I 9, concluding the Vita’s Conversion-story, must evidently contain some words, originally belonging to document I, concerning her Confession, since I has already twice (I 4, I 8) referred to such a coming Confession. And such words are here: “Dopo questo—l’anima”; “Iddio disponendo-circa quattro anni” (this is the original text here); and a vivid description of her suddenly ceasing to see her particular sins.
VII. The Sayings-Passages: Three Tests for discriminating Authentic from Secondary Sayings.
As to the Sayings, it is obviously more difficult to decide as to their provenance, authenticity, and date of enunciation and literary fixation. Yet three tests have proved solidly helpful towards gaining a respectably large collection of texts which can, with high historical probability or even certainty, be reasoned from as truly Catherine’s, even in their form.
1. Rhythm.
There is the test of rhythm and rhyme, since the Vita describes her “wont” of “making rhymed sayings in her joy,” and gives irrefragable proofs of her deep love of Jacopone’s poetry.[463] The still obviously rhymed or rhythmical sayings all answer to the other tests of genuineness; and many sayings now turned, by successive Redactors, into more or less sheer prose, can still be restored to their original poetic form. All these rhythmic, rhymed sayings have an utterly naïve, expansive tone, markedly different from the high-pitched redactional rhetoric in which they are now embedded, or again from Battista’s far more literary poetry: hence they cannot spring from this strong and busy intellect.—Thus she hears her Love say: “Chi di Mè | si fida, || di sè | non dubita”; possibly simply quoting, she says to her soul, “ama chi t’ama, | e chi non t’ama lascia”; and she sums up her life’s ideal as, “s’io mangio o bevo, | s’io [] taccio o parlo, | dormo o veglio; | s’io son in chiesa, in casa, in piazza: | s’io son inferma | o sana: | s’io muojo o non muojo: || ogni ora di vita mia, | tutto voglio che sia, | Dio e prossimo: || non vorrei potere ne volere, | fare, parlare nè pensare | eccetto tutto Dio.||”[464]—And there are her repetitive utterances, beginning with “non più mondo, non più peccati,” on March 22, 1472, and finishing with “andiàmo, non più terra, non più terra,” of August 25, 1510.[465]
2. Simplicity.
The second test requires the sayings to be short and simple, and to be followed, in the present text, by carefully clausulated doublets, or to be themselves now glossed and expanded. Such sayings occur specially in Chapters I to VIII; XVIII and XIX; XXVII to XXIX; XXXVI to XXXVIII; XLIV to XLVI; and in Chapter L. All these Chapters are largely narrative; can in great part be traced to Vernazza or Marabotto; and yield sayings readily attributable to her first Conversion-Period (which she doubtless recounted to those Friends), or to 1495-1510, the years of her intercourse with those intimates.
3. Originality.
And the third test consists of a daring originality, which, often softened and counteracted by the successive Redactors, precludes all idea of sayings expressive of it proceeding from any one of less authority than herself. These sayings again are all short; they too occur, all but exclusively, in the Chapters indicated and in the Dicchiarazione; they are all referable to the years 1495-1510, and to the registration first of Vernazza, and, later on, of Marabotto.
Very few of the sayings grouped together by me in my Chapter VI but satisfy at least two of these three tests.
VIII. Conclusion. At least Six Stages in the upbuilding of the Complete Book of 1551. The Slight Changes introduced since then. First claims to Authorship for Catherine.
1. The Stages.
It would appear, then, from the preceding analyses, that the successive stages in the composition and redaction of the Vita-Dicchiarazione complex of documents cannot have been fewer than the following:—
(i) Description and Registration, (1) first by Vernazza (1495-1510), (2) then also by Marabotto (1499-1510), more or less on the day of their occurrence and utterance, of Catherine’s actions, psycho-physical condition, and sayings expressive of her present spiritual experiences; and of her deliberate reminiscences concerning her past, especially her early Convert life. And similar contemporary Annotations, of much lesser volume, by (3) Suor Tommasa Fiesca, (4) Maestro Boerio, and (5) Don Giacomo Carenzio—the latter two, only since May 1510.
(ii) Redaction, probably in connection with the first public Cultus in the summer or autumn of 1512, of (1) a short Conversione-booklet, by Vernazza, perhaps already with slight contributions by Marabotto; (2) a short Dicchiarazione-booklet, also by Vernazza, probably as yet without the theological “corrections”; and (3) a short Passion-account, by Marabotto, with additions by Carenzio and, in substance, contributions by Argentina.
(iii) Redaction, after the death of the last of the two chief friends (Marabotto, in 1528), by Battista Vernazza, in 1529 or 1530, of a tripartite Vita, made up chiefly of II (1) and II (3), and a longer Dicchiarazione, now with the theological glosses,—these latter presumably from the pen of Fra Gaspar Toleto, O.P., the Inquisitor for the Republic of Genoa, or his successor, Fra Geronimo da Genova.
(iv) Partial change of the tripartite scheme of the Vita-Dottrina to a quadripartite one, early in 1548.
(v) Composition by Battista Vernazza of (1) the Dialogo, “Chapter” I alone, 1549; and then (2) of “Chapter” II (the present Parts II and III), in 1550.
(vi) Final Redaction of the text of the Printed Vita-Dicchiarazione-Dialogo, by means of all the preceding Documents, of which I (4) and possibly the Confession-descriptions of I (2) are now incorporated in the complete Vita for the first time; and, with the help of gossipy reminiscences of Argentina, possibly only now reduced to writing—in 1550, 1551. This final Redactor would again be Battista Vernazza.
2. The Changes.
Now from 1551 onwards this whole corpus has remained stationary, with the exception of purely formal modifications, such as one synonym for another; of, since 1737, her designation, on the title-page and in some other places, as “Santa Caterina da Genova,” and, throughout the text, as “Caterina” (only the Ancient Preface still retains the strictly correct “Caterinetta,” Vita, p. viii); and of two other, more important changes.
The first important change is the insertion (later than the fourth edition, Venice, 1601) at her death-moment,—between “e in quel punto” (after raising her forefinger heavenwards) “quest’ anima beata” and “con una gran pace … spirò,”—of the words: “dicendo: In manus tuas commendo spiritum meum.” This, intrinsically appropriate, last saying prevented henceforth her last, directly recorded, words from being something so little beautiful or characteristic as the “cacciate via questa bestia” with which all the MSS., and all the editions till at least 1601, had the fine courage to conclude the series of her sayings.
And the second change is a modification in the titles of the Book and of its several parts, of significance as indicating the growth of the legend attributing literary composition to her. The First Printed Edition (1551) has: “Book of the admirable Life and holy Doctrine of the Blessed Caterinetta of Genoa, in which is contained a useful and Catholic Demonstration and Declaration” (Elucidation) “of Purgatory”; and in the body of the Book this “Demonstrazione” appears as Trattato del Purgatorio, after the Vita-proper. But though the complete Dialogo appears here, behind the Trattato and divided into two “Chapters,” no mention is made of it on the title-page.—The Second Edition, Florence, 1568, adds to the title: “with a Dialogue between the Soul and the Body, composed by the same,” thus attributing, apparently, full literary authorship by Catherine to precisely that document with which she has least of all to do.—The Fourth Edition, Venice, 1601, simply adds, after “Dialogue,” “divided into two Chapters”; and the Fifth, 1615, modifies this to “three Chapters, between the Soul, (and) the Body; Humanity, (and) Self-love; the Spirit and the Lord God, composed by the Beata herself.”
The first French translation, Paris, 1598, puts the Dialogue before the Treatise, and still attributes Catherine’s direct authorship to the Dialogue alone. But the first Latin translation, Freiburg in Breisgau, 1626, has “Life and Doctrine of Blessed Catherine Adorna … (and) the two excellent Treatises of the same: 1. Dialogue between the Soul and the Body; 2. Concerning Purgatory.” Here both works are attributed to her, in exactly the same degree; but that degree is not clearly specified.[466]
I do not know how soon after the Sixth Edition, Naples, 1645, which is still without it, the quite unambiguous title of the Thirteenth Edition, Genoa, of about 1880: “Vita ed Opere di S. Caterina da Genova,” was adopted, nor how soon the present Second Title-page to the Trattato and Dialogo—“Works of St. Catherine”—was inserted. Yet even here the old correct name for the whole Book still appears as the heading on p. 1: Vita e Dottrina, although now, owing to that Second Title-page, “Doctrine” only covers the Doctrinal Chapters of the Vita-proper.
Thus not till 1568 was anything claimed as a composition of Catherine’s pen, and then only the Dialogue; and not till 1626 was the Treatise put into the same category as the Dialogue. Pope Clement XII, in his Bull of Canonization in 1737, declares the Dialogue to be her composition, whilst nothing is said concerning the Treatise, although the Bull itself most wisely follows the account of the Vita-proper, and softens down or ignores the different version of the Dialogue, in the two crucial cases of Catherine’s Vision of the Bleeding Christ and of the degree of her poverty.[467]
FOOTNOTES
[1] The remainder of this section is for the most part expressed in the words of Prof. Edouard Zeller’s standard Philosophie der Griechen. I have used the German text.
[2] Rep. VII, 518b.
[3] Phaedo, 67c, 64, 69c.
[4] Theaetetus, 168a.
[5] Parmenides, 134c.
[6] Theaetetus, 176a.
[7] Luke ix, 51-56; Matt. xxvi, 51, 52; Mark x, 13-16; ix, 30-32.
[8] I have been much helped throughout the remainder of this section by many of the groupings and discussions of texts in Prof. H. J. Holtzmann’s Lehrbuch der N. T. Theologie, 2 vols., 1897. Inge’s Christian Mysticism, 1899, has also, in its pp. 44-74, furnished me with some useful hints.
[9] Matt. vi, 26, 28; Mark iv, 27, 28; Matt. xiv, 32; xvi, 2, 3.
[10] Matt. v, 17; vi, 1, 2, 5, 16; v, 23.
[11] Mark v, 25-29; vi, 56.
[12] Mark vi, 12, 13; i, 9, 10; Matt. iii, 13-19; Mark xiv, 22-25; Matt. xxvi, 26-29; Luke xxii, 15-19.
[13] Matt. v. 3, 8; xi, 25, 26, 28-30; Mark viii, 34, 35; Matt. xvi, 24, 25; x, 38, 39; Luke ix, 23, 24; xiv, 27; xvii, 33; Mark vii, 14, 15.
[14] Mark ix, 35, 36; x, 15; x, 14.
[15] Mark xii, 24-27; Matt. xxii, 29-33; Luke xx, 34-38.
[16] 1 Cor. xv, 3-8; xi, 23-26.
[17] Acts ii, 1-13; ix, 1-9; xxii, 3-11; xxvi, 9-18; 1 Cor. xii; xiv; 2 Cor. xii, 1-9.
[18] 1 Cor. i, 18, 22-25; ii, 14, 15.
[19] Col. i, 26; ii. 2; iv, 3, 4.
[20] 1 Cor. ii, 6; iii, 1.
[21] 1 Cor. ii, 10, 11.
[22] Eph. iii, 5; Rom. vi, 6, 8; viii, 11.
[23] Col. i, 15-17; Eph. i, 10; Col. iii, 11; 1 Cor. x, 4; Col. i, 15, 17; iii, 11; Eph. iv, 13; Gal. ii, 20; iv, 19; 2 Cor. iii, 18.
[24] John i, 14; 1 John i, 1; John v, 28, 29.
[25] 1 John i, 5; iv, 8; John iv, 24; iii, 16; vi, 44; xvii, 18.
[26] John xvii, 24; viii, 58; i, 3, 10; i, 9; 1 John i, 2; John i, 11; xiv, 6; x, 7-9; vi, 35; xv, 1.
[27] John iii, 3, 5; 1 John v, 10; John vii, 17; iii, 21.
[28] 1 John iii, 2, 5; v, 6.
[29] John ii, 23, 24; iii, 2; iv, 39, 42; xiv, 11; xx, 29.
[30] John iii, 36; v, 24; 1 John iii, 14; v, 20.
[31] John xiv. 20, 21.
[32] I have been much helped in this section by Prof. R. Eucken’s admirably discriminating, vivid book, Die Lebensanschauungen der grossen Denker, in its first and fourth editions, 1890, 1902.
[33] I have been much helped, towards what follows here, by pages 51 to 128 in M. Maurice Blondel’s great book, l’Action, 1893.
[34] I have found much help towards formulating the following experiences and convictions in Professor William James’s striking paper, “Reflex Action and Theism,” in The Will to Believe, pp. 111-114, 1897.
[35] I have been much helped towards the general contents of the next four sections by that profoundly thoughtful little book, Fechner’s Die drei Motive und Gründe des Glaubens, 1863, and by the large and rich conception elaborated by Cardinal Newman in his Preface to The Via Media, 1877, Vol. I, pp. xv-xciv.
[36] See, for this point, the admirably clear analysis in J. Volkelt’s Kant’s Erkenntnisstheorie, 1879, pp. 160-234. This book is probably the most conclusive demonstration extant of the profound self-contradictions running through Kant’s Epistemology.
[37] Works of St. John of the Cross, translated by David Lewis, Vol. I, ed. 1889, p. 298.
[38] Ibid. Vol. II, ed. 1890, pp. 541, 542.
[39] Œuvres de Fénelon, Paris, Lebel, Vol. IX, 1828, pp. 632, 652, 668.
[40] Tractatus de Gratia et Libero Arbitrio, cap. xiv, § 47.
[41] Summa c. Gentiles, 1-3, c. 70, in fine.
[42] For the recent instances, see Walter Elliott’s Life of Father Hecker, New York, 1894, p. 369; The Treatise on Purgatory, by St. Catherine of Genoa, with a Preface by Cardinal Manning, 1858, 1880, 19—; F. W. Faber’s All for Jesus, ch. ix, sections iii-v; Aubrey de Vere’s Legends and Records of the Church and the Empire, 1898, pp. 355, 356; George Tyrrell’s Hard Sayings, 1898, pp. 111-130.
[43] I have done my best to recover the day, or at least the month, but in vain. The baptismal register of her Parish Church (the Duomo) is, as regards that time, destroyed or lost.
[44] Not a shadow of reasonable doubt is possible as to the authenticity of these relics. Buried as she was in the Church of the Hospital of Pammatone, which latter she had first simply served, and then directed and inhabited, during thirty-seven years, her resting-place remained a centre of unbroken devotion up to her Beatification and Canonization, when the relics were removed but a few yards upwards, and placed in their glass shrine above and behind the altar in the Chapel of the Tribune—the Deposito di S. Caterina—where they have rested ever since. The special character of the brow and of the hands is still plainly recognizable. Of the four or five portraits mentioned by Vallebona, not one can be traced back to her lifetime.
In the Manuale Cartularii of the Pammatone Hospital, under date of 10th July 1512 (p. 62), (I quote from an authentic copy which I found among various documents copied out by the protonotary P. Angelo Giovo, and prefixed to his MS. Latin life of the Saint preserved in the Biblioteca della Missione Urbana, Genoa, No. 30, 8, 140,) there is an entry of money (7 lire 10 soldi, equivalent to about £7 10s.) paid by the administrators of the Hospital to Don Cattaneo Marabotto, her Confessor and Executor: “Ratio sepulturae q(uondam) D(ominae) Catarinettae Adurnae pro diversis expensis factis p(er) D(ominum) Cattaneum Marabottum, videlicet pro pictura et apportari facere lapides ipsius sepulturae.” The payment must have been either for expressly painting a picture, or for buying one already painted. We would, however, expect, in the former case, for the entry, in analogy with its final clause, to run: “pro pingi facere picturam.” In the latter case, we are almost forced to think of the picture as painted by some friend or disciple of the Saint, not for herself or for her relations or friends (for in that case it would hardly have been sold, but would have been left or given to the Hospital), but for his own consolation, or in hopes of its being eventually bought for the Hospital (and this may well have been done during her lifetime). In any case, this entry attests that a portrait of the Saint was in existence at the Hospital not two years after her death, and which was approved of by one of her closest friends. I take it that that portrait was placed on her sepulchral monument erected to her in January 1512 in the Hospital Church. If still extant, at least in a copy, that original or copy is, presumably, at the Hospital still.
Now there are but three pictures at the Hospital which claim to be portraits of her and are not, avowedly, copies. (1) The large oil painting of her standing figure, in the room adjoining the closet now shown as the place where she died, is clearly a late, quite lifeless composition. (2) The portrait-head in the Superioress’s room has been carefully examined for me by a trained portrait painter, who reports that the picture consists of a skilful ancient foundation now largely hidden under much clumsy repainting. (3) The picture reproduced at the head of this first volume, now in the sacristy of the Santissima Annunziata in Portorio (the Hospital Church), is clearly the work of one hand alone. It is without the somewhat disagreeable look present in the previous portrait, a look doubtless introduced there by the unskilful restoration. If then the sacristy picture is a copy of the Superioress’s picture, it will have been copied before the latter picture was thus repainted. This sacristy picture now hangs in an old-fashioned white-and-gold wooden frame with “Santa Catarina da Genova” in raised letters carved out upon it, a carving which is evidently contemporary with the frame’s make. The frame thus cannot be older than 1737, the year of Catherine’s canonization. But the portrait is without trace of a nimbus and carefully reproduces the very peculiar features of a particular face, head, and neck.
The original painting, thus still more or less before us in these two pictures, was evidently by no mean artist, and strikes a good connoisseur as of the school of Leonardo da Vinci (died 1519). There were several good painters of this school resident in Genoa about this time: Carlo da Milano, Luca da Novara, Vinzenzo da Brescia, and Giovanni Mazone di Alessandria. In the very year of her death, and still more two years later, she was publicly and spontaneously venerated as Blessed, and this Cultus continued unbroken up to the Bull of Urban VIII, of 1625. Hence the further back we place one or both of these portraits, the more naturally can we explain the absence of the nimbus. Everything conspires, then, to prove that one of these portraits goes back, in some way, to the picture painted for or bought by Marabotto, and which adorned her monument from 1512 to 1593.
I have striven hard but in vain to find some scrap of Catherine’s handwriting. The late Mr. Hartwell Grisell of Oxford, and the Cavaliere Azzolini dei Manfredi of Rome, both of them life-long collectors of Saints’ autographs, have kindly assured me that they have never come across a word even purporting to be in her handwriting. The fourteen wills and codicils made in her favour or by herself are all, according to the universal custom of the time and country, written throughout in a rapid, cursive hand by the lawyer himself alone, with certain slight signs (crosses or lines) for further identification of his authorship, but with no signature of any kind. There is no shadow of a true tradition as to any of her sayings or thinkings having ever been written down by herself. And the business books of the Hospital, kept, at least in part, by Catherine from 1490 to 1496, when she was its matron, have long ago been destroyed by fire.
[45] See Opere Spirituale della Ven. B. Vernazza, Genova, 1755, 6 vols., Vol. I, p. 3.
[46] Op. cit. p. 45.
[47] Although the Church and Monastery belonged, as Catherine’s Will of 1509 puts it, to “the Order of St. Benedict of the Congregation of Saint Justina in Padua”—a Congregation founded from Monte Cassino between 861 and 874—yet the community were evidently closely bound up with the Augustinian Canons Regular of the Lateran, or at all events with the foundation of the Convent of Augustinian Canonesses at Santa Maria delle Grazie. For the concession of Pope Nicolas V for the latter Convent is addressed to his “Beloved sons of Saint Theodore of Genoa” (Augustinian Canons) “and of Saint Nicolas in Boschetto.” And this close connection with, and action for, a Church and Convent so dearly loved by Catherine, will have necessarily been one of the causes of her affection for the Benedictine country-side Church.
[48] This evidently most authentic anecdote stands in the Vita, p. 3, in a doubly disconcerting context. Her prayers, always elsewhere recorded together with their effects, are here abruptly left, without any indication of their sequel; and the prayer for a three months’ illness is followed by an attempted explanation of it—that she had gone through three months of mental affliction. I take it that some other continuation has been suppressed, or, at least, that the present explanation owes its “three months” to a quaint determination to find at least a retrospective correspondence between her prayer and the happenings of her life.
[49] Vita, p. 4, first two paragraphs. I hope to show in the Appendix that we owe their getting on to paper to Ettore Vernazza, and that he derived their contents from Catherine herself, some time after 1495.
[50] Ibid. p. 4. § 3.
[51] Vita, p. 4, § 3; p. 5, § 1.
[52] Ibid. p. 5, §§ 2, 3. I have, together with the Bull of Canonization, deliberately omitted the first two sentences of § 3, which (with their representation of Our Lord as appearing not alive with the Cross, but dead on it, and with their repetition here of the exclamation as to “no more sins” of her conversion-moment) form an interesting doublet, with a complex and eventful history attaching to it. See Appendix to this volume.
[53] Vita, p. 5c.
[54] Vita, p. 5c.
[55] Vita, pp. 5c, 6,—as they appear in MS. “A.” This matter of these periods has given me much trouble, since there are two rival traditions concerning them to be found, really unreconciled, within the oldest documents of the Vita. The point is fully discussed in the Appendix.
[56] Ibid. cc. ix-xli, pp. 21c-111c.
[57] Vita, p. 7a.
[58] I take the above to have been the actual course of events, for the following reasons. (1) The text just given talks of “the desire for Holy Communion” having been given to her on that day in 1473, and of this desire “never failing her throughout the remainder of her life”; but it does not say, that the desire for daily Communion was given to her then, or that such a desire was continuously satisfied from the first. (2) On page 18b we have: “For about two years she had this desire for death, and this desire continued within her, up to when she began to communicate daily.” This passage, (which does not occur, here or with this Communion notation, in the MSS.,) originally without doubt referred to her later desire for death, carefully described by Vernazza (pp. 98a, b; 99b, c) as occurring in 1507—a description in the midst of which now occurs an account of certain death-like swoons which attacked her in 1509 (pp. 98c, and 133b; this latter experience is given in the MSS. as occurring in November 1509). Still this passage points to a tradition, or early inference, that the beginning of the daily communions did not synchronize with her conversion nor indeed with any other very marked date, but took place not many years after her return to fervour. (3) It is impossible to assume that she did not communicate at all during these first fourteen months, since there is no evidence that, even before her conversion, she had ever abstained from Holy Communion altogether, and since two Eastertides with their strict obligation recurred twice within this period. And if she did communicate repeatedly within this time, then this Lady-Day, three days after her conversion, would be a most natural occasion for one of these communions. And the desire and not its gratification would be mentioned, because the writer characteristically wants her conversion to be followed by something absolutely unintermittent, and such unintermittence attached, for the present, not to her communions themselves, but only to her desire for them.
[59] Vita, pp. 8, 9. A MS. list of conclusions concerning various points of her life, which is contained in the volume Documenti su S. Caterina da Genova, in the University Library of Genoa, declares this interdict to have lasted ten days, and in the year 1489. This information is probably correct.
[60] Ibid. pp. 8, 9.
[61] Vita, p. 7b.
[62] I have been unable to discover more than one case illustrative of the practice of that time and town. The Venerable Battista Vernazza, an Augustinian Canoness from 1510 to 1587, was not allowed daily Communion till the last years of her life. Opere, Genoa, 1755, Vol. I, p. 21.
[63] Vita, p. 116c. This passage opens a chapter full of the most authentic information, derived directly from Don Marabotto, her Confessor and close friend from 1499 onwards. I have, in her saying, read “Amore” for the “Signore” of the text of the Vita: my reasons will appear later on.
[64] Vita, pp. 119c, 116c, 117b.
[65] Ibid. p. 16b.
[66] Vita, p. 6.
[67] Ibid. p. 140b, c.
[68] See here, ch. v, § ii, 2 and 5.
[69] Denzinger’s Enchiridion Definitionum, ed. 1888, No. 363.
[70] Summa Theologica, III, supplem. quaest. 6, art. 3.
[71] Denzinger, op. cit. No. 780; Summa Theologica, III, supplem. quaest. 6, art. 3.
[72] Antonii Ballerini, Opus Theologicum Morale, ed. Palmieri, S.J., Prato, 1892, Vol. V, pp. 576-597. The large variations in the earlier practice of Penitence and Confession are admirably described in Abbé Boudhinon’s articles, “Sur l’Histoire de la Pénitence,” in the Revue d’Histoire et de Littérature Religieuses, 1897, pp. 306-344, 496-524.
[73] The reason for this lies in the emphatic, repeated conviction of R. 1, based, no doubt, upon the authentic documents (probably Vernazza’s memoranda) that he has incorporated, (a conviction which appears wherever his scheme was not tampered with by R. 2,) that her great penitential period lasted four years (so still on pp. 12b, 13b twice, 14c; and originally, no doubt, on p. 6a, and probably on p. 5c, where now we read “a little over a year,” and “about fourteen months” respectively). For not all the subsequent doctoring, that shall be traced later on as having been applied by R. 2 to some of the refractory passages, succeeds in making it likely that these penitential exercises outlasted the complete disappearance from her sight of her sins, which we have already quoted from the last likely passage. And it is equally improbable that formal and repeated Confession should not have formed part and parcel of the whole of this penitential time. On the other hand, “her Confessor,” on p. 77, and “the spiritual physician” on p. 8a, indeed all other mentions of a Confessor throughout the Life subsequent to her first convert Confession, will be shown in the Appendix to apply exclusively to Don Marabotto, and to the last eleven years of her life.
[74] Vita, p. 56b, c. Her words as printed there are: “Io non vorrei grazia ne misericordia [nella presente vita] ma giustizia e vendetta del malfattore.” But the words I have bracketed are certainly a gloss; for she is speaking here out of the fulness of her feeling, without the intrusion of reflection. And as regards temporal punishment in the other life, and the soul’s attitude towards it there, she says in the Trattato, p. 180b: “Know for certain, that of the payment required from those souls (in Purgatory), there is not remitted even the least farthing, this having been thus established by the divine justice.… Those souls have no more any personal choice, and can no more will anything but what God wills.”
[75] Dialogo, pp. 203a, 208b.
[76] From the authenticated copies of the entries in the Cartulary, prefixed to the MS. Life of the Saint in the Biblioteca della Missione Urbana, Genoa, Nos. 30, 8, 14; and from careful copies of the still extant original Wills made for me by Dre. Ferretto, of the Archivio di Stato, Genova.
[77] Benedicti XIV, De servorum Dei Beatificatione et Beatorum Canonisatione, ed. Padua, 1743, Vol. II, p. 239a.
[78] Vita, pp. 56c; 3c; 95c; 124c, 125b; 122b.
[79] I have followed here, for my terminus a quo, Vallebona rather than the Bollandists (who prefer 1474 for the date of her conversion), because the ten years required between her marriage in January 1463 and her conversion, have fully elapsed by March 1473, and because the earlier we place her conversion, the larger is the number of lonely convert years that we can find room for, and the more nearly accurate her own allegation of twenty-five years of such loneliness becomes. If we follow the chronology given in the text we get a thoroughly understandable sequence: Catherine’s conversion, March 1473; Giuliano’s bankruptcy, summer of that year; his conversion under the joint influence of her zeal and of his misfortune; the decision of the couple to settle in the midst of the poor and suffering, whom they were now determined to serve, and the execution of this decision, between Michaelmas and Christmas of the same year.