Here the difference between this form of apprehension and that of ordinary vivid thinking is so faintly distinct, that she can only declare that she “felt” (without deciding between hearing, seeing, or any other of the more definite senses) “reasonings” (without being sure of their “explicitation” in words or images); and she herself recognized at the time, and later on remembers that contemporary recognition of, their likeness to the texts of the Canticle of Canticles. It is evidently the profound reluctance, cultivated by her for half a century or more, to treat the deepest acts of the soul as other than directly and exclusively the acts of God in that soul, which makes her not see and admit here the large co-operation of her own mind.
Remark also a characteristic difference from Catherine, in that the latter’s teaching is, we have already seen, entirely free from any influences characteristic of the Song of Songs.
9. Experience of Ascension Day, 1555.
“On the Lord’s Ascension Day Thou didst say to me, O my Love, that, up to this point, I had walked by Faith, but that now Thou wast determined to give me direct assurance (certezza); and that there was no occasion for me to go on writing down Thy words, since I should read them in my own experience. And on my asking what Thou wouldst operate within me, Thou didst affirm to me that I should ever possess Thee in my heart.”—“Another time I felt that I was being told: ‘I generate My Son, having an infinite Cognition of Myself; similarly I generate thee, by infusing into thee that same cognition. But (this) My Cognition is without measure; and thine shall be according to that measure which I shall, by My goodness, be impelled to give thee, in suchwise that of this cognition and of thine intellect there shall be effected one identical thing; so that I shall place My Word, My Concept, which I possess within Myself, in thee, according to the capacity for it which I shall deign to give thee; and so that, again, thy spirit shall be a son within My Son, or rather one only son with Him: and thus will I have generated thee.’ Hence, O Lord, according to this Thy showing, those are generated by Thee, who, united by grace to Thy Majesty, repose in Thy Paternal Bosom, together with Thine only Begotten. But He is by nature one sole substance with Thee—He whom Thou art ever ineffably generating; and we are united with Thee, through reposing in Thy bosom by simple grace and by a singular privilege of Thy love; and in so far as we thus abide there in Thee, Thou generatest us in more and more light and ardour. Hence then Thou generatest him who abides in Thee.”
We have here, in the last locution of this series, the most complicated and seemingly original of them all. Yet here we can still find parallels to Catherine: in the addressing of God as “my Love”; in the fact that the locution proceeds from, and its interpretation is submitted, not to our Lord, but to God, to Him who indeed generates His Son without measure and directly, yet all other souls also, though in measure and by and through His Son; and in the declaration that now she should have a kind of direct assurance in lieu of Faith.[351]
And here especially we can trace the large Neo-Platonist (Dionysian) element in Battista’s Mysticism. There is the first, perfect circle, God’s perfect cognition of Himself, a cognition which produces a fresh (though co-eternal) centre of cognition, which latter in return perfectly cognizes Him who perfectly cognized it. And then there is a derivative imperfect circle—since that perfect cognizedness and cognizing, which is God’s Son, can only be imperfectly imparted to the souls of creatures: yet again we have a circle for the very thing which is cognized by God is, in this instance also, the same which cognizes Him. And lastly, this distance between the perfect and imperfect circles is, as far as possible, overcome by an attempted and momentary identification of the perfectly cognized and cognizing circle, Christ, with the perfectly cognized but imperfectly cognizing one, every human soul in its potentiality and divinely intended end.
And this large Platonist scheme of a progression of Ideas appears here coloured and Christianized, by means of four scriptural texts in particular: Ps. cix, 31, “in the brightness (splendours) of the saints, from the womb, before the day star (Lucifer) I begot thee”; John i, 18, “the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father”; xiii, 23, “there was leaning on Jesus’ bosom one of His disciples whom Jesus loved”; and Luke xvi, 23, “the rich man beheld Abraham from afar, and Lazarus in his bosom.” The first two passages give her the eternal and continuous generation and abiding of the Son by and in the Father; and the last two suggest a similar abiding and (interpretatively) generation, together with that Son, of the faithful soul, in and by God, continuously and for ever.
Note, too, the double meaning, so characteristic of mystical utterances, contained in the sentence, “I generate My Son, having an infinite Cognition of Myself”; which indicates both the mode of generation (“by means of an infinite cognition”), and the nature of the generated one (“who has an infinite cognition”). And by this literary device, the intense close-knitness of the perfect circle is strikingly adumbrated.
And remark how Battista finishes up this soaring flight by an interpretation of a perfect sobriety. Indeed it is this moderation and good sense along with so immense an Idealism and intense Interiority which, together, constitute her noblest characteristic and should make us overlook the comparative absence of spontaneous charm and tender freshness, which cannot but strike us if we allow ourselves to contrast the piety of Battista with that of Catherine.