The Mystical Element of Religion, as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her friends, Volume 1 (of 2)

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

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

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

1. Experience of November 17, 1554.

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

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

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

2. Experience of November 25, 1554.

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

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

3. Experience of December (9?), 1554.

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

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

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

4. Experience of December 16, 1554.

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

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

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

5. Experience of December 23, 24, 1554.

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

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

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

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

6. Experience of December 27, 1554.

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

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

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

7. Experience of January 6, 1555.

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

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

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

8. Experience of the Second Sunday in Lent, 1555.

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

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

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

9. Experience of Ascension Day, 1555.

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV. Some further Letters of Battista, 1575 to 1581.

Before the experiences and confidences of an almost painful privacy and emotional intensity, which require, in part, a considerable amount of patient interpretation from us, if they are to move and touch us, we found and dwelt upon a moral attitude and a document full of immediately understandable heroism and virile common-sense: the scene with her father before his death-ride, and the letter to Dottore Moro. And, somewhat similarly, three further documents succeed to these intermediate confidences, documents full of love and esteem for the externally ordinary vocation of the vast majority of us all, of a large undaunted outlook, and of a shrewd and persevering public spirit. The apparent mental contraction and subjectivity we have just passed through with her is but the recollective movement, the, as it were, drawing itself together for the spring of action on the part of an already large and expansive soul, and leads on and out to fresh and still larger horizons, and, indeed, effects them.

1. Letter to Donna Anguisola, 1575.

We have first a letter of June 10, 1575 (Battista was now seventy-eight years of age, and had been a Religious for sixty-five years) addressed to a widowed noblewoman with young children—the Illustrious Lady Andronica Anguisola.[352] The reader will note the transition, evidently quite natural and spontaneous in the writer, from a soaring Mysticism, full of Pauline, Joannine, and Dionysian forms, and of deep, personally experimental content, to the most practical and shrewd, wisely unflinching, homely heroism. There are few documents, I think, which show with an equal impressiveness how startlingly direct and immediate can be and is the application of such, apparently, purely transcendental, serene contemplations and affections to the struggling, clamorous world of our human passions, circumstances, difficulties, and duties: and how only that transcendence and this immanence, taken and working thus together, give to the soul a height without inflation, and a concrete particularity without pettiness. I shall break up the long letter into three sections, omitting only two, relatively commonplace, passages in the middle and at the end; and shall again point out certain parallels and peculiarities at the end of each section.

(1) Opening of the letter.

“Most Honoured Madam in the Crucified,

“‘I have come to place (cast) fire upon the earth, and what will I but that it be enkindled’ (Luke xii, 49). By these most divine words we can understand, in part, to what a supreme degree such a most happy fire is of importance, since the Eternal Word came down from Heaven to kindle it in His so dearly-loved rational earth. And this great effect could not but follow, since the Paternal goodness willed to communicate to our misery the ardour which He possesses eternally in His Heart. And what else is this communication to us of His infinite love than the planting within our minds of His own intrinsic, incomprehensible delights? His Majesty, in His infinite courtesy, takes His delights in abiding with the children of men (Prov. viii, 31). But He desires that these delights should proceed from both sides, so that, as He takes these delights in us, by His own intrinsic natural goodness, He similarly wills that we, by means of that same goodness which is poured into us by that fire which Christ places upon our earth,—as Paul demonstrates when he says (Rom. v, 5), ‘The charity of God is poured forth in our hearts by the Holy Ghost who is given to us,’—He wills, I say, that, set in motion by the immense potency of this infused fire, we should place, in return, all our delights in His Majesty; and then, to speak according to our human fashion, His unmeasured love attains to its intent. In this correspondence lie hidden away delights beyond all comprehension, considering that it is His own goodness that comes down (into us), as He demonstrates when he says, ‘We will come to him, and will make our abode with him’ (John xiv, 23); and that He raises us up beyond all measure in suchwise that, of the Increate Heart and of the created one, there is made, by the operation of Him who says, ‘The Father who is in Me, worketh’ (John x, 38; v, 17), a single most secret and inestimable union.”

Here, again, we find close parallels to Catherine in “His own intrinsic incomprehensible delights,” “His infinite courtesy,” “the immense virtue of this infused fire,” and “to speak according to our human fashion.” And the whole general conception of a mutual and corresponding action and circle between God and the soul, the whole movement beginning in and by God, and leading back and ending in Him, is here, once more, the common property of Battista and her God-mother.[353] Yet “The Crucified,” with which the whole letter opens, and “His Heart,” the “Increate Heart,” applied directly to God Himself, are expressions we should seek in vain in Catherine. The historical Christ, and a most legitimate anthropomorphism, find here a place, indeed a prominence, which they have not there. And note the sobriety with which Battista insists on the analogical character of all this speculation, for she “speaks” only “according to our human fashion”; and the allegorizing involved in the “His dearly-loved rational earth,” the earth that souls dwell on having here become simply identical with those souls themselves. And especially remark the mystically characteristic doubleness of meaning, and the conception of the substantiality of the divine indwelling, involved in the phrase, “His own intrinsic, incomprehensible delights.” For this phrase means both “the delight which, for our minds, is intrinsically bound up with the thought of God,” and the “delight which He himself takes in His indwelling whilst abiding within us”; and the latter idea involves a belief in the soul’s delight in Him being but a sympathetic echo and answer to His delight in this His own indwelling, a delight thus actually in operation within the human soul.

Mark, too, how her opening her letter with a formally announced text is but an instance of her life-long literary form of composition—the homily; how saturated is the whole with (evidently first-hand) scriptural meditation; and how wise and like her own father is her treatment of this soul, so near to delusion in the very intemperance of her search after perfection. A warning note of a claim about to be made upon her correspondent’s effective self-immolation has been struck, from the first, by the words, “the Crucified”; and yet this note is first followed by a paragraph sufficiently soaring to satisfy even the most lofty moods of the Signora Andronica.

(2) Central part of the letter.

“I have taken up my pen from a desire that you may be wholly and entirely devoted to the Lord, with a whole-hearted abandonment. I do not mean that you should abandon the care of your children: on the contrary, I wish that you may give the greatest care to them, both within and without. For the within, by desiring heart-wholly that they may be joined (cleave) to God, with all they are; and for the without, by helping them studiously to avoid everything that leads to sin.” She then gives the examples of SS. Felicitas and Monica, and of St. Louis of France, and proceeds: “Now note, dear Madam, how great is the fruit of good government on the part of parents. Indeed, according to the little light which God deigns to give me, this alone appears to me necessary—that your Ladyship should observe the counsel of St. Paul, where he says (Eph. iv, 1) ‘that we should walk worthily in the vocation in which we are called.’ Now you are called to the government of your children. Hence I pray you to study how to act, that you may be able to render a good account of it to God. You will remember how our Christ, on the point of going to His death, renders an account to His eternal Father concerning those whom His Father had given into His charge, saying, ‘of them whom Thou hast given Me (in charge), I have not lost one’ (John xviii, 9).

“Consider, my very dear Friend, how that our great God, being infinitely perfect, or, in better terms, perfection itself, we cannot either add to or detract from His glory even the slightest point, as the Prophet saw who said (Ps. ci, 13), ‘Thou, O Lord, art ever the same’ (endurest for ever), ‘unchangeable and invariable.’ All that we can do for Him, is to come in aid to His dear images, to His beloved children, as the Lord shows in Matt, xxv, 40, ‘that which ye shall do unto one of these My least, ye shall have done it unto Me.’—I know well that you desire to withdraw yourself from all the cares of the world, in order to be able to occupy yourself entirely with God. But do you not know that ‘Charity seeketh not the things that are her own’ (1 Cor. xiii, 5), that is, her own utility? That desire which your Ladyship has for herself, let her have it equally for her children. Are we not obliged to love our neighbours as ourselves? (Matt. xix, 19). And hence, how much more our children! That step in perfection, of entirely abandoning all things, your Ladyship cannot take, without great damage to your neighbour,—damage, I mean, to souls. Remember how full of perils is the period of youth; I beg of you, with all possible insistence, for God’s sake, to have a greater care of these young souls than of yourself, since the necessity is greater.”

Here, again, there are parallels to the God-mother: in the love of that intensely unifying term, “si accostino,” “cleave to,” “be joined to,” of St. Paul, so dear to Catherine also; in the love of all souls, as God’s dear images, but specially of those bound to us by blood, so marked in Catherine’s testamentary dispositions, as distinct from the descriptions, possibly even from the surface-appearances, of her last nine years; and in the greater care to be given to others than to our own selves, when their necessity is greater than ours, so heroically practised by Catherine in the case of the Plague.[354] The chief difference, here again, is the prominence given by Battista to the Historic Christ, by her quotation of the words of St. Matthew,—words which, though so obviously applicable to Catherine’s work and duties, nowhere occur throughout Catherine’s own contemplations or discourses.—Note again the ambiguity of the “within and without” in connection with the care to be bestowed, since the words are intended to cover respectively both Donna Anguisola’s intention and exterior action, and her children’s interior dispositions and visible acts.

(3) Conclusion of the letter.

“But pray indeed to His Majesty that He may give you grace so great as to enable you to abandon all things interiorly. Here is the point in which all perfection consists. And I will pray to Him for this, in union with yourself. I most certainly desire, for my part, that your generous heart may have no other delight but God. And do you convert that human consolation which men are wont to take in their children, into a great desire that they may cleave to God; that they may not offend Him, and that they may bear His Majesty in their hearts. And when those things have been actually effected, do you then take the greatest delight in them, whilst mortifying that merely human pleasure which men take in the mutable prosperity of their children, in the most pleasing consolation which arises from their company, and in such-like things. And, from such a course of action, various advantages will follow. First, you will, I think, be thus doing what is most pleasing to God; next, you will be most useful to your neighbour; and lastly, your Ladyship will have carried off a great victory over your own self.”

Here we can trace two close parallels to special points of Catherine’s practice and teaching. In the doctrine that the point of all perfection consists in the interior abandonment of all things, we get but a re-statement of Catherine’s teaching as to God’s love being practicable everywhere; and in the advice to practise interior mortification in the matter of resting in the consolation of her children’s company, we have not only a parallel to Catherine’s early and transitory convert practice, but also an application to human intercourse of Catherine’s, and indeed also Battista’s, continuous and ever-growing practice of detachment from sensible consolations in the soul’s intercourse with God.[355]

We can hardly doubt that this letter was as effectual in keeping Donna Anguisola within the limits of family duties, as the letter of forty-six years before had been in bringing back Dottore Moro to the world-wide spiritual family of the Ancient Church.

2. Letter to Padre Collino, 1576.

And we have next a letter, written in 1576, when she was seventy-nine, to that Father Serafino Collino at Cremona, to whom, five years later, she was to write the truly classical account of her father, which has been the main source of our study of that heroic figure.

And indeed already in this letter she preludes, as it were, to that outburst of filial praise, by first dwelling here upon the effects of her father’s life as they were maturing visibly around her. “A very spiritual, wise, and noble person,” writes Battista, “has been visiting me; and in the course of talk she asked me, ‘Well, and what did you think of the great miracles that God has been working during these times of acute conflict, in this our city—miracles such as no one ever heard of throughout the course of ancient Roman history or in connection with any other warfare?’ And I, knowing well that this person has three Doctors of Theology living continuously in her house, guessed that these men must have carefully scrutinized and examined the whole matter. So I simply asked, ‘What miracles do you mean?’ And she answered me, ‘The city has been for so long a time in arms, a prey to the good and to the wicked, to the wise and to the mad, and has been affording the greatest possible opportunity for acts contrary to justice. And yet, throughout the city within the walls, no one has ever been offended,—no man, in his person; no woman, in her honour; and no man or woman, in their possessions.’”

And then Battista comments on her visitor’s declaration. “As to their persons, all men went about in the city with swords drawn and erect, and spoke injurious words to those of the opposite party. And it really seems as though their hands were tied, for they used their tongues indeed but not their hands; not one drop of blood has been spilt. Within the city two homicides were, no doubt, committed during this time, because of a difference on a point of honour; but none on account of party spirit. Similarly outside of Genoa the son of Signer Antonio d’Oria was killed—not by the opposite party, but by another nobleman like himself,—they had come to words. As to female honour, the women went and came to visit each other, and frequented Mass, whether they belonged to one party or to the other; and the greater number of gentlewomen went out of Genoa, accompanied by their daughters, passing through the very midst of the city, and going down the wharf to get on board their boats; and yet never was any discourtesy shown to any one of them. Similarly, with regard to possessions: quantities of these were sent out of Genoa; great masses of them were deposited in the Monasteries—and yet never even a trifle was ever taken. On this latter point we of this Convent can bear direct witness. For although so much property and money was brought to the Monastery delle Grazie, that it became difficult to move about the house because of the quantity of cases and stray boxes deposited there, nevertheless not even to the poor carriers who brought them was the slightest violence done, although they had to pass through all those drawn and raised swords; nor was a single word said to us Nuns, who appeared in the gateway to receive the goods.”[356]

Now the well-informed lawyer, Professore Morro, thinks that all this was the direct result of Ettore Vernazza’s far-sighted and devoted philanthropy. And he is no doubt right. For we still possess the entries, in the Cartulary of St. George, of the great works carried out by that powerful Banking Body, in conformity with and by means of Ettore’s directions and moneys, amongst Genoa’s teeming poor and sick and ignorant, in the years 1531 and 1553.[357] Indeed even the printed documents bring the administration of this great, ever-growing fund down to the year 1708.

And the points that here concern the character of Battista are this her omnipresent and yet bashful pride in her large-hearted father; her virile joy in the public good; her immensely sane and direct tastes as to the city’s improvement; and her glad finding of a miracle in things thus readily verifiable, universal, interior, and yet profoundly operative in the visible work-a-day life of man. There is something strikingly modern in this severely social, and already more or less statistical, way of testing improvement, an improvement which is found here, not in any vaguely assumed increase of impulsive or perfunctory almsgiving in the one class, or of dependence and passivity in the other, but in the closely scrutinized proofs of a remarkable growth in general self-respect, self-maintenance, public spirit and sense of social interdependence, on the part of all parties and classes.

And in the daughter’s judgment concerning all this it is again easy to trace a likeness to her father, with his careful regulations for a great Register of the Poor, and his provisions for harbour-works and the embellishment of the city. But Catherine’s spirit is also present, with its emphatic insistence upon God’s love as practicable everywhere, and upon truth as, of its very nature, public-spirited and meant for all.[358]

3. Second letter to Padre Collino, 1581.

And five years later still (she was now eighty-four) Battista writes her long account of her father’s life, which we studied in connection with him, but which would well deserve a detailed analysis from the standpoint of the daughter’s dispositions, so keen and large, so tender, true and immensely operative, long after most men have died, or are living on in a selfish second childhood.

V. Battista’s Death, 1587.

And then at last, six years afterwards, at four o’clock in the afternoon of May 9, 1587, Pope Sixtus V being Pope and Mary Stuart having but six months still to live, Battista died in her Convent, fully three generations old. During her last years she had been allowed to communicate daily, and had thus, at the end, added one more trait of resemblance to her God-mother, who, as we know, had, for some thirty-five years of her life, found her greatest strength and consolation in this the simplest, most central and deepest of all the Christian devotions and means of Grace.[359]

One hundred and forty years had now passed since the birth of Catherine, and seventy-seven since her death. It is indeed time that we should, having accumulated so much material, proceed in the next volume to an examination and exposition of the underlying spiritual facts and laws specially brought home to us by the group of lives we have been studying, and of which the central figure was that, for us, largely elusive but immensely suggestive, many-sided and yet rarely beautiful, soul and influence, which the Church venerates as St. Catherine of Genoa.

CONCLUSION
WHEREIN LIES THE SECRET OF SPIRITUAL PERSUASIVENESS

1. Only a life sufficiently large and alive to take up and retain, within its own experimental range, at least some of the poignant question and conflict, as well as of the peace-bringing solution and calm: hence a life dramatic with a humble and homely heroism which, in rightful contact with and in rightful renunciation of the Particular and Fleeting, ever seeks and finds the Omnipresent and Eternal; and which again deepens and incarnates (for its own experience and apprehension and for the stimulation of other souls) this Transcendence in its own thus gradually purified Particular: only such a life can be largely persuasive, at least for us Westerns and in our times.

We would thus have an attempt, ever renewed, ever widening, ever deepening, at the formation of, as it were, a concrete, living, breathing image of the Abiding and the One; of Law, Love, and Duty; of God: an image formed out of the seemingly shifting, shrinking flux, and the apparently shapeless mass of our actual, bewildering human manyfold; our flesh and sweat, and tears and blood, our joy and laughter, our passions and petty revolts, our weariness and isolations. Attend primarily to minimizing or eliminating all such friction and pain; to being clear, materially simple and static, a fixed Thing, rather than vivid, formally unified, and dynamic, a growing Personality: or again, let the friction be so great, or the courage and fidelity so small, as to lead to the break-up of all genuine recollection and harmonization; and, in the former case, such a character or outlook may be considered “safe” or “correct” or “sensible”; and, in the latter, the character and outlook will not be consolidated at all, or will be breaking up: but in neither case will the life be persuasive. For to be truly winning, the soul’s life must become and must keep itself full and true.

2. Now it is simply false that man can, even for his own self alone, hold spiritual reality, even from the first, in a simply passive, purely dependent, entirely automatic and painless fashion; or that he can, even at the last, possess it in a full, continuous and effortless harmony and simultaneousness.

God no doubt holds all Truth and Reality as one great Here and Now, or rather He possesses them entirely outside of space and time; nor can we attribute to Him directly any interior conflict, effort, or suffering. And, again, we ourselves too possess within our minds an element and an apprehension of the Abiding and the Simultaneous; and their rudiments operate within us, if all-diffusively yet most powerfully, from the very first. Indeed the continuous increase in definiteness and influence of that element and of its apprehension here, and the indefinite expansion and continuously conscious possession of this same element hereafter, are respectively the highest aim and fullest achievement of our spiritual life. And finally, the further the soul advances, the more it sees and realizes the profound truth, that all it does and is, is somehow given to it; and hence that, inasmuch as it is permanent at all, it is grounded upon, environed, supported, penetrated and nourished by Him who is its origin and its end. Here all the soul’s actions tend to coalesce to simply being, and this being, in so far as there and then acceptable to the conscience, comes more and more to be felt and considered as the simple effect of the one direct action of God alone.

And yet as to God, some kind and degree of Incarnational doctrine is necessary, and is indeed (in varyingly perfect or imperfect forms) the common property of all higher religion; and Christians have learnt to think the profound thought, of God Himself being in a mysterious closeness to even our most secret perplexities and inarticulate pain.—And by ourselves, poor weaklings, that vast, continuous Simultaneity and Harmony of God can only be more and more nearly approached, if, upon our mostly shadowy, and (when at all clear) our short-lived consciousness of an inchoate simultaneity and harmony of our own, we work an orderly successiveness, and attempt a Melody: an humble, creaturely imitation of the Eternal, Spaceless Creator, under the deliberately accepted conditions and doubly refracting media of time and space. Real temptation, true piercing conflict, heavy darkness, and bewildering perplexity; the constant encountering (as a necessary condition and occasion of all growth) of numberless and multiform remoter risks of failing and of falling: all this forms an essential part of this painful-joyous probation and virile, because necessarily costing and largely gradual, self-constitution of man’s free-willing spirit.

And the place and function, in all this spiritual growth-in-conflict, of Science, both in its most determinist and apparently most anti-spiritual mood, and in its subtler though no less destructive-seeming attitudes, will turn out, we shall find,—now that our generation is getting to know Science’s special scope and implications,—to be of simply irreplaceable value and potency.

And though, in the other life, our earthly pain and temptation are to be no more, we may be sure that, even there, the essential characteristics of our nature will not be reversed. Hence we may be able, later on in this book, to hazard some not all-ungrounded conjecture as to the possible substitute and form in Heaven for what is essentially noble and creaturely in our sufferings and self-renunciations here on earth.

And lastly, though God’s action in all things in general, and in our individual soul in particular, be more and more recognized as all-pervasive in proportion as the soul advances: yet this action will have to be conceived as operating in and through and with our own; as in each case finding, in one sense, its very matter, in another, its very form, in our own free-willings. For Spirit and spirit, God and the creature, are not two material bodies, of which one can only be where the other is not: but, on the contrary, as regards our own spirit, God’s Spirit ever works in closest penetration and stimulation of our own; just as, in return, we cannot find God’s Spirit simply separate from our own spirit within ourselves. Our spirit clothes and expresses His; His Spirit first creates and then sustains and stimulates our own. The two, as regards the inner life of the human soul, rise and sink together. But more as to this too hereafter.

3. We shall indeed, throughout the next volume, have ample opportunities for noting how numerous, definite, far-reaching and at all times operative, even though still but partially unfolded, are the evidences for, and the consequences and applications of, such a fundamental conception, as they are furnished and required by all deeper human life; hence, above all, by Religion; and in Religion, again, specially by its ever largely elusive, yet ever profoundly important, constituent, the Mystical Element.

APPENDIX TO PART II
CHRONOLOGICAL ACCOUNT AND CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE MATERIALS FOR THE RE-CONSTITUTION OF SAINT CATHERINE’S LIFE AND TEACHING.

There is the law of contemporary, simultaneous, spontaneous variation of apprehension. Vernazza and Marabotto, writing down, at the time of their occurrence or communication, certain facts and sayings with an equal self-oblivion, sincerity, and truthfulness, give us apprehensions which, in great part objectively valuable, are, nevertheless, more or less differing pictures of one and the same fact or saying, or different selections from amongst the moods and manifestations of one living personality observed by them.—There is the law of posterior, successive, reflective variation of elaboration. The Dominican Censor and Battista Vernazza, re-thinking Catherine and her teaching, in other times and away from her direct influence, necessarily see her differently again: they are, as it were, spiritual grandchildren, who rather themselves absorb her and re-state her to their generation than they are themselves absorbed by her.—And there is the law of conservation, juxtaposition, and identification. First the Redactor of the Book of 1528-1530, and lastly the Redactor of that of 1551—probably, both times, Battista—with, in between, in 1547, the Redactor who attempted a quadripartite reschematizing of the Life—could not but try and soften the variations produced by the two other laws.

2. The third law tends to confuse the operation of the other two.

And note how it is precisely this third law and stage which largely tends to make the effects of the two other laws into causes of vagueness, confusion, and scepticism. For instead of conceiving the unity and identity of the subject-matter (a deep spiritual personality) as essentially inexhaustible, and as requiring, for its least inadequate apprehension, precisely both those simultaneous and spontaneous, and those successive and reflective experiences and reproductions of it, as furnished by the two other laws, this stage tends to confuse the identity of the apprehended subject-matter with a sameness in the apprehension of it; and, whilst thus robbing that subject-matter of its richness and movement, to introduce an element of arrangement and timidity into the originally quite naïf, and hence directly impressive, evidences of the observers. Yet the instinct and object of this third law is as legitimate and elementary as are those of the other two, since a real unity and utilization of all the preceding variety is as necessary as the variety to be thus integrated, and since the other two laws show a similar variety of actuation throughout religious literature.

3. Examples.

We find (to move in Church History back from St. Catherine) these three tendencies at work in the constitution of the Life and Legend of St. Francis of Assisi, A.D. 1181(?)-1226, traced for us now, with so much sympathy and acumen by M. Paul Sabatier and the Bollandists. We get them again in the case of St. Thomas of Canterbury, A.D. 1118-1171, especially in that of his Death and Miracles, so carefully studied in Dr. Edwin Abbot’s remarkable book (1898). And, once more, in those Merovingian Saints, the great Martin of Tours in their midst, at the end of the fourth century, whose Lives have been so interestingly described by Bernouilli (1900). And we find them, with especial clearness, in the growth of the Life of St. Anthony, about A.D. 250-356, as contained in Palladius’s Historia Monachorum, now that Abbot Cuthbert Butler has given us his admirable analysis and edition of that deeply instructive compiler (1898, 1904).

If we take the Bible, we find (on moving here in a contrary direction) these laws again at work in the elucidation and elaboration of the great figure of Moses and of his world-historic life-work. For if here we get but little that can claim to be by his pen, or even, as literature, to be contemporaneous with him (since the earliest Corpus of Laws, the Book of the Covenant, reaches probably only in its substance back to him), yet here, too, the earliest consecutive descriptions of his life, by the Jahvist and Elohist writers, give us two different, though probably more or less simultaneous, largely naïve, accounts and impressions of his life and work. And these simultaneous variations are followed, later on, by the successive, increasingly reflective variations and developments of Deuteronomy and of the Priestly Code. And lastly, these documents get constituted (in probably two great stages), by Redactional work, into the great composite History and Legislation of our present last four Books of Moses.—So again with David. We have the David of some few of the Psalms; the David of the Books of Samuel, in a double series of most vivid and spontaneous, more or less simultaneous but somewhat differing, accounts; the David of the greater part of the Psalter, the result of a long process of devout successive reflection and re-interpretation; and the David of the Books of Chronicles, where pragmatic systematization reaches its height.—And so too with the Maccabean Heroes, whose history appears, apprehended with varying degrees of contemporary, simultaneous, spontaneous vividness, and of subsequent, successive, reflective pragmatism, in the documents and redactional settings of the First and Second Books of Maccabees.—And the growth indicated in these three cases covered respectively some eight hundred, seven hundred, and one hundred years.

But it is, of course, in the New Testament that the interest and importance of these laws reaches its height. If here we once more move backwards, the case of St. Paul (martyred A.D. 64) furnishes us with parallel contemporary accounts of the spontaneous type, in his own Epistles and in the six “We”-passages by the eyewitness St. Luke in the Acts of the Apostles; whilst the remaining account in the Acts is doubtless by a later, more reflective and pragmatic, writer.—And in the apprehension and interpretation of Our Lord’s inexhaustible life, character, teaching, and work, we find very plainly the three tendencies and stages. We get the contemporary, simultaneous, spontaneous stage, in the cases of the Aramaic annotations of the Apostle Levi-Matthew, which we still possess, translated and incorporated both in the larger and later book, our canonical Greek St. Matthew, and in the corresponding parts of our St. Luke; and in the reminiscences of another eyewitness, presumably St. Peter, given us by a disciple in what is still the substance of our Canonical St. Mark. We get the posterior, successive, increasingly reflective or contemplative stage, chiefly in the two great types furnished, first by the Pauline, and then by the Joannine writings. And we get the juxtaposing, unifying, largely identifying stage and law operating above all in the, partly successive, Canonization of the New Testament Corpus. And these three stages can be taken as having their downward limits in about A.D. 30, 100, 200; so that here we cover a period of some hundred and seventy years.

4. Three different attitudes possible.

And, in all these and countless other cases, we can take up three different attitudes: the impoverishing, sectarian, “purity” attitude; the destructive, sceptical, “identity” attitude; or the fruitful, truly Catholic “approximation” and “development” attitude. The first attitude assumes (ever in part unconsciously) the possibility and necessity of a purely objective apprehension of Personality, of such a Personality being a static entity, both in itself and in its effects upon, and its apprehendedness by, other souls, and of the earliest among the observations concerning such a Personality ever giving us such a purely objective, exhaustive picture and experience, or at least the nearest approach (in all respects) to such an exhaustive objectivity. The third attitude would so understand the admitted identity of the Personality observed as practically to identify also the simultaneous and successive observers and observations, and to eliminate all variety and growth in that spirit’s own inner life and in its apprehension by other minds. Only the second attitude would, by recognizing both the constant, necessary presence of a subjective element in all these simultaneous and successive apprehensions, and the indefinite richness and many-sided apprehensibleness of all great spiritual Personalities, welcome and draw out all the difference in unity of these many “reactions,” as so many means, for a growing soul, towards a growing knowledge of that life and character, whose very greatness is, in part, measurable by the depth, variety, and persistence of these several effects, pictures, and embodiments of itself in different races, times, and souls.