Then again, it is far from easy to settle upon the right order and method of presentation. The more closely we study the chapters in question the more do we find that the strange discomfort and disgust, engendered by any lengthy reading of them, proceeds from the curiously infelicitous manner of their composition. These chapters, in so much as they supply genuine materials, consist of a large number of detached, usually short sayings, of every kind of tone and mood, occasion and mental and emotional context and connotation, and yet all concerning but a few great central realities and truths. These sayings in themselves do not at all represent links in a chain of reasoning; they are numberless variations on some few fundamental experiences of the soul. Hence they require to be given in loose co-ordination, or in free grouping around some great central truth; somewhat like what is done, with such marked felicity, for Our Lord’s own sayings, which also are occasional and freely various, by the oldest of our Gospels, St. Mark. “And,” “and again,” can be used to join these recurrent similitudes, aspirations, emotional reflections; not “because” nor “therefore,” still less “firstly,” “secondly,” “thirdly,” as the Redactors have been so fond of doing. Hence the reader in the Vita feels himself in a constant state of abortive motion, and is ever being promised a precision which usually ends in vagueness.
Let us then group these parallel sayings around some few great central truths or dispositions. But what is the order of these great centres to be? Here again a difficulty occurs, and this time from the very nature of the doctrine concerned. For the special characteristic of her teaching, a teaching so largely derived both from her own intensely unitive character and (through the Dionysian writings, Proclus and Plotinus) from Plato himself, is precisely an infinitely close-woven organization, in which part vibrates in sympathy with part, in which each point carries with it the whole, and in which each one idea and feeling passes, as it were, right through, and colours and is coloured by all the rest. It would be almost as satisfactory to turn the impassioned discourse of Diotima in the Symposium into a series of numbered propositions, as here to try and detach any one feeling or idea from out of the living network of its fellows, in and through which it is, and gets and gives, its special self.
The historical order (i.e. the order in which, successively, each doctrine grew up and dominated her thinking) is, alas! as we have seen, out of the question.—The psychological order (i.e. the order in which the doctrines, such as we have them, would reproduce themselves within her own mind during that last period of her life, 1496-1510) would doubtless throw most light upon the special characteristics of her spirituality, and upon the hidden springs of her doctrine. But it is far too difficult, and must remain too largely hypothetical, to be even distantly aimed at here and now: some such attempt will be made in a later chapter, with the help of the materials first collected and grouped here in a more conventional way.—The theological order (i.e. the order in which these doctrines would appear if made to find their places in an ordinary manual of scholastic theology) is the one that I shall here endeavour to follow as far as possible. For thus I can start with a scheme so thoroughly familiar as nowhere itself to require any explanation; and I can thus help to bring out, from the first, the characteristic peculiarities of the mystical position generally, and of her own variety of it in particular.
I will then take here, successively, her teachings as to God in Himself, and Creation; Sin, Redemption, and Sanctification; and the Last Things. But I do so quite loosely, for I shall try nowhere to break off any bridge that she herself has thrown across from one subject to the other, and shall be satisfied if I can succeed in grouping her doctrine even approximately within those three divisions, according to the predominance of this or that point of her teaching. And, for this, I shall not shrink from a repeated utilization of one and the same text, when (as happens so often) it looks in many directions, and becomes fully clear only in juxtaposition with various parts of her teaching.
5. Literary sources of Catherine’s teaching.
We have evidence, as regards literary influences, that Catherine fed her mind on three books or sets of books: the Bible, the Pseudo-Dionysian Treatises, and the Lode of Jacopone da Todi.
The allusions to passages of Scripture are continual, but mostly of a swiftly passing, combinatory, allegorizing kind. Direct quotations and attempts at penetrating the objective sense of particular passages are rare, for most of the direct quotations are clearly due to her historians, not to herself; yet they exist and put her direct study of Scripture beyond all doubt. Her favourite Bible books were evidently Isaiah and the Psalms, and the Pauline and Joannine writings. Some touches (remarkably few for a mystic) are derived from the Canticle of Canticles, and many less obvious ones from the Synoptic Gospels; but there are no certain traces, I think, of any other Old Testament books, nor, in the Pauline group, of any passage from the Pastoral Epistles.
The evidence for her direct knowledge and use of Dionysius is, it is true, but circumstantial. But the following three facts seem, conjoined as they are in her case, sufficient to prove this knowledge. (i) We have already seen how her cousin and close spiritual friend, Suor Tommasa, wrote a devotional treatise on Denys the Areopagite, presumably before Catherine’s death, since Tommasa was sixty-two years of age in that year 1510; it would be strange indeed if Catherine did not, even if but from this quarter, get to know some of the Dionysian writings, perhaps even whilst they could still only be read in MS. form. (ii) Marsilio Ficino published in Florence, in 1492, his Latin translation of the Mystical Theology and of the Divine Names, with a copious commentary; and the book, dedicated to Giovanni de’ Medici, Archbishop of Florence and future Pope Leo X, found its way at once to all the larger centres of life, learning and devotion in Italy. Thus Catherine lived still eighteen years after the publication of this, the first printed, edition of any part of Denys (original or translation); even if she did not know these writings before, it seems again very unlikely that she would not get to know them now. (iii) There are, it is true, no direct quotations from Denys, nor does his name appear in the Vita ed Opere, except in that account of Suor Tommasa. But numerous sayings of Catherine bear, as we shall see later on, so striking a resemblance to passages in those two books of Denys, that it is difficult to explain them by merely mediate infiltration; and that those sayings ultimately, as to their literary occasion, go back to the Areopagite, is incontestable. I quote Denys from the usually careful translation of the Rev. John Parker: The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite, Pt. I, London, Oxford, 1897, with certain corrections of my own.
The proofs for her knowledge and love of Jacopone da Todi’s Italian “Praises” is, on the other hand, direct and explicit. The Vita, p. 37, makes her say: “Listen to what Fra Jacopone says in one of his Lode, beginning: ‘O amor di povertade,’” and then gives her word-for-word commentary on verse 23 of this his Loda LVIII. Words from this same verse are again quoted by her on p. 62; the opening line of this Loda is put into her mouth on p. 83; and another verse, the sixth, is quoted by her, as by the Blessed Jacopone, on p. 92. I have been able to find many other sayings of hers which are hardly less directly suggested by the great Umbrian than these. Here, again, she probably knew the Lode in MS. form, before they appeared in print in 1490; but will in any case have known them in this their printed form. I have carefully studied in this, the first printed edition (Florence: Bonaccorsi), all the Lode bearing upon subjects and doctrines dear to Catherine. They are twenty in all, from among the hundred and two numbers of that collection.[222]