CHAPTER VIII

THE TWO CATHERINES ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA—ST. CATHERINE OF GENOA
Tue last splendours of the medieval period and the transition to the Renaissance—terms in a sense conventional, but nevertheless indicating genuine historic facts—are summed up in the domain of the spiritual life in the careers of two great women. Both Italians, born exactly a century apart, St. Catherine of Siena (1347-80), the contemporary of Ruysbroeck and Julian of Norwich, and St. Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510), at whose death St. Ignatius, the hero of the counter-reformation, was just nineteen years old, stand up among a crowd of men and women of lesser spiritual genius as supreme representatives of the energy and originality of the Christian mystical type. I do not apologize for devoting a chapter to these classic figures, whose achievement gives so many clues to the true nature and meaning of the contemplative life.
Catherine of Siena was born at a time of almost unequalled ecclesiastical degradation. We know this, not from Protestant critics, but from the terrible words in which she and other Catholic saints of the fourteenth century have described the clerical corruption which they saw. Politically, too, Italy was full of internal wars, treachery,
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miseries of every kind. Yet in this period of violence, wickedness and suffering, the life of the Spirit burned with a peculiar intensity; and much in Catherine’s surroundings fed and developed her genius. In vivid contrast to the state of the official Church, with the Papacy at Avignon, and sins and abuses of every kind flourishing almost unchecked, was the network of mystical devotion—mostly propagated by groups of lay-folk gathered round some saintly character—which had spread over Western Europe and attracted to itself all fervent spirits. In Germany, during her childhood, the movement of the Friends of God was at its height ; in England the followers of Rolle continued his work ; in Italy Giovanni Columbini, a rich Sienese merchant who had embraced utter poverty, was founding the congregation of the Gesuati, which sought to revive the simplicity and ardour of St. Francis, and caused a considerable reformation among the friars; whilst St. Bridget of Sweden (1303-73), a mystic of the type of St. Hildegarde, was pouring forth apocalyptic prophecies and poli- tical denunciations at Rome.
Into this world of mingled ferocity and beauty Catherine, a child of genius, was born in 1347. Her father was a prosperous householder in the tanners’ quarter of Siena; she was among the youngest of a large family. Even as a child, Catherine, like Hildegarde and other mystics, 1s said to have received vivid religious impressions. The visionary world of imaginative children took with her a spiritual form. Her precocity was extra- ordinary. Before she was sixteen, she had deter- | mined to consecrate her life to God. At this age
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she took the habit of the Sisters of Penance of St. Dominic—pious women who followed a religious rule in their own homes—and lived in entire seclusion in one little room in her father’s house; devoting herself to prayer and practising a severe asceticism. Under the influence of this existence, with its total concentration on the inner life, her mystical powers developed quickly ; and this, the first or educative phase of her career, was completed before she was twenty. It was marked not only by numerous ecstasies and visions, and terrible battles with “evil spirits,” which some will attribute to unnatural repression of her temperament and others to her vivid consciousness of sin; but also by the steady expansion of her remarkable spiritual facul- ties. This period culminated in the experience known as her “‘ Mystical Marriage with Christ” in 1366: a dramatic vision which doubtless owed something to the lovely legend of her namesake, St. Catherine of Alexandria. It marked a real epoch in the development of Catherine Benincasa’s soul: her transition from a purely ecstatic and personal to an active and altruistic mysticism. In after life she realized that this period of solitary absorption in God had been a means of attaining that utter penetration by the Divine love and will in which she afterwards performed her public work.
In obedience to the Divine Voice, which told her that it was time to pass on to other souls the grace and certitude she had received, she now left her cell; and devoted herself first to the sick poor of Siena, nursing, comforting and converting. Often her tranquil and unselfish presence healed
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the illness whilst it pacified the soul. She was ready for any menial employment, and in all ways exhibited the truth of her own great maxim, that “there is no perfect virtue—none that bears fruit—unless it is exercised by means of our neigh- bour.” Gradually her spiritual force became recog- nized, and a circle—including not only devoted women, but learned friars and priests and wild young nobles—gathered round her, for whom this young girl was “our Holy Mother,” and over whom she exercised an unquestioned authority. To these she taught, with the calm yet humble certitude of one who knows herself to be in touch with deep sources of life and truth, her doctrine of self-knowledge and of the Cross. She read their hearts, turned them from evil, trained them in the spiritual life, and herself did penance for their sins. The power of human character has seldom been more strikingly exhibited.
Doubtless Catherine obtained from her Domini- can followers—especially from the close friend of her later years, the erudite and spiritual Fra Raimondo—the many theological conceptions and images which she employed in her teaching ; but the intellectual grasp displayed in her use of them, and the fire and life with which she filled them, were her own. Her intuition, both in heavenly and earthly things, was apparently unerring ; and there is evidence that, like so many of the great mystics, she possessed a certain clairvoyant faculty, often being exactly aware of the thoughts and deeds of her absent ‘‘ children,” and especially of their temptations and falls. Thus Francesco Mala- volti, whom she had converted and brought “ from
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being a bestial and wellnigh devilish man to true knowledge and life,” states in his depositions that, having once fallen back into a secret sin “ known only to God,” Catherine immediately divined it, and urged him to confession :
And when I sought some delay, refusing to do it just then, she, with a glowing and kindling countenance, said to me: “‘ How, my son, dost thou think that I have not mine eyes ever open over my children? ‘Thou couldst not do or say anything without my know- ing it. And how dost thou think to hide from me that thou hast just now done so and so? Go therefore immediately and cleanse thyself from such great misery.” ‘Then, when I heard her tell me precisely all that I had done and said, confused and shameful, and without other answer, at once and heedfully I fulfilled her command.
This picture of the lawless young aristocrat dominated and forced to repentance by a girl of the people, probably his junior in age, gives us already a hint of the strength which made Catherine one of the most amazing figures in the history of Christian mysticism; and helps us to understand her declaration that her one desire had been “‘ to know and follow the Truth in a more virile way.” But strength was not the only source of her power ; her great personal charm can still be felt in her letters and in the many touching stories of the love she inspired. Although her naturally good health had been injured by austerities and she was often ill, those who knew her said that she was “always merry and happy”; for she had not been afraid to ask that she might bear ‘“‘all the pains and infirmities there are in the world” in her own body if thus she might contribute to its redemption, and every additional suffering thus became a joy. During this, the middle period of
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her life, her ecstasies and visions were frequent. They reached their culmination in 1370, in a trance which lasted four hours. Her friends supposed her dead, and Catherine herself always held that her spirit had indeed left the body and entered into eternal life, but was sent back again to earth to minister to other souls.
Because my soul shrank with horror from this return, the Lord said to me, ‘‘ The salvation of many souls demands thy return, and thou shalt no more live as thou hast lived hitherto, nor have henceforth thy cell for habitation, but shalt go out from thine own city for the good of souls. I shall be ever with thee, and shall guide thee and bring thee back. ‘Thou shalt bear the honour of My name and witness to spiritual things before small and great, layfolk, clergy and religious; and I shall give thee words and wisdom none shall be able to withstand.”
This crucial experience marks the beginning of Catherine’s real public career. Always intensely though dimly conscious of vocation, with the development of her immense genius for prayer the nature of this vocation now became clear to her. She was twenty-three, and had before her only ten years of life. ‘They were spent in activities, partly political and partly apostolic, for which nothing in her birth and scanty education seemed to prepare her. We shall hardly realize the bear- ing of these activities unless we perceive how pro- foundly spiritual, yet how sternly practical, was Catherine’s conception of the nature of that Church which she so passionately loved. To her'the Pope really was, or should be, that which she so often named him, ‘‘ Our sweet father, Christ on earth” ; and she looked persistently for such a return of Christian power and purity to the spiritual rulers
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of Christendom that “‘ what God now permits by force shall be accomplished by love.” Possessed by this vision, she was faced by the spectacle of the fourteenth-century Papacy, given over to ignoble politics, hiring mercenary troops to make war upon its own spiritual children, and driving the chief Italian communes into open hostility to the Church ; the priesthood full of corruption, the Pope in exile at Avignon, the Cardinals thinking of anything rather than the good of souls and the purposes of God.
To Catherine, one of the most thoroughly insti- tutional and yet profoundly transcendental of all the mystics of the Church, it seemed clear that those purposes must require the making of peace with the insurgent Italian cities and the bringing back of the Papacy to Rome; the restoration of religious discipline and purity. As her influence and reputation for holiness spread, she devoted them to these objects. She wrote, through her secretaries, innumerable letters—of which over four hundred have been preserved—to persons of every sort ; and travelled as unofficial diplomatist through Italy and to Avignon itself, as the almost dictatorial adviser and representative of the chief political personages of the time. Her one desire was to bring about a peace in which the Christian life could flourish and the spiritual authority of the Church be restored ; and there can be little doubt that hers was the decisive influence which brought Gregory XI back to Rome.
«* Answer the summons of God!” she wrote to him, “‘ Who is calling you to come, hold, and possess the place of the glorious shepherd St. Peter, whose vicar you are. Lift up the banner of
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the holy Cross. Come, that you may reform the Church with good shepherds, giving back to her the colour of most ardent charity that she has lost ; for so much blood has been sucked from her by wicked devourers that she is pale. But take heart, and come, Father! Do not make the servants of God wait, who are afflicted in longing. And I, poor wretched woman, can wait no more; living, I seem to die in pain, as seeing God thus outraged !”
Yet the remarkable ascendancy which is dis- played in such letters, and which made Catherine for a few years one of the chief political personages of her time, was exercised with the deep humility of one who knew herself the unworthy agent of another Power. She used it always and wholly for the good of souls. ‘I came,” she said in answer to some complaint laid against her, “ for nought else save to eat and taste souls and draw them from the hands of the devils. For this I _ would lay down my life if I had a thousand, and for this I shall go or stay, as the Holy Spirit shall direct.” Political action never reduced her pas- sionate interest in, and care for, her spiritual family —now greatly increased in numbers—or her devo- tion to apostolic work among the poor. So many were the conversions she effected that she was called with justice “‘the mother of thousands of souls.” During the last years of her life, wherever she appeared, people flocked to her, and were often brought to repentance merely by the sight of her face. Yet she remained meekly conscious of her own imperfections, always lived a life of penance —for her vivid sense of Christian unity involved the mystery of vicarious suffering—and charged to her own sins every failure in the success of her mission. Worn out by a compelling power and passion too strong for her frail physical
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health, she died at Rome in 1380, aged only thirty-three.
If it is Catherine’s amazing public ministry which first strikes the imagination, this only repre- sents one aspect of her greatness. It was the temporal expression of something reaching far beyond itself: the profound experience of God and consequent sense of vocation, which began at adolescence and persisted throughout her life, often overwhelming her by its intensity, and pro- ducing the so-called mystical, but really psycho- logical, states of rapture and ecstasy. Though all that St. Catherine was able to report of the truths learnt in these deep absorptions was a fragment of the whole, it was enough to give her a great place among the teaching mystics. Like other women contemplatives of the first rank—St. Hildegarde, Angela of Foligno, and her contemporary Julian of Norwich—she combined with an ardent spiritu- ality remarkable intellectual power. Her chief literary work, the Divine Dialogue, largely consists in an account of the direct teaching she received from God in her ecstasies and contemplations, with the results of her own meditations thereon: in this closely resembling the Revelations of Julian of Norwich. It is said to have been dictated “‘in a state of ecstasy’? ; but this probably means little more than that deep, brooding concentration in which the surface faculties are in abeyance, and the “ spiritual seeing and hearing ”’ have possession of the mental field.
The Dialogue gives ample evidence of deep, clear thinking and of wide acquaintance with the language and concepts of theology. We find in
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it practical counsels and unmeasured denunciation of clerical vices, alternating with passages of marvellous beauty, which take us into those regions beyond thought where Catherine declares that she has beheld ‘‘ the hidden things of God,” and “tasted and seen with the light of the intellect in Thy Light the Abyss of Thine Eternal Trinity and the beauty of Thy creatures.” It is not the mere emotional outpouring of a fervent visionary, but the solemn testament of a soul which has been raised to such a contemplation of supernatural truth that she is able to say of it, “‘ The more I enter, the more I find, and the more I find the more I seek of Thee. Thou art the Food that never satiates, for when the soul is satiated in Thine abyss it is not satiated, but ever continues to hunger and thirst for Thee.’ The Truth is one of Catherine’s favourite names for Christ ; and her test of spiritual health is the soul’s ever-growing capacity for seeing things as they really are. Thus she writes to the Bishop of Castello “‘ with the desire of seeing you illuminated with a true and perfect light’ ; and this true and perfect light is identical with that self-knowledge in which she taught her disciples to live as ina cell. It is not a niggling introspection, but that clear view of human nothingness matched against the perfection of God which is the sovereign remedy against pride and self-love ; the only foundation of that charity which she calls in one of her jewelled phrases ‘‘a continual prayer.”
The soul is a tree existing by love, and can live by nothing else but love. If this soul have not in truth the divine love of perfect
Charity she cannot produce the fruit of life, but only of death. 161 L
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Needs be then that the root of this tree, that is the affection of the soul, should grow in and issue from the circle of true self-knowledge which is contained in Me, who have neither beginning nor end, like the circumference of a circle. For tur as thou wilt within a circle, inasmuch as the circumference has no end nor beginning, thou always remainest within it. And this knowledge of thyself and of Me is found in the earth of true humility, which is as wide as the diameter of the circle, that is, the knowledge of self and of Me.
Catherine of Siena’s great namesake, Caterina Adorna—afterwards known as St. Catherine of Genoa—was born in 1447. Externally, the cir- cumstances and character of these two mystics differed widely, yet they had in common several important qualities and convictions. The first was a girl of the people, of ardently spiritual tem- perament, who gave herself to God when little more than a child, and never wavered from her allegiance. Her mysticism was intensely visionary and Christocentric ; the public career which it inspired almost sensational in character. The second was an aristocrat, whose naturally hypersensitive and melancholy disposition had been aggravated by an unhappy marriage, and whose conversion at the age of twenty-six was at least in part the result of disillusionment. Her mysticism at its full development had a deeply philosophic side; she had few visions ; her public work was that of a devoted and clear-sighted philanthropist. In both the tendency to mystical absorption in God was balanced by a powerful intellect, by a passion for active and apostolic work, and by a sacramental sense which found expression in intense devotion to the Eucharist—for them the focal point of external religion. Thus they stand together as
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examples of the proper co-ordination of every part of a full human personality; its complete conse- cration to the purposes of the Spirit. Both were able to express in words at least something of the truths which they had realized, and left behind them teaching which, had it come from a trained theologian, would still have been remarkable for its authority, originality, and depth. Both gathered and held a group of devoted disciples, to whom they gave something of their own spiritual fire.
Catherine of Genoa was abruptly aroused from religious indifference and deep melancholy by an experience in which “‘ her heart was pierced by so sudden and immense a love of God, accompanied by so deep a sight of her miseries and sins and of His Goodness, that she was near falling to the ground; and in a transport of pure and all- purifying love she was drawn away from the miseries of the world.”’ This happened in 1474. She at once gave herself to work among the sick poor, deliberately undertaking the most repulsive duties, in order to cure her natural fastidiousness. For four years she combined this persevering life of active detailed charity with a penitential dis- cipline chiefly directed towards the mortification of the will. She gave many hours daily to prayer, and practised severe austerities; as most contem- platives of the Catholic type have felt impelled to do during their first period of education.
The expansion and consecration of her great abilities followed naturally on this sacrifice of personal enjoyments. In 1477 she founded the first hospital in Genoa. It soon became her per- manent home and principal sphere of activity ;
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and from this time onwards her life was a perfect illustration of St. Teresa’s maxim that “to give our Lord a perfect service Martha and Mary must combine.”
Her penitential phase was now over; and during the central period of her life, from about 1477 to 1499—when she was fifty-two years old— she lived in the almost unbroken consciousness of the Divine presence ; a consciousness which inun- dated her with love and joy, and often caused ecstasies from which she is said to have come forth ‘happy and rosy-faced.” Yet during the same period she managed with skill and devotion the affairs of the hospital. Her accounts were never a farthing wrong, nor was she ever known to fail in her duties through absorption in spiritual joys. When the plague came to Genoa, she was the centre of a devoted band who went through the city nursing the victims, and in many cases sacri- ficed their own lives.
It is when we balance the height achieved in her mystical contemplation by the width and ardour of this outflowing love and compassion—a compassion which passed beyond humanity to all creatures, so that “if an animal were killed or a tree cut down, she could hardly bear to see them lose the being God had given ’’—that we begin to realize the greatness of Catherine’s soul. She fully satisfied the demand of Ruysbroeck, that the “truly inward man should flow out to all in common.” ‘“‘ Thou dost command me to love my neighbour,” she once exclaimed in prayer, “and yet I cannot love anything but Thee, nor
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Thee. How then can I act?” And she was answered inwardly: ‘‘ He who loves Me, loves all that I love.” Her influence gradually spread ; and, perhaps in unconscious imitation of her great namesake of Siena, she gathered round her one of those spiritual groups which seem so congenial to the Italian religious temper. It was in conver- sation with these disciples, and mostly in the eight years between 1499 and 1507—when her health finally broke down—that her great mystical doc- trines were developed and expressed.
Catherine’s earliest biographer testifies to the moving character of these conferences, when “‘ each fed on spiritual food of a delicious kind, and because time fled so quickly could never be satiated; but, all burning within, would remain there unable at last to speak, unable to depart, as though in ecstasy !”’ Some of her sayings of this period are among the strangest which the Christian mystics have left to us, and seem almost to imply the claim to an actual transmutation of her personality ; that which is known in mystical theology as the ‘‘ transforming union” of the soul with God. ‘“* My me is God, nor do I know my selfhood, save in Him!” ‘‘ My being is God, not by simple participation but by a true transformation of my being.” ‘God is my being, my self, my strength, my blessedness!”” In the development which was crowned by such convictions as these, we have an almost classical example of spiritual growth; moving out from the limitations of a selfish and unsatisfied naturalism, through purifying self-disci- pline and service, to the levels of full, creative personality.
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St. Catherine of Genoa stands almost alone among the great Catholic women mystics, on account of the naturally Platonic bent of her mind. Deeply influenced by the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite and the poems of Jacopone da Todi, she conceived of eternal things most easily under great abstract images, and seldom used the language of personality. Not Christ, but the Infinite God, is the centre of her devotion ; and were it not for her intense love of the Eucharist— bringing this unmeasured Reality to a personal focus—we might call her mysticism less Christian than theistic. God is for her Light, Fire, Love ; a living, all-pervading, peaceful Ocean of Reality. ‘‘ Pure Love is no other than God.” ‘“‘ Love, I want Thee, the whole of Thee.” ‘‘ Wouldst thou that I should show thee what thing Godis? Peace ; that peace which no man finds, who departs from Him.” ‘I am so placed and submerged in His immense love, that I seem as though immersed in the sea, and nowhere able to touch, see or feel aught but water.”
Her deep and beautiful doctrine concerning the soul’s purification after death, by which perhaps she is now best known, is wholly based on this conception of the perfected harmony between human and Divine love, as the essential constituent of all full life. God and the soul, the two supreme spiritual realities, are here placed over against each other; and the inevitable suffering which is en- dured by each imperfect spirit in the course of its purification originates in the bitter realization of this its own separation from the Divine will and love. Yet this is a happy suffering, full of hope,
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and willingly, even eagerly, embraced; for it is caused by the creature’s capacity for God, and leads to its fulfilment in Him. “It consumes in the soul every imperfection. And, when the soul is thus purified, it abides all in God, without any thing of its own.” Here, in this consummation of Catherine’s doctrine, that close alliance between the ethical and the mystical which is characteristic of all that is best in Christian spirituality, achieves triumphant expression.
ILLUSTRATIVE WORKS
Catherine of Genoa, St. The Treatise on Purgatory. London, 1858.
Catherine of Siena, St. Divine Dialogue. ‘Translated by Algar Thorold. London, 1896.
Letters. ‘Translated by V. D. Scudder. London,
1905.
CP Gdlnd St. Catherine of Siena. London, 1907.
Hiigel, Baron F. von. The Mystical Element of Religion as Studied in St. Catherine of Genoa and her Friends. 2nd edition. 2 vols. London, 1923.
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