And yet these remarkable forty pages furnish us with three fresh statements or implications of detail, respectively too precise, vivid and verisimilar and too little obvious, to be easily attributable to any but a new and authentic source of information. There is the vividly precise information that, during Catherine’s actively penitential period, “the love of God, wishing that she should lose all relish in what she ate, made her always carry some epatic aloes and pounded agaric about with her; and whenever she suspected that one kind of her food was about to give her more pleasure than another, she would furtively put a little of that most bitter compound upon it, before eating it.” There is the formal declaration that “she also went to the poor of San Lazaro.” And there is the statement, already noticed, that, after her conversion, she had “to work to provide for her living,” and “that she would have been unable to live, unless God had provided for her by way of alms.”[412]
Now the first statement should be compared with Battista Vernazza’s, similarly precise, pharmaceutical detail as to the cassia used by her father in doctoring the poor in 1493, recorded by Battista, nearly ninety years later, in 1581:[413] Battista would, then, have been quite capable of remembering and recording that aloes-and-agaric detail some seventy years after the event. As to the second statement, I have already given the various solid reasons which point to Catherine’s co-operation with Battista’s father in his work amongst the Pestiferous, as far back as the year 1493.[414] And as to the third statement (in apparently direct conflict with the declaration in the Vita-proper, that, although entirely devoted to the service of the Hospital, she never would enjoy or use the slightest thing belonging to it for her own living[415]) the Wills prove to us that, however exaggerated be the language of D., it, and not V., is here substantially in the right. For, though she could have afforded to live in modest style, on her own little income, she did, as a matter of fact, hold her little house rent-free from the Hospital, in return for her services to it. Here also Battista would have known the precise facts from her father, who had himself drawn up or witnessed three documents referring to these matters.
6. Battista Vernazza, the author of this first “Dialogo.”
The reader will by now be concluding with me, that all these peculiarities of the Dialogo point to one person as its author: Battista Vernazza. And all its other circumstances and characteristics make for the same conclusion.
(1) Particular circumstances.
There is the place. For the original of MS. C., in which appear the first traces, (this whole first part), of D., came from Battista’s own Convent; and thus a document which, in its later narrative part, contained, as we shall find, so much primary matter due to Vernazza the father, and so much secondary composition and arrangement due to Vernazza the daughter; and which, in its dialogue part, gave much original literary work due to a Vernazza: would easily (no doubt soon after Battista’s death), come to be considered as the work and the copying of Ettore Vernazza alone. And there is the date. For if this first part was written in 1548, 1549, Battista would have been fifty or fifty-two years old. And we have already considered writings of hers, written, with equal subtlety of psychological distinctions and even greater vigour of style, in 1554, 1555, and even in 1575, at seventy-eight and eighty-four years of age.[416]
There is, too, the form, so curiously schematic and abstract, and, in part, far-fetched, yet based upon a minute, most ingenious use of scriptural texts. Thus those two “weeks,” (symbols for the two, respectively lukewarm and sinful, lustres), are no doubt suggested by the “seventy weeks” which “the man Gabriel” declares to Daniel “shall be shortened upon the Jewish people, that transgression may be finished, and everlasting justice may be brought and vision may be fulfilled”;[417] and by Jacob’s twice seven years of servitude under Laban, and by Laban’s words “make up the week of days of this match.”[418] We thus get Catherine’s two weeks (of years) of servitude to sin, and her two successive “matches” or alliances, entered into between her soul and body under the influence of self-love. We found a similar minute ingenuity in Battista’s use of Scripture in 1554.[419]
And there is a complex, abstract, astonishingly self-consistent psychology running through the whole, and one simply identical with the psychology treated by Battista as more or less a point of revelation to herself in 1554. And, partly as effect or as cause of that psychology, the Dialogo has a painfully great, at times downrightly repulsive, insistence upon detachment from emotional feeling, both in intercourse with fellow-creatures, and in spiritual commerce with God, that is simply identical, in its parallelism, range, depth, and doctrinal setting, with the position which Battista takes up in her Colloquii of 1554.[420]
Again we get here a prominent and persistent occupation with the historic Christ and His passion, that are as unlike Catherine’s as they are identical with Battista’s spiritual trend. For, during her Conversion-Vision, Catherine here sees that “burning love which Our Lord Jesus Christ manifested when upon earth, from His Incarnation up to His Ascension”; and this corresponds precisely with Battista’s sight (vista), in 1554, of “the Infinite Love manifested unto men, in and by the life of Christ, at the Nativity and at the Ascension.” And the Christ-Vision here becomes two separate apparitions; that of the Crucified Christ is declared “greater than” that of the Walking Christ; and there is an insistence upon “those five Fountains,” an image derived indeed from Catherine’s “living fountain of Goodness, which participated with the creature,” but which, in Catherine, is conceived in connection with God and metaphysically, and here is transferred to the historic and crucified Christ, in close keeping with Battista’s whole emphatic Christo-centrism.[421]
And, finally, we find here certain daring anthropomorphisms without any full parallel in Catherine’s sayings, but entirely matched by expressions of Battista. God is here not as, in Catherine’s manner, Himself an irradiating Love, but is “ever standing with burning rays of love in His hand, to inflame and penetrate the hearts of men,” a combination of the Thing-imagery dear to Catherine (for Love is here still a luminous, burning substance), and of the human, Personal picturing prominent with Battista (for God here has a hand, in which He holds that substance). This latter picturing (probably in 1550) is not unlike the more spiritual anthropomorphism of “the Increate Heart” of God, used by Battista in 1575 a passage already exceeded here, in the Dialogo, by the words, “God showed her the love with which He had suffered”—words which, if pressed, would introduce suffering into the divine nature Itself.[422]