The Lord declares here: “I descend with a fine thread of gold, which is My secret love, and to this thread is bound a hook, which seizes the heart of men. I hold this thread in My hand and ever draw it towards Myself.” The hook and hand are additions to her authentic declaration, “She seemed to herself to have in her heart a continuous ray of Love … a thread of gold, as to which she had no fear that it would ever break.”[450]—We get here the Wedding-feast imagery that is entirely wanting in Catherine’s authentic sayings. “There is no shorter way to salvation than (the owning of) this delightful wedding-garment of charity”[451] A garment, generally in a bad sense, is quite Catherinian; a wedding-garment is exclusively Battistan.—And the parallel between St. John’s care of the Blessed Virgin, and Marabotto’s attendance upon Catherine[452] is quite foreign to Catherine’s mind.
And the whole Dialogo culminates in a double, daring yet graduated, anthropomorphic picturing of the deification of the perfect soul, interestingly different from Catherine’s favourite Ocean and Fire similes, and from her description of the Soul as respectively submerged in, and transformed by, this infinite and all-penetrating living Ocean-Fire, God. The Soul asks what is the name which the Lord gives to perfect souls; and the Lord answers (in Latin, as ever with Battista) with the text of Ps. lxxxi, 6: “I have said, ye are Gods, and all of you sons of the Most High”; a text which still leaves us with separate human personalities face to face with the distinct Spirit-Person, God. And then, to the Lord’s question, as to what the Soul declares its heart to be, the Soul answers (this climax has been carefully led up to all along): “I say that it is my God, wounded by love,—in Whom I live joyful and contented.”—For, as in Battista’s own Colloquy of December 10, 1554, we get three simultaneous “voices” at different depths of her consciousness, so here, in this composition of 1550, Catherine hears simultaneously within herself three voices—of the Lord, of her own soul, and of her own heart. And Catherine can here declare that now her heart is God, and God wounded by Love; for Battista can write in 1576 that, in the perfect state, “of the Increate Heart and of the created heart there is made a single, most secret and inestimable union,”[453] and that Increate Heart appears here as wounded, because God is ever, in Battista’s mind, explicitly identified with Christ, and Christ’s Passion is ever in her thoughts. Catherine identifies her true self with God, and God with Love; and conceives her own heart as filled with love and inflamed and pierced by it; but nowhere figures God with a Heart, or that Heart as wounded, for she has little or nothing of Battista’s anthropomorphic tendency in regard to God, or of her historical picturings with regard to Christ.
The entire Dialogo then is the work of Battista Vernazza; and we have to eliminate it, all but completely, from the means and materials directly available for the constitution of Catherine’s life and doctrine. The next Division will now attempt to deal finally with the chief of these means—the Dimostrazione (Trattato) and the Vita-proper.
Second Division: Analysis, Assignation, and Appraisement of the “Vita-Dottrina-Dicchiarazione” Corpus, in Eight Sections.
We now find ourselves in face of the most difficult, and the alone directly important, corpus of documents concerning Catherine’s inner life: the Vita e Dottrina, together with the Dicchiarazione or Trattato. It will be best to begin with this Trattato, and only after a careful study of this little book, which, as we know, contains the most original and valuable part of Catherine’s teaching, to finish up with an examination of the, now separate, Life and (other) Doctrine.
I. The “Dicchiarazione”: the Two Stages Of its Existence.
1. The “Dicchiarazione,” from the first a booklet by itself.
All the Manuscripts give the Dicchiarazione (Trattato) substantially as we have it at present, although ever as but a Chapter of the Vita e Dottrina, and not, as yet, itself divided up in any way. Even the last Editions of the Printed Vita still retain a reference to this old arrangement: “The soul purifies itself, as do the souls in Purgatory, according to the process described in the Chapter appropriated to this matter.”[454]
Yet the very length of this “Chapter,” then as now, and the solemn introductory paragraph, both point to its having, at first, formed a booklet by itself. Thus the longest of the other doctrinal Chapters of MS. A (Chapters XV, XVI, XX, and XL) are respectively 29, 22, 19, and 17½ pages long; whilst the Trattato-Chapter XLII runs to 46 pages. Only the Narrative-Chapter XLI, the Passion, is of an exactly equal length; but we shall find that this Chapter also existed, originally, in part at least, as a separate document. And the introduction to Chapter XLII is unparalleled by anything in such a position. “This holy Soul, whilst yet in the flesh, finding herself placed in the purgatory of God’s burning love, which consumed and purified her from whatever she had to purify, in order that, in passing out of this life, she might enter at once into the immediate presence of her tender Love,—God: understood, by means of this fire of love, how the souls of the faithful abide in the place of Purgatory to purge away every stain of sin that, in this life, they had not yet purged.” I have here omitted (after “understood”) “in her soul,” as marring the rhythm; and (before “stain of sin”) “rust and,” since the whole group of words appears in MS. A as “ogni rubigine di macchia di peccato,” requiring the suppression of at least one of the first two nouns: we shall find that “rubigine” is secondary.