Introduction.
The following laborious study of the growth and upbuilding of the Life and Legend of St. Catherine is a study worth the making. For this study will bring out fully the test and reasons which have guided the process of documentary selection and estimation adopted throughout the second part of this book, indicating thus the precise degree of reliability pertaining to my narrative. But especially will it furnish a detailed, and peculiarly instructive, example of what, with numberless differences in degree, kind, and importance, can be traced throughout the history of the transmission of the image and influence of great religious personalities and teachers. These continuously recurring phenomena can be taken as, together, constituting the general forms and laws which regulate the growth of all religious devotional biography.
I.
These general laws appear to be as follows.
1. Three Laws.
There is the law of contemporary, simultaneous, spontaneous variation of apprehension. Vernazza and Marabotto, writing down, at the time of their occurrence or communication, certain facts and sayings with an equal self-oblivion, sincerity, and truthfulness, give us apprehensions which, in great part objectively valuable, are, nevertheless, more or less differing pictures of one and the same fact or saying, or different selections from amongst the moods and manifestations of one living personality observed by them.—There is the law of posterior, successive, reflective variation of elaboration. The Dominican Censor and Battista Vernazza, re-thinking Catherine and her teaching, in other times and away from her direct influence, necessarily see her differently again: they are, as it were, spiritual grandchildren, who rather themselves absorb her and re-state her to their generation than they are themselves absorbed by her.—And there is the law of conservation, juxtaposition, and identification. First the Redactor of the Book of 1528-1530, and lastly the Redactor of that of 1551—probably, both times, Battista—with, in between, in 1547, the Redactor who attempted a quadripartite reschematizing of the Life—could not but try and soften the variations produced by the two other laws.
2. The third law tends to confuse the operation of the other two.
And note how it is precisely this third law and stage which largely tends to make the effects of the two other laws into causes of vagueness, confusion, and scepticism. For instead of conceiving the unity and identity of the subject-matter (a deep spiritual personality) as essentially inexhaustible, and as requiring, for its least inadequate apprehension, precisely both those simultaneous and spontaneous, and those successive and reflective experiences and reproductions of it, as furnished by the two other laws, this stage tends to confuse the identity of the apprehended subject-matter with a sameness in the apprehension of it; and, whilst thus robbing that subject-matter of its richness and movement, to introduce an element of arrangement and timidity into the originally quite naïf, and hence directly impressive, evidences of the observers. Yet the instinct and object of this third law is as legitimate and elementary as are those of the other two, since a real unity and utilization of all the preceding variety is as necessary as the variety to be thus integrated, and since the other two laws show a similar variety of actuation throughout religious literature.
3. Examples.
We find (to move in Church History back from St. Catherine) these three tendencies at work in the constitution of the Life and Legend of St. Francis of Assisi, A.D. 1181(?)-1226, traced for us now, with so much sympathy and acumen by M. Paul Sabatier and the Bollandists. We get them again in the case of St. Thomas of Canterbury, A.D. 1118-1171, especially in that of his Death and Miracles, so carefully studied in Dr. Edwin Abbot’s remarkable book (1898). And, once more, in those Merovingian Saints, the great Martin of Tours in their midst, at the end of the fourth century, whose Lives have been so interestingly described by Bernouilli (1900). And we find them, with especial clearness, in the growth of the Life of St. Anthony, about A.D. 250-356, as contained in Palladius’s Historia Monachorum, now that Abbot Cuthbert Butler has given us his admirable analysis and edition of that deeply instructive compiler (1898, 1904).
If we take the Bible, we find (on moving here in a contrary direction) these laws again at work in the elucidation and elaboration of the great figure of Moses and of his world-historic life-work. For if here we get but little that can claim to be by his pen, or even, as literature, to be contemporaneous with him (since the earliest Corpus of Laws, the Book of the Covenant, reaches probably only in its substance back to him), yet here, too, the earliest consecutive descriptions of his life, by the Jahvist and Elohist writers, give us two different, though probably more or less simultaneous, largely naïve, accounts and impressions of his life and work. And these simultaneous variations are followed, later on, by the successive, increasingly reflective variations and developments of Deuteronomy and of the Priestly Code. And lastly, these documents get constituted (in probably two great stages), by Redactional work, into the great composite History and Legislation of our present last four Books of Moses.—So again with David. We have the David of some few of the Psalms; the David of the Books of Samuel, in a double series of most vivid and spontaneous, more or less simultaneous but somewhat differing, accounts; the David of the greater part of the Psalter, the result of a long process of devout successive reflection and re-interpretation; and the David of the Books of Chronicles, where pragmatic systematization reaches its height.—And so too with the Maccabean Heroes, whose history appears, apprehended with varying degrees of contemporary, simultaneous, spontaneous vividness, and of subsequent, successive, reflective pragmatism, in the documents and redactional settings of the First and Second Books of Maccabees.—And the growth indicated in these three cases covered respectively some eight hundred, seven hundred, and one hundred years.
But it is, of course, in the New Testament that the interest and importance of these laws reaches its height. If here we once more move backwards, the case of St. Paul (martyred A.D. 64) furnishes us with parallel contemporary accounts of the spontaneous type, in his own Epistles and in the six “We”-passages by the eyewitness St. Luke in the Acts of the Apostles; whilst the remaining account in the Acts is doubtless by a later, more reflective and pragmatic, writer.—And in the apprehension and interpretation of Our Lord’s inexhaustible life, character, teaching, and work, we find very plainly the three tendencies and stages. We get the contemporary, simultaneous, spontaneous stage, in the cases of the Aramaic annotations of the Apostle Levi-Matthew, which we still possess, translated and incorporated both in the larger and later book, our canonical Greek St. Matthew, and in the corresponding parts of our St. Luke; and in the reminiscences of another eyewitness, presumably St. Peter, given us by a disciple in what is still the substance of our Canonical St. Mark. We get the posterior, successive, increasingly reflective or contemplative stage, chiefly in the two great types furnished, first by the Pauline, and then by the Joannine writings. And we get the juxtaposing, unifying, largely identifying stage and law operating above all in the, partly successive, Canonization of the New Testament Corpus. And these three stages can be taken as having their downward limits in about A.D. 30, 100, 200; so that here we cover a period of some hundred and seventy years.
4. Three different attitudes possible.
And, in all these and countless other cases, we can take up three different attitudes: the impoverishing, sectarian, “purity” attitude; the destructive, sceptical, “identity” attitude; or the fruitful, truly Catholic “approximation” and “development” attitude. The first attitude assumes (ever in part unconsciously) the possibility and necessity of a purely objective apprehension of Personality, of such a Personality being a static entity, both in itself and in its effects upon, and its apprehendedness by, other souls, and of the earliest among the observations concerning such a Personality ever giving us such a purely objective, exhaustive picture and experience, or at least the nearest approach (in all respects) to such an exhaustive objectivity. The third attitude would so understand the admitted identity of the Personality observed as practically to identify also the simultaneous and successive observers and observations, and to eliminate all variety and growth in that spirit’s own inner life and in its apprehension by other minds. Only the second attitude would, by recognizing both the constant, necessary presence of a subjective element in all these simultaneous and successive apprehensions, and the indefinite richness and many-sided apprehensibleness of all great spiritual Personalities, welcome and draw out all the difference in unity of these many “reactions,” as so many means, for a growing soul, towards a growing knowledge of that life and character, whose very greatness is, in part, measurable by the depth, variety, and persistence of these several effects, pictures, and embodiments of itself in different races, times, and souls.
Let us, then, betake ourselves to a systematic examination of one example of these world-wide three laws: the trouble taken will be well spent.
II.
Had I found room to print my notes in justification of the text adopted by me, the reader would have gained some idea of the exceeding complexity of the materials furnished by the printed Vita e Dottrina. Indeed the original Preface to that book (1551) finds it necessary to conclude with the words “we therefore” (because of the book’s utility, indeed necessity, “in these turbulent times”) “beg the devout reader not to be disturbed” (stomacharsi now changed to meravigliarsi) “if he finds here matters which appear to be out of their proper order” (non ben ordinate), “and which are sometimes repeated; since attention has been given, neither to much precision” (distinzione), “nor to the order of events, nor to elegance of form, but only to that truth and simplicity with which its facts and discourses were gathered by devout spiritual persons” (“her Confessor and a Spiritual Son of hers”) “from the very lips of that Seraphic Woman.” Both the praise and the blame of this pregnant sentence will appear to be most fully deserved.
In our Second Part we have, in imitation of all experience in life itself, been thrown in medias res, and have thus gained some general idea and curiosity as to the sources of our knowledge; in this Appendix we will now, without repeating details already given, take this evidence, as much as possible, in its chronological order. And at each stage I shall attempt so to analyze the evidence of that stage, as to be able to use it as a check and test of the evidence of the next stage.—We shall, however, have to bear in mind that this method has necessarily, at each earlier stage, somewhat to beg the question; for, in order to make its meaning everywhere sufficiently clear, it has from the first to assume a confidence of tone, which can be justified only by the whole argument, and which therefore has its logical place only at the very end.
This Appendix shall consist of two Divisions, of seven stages and eight sections respectively. The first Division gives the dated Documents, or such as can readily be restricted to within certain years; and the second Division analyses the remaining, undated Corpus and attempts to fix its origin and value.