A Decade of Italian Women, vol. 1 (of 2)

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

The epistles were first printed by Aldus in 1500, just 180 years after Catherine's death, and afterwards in many other editions, all, according to Gigli, exceedingly incorrect, and requiring much critical care both in the restoration of the text to its original Tuscan purity, and in the arrangement of the letters, as far as possible, in their due chronological order. This, however, is made subsidiary in Gigli's edition to a division of them according to the persons to whom they were addressed. Thus those to the two Popes, Gregory XI. and Urban VI., come first; then those written to cardinals; then those to bishops and other ecclesiastical authorities; and lastly those to private individuals.

And this is the substance of all the Sienese editor has to tell us respecting the texts, manuscript and printed, on which his own has been formed. But the Saint's confessor, and one or two of her disciples, have recorded some circumstances respecting the lost originals of these letters which require to be noticed.

It is stated in perfect accordance with all probability, that Catherine had never learned to read or write, as was in those days the case with the great majority of women in stations of life far superior to her own. Her biographer's account of her miraculously acquiring the power of reading by sudden endowment has been related in the preceding chapter. And at a later period of her life we are told that she similarly acquired the power of writing, "in order that she might be able," writes Girolamo Gigli in his Preface to the Letters, "to carry out the office of her apostolate by more agencies than one, and in more places than one, at the same time, Christ gave her by a wonderful method the use of the pen, in the short schooling of a trance, and by the teaching of St. John the Evangelist, and of the blessed Doctor, Aquinas, as the Saint herself affirms in a letter to the above-mentioned blessed Raymond her confessor."

One of the most interesting points of inquiry in the life of St. Catherine turns on the question, more fully examined in a subsequent chapter, how far was she, or was she not, entirely sincere in her statements and pretensions. Now if she makes the statement attributed to her respecting her acquisition of the art of writing, it must be concluded that she was guilty of wilful imposture. No possible self-deception could have misled her as to the fact of her previous ignorance of writing, and as little as to that of her writing after the trance. It will be well therefore to observe accurately what she really does say herself upon the subject. In 1377, when she was in the thirtieth year of her age, after her return from Avignon, and before her final journey to Rome, she was inhabiting a villa belonging to the noble Sienese family of Salimbeni, situated on an isolated eminence overlooking the road to Rome, and called "Rocca d'Orcia." Hence she wrote a very long letter—the longest probably in the whole collection—occupying, as it does, twelve full octavo pages—to Father Raymond; and concludes it with the following lines.

HER POWER OF WRITING.

"This letter, and another which I sent you, I have written with my own hand from this isolated fortress, with many sighs and abundance of tears, so that seeing with my eyes, I did not see. But I was full of admiration at myself, and at the goodness of God, considering his mercy towards creatures, who have reason in them, and his providence, which abounded upon me, giving and providing me with the aptitude for writing for my comfort, I having been deprived of that consolation, which by reason of my ignorance I knew not. So that on descending from the height (does this mean 'on coming out of my trance,' or 'on leaving this fortress?') I might have some little vent for the feelings of my heart, so that it should not burst. Not being willing to take me as yet out of this darksome life, God formed it in my mind in a wonderful manner, as the master does to the child, to whom he gives an exemplar. So that, as soon as ever he was gone from me, together with the glorious Evangelist John, and Thomas Aquinas, sleeping I began to learn."

Now the entire value of this incident in the eyes of the fourteenth, and the entire incredibility of it in the eyes of the nineteenth century, and consequently its stringency as evidence against the sincerity of St. Catherine, depends on the length of time intervening between the moment when she began to learn in her sleep, and that at which she first wrote. All her own admiration of herself and of God's providence in the matter, all her own belief in miracle, and her beginning to learn in her sleep, we may admit without founding thereon any impeachment of her sincerity. Nor need we be accurate in taking the sense of her statement, that she then began to learn. Most people would find it difficult to say when they began to learn most things. And on the other hand the phrase would seem to express, that she did not complete her learning to write in that same trance. We have other indications also of a gradual advance in the art. The long letter, in which the Saint makes the above statement, is certainly not the first product of her new acquirement. She speaks of having written a former letter to the same correspondent. But neither was that her first writing.

In the evidence given by the Beato Tomaso Caffarini on the occasion of the examination of her pretensions to canonization, he deposes: "I further testify, that I heard from Master Stephen,[26] of Siena," by means of letters from him, how that this Virgin, after that she miraculously learned to write, rising up from prayer with a desire of writing, wrote with her own hand a little letter (litterulam), which she sent to the said Master Stephen, and in which was the following conclusion, written, that is to say, in her own vernacular: "Know, my son, that this is the first letter, which I ever wrote;"—much such a first attempt as the most unmiraculously taught of penmen might be likely to make.

HER FIRST PENMANSHIP.

Consistently then with all that Catherine distinctly asserts on the subject, we may believe, that despite her ready credence of her own environment with the supernatural at every moment of her life, the only miracle on the occasion of her newly acquired power of writing was worked by that intensely strong will, which works so many miracles in this world, and which all Catherine's history shows her to have eminently possessed.