These transpositions would alone suffice to show how complicated is the textual history of the Vita: we may have to consider some of them later on. But it is the lacunae which are especially interesting. One of these is quite certainly right, as against the printed text. Paragraphs 23 to 25 of Chapter L of the Print are wanting here. Those pages give an entirely fantastic, and formally vague, account of a supposed interior stigmatization of Catherine, and of a preposterous elongation of one of her arms,—both “facts” based explicitly upon the authority of Argentina.[373] And the circumstance of the scribe being a disciple of the stigmatized St. Francis, and the probability that Argentina was still accessible, conjoin to render the absence of these paragraphs from this MS. simply decisive against their historical character.—The longest of all the omissions, that of the Dialogo, must, even more, be explained on the ground of its non-existence at this time, or, at least, of its not being known to the Scribe, or again, of its having as yet no kind of authority. For not only does he make no use of, or allusion to this, very long, and (were it primitive) simply supreme document, but, as we shall find, quite a number of his facts contradict the Dialogo’s version of them; and we shall soon see that, had he known and esteemed the document, he would not have allowed such a defiance of it to remain without correction.
Over against these two non-appearances of spurious or secondary matter, we have to set three omissions of highly valuable material. The two interconnected, obviously entirely historical, paragraphs concerning Maestro Boerio,—his attempt to cure Catherine, and the excessive impression made upon her by his scarlet robes,[374]—are both wanting here. But we shall see that they were probably not incorporated in any Vita, till the preparation of the Printed Life of 1551.—Matters stand differently with respect to the third omission,—the beautifully vivid, inimitably daring and characteristic, Chapter XIX, containing Catherine’s dialogue with the Friar, who, according to the well-informed Parpera, was a Franciscan Observant.[375] It is impossible to hold that this, most historical and well-preserved, story did not stand in the Observant’s Prototype, or that it was otherwise unknown to him; its omission is doubtless deliberate and “prudential.”—An interesting instance of demonstrable omission on his part, is indeed furnished also by his version of the beautiful story of Suor Tommasa’s life: his abbreviation of it is so obvious and yet so unintelligent, that only a reference to the full account, which lay certainly before him and is still preserved in the Printed Life, makes any satisfactory sense of what he has retained.[376]
3. Modification from a tripartite scheme to a quatripartite one.
But the most interesting of all the differences between this MS. A of 1547 and the Printed Life of 1551 is another group of omissions, connected, as these are, with the one single modification introduced into his own text by the Scribe himself. The whole of the matter corresponding to the Printed Life’s Chapter XLIV (all but the first seven lines) and that corresponding to the first three paragraphs of its Chapter XLIX, which treat consecutively, and with an inimitable vividness and a daring, unreflective truthfulness, of her most unusual self-revelations to her Confessor Don Marabotto,[377] is omitted—possibly, again, in part at least, from fear of scandal; but more probably because, even at this time, this (the most private and consecutive) contribution to the Life, still existed separately, perhaps from all, and presumably from most, copies of the Vita then in circulation. And such a copy will have been the Observant’s Prototype.—Only when he had finished copying out his manuscript, will he have discovered that, if he would take any, even though silent, account of that contribution, which, by now, will have become known to him, he must, at all costs, break up and seriously modify one of his chapters. We have already studied the treble, most solemn affirmation, by Catherine and her Confessor themselves, in that Printed Chapter XLIV, as to her twenty-five years of spiritual loneliness and guidance by God alone;[378] and we have seen that (since we cannot place her Conversion before 1474, nor the beginning of her later practice of Confession after 1499) we are forced (if we take her words in their obvious sense, as applying to Confession as well as to Direction, and assume her First Convert-Period, the penitential time, to have been accompanied throughout by repeated Confessions) to make this first Period very short.
Now the volume of 1547, 1548, consists throughout of paper, all but the first three leaves and the tenth leaf, which are of parchment. The first leaf remains blank; the second contains the Observant’s Preface on its obverse; the third holds, on its two sides, the first two pages of the Vita. That Preface was certainly written before all the rest, or at least certainly during the lifetime of Donna Orientina Centurione, i.e. before February 4, 1548; nor does anything in those first two (parchment and paper) pages of text suggest that they are an insertion subsequent to the following (paper) pages. At first, then, the copy will have consisted of three parchment leaves, and then of nothing but paper leaves; and the Observant will have made the last of these parchment leaves the sole and opening parchment leaf of the text of the Book.
But matters stand differently with the tenth leaf, pp. 19, 20 of the MS., which begins with the words “bisogna, sono apparecchiata a confessar”—“(if) necessary, I am prepared to confess my sins in public” (Catherine’s words, on occasion of her Conversion); and ends with “(abru) savano insino al core. Poi fù tirata al Petto”—“Love, with those penetrating rays of its own, which burnt her, even to the heart. She was then drawn to the Breast” (narrative words which, in the scheme of her Life that follows upon the Conversion-story, mark the transition from one of this scheme’s stages to another).
Now here we have clear indications that these two parchment pages hold a modified text. For that last parchment-leaf word “Petto” is picked up, on the paper continuation, by “Pecto,” the ordinary form of the Observant’s Prototype: see his page 81. And the whole book (all but this parchment leaf and its highly restricted effects), still attributes four years to her First Convert-Period, her Penitential, Purgative Stage.
Indeed, this solitary parchment leaf itself still allows us to trace, (as though the leaf were a Palimpsest), both this, the original, length of that Period, and the fact of that Period having then been the first of three, and not, as now, of four such periods.—For this leaf, in finishing up the manuscript’s fourth chapter, the history of her Conversion,[379]—declares that “this sight (of her sins) and this contrition (for them) lasted fourteen months, during which she went on confessing herself, continually increasing her self-accusation (aggravando la colpa); after the passing of which months, all sadness was lifted from her, nor did she have any memory of her sins,—as though she had cast them into the depths of the sea.” And then, in the opening of the fifth chapter,[380] the scheme and conspectus of her Convert Life runs as follows. She is first “drawn to the feet of Christ” and abides there “one year until she had satisfied her conscience by Contrition, Confession, and Satisfaction.”—“She next felt herself drawn, with St. John, to repose on the Breast of her Loving Lord.… The sight of the sins committed by her against God would come to her, so that she would be, as it were, wild (arrabbiava) with grief, and would lick the ground with her tongue; and in this wise she appeared to derive relief for her tempestuous feelings (affannato cuore). And she abode thus for three years, during which she was, as it were, wild with grief and love, with those penetrating rays of its own, which burned her to the very heart.[381] She was then drawn to the Breast”—which last parchment-leaf word is taken up by the next, ordinary paper-leaf: “Breast; and here she was shown the Heart of Christ.… And she abode many years with this impression of His burning Heart.—And then she was drawn (still) further up, that is, to the Mouth; and there she was found worthy of being kissed by the true Solomon.… And she no more (directly) recognized her human acts, whether they had been done well or evilly; but she saw all in God.”[382]
We see here how the original four years of her First Period, which are still retained elsewhere by the Printed Vita,[383] have been broken up by the scribe of this Manuscript into two shorter (first and second) Periods, of fourteen months (one year), and three years respectively; how the copyist, both in his first apportionment of length to his new First Period, “fourteen months,” and in his second assignment, now of one year (since he has to divide up the original Four years so as to get them again by addition, “one year” and “three years”), leaves us two curious echoes of the “Four” of his Prototype; how his amended description of his new second Period is still largely the old Penitential description, for she still sees her sins (a sight which is here an anachronism), and she is still prostrate on the ground (a prostration which exactly suits the Feet, but in no way the Breast of Christ); how the Observant has been half-hearted and clumsy, for he has now left two successive Breast-Periods, hardly differentiated from each other; and how he was able to shift (though not to change) the original single Breast-Period (now his second Breast-Period), because of its conveniently vague time-note of “many years.” All this laborious, yet timid, incomplete and ineffectual change, thus forced upon an evidently long-established, toughly resisting composition, can only have taken place under some severe pressure of evidence; and the root-causes of the change are somehow connected with the question as to the duration, in her life, of the perception and Confession of her sins. For the Confession of her sins, which (in the old scheme) extended over four years, is now restricted to fourteen months or one year; and if contemplative and restful love are now anticipated (from the original second Period) in the new second Period of three years, yet an intense sight of her particular sins, piercing contrition for them, and a complete prostration on the ground, are all indeed retained, from the original Feet-Period, for this new second Period, but Confession has disappeared from these three years.