I am compelled to pass over the emotional rhythm, and the mystical ambiguity and paradox, that appear, in identical forms, in Battista’s avowed writings and here. But we must briefly dwell upon some special sources of interest in Catherine, and of certain knowledge of a peculiar kind, traceable in the writer of this second “Chapter”; both sets of passages clearly point to Battista as their author.
(1) There is the deeply-felt description of Catherine’s conversation with her disciples: “This soul would many times abide with her spiritual friends, discoursing of the Divine Love, in suchwise that it appeared to them all as though they were in Paradise. And indeed, what delightful colloquies took place! Both he who spoke and he who listened, one and all would get nourished by spiritual food, of a sweet and delectable kind. And, because the time sped so quickly, they could not attain to satiety; but they would abide so enkindled and inflamed, that they knew not what more to say. And yet they could not depart, and would seem as though in an ecstasy. Oh! what loving repasts, what delightful food, what sweet viands, what a gracious union, what a divine companionship!”[443]—Now it is true that the writer has here certainly utilized four pregnantly descriptive lines in the Vita-proper, and the fine account there, undoubtedly by Ettore Vernazza, as regards these conversations.[444] Yet one readily feels, at the moved and moving tone of the re-telling here, that the writer was specially impelled to dwell with a tender, living sympathy upon those meetings of forty years ago. Now Battista must, of course, again and again, have heard from her Father’s own lips, during those fourteen years that he lived on after Catherine’s great soul had gone to God, of these unforgettable talks, in which he himself had played so large a part, as questioner, interpreter, and chronicler.
(2) And the other set of passages points, even more definitely, to the same daughter and father. Catherine’s “humanity,” being threatened by the Spirit with various future sufferings, asks to be told the precise offence, charge (la causa), which will bring so great a martyrdom with it, without hope of any help. But “she was answered that this grace,” of knowing exactly what and why she should suffer, “would be accorded to her in due time, as happens with men condemned to death, who, by hearing read aloud to them the precise sentence pronounced upon their specific misdeeds, support with a greater peace of mind their ignominious death.”—And: “Since I am forsaken on all sides,” Catherine says to God, “give me at least, O Lord, some person that may be able to understand and comfort me, amidst the torments that I see coming upon me—as men are wont to do for those who are condemned to death, so that the latter may not despair.”—And the natural man in such advanced souls is described as suspended in mid-air, “like unto one who is hung, and who touches not the ground with his feet, but abides in the air, attached to the cord which has caused his death.”[445] Ettore’s life-long, detailed interest in, and experience of, prisoners and condemned men, whom he, the Founder of the Society of the Beheading of St. John the Baptist, so loved to attend and help throughout their last night and at the scaffold, speak here through the devoted daughter who, countless times, must have listened to that father’s prison-experiences, which we found her describing, still most vividly, in 1581, thirty years after the publication of these Dialogo-passages.[446]
3. Schematic, intensely abstract psychology.
At this spiritual stage “there was, as it were, a chain. God, Spirit, draws to Himself the Spirit of man, and there this Spirit abides completely occupied. The Soul, which cannot abide without the Spirit, follows the Spirit, and is there kept occupied. And the Body, which is subject to the Soul, thus prevented from possessing its natural sensations and its natural sustenance, remains, as it were, forsaken and outside of its natural being.”—“God at times allowed the Spirit to correspond with the Soul, and the Soul with the Body.… But when God withdrew that Spirit into Himself, all the rest (the Soul) followed after it; and hence the Body remained like dead.” The two dividings, first of the Soul from the Body, and then of the Soul from the Spirit, so much emphasized in those other documents,[447] is thus carried through in this “Chapter” also.
4. Rigorism.
We find here the same exaggeration as to Catherine’s faults and contrition, and the same rigoristic doctrine as in “Chapter” First, although, here also, counterbalanced by a noble tenderness of heart. Thus her but semi-conscious attachment to, and self-attribution of, spiritual consolations, is here magnified into a grave sin. “How can I act, so as to make satisfaction for this sin, which is so great and so subtle?” her soul asks God, concerning but semi-conscious attachment to spiritual consolations. And of her social affections, as manifested in her great colloquies with her friends, Catherine now says, “All other loves” than the direct love of God “now appear to me as worse than sheer self-loves.”—“She began to confess her sins with so great a contrition that it appeared a wonderful thing,” we are told of Catherine, in 1499-1510; yet we know, from the unimpeachable testimony of Don Marabotto himself, that “the wonderful thing” about these latter Confessions was precisely the absence of that former keen sense of, and sorrow for, specific sins.[448]
5. Pronounced Christo-centrism and daring Anthropomorphism.
We get, again, the predominance of the Personal conceptions and imagery over those of Thing or Law, and the same greater attention to the historical element of religion, that characterize Battista’s writings and “Chapter First” of the Dialogo, as against Catherine’s authentic sayings.
Catherine’s energetic repudiation of “the corrupt expression, ‘You have offended God,’” is replaced by God saying to Catherine, “Know that I cannot be offended by man, except when he raises an obstacle to the work which I have ordained for his good.”[449] Catherine has angrily declared that the term could never be correctly used; the Dialogo explains how special and metaphorical is its correct use.