1. The writer’s power.
The following passages, all more or less peculiar to the Dialogo, suffice, I think, to prove his power.
At the beginning of these, her last nine years, the Lord explains to Catherine the means by which Love may be known: “My love can be better known by means of interior experience than in any other way; if man is to acquire it, Love must snatch man from man himself, since it is man himself who is his own chief impediment,”[434]—a passage that recalls Thackeray’s Arthur Pendennis, his Friends and his Greatest Enemy—namely, his own self.
These years are, a little later, described in language no doubt suggested, probably through some Patristic passage, by Plato, the harmonious. “This soul now abode like a musical instrument which, as long as it remains furnished with chords, gives forth sweet sounds; but which, bereft of them, is silent. Thus she too, in the past, by means of the sentiments of soul and body, was wont to render so sweet a harmony, that every one who heard it rejoiced in it; but now, alienated from those sentiments, as it were without” psychic “chords, she remained entirely bare and mute.”[435]
And we are told of “words which the heart alone speaks to the soul alone”[436]—a passage which recalls Pascal’s saying, “The heart has reasons which Reason does not know.”
Amongst the rapturous addresses we find, “O Spirit naked and invisible! No man can hold thee (here below), because of thy very nakedness! Thy dwelling-place is in Heaven, even whilst, joined to the body, thou happenest still to tarry upon earth! Thou dost not know thine own self, nor art thou known by others in this world. All thy friends and (true) relatives are in Heaven, recognized by thee alone, through an interior instinct infused by the Spirit of God.”[437] An apostrophe which, in part, strongly recalls Henry Vaughan’s poem, “They are all gone into a world of light, and I alone am lingering here.”
The final address in this series of apostrophes to Love, God, contains the sentences: “O Lord, how great is Thy loving care, both by day and by night, for man who knows not even his own self, and far less Thee, O Lord. Thou art that great and high God, of whom we cannot speak or think, because of the ineffable super-eminence of Thy Greatness, Power, Wisdom, and Goodness infinite. Thou labourest in man and for man with Thy Love, and in return Thou willest that the whole man should act for Love, and this because, without Love, nothing good can be produced. Thou workest solely for man’s true utility; and Thou willest that man should operate solely for Thine honour, and not for his own (separate) utility.”[438] A passage strongly coloured by Dionysian ideas.
And yet the writer continues to think and to write, but says: “These words of mine are like ink: for ink is black and of an evil odour; and yet, by its means, many ideas are apprehended, which otherwise would be ignored altogether.”[439] Here we have an image, based as it is upon a vivid sensible perception of a chemical compound, which reminds one of the epatic-agaric passage in “Chapter” First of the Dialogo, and of the reference to cassia in Battista’s letter of 1581.[440]
And the whole Book finishes up with two impressive passages. The first, as to the means of knowing Love, is as Pauline as is most of the remaining doctrine of the Dialogo: “Not by means of external signs, nor even by martyrdoms, can this love be comprehended. Only he who actually experiences it can understand something of it.”[441] And the second concludes all with a forcible and comprehensive paraphrase of Catherine’s central doctrine,—as to the Soul’s condition and action, revealed at the moment of death: “Every man bears within his own self the sentence of his own judgment, pronounced indeed by God, yet each man himself ratifies it, in and for his own case and self. There is no place totally bereft of God’s mercy. The very souls in Hell itself would suffer a greater Hell outside of it than they do within it.”[442]—We have had repeated proofs of how great were Battista’s gifts and experience in such-like eloquent writing, from the earlier Dialogo-Chapter, and from her Colloquies and Letters.