Before the experiences and confidences of an almost painful privacy and emotional intensity, which require, in part, a considerable amount of patient interpretation from us, if they are to move and touch us, we found and dwelt upon a moral attitude and a document full of immediately understandable heroism and virile common-sense: the scene with her father before his death-ride, and the letter to Dottore Moro. And, somewhat similarly, three further documents succeed to these intermediate confidences, documents full of love and esteem for the externally ordinary vocation of the vast majority of us all, of a large undaunted outlook, and of a shrewd and persevering public spirit. The apparent mental contraction and subjectivity we have just passed through with her is but the recollective movement, the, as it were, drawing itself together for the spring of action on the part of an already large and expansive soul, and leads on and out to fresh and still larger horizons, and, indeed, effects them.
1. Letter to Donna Anguisola, 1575.
We have first a letter of June 10, 1575 (Battista was now seventy-eight years of age, and had been a Religious for sixty-five years) addressed to a widowed noblewoman with young children—the Illustrious Lady Andronica Anguisola.[352] The reader will note the transition, evidently quite natural and spontaneous in the writer, from a soaring Mysticism, full of Pauline, Joannine, and Dionysian forms, and of deep, personally experimental content, to the most practical and shrewd, wisely unflinching, homely heroism. There are few documents, I think, which show with an equal impressiveness how startlingly direct and immediate can be and is the application of such, apparently, purely transcendental, serene contemplations and affections to the struggling, clamorous world of our human passions, circumstances, difficulties, and duties: and how only that transcendence and this immanence, taken and working thus together, give to the soul a height without inflation, and a concrete particularity without pettiness. I shall break up the long letter into three sections, omitting only two, relatively commonplace, passages in the middle and at the end; and shall again point out certain parallels and peculiarities at the end of each section.
(1) Opening of the letter.
“Most Honoured Madam in the Crucified,
“‘I have come to place (cast) fire upon the earth, and what will I but that it be enkindled’ (Luke xii, 49). By these most divine words we can understand, in part, to what a supreme degree such a most happy fire is of importance, since the Eternal Word came down from Heaven to kindle it in His so dearly-loved rational earth. And this great effect could not but follow, since the Paternal goodness willed to communicate to our misery the ardour which He possesses eternally in His Heart. And what else is this communication to us of His infinite love than the planting within our minds of His own intrinsic, incomprehensible delights? His Majesty, in His infinite courtesy, takes His delights in abiding with the children of men (Prov. viii, 31). But He desires that these delights should proceed from both sides, so that, as He takes these delights in us, by His own intrinsic natural goodness, He similarly wills that we, by means of that same goodness which is poured into us by that fire which Christ places upon our earth,—as Paul demonstrates when he says (Rom. v, 5), ‘The charity of God is poured forth in our hearts by the Holy Ghost who is given to us,’—He wills, I say, that, set in motion by the immense potency of this infused fire, we should place, in return, all our delights in His Majesty; and then, to speak according to our human fashion, His unmeasured love attains to its intent. In this correspondence lie hidden away delights beyond all comprehension, considering that it is His own goodness that comes down (into us), as He demonstrates when he says, ‘We will come to him, and will make our abode with him’ (John xiv, 23); and that He raises us up beyond all measure in suchwise that, of the Increate Heart and of the created one, there is made, by the operation of Him who says, ‘The Father who is in Me, worketh’ (John x, 38; v, 17), a single most secret and inestimable union.”
Here, again, we find close parallels to Catherine in “His own intrinsic incomprehensible delights,” “His infinite courtesy,” “the immense virtue of this infused fire,” and “to speak according to our human fashion.” And the whole general conception of a mutual and corresponding action and circle between God and the soul, the whole movement beginning in and by God, and leading back and ending in Him, is here, once more, the common property of Battista and her God-mother.[353] Yet “The Crucified,” with which the whole letter opens, and “His Heart,” the “Increate Heart,” applied directly to God Himself, are expressions we should seek in vain in Catherine. The historical Christ, and a most legitimate anthropomorphism, find here a place, indeed a prominence, which they have not there. And note the sobriety with which Battista insists on the analogical character of all this speculation, for she “speaks” only “according to our human fashion”; and the allegorizing involved in the “His dearly-loved rational earth,” the earth that souls dwell on having here become simply identical with those souls themselves. And especially remark the mystically characteristic doubleness of meaning, and the conception of the substantiality of the divine indwelling, involved in the phrase, “His own intrinsic, incomprehensible delights.” For this phrase means both “the delight which, for our minds, is intrinsically bound up with the thought of God,” and the “delight which He himself takes in His indwelling whilst abiding within us”; and the latter idea involves a belief in the soul’s delight in Him being but a sympathetic echo and answer to His delight in this His own indwelling, a delight thus actually in operation within the human soul.
Mark, too, how her opening her letter with a formally announced text is but an instance of her life-long literary form of composition—the homily; how saturated is the whole with (evidently first-hand) scriptural meditation; and how wise and like her own father is her treatment of this soul, so near to delusion in the very intemperance of her search after perfection. A warning note of a claim about to be made upon her correspondent’s effective self-immolation has been struck, from the first, by the words, “the Crucified”; and yet this note is first followed by a paragraph sufficiently soaring to satisfy even the most lofty moods of the Signora Andronica.