4. The Subscription.
The subscription to the Vita-proper, in this first Edition, runs: “Here ends the life of the noble Matron, Catarinetta Adorna”; which thus still retains (like the Preface, but against the Title) the warmly human and precise, domestic and familiar designation of the first heading of MS. A.
VII. Seventh Stage: The Second “Chapter” of the “Dialogo,” which appears for the First Time in the Printed “Vita,” 1551.
1. Three remarks concerning the two Parts of this “Chapter.”
(1) The additions to the Dialogo which appear here for the first time, and which amount to its present Parts Second and Third, are given in this First Edition as one single, the Second, “Chapter,” following upon the older part here designated “Chapter First.” In the Fourth Edition, 1601, this division of the Dialogo is formally announced on the Title-page: “With a Dialogue, divided into two Chapters, between the Soul, the Body, and Self Love; and (the Soul and) the Lord.” I do not know precisely when those two “Chapters” were replaced by the present Three Parts, and when these Parts were divided up into the present Chapters; it was, in any case, after the sixth edition (1645).
(2) These last two Parts seem to have been written, from the first, with a view to eventual division into two. For though the whole of this Second Chapter is not much longer than the First Chapter (forty-seven and a half pages, against forty), it yet divides up very well at about half-way, since the first half here ends with a piece of moralizing narrative, applied to the whole earthly existence: “The more valiant a man is at the beginning, the greater martyrdom should he expect at the end … nor does God cease to make provision … up to that Man’s death.”[427]
(3) This whole “Chapter” Second is by the same author as “Chapter” First; in this Second, even more than in that First “Chapter,” there are no historical materials other than those still present, more or less untouched, in the Vita-proper; and yet these materials have again been modified, in their sequence and setting, their tone and pitch, their drift and meaning, and all this throughout by the same powerful and experienced, often deep and touching, but also, in great part, painfully abstract and straining, absolute-minded and excessive writer.
2. General indications of identity of authorship for “Chapters” First and Second.
(1) “Chapter” First had, we know, concluded with a paraphrase of the last stage in the scheme of Catherine’s spiritual growth as given in the Vita-proper, and had thus reached the ne plus ultra of perfection for any creature, either here or in the world to come. “And now the Spirit said: ‘I am determined no further to call her a human creature, since I now see her (to be) all in God, without any Humanity’”: a statement which may well (like the corresponding Spiritual-Kiss stage in the Vita’s scheme)[428] have been intended, at the time of its composition, both to describe directly her great middle years, 1474-1499, and to sum up generally her later life, 1499-1510.—But no such hyperbolic language, when thus applied to man as we know him, or as we can even conceive him here below, can, of course, be kept up. And thus here in the Dialogo (as previously in the corresponding place in the Vita-proper), what had originally been the conclusion of a self-contained account of her Conversion, became, owing to the desire of utilizing much extant material which directly described her years of physical break-up, but one chapter in the story of her total life. Hence we now find, both in the Vita-proper and the Dialogo, an instructive anti-climax, in an attempted description (the Dialogo gives this in its “Chapter” Second) of her successive states from 1497 to her death in 1510, states and changes which, were we to take the concluding words of the Vita-scheme and of the Dialogo’s “Chapter” First at all strictly, would, in great part, be impossible.
(2) In the Dialogo’s First “Chapter” we found a remarkably free, deliberately pragmatic handling of the Vita-materials, in the making two different visions on two separate occasions (the Vision of the blood-stained Moving Christ, and the Vision of the blood-pouring Fixed Christ) out of the one, curiously composite, Moving-Fixed Christ-Vision of the Vita; and this doubling introduced, into that First Part, a special kind of obscurity, a sort of eddying, circular, repetitive movement and practical fixedness. Similarly we find here, in the Second “Chapter,” the one description of her resumption of Confession, given by the Vita-proper, is made into two accounts, accounts still further separated from each other here than the two visions were separated from each other there. For the first ten and a half Chapters, pages 226b to 242b, give us her history from 1497 to 1501. And, amongst these, Chapter First to Third cover the years 1497 to 1499; and at the end of Chapter Third, page 232b, we get an account of how “she began to confess her sins” (necessarily, at this period, to Marabotto) “with such Contrition, that it appeared a marvellous thing”—a description which has been taken from the story of her First Conversion-Period, but which is made to do duty here, at the date of her beginning to confess, in a very different manner, to Don Marabotto, twenty-five years after those Conversion-Confessions. Yet only at the beginning of the second half of Chapter Tenth (p. 242c) do we hear, (wedged in between two passages, pp. 242b, 243b, which are re-castings of descriptions of a scene which occurred on January 10, 1510, Vita, pp. 139a-140c) of God giving her the help of a “Religioso,” “suo Confessore,” i.e. Marabotto (p. 242c). This is followed, not two pages later on (p. 244b), by a description of the experience of the “Scintilla” on August 11, 1510 (Vita, p. 148b), and by an allusion to her death on September 15, 1510 (p. 245c).—This doubling was no doubt effected for the purpose of introducing as much variety as possible into what is, anyhow, a monotonous narrative; of being thus able to produce a more ordinary and “correct” account of her dispositions and acts, on occasion of the resumption of her Confessions in 1499, than could be given by the direct utilization of Marabotto’s description of them; and of thus, by these two narratives in lieu of that single one, giving greater place and prominence to the practice of Confession than this practice actually occupied in her real life.