Chapter VIII: Battista Vernazza’s Life (1)

INTRODUCTORY.

We have, in the characters described in the previous Chapter, dwelt upon figures remarkably unlike Catherine, on her psycho-physical side. Yet it would be only too easy for us now-a-days, by dwelling too much upon the foregoing contrast, to grow actually unfair to Catherine’s kind of temperament and health, and to her mode of apprehending truth and of attaining sanctity. We might thus come to overlook or to underestimate the important fact that certain psycho-physical, neural peculiarities or states most certainly constitute the general antecedents, concomitants or consequences (probably, indeed, one of the necessary though secondary conditions), not indeed of sanctity, but of at least some forms of the contemplative gift, habit, and attainment. We might, too, forget that neither this contemplative gift itself, nor even those neural peculiarities, are at all incompatible with great practical shrewdness and an unusually large external activity; indeed that such rare and costly contemplative picturings and symbolizations of the Unseen are, when true and deep, means and helps for the contemplative, in his own life and often still more in his influence upon others, towards a great recollection and concentration, which would not only turn the soul away from the dispersion and feverishness that sets in towards the close of external action, but would also bring it back renewed to such outward-moving, joyful-humble creativeness, as wholesome recollection itself requires. For without such contact with the material and the opposition of external action, recollection grows gradually empty; and without recollection, external action rapidly becomes soul-dispersive. Hence it is plain, that the true significance and living system of any such deep soul may be on too large a scale not to require, for its due exhibition, that we survey it in connection with some other supplementary life,--like unto some Gobelin design or cloth-pattern, so large as to require two contiguous walls or two human figures to show its totality by means of their combination.

Now Vernazza the father, who throughout his life possessed the most robust and normal health, can fairly be taken as Catherine’s supplementary figure, for the years when ill-health was limiting her normal range of energies, on their operatively outgoing, philanthropic side; and is thus a living protest against isolating Saints’ lives from their complementary extensions and effects. But Battista, his daughter, gives us, in her own person and up to the end of her life, an example of the combination and stimulating interaction of the Contemplative and the Practical, the Transcendent and the Immanental, the heroically normal and Universal and the tenderly Personal, indeed the more or less psycho-physically peculiar. Catherine was the greater, more original, and more winning Contemplative, and Ettore was more massively Practical than was Battista. Yet Battista possessed both gifts, from early times up to the end, apparently unclouded and unbroken by any kind of incapacitation.

I. BATTISTA’S LIFE, FROM APRIL 1497 TO JUNE 1510.

We have already seen how Ettore’s eldest child was born on April 15, 1497, and was held at the font by Catherine, receiving, however, the name of Tommasa, after the God-father, the celebrated Doctor of Law, Tommaso Moro. Giuliano was still alive, but already gravely ill. Nothing could well prove more clearly Vernazza’s closeness of friendship for the Adorna and for Moro than his making them thus his first-born’s God-parents. And Moro’s subsequent history makes this, his intimate collocation and spiritual affinity with Catherine a matter suggestive of much reflection.

With her beautiful young mother still alive and living at home with her, Tommasa, a child of precocious intelligence, took to writing verse of various kinds, as early as at ten years of age. Vallebona quotes, from Semeria’s _Secoli Christiani della Liguria_, ten short lines written by her at that age, and which he apparently holds to have been addressed to her God-mother. They are, however, too vague and hyperbolical for one to be sure as to whom they are dedicated; her own mother or the Blessed Virgin would, I think, fit the case respectively as well as, or better than, Catherine. The “short days” prophesied for herself by the little girl, were destined to amount to ninety years![333]

On her mother dying, some time in 1508 or 1509,--Bartolommea can hardly have been more than thirty-two years of age, and Ettore some six years older,--Vernazza decided, as we know, against continuing an establishment of his own and keeping his three daughters with him. It is certain from his Wills that he had no near female relative whom he could have asked to come and help, or to take, the children; and clear that he was determined not to marry again, so as to remain completely free for his philanthropic work. And hence he was driven to the alternative of boarding the girls in the two convents that we know.

And already on June 24, 1510, on the feast of her father’s favourite Saint and prison-work Patron, Tommasa received the habit of an Augustinian Canoness of the Lateran, and changed her name to Battista. Catherine had still not quite twelve weeks to live, and may well have been deeply interested in her God-daughter’s taking of the veil in that very Convent and at the very age where and when she herself had, half-a-century before, desired to receive it.[334] We cannot but feel that the Superiors were wise who, at that earlier date, had found thirteen too young an age for even an Italian, so early physically mature, and a Catherine, so little suited for marriage, to take even this first and revocable step in the Religious life; and we would doubtless have experienced some uneasiness at the time when Tommasa was somehow allowed to take this identical step at the very same age. Yet we have, as we shall see, full and absolutely conclusive, because first-hand, evidence, that every one concerned in the case acted with true insight. Rarely indeed can a woman have been more emphatically in her right place, than Battista during her seventy-seven years at Santa Maria delle Grazie. And this complete and comfortable appropriateness of vocation no doubt helped her large, balanced, virile mind to feel, with the Church, that such a vocation is but one amongst the numberless forms of even heroic devotedness, a devotedness of which the essence is interior and is capable of being exercised, and which requires to be represented in every honest circumstance and calling of God’s great, many-coloured world.

Of Catetta’s further history, beyond her reception of the veil in the same Convent, under the name of Daniela, some time before November 1517, and of Ginevrina’s later lot, beyond her becoming a Cistercian Nun, under the name of Maria Archangela, at Sant’ Andrea, some time between 1517 and 1524, I have been unable to discover anything. But as to Battista, I wish to dwell upon three characteristic episodes of her long life; they all three throw much light both upon Catherine and (still more) upon the whole question of Mysticism.

II. BATTISTA AND HER GOD-FATHER, TOMMASO MORO.

The first episode illustrates the rigoristic side of the pre-Reformation Catholic temper and teaching, and the terrible complications, perplexities and pitfalls of those strenuous, confusing times. For we must now move on fifteen further years from that interview with her father, a few days before his death, in June 1524, to reach this event, the first fresh one in Battista’s life of which we have a record.

1. _The early stages of Lutheranism and Calvinism._

The Religious Revolution had now well nigh reached its culmination. Battista’s father had only lived to see what may rightly be termed the first step in the Teutonic stage and element of the movement, a stage which, in spite of its political and social, indeed religious, violences and fanaticisms,--and even these came mostly after Vernazza’s death,--retained, if in large part illogically yet with great practical advantage, a considerable portion of the old Catholic convictions and spiritual attitude. Luther had indeed, as we saw, published his Theses in 1517, and Pope Leo X had condemned nearly one-half of them in 1520 in his Bull of Excommunication. And Melanchthon, the mild and deeply learned, had also broken with the Old Church, and had begun, in 1521, the publication of his _Loci_. But an earnest Catholic (in this case a Teutonic) Reformer had become Pope, in the person of Adrian Dedel of Utrecht (Hadrian VI), in 1522, 1523. And in the very year of Ettore’s heroic death, Erasmus, proving, under the stress of the times, substantially true to the Old Faith, was writing against Luther; whilst in Italy, Vernazza’s old patron, Cardinal Caraffa, was helping to found the Theatine Order.

But within the next fifteen years matters move on and further. For first the Teutonic stage of the Revolution takes its second step, and hardens, and formally and permanently organizes itself; whilst its socially anarchical effects reach their zenith. For there are the Peasants’ War and Luther’s marriage in 1525; and the capture and the sack of Rome by the Imperial (largely Lutheran) troops in 1527; and the Revolutionists’ assumption of the name of “Protestants,” at the Diet of Speyer, in 1529. And, on the Roman Church’s part, the Capuchins are founded in 1525, and the Barnabites in 1530. And this whole Teutonic stage of the Revolution can be taken as closed, for the time, by the terrible Saturnalia of the Anabaptists at Münster, 1533-1535; the executions of the Catholic Humanists, Bishop Fisher and Chancellor More, in England, 1535; and Erasmus’s death in 1536.

And the second element and stage, the Romanic Revolution, was now fully and independently at work, with its indefinitely greater coldness and logical completeness, and its systematic antagonism to the Old Faith. And if the Saxon Mystical-minded Peasant-monk, Luther, stood at the head and in the centre of the first movement, the Picardese bourgeois lawyer and Humanist, Calvin, stands now at the head of this second movement. Born in 1509, he flees, now an avowed Protestant, in 1535 to Basle; and in the spring of 1536 publishes his _Institutio Religionis Christianae_, which was destined to remain his chief work.

Now it was in the summer of that year that Calvin went to stay at the Court of Renée de Valois, daughter of the French King Louis XII, and Duchess of Ferrara, who had already been gained over to the cause of the Lutheran Reformers; and who was now influenced, by her grim, relentless guest, to move still further away from the Old Church. And though the Roman Inquisition succeeded in forcing Calvin to leave Italy, after not many weeks’ stay: yet the cases of Vittoria Colonna, Bernardino Occhino, and of our Tommaso Moro, show us all plainly, though each differently, how complex and difficult, how obscure and full of pitfalls, was the situation for even permanently loyal and indeed saintly, and still more for simply earnest and eager, souls. For Vittoria Colonna, that truly saint-like daughter of the Church, not only stays, during the following year, with the Duchess Renée at Ferrara, and indeed stands God-mother to her daughter Eleonora (born June 19, 1537), the child that, later on, became the friend of the poet Tasso: but Vittoria is the close friend and confidante of that most zealous preacher, that restless, ardent, absolute-minded Bernardino Occhino, who, born in Siena in 1487, had joined the Franciscan Reform, the later Capuchins, in 1534, and indeed, in 1539, became their General. It is to Vittoria indeed that, on his deciding not to obey the summons to Rome, there to defend himself against the (no doubt, in part, unfair) attacks upon his teaching, he, in the night of August 22, 1542, before his flight and abandonment of his Order and of the Church, writes his still extant sad and saddening letter of self-exculpation.[335] But this latter catastrophe was not to take place till three years after the date at which I would now linger.

2. _Moro becomes a Calvinist: probable causes of this step._

It must, I think, have been through some influence emanating from the not very far away Ferrara, that the Genoese Tommaso Moro was, just about this time, carried away into Calvinism. We must not forget that, deplorable as was such an aberration, there were two excuses for him, which would apply no doubt, in varying degrees, to many others even of those who were, at this time, permanently lost to the Church.

For one thing the views held, and allowably held, during two or three generations, on points of Grace and Free-will, of Predestination and the corruption of the natural man, by even those whom the Church eventually raised to her Altars, were, as a matter of fact, less removed from the Protestant Reformers’ positions, than were probably any views (with the exception of the extreme Jansenist position) which have prevailed in the Catholic Church since the Protestant Reformation. St. Catherine, Moro’s fellow God-parent, had expressed herself, in certain moods, in so rigoristic a sense on these deep matters, as to invite the comment of the Bollandist Sticker that these passages are _caute legenda_.[336] Yet Catherine, in speaking thus, simply resembled probably all her really earnest contemporaries--witness the great Paris Chancellor Jean Gerson, some time before, and the devoted Cardinals Contarini and Morone and Vittoria Colonna, a little after Catherine’s own zenith.[337]

Again, the practical, moral abuses were most real and often very pressing; and whilst the numerous attempts at Reform extending now over a century (the Council of Constance had assembled in 1414) had emphasized this fact, they had also plainly shown, by their practical abortiveness, how very difficult the attainment of such a universally desired Reform persisted in appearing, if there was to be no final breach with Rome.

And the fullest consequences of such a breach could not be present to the experience, or even to the imagination, of the first who made it, as they are to us, or even as they were after the second step of the Romanic Revolution had been taken by Lelio Socino, the Sienese and his nephew Fausto Socino, the founders of Socinianism, who died respectively in 1562 and 1604,--the former shortly after Occhino had died, in 1560, miserably alone and out of the Catholic Roman Church.

3. _Battista’s letter to Moro, September 1537; its effect._

Now it was on September 10, 1537, that his Augustinian God-daughter wrote, to her now Calvinist God-father, a letter which occupies five pages of print in the fifth, a handsome octavo, edition of her works published in Genoa in 1755. Though the earliest of all her extant, or at least of her printed, letters, it is evidently an answer to a communication of his, in which he had urged certain objections against the Roman Church. And that communication must have been provoked by a first letter from herself--a letter which, though probably less theologically interesting and learned, will have been more uniformly touching than the one preserved. Yet if that first note had clearly succeeded in getting him to state his case, this second letter also, we shall see, completely attained its still more important object.

Moro had insisted that the Roman Church followed merely human inventions in the matter of (1) Fasting; (2) Confession; (3) the Real Presence; (4) Public Prayer and Psalmody; (5) Vows; and (6) Extreme Unction.--The order is curious, but is evidently not hers but his. Extreme Unction stands in the obvious position--at the end. The vows of Religion immediately precede it, probably because, at this time, they typified something not only irrevocable but sepulchral to this ardent Calvinist. Public Prayer and Psalmody would naturally precede these vows, as an appropriate link between the life of the cloister, so largely given to the Divine Office, and the Real Presence, its celebration being and requiring the most marked of all the exhibitions of Public Prayer. Confession would stand before the Real Presence, as being actually practised before the reception of Communion. And Fasting, finally, would precede Confession, and would, most characteristically, head the whole list, because the completest and most universally binding of all Fasts is that which is antecedent to Holy Communion; and because, in beginning thus, Moro can start his attack on the Church by the criticism of something that is obviously and avowedly external.

The tone of Battista’s answer is interesting throughout, for a double reason. There is in it a successful, very difficult combination of filial respect and of lofty reproof; and there runs through all the argumentation a sort of legal hard-headedness, entirely in its place on the lips of the lawyer’s daughter in dealing with her lawyer correspondent. I give her answers to his second and fifth objections, since the former is interesting as touching on the point of the obligation and frequency of Sacramental Confession, which has occupied us much in her God-mother’s life; and the latter gives a vivid insight into Battista’s own deeply genuine and happy vocation.

As to Confession, she writes: “You hold one opinion, and the Church holds another; and to this Church it has not appeared good to constrain us to confess ourselves in public, nor always to manifest our whole interior to any and every man who may reprehend us. In this latter case we should have been left without any protection. You grudge obeying her once a year; how then would you carry out the other plan? Certainly the said Church would have but little authority if she could not lay down ordinances, according to her own judgment, concerning the mode (of administration and reception) of the Sacraments already ordained by Christ.”

As to Vows, she finishes up by declaring: “According to my humble judgment, that thing cannot be called slavery which a soul elects for itself, by an act of free choice alone, and with a supreme desire. And in this matter you really can trust me, since here I am, living under the very test of experience, and yet I have no consciousness of being bound to any obligation: so little indeed that, if I had full licence from God to do all those things of which I have deprived myself by my vows, I would do neither more nor less than what I now am actually doing; indeed no taste for anything beyond these latter things arises within me. How then do you come to give the name of servitude to that which gets embraced thus with supreme delight? Perchance you will say ‘not every one is thus disposed.’ My dear Sir: he who does not find this inclination within him, let him not execute it. Neither Christ nor His Church constrain any one in this matter.”[338]

The effect of this homely and sensible, straightforward and firm, first-hand witness to a strong soul’s full daily life of faith and self-expansion in and for Christ in His extension, the Old Church, was evidently decisive, perhaps immediate. It is at least certain that Tommaso Moro came back to the Roman obedience; that he became and died a Priest and Religious; and that his return is universally attributed to the instrumentality of this letter.[339]

III. BATTISTA’S _COLLOQUIES_, NOVEMBER 1554 TO ASCENSION-DAY 1555.

Yet her letters form but a small part of the literary output of this many-sided woman. Her printed writings fill six stout volumes, in all some 2,400 octavo pages, and fall into four chief divisions. The independent verses consist only of four “Canticles of Divine Love,” twelve “Spiritual Canticles,” and five “Sonnets.” Yet even the second division, which alone fills quite five out of the six volumes, and consists of Spiritual Discourses or Dissertations, contains much verse, since the Discourse (which invariably takes its title and starting-point from some, originally or interpretatively, Mystical Biblical text) usually finishes up with a chapter of eight verses, in which she sums up metrically the doctrine which she has just expounded in finely balanced and stately prose. Mostly proceeding from some Pauline, or, more often still, some Joannine text, these writings evince throughout a fine Christian-Platonist breadth of outlook and concentration and expansion of devotional feeling, and have much of that unfading freshness which appertains to the universal experiences of religion, wherever these are experienced deeply and anew and are communicated largely in the form and tone of their actual experimentation. These Discourses would also, of course, furnish all but endless parallels and illustrations to Catherine’s teachings.

Yet it is the last two divisions of Battista’s writings which are the most entirely characteristic and suggestive--her _Colloquies_ and her _Letters_. As to the seventy-five pages of letters, I have already given extracts from two, of the years 1581 and 1589, and shall presently give portions of two others, of the years 1575 and 1576. But in this section I want to translate and comment upon a considerable portion of her _Colloquies_, so interesting for various reasons, all directly connected with the subject of this book. These contemporary annotations occupy only eleven pages of print, but they constitute, I think, one of the most instructive first-hand documents of mystical and religious psychology in existence, and have nowhere, as yet, received any of the comparative and analytic study they so richly deserve.

It is but right to remember throughout, that even all her other writings (including the Discourses which are so general and, in a manner, quite public in their tone) were, with the sole exception of her Sonnets, none of them printed with her knowledge and consent. A certain Secular Priest, Gaspare Scotto, did indeed print some at least of the Discourses, without her knowledge, during her long lifetime; but the _Colloquies_ were certainly never meant for any eyes other than her own, and were doubtless not printed, or indeed known, until after her death. I suppose them to have first appeared in the collected edition of her works, published in 1602, fifteen years after her demise.

Now these _Colloquies_ belong to three periods. The first set is timed vaguely _una volta_; and the third is also but approximately fixed; but the second, by far the longest and most important series, is, at its main turning-points, dated with absolute precision. And since its authenticity, the identity of the chronicler with the experiencing person, and the complete contemporaneousness of the record, are all beyond cavil or question (the majority of the entries were evidently put down by her on the very day, often probably within the hour, of the cessation of the experience thus chronicled)--the document can serve as a simply first-hand illustration of, and commentary on, the analogous experiences of Battista’s God-mother, experiences which, in the latter case, were nowhere recorded by their subject, nor indeed by others till probably, in some cases, a considerable time after their occurrence. And if here again there can be no difficulty, for any sincere and consistent believer, in holding that we have to do with enlightenments of the mind and stimulations of the affections and will, proceeding as truly from God as they led back to Him: we cannot but, here again, find plentiful indications of the antecedent material, and of the co-operation, response, and special colour furnished throughout by the human subject’s special sex and age, race and period, temperament, training, and reading. Not all the latter conditions put together would explain even half of the total experience; yet had these conditions been different, the total experience would have differed, not indeed in its fundamental contents, yet in its special forms and applications. As matters stand, these latter are often strikingly like those manifested in the teaching of Catherine, Battista’s fellow-Genoese. I will now take the nine most interesting days of this series,[340] stopping after certain of them to point out parallels and peculiarities.

1. _Experience of November 17, 1554._

“On (Saturday) November 17, 1554” (Battista was now fifty-seven and a half years old), “having, before Holy Communion, a great desire to die to all things, I prayed with all my heart that God, in the most perfect manner possible, would slay me and unite me with Himself. And in so doing I renounced into His hands all myself and everything existing under heaven, whilst electing God anew as my only Love, my only Solace, my only Comfort, and my All. And I refused to accept every consolation arising from such interiorness, however holy the latter might be, except inasmuch as the consolation arises whilst the interior is distinctly occupied with God, and does not turn its gaze upon itself or upon any (other) belovèd object. Even if I could enjoy all this, quite justly, till the day of judgment, I renounce it all. Nothing pleases me, except my God. And if I were assured, which God forbid, of going (to abide) under Lucifer, still would I will, neither more nor less than my God alone. And it would be grievous to me to embrace, even for one single hour, anything else but Him.--After this Communion I remained with a most intense impression of renouncing, with regard to all things and to all moments, all myself and every other thing that is lower than Thee; and with a determination to keep Forty Days of silence, depriving myself during them, as far as my own will and inclination went, even of such reasoning as turned on religious subjects.--And acting thus, by means of Thy grace alone, I arrived, in my inner heart, at having no other actions left, except those of adoring Thee and praying for all men. Whence it happened that I experienced the most quiet and consoling week that, possibly, I have ever had, up to this hour, in all my life.”

It is clear that even the first part of this week’s experience was not written down later than at the end of that week; indeed it reads more as if written down on at least two, and perhaps three, occasions. We have here many close parallels to Catherine: to her exclamation of “God is my Being … my Delight”; to the Divine Voice heard by her, “I do not wish thee henceforth to turn thine eyes to right or left”; to the question asked, and the interior answer heard, by her, as to “love and union not being able to exist without a great contentment of soul”; to her assertions that “the attribution to her own separate self of even one single meritorious act, would be to her as though a Hell,” and that “she would rather remain in eternal condemnation than be saved by such an act of the separate self”; to her Love saying within her, “that He wanted her to keep the Forty Days in His Company in the Desert”; and to her declaration that she could not pray for Vernazza and his fellow-disciples separately, but could only “present them” collectively “in His presence.” And in Battista’s phrase of “going under Lucifer,” we have again, if we take it together with the renunciation of “all things lower than God,” an illustration of those sayings of Catherine which I have grouped under the special category of “up” and “above.”[341]

And note, in Battista’s record, how the contradiction, which appears between her affirmation of having love for God alone, and the admission that she loved herself and other things (since she is determined not to let her mental gaze rest upon these latter beloved objects), is more apparent than real. For the former love is the direct and central object of her fully deliberate and free endeavours; the latter is instinctive, continuous, inevitable, but, inasmuch as it now still remains actively willed at all, it is but the consequential and peripheral object of that willing. As in all deep religion there is here an heroic willing at work to effect a genuine displacement of the centre and object of interest; the system from being instinctively man-centred, becomes a freely willed God-centredness.

2. _Experience of November 25, 1554._

“On Sunday” (November 25), “the Feast of St. Catherine” (Virgin Martyr of Alexandria) “was being celebrated. And I communicated with new emotion. And when I received the Host, I willed Thee, my God, alone; renouncing all the rest into Thy hands: I but desired to die and unite myself with Thee. And I felt within me those colloquies of Thine own extreme love; and Thou didst say unto me, O my Joy, ‘The thing that thou seekest is (already) produced eternally in My Divine Mind. Thou desirest to feed on mutability, and I desire to feed thee on eternity.’ And I do not remember in what connection Thou didst say,‘ Ego ero merces tua magna nimis’ (Gen. xv, 1).”

Here, on her God-mother’s Saint’s day, we find that act of pure love at the moment of Holy Communion so dear to Catherine also; and we get here, as in the previous group (but here, even on occasion of the Holy Eucharist), prayer and aspiration directed to God pure and simple, or to God conceived as Love and Joy, precisely as in the Fiesca’s ordinary practice.[342] And the inner voice, if it says deeply mystical things, also directly quotes Scripture in Latin, whilst the scrupulous care of Battista, in registering her oblivion of the precise context in which this quotation appeared, is interestingly characteristic of her nature and experience.

3. _Experience of December (9?), 1554._

“On Sunday” (December 9?) “I communicated; and I experienced within myself the most tender colloquies of Thy Majesty, which said to me, ‘The time will come when thou must be so occupied with Me--with My Divinity, My Infinity, My Glory--that, even if thou shouldst so wish, thou wouldest be unable to break off this preoccupation. I have elected thee from amongst thousands. I want to make thee My very Self.’ … Then Thou saidst unto me, ‘I do not want thee to merit, but to return the love which I ever bear thee.’”[343]

Here we have parallels to Catherine’s practice and declarations in Battista’s ever-growing occupation with God; in her, at first sight, strongly pantheistic, because apparently substantial, identification of her true self with God; and in her doctrine that God desires not that we should merit, but that we should, by purely loving, make Him a return of His own pure love. And, as but an apparent contrast, note how here it is God Who chooses out Battista’s soul from amongst thousands; whilst, with Catherine, we have herself instinctively choosing out God, even were He, _per impossible_, like to one of the whole Court of Heaven (the angels, “whose number is thousands of thousands,” Apoc. v, 11). For the difference consists, at bottom, only in the fact that each dwells, in these special instances, upon the other half of the complete mystic circle of the divine and human intercourse. The same complete scheme is, in reality, experienced and proclaimed both by the widow and the nun,--indeed God’s prevenient election of the soul, and His special attention to it, is even more strongly emphasized by the older woman: “It appears to me, indeed, that God has no other business than myself.”[344]

Remark, too, how here again an unmistakable text of Scripture appears as part of the words heard by Battista. But since it is a composite quotation--“I have elected thee,” coming from Isa. xliii, 10; xliv, 1; xlviii, 10; and “elected among thousands,” coming from Cant. v, 10, where the elect is (as with Catherine) the Bridegroom, and not (as with Battista) the Bride,--therefore, no doubt, it does not appear in Latin or with any reference.

4. _Experience of December 16, 1554._

“The following Sunday” (December 16) “I communicated with a greater desire for Union than usual, and with a more detailed sight concerning it. And after this communion I prayed in such a state of Union,--without any means either of thoughts or of anything else that could be made to intervene, remaining naked in Thy bosom as I have been from eternity. And whilst praying thus, I felt that certain words were being spoken within me, the gist of which (_la sentenza_) seems to me to have been, that my prayer did not reach to the reality of Union itself. So that there then came to my mind that which Paul says, Rom. viii (26), that ‘we do not know how to pray _sicut oportet_.’ And Thou saidst to me that, above all understanding of mine, Thou wouldest produce the effect; indeed the thing is already effected continuously in Thy divine mind. And Thou saidst to me, my only Love, that Thou didst will to make me Thyself; and that Thou wast all mine, with all that Thou hadst and with all Paradise; and that I was all Thine. That I should leave all, or rather the nothing; and that (then) Thou wouldst give me the all. And that Thou hadst given me this name--at which words I heard within me ‘dedi te in lucem gentium’--not without good reason. And it seemed then, as though I had an inclination for nothing except the purest Union, without any means, in accordance with that detailed sight which Thou hadst given me. So then I said to Thee: ‘These other things, give them to whom Thou wilt; give me but this most pure Union with Thee, free from every means.’”

Here we again have numerous parallels. Battista’s state of Union, without any means that could be made to intervene, compares readily with Catherine’s declaration: “I cannot abide to see that word ‘for’ (God) and ‘in’ (God), since they denote to my mind something that can stand between God and myself.” Battista’s description, “remaining naked in Thy bosom, as I have been from eternity,” resembles Catherine’s sayings: “True love wills to stand naked. This naked love sees the truth”; “the soul in that state of cleanness in which it was created”; “the angels and man, when disobedient, were clothed in sin”; and the words heard by her: “I want thee naked, naked.” The answer granted to Battista, that “possessing her Lord, her only Love, she possessed at the same time all Paradise,” recalls Catherine’s declaration that “if of what her heart felt but one drop were to fall into Hell, Hell itself would become Eternal Life.” And Battista’s prayer, “these other things, give them to whom Thou wilt; give me but this most pure Union with Thee,” is substantially like Catherine’s answer to the Friar, “that you should merit more than myself--I leave that in your hands; but that I cannot love Him as much as you, is a thing that you will never by any means get me to understand.”[345]

And we get here two further interesting particularities as to such “locutions.” In this case Battista only “feels,” at the time of their occurrence, that certain words are being spoken within her (once before she has used that remarkably general term, instead of the more obvious and specific “hear”); and she possesses, on coming (evidently soon after) to write them down, a but approximate remembrance of them, and a certainty as to their substance alone. And then we find here the interesting case of two different simultaneous locutions: one voice referring to the name which our Lord had given her, and another, at this point, quoting the text, “dedi te in lucem gentium.” The text, in this full form, occurs in Isaiah xlix, 6, and is there spoken by God to His servant Israel, v. 3; but part of it, expanded to “a light to the revelation of the Gentiles,” is, in Luke ii, 32, quoted by Simeon of Christ. We thus, in this place, get three different, yet simultaneous, levels of consciousness within Battista’s soul: her own (more or less ordinary) consciousness and “voice” recognized by her own self, as such; another, deeper, extraordinary consciousness and “voice” proceeding, according to her apprehension, from our Lord’s presence and action within her; and finally a third, deepest consciousness and “voice” taken, I presume, to be directly communicated by God Himself. It is to be noted that, though interior “locutions” seem to have been fairly frequent with Catherine, there is no case on record in her life of more than two levels of consciousness, two “voices,” at one and the same moment, her own and Love’s.

5. _Experience of December 23, 24, 1554._

“The following night” (December 23 to 24), “I woke up and found impressed upon my mind (the words): ‘comedite bonum,’ Isaiah lv (2). And this impression remained with me (throughout the day),--an impression of eating God, and of inviting all others to the same Divine food.--In the evening,--it was the Vigil of the Nativity,--I had a sight of how, God Himself having taken our nature, and having done so as the Infinite one, the very greatest virtue must be diffused throughout this same (human) nature: a truth which he knew who says: ‘Plena est omnis terra gloria eius,’ Isaiah vi (3). If by one man sin entered into all, by a God-man how much good has not entered into us all? Romans v, 15-19. If God has made Himself Flesh, what virtue is there which He has denied to this same flesh?--And in the night of the Nativity, after Matins, I had a sight of that extreme, eternal and incomprehensible Love, which, unable to abide within Itself, had become ecstatic into the thing It loved, and had indeed, by means of Its Almighty power, become that very thing. Whence it is that, seeing Thy Majesty gone forth out of Thyself and become me, I was determined, in virtue of that self-same love, to go forth from myself and, in every manner, make myself into Thy very Self. And Thou, my God, didst say that Thou hadst descended to the same degree as that to which Thou wantedst man to ascend.”

Here Battista’s “impression of eating God, and of inviting all others to the same Divine food” is substantially identical with Catherine’s doctrine as to the “One Bread, God,” and “all creatures hungering for this One Bread.” Battista’s sight of “God being diffused throughout human nature,” is analogous to Catherine’s teaching as to no creature existing that does not, in some measure, participate in His goodness,--although, with characteristic difference, Battista dwells on the ennoblement of that nature through the Incarnation of God, and Catherine insists upon the nobility contemporaneous with, and intrinsic to, Man’s original Creation. And Battista’s determination to go forth from herself is identical, in substance, with all the sayings of Catherine which I have grouped under the “outside” “outwards” category.[346]

And note how, in this group, Battista mentally sees, instead of interiorly hearing, the truth of the Incarnation of the Infinite, and of the consequent ennobling of our whole nature; how this sight then suggests to her mind a definite text (recognized by herself as such), and then an amplification of another text (not perhaps identified by her as such at all): and how the transition from that sight to these texts is so smooth and rapid that it is practically impossible to mark off precisely where she held the simply given experience to end, and her own action and comment to begin. The fact of the matter no doubt is that, in both cases, though very possibly in different degrees, there was divine and human action indistinguishably co-operant throughout.

And mark again how her “vista”--“of that extreme, eternal, and incomprehensible Love which had become ‘ecstatic’ into the Thing it loves”; her consequent determination to “go forth from herself,” and the voice which told her that He wanted her “to ascend in the same degree as He had descended”: all goes back, for its literary suggestion, to the Dionysian “Divine Names”: “Divine Love is ecstatic, not permitting any to be lovers of themselves but of those beloved. The very Author of all things, through an overflow of His loving goodness, becomes ‘out of Himself,’ and is led down from the eminence above all, to being in all.” “He is at once moving and conducting Power to Himself, as it were a sort of everlasting circle.” “Let us restore all loves back to the one and enfolded Love and Father of them all.”[347] Not the less truly did Battista’s mental lights and voluntary determinations come from God, because they consisted, for the most part, in a vivid realization and acceptation, in and for her particular case, on this Christmas night in 1554, of spiritual facts and truths which had been slowly and successively revealed, experienced, and formulated as far back as the Hebrew Prophets and the Greek Plato, and above all by our Lord, and in St. Paul’s writings and the Gospel of St. John. These truths were none the less hers, because they had been successively experienced and proclaimed, so long ago by others; and their suggestion and realization to and in her, were as truly the work of God in her own case as they were in that of those others.

6. _Experience of December 27, 1554._

“This morning” (December 27), “which is the Feast of the Evangelist John, when I awoke, I suddenly heard the words being spoken within my mind: ‘To-day I am determined to divide thy soul from thy spirit’--and later on, when the Host was being elevated at Mass and I was praying about this matter, I had a sight or Thou didst say unto me--I cannot remember precisely which it was,--enough, it appeared to me that as, when the soul is divided from the body, the soul, in so far as immortal, flies to its destined place, and the entire body remains dead: so also, when the almighty hand of God makes a similar division of the soul from the spirit, the former, the animal part (of man), remains dead, but the spirit, (truly) free (at last), flies to its natural place, which is God, the Living Fountain.”

Here we are at once reminded of Catherine’s experience of “Love once speaking within her mind”; of her sayings which dwell on the separation of the soul from the body, and on the flight of the spirit to its natural place, God; and of her sight of “the living Fountain” of Goodness.[348] But Battista’s psychology is entirely clear and self-consistent, as to the precise extension of, and the precise distinction between, the terms “spirito” and “anima”; whereas, in the authentic sayings of Catherine, “anima” is used sometimes as inclusive of, and sometimes in contradistinction to, “spirito.” We shall see how it is only the later systematizing _Dialogo_-writer who brings perfect consistency, and a scheme identical with Battista’s, into Catherine’s terminology. Yet in Catherine’s image of the assimilation of bread by man, in illustration of the assimilation of man’s nature by God, we find Battista’s two stages of the divisional process. For there the body is first purified up to the actual level of the soul, and then the soul itself is purified perfectly, its animal part being eliminated or dominated by the spiritual part.[349]

It is interesting, too, to note how Battista cannot decide here whether this interpretation of the short sentence she had heard was mentally seen or interiorly heard by her; indeed, she is sure only that, whilst she was praying to understand the meaning of that sentence, the meaning thus sought appeared to her, by some means or other, to be so and so. It is then abundantly clear from this, that the difference between an interior sight and an interior voice, and again between either of these and the admittedly normal workings of her own mind, was, at times, so delicate, as either not to be clear to her own consciousness, even at the very time of the experience; or, at least, to fade away from her memory before she came to chronicle the experience.

7. _Experience of January 6, 1555._

“On the Feast of the Epiphany” (January 6, 1555), “before Communion, I felt ineffable and most tender colloquies, and greatly I rejoiced because of them. For I had caused Masses to be said and prayers to be prayed, by various persons during many days, with the intention that, if these colloquies were not from Thee, I might no more experience them; but that, if they were Thine, they might be produced within me more clearly and more efficaciously. And seeing that I now felt them more than usual, and in a more admirable manner, I had and have a firm hope that they were Thine. Whence it happened that (having, on that same blessed day, to go up to receive Thee in the Sacrament), I felt Thy Majesty more than once calling me within me, ‘Come, since I want to devour thee entirely.’ … It seems to me that ‘entirely’ was one of the words, but I have no firm remembrance of this. But I know well that Thou saidst several times, ‘Come, since I want to devour thee.’ … To me it seemed that I merited rather to go under Lucifer, than into the Infinite Light (_Luce_).”

We get here a number of interesting parallels and contrasts to Catherine’s teaching and practice. God’s devouring of the soul; God pictured as Light; souls conceived as higher up or lower down in space, according to their degree of goodness or of badness; even the pleasure in a play upon words: all this finds its close counterpart in Catherine.[350] But far more important is the difference in the subject-matter of their scruples and in their respective attitudes towards psychically unusual experiences. In Catherine’s case there is no record of anxieties concerning other things than her degree of detachment and her administrative responsibilities; indeed her whole practice and teaching, continuously bent as they were upon the ethico-spiritual truth and upon the practical application of her unusual experiences, make it morally certain that her anxieties never turned upon these forms and means themselves. She was, as it were, too much occupied with the content of the cup, ever to be actively perplexed as to the cup itself. Battista, on the contrary, seems to have been quite free from scruples of Catherine’s melancholic type; but did not, evidently, always soar as highly as her God-mother above all anxious occupation with the form of her experiences. And, indeed, if, in this instance, it was evidently the form of her experiences which perplexed her, it was also the renewed and heightened experience of this peculiar form which reassured her.--Yet the very fact of such a perplexity, and again the moderation with which, even at the end of it all, she but “hopes that it all comes from God,” shows a healthy reluctance to trust too readily or too much to such tests and indications. It would probably not be unfair to put her attitude towards such things midway between Don Marabotto’s readiness of belief and Catherine’s soaring ethico-spiritual transcendence.

It is noticeable too that, if the inner voice is more distinct than before, Battista’s anxious care for accuracy is also, if possible, more on the alert than ever: witness her remarks as to the word “all.”

8. _Experience of the Second Sunday in Lent, 1555._

“On the second Sunday (in Lent), having communicated, I felt Thine ineffable reasonings; but, since I did not write them down at once, I do not any more venture to write them down, having in great part lost the memory of them. But this I remember, that the words were like those which the Bridegroom says to the Bride in the Canticle (of Canticles).”

Here the difference between this form of apprehension and that of ordinary vivid thinking is so faintly distinct, that she can only declare that she “felt” (without deciding between hearing, seeing, or any other of the more definite senses) “reasonings” (without being sure of their “explicitation” in words or images); and she herself recognized at the time, and later on remembers that contemporary recognition of, their likeness to the texts of the Canticle of Canticles. It is evidently the profound reluctance, cultivated by her for half a century or more, to treat the deepest acts of the soul as other than directly and exclusively the acts of God in that soul, which makes her not see and admit here the large co-operation of her own mind.

Remark also a characteristic difference from Catherine, in that the latter’s teaching is, we have already seen, entirely free from any influences characteristic of the Song of Songs.

9. _Experience of Ascension Day, 1555._

“On the Lord’s Ascension Day Thou didst say to me, O my Love, that, up to this point, I had walked by Faith, but that now Thou wast determined to give me direct assurance (_certezza_); and that there was no occasion for me to go on writing down Thy words, since I should read them in my own experience. And on my asking what Thou wouldst operate within me, Thou didst affirm to me that I should ever possess Thee in my heart.”--“Another time I felt that I was being told: ‘I generate My Son, having an infinite Cognition of Myself; similarly I generate thee, by infusing into thee that same cognition. But (this) My Cognition is without measure; and thine shall be according to that measure which I shall, by My goodness, be impelled to give thee, in suchwise that of this cognition and of thine intellect there shall be effected one identical thing; so that I shall place My Word, My Concept, which I possess within Myself, in thee, according to the capacity for it which I shall deign to give thee; and so that, again, thy spirit shall be a son within My Son, or rather one only son with Him: and thus will I have generated thee.’ Hence, O Lord, according to this Thy showing, those are generated by Thee, who, united by grace to Thy Majesty, repose in Thy Paternal Bosom, together with Thine only Begotten. But He is by nature one sole substance with Thee--He whom Thou art ever ineffably generating; and we are united with Thee, through reposing in Thy bosom by simple grace and by a singular privilege of Thy love; and in so far as we thus abide there in Thee, Thou generatest us in more and more light and ardour. Hence then Thou generatest him who abides in Thee.”

We have here, in the last locution of this series, the most complicated and seemingly original of them all. Yet here we can still find parallels to Catherine: in the addressing of God as “my Love”; in the fact that the locution proceeds from, and its interpretation is submitted, not to our Lord, but to God, to Him who indeed generates His Son without measure and directly, yet all other souls also, though in measure and by and through His Son; and in the declaration that now she should have a kind of direct assurance in lieu of Faith.[351]

And here especially we can trace the large Neo-Platonist (Dionysian) element in Battista’s Mysticism. There is the first, perfect circle, God’s perfect cognition of Himself, a cognition which produces a fresh (though co-eternal) centre of cognition, which latter in return perfectly cognizes Him who perfectly cognized it. And then there is a derivative imperfect circle--since that perfect cognizedness and cognizing, which is God’s Son, can only be imperfectly imparted to the souls of creatures: yet again we have a circle for the very thing which is cognized by God is, in this instance also, the same which cognizes Him. And lastly, this distance between the perfect and imperfect circles is, as far as possible, overcome by an attempted and momentary identification of the perfectly cognized and cognizing circle, Christ, with the perfectly cognized but imperfectly cognizing one, every human soul in its potentiality and divinely intended end.

And this large Platonist scheme of a progression of Ideas appears here coloured and Christianized, by means of four scriptural texts in particular: Ps. cix, 31, “in the brightness (splendours) of the saints, from the womb, before the day star (Lucifer) I begot thee”; John i, 18, “the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father”; xiii, 23, “there was leaning on Jesus’ bosom one of His disciples whom Jesus loved”; and Luke xvi, 23, “the rich man beheld Abraham from afar, and Lazarus in his bosom.” The first two passages give her the eternal and continuous generation and abiding of the Son by and in the Father; and the last two suggest a similar abiding and (interpretatively) generation, together with that Son, of the faithful soul, in and by God, continuously and for ever.

Note, too, the double meaning, so characteristic of mystical utterances, contained in the sentence, “I generate My Son, having an infinite Cognition of Myself”; which indicates both the mode of generation (“by means of an infinite cognition”), and the nature of the generated one (“who has an infinite cognition”). And by this literary device, the intense close-knitness of the perfect circle is strikingly adumbrated.

And remark how Battista finishes up this soaring flight by an interpretation of a perfect sobriety. Indeed it is this moderation and good sense along with so immense an Idealism and intense Interiority which, together, constitute her noblest characteristic and should make us overlook the comparative absence of spontaneous charm and tender freshness, which cannot but strike us if we allow ourselves to contrast the piety of Battista with that of Catherine.

IV. SOME FURTHER LETTERS OF BATTISTA, 1575 TO 1581.