3. Closer examination of the earlier portion of “Chapter” Second.
A closer examination of the whole Second “Chapter” of the Dialogo fully substantiates this conclusion, and brings out other interesting points. Let us take the eleven Chapters of the present Part Second.
(1) The first two Chapters describe her condition when “the Soul could no more correspond to the sensations of the Body,—the Body remained, as it were, without its natural being, and dwelt confused and stunned, without knowing where it was or what it should do or say” (pp. 226c, 227a). And then the Soul begins to address “the Lord” (p. 229a). And on p. 230b we hear, for the first time, of its “sweet and cruel Purgatory.” And Chapter Third tells of the Soul’s painful prison-life, and of vomitings, emaciation, and occasional inability to move (pp. 230b-232a).—Now Purgatory, prison-house and these psycho-physical conditions do not appear, in the Vita-proper, till “nine years before her death,” and, indeed, in great part only within the last year of her life.[429] Indeed it is only the characteristic intensity with which the Dialogo here describes the fresh access of Contrition, and the resumption of frequent Confession for evidently new offences (a description entirely inappropriate to this late stage of her life), that makes it difficult to realize that these three Chapters are dealing with 1497 to 1499. And the exaggeration here exactly corresponds to the exaggeration, in Part (“Chapter”) First, of her earlier sinfulness, and her first Conversion and Contrition.
(2) Chapter Fourth then gives a short description of another “ray of love”; and then apostrophizes, in seven “oh” and “che” sentences, such a state of soul (pp. 232c-233c). Chapter Fifth contains one question and answer exchanged between the Soul and the Lord, and then three narrative-exclamatory paragraphs (pp. 233c-235a). Chapter Sixth gives two explanations by the Lord of the Soul’s sufferings, interrupted by the Soul’s thanks and acceptance (pp. 235b-237a). And then Chapter Seventh describes a lull in the Soul’s battles and trials (pp. 237a-238a). And this lull is followed, in Chapter Eighth, by a declaration from the Lord that she has now been led up to the door of Love but has not yet entered in (pp. 238a-239a); and, in Chapter Ninth, by a dialogue (for the first time in the entire work) between the Spirit and the Soul, the former being now determined to separate itself from the latter; and, at the end of this same Chapter, by a description of this, now more or less achieved, separation (pp. 239a-241a; 241b).—These conflicts and dialogues between the Spirit and the Soul, are closely like the conflicts and dialogues between the Spirit and “Humanity” in Part First.[430] Yet there, the historical materials are derived chiefly from the Vita-proper, pp. 20a-21b, 96b-97c (which give an account of her work from 1473 to 1497); whilst here they come exclusively from pp. 133b-138b of the Vita-proper (which tell her experiences from November 11 to the end of December 1509).
(3) And the last two Chapters, Tenth and Eleventh, are particularly difficult and self-destructive, obscure and disappointing. The Tenth (to be fully analyzed presently), is difficult, because it starts with fragments of Vita-information which, in the Vita, rightly refer, in large part, to the beginning of the last ten years of her life, and even to 1499 in particular,—hence to a period long anterior to all that has been described in the Dialogo ever since Chapter Third of this Part. And these fragments are here made to lead up to a re-statement of the scene of January 10, 1510, when she shut herself off from every one, but when Marabotto managed to overhear her soliloquy (pp. 241c-244a compared with pp. 139b, 113c.) And the Eleventh Chapter is obscure and disappointing, because, after giving the “scintilla”-incident of August 11, 1510, and a final short dialogue between the “Lord” and her “Humanity” (again a combination of Dramatis Personae which has occurred nowhere else), it finishes, not with any description or even affirmation of her earthly end, but simply with an account as to the necessity of Purgation, and, in particular, with the words “a martyrdom which never ceases until death” (pp. 244a-245c).
4. Closer examination of later portion of “Chapter” Second.
Part Third, on the contrary, is peculiar in this, that its Dialogue passes exclusively between but two interlocutors, the Soul and the Lord: it thus brings back the whole composition to its opening form of strict duologue,—although there the speakers had been the (unpurified) Soul and the Body. The present thirteen Chapters constitute, in substance, a single, all but unbroken, disquisition on God’s love for the Soul, and on the Soul’s growth in the love of God; although the form alternates between Chapters of questions and answers, and Chapters of rapturous descriptions and apostrophizings of Love.
(1) Chapters First and Second consist of such questions and answers, and conclude with an, abruptly introduced, account of her former spiritual conversations with her friends, which (though based upon the beautiful document in the Vita-proper, pp. 94b-95c, and upon the fragment there, p. 97b, and though the narrative here has a certain noble warmth of its own) is given here merely as a something to be transcended, and which, by now, had been actually left far behind. Thus, as in Parts First and Second the Dialogo had given a characteristically rigoristic, indeed exaggerating, account of her Conversation and her later Purification respectively, so here again this curious book is more severe than are the authentic accounts on which it otherwise relies.
(2) Chapter Third gives a question and answer as to the comprehensibility of this love. The answer incorporates Catherine’s description of her soul as, so to speak, under water in an ocean of peace; and interestingly turns the “scintilla,” the “spark of love,” into a “stilla,” a “drop,” suggested, no doubt, by the “goccia,” “the drop of love,” which figured so prominently in Catherine’s great conversation with her spiritual children.[431]—Chapters Fourth to Sixth open out with a page where the Lord declares how the pure and love-absorbed Soul alone holds Love (p. 253); and consist, for the rest, of exclamatory descriptions of this love, the soul proffering first ten “O Amore” apostrophes (pp. 253c-258b), then one “O Amore puro” address (pp. 259c, 260a). And the tenth of those apostrophes introduces a characteristic sentence from the Vita-proper: “the Soul,—if bereft of charity,—when it is separated from the Body, would, rather than present itself thus before that (Divine) cleanness and simplicity, cast itself into Hell.”[432]—And Chapter Seventh then makes the Lord ask the Soul to tell him some of the words which it addresses to Love; the Soul does so, and the Lord approves of them (pp. 260b-261b).
(3) And then Chapter Eighth begins a narrative piece (pp. 261c-263c); but which, after a transitional, exclamatory paragraph (p. 263c), arrives at three short questions and answers. The first two questions and answers are by the Soul and the Lord respectively; the third question and answer are respectively by the Lord and the Soul (pp. 264a, b). We shall presently see that, in this set of short sentences, we have reached the culmination of the whole Dialogo, and that, in astonishingly explicit daring, they exceed any and all of Catherine’s authentic sayings.