitted. No Chapter numbered XXXIX appears here, but, after a small break behind Chapter XXXVIII, the Trattato follows, as Chapter XL.
4. Laceration at end of Manuscript.
And this Chapter XL is abruptly broken off in the midst of a penultimate paragraph: “et per gratia li sono monstrati et” are the last words. The authentication of the MS., appended immediately after this rough ending, shows this laceration to be at least as old as 1672. Nor is it a case of some complete set or sets of leaves being lost, since one leaf has had to be torn off, from the still remaining other half-sheet.[386] The last part, no doubt, contained the end of the Trattato and the Passion-Chapter; and will, like its Prototype, MS. A, have been without a trace of the Dialogo. Indeed I suspect that it was the latter circumstance which, when once this elaborate composition had come to be prized, gave rise to the, surely deliberate, destruction of the evidence for its absence here. MS. A will, in that case, have been saved from a similar fate, by its special appropriation to a powerful family; by its superior, uncial kind of script; and, above all, by its important contemporary date and dedication at the end.
V. Fifth Stage: Manuscript C.
Our next, deeply interesting stage, is represented by one single MS. in the University Library, Genoa,—catalogued as B. VII 17. It is a careful copy, made throughout by the Protonotary Angelo Luigi Giovo, and subscribed by himself on April 20, 1671, of, as he there says, “Another ancient MS. received from the Signora ——, Matron of the Great Hospital, who declared that she had herself received it from the Nuns of the Madonna delle Grazie; and which is believed, with great probability, to be the MS. copied by Ettore Vernazza and sent to the Venerable Donna Battista, his daughter. The book, in view of the antiquity of the paper, of the character of the binding of the copy, and of the other peculiarities, has been judged by experts to belong to the above-mentioned Period.” The reader will soon see why I place (not necessarily the execution, but the text of) the MS. thus copied by Giovo, before the printing of the Vita in 1551, and will thus be helped to a decision as to the “greatly probable” attribution to Ettore Vernazza.
1. Differences in text of MS. C from MSS. A and B.
Giovo’s Copy (my MS. C) follows, up to the end of its Chapter XLI (the Trattato), the division, number, and sequence of the chapters, and the peculiarities of the text, of MS. A, with an all but unbroken closeness: even the slip, of 1506 (for 1509), in the date of the great attack of “fire at heart,” reappears here as it stands there (fol. 33v of MS. C, compared with p. 193 of MS. A). But the “Petto” and “Pecto,” of respectively the first and second Breast-Periods in MSS. A and B, read here, in both cases, as simply “Petto” (MS. C, fol. 3).—There is but one at all remarkable addition in this, the Vita-part of the MS. In the account of the refusal to accept Catherine on the part of the Nuns of the very Convent where, as we shall see, the Prototype copied by Giovo was no doubt written, there occur the new words: “Although her Confessor was instant with them (to take her), knowing her, as he did, better than the Nuns knew her” (MS. C, fol. 1v).—And, in concluding further on (on its fol. 71v seq.) with the Passion-Chapter, as this stands in MS. A (Chapter XLII), a Chapter which here (for a reason to be given in a minute) is not numbered, the MS. still follows closely (although now with a few generally unimportant additions, omissions, and transpositions of paragraphs), the matter, order, and literary form of MS. A.—Only one, formally slight, but materially significant, difference exists here between Giovo’s text and the Printed Life. The Printed Life, p. 142b, reads: “After this, she felt a hard nail at heart”; to this MS. C adds (fol. 72r) “so that she seemed nailed to the Cross.” Neither set of words occurs in MSS. A and B. MS. C here gives us something unlike Catherine’s, but very like Battista’s, special spirit.
2. The great addition: the “Dialogo,” Part First.
(1) The “Dialogo” originally no longer.
But it is in the pages intermediate between the Trattato and the Passion (foll. 53v to 71v), that lies the interest of this MS. For here we get, for the first time, the Dialogo, although, as yet, only its eventual First Part (pp. 185-225 in the Printed Life). Chapter XLI (the Trattato) has just finished, by only six lines short of its printed form, with the words “because that occupation with Himself which God gives to the soul, slight though it be, keeps the soul so occupied, that it exceeds everything, nor can the soul esteem anything else.” And immediately next there come (53v) the title-words: “Here follows a certain beautiful Allegory (Figura) which this holy soul institutes (fà) concerning the Soul and the Body.”—The eventual division into (17) chapters is still absent, and the work seems, at this time, to have been planned to be no longer than it is here. For it concludes with the emphatic climax: “Now the Spirit, having come to hold this creature in this manner, declared: ‘I am determined henceforth no more to call her a human creature, because I see her (to be) all in God, without any (mere) humanity.’” For these words simply re-cast the last words of the scheme of her entire life, given by the Vita: “She said: ‘I live no more, but Christ lives in me.’ Hence she could no more recognize the quality of her human acts, in themselves—whether they were good or evil; but she saw all in God” (Pr. L., p. 6c).
(2) The “Dialogo’s” two stages, each comprising two steps, and their suggestions in the “Vita.”
Now the Dialogo, as here given, consists of two chief stages, and each stage contains two steps.
Chapters I to VI give the first stage—the history of a soul in a state of moral and spiritual decline and contraction: all this, in the form of a Dialogue between the Soul, the Body, and Self-Love.—Throughout this first stage Self-Love holds dominion. But, during the first step, the Soul (although it already distinguishes, with regard to what it intends to practise, between simply avoiding grave sin and striving after perfection) still continues fairly determined not to commit sin, and still leads the Body. During the second step, on the contrary, even this simple avoidance of grave sin has ceased, for now the Body leads the Soul. Thus first the Soul, and then the Body, each leads the other during one step, for “one week.”—These two steps or weeks stand for the two lustres of Catherine’s pre-Conversion-Period, for the lukewarm, and then the positively dissipated, lustre respectively. Chapters I to III give the first week, equivalent to the first five years of her married life, 1463 to 1468; and Chapters IV to VI give the second week, and correspond to the second five years, 1468 to 1473.[387]
Chapters VII to XXI describe the second stage, that of Conversion and Transformation, which (notwithstanding its appearance of instantaneous and complete attainment of its end) is here presented as, in reality, by far the longer and the more difficult, although the alone fruitful and happy one. Chapters VII to XIII describe the first step. Chapters VII to IX give us the Soul’s longing for Light; the spark of Pure Love shown to it, on its conversion-day; and a long address by the Soul to the Body and Self-Love, and the answers of these two.[388] In this address the Soul for the first time speaks of “the Spirit.”[389] Chapter X makes the Soul for the first time address “the Lord,” “O Signore,” on the one hand: and her “Humanity” “O Umanità,” on the other.[390] In Chapters XI and XII the Soul stands alone, face to face with the Lord, who appears to it in two successive visions,—first as Christ alive and walking along all stained with blood from head to foot; and, on a later occasion, as Christ evidently motionless and presumably dead, with His five fountain-wounds, which are sending drops of burning blood towards mankind. And these two visions, so carefully kept apart, doubtless typify the two periods of Catherine’s Convert life,—the two steps of her second stage: the moving, scourged and cross-bearing Christ stands for the active penance of the first four years or fourteen months; and the motionless, crucified Christ stands for the passive purification of the rest of her life.[391] Chapter XIII has no dialogue, but describes her active penances and good works, and mentions the Soul, Humanity, and the Spirit.[392]
And then, up to the end, in Chapters XIV to XXI, which give us the second step, the dialogue reappears, but now no more between the three Dramatis Personae (Soul, Body, and Self-Love) of the pre-Conversion-Period; but between the two interlocutors of the post-conversion time (the Spirit and Humanity).[393] And there is here but one sporadic mention, an invocation, of “the Lord” (p. 214c).
Thus only after its Conversion does the Soul itself become aware of, or does it name, either the Spirit or its “Humanity”; and only after the two successive Christ-Visions do these two new experiences and conceptions entirely replace the three old ones of Soul, Body, and Self-Love. In a word, we have here, carefully carried through, the scheme, so clearly enunciated by Battista Vernazza in 1554, of the two successive divisions effected by God in Man, during the process of Man’s purification: first, the separation (division) of the Soul from the Body; and then the separation (division) of the Spirit from the Soul.[394] And, in strict accordance with this scheme, the Soul here becomes conscious of being, in its upper reaches, Spirit, only on the day that it has broken away from the domination of the downward-tending Body, and of Self-Love. And once the Soul has thus affirmed the Spirit and denied the Body, the “Body” and the “Soul” cease to be directly mentioned; the one term “Humanity” now takes the Soul’s and the Body’s place. For now the Soul, in so far as it has still not completely identified itself with the Spirit, does not any more attach itself directly to the Body and the Body’s pleasures,—to, as it were, the upper fringe of the Body,—but to the sensible-spiritual consolations which are the necessary concomitants and consequences of the Soul’s affirmation and acceptance of the Spirit,—hence, as it were, to the lower fringe of the Spirit. “I would have thee know,” the Spirit now says to Catherine, “that I fear much more an attachment to the spiritual than to the bodily taste and feeling. Man goes his way ‘feeding’ his spiritual sensuality upon the things which proceed from God, and yet these things are a very poison for the Pure Love of God.”[395]
3. The “Dialogo” intensifies or softens certain narratives and sayings given by the “Vita.”
Now these interesting forty pages of the first Dialogo derive (with the sole exception of three little touches) their entire historical materials from the Vita e Dottrina, and, indeed, from but those parts of this corpus which already appear in MSS. A and B, and in the previous pages of MS. C itself. But all these materials have been re-thought, re-pictured, re-arranged throughout, by a new, powerful, and experienced mind, a mind dominated by certain very definite, schematic conceptions as to the constitution of the human personality, the nature of holiness, and the laws of its growth, and which is determined to find or form concrete examples of these conceptions, in and from the life of Catherine.
(1) Cases of intensifying.
There are, first, five cases of the intensifying of authentic Vita-accounts, intensifications necessary, or at least ancillary, to the scheme underlying the whole Dialogo-composition.
As to the pre-conversion sinfulness, during her second “week,” Catherine’s soul is made to say: “In a short time I was enveloped in sin; and, abiding in that snare, I lost the grace (of God) and remained blind and heavy, and from spiritual I became all earthly.”[396] Yet there is no evidence that Catherine, even at that time, ever committed grave sin; nor does there exist an authentic saying of hers which, however intense its expressions of contrition, conveys an impression really equivalent to this passage.—As to the form of her contrition, “so greatly was this soul alienated (from her own self) and submerged in the sight of the offence of God, that she no longer seemed a rational creature, but a terrified animal.”[397] Yet the earlier accounts, which certainly do not minimize here, keep well within the limits of normal, though intense, human feeling and expression of feeling.—As to the forcible means taken by her to overcome her fastidiousness in the matter of cleanliness and in the sense of taste, “she would put the impurities into her mouth, as though they had been precious pearls.”[398] Yet the original versions, drastic enough in all conscience, nowhere imply that there was any such relish, even of a merely apparent kind.—As to her post-conversion poverty, the Spirit says to her: “Thou shalt work to provide for thy living,” and the narrative declares: “The Spirit made her so poor, that she would have been unable to live, had not God provided for her by the means of alms.”[399] Yet we know from her wills that (though the Hospital authorities gave her free lodging, and perhaps, at first, free board as well) she retained, up to the last, an appreciable little income, and herself conferred many an alms out of these her own means.
Nevertheless, in each of these cases, the Dialogo exaggeration is suggested by some phrase or word in the Vita which has been taken up into the new context and medium of this other mind, and has come to mean something curiously (though often in form but slightly) different from that older account.—Thus, in this fourth instance, the Vita-accounts had said: “nel principio di sua conversione, molto si esercitò.” “Viveva ancora molto sottomessa ad ogni creatura.” “Quantunque ella fosse in tutto dedicata ed occupata negli esercizii di esso Spedale, nondimeno mai volle godere ne usare una minima cosa di quello per viver suo; ma, per quel poco che abbisognava, si serviva della povera sostanza sua: onde ben si scorgeva che il suo dolce Amore era quello il quale operava in lei ogni cosa per vera unione.” “Si esercitò nelle opere pie, cercando i poveri, essendo condotta delle Donne della Misericordia, e le davano danari ed altre provvisioni.”[400] The Dialogo-writer has worked all this up as follows: “Io (lo Spirito) ti avviso primieramente voler io che tu pruovi che cosa sia esser ubbidiente, acciò tu divenghi umile e soggetta ad ogni creatura; ed acciochè ti possi esercitare, lavorerai per provedere al viver tuo.” “Primieramente la fece tanto povera, che non avrebbe potuto vivere, se Dio non l’avvesse provveduta per via di limosine. Poi quando le Signore della Misericordia l’addimandavano per andare a’poveri … ella sempre con loro andava.”[401] I have italicized the words taken over by the Dialogo. Thus her own poor substance (i.e. her own modest income), and the money given to her by the Misericordia-ladies for distribution among the poor, becomes a substance, alms and money, given to herself as to a poor person.
The fifth case concerns the affections. In the Vita-proper nothing is more characteristic of Catherine, up to the spring of 1509, than her swift and deep affective sympathy, and the fearless forms of its manifestation. True, Catherine “would” (certainly up to 1490, perhaps more or less up to 1496) “abide at times,” up to six hours on end, “as though dead.” But, “on hearing herself called, she would suddenly arise and betake herself, in answer, to whatever was required of her, however small a service this might be.” And indeed “she served the sick with most fervent affection:” thus she attended throughout a week upon a poor pestiferous woman; and at the end, “unable further to contain herself, kissed” the dying woman “upon the mouth with great affection of heart, and so caught the pestilential fever, and well-nigh died of it.”[402]—Then, too, there is the Vita’s quite general, indeterminate remark, “she (Catherine) felt no pain at the deaths of her (two elder) brothers and of her sisters” (the latter should be “sister,” unless, perhaps, a sister-in-law is included) in 1502.[403] But her extant wills have shown us how actively thoughtful she remained, even in 1506 and 1509, for her brother, nephews and nieces, and humble retainers; and the deeply affectionate scenes with Marco and Argentina occurred between 1503 and 1506. Marco, the poor navvy, was dying “of a cancer in the face,” and Catherine, at Argentina’s asking, “as though with prompt obedience, betook herself to him”; and he “threw his arms round Catherine’s neck, and, pressing her with sobs, seemed unable to have done with weeping.[404] And then, still weeping, with great tenderness he besought Catherine to adopt his wife as her spiritual daughter,” and Catherine did so, and “loved this spiritual daughter much.”[405]—Only in the very late actions, the change as to her burial-place (Will of March 1509), and the exclusion of all her attendants on January 10, and of most of them on and after August 27, 1510,[406] are there indications of any absence or renunciation of tender and spontaneous human affection.
But here again the Dialogo both closely presses and profoundly changes the original accounts. For here the Spirit declares to her: “in these exercises” of work among the poor, “I shall keep thee … as though thou wast dead. I will not allow thee to make friends with any one, nor that thou shouldst have any particular affection for any relative; but I want thee to love all men, and this without affection, both poor and rich, both friends and relatives. I do not want thee, in thine interior, to know one person from the other, nor would I have thee go to any one from motives of friendship; it will suffice to go when thou art called.” And thus “she went, when the Misericordia-ladies asked her to go into dwellings that would have frightened away all ordinary mortals. But she, on the contrary, deliberately touched these sick (voleva toccarli), for the purpose of giving them some refreshment to soul and body.”[407]—Note how skilfully the call, and the going at the call, the affection and its spontaneous manifestations in the original accounts, have been altered and crossed by the Dialogue’s re-statement.—Here again we are strongly reminded of Battista, in her letter to the Signora Andronica in 1575, encouraging her to “abandon all things,” her children included, “interiorly,” and “to mortify the most pleasing consolation which arises from the children’s company.” Indeed, already in 1554, Battista has, in one of her own Colloquies, refused to accept every avoidable consolation arising from her pure election by God.[408] Only by such a reference of these Dialogo-passages to Battista, the many-sided, the ever-affectionate daughter and public-spirited woman, can we come to see them in a wider context; indeed only thus can they cease to be profoundly repulsive.
(2) Cases of softening.
There are two instances of the softening of (doubtless authentic) doctrinal sayings given by the Vita-proper. Her evidently impulsive exclamation: “I would not have grace or mercy, but justice and vengeance exercised against the malefactor,”—has here become: “She did not attach any importance to her sins, on the ground of the punishment awaiting them, but solely because they had been enacted against the infinite goodness of God.”—And her bold declaration: “If any creature could be found which did not participate in the divine goodness, that creature would be as malignant as God is good,” here reads: “The soul bereft of the Divine love becomes well-nigh as malignant as the Divine love is good and delightful. I say ‘well-nigh,’ for God shows it a little mercy.”[409] The proclamation of some moral good even in lost souls, is thus weakened to an admission of some consolation in the latter.
4. Re-statement of the Conversion-experiences of March 1474.
But it is in the matters of Catherine’s Conversion in the Convent-Chapel, on March 22, 1474, and of the Vision of the Bleeding Christ in the Palazzo Adorno, soon after, that the Dialogo’s transformation of the Vita-accounts reaches its highest interest. I give it here as the chief of many such re-statements which I have carefully analyzed.
Hence D. gives but one exclamation as to “world” and “sins,” and constructs this out of the two (mutually differing) exclamations of the same kind given by V., the second of which now stands in V. after the Bleeding-Christ episode. Whilst spacing all out, D. keeps to the order and context of V.’s paragraphs. And D. utilizes the curious, silent change from the moving Christ to the affixed Christ in V.’s account of the single vision in the Palace, so as to constitute two perfectly distinct visions. The Cross of both these doublets of V., (the “Croce” which, in the first part of V.’s single account, is “in spalla,” on His shoulder; and the Cross which, in the second part of the same account, He is nailed to), has, in D., disappeared from both separate visions. And yet the Cross hovers about the first vision, here transformed into a “carico alle spalle,” a load upon Catherine’s shoulders,—an oppression on her mind; and is presupposed in the second vision, since those “five fountains sending forth burning blood” are, of course, the wounds of Christ, whilst He hangs affixed to the Cross as described in V.’s second part. And the “Signore piovendo tutto sangue,” and the “rivoli di sangue, sparso per amore, il che accese nel cuore tanto fuoco,” of V., have, in D., become “quelle cinque fontane di Christo, le quali mandavano goccie d’affuocato sangue e di acceso amore.”—This fountain-imagery is derived from numerous authentic sayings and “viste” of Catherine as to the “living Fount (fonte) of the divine goodness,” or “of infinite love,” and “the clear waters coming from the divine fount.” The very word “fountain” (fontana) occurs in one of V.’s descriptive passages; and the idea appears in Catherine’s address to Our Lord at the well (pozzo) of Samaria, and in her thereupon receiving refreshment of soul, by the gift of “a little drop (gocciola)” of that divine water.[410] And the fountains are here made to proceed from a ray of love; and this again comes from numerous authentic sayings of hers: in one case the “raggio d’amore” appears split up into several rays: “raggi … affocati di divino amore.”[411]
5. Three new authentic details.
And yet these remarkable forty pages furnish us with three fresh statements or implications of detail, respectively too precise, vivid and verisimilar and too little obvious, to be easily attributable to any but a new and authentic source of information. There is the vividly precise information that, during Catherine’s actively penitential period, “the love of God, wishing that she should lose all relish in what she ate, made her always carry some epatic aloes and pounded agaric about with her; and whenever she suspected that one kind of her food was about to give her more pleasure than another, she would furtively put a little of that most bitter compound upon it, before eating it.” There is the formal declaration that “she also went to the poor of San Lazaro.” And there is the statement, already noticed, that, after her conversion, she had “to work to provide for her living,” and “that she would have been unable to live, unless God had provided for her by way of alms.”[412]
Now the first statement should be compared with Battista Vernazza’s, similarly precise, pharmaceutical detail as to the cassia used by her father in doctoring the poor in 1493, recorded by Battista, nearly ninety years later, in 1581:[413] Battista would, then, have been quite capable of remembering and recording that aloes-and-agaric detail some seventy years after the event. As to the second statement, I have already given the various solid reasons which point to Catherine’s co-operation with Battista’s father in his work amongst the Pestiferous, as far back as the year 1493.[414] And as to the third statement (in apparently direct conflict with the declaration in the Vita-proper, that, although entirely devoted to the service of the Hospital, she never would enjoy or use the slightest thing belonging to it for her own living[415]) the Wills prove to us that, however exaggerated be the language of D., it, and not V., is here substantially in the right. For, though she could have afforded to live in modest style, on her own little income, she did, as a matter of fact, hold her little house rent-free from the Hospital, in return for her services to it. Here also Battista would have known the precise facts from her father, who had himself drawn up or witnessed three documents referring to these matters.
6. Battista Vernazza, the author of this first “Dialogo.”
The reader will by now be concluding with me, that all these peculiarities of the Dialogo point to one person as its author: Battista Vernazza. And all its other circumstances and characteristics make for the same conclusion.
(1) Particular circumstances.
There is the place. For the original of MS. C., in which appear the first traces, (this whole first part), of D., came from Battista’s own Convent; and thus a document which, in its later narrative part, contained, as we shall find, so much primary matter due to Vernazza the father, and so much secondary composition and arrangement due to Vernazza the daughter; and which, in its dialogue part, gave much original literary work due to a Vernazza: would easily (no doubt soon after Battista’s death), come to be considered as the work and the copying of Ettore Vernazza alone. And there is the date. For if this first part was written in 1548, 1549, Battista would have been fifty or fifty-two years old. And we have already considered writings of hers, written, with equal subtlety of psychological distinctions and even greater vigour of style, in 1554, 1555, and even in 1575, at seventy-eight and eighty-four years of age.[416]
There is, too, the form, so curiously schematic and abstract, and, in part, far-fetched, yet based upon a minute, most ingenious use of scriptural texts. Thus those two “weeks,” (symbols for the two, respectively lukewarm and sinful, lustres), are no doubt suggested by the “seventy weeks” which “the man Gabriel” declares to Daniel “shall be shortened upon the Jewish people, that transgression may be finished, and everlasting justice may be brought and vision may be fulfilled”;[417] and by Jacob’s twice seven years of servitude under Laban, and by Laban’s words “make up the week of days of this match.”[418] We thus get Catherine’s two weeks (of years) of servitude to sin, and her two successive “matches” or alliances, entered into between her soul and body under the influence of self-love. We found a similar minute ingenuity in Battista’s use of Scripture in 1554.[419]
And there is a complex, abstract, astonishingly self-consistent psychology running through the whole, and one simply identical with the psychology treated by Battista as more or less a point of revelation to herself in 1554. And, partly as effect or as cause of that psychology, the Dialogo has a painfully great, at times downrightly repulsive, insistence upon detachment from emotional feeling, both in intercourse with fellow-creatures, and in spiritual commerce with God, that is simply identical, in its parallelism, range, depth, and doctrinal setting, with the position which Battista takes up in her Colloquii of 1554.[420]
Again we get here a prominent and persistent occupation with the historic Christ and His passion, that are as unlike Catherine’s as they are identical with Battista’s spiritual trend. For, during her Conversion-Vision, Catherine here sees that “burning love which Our Lord Jesus Christ manifested when upon earth, from His Incarnation up to His Ascension”; and this corresponds precisely with Battista’s sight (vista), in 1554, of “the Infinite Love manifested unto men, in and by the life of Christ, at the Nativity and at the Ascension.” And the Christ-Vision here becomes two separate apparitions; that of the Crucified Christ is declared “greater than” that of the Walking Christ; and there is an insistence upon “those five Fountains,” an image derived indeed from Catherine’s “living fountain of Goodness, which participated with the creature,” but which, in Catherine, is conceived in connection with God and metaphysically, and here is transferred to the historic and crucified Christ, in close keeping with Battista’s whole emphatic Christo-centrism.[421]
And, finally, we find here certain daring anthropomorphisms without any full parallel in Catherine’s sayings, but entirely matched by expressions of Battista. God is here not as, in Catherine’s manner, Himself an irradiating Love, but is “ever standing with burning rays of love in His hand, to inflame and penetrate the hearts of men,” a combination of the Thing-imagery dear to Catherine (for Love is here still a luminous, burning substance), and of the human, Personal picturing prominent with Battista (for God here has a hand, in which He holds that substance). This latter picturing (probably in 1550) is not unlike the more spiritual anthropomorphism of “the Increate Heart” of God, used by Battista in 1575 a passage already exceeded here, in the Dialogo, by the words, “God showed her the love with which He had suffered”—words which, if pressed, would introduce suffering into the divine nature Itself.[422]
(2) General considerations.
All these cumulative reasons of detail will be indefinitely fortified by what I shall have to say as to the character of the subsequent parts of the Dialogo, and in proof of these parts and the first instalment being by one and the same author. But, meanwhile, we can press this further general consideration, that only a person with considerable traditional authority in matters concerning Catherine, and yet a person, not a direct eyewitness or full contemporary, hence an individual without any additional information, and unhampered by the (otherwise necessary) regard for the sensitiveness of still living contributors to the original biography, can possibly have written such a document. For this production, when it first appears complete, in the first Printed Vita of 1551, will there occupy quite one third of the whole book; and yet, whilst incorporating practically all, and only all, the material of those other two-thirds (the Trattato alone excepted), it gives to everything a fresh grouping and setting, colour and atmosphere, drift and character. Only a remarkable, powerful mind; a writer skilled in mystical subjects; one with leisure for such a careful composition; one, too, sufficiently in sympathy with Catherine to be attracted to, and helped through, the difficult task; a person living now, thirty-eight years after Catherine’s death, in an environment of a kind to preserve her memory green: all these conditions must, more or less, have met and been realized in the writer of this curious, forcible book.—And Battista, the God-daughter of the heroine of the work, and the eldest, devoted daughter of the chief contributor to the already extant biography; a Contemplative with a deep interest in, and much practical experience of, the kind of spirituality to be portrayed and the sort of literature required; a Nun, during thirty-eight years, in the very Convent where Catherine’s sister (one of its foundresses) had lived and died, and where Catherine herself had desired to live and where her Conversion had taken place; a woman who was but thirteen at the time when Catherine died, after nine years of much suffering and seclusion, and who, even now but fifty-one years of age, had outlived all the close friends and original chief biographers of Catherine by thirty-five, twenty-four, and twenty years: Battista, and Battista alone, united in her own person all these necessary conditions. And it will have been the sensitively original and strongly synthetic cast of Battista’s mind which made the strangely fragmentary, repetitive, contradictory, static, and yet abrupt and unharmonized multiplicity of the Vita both irritating as it stood, and yet (with its considerable elements of unmistakably first-hand portraiture of a rarely large and lofty mind and character) profoundly stimulative to a re-thinking, re-feeling, re-stating of the whole,—at least, up to the zenith of that Soul’s perfection.
But our next stage will make all this clearer still.
VI. Sixth Stage: First Printed Edition of the “Vita-Dottrina-Dicchiarazione,” 1551; Examination of all it possesses in addition to MSS. A, B and C, apart from the “Dialogo.”
At last we reach the publication of the Life, in Genoa, in 1551.[423] A printing-press had not been established in Genoa till 1536 (by Bellone); hence the Life appeared only fifteen years after the earliest date possible for its publication,—other cities not being, as yet, sufficiently interested in Catherine to think of such an undertaking.—Only further on shall I attempt some analysis, estimation, and attribution of that corpus of earlier and earliest constituents of the Book, which, although frequently referred to at our last two stages, had there to remain unanalyzed. In these remaining two stages I intend to treat only, first of the Introductory parts of the Book, special to its printed form, and then of the Second “Chapter” of the Dialogo (its present Second and Third Parts).
Here then we have to deal with the matter which, amongst our extant documents, appears for the first time in the Printed Vita of 1551, and first with that part of it which is there devoted to the publication of the Book. This part of the matter consists, in the order of its place in the Book, of the Title with its Picture; the Approbation; the Preface; and the Subscription.
1. Title-page.
The Title-page has: “Book of the Admirable Life and Holy Doctrine of the Blessed Catarinetta of Genoa, in which is contained a Useful and Catholic Demonstration and Declaration of Purgatory.” And underneath appears a picture of Our Lord Crucified, and Blessed Catherine on her knees before Him, and crowned with a Diadem; with the text: “I confess to Thee, Father, Lord of Heaven and Earth, that Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent and hast revealed them unto little ones” (Matt. xi).
Note here, in the Title, the correct and most attractive baptismal form of her Christian name, Catarinetta, which appears here for the last time, either in the Title, the Heading, or the Subscription of her Life; and the disappearance, which is final, of her family name Adorna, which had figured in the titles of all the MSS. Thus “La miranda vita e sancta conversation di Madonna Catherinetta Adorna,” the older heading of MS. A, which will have been that of the Giustiniano book (a heading which itself had succeeded to “De la Miranda Conversione di quondam Donna Catherinetta Adorna” of the booklet of 1512, still preserved in MS. B), has here become “La vita mirabile e dottrina santa de la Beata Catarinetta da Genoa.”—And note how, for the first time, mention is made in the title of what has hitherto been but a long Chapter of the Vita; and how what in the MSS. had, in that Chapter’s heading, claimed but to be a matter of devotional experience (“How, by comparison of the divine fire, which she felt in her heart and which purified her soul, she saw interiorly and understood how the Souls abide in Purgatory”), has here been given, some thirty years after the Papal condemnation of Luther’s theses on Purgatory, a controversial point,—it is now “a Useful and Catholic Demonstration and Declaration of Purgatory.” We have here an attitude of mind inevitably different from Catherine’s pure positiveness.—And remark, too, the continued non-indication of the Dialogo, although this is now present, like the “Dimostrazione,” as a distinct document in the Book: the Dialogue is evidently still too new to be able to modify the old title-page, and to appear there alongside of a composition which, though but one-sixth of its own length, is now some thirty and more years old.
In the Picture Catherine wears a diadem, a compromise between an indication of her noble birth and a hint of the nimbus which they shrink from giving to her unequivocally. And she is kneeling before the Christ Crucified,—evidently an attitude chosen as specially typical of her whole life and doctrine, because of the passages in the Vita: “She ever seemed to see her Love affixed to the Cross”; “she was next drawn to the side of the Crucified”; “she appeared in very truth as a body affixed to a Cross,” with the dependent account of her “interior stigmatization,”—“she received a new wound at her heart, so that she might feel within herself the wound in the side of her tender Love”; and the amplifications of some of these passages in the Dialogo.[424] Yet only the first three passages occur in the MSS.; and the first two are carefully restricted there to her first Conversion-Period (of four years at most), whilst the third passage refers to a (quite unusual) bodily posture, assumed by her on one single occasion during her last illness, an attitude which remained uninterpreted by herself. The fact is that the precise contrary of what this picture suggests is one of the chief characteristics of Catherine, for she is habitually absorbed in contemplations remarkably lacking in historical imagery and setting. And the Dialogo parallels and variants which, as we have seen, so largely increase this historical element, and especially this occupation with Christ Crucified, are characteristic, not of Catherine but of Battista. The picture is, no doubt, the consequence of this increasing emphasis laid, in her successive Vitae, upon a side of religion all but entirely absent from the middle and last periods of Catherine’s actual life; and fully expresses Battista’s feeling, who, just as she addressed her whole long letter of 1575 in Donna Anguisola, “in the Crucified,” will have seen to it that the whole book concerning her own God-mother was placed at the feet of the Crucifix.
2. The Approbation.
The Latin Approbation runs: “I, Fra Geronimo of Genoa of the Order of Preachers, Apostolic Inquisitor into Heretical Pravity throughout the whole Dominion of Genoa, assent to this Book being committed to print, for the consolation and instruction of spiritual persons. Witness this my autograph.” The points of interest in connection with this Approbation will appear, as we proceed, to consist in the reasons why such theological “corrections” as were actually introduced into the doctrinal parts of the Vitae had all been made long before this date, probably none of them later than 1530; and why they were, throughout, practically restricted to her very sober and correct Purgatorial teaching, and left her other, far more daring, sayings more or less untouched. I can find no traces of any theological changes introduced, for this edition of 1551, into the Vita-Dicchiarazione sections; but we shall see how three points and tendencies of the Vita-proper have been indirectly criticised and “corrected” by means of their re-statement in the Dialogo, which was certainly finished, and possibly begun, with a view to its appearance in the company of the Vita and the Dicchiarazione.
3. The Preface.
The Preface consists of seven full and balanced, dignified and self-restrained, thoroughly well-informed and yet, in part, deliberately obscure and illusive, sentences. It still excludes the idea of any literary authorship on the part of Catherine: “Madonna Caterinetta, of whose admirable Conversion, Life, and Doctrine, together with her many privileges and particular graces, we shall write.… Here, in her Life and Holy Doctrine is to be found.…” Not Catherine writes, but “we,” i.e. the final Redactor, or all the Contributors together with him; and not her Writings are to be found here, but her “Doctrine” only. Indeed, it all “has been collected with truth and simplicity by two devout spiritual persons, from the very lips of the Seraphic Woman herself.” More would quite evidently have been claimed, if more had been true.
And it contains two or three evident additions to its original text, made for this publication in view of the entire Dialogo’s first appearance here; additions which contain an expression which may well have occasioned or helped on the legend of “Catherine, an Author,” a legend which was sure to spring up at the first opportunity and provocation. The fifth sentence reads at present as follows: “Sono in questo libro [dignissimi suoi trattati dell’ amor di Dio e dell’ amor proprio] una bellisima e chiarissima dimostrazione del Purgatorio, e in che modo vi stiano dentro le anime contentissime, [e un bel dialogo dell’ Anima con il Corpo e Amor poprio, dal quale ne seguita un amoroso colloquio dell’ Anima con il suo Signore] ed altre dignissime cose da sapere, veramente tutte di eccellentissima speculazione ed utilità [e massime in questi turbolenti tempi necessarie].”[425]
Now even the last set of bracketed words seems an addition, and points to the existence of the body of this Preface at a period prior to “questi turbolenti tempi,” times that I take to be 1536-1537, when Battista’s God-father Moro lapsed into Calvinism. Ever since 1520, when Luther’s Purgatory doctrines were condemned, these writings would have been held, if not “necessary,” at least “of most excellent utility.”—There is, any way, no doubt as to the two previous sets being insertions. For note, if they be retained, the slovenly repetition, by the first set, of “dignissimi” in the midst of a most finished composition; the extraordinary use of the word “Trattati,” to signify either Chapter XXV (which bears the title “Dell’ Amor Proprio e del Divino Amore,” and is a collection of sayings pronounced on at least three different occasions), or Chapters XXV and XXVI,—in either case, Chapters which are no more significant or authentic than any other of the doctrinal chapters. And remark, in the second set, the curiously mild praise for the Dialogo contained in the one positive “un bel,” wedged in between the two superlatives lavished on the “Dimostrazione” and the two superlatives given to the remaining doctrinal parts of the Book. The object of that first “Trattati” insertion is evidently to pick out some one or other of the already ancient Chapters of the Vita, which have some special likeness to the subject-matter and title of the Dialogo, so as to prevent the latter from looking too suspiciously different from the rest of the doctrine traditionally ascribed to Catherine.
I take this Preface to have existed, without these additions, in the “worthy book” described by Giustiniano in 1536. But as that careful writer insists upon the precise length of time, because it had been considerable, during which Catherine’s body had lain incorrupt, and says nothing about the antiquity of the book, a point he would hardly have failed to urge had he been able to do so, I hesitate to push this Book, and this its Preface, further back than 1530, a very probable date for the first (at least complete) fusion of Vernazza’s and Marabotto’s separate contributions, since these two chief disciples would then have been dead six and two years respectively, and the culmination of Protestant “turbulence” in Calvin’s open revolt and Moro’s defection would not be taking place for another five and six years respectively.—Catherine indeed appears here no more as the “quondam Donna Catarinetta” of MS. B, but still as “Madonna Catherinetta, figliuola di M. Giacomo della nobilissima casa Fiesca, maritata a M. Giuliano Adorno,” a designation distinctly earlier than the “Beata Catarinetta di Genoa” of the Title. And the Book, its substance, is declared to have been “collected by two spiritual persons (Religiosi), her devotees, from the very lips of the Seraphic Woman herself.” This passage, it is true, now reads “Raccolto dai divoti religiosi (suo Confessore e un figliuolo suo spirituale).” But, where the Preface is above the suspicion of having been touched up, a “cioê” introduces such a bracket; the rhythm of this sentence, in the midst of this otherwise exquisite Preface, is woefully imperfect; and the evidently deliberate ambiguity of “divoti religiosi” is rendered all but nugatory by the considerable clearness of the bracketed information. The clause will originally have read, “Da due religiosi sui divoti,” for this obviates all three objections. But, in this deliberately mysterious form, it must have been written when both were dead, and yet when the death of the last was still recent; and this again brings us to a date soon after Marabotto’s death in 1528.
Who wrote this Preface? Much in it points to Battista. So the use of “cioè,” so characteristic of her Colloquies and Letters and also of the Dialogo; and the phrase “divote persone,” recurring in the Dialogo;[426] and the doctrinal tone of “l’amoroso Signor Nostro, sitibondo della salute delle sue razionali creature,” “il suo consolatorio spirito,” “la perfetta e consummata unione possibile ai viatori,” and “quasi non più fide, ma già certezza,” all closely like passages in her Colloquies and in her Letter to Donna Anguisola. The mysteriousness and equality of designation, applied to both Ettore and Don Cattaneo, would come with a special naturalness from Battista, spontaneously anxious to place her heroic father’s sanctity and intimacy with Catherine on a level with those of Catherine’s priest-friend and Confessor Marabotto. And, if written in 1530, Battista would at the time have been a formed writer,—a woman of thirty-three years of age.—There are, no doubt, certain differences. The Dialogo nowhere has such an “ancorchè … niente (non) dimeno” clause. “Un Serafino,” “essa Serafica Donna” of this Preface, are, in strictness, unmatched in Battista’s, otherwise even intenser, writings. “La perfetta e consummata unione possibile ai viatori” is a more ordinary and technical phrase than I can find elsewhere in Battista’s writings. Above all, the general style and rhythm is here, somehow, a little different from that of those other writings.—Still, these differences are explicable by the writer of the Preface finding himself largely bound by the existing Vita-materials, and by their very niceties of expression. The Author of the Preface is certainly identical with the Redactor of the first (tripartite) Vita e Dottrina; and this Redactor, we shall find, must be Battista. The insertions in the Preface, containing the praise of the Dialogo, are certainly the work of another hand.—Upon the whole, then, we can safely attribute the Preface, in its original form, to Battista Vernazza.
4. The Subscription.
The subscription to the Vita-proper, in this first Edition, runs: “Here ends the life of the noble Matron, Catarinetta Adorna”; which thus still retains (like the Preface, but against the Title) the warmly human and precise, domestic and familiar designation of the first heading of MS. A.
VII. Seventh Stage: The Second “Chapter” of the “Dialogo,” which appears for the First Time in the Printed “Vita,” 1551.
1. Three remarks concerning the two Parts of this “Chapter.”
(1) The additions to the Dialogo which appear here for the first time, and which amount to its present Parts Second and Third, are given in this First Edition as one single, the Second, “Chapter,” following upon the older part here designated “Chapter First.” In the Fourth Edition, 1601, this division of the Dialogo is formally announced on the Title-page: “With a Dialogue, divided into two Chapters, between the Soul, the Body, and Self Love; and (the Soul and) the Lord.” I do not know precisely when those two “Chapters” were replaced by the present Three Parts, and when these Parts were divided up into the present Chapters; it was, in any case, after the sixth edition (1645).
(2) These last two Parts seem to have been written, from the first, with a view to eventual division into two. For though the whole of this Second Chapter is not much longer than the First Chapter (forty-seven and a half pages, against forty), it yet divides up very well at about half-way, since the first half here ends with a piece of moralizing narrative, applied to the whole earthly existence: “The more valiant a man is at the beginning, the greater martyrdom should he expect at the end … nor does God cease to make provision … up to that Man’s death.”[427]
(3) This whole “Chapter” Second is by the same author as “Chapter” First; in this Second, even more than in that First “Chapter,” there are no historical materials other than those still present, more or less untouched, in the Vita-proper; and yet these materials have again been modified, in their sequence and setting, their tone and pitch, their drift and meaning, and all this throughout by the same powerful and experienced, often deep and touching, but also, in great part, painfully abstract and straining, absolute-minded and excessive writer.
2. General indications of identity of authorship for “Chapters” First and Second.
(1) “Chapter” First had, we know, concluded with a paraphrase of the last stage in the scheme of Catherine’s spiritual growth as given in the Vita-proper, and had thus reached the ne plus ultra of perfection for any creature, either here or in the world to come. “And now the Spirit said: ‘I am determined no further to call her a human creature, since I now see her (to be) all in God, without any Humanity’”: a statement which may well (like the corresponding Spiritual-Kiss stage in the Vita’s scheme)[428] have been intended, at the time of its composition, both to describe directly her great middle years, 1474-1499, and to sum up generally her later life, 1499-1510.—But no such hyperbolic language, when thus applied to man as we know him, or as we can even conceive him here below, can, of course, be kept up. And thus here in the Dialogo (as previously in the corresponding place in the Vita-proper), what had originally been the conclusion of a self-contained account of her Conversion, became, owing to the desire of utilizing much extant material which directly described her years of physical break-up, but one chapter in the story of her total life. Hence we now find, both in the Vita-proper and the Dialogo, an instructive anti-climax, in an attempted description (the Dialogo gives this in its “Chapter” Second) of her successive states from 1497 to her death in 1510, states and changes which, were we to take the concluding words of the Vita-scheme and of the Dialogo’s “Chapter” First at all strictly, would, in great part, be impossible.
(2) In the Dialogo’s First “Chapter” we found a remarkably free, deliberately pragmatic handling of the Vita-materials, in the making two different visions on two separate occasions (the Vision of the blood-stained Moving Christ, and the Vision of the blood-pouring Fixed Christ) out of the one, curiously composite, Moving-Fixed Christ-Vision of the Vita; and this doubling introduced, into that First Part, a special kind of obscurity, a sort of eddying, circular, repetitive movement and practical fixedness. Similarly we find here, in the Second “Chapter,” the one description of her resumption of Confession, given by the Vita-proper, is made into two accounts, accounts still further separated from each other here than the two visions were separated from each other there. For the first ten and a half Chapters, pages 226b to 242b, give us her history from 1497 to 1501. And, amongst these, Chapter First to Third cover the years 1497 to 1499; and at the end of Chapter Third, page 232b, we get an account of how “she began to confess her sins” (necessarily, at this period, to Marabotto) “with such Contrition, that it appeared a marvellous thing”—a description which has been taken from the story of her First Conversion-Period, but which is made to do duty here, at the date of her beginning to confess, in a very different manner, to Don Marabotto, twenty-five years after those Conversion-Confessions. Yet only at the beginning of the second half of Chapter Tenth (p. 242c) do we hear, (wedged in between two passages, pp. 242b, 243b, which are re-castings of descriptions of a scene which occurred on January 10, 1510, Vita, pp. 139a-140c) of God giving her the help of a “Religioso,” “suo Confessore,” i.e. Marabotto (p. 242c). This is followed, not two pages later on (p. 244b), by a description of the experience of the “Scintilla” on August 11, 1510 (Vita, p. 148b), and by an allusion to her death on September 15, 1510 (p. 245c).—This doubling was no doubt effected for the purpose of introducing as much variety as possible into what is, anyhow, a monotonous narrative; of being thus able to produce a more ordinary and “correct” account of her dispositions and acts, on occasion of the resumption of her Confessions in 1499, than could be given by the direct utilization of Marabotto’s description of them; and of thus, by these two narratives in lieu of that single one, giving greater place and prominence to the practice of Confession than this practice actually occupied in her real life.
3. Closer examination of the earlier portion of “Chapter” Second.
A closer examination of the whole Second “Chapter” of the Dialogo fully substantiates this conclusion, and brings out other interesting points. Let us take the eleven Chapters of the present Part Second.
(1) The first two Chapters describe her condition when “the Soul could no more correspond to the sensations of the Body,—the Body remained, as it were, without its natural being, and dwelt confused and stunned, without knowing where it was or what it should do or say” (pp. 226c, 227a). And then the Soul begins to address “the Lord” (p. 229a). And on p. 230b we hear, for the first time, of its “sweet and cruel Purgatory.” And Chapter Third tells of the Soul’s painful prison-life, and of vomitings, emaciation, and occasional inability to move (pp. 230b-232a).—Now Purgatory, prison-house and these psycho-physical conditions do not appear, in the Vita-proper, till “nine years before her death,” and, indeed, in great part only within the last year of her life.[429] Indeed it is only the characteristic intensity with which the Dialogo here describes the fresh access of Contrition, and the resumption of frequent Confession for evidently new offences (a description entirely inappropriate to this late stage of her life), that makes it difficult to realize that these three Chapters are dealing with 1497 to 1499. And the exaggeration here exactly corresponds to the exaggeration, in Part (“Chapter”) First, of her earlier sinfulness, and her first Conversion and Contrition.
(2) Chapter Fourth then gives a short description of another “ray of love”; and then apostrophizes, in seven “oh” and “che” sentences, such a state of soul (pp. 232c-233c). Chapter Fifth contains one question and answer exchanged between the Soul and the Lord, and then three narrative-exclamatory paragraphs (pp. 233c-235a). Chapter Sixth gives two explanations by the Lord of the Soul’s sufferings, interrupted by the Soul’s thanks and acceptance (pp. 235b-237a). And then Chapter Seventh describes a lull in the Soul’s battles and trials (pp. 237a-238a). And this lull is followed, in Chapter Eighth, by a declaration from the Lord that she has now been led up to the door of Love but has not yet entered in (pp. 238a-239a); and, in Chapter Ninth, by a dialogue (for the first time in the entire work) between the Spirit and the Soul, the former being now determined to separate itself from the latter; and, at the end of this same Chapter, by a description of this, now more or less achieved, separation (pp. 239a-241a; 241b).—These conflicts and dialogues between the Spirit and the Soul, are closely like the conflicts and dialogues between the Spirit and “Humanity” in Part First.[430] Yet there, the historical materials are derived chiefly from the Vita-proper, pp. 20a-21b, 96b-97c (which give an account of her work from 1473 to 1497); whilst here they come exclusively from pp. 133b-138b of the Vita-proper (which tell her experiences from November 11 to the end of December 1509).
(3) And the last two Chapters, Tenth and Eleventh, are particularly difficult and self-destructive, obscure and disappointing. The Tenth (to be fully analyzed presently), is difficult, because it starts with fragments of Vita-information which, in the Vita, rightly refer, in large part, to the beginning of the last ten years of her life, and even to 1499 in particular,—hence to a period long anterior to all that has been described in the Dialogo ever since Chapter Third of this Part. And these fragments are here made to lead up to a re-statement of the scene of January 10, 1510, when she shut herself off from every one, but when Marabotto managed to overhear her soliloquy (pp. 241c-244a compared with pp. 139b, 113c.) And the Eleventh Chapter is obscure and disappointing, because, after giving the “scintilla”-incident of August 11, 1510, and a final short dialogue between the “Lord” and her “Humanity” (again a combination of Dramatis Personae which has occurred nowhere else), it finishes, not with any description or even affirmation of her earthly end, but simply with an account as to the necessity of Purgation, and, in particular, with the words “a martyrdom which never ceases until death” (pp. 244a-245c).
4. Closer examination of later portion of “Chapter” Second.
Part Third, on the contrary, is peculiar in this, that its Dialogue passes exclusively between but two interlocutors, the Soul and the Lord: it thus brings back the whole composition to its opening form of strict duologue,—although there the speakers had been the (unpurified) Soul and the Body. The present thirteen Chapters constitute, in substance, a single, all but unbroken, disquisition on God’s love for the Soul, and on the Soul’s growth in the love of God; although the form alternates between Chapters of questions and answers, and Chapters of rapturous descriptions and apostrophizings of Love.
(1) Chapters First and Second consist of such questions and answers, and conclude with an, abruptly introduced, account of her former spiritual conversations with her friends, which (though based upon the beautiful document in the Vita-proper, pp. 94b-95c, and upon the fragment there, p. 97b, and though the narrative here has a certain noble warmth of its own) is given here merely as a something to be transcended, and which, by now, had been actually left far behind. Thus, as in Parts First and Second the Dialogo had given a characteristically rigoristic, indeed exaggerating, account of her Conversation and her later Purification respectively, so here again this curious book is more severe than are the authentic accounts on which it otherwise relies.
(2) Chapter Third gives a question and answer as to the comprehensibility of this love. The answer incorporates Catherine’s description of her soul as, so to speak, under water in an ocean of peace; and interestingly turns the “scintilla,” the “spark of love,” into a “stilla,” a “drop,” suggested, no doubt, by the “goccia,” “the drop of love,” which figured so prominently in Catherine’s great conversation with her spiritual children.[431]—Chapters Fourth to Sixth open out with a page where the Lord declares how the pure and love-absorbed Soul alone holds Love (p. 253); and consist, for the rest, of exclamatory descriptions of this love, the soul proffering first ten “O Amore” apostrophes (pp. 253c-258b), then one “O Amore puro” address (pp. 259c, 260a). And the tenth of those apostrophes introduces a characteristic sentence from the Vita-proper: “the Soul,—if bereft of charity,—when it is separated from the Body, would, rather than present itself thus before that (Divine) cleanness and simplicity, cast itself into Hell.”[432]—And Chapter Seventh then makes the Lord ask the Soul to tell him some of the words which it addresses to Love; the Soul does so, and the Lord approves of them (pp. 260b-261b).
(3) And then Chapter Eighth begins a narrative piece (pp. 261c-263c); but which, after a transitional, exclamatory paragraph (p. 263c), arrives at three short questions and answers. The first two questions and answers are by the Soul and the Lord respectively; the third question and answer are respectively by the Lord and the Soul (pp. 264a, b). We shall presently see that, in this set of short sentences, we have reached the culmination of the whole Dialogo, and that, in astonishingly explicit daring, they exceed any and all of Catherine’s authentic sayings.
(4) Chapter Ninth then gives a narrative description of the apparently empty and abandoned condition of the advanced Soul, and, for this purpose carefully utilizes (whilst completely altering the meaning and context of) Marabotto’s description of Catherine’s first Confession to him. And in its last paragraph it again (but here with less change) incorporates other passages of that descriptive Chapter.[433] Then comes Chapter Tenth, with a short question and answer between the Lord and the Soul, the latter partly in verse (p. 267a). And this is followed by two descriptive paragraphs, how that this soul “seemed to mount above Paradise itself”; “this heart is transformed into a tabernacle of God”; and “such souls, were they but known, would be adored upon earth” (pp. 267b, c; 268a).
(5) This description is followed by a long rapturous suspension of the dialogue form, since here the Writer himself addresses successively, in three “O” paragraphs, the “soul, heart, and mind”; “Love”; and “the Spirit naked and invisible.” And, after a little exclamation as to the inadequacy of all words (this also is introduced by an “O”), he similarly invokes (in three other “O” paragraphs), “my tender Lord”; the “infinite Good”; and “the Lord” (pp. 268b-269c).—The present, most unskilful, division makes Chapter Eleventh begin with these last three of the seven “O’s.” And after the seventh “O” paragraph and a descriptive passage, still addressed to “the Lord,” composed of five “Thou” sentences, follows another short interruption,—apologizing for the delay in the narrative and the inadequacy of the words used. And then two “Oimè,” and one “O terra, terra” paragraph finish up the Writer’s exclamations, and bring us back to the interrupted dialogue-form (pp. 269c-271b). Here again a violent division has been effected in the text by Chapter Twelfth being made to exclude the first, but to include, the second “Oimè” (p. 271a). And this Chapter, after finishing the “Terra-terra” paragraph, and, with it, the whole digression, re-opens the dialogue with a curious, serpentine, all but unbroken series of seven questions of the Soul and answers of the Lord, in which each successive question picks up the previous answer and point reached, and tries to reach a deeper one. “What is Thine Operation within man? A Moving of the heart of man. And this Movement? A Grace. And this Grace? A Ray of Love. And this Ray of Love? An Arrow. And this Arrow? A Glimpse (Scintilla) of love. And this Glimpse? An Inspiration.” And at this point, description is declared to be unable to proceed further (pp. 271b-272c.)
(6) And then Chapter Thirteenth finishes up the whole by two questions and descriptive answers. The first question and answer passes between the Writer’s own mind and his heart, and thus again constitutes a break in the dialogue; and the second question and answer occurs between the Lord and the Soul. The first answer dwells upon personal experience, as the sole means of some real apprehension of Love; and the second answer concludes the whole book with a majestic paraphrase of Catherine’s doctrine as to the immanental, inevitable, self-determined, and self-endorsed character of the Soul’s joys and sufferings, here and hereafter, on Earth, in Purgatory, indeed in Hell itself (pp. 273a-275a). Such passages as these make up for much of the often painfully intense, abstract, schematic, rigoristic, and too exclusively transcendental character of this remarkable book, and explain its fascination for a mind of such rare experience and breadth as was that of Friedrich Schlegel. I shall presently group together the finest sayings peculiar to the work.
VIII. Seventh Stage continued: Minute Analysis of one Passage from the Second “Chapter.”
But I must still give for this last “Chapter,” as I did for the First “Chapter,” a synoptic demonstration, by means of one example among many, of the strange manner in which the Dialogo-writer combines the most detailed dependence on the materials of the Vita-proper with the most sovereign independence concerning the chronology, context, and drift of those same materials.—And again I choose an originally unique occurrence and description, so as to eliminate all possibility of an explanation by an original multiplicity of facts and accounts.
Catherine as “Garzonzello” or “Figliuolino.”
The Dialogo-writer having, as we saw, combined, for the purpose of describing Catherine’s latter-day habits, V.’s account of her unusually peaceful dispositions of soul, obtaining in 1499, with V.’s account of her Penance and Confessions in 1473: now utilizes here Marabotto’s account of her Confessions to him from 1499 onwards (an account which the writer had rejected there), for an entirely different purpose and context than those developed by the Confessor himself. For, in the Vita-proper account, it is in connection with the Confession of her sins that we get the highly original and curious “garzonzello” parallel; and Catherine’s lamentations do not there occur in any relation to this parallel, but they arise only when Marabotto is not at hand to comfort her. In the Dialogo-version it is simply in relation to this requirement of his presence and to its postponement, that Catherine behaves like a “figliuolino,” and cries till she gets what she wants. And yet there is not the slightest doubt that it is really the “Garzonzello” Confession-passage which (left unutilized by the writer in his account of the Contrition and Confessions of her last period, Dialogo, pp. 231c-232b, no doubt because of the difficulty and apparent temerity of the facts and doctrines implied), has here been used after all, but with all its originality and daring carefully eliminated from it. For nowhere else, in the Vita-proper, does a “Garzonzello”-passage or language, or anything like them, occur; nowhere else again, in the Dialogo does a “figliuolino”-passage or wording, or anything really resembling them, appear; and these two, respectively unique and very peculiar, passages, both occur at one and the same stage of her life, and in connection with one and the same couple of persons.
IX. Seventh Stage concluded: Character and Authorship of this Second “Chapter.”
Let us take these two points simultaneously, and move, from the more formal and literary qualities, through indications of the more or less external life-circumstances of the author, on to the writer’s special views and aims in psychology and spirituality.
1. The writer’s power.
The following passages, all more or less peculiar to the Dialogo, suffice, I think, to prove his power.
At the beginning of these, her last nine years, the Lord explains to Catherine the means by which Love may be known: “My love can be better known by means of interior experience than in any other way; if man is to acquire it, Love must snatch man from man himself, since it is man himself who is his own chief impediment,”[434]—a passage that recalls Thackeray’s Arthur Pendennis, his Friends and his Greatest Enemy—namely, his own self.
These years are, a little later, described in language no doubt suggested, probably through some Patristic passage, by Plato, the harmonious. “This soul now abode like a musical instrument which, as long as it remains furnished with chords, gives forth sweet sounds; but which, bereft of them, is silent. Thus she too, in the past, by means of the sentiments of soul and body, was wont to render so sweet a harmony, that every one who heard it rejoiced in it; but now, alienated from those sentiments, as it were without” psychic “chords, she remained entirely bare and mute.”[435]
And we are told of “words which the heart alone speaks to the soul alone”[436]—a passage which recalls Pascal’s saying, “The heart has reasons which Reason does not know.”
Amongst the rapturous addresses we find, “O Spirit naked and invisible! No man can hold thee (here below), because of thy very nakedness! Thy dwelling-place is in Heaven, even whilst, joined to the body, thou happenest still to tarry upon earth! Thou dost not know thine own self, nor art thou known by others in this world. All thy friends and (true) relatives are in Heaven, recognized by thee alone, through an interior instinct infused by the Spirit of God.”[437] An apostrophe which, in part, strongly recalls Henry Vaughan’s poem, “They are all gone into a world of light, and I alone am lingering here.”
The final address in this series of apostrophes to Love, God, contains the sentences: “O Lord, how great is Thy loving care, both by day and by night, for man who knows not even his own self, and far less Thee, O Lord. Thou art that great and high God, of whom we cannot speak or think, because of the ineffable super-eminence of Thy Greatness, Power, Wisdom, and Goodness infinite. Thou labourest in man and for man with Thy Love, and in return Thou willest that the whole man should act for Love, and this because, without Love, nothing good can be produced. Thou workest solely for man’s true utility; and Thou willest that man should operate solely for Thine honour, and not for his own (separate) utility.”[438] A passage strongly coloured by Dionysian ideas.
And yet the writer continues to think and to write, but says: “These words of mine are like ink: for ink is black and of an evil odour; and yet, by its means, many ideas are apprehended, which otherwise would be ignored altogether.”[439] Here we have an image, based as it is upon a vivid sensible perception of a chemical compound, which reminds one of the epatic-agaric passage in “Chapter” First of the Dialogo, and of the reference to cassia in Battista’s letter of 1581.[440]
And the whole Book finishes up with two impressive passages. The first, as to the means of knowing Love, is as Pauline as is most of the remaining doctrine of the Dialogo: “Not by means of external signs, nor even by martyrdoms, can this love be comprehended. Only he who actually experiences it can understand something of it.”[441] And the second concludes all with a forcible and comprehensive paraphrase of Catherine’s central doctrine,—as to the Soul’s condition and action, revealed at the moment of death: “Every man bears within his own self the sentence of his own judgment, pronounced indeed by God, yet each man himself ratifies it, in and for his own case and self. There is no place totally bereft of God’s mercy. The very souls in Hell itself would suffer a greater Hell outside of it than they do within it.”[442]—We have had repeated proofs of how great were Battista’s gifts and experience in such-like eloquent writing, from the earlier Dialogo-Chapter, and from her Colloquies and Letters.
2. Indications of special knowledge.
I am compelled to pass over the emotional rhythm, and the mystical ambiguity and paradox, that appear, in identical forms, in Battista’s avowed writings and here. But we must briefly dwell upon some special sources of interest in Catherine, and of certain knowledge of a peculiar kind, traceable in the writer of this second “Chapter”; both sets of passages clearly point to Battista as their author.
(1) There is the deeply-felt description of Catherine’s conversation with her disciples: “This soul would many times abide with her spiritual friends, discoursing of the Divine Love, in suchwise that it appeared to them all as though they were in Paradise. And indeed, what delightful colloquies took place! Both he who spoke and he who listened, one and all would get nourished by spiritual food, of a sweet and delectable kind. And, because the time sped so quickly, they could not attain to satiety; but they would abide so enkindled and inflamed, that they knew not what more to say. And yet they could not depart, and would seem as though in an ecstasy. Oh! what loving repasts, what delightful food, what sweet viands, what a gracious union, what a divine companionship!”[443]—Now it is true that the writer has here certainly utilized four pregnantly descriptive lines in the Vita-proper, and the fine account there, undoubtedly by Ettore Vernazza, as regards these conversations.[444] Yet one readily feels, at the moved and moving tone of the re-telling here, that the writer was specially impelled to dwell with a tender, living sympathy upon those meetings of forty years ago. Now Battista must, of course, again and again, have heard from her Father’s own lips, during those fourteen years that he lived on after Catherine’s great soul had gone to God, of these unforgettable talks, in which he himself had played so large a part, as questioner, interpreter, and chronicler.
(2) And the other set of passages points, even more definitely, to the same daughter and father. Catherine’s “humanity,” being threatened by the Spirit with various future sufferings, asks to be told the precise offence, charge (la causa), which will bring so great a martyrdom with it, without hope of any help. But “she was answered that this grace,” of knowing exactly what and why she should suffer, “would be accorded to her in due time, as happens with men condemned to death, who, by hearing read aloud to them the precise sentence pronounced upon their specific misdeeds, support with a greater peace of mind their ignominious death.”—And: “Since I am forsaken on all sides,” Catherine says to God, “give me at least, O Lord, some person that may be able to understand and comfort me, amidst the torments that I see coming upon me—as men are wont to do for those who are condemned to death, so that the latter may not despair.”—And the natural man in such advanced souls is described as suspended in mid-air, “like unto one who is hung, and who touches not the ground with his feet, but abides in the air, attached to the cord which has caused his death.”[445] Ettore’s life-long, detailed interest in, and experience of, prisoners and condemned men, whom he, the Founder of the Society of the Beheading of St. John the Baptist, so loved to attend and help throughout their last night and at the scaffold, speak here through the devoted daughter who, countless times, must have listened to that father’s prison-experiences, which we found her describing, still most vividly, in 1581, thirty years after the publication of these Dialogo-passages.[446]
3. Schematic, intensely abstract psychology.
At this spiritual stage “there was, as it were, a chain. God, Spirit, draws to Himself the Spirit of man, and there this Spirit abides completely occupied. The Soul, which cannot abide without the Spirit, follows the Spirit, and is there kept occupied. And the Body, which is subject to the Soul, thus prevented from possessing its natural sensations and its natural sustenance, remains, as it were, forsaken and outside of its natural being.”—“God at times allowed the Spirit to correspond with the Soul, and the Soul with the Body.… But when God withdrew that Spirit into Himself, all the rest (the Soul) followed after it; and hence the Body remained like dead.” The two dividings, first of the Soul from the Body, and then of the Soul from the Spirit, so much emphasized in those other documents,[447] is thus carried through in this “Chapter” also.
4. Rigorism.
We find here the same exaggeration as to Catherine’s faults and contrition, and the same rigoristic doctrine as in “Chapter” First, although, here also, counterbalanced by a noble tenderness of heart. Thus her but semi-conscious attachment to, and self-attribution of, spiritual consolations, is here magnified into a grave sin. “How can I act, so as to make satisfaction for this sin, which is so great and so subtle?” her soul asks God, concerning but semi-conscious attachment to spiritual consolations. And of her social affections, as manifested in her great colloquies with her friends, Catherine now says, “All other loves” than the direct love of God “now appear to me as worse than sheer self-loves.”—“She began to confess her sins with so great a contrition that it appeared a wonderful thing,” we are told of Catherine, in 1499-1510; yet we know, from the unimpeachable testimony of Don Marabotto himself, that “the wonderful thing” about these latter Confessions was precisely the absence of that former keen sense of, and sorrow for, specific sins.[448]
5. Pronounced Christo-centrism and daring Anthropomorphism.
We get, again, the predominance of the Personal conceptions and imagery over those of Thing or Law, and the same greater attention to the historical element of religion, that characterize Battista’s writings and “Chapter First” of the Dialogo, as against Catherine’s authentic sayings.
Catherine’s energetic repudiation of “the corrupt expression, ‘You have offended God,’” is replaced by God saying to Catherine, “Know that I cannot be offended by man, except when he raises an obstacle to the work which I have ordained for his good.”[449] Catherine has angrily declared that the term could never be correctly used; the Dialogo explains how special and metaphorical is its correct use.
The Lord declares here: “I descend with a fine thread of gold, which is My secret love, and to this thread is bound a hook, which seizes the heart of men. I hold this thread in My hand and ever draw it towards Myself.” The hook and hand are additions to her authentic declaration, “She seemed to herself to have in her heart a continuous ray of Love … a thread of gold, as to which she had no fear that it would ever break.”[450]—We get here the Wedding-feast imagery that is entirely wanting in Catherine’s authentic sayings. “There is no shorter way to salvation than (the owning of) this delightful wedding-garment of charity”[451] A garment, generally in a bad sense, is quite Catherinian; a wedding-garment is exclusively Battistan.—And the parallel between St. John’s care of the Blessed Virgin, and Marabotto’s attendance upon Catherine[452] is quite foreign to Catherine’s mind.
And the whole Dialogo culminates in a double, daring yet graduated, anthropomorphic picturing of the deification of the perfect soul, interestingly different from Catherine’s favourite Ocean and Fire similes, and from her description of the Soul as respectively submerged in, and transformed by, this infinite and all-penetrating living Ocean-Fire, God. The Soul asks what is the name which the Lord gives to perfect souls; and the Lord answers (in Latin, as ever with Battista) with the text of Ps. lxxxi, 6: “I have said, ye are Gods, and all of you sons of the Most High”; a text which still leaves us with separate human personalities face to face with the distinct Spirit-Person, God. And then, to the Lord’s question, as to what the Soul declares its heart to be, the Soul answers (this climax has been carefully led up to all along): “I say that it is my God, wounded by love,—in Whom I live joyful and contented.”—For, as in Battista’s own Colloquy of December 10, 1554, we get three simultaneous “voices” at different depths of her consciousness, so here, in this composition of 1550, Catherine hears simultaneously within herself three voices—of the Lord, of her own soul, and of her own heart. And Catherine can here declare that now her heart is God, and God wounded by Love; for Battista can write in 1576 that, in the perfect state, “of the Increate Heart and of the created heart there is made a single, most secret and inestimable union,”[453] and that Increate Heart appears here as wounded, because God is ever, in Battista’s mind, explicitly identified with Christ, and Christ’s Passion is ever in her thoughts. Catherine identifies her true self with God, and God with Love; and conceives her own heart as filled with love and inflamed and pierced by it; but nowhere figures God with a Heart, or that Heart as wounded, for she has little or nothing of Battista’s anthropomorphic tendency in regard to God, or of her historical picturings with regard to Christ.
The entire Dialogo then is the work of Battista Vernazza; and we have to eliminate it, all but completely, from the means and materials directly available for the constitution of Catherine’s life and doctrine. The next Division will now attempt to deal finally with the chief of these means—the Dimostrazione (Trattato) and the Vita-proper.