Chapter X: makes the Soul for the first time address “the Lord,” “O (1)

Signore,” on the one hand: and her “_Humanity_” “O Umanità,” on the other.[390] In Chapters XI and XII the Soul stands alone, face to face with the Lord, who appears to it in two successive visions,--first as Christ alive and walking along all stained with blood from head to foot; and, on a later occasion, as Christ evidently motionless and presumably dead, with His five fountain-wounds, which are sending drops of burning blood towards mankind. And these two visions, so carefully kept apart, doubtless typify the two periods of Catherine’s Convert life,--the two steps of her second stage: the moving, scourged and cross-bearing Christ stands for the active penance of the first four years or fourteen months; and the motionless, crucified Christ stands for the passive purification of the rest of her life.[391] Chapter XIII has no dialogue, but describes her active penances and good works, and mentions the Soul, Humanity, and the Spirit.[392]

And then, up to the end, in Chapters XIV to XXI, which give us the second step, the dialogue reappears, but now no more between the three _Dramatis Personae_ (Soul, Body, and Self-Love) of the pre-Conversion-Period; but between the two interlocutors of the post-conversion time (the Spirit and Humanity).[393] And there is here but one sporadic mention, an invocation, of “the Lord” (p. 214_c_).

Thus only after its Conversion does the Soul itself become aware of, or does it name, either the Spirit or its “Humanity”; and only after the two successive Christ-Visions do these two new experiences and conceptions entirely replace the three old ones of Soul, Body, and Self-Love. In a word, we have here, carefully carried through, the scheme, so clearly enunciated by Battista Vernazza in 1554, of the two successive divisions effected by God in Man, during the process of Man’s purification: first, the separation (division) of the Soul from the Body; and then the separation (division) of the Spirit from the Soul.[394] And, in strict accordance with this scheme, the Soul here becomes conscious of being, in its upper reaches, Spirit, only on the day that it has broken away from the domination of the downward-tending Body, and of Self-Love. And once the Soul has thus affirmed the Spirit and denied the Body, the “Body” and the “Soul” cease to be directly mentioned; the one term “Humanity” now takes the Soul’s and the Body’s place. For now the Soul, in so far as it has still not completely identified itself with the Spirit, does not any more attach itself directly to the Body and the Body’s pleasures,--to, as it were, the upper fringe of the Body,--but to the sensible-spiritual consolations which are the necessary concomitants and consequences of the Soul’s affirmation and acceptance of the Spirit,--hence, as it were, to the lower fringe of the Spirit. “I would have thee know,” the Spirit now says to Catherine, “that I fear much more an attachment to the spiritual than to the bodily taste and feeling. Man goes his way ‘feeding’ his spiritual sensuality upon the things which proceed from God, and yet these things are a very poison for the Pure Love of God.”[395]

3. _The “Dialogo” intensifies or softens certain narratives and sayings given by the “Vita.”_

Now these interesting forty pages of the first _Dialogo_ derive (with the sole exception of three little touches) their entire historical materials from the _Vita e Dottrina_, and, indeed, from but those parts of this _corpus_ which already appear in MSS. A and B, and in the previous pages of MS. C itself. But all these materials have been re-thought, re-pictured, re-arranged throughout, by a new, powerful, and experienced mind, a mind dominated by certain very definite, schematic conceptions as to the constitution of the human personality, the nature of holiness, and the laws of its growth, and which is determined to find or form concrete examples of these conceptions, in and from the life of Catherine.

(1) _Cases of intensifying._

There are, first, five cases of the intensifying of authentic _Vita_-accounts, intensifications necessary, or at least ancillary, to the scheme underlying the whole _Dialogo_-composition.

As to the pre-conversion sinfulness, during her second “week,” Catherine’s soul is made to say: “In a short time I was enveloped in sin; and, abiding in that snare, I lost the grace (of God) and remained blind and heavy, and from spiritual I became all earthly.”[396] Yet there is no evidence that Catherine, even at that time, ever committed grave sin; nor does there exist an authentic saying of hers which, however intense its expressions of contrition, conveys an impression really equivalent to this passage.--As to the form of her contrition, “so greatly was this soul alienated (from her own self) and submerged in the sight of the offence of God, that she no longer seemed a rational creature, but a terrified animal.”[397] Yet the earlier accounts, which certainly do not minimize here, keep well within the limits of normal, though intense, human feeling and expression of feeling.--As to the forcible means taken by her to overcome her fastidiousness in the matter of cleanliness and in the sense of taste, “she would put the impurities into her mouth, as though they had been precious pearls.”[398] Yet the original versions, drastic enough in all conscience, nowhere imply that there was any such relish, even of a merely apparent kind.--As to her post-conversion poverty, the Spirit says to her: “Thou shalt work to provide for thy living,” and the narrative declares: “The Spirit made her so poor, that she would have been unable to live, had not God provided for her by the means of alms.”[399] Yet we know from her wills that (though the Hospital authorities gave her free lodging, and perhaps, at first, free board as well) she retained, up to the last, an appreciable little income, and herself conferred many an alms out of these her own means.

Nevertheless, in each of these cases, the _Dialogo_ exaggeration is suggested by some phrase or word in the _Vita_ which has been taken up into the new context and medium of this other mind, and has come to mean something curiously (though often in form but slightly) different from that older account.--Thus, in this fourth instance, the _Vita_-accounts had said: “nel _principio_ di sua conversione, molto si _esercitò_.” “Viveva ancora molto _sottomessa ad ogni creatura_.” “Quantunque ella fosse in tutto dedicata ed occupata negli _esercizii_ di esso Spedale, nondimeno mai volle godere ne usare una minima cosa di quello per _viver suo_; ma, per quel poco che abbisognava, si serviva della _povera_ sostanza sua: onde ben si scorgeva che il suo dolce Amore era quello il quale operava in lei ogni cosa per vera unione.” “Si _esercitò_ nelle opere pie, cercando i _poveri_, essendo condotta delle Donne della Misericordia, e le davano danari ed altre _provvisioni_.”[400] The _Dialogo_-writer has worked all this up as follows: “Io (lo Spirito) ti avviso _primieramente_ voler io che tu pruovi che cosa sia esser ubbidiente, acciò tu divenghi umile e _soggetta ad ogni creatura_; ed acciochè ti possi _esercitare_, lavorerai per provedere al _viver tuo_.” “Primieramente la fece tanto _povera_, che non avrebbe potuto vivere, se Dio non l’avvesse _provveduta_ per via di limosine. Poi quando le Signore della Misericordia l’addimandavano per andare a’poveri … ella sempre con loro andava.”[401] I have italicized the words taken over by the _Dialogo_. Thus her own poor substance (_i.e._ her own modest income), and the money given to her by the _Misericordia_-ladies for distribution among the poor, becomes a substance, alms and money, given to herself as to a poor person.

The fifth case concerns the affections. In the _Vita_-proper nothing is more characteristic of Catherine, up to the spring of 1509, than her swift and deep affective sympathy, and the fearless forms of its manifestation. True, Catherine “would” (certainly up to 1490, perhaps more or less up to 1496) “abide at times,” up to six hours on end, “as though dead.” But, “on hearing herself called, she would suddenly arise and betake herself, in answer, to whatever was required of her, however small a service this might be.” And indeed “she served the sick with most fervent affection:” thus she attended throughout a week upon a poor pestiferous woman; and at the end, “unable further to contain herself, kissed” the dying woman “upon the mouth with great affection of heart, and so caught the pestilential fever, and well-nigh died of it.”[402]--Then, too, there is the _Vita’s_ quite general, indeterminate remark, “she (Catherine) felt no pain at the deaths of her (two elder) brothers and of her sisters” (the latter should be “sister,” unless, perhaps, a sister-in-law is included) in 1502.[403] But her extant wills have shown us how actively thoughtful she remained, even in 1506 and 1509, for her brother, nephews and nieces, and humble retainers; and the deeply affectionate scenes with Marco and Argentina occurred between 1503 and 1506. Marco, the poor navvy, was dying “of a cancer in the face,” and Catherine, at Argentina’s asking, “as though with prompt obedience, betook herself to him”; and he “threw his arms round Catherine’s neck, and, pressing her with sobs, seemed unable to have done with weeping.[404] And then, still weeping, with great tenderness he besought Catherine to adopt his wife as her spiritual daughter,” and Catherine did so, and “loved this spiritual daughter much.”[405]--Only in the very late actions, the change as to her burial-place (Will of March 1509), and the exclusion of all her attendants on January 10, and of most of them on and after August 27, 1510,[406] are there indications of any absence or renunciation of tender and spontaneous human affection.

But here again the _Dialogo_ both closely presses and profoundly changes the original accounts. For here the Spirit declares to her: “in these exercises” of work among the poor, “I shall keep thee … as though thou wast dead. I will not allow thee to make friends with any one, nor that thou shouldst have any particular affection for any relative; but I want thee to love all men, and this without affection, both poor and rich, both friends and relatives. I do not want thee, in thine interior, to know one person from the other, nor would I have thee go to any one from motives of friendship; it will suffice to go when thou art called.” And thus “she went, when the _Misericordia_-ladies asked her to go into dwellings that would have frightened away all ordinary mortals. But she, on the contrary, deliberately touched these sick (_voleva toccarli_), for the purpose of giving them some refreshment to soul and body.”[407]--Note how skilfully the call, and the going at the call, the affection and its spontaneous manifestations in the original accounts, have been altered and crossed by the _Dialogue’s_ re-statement.--Here again we are strongly reminded of Battista, in her letter to the Signora Andronica in 1575, encouraging her to “abandon all things,” her children included, “interiorly,” and “to mortify the most pleasing consolation which arises from the children’s company.” Indeed, already in 1554, Battista has, in one of her own _Colloquies_, refused to accept every avoidable consolation arising from her pure election by God.[408] Only by such a reference of these _Dialogo_-passages to Battista, the many-sided, the ever-affectionate daughter and public-spirited woman, can we come to see them in a wider context; indeed only thus can they cease to be profoundly repulsive.

(2) _Cases of softening._

There are two instances of the softening of (doubtless authentic) doctrinal sayings given by the _Vita_-proper. Her evidently impulsive exclamation: “I would not have grace or mercy, but justice and vengeance exercised against the malefactor,”--has here become: “She did not attach any importance to her sins, on the ground of the punishment awaiting them, but solely because they had been enacted against the infinite goodness of God.”--And her bold declaration: “If any creature could be found which did not participate in the divine goodness, that creature would be as malignant as God is good,” here reads: “The soul bereft of the Divine love becomes _well-nigh_ as malignant as the Divine love is good and delightful. I say ‘well-nigh,’ for God shows it a little mercy.”[409] The proclamation of some moral good even in lost souls, is thus weakened to an admission of some consolation in the latter.

4. _Re-statement of the Conversion-experiences of March 1474._

But it is in the matters of Catherine’s Conversion in the Convent-Chapel, on March 22, 1474, and of the Vision of the Bleeding Christ in the Palazzo Adorno, soon after, that the _Dialogo’s_ transformation of the _Vita_-accounts reaches its highest interest. I give it here as the chief of many such re-statements which I have carefully analyzed.

_Vita_-proper, _Vita_ (_Dialogo_), pp. 199_c_,
pp. 4_a_-5_b_. 200_c_, 202_c_, 208_c_, 209_a_,
_b_. 209_c_, 210_a_, 211_a_, _b_.

Subitocchè se gli fù inginocchiata Quando Iddio vuole purgare
innanzi, receve una un anima … le manda il
ferita al cuore d’immenso suo divino lume, facendola
amore di Dio, con una vista vedere una scintilla di quel
così chiara delle sue miserie puro amore con quale ci ama
e diffetti, e della bontà di Dio … essendo noi nemici per
che ne fù per cascare in terra. molte offese che gli abbiamo
Onde … restò quasi fuor di fatte.… E le fà vedere quel
sè: e perciò internamente affocato amore.… Tutto
gridava con ardente amore: questo fù dimostrato da Dio
“Non più mondo, non più peccati.” in un instante, coll’ operazione
Ed in quel punto.… sua purissima.… Questo
… Per la viva fiamma d’infocato raggio d’amore fù quello che
amore il dolce Iddio ferì quell’ anima in un istante
impresse in quell’ anima … … che la fece restare in
tutta la perfezione.… quel punto quasi fuori di sè.…

Vedeva ancora le offese che Le fù ancora mostrato … quanti
gli aveva fatte; e perciò gridava: erano tutti i suoi diffetti
“O amore mai più, mai … in modo che sommerse
più, peccati.” Se le accese poi sè stessa con tal
un odio di sè medesima, che dispregio che avrebbe detto
non si poteva sopportare, e i suoi peccati pubbliccamente
diceva: “O amore, se bisogna, per tutta la città, nè altro
sono apparecchiata di confessare poteva dire se non: “O Signore
i miei peccati in pubblico.” mai più mondo, nè peccati.”

Ma volendo il Signore accendere Stando l’anima in questa
intrinsecamente più quasi disperazione di sè
l’amor suo in quest’ anima, ed medesima … vedendosi un
insieme il dolore dei suoi carico da disperato alle spalle,
peccati, se le mostrò in ispirito … era come una cosa insensata
colla Croce in spalla, piovendo ed attonita fuori di sè.…
tutto sangue, per modo che la Essendo un giorno in casa,
casa le pareva tutta piena di le apparve in vista interiore
rivoli di quel sangue, il quale il Signor Nostro Gesù
vedeva essere tutto sparso per Christo, tutto insanguinato
amore: il che le accese nel da capo a’ piedi, in modo che
cuore tanto fuoco, che ne pareva che da quel corpo
usciva fuor di sè, e pareva piovesse sangue per tutta la
una cosa insensata per tanto terra dove andava; e le fù
amore e dolore che ne sentiva. detta in occulto questa parola:
“vedi tu questo sangue? tutto
è sparso per amor tuo, e per
soddisfazione de’ tuoi peccati.”
In queste parole le fù data
una gran ferita d’amore verso
esso Signor nostro Gesù
Christo, con una confidenza
tale, che disparve quella prima
vista tanto disperata e si
rallegrò un poco in esso
Signore.…

Questa vista le fù tanto Le fù mostrata un altra
penetrativa che vista maggior di quella, e
tanto più grande che con
lingua non si potrebbe dire
… le fù infuso un raggio
d’amore nel cuore.… Gridava
e sospirava molto più e
le pareva sempre vedere (e senza comparazione che della
cogli occhi corporali) prima vista, la quale fù dell’
esser maligno di sè stessa.
Questo raggio d’amore le fù
il suo Amore tutto insanguinato lasciato impresso con quelle
e confitto in Croce. cinque fontane di Christo, le
quali mandavano goccie
d’affuoccato sangue di acceso
amore verso dell’ uomo.

Hence _D._ gives but one exclamation as to “world” and “sins,” and constructs this out of the two (mutually differing) exclamations of the same kind given by _V._, the second of which now stands in _V._ after the Bleeding-Christ episode. Whilst spacing all out, _D._ keeps to the order and context of _V.’s_ paragraphs. And _D._ utilizes the curious, silent change from the moving Christ to the affixed Christ in _V.’s_ account of the single vision in the Palace, so as to constitute two perfectly distinct visions. The Cross of both these doublets of _V._, (the “Croce” which, in the first part of _V.’s_ single account, is “in spalla,” on His shoulder; and the Cross which, in the second part of the same account, He is nailed to), has, in _D._, disappeared from both separate visions. And yet the Cross hovers about the first vision, here transformed into a “carico alle spalle,” a load upon Catherine’s shoulders,--an oppression on her mind; and is presupposed in the second vision, since those “five fountains sending forth burning blood” are, of course, the wounds of Christ, whilst He hangs affixed to the Cross as described in _V.’s_ second part. And the “Signore piovendo tutto sangue,” and the “rivoli di sangue, sparso per amore, il che accese nel cuore tanto fuoco,” of _V._, have, in _D._, become “quelle cinque fontane di Christo, le quali mandavano goccie d’affuocato sangue e di acceso amore.”--This fountain-imagery is derived from numerous authentic sayings and “viste” of Catherine as to the “living Fount (_fonte_) of the divine goodness,” or “of infinite love,” and “the clear waters coming from the divine fount.” The very word “fountain” (_fontana_) occurs in one of _V.’s_ descriptive passages; and the idea appears in Catherine’s address to Our Lord at the well (_pozzo_) of Samaria, and in her thereupon receiving refreshment of soul, by the gift of “a little drop (_gocciola_)” of that divine water.[410] And the fountains are here made to proceed from a ray of love; and this again comes from numerous authentic sayings of hers: in one case the “raggio d’amore” appears split up into several rays: “raggi … affocati di divino amore.”[411]

5. _Three new authentic details._

And yet these remarkable forty pages furnish us with three fresh statements or implications of detail, respectively too precise, vivid and verisimilar and too little obvious, to be easily attributable to any but a new and authentic source of information. There is the vividly precise information that, during Catherine’s actively penitential period, “the love of God, wishing that she should lose all relish in what she ate, made her always carry some epatic aloes and pounded agaric about with her; and whenever she suspected that one kind of her food was about to give her more pleasure than another, she would furtively put a little of that most bitter compound upon it, before eating it.” There is the formal declaration that “she also went to the poor of San Lazaro.” And there is the statement, already noticed, that, after her conversion, she had “to work to provide for her living,” and “that she would have been unable to live, unless God had provided for her by way of alms.”[412]

Now the first statement should be compared with Battista Vernazza’s, similarly precise, pharmaceutical detail as to the cassia used by her father in doctoring the poor in 1493, recorded by Battista, nearly ninety years later, in 1581:[413] Battista would, then, have been quite capable of remembering and recording that aloes-and-agaric detail some seventy years after the event. As to the second statement, I have already given the various solid reasons which point to Catherine’s co-operation with Battista’s father in his work amongst the Pestiferous, as far back as the year 1493.[414] And as to the third statement (in apparently direct conflict with the declaration in the _Vita_-proper, that, although entirely devoted to the service of the Hospital, she never would enjoy or use the slightest thing belonging to it for her own living[415]) the Wills prove to us that, however exaggerated be the language of _D._, it, and not _V._, is here substantially in the right. For, though she could have afforded to live in modest style, on her own little income, she did, as a matter of fact, hold her little house rent-free from the Hospital, in return for her services to it. Here also Battista would have known the precise facts from her father, who had himself drawn up or witnessed three documents referring to these matters.

6. _Battista Vernazza, the author of this first “Dialogo.”_

The reader will by now be concluding with me, that all these peculiarities of the _Dialogo_ point to one person as its author: Battista Vernazza. And all its other circumstances and characteristics make for the same conclusion.

(1) _Particular circumstances._

There is the place. For the original of MS. C., in which appear the first traces, (this whole first part), of _D._, came from Battista’s own Convent; and thus a document which, in its later narrative part, contained, as we shall find, so much primary matter due to Vernazza the father, and so much secondary composition and arrangement due to Vernazza the daughter; and which, in its dialogue part, gave much original literary work due to a Vernazza: would easily (no doubt soon after Battista’s death), come to be considered as the work and the copying of Ettore Vernazza alone. And there is the date. For if this first part was written in 1548, 1549, Battista would have been fifty or fifty-two years old. And we have already considered writings of hers, written, with equal subtlety of psychological distinctions and even greater vigour of style, in 1554, 1555, and even in 1575, at seventy-eight and eighty-four years of age.[416]

There is, too, the form, so curiously schematic and abstract, and, in part, far-fetched, yet based upon a minute, most ingenious use of scriptural texts. Thus those two “weeks,” (symbols for the two, respectively lukewarm and sinful, lustres), are no doubt suggested by the “seventy weeks” which “the man Gabriel” declares to Daniel “shall be shortened upon the Jewish people, that transgression may be finished, and everlasting justice may be brought and vision may be fulfilled”;[417] and by Jacob’s twice seven years of servitude under Laban, and by Laban’s words “make up the week of days of this match.”[418] We thus get Catherine’s two weeks (of years) of servitude to sin, and her two successive “matches” or alliances, entered into between her soul and body under the influence of self-love. We found a similar minute ingenuity in Battista’s use of Scripture in 1554.[419]

And there is a complex, abstract, astonishingly self-consistent psychology running through the whole, and one simply identical with the psychology treated by Battista as more or less a point of revelation to herself in 1554. And, partly as effect or as cause of that psychology, the _Dialogo_ has a painfully great, at times downrightly repulsive, insistence upon detachment from emotional feeling, both in intercourse with fellow-creatures, and in spiritual commerce with God, that is simply identical, in its parallelism, range, depth, and doctrinal setting, with the position which Battista takes up in her _Colloquii_ of 1554.[420]

Again we get here a prominent and persistent occupation with the historic Christ and His passion, that are as unlike Catherine’s as they are identical with Battista’s spiritual trend. For, during her Conversion-Vision, Catherine here sees that “burning love which Our Lord Jesus Christ manifested when upon earth, from His Incarnation up to His Ascension”; and this corresponds precisely with Battista’s sight (_vista_), in 1554, of “the Infinite Love manifested unto men, in and by the life of Christ, at the Nativity and at the Ascension.” And the Christ-Vision here becomes two separate apparitions; that of the Crucified Christ is declared “greater than” that of the Walking Christ; and there is an insistence upon “those five Fountains,” an image derived indeed from Catherine’s “living fountain of Goodness, which participated with the creature,” but which, in Catherine, is conceived in connection with God and metaphysically, and here is transferred to the historic and crucified Christ, in close keeping with Battista’s whole emphatic Christo-centrism.[421]

And, finally, we find here certain daring anthropomorphisms without any full parallel in Catherine’s sayings, but entirely matched by expressions of Battista. God is here not as, in Catherine’s manner, Himself an irradiating Love, but is “ever standing with burning rays of love in His hand, to inflame and penetrate the hearts of men,” a combination of the Thing-imagery dear to Catherine (for Love is here still a luminous, burning substance), and of the human, Personal picturing prominent with Battista (for God here has a hand, in which He holds that substance). This latter picturing (probably in 1550) is not unlike the more spiritual anthropomorphism of “the Increate Heart” of God, used by Battista in 1575 a passage already exceeded here, in the _Dialogo_, by the words, “God showed her the love with which He had suffered”--words which, if pressed, would introduce suffering into the divine nature Itself.[422]

(2) _General considerations._

All these cumulative reasons of detail will be indefinitely fortified by what I shall have to say as to the character of the subsequent parts of the _Dialogo_, and in proof of these parts and the first instalment being by one and the same author. But, meanwhile, we can press this further general consideration, that only a person with considerable traditional authority in matters concerning Catherine, and yet a person, not a direct eyewitness or full contemporary, hence an individual without any additional information, and unhampered by the (otherwise necessary) regard for the sensitiveness of still living contributors to the original biography, can possibly have written such a document. For this production, when it first appears complete, in the first Printed _Vita_ of 1551, will there occupy quite one third of the whole book; and yet, whilst incorporating practically all, and only all, the material of those other two-thirds (the _Trattato_ alone excepted), it gives to everything a fresh grouping and setting, colour and atmosphere, drift and character. Only a remarkable, powerful mind; a writer skilled in mystical subjects; one with leisure for such a careful composition; one, too, sufficiently in sympathy with Catherine to be attracted to, and helped through, the difficult task; a person living now, thirty-eight years after Catherine’s death, in an environment of a kind to preserve her memory green: all these conditions must, more or less, have met and been realized in the writer of this curious, forcible book.--And Battista, the God-daughter of the heroine of the work, and the eldest, devoted daughter of the chief contributor to the already extant biography; a Contemplative with a deep interest in, and much practical experience of, the kind of spirituality to be portrayed and the sort of literature required; a Nun, during thirty-eight years, in the very Convent where Catherine’s sister (one of its foundresses) had lived and died, and where Catherine herself had desired to live and where her Conversion had taken place; a woman who was but thirteen at the time when Catherine died, after nine years of much suffering and seclusion, and who, even now but fifty-one years of age, had outlived all the close friends and original chief biographers of Catherine by thirty-five, twenty-four, and twenty years: Battista, and Battista alone, united in her own person all these necessary conditions. And it will have been the sensitively original and strongly synthetic cast of Battista’s mind which made the strangely fragmentary, repetitive, contradictory, static, and yet abrupt and unharmonized multiplicity of the _Vita_ both irritating as it stood, and yet (with its considerable elements of unmistakably first-hand portraiture of a rarely large and lofty mind and character) profoundly stimulative to a re-thinking, re-feeling, re-stating of the whole,--at least, up to the zenith of that Soul’s perfection.

But our next stage will make all this clearer still.

VI. SIXTH STAGE: FIRST PRINTED EDITION OF THE “VITA-DOTTRINA-DICCHIARAZIONE,” 1551; EXAMINATION OF ALL IT POSSESSES IN ADDITION TO MSS. A, B AND C, APART FROM THE “DIALOGO.”

At last we reach the publication of the _Life_, in Genoa, in 1551.[423] A printing-press had not been established in Genoa till 1536 (by Bellone); hence the _Life_ appeared only fifteen years after the earliest date possible for its publication,--other cities not being, as yet, sufficiently interested in Catherine to think of such an undertaking.--Only further on shall I attempt some analysis, estimation, and attribution of that _corpus_ of earlier and earliest constituents of the Book, which, although frequently referred to at our last two stages, had there to remain unanalyzed. In these remaining two stages I intend to treat only, first of the Introductory parts of the Book, special to its printed form, and then of the Second “Chapter” of the _Dialogo_ (its present Second and Third Parts).

Here then we have to deal with the matter which, amongst our extant documents, appears for the first time in the Printed _Vita_ of 1551, and first with that part of it which is there devoted to the publication of the Book. This part of the matter consists, in the order of its place in the Book, of the Title with its Picture; the Approbation; the Preface; and the Subscription.

1. _Title-page._

The Title-page has: “Book of the Admirable Life and Holy Doctrine of the Blessed Catarinetta of Genoa, in which is contained a Useful and Catholic Demonstration and Declaration of Purgatory.” And underneath appears a picture of Our Lord Crucified, and Blessed Catherine on her knees before Him, and crowned with a Diadem; with the text: “I confess to Thee, Father, Lord of Heaven and Earth, that Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent and hast revealed them unto little ones” (Matt. xi).

Note here, in the Title, the correct and most attractive baptismal form of her Christian name, Catarinetta, which appears here for the last time, either in the Title, the Heading, or the Subscription of her _Life_; and the disappearance, which is final, of her family name Adorna, which had figured in the titles of all the MSS. Thus “La miranda vita e sancta conversation di Madonna Catherinetta Adorna,” the older heading of MS. A, which will have been that of the Giustiniano book (a heading which itself had succeeded to “De la Miranda Conversione di quondam Donna Catherinetta Adorna” of the booklet of 1512, still preserved in MS. B), has here become “La vita mirabile e dottrina santa de la Beata Catarinetta da Genoa.”--And note how, for the first time, mention is made in the title of what has hitherto been but a long Chapter of the _Vita_; and how what in the MSS. had, in that Chapter’s heading, claimed but to be a matter of devotional experience (“How, by comparison of the divine fire, which she felt in her heart and which purified her soul, she saw interiorly and understood how the Souls abide in Purgatory”), has here been given, some thirty years after the Papal condemnation of Luther’s theses on Purgatory, a controversial point,--it is now “a Useful and Catholic Demonstration and Declaration of Purgatory.” We have here an attitude of mind inevitably different from Catherine’s pure positiveness.--And remark, too, the continued non-indication of the _Dialogo_, although this is now present, like the “Dimostrazione,” as a distinct document in the Book: the Dialogue is evidently still too new to be able to modify the old title-page, and to appear there alongside of a composition which, though but one-sixth of its own length, is now some thirty and more years old.

In the Picture Catherine wears a diadem, a compromise between an indication of her noble birth and a hint of the nimbus which they shrink from giving to her unequivocally. And she is kneeling before the Christ Crucified,--evidently an attitude chosen as specially typical of her whole life and doctrine, because of the passages in the _Vita_: “She ever seemed to see her Love affixed to the Cross”; “she was next drawn to the side of the Crucified”; “she appeared in very truth as a body affixed to a Cross,” with the dependent account of her “interior stigmatization,”--“she received a new wound at her heart, so that she might feel within herself the wound in the side of her tender Love”; and the amplifications of some of these passages in the _Dialogo_.[424] Yet only the first three passages occur in the MSS.; and the first two are carefully restricted there to her first Conversion-Period (of four years at most), whilst the third passage refers to a (quite unusual) bodily posture, assumed by her on one single occasion during her last illness, an attitude which remained uninterpreted by herself. The fact is that the precise contrary of what this picture suggests is one of the chief characteristics of Catherine, for she is habitually absorbed in contemplations remarkably lacking in historical imagery and setting. And the _Dialogo_ parallels and variants which, as we have seen, so largely increase this historical element, and especially this occupation with Christ Crucified, are characteristic, not of Catherine but of Battista. The picture is, no doubt, the consequence of this increasing emphasis laid, in her successive _Vitae_, upon a side of religion all but entirely absent from the middle and last periods of Catherine’s actual life; and fully expresses Battista’s feeling, who, just as she addressed her whole long letter of 1575 in Donna Anguisola, “in the Crucified,” will have seen to it that the whole book concerning her own God-mother was placed at the feet of the Crucifix.

2. _The Approbation._

The Latin Approbation runs: “I, Fra Geronimo of Genoa of the Order of Preachers, Apostolic Inquisitor into Heretical Pravity throughout the whole Dominion of Genoa, assent to this Book being committed to print, for the consolation and instruction of spiritual persons. Witness this my autograph.” The points of interest in connection with this Approbation will appear, as we proceed, to consist in the reasons why such theological “corrections” as were actually introduced into the doctrinal parts of the _Vitae_ had all been made long before this date, probably none of them later than 1530; and why they were, throughout, practically restricted to her very sober and correct Purgatorial teaching, and left her other, far more daring, sayings more or less untouched. I can find no traces of any theological changes introduced, for this edition of 1551, into the _Vita-Dicchiarazione_ sections; but we shall see how three points and tendencies of the _Vita_-proper have been indirectly criticised and “corrected” by means of their re-statement in the _Dialogo_, which was certainly finished, and possibly begun, with a view to its appearance in the company of the _Vita_ and the _Dicchiarazione_.

3. _The Preface._

The Preface consists of seven full and balanced, dignified and self-restrained, thoroughly well-informed and yet, in part, deliberately obscure and illusive, sentences. It still excludes the idea of any literary authorship on the part of Catherine: “Madonna Caterinetta, of whose admirable Conversion, Life, and Doctrine, together with her many privileges and particular graces, we shall write.… Here, in her Life and Holy Doctrine is to be found.…” Not Catherine writes, but “we,” _i.e._ the final Redactor, or all the Contributors together with him; and not her Writings are to be found here, but her “Doctrine” only. Indeed, it all “has been collected with truth and simplicity by two devout spiritual persons, from the very lips of the Seraphic Woman herself.” More would quite evidently have been claimed, if more had been true.

And it contains two or three evident additions to its original text, made for this publication in view of the entire _Dialogo’s_ first appearance here; additions which contain an expression which may well have occasioned or helped on the legend of “Catherine, an Author,” a legend which was sure to spring up at the first opportunity and provocation. The fifth sentence reads at present as follows: “Sono in questo libro [dignissimi suoi trattati dell’ amor di Dio e dell’ amor proprio] una bellisima e chiarissima dimostrazione del Purgatorio, e in che modo vi stiano dentro le anime contentissime, [e un bel dialogo dell’ Anima con il Corpo e Amor poprio, dal quale ne seguita un amoroso colloquio dell’ Anima con il suo Signore] ed altre dignissime cose da sapere, veramente tutte di eccellentissima speculazione ed utilità [e massime in questi turbolenti tempi necessarie].”[425]

Now even the last set of bracketed words seems an addition, and points to the existence of the body of this Preface at a period prior to “questi turbolenti tempi,” times that I take to be 1536-1537, when Battista’s God-father Moro lapsed into Calvinism. Ever since 1520, when Luther’s Purgatory doctrines were condemned, these writings would have been held, if not “necessary,” at least “of most excellent utility.”--There is, any way, no doubt as to the two previous sets being insertions. For note, if they be retained, the slovenly repetition, by the first set, of “dignissimi” in the midst of a most finished composition; the extraordinary use of the word “Trattati,” to signify either Chapter XXV (which bears the title “Dell’ Amor Proprio e del Divino Amore,” and is a collection of sayings pronounced on at least three different occasions), or Chapters XXV and XXVI,--in either case, Chapters which are no more significant or authentic than any other of the doctrinal chapters. And remark, in the second set, the curiously mild praise for the _Dialogo_ contained in the one positive “un bel,” wedged in between the two superlatives lavished on the “Dimostrazione” and the two superlatives given to the remaining doctrinal parts of the Book. The object of that first “Trattati” insertion is evidently to pick out some one or other of the already ancient Chapters of the _Vita_, which have some special likeness to the subject-matter and title of the _Dialogo_, so as to prevent the latter from looking too suspiciously different from the rest of the doctrine traditionally ascribed to Catherine.

I take this Preface to have existed, without these additions, in the “worthy book” described by Giustiniano in 1536. But as that careful writer insists upon the precise length of time, because it had been considerable, during which Catherine’s body had lain incorrupt, and says nothing about the antiquity of the book, a point he would hardly have failed to urge had he been able to do so, I hesitate to push this Book, and this its Preface, further back than 1530, a very probable date for the first (at least complete) fusion of Vernazza’s and Marabotto’s separate contributions, since these two chief disciples would then have been dead six and two years respectively, and the culmination of Protestant “turbulence” in Calvin’s open revolt and Moro’s defection would not be taking place for another five and six years respectively.--Catherine indeed appears here no more as the “quondam Donna Catarinetta” of MS. B, but still as “Madonna Catherinetta, figliuola di M. Giacomo della nobilissima casa Fiesca, maritata a M. Giuliano Adorno,” a designation distinctly earlier than the “Beata Catarinetta di Genoa” of the Title. And the Book, its substance, is declared to have been “collected by two spiritual persons (_Religiosi_), her devotees, from the very lips of the Seraphic Woman herself.” This passage, it is true, now reads “Raccolto dai divoti religiosi (suo Confessore e un figliuolo suo spirituale).” But, where the Preface is above the suspicion of having been touched up, a “cioê” introduces such a bracket; the rhythm of this sentence, in the midst of this otherwise exquisite Preface, is woefully imperfect; and the evidently deliberate ambiguity of “divoti religiosi” is rendered all but nugatory by the considerable clearness of the bracketed information. The clause will originally have read, “Da due religiosi sui divoti,” for this obviates all three objections. But, in this deliberately mysterious form, it must have been written when both were dead, and yet when the death of the last was still recent; and this again brings us to a date soon after Marabotto’s death in 1528.

Who wrote this Preface? Much in it points to Battista. So the use of “cioè,” so characteristic of her _Colloquies_ and _Letters_ and also of the _Dialogo_; and the phrase “divote persone,” recurring in the _Dialogo_;[426] and the doctrinal tone of “l’amoroso Signor Nostro, sitibondo della salute delle sue razionali creature,” “il suo consolatorio spirito,” “la perfetta e consummata unione possibile ai viatori,” and “quasi non più fide, ma già certezza,” all closely like passages in her _Colloquies_ and in her Letter to Donna Anguisola. The mysteriousness and equality of designation, applied to both Ettore and Don Cattaneo, would come with a special naturalness from Battista, spontaneously anxious to place her heroic father’s sanctity and intimacy with Catherine on a level with those of Catherine’s priest-friend and Confessor Marabotto. And, if written in 1530, Battista would at the time have been a formed writer,--a woman of thirty-three years of age.--There are, no doubt, certain differences. The _Dialogo_ nowhere has such an “ancorchè … niente (non) dimeno” clause. “Un Serafino,” “essa Serafica Donna” of this Preface, are, in strictness, unmatched in Battista’s, otherwise even intenser, writings. “La perfetta e consummata unione possibile ai viatori” is a more ordinary and technical phrase than I can find elsewhere in Battista’s writings. Above all, the general style and rhythm is here, somehow, a little different from that of those other writings.--Still, these differences are explicable by the writer of the Preface finding himself largely bound by the existing _Vita_-materials, and by their very niceties of expression. The Author of the Preface is certainly identical with the Redactor of the first (tripartite) _Vita e Dottrina_; and this Redactor, we shall find, must be Battista. The insertions in the Preface, containing the praise of the _Dialogo_, are certainly the work of another hand.--Upon the whole, then, we can safely attribute the Preface, in its original form, to Battista Vernazza.

4. _The Subscription._

The subscription to the _Vita_-proper, in this first Edition, runs: “Here ends the life of the noble Matron, Catarinetta Adorna”; which thus still retains (like the Preface, but against the Title) the warmly human and precise, domestic and familiar designation of the first heading of MS. A.

VII. SEVENTH STAGE: THE SECOND “CHAPTER” OF THE “DIALOGO,” WHICH APPEARS FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE PRINTED “VITA,” 1551.

1. _Three remarks concerning the two Parts of this “Chapter.”_

(1) The additions to the _Dialogo_ which appear here for the first time, and which amount to its present Parts Second and Third, are given in this First Edition as one single, the Second, “Chapter,” following upon the older part here designated “Chapter First.” In the Fourth Edition, 1601, this division of the _Dialogo_ is formally announced on the Title-page: “With a Dialogue, divided into two Chapters, between the Soul, the Body, and Self Love; and (the Soul and) the Lord.” I do not know precisely when those two “Chapters” were replaced by the present Three Parts, and when these Parts were divided up into the present Chapters; it was, in any case, after the sixth edition (1645).

(2) These last two Parts seem to have been written, from the first, with a view to eventual division into two. For though the whole of this Second Chapter is not much longer than the First Chapter (forty-seven and a half pages, against forty), it yet divides up very well at about half-way, since the first half here ends with a piece of moralizing narrative, applied to the whole earthly existence: “The more valiant a man is at the beginning, the greater martyrdom should he expect at the end … nor does God cease to make provision … up to that Man’s death.”[427]

(3) This whole “Chapter” Second is by the same author as “Chapter” First; in this Second, even more than in that First “Chapter,” there are no historical materials other than those still present, more or less untouched, in the _Vita_-proper; and yet these materials have again been modified, in their sequence and setting, their tone and pitch, their drift and meaning, and all this throughout by the same powerful and experienced, often deep and touching, but also, in great part, painfully abstract and straining, absolute-minded and excessive writer.

2. _General indications of identity of authorship for “Chapters” First and Second._

(1) “Chapter” First had, we know, concluded with a paraphrase of the last stage in the scheme of Catherine’s spiritual growth as given in the _Vita_-proper, and had thus reached the _ne plus ultra_ of perfection for any creature, either here or in the world to come. “And now the Spirit said: ‘I am determined no further to call her a human creature, since I now see her (to be) all in God, without any Humanity’”: a statement which may well (like the corresponding Spiritual-Kiss stage in the _Vita’s_ scheme)[428] have been intended, at the time of its composition, both to describe directly her great middle years, 1474-1499, and to sum up generally her later life, 1499-1510.--But no such hyperbolic language, when thus applied to man as we know him, or as we can even conceive him here below, can, of course, be kept up. And thus here in the _Dialogo_ (as previously in the corresponding place in the _Vita_-proper), what had originally been the conclusion of a self-contained account of her Conversion, became, owing to the desire of utilizing much extant material which directly described her years of physical break-up, but one chapter in the story of her total life. Hence we now find, both in the _Vita_-proper and the _Dialogo_, an instructive anti-climax, in an attempted description (the _Dialogo_ gives this in its “Chapter” Second) of her successive states from 1497 to her death in 1510, states and changes which, were we to take the concluding words of the _Vita_-scheme and of the _Dialogo’s_ “Chapter” First at all strictly, would, in great part, be impossible.

(2) In the _Dialogo’s_ First “Chapter” we found a remarkably free, deliberately pragmatic handling of the _Vita_-materials, in the making two different visions on two separate occasions (the Vision of the blood-stained Moving Christ, and the Vision of the blood-pouring Fixed Christ) out of the one, curiously composite, Moving-Fixed Christ-Vision of the _Vita_; and this doubling introduced, into that First Part, a special kind of obscurity, a sort of eddying, circular, repetitive movement and practical fixedness. Similarly we find here, in the Second “Chapter,” the one description of her resumption of Confession, given by the _Vita_-proper, is made into two accounts, accounts still further separated from each other here than the two visions were separated from each other there. For the first ten and a half Chapters, pages 226_b_ to 242_b_, give us her history from 1497 to 1501. And, amongst these, Chapter First to Third cover the years 1497 to 1499; and at the end of Chapter Third, page 232_b_, we get an account of how “she began to confess her sins” (necessarily, at this period, to Marabotto) “with such Contrition, that it appeared a marvellous thing”--a description which has been taken from the story of her First Conversion-Period, but which is made to do duty here, at the date of her beginning to confess, in a very different manner, to Don Marabotto, twenty-five years after those Conversion-Confessions. Yet only at the beginning of the second half of Chapter Tenth (p. 242_c_) do we hear, (wedged in between two passages, pp. 242_b_, 243_b_, which are re-castings of descriptions of a scene which occurred on January 10, 1510, _Vita_, pp. 139_a_-140_c_) of God giving her the help of a “Religioso,” “suo Confessore,” _i.e._ Marabotto (p. 242_c_). This is followed, not two pages later on (p. 244_b_), by a description of the experience of the “Scintilla” on August 11, 1510 (_Vita_, p. 148_b_), and by an allusion to her death on September 15, 1510 (p. 245_c_).--This doubling was no doubt effected for the purpose of introducing as much variety as possible into what is, anyhow, a monotonous narrative; of being thus able to produce a more ordinary and “correct” account of her dispositions and acts, on occasion of the resumption of her Confessions in 1499, than could be given by the direct utilization of Marabotto’s description of them; and of thus, by these two narratives in lieu of that single one, giving greater place and prominence to the practice of Confession than this practice actually occupied in her real life.

3. _Closer examination of the earlier portion of “Chapter” Second._

A closer examination of the whole Second “Chapter” of the _Dialogo_ fully substantiates this conclusion, and brings out other interesting points. Let us take the eleven Chapters of the present Part Second.

(1) The first two Chapters describe her condition when “the Soul could no more correspond to the sensations of the Body,--the Body remained, as it were, without its natural being, and dwelt confused and stunned, without knowing where it was or what it should do or say” (pp. 226_c_, 227_a_). And then the Soul begins to address “the Lord” (p. 229_a_). And on p. 230_b_ we hear, for the first time, of its “sweet and cruel Purgatory.” And Chapter Third tells of the Soul’s painful prison-life, and of vomitings, emaciation, and occasional inability to move (pp. 230_b_-232_a_).--Now Purgatory, prison-house and these psycho-physical conditions do not appear, in the _Vita_-proper, till “nine years before her death,” and, indeed, in great part only within the last year of her life.[429] Indeed it is only the characteristic intensity with which the _Dialogo_ here describes the fresh access of Contrition, and the resumption of frequent Confession for evidently new offences (a description entirely inappropriate to this late stage of her life), that makes it difficult to realize that these three Chapters are dealing with 1497 to 1499. And the exaggeration here exactly corresponds to the exaggeration, in Part (“Chapter”) First, of her earlier sinfulness, and her first Conversion and Contrition.

(2) Chapter Fourth then gives a short description of another “ray of love”; and then apostrophizes, in seven “oh” and “che” sentences, such a state of soul (pp. 232_c_-233_c_). Chapter Fifth contains one question and answer exchanged between the Soul and the Lord, and then three narrative-exclamatory paragraphs (pp. 233_c_-235_a_). Chapter Sixth gives two explanations by the Lord of the Soul’s sufferings, interrupted by the Soul’s thanks and acceptance (pp. 235_b_-237_a_). And then Chapter Seventh describes a lull in the Soul’s battles and trials (pp. 237_a_-238_a_). And this lull is followed, in Chapter Eighth, by a declaration from the Lord that she has now been led up to the door of Love but has not yet entered in (pp. 238_a_-239_a_); and, in Chapter Ninth, by a dialogue (for the first time in the entire work) between the Spirit and the Soul, the former being now determined to separate itself from the latter; and, at the end of this same Chapter, by a description of this, now more or less achieved, separation (pp. 239_a_-241_a_; 241_b_).--These conflicts and dialogues between the Spirit and the Soul, are closely like the conflicts and dialogues between the Spirit and “Humanity” in Part First.[430] Yet there, the historical materials are derived chiefly from the _Vita_-proper, pp. 20_a_-21_b_, 96_b_-97_c_ (which give an account of her work from 1473 to 1497); whilst here they come exclusively from pp. 133_b_-138_b_ of the _Vita_-proper (which tell her experiences from November 11 to the end of December 1509).

(3) And the last two Chapters, Tenth and Eleventh, are particularly difficult and self-destructive, obscure and disappointing. The Tenth (to be fully analyzed presently), is difficult, because it starts with fragments of _Vita_-information which, in the _Vita_, rightly refer, in large part, to the beginning of the last ten years of her life, and even to 1499 in particular,--hence to a period long anterior to all that has been described in the _Dialogo_ ever since Chapter Third of this Part. And these fragments are here made to lead up to a re-statement of the scene of January 10, 1510, when she shut herself off from every one, but when Marabotto managed to overhear her soliloquy (pp. 241_c_-244_a_ compared with pp. 139_b_, 113_c_.) And the Eleventh Chapter is obscure and disappointing, because, after giving the “scintilla”-incident of August 11, 1510, and a final short dialogue between the “Lord” and her “Humanity” (again a combination of _Dramatis Personae_ which has occurred nowhere else), it finishes, not with any description or even affirmation of her earthly end, but simply with an account as to the necessity of Purgation, and, in particular, with the words “a martyrdom which never ceases until death” (pp. 244_a_-245_c_).

4. _Closer examination of later portion of “Chapter” Second._

Part Third, on the contrary, is peculiar in this, that its Dialogue passes exclusively between but two interlocutors, the Soul and the Lord: it thus brings back the whole composition to its opening form of strict duologue,--although there the speakers had been the (unpurified) Soul and the Body. The present thirteen Chapters constitute, in substance, a single, all but unbroken, disquisition on God’s love for the Soul, and on the Soul’s growth in the love of God; although the form alternates between Chapters of questions and answers, and Chapters of rapturous descriptions and apostrophizings of Love.