Chapter III (1)

CATHERINE FIESCA ADORNA’S LIFE, UP TO HER CONVERSION; AND THE CHIEF PECULIARITIES PREDOMINANT THROUGHOUT HER CONVERT YEARS

INTRODUCTORY.

_Each of the three Elements of Religion, again multiple. The two main functions of each._

We have so far considered religion as constituted, on its human side, by the interaction of three modalities,--the Historical, the Intellectual, the Experimental. But it is of course clear that each of these is again, just because it is a living force, a Multiplicity in Unity. The first distinction we can find in each would break each up into two parts.

The Historical modality readily gives us the function busy with the Historical Person and the function occupied with the Historical Thing. The former function will insist upon all the temporal and local sayings, doings, and happenings, that together make up the picture and memory of the Prophet or Founder; the latter will transmit certain rites and symbols instituted or occasioned by him. And either the suppression of these latter things, or the taking them apart from the person from whom they issued and to whom they ever should lead back, will turn out equally impoverishing: the very friction of this Thing, coming from a Person, and leading to a Person, and operating within our own personality, will be found to help to make the latter truly such.

The Intellectual modality will as readily split up into the Analytic and the Synthetic. The former will busy itself with distinguishing and weighing, and with reducing everything as far as possible to its constituent elements. The latter will attempt to reconstitute the living whole, as far as may be, in such terms of clear reason. The former will have more affinity with the discursive reason, the second with the contemplative; the former with religious History, and the approaches to religious Philosophy,--Physiology and Experimental Psychology and the Theory of Knowledge; the latter with Religious Philosophy proper,--the Metaphysics of Religion.

The Experimental modality, finally, will as readily break up into Intuitions and Feelings of every mental and moral kind, and Willings, the determinations of which, close as they are to the feelings, are not identical with them, but often exist more or less without or even against them.

And this whole series of six movements exists only in Persons; it begins with an at least incipient Person and ends in the fullest self-expression of Personality, the determination of the will. And Things--both external (Institutions) and internal (analytic and synthetic Abstractions)--are but ever operative, necessary means towards the firm constitution and expansion of that rich life of the living soul within which the first apprehension and ordering of such thinkings and doings took their rise.

I. PROPOSED STUDY OF THE MYSTICAL-VOLITIONAL ELEMENT IN A PARTICULAR, CONCRETE INSTANCE: ST. CATHERINE OF GENOA.

Now it is the fact of the Multiplicity in Unity, to be found in each of these modalities of religion, that makes it desirable to study each of them, as far as may be, separately. And of these the deepest and most near to our living selves, and hence also most far away from our clear analysis, is the Experimental. It is this Element then that I propose to study in a particular concrete instance: St. Catherine of Genoa.

1. _Disadvantages of such a method and of this particular instance._

The disadvantage arising from such a method of procedure is obvious: no one life, even were it the richest and most completely knowable, can exhaust, can indeed do more than simply suggest, the true questions, let alone the adequate answers. But such a biographical study can hope to arouse attention and interest in the living facts of religion, in a manner in which no simple theory or generalization can do; and it can stand out, in the midst of any such attempt at explanation, as an emphatic reminder, to both writer and reader, of the inexhaustible richness and mystery, of the awe-inspiring and yet stimulating surplusage which is ever furnished by reality over and above all our best endeavours at commensurate presentation or analysis.

And quite special disadvantages attach to the study of this particular Saint. Her character, for one thing, is distinctly wanting in humour, in that shrewd mother-wit which is so marked a feature in some of the great Spanish Mystics, in St. Teresa especially, but which is not quite absent even in the less varied and very austere St. John of the Cross. There is, on the contrary, a certain monotony, a somewhat wearying vehemence, about our Genoese. Her experience, again, is without the dramatic vicissitudes of the reform of an Order or the foundation of Monasteries, as with St. Teresa; or of contact and even conflict with the temporal and spiritual officiality of her time, as with St. Catherine of Siena. Nor is her life lit up by the beautiful warmth of happy, requited domestic affection, nor is it varied and extended by the rich possession of children of her own. And again her life is obscured and complicated, at least for our comprehension of it, by a nervous ill-health which it is impossible for us to care about, in itself. And, finally, special difficulties attach to the understanding of her. Unlike St. Teresa, St. John of the Cross, and many other Saints, she did not herself write one line of her so-called “Writings”; and yet it is these, mostly very abstruse and at times all but insuperably difficult, “Writings,” records which did not attain their present form and bulk till a good forty years after her death, that contain the most original part of her legacy to the Church.

2. _The drawbacks of the instance outweighed by its rare combination of characteristics._

Yet all this is balanced if not exceeded by a rare and stimulating combination of characteristics. The very ordinariness of her external lot,--a simple wife and widow, at no time belonging to any Religious Order or Congregation; the apparently complete failure of her earthly life, which gives occasion to the birth within her of the heavenly one; the rich variety and contrasts of her princely birth and social position, and the lowly, homely activity and usefulness of her forty years of devotedness; the unusually perfect combination of a great external action and administrative capacity with a lofty contemplation; the apparent suddenness and whole-hearted swiftness of her Conversion, succeeded by the long years of interior conflict and painful growth, unhelped, practically unknown, by any one but God’s inspiring Spirit, and these years again followed by a period of requiring and practising the ordinary mediate docilities; the strange nervous health of especially her later years, so carefully and truthfully recorded for us, a psychic condition interesting if but for her own lofty superiority to attaching any direct importance or necessarily miraculous meaning to it: all this, even if it were all, helps to give an extraordinary richness and instructiveness to her life.

But stimulating, transfiguring, embracing all this, appears her special spiritual apprehension and teaching, of a quite extraordinary depth, breadth and balance, distinction and refinement. The central oneness of the soul’s nature and sufferings and joys here and hereafter, and the resultant psychological character and appeal, to be found in all true experience or forecasting of such things; the never-ceasing difference between Spirit and Matter; the incomprehensibility, but indefinite apprehensibleness, for the clean of heart, of God and spiritual realities; the pure disinterestedness of His love for us, and the corresponding disinterestedness of all true love for Him; the universality of His light and love, and the excess of His mercy above His justice; the innate affinity between every human soul and Him, and the immanence of Himself within us; the absence of all arbitrary or preternatural action in the forces and realities constitutive of the spiritual world and life; the constant union of right suffering with deep peace, and the final note of joy and of self-conquering triumph issuing from complete self-renunciation: all this and much more appears in her teaching with a spontaneity, breadth, and balance peculiarly its own.

3. _Men who have been devoted to her spirit. Its vitality._

No wonder then that, from the contemporary circle of her devoted friends and disciples onwards, Catherine should have attracted, throughout the centuries and in many lands, a remarkable number of deep minds and saintly characters. The ardent young Spaniard, St. Aloysius Gonzaga, and the shrewd and solid Savoyard Bishop, St. François de Sales, love to quote and dwell upon her example and her doctrine. Mature theologians, such as Cardinal Bellarmine, the hard-headed controversialist; Cardinal Bona, the liturgical and devotional writer; and Cardinal de Berulle, the mystical-minded founder of the French Oratory; and again, such varied types of devotedness as Madame Acarie, the foundress of the French Reformed Carmelites; the Baron de Renté, that noble Christian soldier; Bossuet, the hard and sensible; and Fénelon, the elastic and exquisite,--all love her well. Such thoroughly representative ascetical writers again as the Spanish Jesuits Francisco Arias and Alfonzo Rodriguez; the French ones, Saint-Jure and Jean Joseph Surin; the Italian, Paolo Segneri; the Pole, Lancisius; and the German, Drexel, all drew food and flame from her character and doctrine. Then at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, Friedrich von Schlegel, the penetrating, many-sided leader of the German Romantic school, translated her _Dialogue_. In our own time Father Isaac Hecker, that striking German-American, loved her as a combination of contemplation and external action; Father Faber strongly endorsed her conception of Purgatory; Cardinal Manning occasioned and prefaced an admirable translation of her _Treatise_; and Cardinal Newman has incorporated her Purgatorial teaching in the noblest of his poems, “The Dream of Gerontius.” Indeed, General Charles Gordon also can not unfairly be claimed as her unconscious disciple, since her teaching, embodied in Cardinal Newman’s poem, was, besides the Bible and “Imitations,” his one written source of strength and consolation, during that noble Christian captain’s heroic death-watch at Khartoum. And among quite recent or still living writers, Mr. Aubrey de Vere has given us a refined poetic paraphrase of her _Treatise_, and Father George Tyrrell has developed its theme in one of his most striking Essays.[42]

I too have, in my own way, long cared for her example and teaching, and for the great questions and solutions suggested by both. A dozen times and more have I visited and lingered over the chief scenes of her activity; and the literary sources of all our knowledge of her life have been dwelt upon by me for twenty years and more.

I have but very few new details and combinations to offer, in so far as her external life is concerned. It is with regard to the growth of her historic image and the curious vicissitudes which I have been able to trace in the complication of her “Writings”; as to her spirit and teaching; and as to the place and function to be allotted in the religious life to such realities and phenomena as those presented by her, that I hope to be able to contribute something of value. For although the substance and the primary phenomena of religion are eternal, they appear in each soul with an individuality and freshness pathetically unique; and their attempted analysis and apprehension, and their relations to the other departments of human life, necessarily grow and vary. Indeed it would be truly sad, and would rightly tempt to disbelief in an overruling Providence and divine education of the human race, if the four centuries that intervene between our Saint and ourselves had taught us little or nothing of value, in such matters of borderland and interpretation as nervous health, the psychology of religion, and the distinguishing differences between Christian and Neo-Platonic Mysticism. Whole Sciences, indeed the Scientific, above all the Historic spirit itself, have arisen or have come to maturity since her day. Hence the realities of her life, as of every religious life, remain fresh indeed with the deathless vitality of love and grace, and but very partially explicable still; and yet the highest intellectual honour of each successive period should be found in an ever-renewed attempt at an ever less inadequate apprehension and utilization of these highest and deepest manifestations of Authority, Reason, and Experience,--of the Divine in our poor human life.

II. THE MATERIALS AND AIDS TOWARDS SUCH A STUDY.

1. _The “Vita e Dottrina,” 1551._

All the biographies of St. Catherine, and all the editions or translations of her “Works,” are based upon the _Vita e Dottrina_ published in Genoa, by Jacobo Genuti, in 1551. I work from the thirteenth Genoese edition, a reprint of that of 1847 (_Tipi dei Sordo-Muti_). All our knowledge of her mental and physical condition, and of her spiritual doctrine, is practically restricted to this book, and indeed, as we shall see, to its first two parts, the “Vita” and the “Trattato.”

The _Vita_ is, in its fundamental portions, the joint production of her devoted disciples, Cattaneo Marabotto, a Secular Priest, her Confessor; and Ettore Vernazza, a Lawyer, her “spiritual son.” Its fifty-two chapters (166 octavo pages) are only in small part narrative; quite thirty-five of them are filled with discourses and contemplations of the Saint, evidently, in the simpler of the many parallel versions accumulated here, taken down, at the time of the Saint’s communication of them, with quite remarkable fidelity. But the whole suffers from the inclusion of much secondary, amplifying, repetitive matter; is badly arranged; is kept, almost throughout, above all definite indications of the precise successions, dates, and places; and is deficient in unity of view and literary organization. The result is, of necessity, largely insipid and monotonous.

The first of the “Works” is the _Treatise on Purgatory_, the seventeen chapters of which (17 pages) are again hard reading, owing to their evidently consisting of but a mosaic of detached, sometimes parallel sayings, spoken on various occasions and according to the experience and fulness of the moment, and without any reference to the previous one. I shall show reason for holding that this little collection of sayings was originally shorter still (consisting probably of but the matter which now makes up the first seven of its seventeen chapters); that the original chronicler and first redactor of these sayings was Vernazza; and that certain obvious and formal contradictions which appear in the present text must be theological glosses introduced some time between 1520 (or rather 1526) and say 1530 (at latest 1547).

The second of the “Works,” the _Spiritual Dialogue between the Soul, the Body, Self-love, the Spirit, the Natural Man, and the Lord God_, is divided into three parts, and fills forty-five chapters (120 pages). I hope to show conclusively that this _Dialogue_ was at first no longer than its present Part I; that even this did not exist before 1547; that the whole was written by one and the same person, some one who had never (at least intimately) known the Saint, and who had no other direct material than our present _Vita_ and _Trattato_; that this person was the Augustinian canoness, Battista Vernazza, Ettore’s eldest daughter; and that the whole has been written for the purpose of attempting some unification and systematization of what in the _Vita_ appeared to the writer as wanting in unity and in correctness of wording or of feeling. In this case we get a fairly continuous re-statement, in part a heightening, in part a minimizing of the historical facts of Catherine’s life, which, just because we have thus a pragmatic, theological transfiguration of the older materials, caused by a penetrating admiration, and resulting in some true increase of insight into its subject-matter, forms a precious document for the psychology and the effect of such states of mind.

The Oratorian Giacinto Parpera’s book: _B Caterina da Genova … Illustrata_, Genova, 1682, gives, in its three parts, respectively the opinions of Saints and Theologians concerning the Saint; a systematic analysis of her doctrine; and an explanation of certain terms and declarations more or less peculiar to her. It is decidedly learned and in parts still useful; but pompously rhetorical and full of “anatomia,” _i.e._ much wearisome numbering and indefinite sub-division. The Jesuit Padre Maineri’s _Vita de S. Caterina di Genova_, Genova, 1737,--written on occasion of her canonization,--contains nothing new.

2. _Later books on Catherine._

A sensible discussion of difficult or obscure points connected with her life occurs in the Bollandists’ Life of the Saint, written by Father Sticken in 1752 (_Acta Sanctorum_, September, Vol. V, ed. 1866, pp. 123-195). But the greater part of the discussion is vitiated by the assumption of the independent value, indeed of Catherine herself being the author, of the entirely secondary _Dialogo_; Sticken had not seen a single MS. life or document; and the most important part of her entire personality, her doctrine, had, according to the general plan of the work, to be passed over by him.

I have also had before me Alban Butler’s accurate compilation; Monseigneur Paul Fliche’s disappointing book, which, though he declares that he has consulted the MSS. Lives, is but a rhetorical amplification of the Life of 1551, with here and there a useful date or other detail added by himself (Paris, 1881); and the Rev. Baring Gould’s hasty and slipshod account, which completely ignores the “Works” (_Lives of the Saints_, Vol. X, ed. 1898).

But by far the most important printed matter which has hitherto appeared since 1551, indeed the only one which contains anything at all significant that is not already in the _Vita ed Opere_, is Sebastiano Vallebona’s booklet, _La Perla dei Fieschi_, Genova, 2nd ed., 1887, 109 pp. It publishes many a painstaking recovery and identification of various dates and sites, relationships, family documents and contemporary events; and has helped me greatly in such matters.

3. _The Manuscripts._

It is, however, to the careful analysis of the important still extant MS. material, that I owe far more than to all the printed matter subsequent to 1551. And indeed I can say without exaggeration that this is the first serious attempt at a critical presentation of Catherine’s Life and Teaching. A detailed account of my materials and method will be given in the Appendix to this volume.

III. PECULIARITIES OF THE GENOESE CLIMATE AND GEOGRAPHICAL POSITION; OF THE LIGURIAN CHARACTER; AND OF THE TIMES INTO WHICH CATHERINE WAS BORN. HER FAMILY, FATHER AND MOTHER.

Catherine Fiesca was born in Genoa, towards the end of the year 1447.[43] She thus belonged to a race and a time full indeed of violence and conflict, intrigue and cruelty, excessive in all things; but hence full too of courage and of daring, of boundlessly expansive energies, and of throbbing life.

1. _The Genoese country and character._

Lying at the foot of imposing mountain terraces, at the great central bend and chief natural harbour of the rocky, sun-baked, mountain-backed Riviera, Genoa formed, from early, pre-Roman days, the natural capital of this thin strip of territory which, eastward from Spezia and westward from Nice, looks all along towards the sea, and towards the broad blue sea alone. And the natural influences of the country seem ever to have been met and doubled by a fierce, explosive strain in the characters of the successive races that peopled this narrow, steep, hot sea-board. The ferocious, wild Ligurians gave the Romans trouble, right up to the end of their dominion; and the subsequent Lombard invasion and subjugation did little to change their character. The keen rivals of Venice, in her trade and power in the East, and the mortal foes of their competitor Pisa, so near to their own gates, the Genoese did much for trade and commerce, but little for science and art, and were feared and hated by the Tuscans, in their rich and fertile lands, and with their large and liberal culture. Sailors, adventurers, free-booters; great merchants and carriers and bankers; conspirators and revolutionaries,--they have produced great admirals, such as Andrea Doria; great administrative and warlike Popes, in the persons of the two masterful, irascible della Roveres, from the twenty miles distant Savona,--Sixtus IV, and Michael Angelo’s friend and patron, Julius II; a great navigator, in Christopher Columbus; a fierce and fanatical, but lofty and utterly disinterested revolutionary, in Mazzini; and a brave, reckless condottiere in Garibaldi, born as far away as Nice, but whose mother came from the near Chiavari.

2. _The times into which Catherine was born._

And our Saint was born in the midst of singularly active, changeful, far-outward-looking, swift-onward-moving times. Columbus had been born the year before; Fust and Gutenberg were printing the first printed books three years later; Constantinople was taken by the Turks when she was six years old.

The Mediaeval system was, at last, breaking up fast. That whole conception of life and polity of peoples had rendered services too great, indeed too unique, to civilization and religion; they had been for too long the faithful instrument, expression and result of a certain stage and aspect of human and Christian character and development, for this break-up not to have been slow, reluctant, and intermittent at first, notwithstanding the heavy blows levelled, often unconsciously, at the system from both within and without the Church. Pope Boniface’s Bull, _Unam Sanctam_, which stretched and strained the Mediaeval conception to breaking-point (1302); the dreary blank and confusion of the seventy years of the Avignon exile of the Papacy (1309-1377); the thirty years’ distraction of the great Papal Schism (1378-1409); the fierce revolts and tragic fates of Wycliffe and of Hus, in 1384 and 1415; the ineffectual Council of Constance (1414-1418),--all this had already taken place. And not even such saintly figures as Tauler and Blessed Henry Suso in Germany, and St. Catherine of Siena in Italy and France; or such nobly reforming characters as the French Chancellor Gerson, who had died eighteen years before our Saint’s birth (1429); or the bold and spiritual German Philosopher-Cardinal Nicolas of Coes, who died when she was seventeen (1464),--could achieve more than to announce and prepare the transition to a great modification of Christendom, and to indicate the eternal and necessary source from which it must spring, and the new temporal, contingent form which it might take.

But the scandals, revolts, and repressions, on a scale and with results which turned Reform into Revolution, and broke up Western Europe into those two hostile camps, which, towards the end of four centuries, we see, alas! hostile still--these things were yet to come. Roderigo Borgia was to be Pope (1492-1503) only towards the end of her life. And only after she had been seven years dead, was Luther to nail his theses on the University-Church door at Wittenberg (1517), and more than a generation later were Mary Tudor in England and Philip II in Spain (1553-1598) to attempt, for the last time on so large a scale, the task of keeping and winning minds and souls, by ruthless physical repression.

Catherine lived thus within a period which, in its depths, was already modern, but not yet broken up into seemingly final, institutionalized internecine antagonisms. And hence we can get in her a most restful and bracing pure affirmativeness, an entire absence of religious controversy, such as, of necessity, cannot be found in even such predominantly interior souls as the great Post-Reformation Spanish Mystics. Her whole religion can grow and show itself as simply positive, and in rivalry and conflict with her own false self and with that alone.

3. _The Fieschi family._

And the particular family from which she sprang, and the period of its history at which she appeared, each helped to bring right into her blood and immediate surroundings the more general conditions of her race and time.

The Fieschi had indeed a long past story, securely traceable through a good two centuries and a half before Catherine’s birth. They sprang from the little seaside town of Lavagna, twenty English miles east of Genoa, where shipbuilding is still carried on. Here it was that Sinibaldo de’ Fieschi, the first of the two Popes of the family, Innocent IV (1243-1254), was born, whose whole Pontificate was one long vehement struggle with his former friend, the masterful and sceptical Emperor Frederic II of Germany. His nephew was Pope, under the title of Hadrian V, for but a few months (1276). It was from Pope Innocent’s brother Robert that St. Catherine was descended.

The Fieschi were the greatest of the great Guelph families of Genoa, such as the Grimaldi, Guarchi, and Montaldi. The great Doria family, with the Spinola, Fregosi, and Adorni was as strongly Ghibelline. And the endless, fierce conflict between these two factions, in Genoa itself and along both Rivieras, led to the calling in, and to the temporary supremacy over Genoa, of the Dukes of Milan, the Counts of Montferrat, and of the Kings of Naples and of France. The Revolution of 1339, which put an end to the exclusive rule of the Nobles, and introduced elective Doges or Dukes as life-long heads of the Republic, really altered little or nothing of all this.

Indeed the Fieschi had, just now at Catherine’s birth, reached the full height of their power and worldly splendour. For the two Popes of the family had already reigned two centuries before, and Cardinal Luca Fieschi lay buried in the Cathedral for over a hundred years; but the Fieschi now possessed numerous fiefs in Liguria, Piedmont, Lombardy, and even in the Kingdom of Naples; Nicolò Fieschi, a cousin of the Saint, was, in Catherine’s time, a prominent member of the College of Cardinals; and her own father was Viceroy of Naples to King René of Anjou. There was indeed exactly a century yet to run, up to the beginning of the downward course of the family,--the disastrous conspiracy of the Fieschi against the Dorias (1547), which forms the subject of Schiller’s well-known play.

Catherine’s father had been Viceroy of Naples to that René Duc of Anjou, Count of Provence, Duke of Lorraine, and titular King of Naples, whose adventurous career and immensely popular character still stand out so vividly in history. The “roi débonnaire,” the friend of the Troubadours and father of Margaret of Anjou, Consort to King Henry VI of England, figures life-like in Scott’s _Anne of Geierstein_; and his strikingly _bourgeois_ profile may still be seen, as part of the vivid portraiture of his kneeling figure which faces the corresponding one of his Queen, upon the great contemporary triptyche picture, representing in its central division the Madonna and Child in the branches of a tree (in allusion to the Burning Bush and the Rod of Jesse), which hangs in the choir of the cathedral of Aix, King René’s old wind-swept and now sleepy Provençal capital. Since Charles I of Anjou (1265-1285), the Angevine Kings had made Naples the capital of their Kingdom; Duke René was the last of the Angevines to hold or seriously to claim it. He lost it in 1442 to the Spaniards; but still in 1459 he attempted, by means of a Genoese fleet, to repossess himself of his old kingdom, so that Catherine’s father could, even up to the time of his death in 1462, retain the title of Vice-Roy of Naples. Her mother, Francesca di Negro, also belonged to an ancient and noble Genoese family.

IV. CATHERINE’S LIFE, UP TO THE PRELIMINARIES OF HER CONVERSION: AUTUMN 1447-MID-MARCH 1474.

1. _The house where she was born; her brothers and sister._

Catherine was born in one of the many palaces of the Fieschi, in the one which stood in the Vico Filo, close to the dark grey limestone façade of the Cathedral of San Lorenzo. The palace was hemmed in, on its two sides and at its back, by the houses of Urbano and Sebastiano di Negri, and was demolished when the then Piazza dei Fieschi was enlarged and became the present Piazza di San Lorenzo. The house now facing the Cathedral doorway occupies approximately the site of that old palace.

She was the youngest of five children. There were three sons: Giacomo, named after his father; and Lorenzo and Giovanni, no doubt named respectively after the great Roman deacon, the titular saint of the Cathedral, and who already appeared upon his gridiron, on the quaint Mediaeval relief over its portal; and after the Baptist, whose reputed relics lay there, in the great Chapel, rebuilt for them soon after this time (1451-1496). Last came the two daughters: Limbania, named after a beatified virgin and contemplative, a Genoese Augustinian Nun of the thirteenth century, and Catherine, christened and in all the legal documents always called by this diminutive, presumably after St. Catherine of Alexandria, who had an altar in the Cathedral. And the Cathedral was their Parish Church.

2. _Catherine’s physical appearance; her qualities and habits of body and of mind._

In this house, then, Catherine grew up and lived till she was sixteen. The beautiful, tall figure; the noble oval face with its lofty brow, finely formed nose, and powerful, indeed obstinate chin; the winning countenance with its delicate complexion and curling, sensitive, spiritual mouth-line; deep grey-blue spiritual eyes; the long, tapering fingers; the massive dark brown or black hair; still more the quickly and intensely impressionable, nervous and extremely tense and active physical and psychical organization; and then the very affectionate, ardent, aspiring, impatient and absolute qualities and habits of her mind and heart and will,--all these things we are not merely told, we can still see them and find them, in part, even in her remains, but more fully in her portrait, and above all, in her numerous authentic utterances.[44]

3. _The few certain details concerning her early years. Santa Maria delle Grazie._

We have, as only too often in such older biographies, but very few precise and characteristic details concerning her early years. She had in her room a Pietà, a representation of the Dead Christ in His Mother’s arms, and we are told how deeply it affected her every time she entered this room, and raised her eyes up to it. The other points mentioned, her early bodily penances, silence, and gift of prayer (the latter said to have been communicated to her at twelve years of age), read suspiciously like simple assumptions made by her biographers, and in any case do not help to individualize her, in these years of uncertain, tentative, or as yet but little characteristic, forms of goodness.

But from thirteen, for three years onwards, the young girl is very certainly and deeply drawn to the Conventual life, as she sees it practised by her sister Limbania, who, true to the example of her own Genoese Augustinian Patron Saint, had become a member of the Augustinian Canonesses of our Lady of Graces, and now lived there happy and devoted in the midst of that very fervent and cultivated Community. Limbania was one of the nineteen Foundresses of this Convent, who, on August 5, 1451, received the habit of Canonesses Regular of the Lateran, from the hands of Padre Giovanni de’ Gatti, at that time Superior of S. Teodoro outside the walls of Genoa, a house of the same Order. Among these Novices occur a Simonetta di Negro, no doubt a cousin of Catherine, and Nicola and Lucia da Nove, two sisters; these facts will have helped Catherine to hope for admission together with her own sister Limbania.[45]

The Convent and its Chapel, both secularized, are still in existence, at a quarter of an hour’s walk from Catherine’s palace-home. Moving from here, along the Vico Chiabrera, up the Via dei Maruffi (now San Bernardo), and across the latter, up one of the many steep, very narrow little alleys, to the Piazza dei Embriaci, and again up by the tall, slim, grey tower of the Crusader Guilielmo Embriaco, we arrive at last at a level, all but deserted, sun-baked piazza, called, after its Church, Sta Maria in Passione. Face this Church, and the long, tall house on your left hand, covered with dim, faded frescoes, is Limbania’s Convent, so loved by Catherine. The right door leads into the Chapel, which Vallebona[46] found in 1887 in use as a wood-store, and which I saw in May 1900 turned into a music-hall: where the altar had stood, were a dingy stage, and tawdry wings. The pompous frescoes and stuccos on the walls and ceiling are evidently of the seventeenth century or even later. The adjoining Convent still retains a small figure of St. Augustine sculptured on a corbel on the vault of the first landing. The Byzantine, dark brown Madonna-and-Child picture, which Catherine so often prayed before in the Chapel, can still be seen, on the left-hand wall of the Chapel of St. Thomas Aquinas, in the Church of S. Maria di Castello, which is close by, at a lower level than the Piazza of the Convent.

4. _Catherine’s marriage. The Adorni family._

The Convent Chaplain was Catherine’s Confessor, and through him she attempted to gain the permission of the Nuns to enter their Community. But whilst they hesitated and put her off, on the very reasonable ground of her unusual youth, her father died (end of 1461); and a particular combination, from amongst the endless political rivalries and intrigues of Genoa, soon closed in upon the beautiful girl, member of the greatest of the Guelph families of that turbulent time. It was a bad and sorry business, and one likes to think that the father, had he lived, would not thus have sacrificed his daughter. For if in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet we have two youthful lovers joining hands and hearts, in spite of the secular enmity of their respective houses; here, alas! in real life, we have the contrary spectacle, the deep because dreary tragedy of two great rival factions making--rather, hoping to make--peace, by the enforced union of two mutually indifferent and profoundly unsuited young people.

Not but that socially the two were admirably matched. For Giuliano Adorno belonged to a family hardly inferior in antiquity and splendour to Catherine’s own. Six different Adorni had been Doges of Genoa in 1363, 1385, 1413, 1443, 1447, 1461; and the one of 1413 had been Giuliano’s own grandfather. They were Lords of the Greek Island of Chios (Scio), which they had helped to conquer for Genoa in 1349.

And now the last Doge of the family, Prospero Adorno, had just been driven from the Ducal throne by Paolo Campofregoso, the strong-willed representative of the great rival, though also Ghibelline, family of the Fregosi. Campofregoso was now both Duke and Archbishop of Genoa. By an alliance with the Fieschi, the most powerful of the Guelph families, the Adorni could hope, in their turn, to oust the Fregosi, and to reinstate themselves at the head of the great Republic. The ideals, antipathies or indifference of a girl of sixteen were not allowed to stand in the way; and so the contract was signed on January 13, 1463.

The marriage was celebrated soon afterwards in the Cathedral of San Lorenzo, in the Chapel of St. John the Baptist, since the Campanaro family, which had built it in 1299, and the Adorni, who had married into and succeeded the Campanaro, were excepted from the rule prohibiting the access of women to this Chapel. Since Cardinal Giorgio Fieschi had recently died, Bishop Napoleone Fieschi, of Albenga, presided at the ceremony.

5. _Giuliano’s character. Catherine’s pre-conversion married life._

Giuliano’s father was dead; only his widowed mother, Tobia dei Franchi, remained. It was, however, with Catherine’s mother, in the old Palazzo near the Cathedral, that the young couple were to live, and actually stayed, during the first two years.

Giuliano was young and rich; his two elder brothers occupied high naval posts; his first cousin, Agostino Adorno, was a man of noble character and great initiative; and a descendant of this cousin, also Agostino, was later on Beatified. But Giuliano himself did at first worse than nothing, and never did much throughout his life. A man of an undisciplined, wayward, impatient, and explosive temper; selfish and self-indulgent; a lover of obscure and useless, in one instance criminal, squandering of his time, money, health, and affections, he did not deserve the rare woman who had been sold to him; and would possibly indeed have managed to be a better man with a wife he had really loved, or with one of a temperament and outlook more ordinary and nearer to his own. As it was, he was hardly ever at home, and, according to his own later penitent admission and testamentary provisions, he was, some time during the first ten years of his marriage, gravely unfaithful to his wife.

Catherine, on her part, spent the first five of these dreary years in sad and mournful loneliness, at first in her mother’s house, and afterwards, at least in the winter-time, in Giuliano’s own palace, a building which stood exactly where now stands the Church of Saint Philip Neri, in the Via Lomellina (at that time, Via Sant’ Agnese), and near the Piazza Annunziata. In the summer-time she would stay, mostly alone again, at Giuliano’s country seat at Prà on the Western Riviera, just beyond Pegli, and six English miles from Genoa.

This latter property is still in existence, but was, some twenty years ago, on the extinction of the male line of the Adorni, sold to the Piccardo family. The present moderate-sized house, standing close to the high-road and sea-beach, although evidently rebuilt (probably on a considerably smaller scale) since Catherine’s time, no doubt occupies part at least of the old site. But the Chapel which, in the Saint’s days, adjoined the house, was described by Vallebona (in 1887) as turned into a stable; and in April 1902 an elderly serving-man of the Piccardo family showed me the precise spot, on a now level meadow expanse closely adjoining the house, where he himself, some fifteen years since, had helped to pull down this chapel-stable. He showed me the (probably seventeenth-century) picture representing the scene of the Saint’s conversion, which had, at that time, been still in this building, and which is now hung up in a small Confraternity-Chapel near by in Prà.

As to money of her own, Catherine had, as we shall see later on, her dowry of £1,000, to which Giuliano had contributed £200. But we have no evidence of any good works performed by her in this decade, although, as we shall find, it must have been during these summers that she, at least occasionally, walked or rode over the wooded hill-path to the old Benedictine Pilgrimage Church and Monastery of San Nicolò in Boschetto, three or four English miles away. These buildings are now secularized and empty, but, even so, impressive still.[47]

It is but natural to suppose that she was as yet too little at one with her true self, to be able to surmount her lot, or even seriously to attempt such a task, by escaping from the false self and from all attempts at finding happiness within the four corners of the demands of her most sensitive and absolute disposition. To learn to do things well takes time,--and even if it be but the finding out that those things to do are _there_, ready and requiring to be done; or the seeing that we are doing them badly. Hence above all does the learning to suffer well, the turning pain into self-expansion and self-escape, as well as into fruitful action, require time, special graces, and unusual fidelity of soul. And even the noblest nature will usually begin by thinking of getting, rather than of giving; it will simply thirst to be loved, and to find its happiness in its own heart’s perfect “comprehendedness.”

Catherine tried to find relief, first in one attitude on her life’s sad couch of mental suffering, and then in another; and neither brought her any alleviation. During the first five years she had hidden herself away, and had moped in solitude; the last five, she had given herself to worldly gaieties and feminine amusements, short, however, of all grave offence against the moral law. And at the end of these experiences and experiments she, noble, deep nature that she was, found herself, of course, sadder than ever, with apparently no escape of any kind from out of the dull oppression, the living death of her existence and of herself.

V. HER CONVERSION, WITH ITS IMMEDIATE PRELIMINARIES AND CONSEQUENCES, MARCH 1474.

1. _Her prayer, March 20, 1474. Her conversion, March 22._

From after Christmas-time in 1472, Catherine’s affliction of mind had become peculiarly intense, and a profound aversion to all the things of this world made her fly anew from all human intercourse; and yet her own company had become insupportable to her, as nothing whatsoever attracted her will.

And at the end of three months, on the 20th of March 1474--it was the eve of the Feast of St. Benedict--she was praying in his little church still standing close to the sea, at the western end of Genoa, not far beyond Andrea Doria’s Palace, built so soon after her death. And in her keen distress she prayed: “St. Benedict, pray to God that He make me stay three months sick in bed.”[48]

And two days later, when Catherine was visiting her sister at her Convent, Limbania proposed to her, since she declared herself indisposed to go to confession (although the Feast of the Annunciation was at hand), at least to go and recommend herself in the Chapel to the chaplain of the Convent, who was indeed a saintly Religious. And, at the moment that she was on her knees before him, her heart was pierced by so sudden and immense a love of God, accompanied by so penetrating a sight of her miseries and sins and of His goodness, that she was near falling to the ground. And in a transport of pure and all-purifying love, she was drawn away from the miseries of the world; and, as it were beside herself, she kept crying out within herself: “No more world; no more sins!” And at that moment she felt that, had she had in her possession a thousand worlds, she would have cast them all away.[49]

2. _Views and truths concerning this Experience._

One of the various writers who have successively, and in great part differently, moralized upon the chief events of her life, dwells on this great moment as achieving in her soul all the usually lengthy and successive effects of the purgative, illuminative, and unitive progression, and as, in that one instant, bringing her soul to that highest state of transformation, in which the will is wholly united to God.[50] But having regard to the fact, patent on every page of her biography and “Works,” that, for the remaining thirty-seven years of her life, her interior history represents one continuous widening and deepening and moving onwards of efforts, trials and pains, of achievements and ideals--a fact actually schematized by another writer (who, as I shall show, is the penultimate Redactor of the Life) not two pages lower down--it is clear that we must be careful to conceive this perfection as relative to her previous state or even to the final goodness of many saintly souls. We must, in a word, try to realize vividly, and constantly to recall, certain complex truths, without which the very greatness of the experience here considered will but help to check or deflect our apprehension of the spiritual life.

For one thing, the deeper and the more unique the soul’s experience, and the richer such experience is, the more entirely does all that the soul is, and ever was, wake up and fuse itself in one indivisible act, in which much of the old is newly seen to be dross and is so far forth excluded; and in which the old that is retained reappears in a fresh context, a context which itself affects and is itself affected by all the other old and new ideas and feelings. It thus clearly bears the stamp upon it of the profound difference between Time, conceived as a succession of moments of identical quantity and quality, each in juxtaposition and exterior to the other, mathematical time, such as our clocks register on the dials,--a conception really derived from space-perception and exterior, measurable _things_--and Duration, with its variously rapid succession of heterogeneous qualities, each affecting and colouring, each affected and coloured by, all the others, and all producing together a living harmony and organic unity, all which constitutes the essentially unpicturable experience of the living _person_. Such a moment is thus incapable of adequate analysis, in exact proportion as it is fully expressive of the depths of the personality and of its experience: for each element here, whilst, in its living context, an energy and a quality which at each moment modifies and is modified by all the other elements, becomes, in an intellectual analysis, when each is separated from the others, a mere dead thing and a quantity.

And secondly, such an experience is throughout as truly a work of pure grace, a gift, as it is a work of pure energy, an act. And here again, the grace and the energy, the gift and the act are not juxtaposed, but throughout they stimulate and interpenetrate each other, with the most entirely unanalyzable, unpicturable completeness. It is indeed in exact proportion to the fulness of this interstimulation and penetration, to the organic oneness of the act, that such an act is this one particular soul’s very own act and yet the living God’s own fullest gift. Grace does not lie without, but within; it does not check or limit, but constitutes the will’s autonomy.

And thirdly, it is an experience which leaves the soul different forever from what it was before; which purifies her perfectly, in and for that moment, from all her stains of actual sin committed up to that moment; and which materially strengthens her inclinations towards good and weakens her tendencies towards evil. But the soul herself lives on; and she lives but in and through successive acts of all kinds. Hence it is not an act,--there is none such, here below at least,--which takes or can take the place of fresh acts to be produced again and again throughout her life, The soul has not, in any sense or any degree, been approximated to that utterly paradoxical thing, a saintly automaton. She is not raised above the limitations and imperfections, the obscurities and conflicts, the failings and sins of humanity. She _could_ fall away and commit grave sin; she actually _does_ commit minor sins of frailty and surprise. Her interior efforts and experiences are now but on a larger, deeper scale, and on a higher plane, and take place from a new vantage-ground, a position which has, however, itself to be continually actively defended and reinforced. Temptation, trial, sorrow, pain; hope, fear, self-hatred, love and joy, with ever-renewed and increased aspiration and effort, all variously change and deepen their combinations and qualities, outlook and ideals. But they do not for one moment cease. All things but grow in depth and significance, in variety within unity, in interiority and interpenetration.

And finally, although conversions of the apparent suddenness and profound depth and perseverance of the one here studied, are rightly taken to be very special and rare graces of God, yet it would be but misinterpreting and depreciating their true significance to make their suddenness the direct proof and measure of their own supernaturalness or the standard by which to appraise the altitude of the goodness of other lives. God is as truly the source of gradual purification as of sudden conversion, and as truly the strength which guards and moves us straight on, as that which regains and calls us back. Hence such acts as Catherine’s should not be entirely separated off from those acts of love, contrition and self-dedication which occur, as so many free graces of God in and with the free acts of man, more or less frequently in the secret lives of human beings throughout the world.

3. _The Second Experience, in the Palace._

Catherine then was kneeling on, in these great moments of her true self’s self-discovery and self-determination, with her true Life now at last felt so divinely near and yet still so divinely far: she was kneeling on, oblivious of time and space, incapable of speech--throughout a deep, rich age of growth, during but some minutes of poor clock-time--whilst the chaplain was called away by some little momentary matter. And when he returned, she was just able to utter: “Father, if you please, I should like to let this confession stand over to another time.” And returning home, she was so on fire and wounded with the love which God had interiorly manifested to her, that, as if beside herself, she went into the most private chamber she could find, and there gave vent to her burning tears and sighs. And, all instructed as she had suddenly become in prayer, her lips could only utter: “O Love, can it be that Thou hast called me with so much love, and revealed to me, at one view, what no tongue can describe?” And her contrition for her offences against such infinite goodness was so great, that, if she had not been specially supported, her heart would have been broken, and she would have died.[51]

And yet, though her biographer, no doubt rightly, represents her feeling and dispositions as now at their uttermost,--they may well have actually been so, at that moment for that moment,--they were nevertheless evidently capable of indefinite subsequent increase. Indeed it must have been on this same day, or on one of the next three days, that, in one of the rooms of the palace in the Via S. Agnese,--(the approximate spot is marked in the Church of St. Philip by a fine picture representing the scene, hung over the altar of one of the left-hand-side chapels),--“Our Lord, desiring to enkindle still more profoundly His love in this soul, appeared to her in spirit with His Cross upon His shoulder dripping with blood, so that the whole house seemed to be all full of rivulets of that Blood, which she saw to have been all shed because of love alone.” “And filled with disgust at herself, she exclaimed: ‘O Love, if it be necessary, I am ready to confess my sins in public.’”[52]

4. _Two peculiarities of this Experience._

Here two things are remarkable. This is, to begin with, her first and last vision (_visione_), which I can find, in the sense of a picture produced indeed “in the spirit,” but yet evidently apprehended with a sense of apparently complete passivity in the perceiving mind and of objectivity as to the perceived thing, and remembered as such throughout her life. For the frequent subsequent “sights” or picturings (_viste_) are avowedly only of the nature of profoundly vivid, purely mental, more or less consciously voluntary and subjective contemplations and intuitions; whilst her only other “visions,” those seen during the last stage of her last illness, seem indeed to have been of an even more sensible kind than this _visione_, but they were entirely fitful and left no permanent impression behind them.

And again, this is the one only picture of any, even of a voluntary, meditational kind, concerning the Passion, to be found throughout her life; all her other contemplations and impressions of whatever kind are of other subjects.

5. _Her general confession._

It was after these fundamental experiences that, once more in the Chapel of the Augustinianesses, apparently four days later, on the 24th of March, “she made her general confession, with such contrition and compunction as to pierce her soul.”[53]

VI. THE TWO CONCEPTIONS CONCERNING THE CHARACTER AND _RATIONALE_ OF HER PENITENTIAL PERIOD AND OF HER WHOLE CONVERT LIFE. THE POSITION ADOPTED HERE.

At this point of the Life two successive reporters or redactors introduce, respectively, a general reflection on the character and _rationale_ of the period of penitence now immediately ensuing, and a scheme and forecast as to the stages in the ascensional movement of her entire convert life.

1. _The older conception._

The first reporter,--evidently the same who, in connection with the Conversion scene, had described her soul as, there and then, at the culmination of holiness,--here says: “And although God, at the moment when,” four days before, “He had given her that love and pain, had there and then pardoned her all her sins, consuming them in the fire of His love; yet He, wishing her to satisfy the claims of justice, led her by the way of satisfaction, in such wise as to cause this special contrition, illumination, and conversion to last about fourteen months,” and it is no doubt implied by him that frequent confession was practised throughout this time.[54]

Thus we get an impressive instance of the rich and complex experience on which the Catholic doctrine is built, as to how, on the one hand, pure and perfect love ever instantly obliterates all sin; how, on the other hand, such perfect love, in those who explicitly know and accept the Church’s claims, involves a determination to confess all such grave sins as may have been committed; and how, finally, such subsequent confession is itself operative within the soul. For as between the soul and the body, so between the Mystical and Sacramental, there is a real and operative connection, though one which, however inadequately known by us, we know to be one not of simple identity or coextension.