The Mystical Element of Religion, as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her friends, Volume 1 (of 2)

by Freiherr von Friedrich Hügel

(2) General considerations.

All these cumulative reasons of detail will be indefinitely fortified by what I shall have to say as to the character of the subsequent parts of the Dialogo, and in proof of these parts and the first instalment being by one and the same author. But, meanwhile, we can press this further general consideration, that only a person with considerable traditional authority in matters concerning Catherine, and yet a person, not a direct eyewitness or full contemporary, hence an individual without any additional information, and unhampered by the (otherwise necessary) regard for the sensitiveness of still living contributors to the original biography, can possibly have written such a document. For this production, when it first appears complete, in the first Printed Vita of 1551, will there occupy quite one third of the whole book; and yet, whilst incorporating practically all, and only all, the material of those other two-thirds (the Trattato alone excepted), it gives to everything a fresh grouping and setting, colour and atmosphere, drift and character. Only a remarkable, powerful mind; a writer skilled in mystical subjects; one with leisure for such a careful composition; one, too, sufficiently in sympathy with Catherine to be attracted to, and helped through, the difficult task; a person living now, thirty-eight years after Catherine’s death, in an environment of a kind to preserve her memory green: all these conditions must, more or less, have met and been realized in the writer of this curious, forcible book.—And Battista, the God-daughter of the heroine of the work, and the eldest, devoted daughter of the chief contributor to the already extant biography; a Contemplative with a deep interest in, and much practical experience of, the kind of spirituality to be portrayed and the sort of literature required; a Nun, during thirty-eight years, in the very Convent where Catherine’s sister (one of its foundresses) had lived and died, and where Catherine herself had desired to live and where her Conversion had taken place; a woman who was but thirteen at the time when Catherine died, after nine years of much suffering and seclusion, and who, even now but fifty-one years of age, had outlived all the close friends and original chief biographers of Catherine by thirty-five, twenty-four, and twenty years: Battista, and Battista alone, united in her own person all these necessary conditions. And it will have been the sensitively original and strongly synthetic cast of Battista’s mind which made the strangely fragmentary, repetitive, contradictory, static, and yet abrupt and unharmonized multiplicity of the Vita both irritating as it stood, and yet (with its considerable elements of unmistakably first-hand portraiture of a rarely large and lofty mind and character) profoundly stimulative to a re-thinking, re-feeling, re-stating of the whole,—at least, up to the zenith of that Soul’s perfection.

But our next stage will make all this clearer still.

VI. Sixth Stage: First Printed Edition of the “Vita-Dottrina-Dicchiarazione,” 1551; Examination of all it possesses in addition to MSS. A, B and C, apart from the “Dialogo.”

At last we reach the publication of the Life, in Genoa, in 1551.[423] A printing-press had not been established in Genoa till 1536 (by Bellone); hence the Life appeared only fifteen years after the earliest date possible for its publication,—other cities not being, as yet, sufficiently interested in Catherine to think of such an undertaking.—Only further on shall I attempt some analysis, estimation, and attribution of that corpus of earlier and earliest constituents of the Book, which, although frequently referred to at our last two stages, had there to remain unanalyzed. In these remaining two stages I intend to treat only, first of the Introductory parts of the Book, special to its printed form, and then of the Second “Chapter” of the Dialogo (its present Second and Third Parts).

Here then we have to deal with the matter which, amongst our extant documents, appears for the first time in the Printed Vita of 1551, and first with that part of it which is there devoted to the publication of the Book. This part of the matter consists, in the order of its place in the Book, of the Title with its Picture; the Approbation; the Preface; and the Subscription.

1. Title-page.

The Title-page has: “Book of the Admirable Life and Holy Doctrine of the Blessed Catarinetta of Genoa, in which is contained a Useful and Catholic Demonstration and Declaration of Purgatory.” And underneath appears a picture of Our Lord Crucified, and Blessed Catherine on her knees before Him, and crowned with a Diadem; with the text: “I confess to Thee, Father, Lord of Heaven and Earth, that Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent and hast revealed them unto little ones” (Matt. xi).

Note here, in the Title, the correct and most attractive baptismal form of her Christian name, Catarinetta, which appears here for the last time, either in the Title, the Heading, or the Subscription of her Life; and the disappearance, which is final, of her family name Adorna, which had figured in the titles of all the MSS. Thus “La miranda vita e sancta conversation di Madonna Catherinetta Adorna,” the older heading of MS. A, which will have been that of the Giustiniano book (a heading which itself had succeeded to “De la Miranda Conversione di quondam Donna Catherinetta Adorna” of the booklet of 1512, still preserved in MS. B), has here become “La vita mirabile e dottrina santa de la Beata Catarinetta da Genoa.”—And note how, for the first time, mention is made in the title of what has hitherto been but a long Chapter of the Vita; and how what in the MSS. had, in that Chapter’s heading, claimed but to be a matter of devotional experience (“How, by comparison of the divine fire, which she felt in her heart and which purified her soul, she saw interiorly and understood how the Souls abide in Purgatory”), has here been given, some thirty years after the Papal condemnation of Luther’s theses on Purgatory, a controversial point,—it is now “a Useful and Catholic Demonstration and Declaration of Purgatory.” We have here an attitude of mind inevitably different from Catherine’s pure positiveness.—And remark, too, the continued non-indication of the Dialogo, although this is now present, like the “Dimostrazione,” as a distinct document in the Book: the Dialogue is evidently still too new to be able to modify the old title-page, and to appear there alongside of a composition which, though but one-sixth of its own length, is now some thirty and more years old.