The tone of Battista’s answer is interesting throughout, for a double reason. There is in it a successful, very difficult combination of filial respect and of lofty reproof; and there runs through all the argumentation a sort of legal hard-headedness, entirely in its place on the lips of the lawyer’s daughter in dealing with her lawyer correspondent. I give her answers to his second and fifth objections, since the former is interesting as touching on the point of the obligation and frequency of Sacramental Confession, which has occupied us much in her God-mother’s life; and the latter gives a vivid insight into Battista’s own deeply genuine and happy vocation.
As to Confession, she writes: “You hold one opinion, and the Church holds another; and to this Church it has not appeared good to constrain us to confess ourselves in public, nor always to manifest our whole interior to any and every man who may reprehend us. In this latter case we should have been left without any protection. You grudge obeying her once a year; how then would you carry out the other plan? Certainly the said Church would have but little authority if she could not lay down ordinances, according to her own judgment, concerning the mode (of administration and reception) of the Sacraments already ordained by Christ.”
As to Vows, she finishes up by declaring: “According to my humble judgment, that thing cannot be called slavery which a soul elects for itself, by an act of free choice alone, and with a supreme desire. And in this matter you really can trust me, since here I am, living under the very test of experience, and yet I have no consciousness of being bound to any obligation: so little indeed that, if I had full licence from God to do all those things of which I have deprived myself by my vows, I would do neither more nor less than what I now am actually doing; indeed no taste for anything beyond these latter things arises within me. How then do you come to give the name of servitude to that which gets embraced thus with supreme delight? Perchance you will say ‘not every one is thus disposed.’ My dear Sir: he who does not find this inclination within him, let him not execute it. Neither Christ nor His Church constrain any one in this matter.”[338]
The effect of this homely and sensible, straightforward and firm, first-hand witness to a strong soul’s full daily life of faith and self-expansion in and for Christ in His extension, the Old Church, was evidently decisive, perhaps immediate. It is at least certain that Tommaso Moro came back to the Roman obedience; that he became and died a Priest and Religious; and that his return is universally attributed to the instrumentality of this letter.[339]
III. Battista’s Colloquies, November 1554 to Ascension-Day 1555.
Yet her letters form but a small part of the literary output of this many-sided woman. Her printed writings fill six stout volumes, in all some 2,400 octavo pages, and fall into four chief divisions. The independent verses consist only of four “Canticles of Divine Love,” twelve “Spiritual Canticles,” and five “Sonnets.” Yet even the second division, which alone fills quite five out of the six volumes, and consists of Spiritual Discourses or Dissertations, contains much verse, since the Discourse (which invariably takes its title and starting-point from some, originally or interpretatively, Mystical Biblical text) usually finishes up with a chapter of eight verses, in which she sums up metrically the doctrine which she has just expounded in finely balanced and stately prose. Mostly proceeding from some Pauline, or, more often still, some Joannine text, these writings evince throughout a fine Christian-Platonist breadth of outlook and concentration and expansion of devotional feeling, and have much of that unfading freshness which appertains to the universal experiences of religion, wherever these are experienced deeply and anew and are communicated largely in the form and tone of their actual experimentation. These Discourses would also, of course, furnish all but endless parallels and illustrations to Catherine’s teachings.
Yet it is the last two divisions of Battista’s writings which are the most entirely characteristic and suggestive—her Colloquies and her Letters. As to the seventy-five pages of letters, I have already given extracts from two, of the years 1581 and 1589, and shall presently give portions of two others, of the years 1575 and 1576. But in this section I want to translate and comment upon a considerable portion of her Colloquies, so interesting for various reasons, all directly connected with the subject of this book. These contemporary annotations occupy only eleven pages of print, but they constitute, I think, one of the most instructive first-hand documents of mystical and religious psychology in existence, and have nowhere, as yet, received any of the comparative and analytic study they so richly deserve.
It is but right to remember throughout, that even all her other writings (including the Discourses which are so general and, in a manner, quite public in their tone) were, with the sole exception of her Sonnets, none of them printed with her knowledge and consent. A certain Secular Priest, Gaspare Scotto, did indeed print some at least of the Discourses, without her knowledge, during her long lifetime; but the Colloquies were certainly never meant for any eyes other than her own, and were doubtless not printed, or indeed known, until after her death. I suppose them to have first appeared in the collected edition of her works, published in 1602, fifteen years after her demise.
Now these Colloquies belong to three periods. The first set is timed vaguely una volta; and the third is also but approximately fixed; but the second, by far the longest and most important series, is, at its main turning-points, dated with absolute precision. And since its authenticity, the identity of the chronicler with the experiencing person, and the complete contemporaneousness of the record, are all beyond cavil or question (the majority of the entries were evidently put down by her on the very day, often probably within the hour, of the cessation of the experience thus chronicled)—the document can serve as a simply first-hand illustration of, and commentary on, the analogous experiences of Battista’s God-mother, experiences which, in the latter case, were nowhere recorded by their subject, nor indeed by others till probably, in some cases, a considerable time after their occurrence. And if here again there can be no difficulty, for any sincere and consistent believer, in holding that we have to do with enlightenments of the mind and stimulations of the affections and will, proceeding as truly from God as they led back to Him: we cannot but, here again, find plentiful indications of the antecedent material, and of the co-operation, response, and special colour furnished throughout by the human subject’s special sex and age, race and period, temperament, training, and reading. Not all the latter conditions put together would explain even half of the total experience; yet had these conditions been different, the total experience would have differed, not indeed in its fundamental contents, yet in its special forms and applications. As matters stand, these latter are often strikingly like those manifested in the teaching of Catherine, Battista’s fellow-Genoese. I will now take the nine most interesting days of this series,[340] stopping after certain of them to point out parallels and peculiarities.