Now if the question be taken thus, the answer can hardly be doubtful. Certainly not because of her profoundly original doctrine, by which Catherine is speculatively more interesting and humanly more complete than Vernazza, was Catherine prized and preferred to Vernazza by the crowd. Nor did they single her out precisely because of her works and long life of mercy, for Vernazza’s labours of this kind no doubt exceeded Catherine’s, both in their variety and in their visible extension. But it was the psycho-physical peculiarities of the life of Catherine, and the more or less complete incorruption of the body: these two things, neither of which has any necessary connection with that faithful and heroic use of free-will and that spirit and grace of God in which the whole substance of sanctity consists, which, each leading on and back to and strengthening the impression and tradition of the other, determined the outbreak and onflow of popular devotion in the one case, and the absence of which prevented the growth of any such cultus in the other. And thus we have here one more instance of the pathetic irony of fate, or rather one of those many mysterious operations of the divine will which, under the ebb and flow of influences that seem merely human and deteriorative, works in history for the slow upward-raising of our poor kind.
When the well-known ecstatic Augustinian Nun, Anne Catharine Emmerich, died at Dülmen, in Westphalia, on February 6, 1824, her remains also were not long allowed to rest undisturbed in the grave. Already in mid-March the poetess Luise Hensel, who had much loved and venerated her, caused the grave to be opened quite privately, in hopes of finding the body still incorrupt, and of once more being able to gaze on that striking countenance. And a few days later, on March 21 and 22, the grave and coffin were again, this time officially, opened. In both cases the body was found still incorrupt, and two pale red spots appeared on the cheeks. But when, on October 6, 1858, the grave was opened a third and last time, nothing was found of the coffin but one nail, and the body was now represented only by so many separate bones.[332] Now when, some twenty years ago, I visited Dülmen in the company of a distinguished Münster Priest, the latter told me, as we stood together by the grave-side, that this discovery had greatly checked the survivals or beginnings of any such local and popular cultus as had been expected and hoped for by Anne Catharine’s, mostly distant or foreign, admirers.
Similar cases it would be easy to multiply; and they all point to the great advantage, probably to the actually determining incentive, which accrued to the Cultus of Catherine, in that her body continued more or less incorrupt, and thus added a sensible marvel after death to the sensible marvels of her fasts and ecstasies during life. Whereas Catharine Emmerich’s analogous psycho-physical condition during life was not thus reinforced by an unusual physical condition after death. And Ettore, again, had evidently nothing physically, or even psycho-physically, abnormal about him, either in life or in death.
CHAPTER VIII
BATTISTA VERNAZZA’S LIFE
Introductory.
We have, in the characters described in the previous Chapter, dwelt upon figures remarkably unlike Catherine, on her psycho-physical side. Yet it would be only too easy for us now-a-days, by dwelling too much upon the foregoing contrast, to grow actually unfair to Catherine’s kind of temperament and health, and to her mode of apprehending truth and of attaining sanctity. We might thus come to overlook or to underestimate the important fact that certain psycho-physical, neural peculiarities or states most certainly constitute the general antecedents, concomitants or consequences (probably, indeed, one of the necessary though secondary conditions), not indeed of sanctity, but of at least some forms of the contemplative gift, habit, and attainment. We might, too, forget that neither this contemplative gift itself, nor even those neural peculiarities, are at all incompatible with great practical shrewdness and an unusually large external activity; indeed that such rare and costly contemplative picturings and symbolizations of the Unseen are, when true and deep, means and helps for the contemplative, in his own life and often still more in his influence upon others, towards a great recollection and concentration, which would not only turn the soul away from the dispersion and feverishness that sets in towards the close of external action, but would also bring it back renewed to such outward-moving, joyful-humble creativeness, as wholesome recollection itself requires. For without such contact with the material and the opposition of external action, recollection grows gradually empty; and without recollection, external action rapidly becomes soul-dispersive. Hence it is plain, that the true significance and living system of any such deep soul may be on too large a scale not to require, for its due exhibition, that we survey it in connection with some other supplementary life,—like unto some Gobelin design or cloth-pattern, so large as to require two contiguous walls or two human figures to show its totality by means of their combination.
Now Vernazza the father, who throughout his life possessed the most robust and normal health, can fairly be taken as Catherine’s supplementary figure, for the years when ill-health was limiting her normal range of energies, on their operatively outgoing, philanthropic side; and is thus a living protest against isolating Saints’ lives from their complementary extensions and effects. But Battista, his daughter, gives us, in her own person and up to the end of her life, an example of the combination and stimulating interaction of the Contemplative and the Practical, the Transcendent and the Immanental, the heroically normal and Universal and the tenderly Personal, indeed the more or less psycho-physically peculiar. Catherine was the greater, more original, and more winning Contemplative, and Ettore was more massively Practical than was Battista. Yet Battista possessed both gifts, from early times up to the end, apparently unclouded and unbroken by any kind of incapacitation.