Indeed nothing is more characteristic of her psychic state, during these years, than the ever-increasing intensity, shiftingness and close interrelation between the physical and mental. But we shall find that, whereas those who surround her, Confessor, Doctors, Disciples, Attendants, all, in various degrees and ways, increasingly insist upon and persist in finding direct proofs of the supernatural in the purely physical phenomena of her state even when taken separately, and indeed more and more in exact proportion to their non-spiritual character: Catherine herself, although no doubt not above the medical or psychical knowledge of her time, remains admirably centred in the truly spiritual, and continually awake to the necessity of interior spiritual selection amongst and assimilation and transformation of all such psycho-physical impressions and conditions. Even in the midst of the extreme weaknesses of her last illness we shall see her only quite exceptionally, and ever for but a few instants, without this consciousness of the deep yet delicate difference in ethical value and helpfulness between the various psycho-physical things experienced by herself, and of the requirements, duties and perceptions of her own spirit with regard to them.
And this attitude is all the more remarkable because, to the outer difficulty arising from the persistent, far more immediate, and apparently more directly religious, view of all her little world about her, came two peculiarities working in the same direction from within her own self. There was the old constitutional keenness and concentration of her highly nervous physical and psychical temperament, and the rarely high pitch and swift pace of her whole inner life, which must, at all times, have rendered suspense of judgment and detachment with regard to her own sensations and quasi-physical impressions specially difficult. And there was now the new intensity and closeness of interaction between soul and body, which must have made such lofty detachment from all but spiritual realities a matter of the rarest grace and of the most heroic self-conquest.
3. Catherine’s health does not break up completely till 1507.
The Vita, indeed, as we now have it, tells us that “about nine years before her death,” hence in 1501, “an infirmity came upon her, which neither her attendants nor the doctors knew how to identify”; and that “there was confusion, not on her own part, but on the part of those who served her.”[146] But this whole Chapter XLVII (pp. 127-132) of the present Vita, which opens out thus, is wanting in MSS. “A” and “B”; and is composed of documents which appear, in a fuller and more primitive form and in their right chronological place, in the next three chapters (pp. 132-160), chapters without doubt predominantly due to Marabotto; and of the documents making up the present Chapter XXXVIII (pp. 98, 99), which are earlier again, in both contents and composition, and are very certainly the work of Vernazza. And this means that, though the present Chapter XLVII claims to give a general account of her condition during 1501-1510, it does not, as a matter of fact, give us anything but details belonging without doubt to 1507-1510.
The manner in which this late compiler insists upon the directly spiritual, indeed supernatural, character of even the clearly secondary and physical phenomena of her state, make it highly probable that, having once exaggerated the quality, he readily snatched at any indications (possibly a slip of the pen in some MS., writing 1501 instead of 1507; we have a similar slip in MS. “A” which on p. 193 twice writes 1506 for 1509), which favoured an early date for the beginning of her last illness. Certainly the legal documents at our disposal show her to us still variously interested and active, right up to 1507.
It will, then, be better first to describe this activity up to 1507, and to take even the general questions concerning her illness in connection with her last four years, 1507-1510.
XIV. Catherine’s Social Joys and Sorrows, 1501-1507.
1. Birth of Ettore’s last two daughters.
It will have been during these years 1501 to 1507, unless indeed already between 1497 and 1501, that Vernazza’s second and third daughters were born; and if Catherine had stood God-mother to his eldest child, Tommasina, it is inconceivable that she should not have cared for Tommasina’s sisters, Catetta and Ginevrina. Certainly their father, Catherine’s closest friend and disciple, gave detailed attention, right up to the end of his strenuous life, to all three children; and made most thoughtful particular provision, in his still extant remarkable Will of 1517, for the youngest, Ginevrina, who at that time was the only one not yet settled in life.[147] Thus Vernazza knew how to combine all this detailed thought for his own children with the spacious public spirit of which his Dispositions are a still extant, most impressive monument; and Catherine, who was his deepest inspirer, clearly led the way here, right up to the last four years of her life. For we have already seen how she managed to conjoin, in a fashion similar to Ettore’s, a universalist love for Love Transcendent, with a particularism of attachment to individual souls, in which that Love is immanent.