And if she did not ask others for prayers for herself in her own lifetime, her own prayers for others were evidently rare, were apparently always concerned with their spiritual welfare, and were generally produced only under some special interior impulsion. Hence when asked, in 1496 or later, by Vernazza, in the name of several of her spiritual children, to pray that God might grant them “some little drops of His Love,” she answers that “for these I cannot ask anything from this tender Love; I can but present them in His presence.” This is, no doubt, because she sees them to be already full of the love of God. Whereas in 1495 the poor working man, Marco del Sale, is dying of a cancer in the face, and is in a state of wild impatience: so she prays most fervently for him. It is true that the Vita adds that she did so, “having had an interior movement to this effect. For she never could turn to pray for a particular object, unless she had first felt herself called interiorly by her Love.” Still, this did not prevent her, in 1497, from praying most fervently for patience for her husband, (who was dying from a painful complaint,) simply “because she feared that he might lose his soul,” and without any other more peculiar incentive than this.[78]
2. The rich variety of her life.
Evidently here again, as with the Confessions and Indulgences, her life and practice were indefinitely varied and spontaneous, and incomparably richer than the preconceptions and logic of at least some of her biographers will admit, or indeed than many of her own fervent sayings, so vividly expressive of certain moments or sides of her career or character, suggest or even seem to leave possible. But the underlying meaning and ultimate harmonization of these apparent inconsistencies between her doctrine and her practice, we can only gradually hope to find.
CHAPTER IV
CATHERINE’S LIFE FROM 1473 TO 1506 AND ITS MAIN CHANGES AND GROWTH
Let us now attempt, as far as the often scanty and obscure evidence permits, to give, in the following two chapters, some general account of the changes and growth observable in her external surroundings, her human intercourse and social occupation, her physical health and psychical mood, and above all of those inner experiences and spiritual apprehensions of hers which dominated all the rest, during each of the three main periods of her convert life. This general account will, I trust, suggest the main points for our later investigations, and will show at once how largely artificial, though necessary, all such dividing into periods must be, in the case of so deeply unified and diversified an inner life as Catherine’s.
I. First Period of Catherine’s Convert Life: Giuliano’s Bankruptcy and Conversion; their Work among the Poor, March 1473 to May 1477.
1. Giuliano’s affairs. Catherine’s attitude.
The first six months of her first period (this latter we take to have extended from March 1473 to May 1477) were still spent in Giuliano’s Palace of the Via Agnese and in his country mansion at Prà.[79] But all was now swiftly changing, or already greatly changed, both around her and within. Anxiety, hope, grief, consolation—inasmuch as such feelings could still for her cluster around events external to her deepest spiritual life, and could make themselves at all separately felt during this period of profound absorption in her new large life of love and penance—must all have centred in her husband. For Giuliano had by now got his affairs into such disorder as to be unable to keep up his great social position; and by the autumn of 1473 he had sold his mansion at Prà, and had vacated and let his palace in Genoa itself.[80] He was also by now a very sincere convert, in his own manner and degree; and it was no doubt now that he told Catherine, although she can hardly have failed to know already, of the existence of a poor little girl whom, with an apparently ominous indication of weak indulgence on the part of his widowed mother, he had called Tobia.