ST. CATHERINE AS AN AUTHOR.
The literary phase of Catherine's career and character, especially as seen in her letters, is by no means its least curious and suggestive aspect. The indications of what she herself was, and yet more, the evidences obtainable from them of the undeniably exceptional and extraordinary position she held among her contemporaries, are valuable, and yet at the same time not a little puzzling.
Her works consist of a treatise occupying a closely printed quarto volume, which Father Raymond describes as "a Dialogue between a Soul, which asked four questions of the Lord, and the same Lord, who made answer, and gave instruction in many most useful truths;" of her letters, three hundred and seventy-three in number; and of twenty-six prayers.
This Dialogue is entitled, "The book of Divine Doctrine, given in person by God the Father, speaking to the mind of the most glorious and holy Virgin, Catherine of Siena, and written down as she dictated it in the vulgar tongue, she being the while entranced, and actually hearing that which God spoke in her." It is stated to have been dictated by the Saint in her father's house in Siena, a little before she went to Rome, and to have been completed the 13th of October, 1378. This dialogue has been divided into five parts, though no such division existed in it, as it fell from her lips. The first part treats of Discretion; the second of Prayer; the third of the Divine Providence; the fourth of Obedience; and the fifth of Consummate Perfection. The four first exist in manuscript in the original Italian, as they were taken down from the lips of the entranced Saint; though these ancient manuscript copies abound, we are told by the modern editor of them, Girolamo Gigli, with such errors as frequently not only to alter the sense, but to render it inconsistent with true orthodoxy. Of course nothing but the purest doctrine could have been uttered by the Saint, and these dangerous errors have been corrected. But the fifth treatise is not extant in the original, but only in Father Raymond's Latin translation of it, from which the published Italian version has been re-translated.
The French oratorian, Father Casimir Oudin,[23] in his Supplement of Ecclesiastical writers, omitted by Bellarmine, quietly says, "She wrote, or Raymond de Vineis wrote in her name, a work inscribed," &c. &c. It is very possible, that the Frenchman's suspicion may be just. But, with the exception of some allusions and subtleties, indicating, perhaps, a greater acquaintance with scholastic theology than the Saint may be thought to have possessed, there is nothing in the work itself to belie the origin attributed to it. It could not, indeed, have been written down from the Saint's dictation, as it professes to have been, in the form and sequence in which we have it printed; because it is intermingled (without any typographical or other advertisement, that the reader is about to enter on matter of a different authorship and pretensions)—with long passages descriptive of the Saint's mode of receiving the revelation, written in the person of the secretary, and bearing a strong likeness to Father Raymond's style and phraseology. But the Saint's own utterances are exactly such as might have been expected from such a patient, and much resemble in many respects those which many readers have probably heard in these latter days, from persons in all likelihood similarly affected in greater or less degree. As the latter have often been found to bear a singular resemblance in quality and manner to the verbose and repetitive inanities of some very slenderly gifted extempore preacher, so these ecstatic outpourings of St. Catherine are like the worst description of the pulpit eloquence of her day and country. Low and gross as the taste and feeling of the age were, especially in matters spiritual and theological, it is difficult to imagine that Catherine could have gained any part of the great reputation and influence she undeniably exercised in high places from this production. The reader may see from the following passage, taken quite at haphazard from its pages, whether his impression on this point agrees with that of the writer.
Catherine dictates these sentences as hearing them word for word as she repeats them, from the mouth of God!
"Know, O daughter! that no one can escape from my hands, because I am He, who I am; and ye do not exist by yourselves, but only in so far as ye are created by Me, who am the Creator of all things that have existence, except only Sin, which does not exist, and therefore has not been created by me. And because it is not in me, it is not worthy of being loved. And therefore the Creature offends, because he loves that which he ought not to love, which is sin, and hates Me, whom he is bound and obliged to love; for I am supremely good, and have given him existence by the so ardent fire of my love. But from Me men cannot escape. Either they fall into my hands for justice on their sins, or they fall into my hands for mercy. Open therefore the eyes of your mind, and look at my hand, and you will see that what I have said to you is the truth." Then she raising her eyes in obedience to the supreme Father, "saw enclosed in his hand the entire universe," &c., &c.[24]
It is evident, that this could not have been written from the Saint's dictation. But the work may have been composed from notes taken down while she poured forth her trance-talk. And such an hypothesis would not be incompatible with Oudin's supposition, that the book, as we have it, was composed by Father Raymond. In any case the staple of its contents, if not inferior to the generality of the theological literature of the time, shows at least no such superiority to it as to place the author in the high and exceptional position Catherine is proved to have occupied.
Twenty-six prayers have been preserved among the works of Saint Catherine; and it might be supposed, that such a record of the secret outpourings of an ardent heart in its communion with the infinite God, sole object of its fervent aspirations and daily and nightly meditations, would have been calculated to throw considerable light on the character, capabilities, and mental calibre of the worshipper. But these documents afford no glimpse of any such insight. They are not the sort of utterances that could ever bring one human heart nearer to another: and no assimilating power of sympathy will enable the reader of them to advance one jot towards a knowledge of the heart from which they proceeded. The impression they are calculated to produce, is either that the Saint was a self-conscious actor and pretender, or that they are not her compositions. And the latter, perhaps, may be considered the more probable hypothesis.
Though addressed in form to the Deity, there is little that can be accurately called prayer. The speaker, or writer rather, seems continually to forget his avowed object, and runs off into long statements of the nature and attributes of the Deity, and ecclesiastical propositions based thereon, evidently prompted rather by didactic views on mortal hearers, than by effort to hold communion with the Almighty. It is all dry, cold, repetitive, verbose theology, instead of the spontaneous warm utterances of either a thankful or a contrite heart;—neither the expression of an earnest spirit, nor the production of an eloquent writer.
There remain the letters, by far the most interesting and valuable of the Saint's reputed works. They are 373 in number, and form two stout quarto volumes of the Lucca edition. In the four octavo volumes of the cheap Milan reprint before mentioned, only the first 198 are given; though there is no word of notice or explanation to indicate, that the work is not complete. On the contrary, the fourth volume is entitled "fourth and last;" and we are left to the hopeful conjecture, that the devout editors found the speculation so bad a one commercially, that they thought fit to close the publication suddenly, and leave their subscribers to discover as late as might be, that they had purchased an imperfect book.
The 373 letters of the entire collection have among them many addressed to kings, popes, cardinals, bishops, conventual bodies, and political corporations, as well as a great number written to private individuals. And it seems strange, that among so many correspondents of classes, whose papers are likely to be preserved, and many of whom, especially the monastic communities, would assuredly have attached a high value to such documents, no one original of any of these letters should have been preserved.
Girolamo Gigli, the editor of the quarto edition of the Saint's works, printed at Lucca and Siena, in 1707–13, an enthusiastic and laborious investigator and collector of every description of information regarding her, gives in his Preface to the letters, a careful account of the manuscript collections from which they have at different times been printed, but has not a word to say of any scrap of original document. "As soon," he writes, "as the saintly Virgin had ascended to heaven in the year 1380, some of her secretaries and disciples collected from one place and another some of her letters and writings." But the words which follow this seem to indicate that even these earliest collectors did not possess any of the original manuscripts, but made copies of them, in most cases probably from other copies. "The blessed Stefano Maconi," he says, "having transcribed the book of the Dialogue, added at the end of it some epistles; and another larger collection was made, also by him as I think, in a certain volume which exists in the library of the Certosa at Pavia. Buonconti also collected not a few, as may be seen by an ancient copy in his writing, which was among the most notable things left by the Cardinal Volunnio Bandinelli, and now belongs to the Signor Volunnio, his nephew and heir. We have another abundant collection in an ancient manuscript preserved in the library of St. Pantaleo at Rome; and this is one of the most faithful of all those I have seen in its orthography and style; and as far as can be judged by the character of the writing, the scribe must have been contemporary with the Saint. But the blessed Raymond of Capua, her confessor, left to the Dominicans of Siena two very large volumes of her letters neatly copied out on parchment, in which nearly all those collected by the others are contained. And these most precious documents are rendered more valuable by the testimony given to their authenticity by the blessed Tomaso Caffarini in the above cited reports made at Venice."[25]
The epistles were first printed by Aldus in 1500, just 180 years after Catherine's death, and afterwards in many other editions, all, according to Gigli, exceedingly incorrect, and requiring much critical care both in the restoration of the text to its original Tuscan purity, and in the arrangement of the letters, as far as possible, in their due chronological order. This, however, is made subsidiary in Gigli's edition to a division of them according to the persons to whom they were addressed. Thus those to the two Popes, Gregory XI. and Urban VI., come first; then those written to cardinals; then those to bishops and other ecclesiastical authorities; and lastly those to private individuals.
And this is the substance of all the Sienese editor has to tell us respecting the texts, manuscript and printed, on which his own has been formed. But the Saint's confessor, and one or two of her disciples, have recorded some circumstances respecting the lost originals of these letters which require to be noticed.
It is stated in perfect accordance with all probability, that Catherine had never learned to read or write, as was in those days the case with the great majority of women in stations of life far superior to her own. Her biographer's account of her miraculously acquiring the power of reading by sudden endowment has been related in the preceding chapter. And at a later period of her life we are told that she similarly acquired the power of writing, "in order that she might be able," writes Girolamo Gigli in his Preface to the Letters, "to carry out the office of her apostolate by more agencies than one, and in more places than one, at the same time, Christ gave her by a wonderful method the use of the pen, in the short schooling of a trance, and by the teaching of St. John the Evangelist, and of the blessed Doctor, Aquinas, as the Saint herself affirms in a letter to the above-mentioned blessed Raymond her confessor."
One of the most interesting points of inquiry in the life of St. Catherine turns on the question, more fully examined in a subsequent chapter, how far was she, or was she not, entirely sincere in her statements and pretensions. Now if she makes the statement attributed to her respecting her acquisition of the art of writing, it must be concluded that she was guilty of wilful imposture. No possible self-deception could have misled her as to the fact of her previous ignorance of writing, and as little as to that of her writing after the trance. It will be well therefore to observe accurately what she really does say herself upon the subject. In 1377, when she was in the thirtieth year of her age, after her return from Avignon, and before her final journey to Rome, she was inhabiting a villa belonging to the noble Sienese family of Salimbeni, situated on an isolated eminence overlooking the road to Rome, and called "Rocca d'Orcia." Hence she wrote a very long letter—the longest probably in the whole collection—occupying, as it does, twelve full octavo pages—to Father Raymond; and concludes it with the following lines.
"This letter, and another which I sent you, I have written with my own hand from this isolated fortress, with many sighs and abundance of tears, so that seeing with my eyes, I did not see. But I was full of admiration at myself, and at the goodness of God, considering his mercy towards creatures, who have reason in them, and his providence, which abounded upon me, giving and providing me with the aptitude for writing for my comfort, I having been deprived of that consolation, which by reason of my ignorance I knew not. So that on descending from the height (does this mean 'on coming out of my trance,' or 'on leaving this fortress?') I might have some little vent for the feelings of my heart, so that it should not burst. Not being willing to take me as yet out of this darksome life, God formed it in my mind in a wonderful manner, as the master does to the child, to whom he gives an exemplar. So that, as soon as ever he was gone from me, together with the glorious Evangelist John, and Thomas Aquinas, sleeping I began to learn."
Now the entire value of this incident in the eyes of the fourteenth, and the entire incredibility of it in the eyes of the nineteenth century, and consequently its stringency as evidence against the sincerity of St. Catherine, depends on the length of time intervening between the moment when she began to learn in her sleep, and that at which she first wrote. All her own admiration of herself and of God's providence in the matter, all her own belief in miracle, and her beginning to learn in her sleep, we may admit without founding thereon any impeachment of her sincerity. Nor need we be accurate in taking the sense of her statement, that she then began to learn. Most people would find it difficult to say when they began to learn most things. And on the other hand the phrase would seem to express, that she did not complete her learning to write in that same trance. We have other indications also of a gradual advance in the art. The long letter, in which the Saint makes the above statement, is certainly not the first product of her new acquirement. She speaks of having written a former letter to the same correspondent. But neither was that her first writing.
In the evidence given by the Beato Tomaso Caffarini on the occasion of the examination of her pretensions to canonization, he deposes: "I further testify, that I heard from Master Stephen,[26] of Siena," by means of letters from him, how that this Virgin, after that she miraculously learned to write, rising up from prayer with a desire of writing, wrote with her own hand a little letter (litterulam), which she sent to the said Master Stephen, and in which was the following conclusion, written, that is to say, in her own vernacular: "Know, my son, that this is the first letter, which I ever wrote;"—much such a first attempt as the most unmiraculously taught of penmen might be likely to make.
Consistently then with all that Catherine distinctly asserts on the subject, we may believe, that despite her ready credence of her own environment with the supernatural at every moment of her life, the only miracle on the occasion of her newly acquired power of writing was worked by that intensely strong will, which works so many miracles in this world, and which all Catherine's history shows her to have eminently possessed.
The same witness further testifies that the above-mentioned Stephen informed him that Catherine had after that frequently written in his presence both letters and some sheets of the book[27] she composed in the vulgar tongue, all which writings he—Stephen—had preserved in the Carthusian convent of Pontignano near Siena, over which he presided. And there, according to Girolamo Gigli, "they were known to have been in existence for many years, until, not long ago," says he, writing in 1707, "they were transported to Grenoble, at the time when the monks of Pontignano, as well as all those of the Carthusian order, were obliged to send all their papers to the Grande Chartreuse." And so they vanish out of our sight.
Further Caffarini testifies, that he saw and had in his own possession at Venice a prayer, written miraculously, as he says, by Catherine, with a piece of cinnabar, immediately on waking from a trance; meaning, apparently, that trance, during which she obtained the faculty of writing. He gives the prayer in Latin prose. But Gigli says that it ought to be written in the Tuscan as verse, in the manner in which it is printed by Crescimbeni in the third volume of his "Volgare Poesia," as follows:—
"O Spirito santo, vieni nel mio cuore;
Per la tua potenzia trailo a te, Dio:
E concedemi carità con timore.
Custodimi Christo da ogni mal pensiere,
Riscaldami e rinfiammami del tuo dolcissimo amore,
Sicchè ogni pena mi paja leggiere.
Santo il mio padre, e dolce il mio Signore,
Ora ajutami in ogni mio mestiere,
Christo amore, Christo amore."
This writing, in cinnabar, Caffarini declares is "now," 1411, in the Dominican nunnery at Venice. But this also has shared the ill fortune which seems to have attended every scrap of the Saint's writing. For Gigli states that all his efforts to obtain any tidings of it in his own time had been in vain.
A few other letters are recorded to have been written by her own hand, especially one to Pope Urban. But it is admitted, that the great bulk of the letters were written by her secretaries, of whom she seems to have kept three regularly employed, besides occasionally using the assistance of several other of her companions and disciples. A few of the letters are recorded to have been dictated by her, when in a state of trance or extasy; but there is nothing in either their matter or manner to distinguish them from the rest. Whatever may have been the true physical characteristics of these trances, it is perfectly clear, that the mind which dictated the letters in question, was pursuing the habitual tenor of its daily thoughts, neither obscured nor intensified by the condition of the body. They are neither more nor less argumentative, neither more nor less eloquent, than the others of the collection. And it seems strange, that the same state of abstraction from all bodily clog or guidance, which so often left her mind impressionable by visions and hallucinations having to her all the vivid reality of material events, should on other occasions have been compatible with the conduct of mental operations, in no respect differing from those of her ordinary waking state. But it is to be observed, that the authority on which it is stated, that these letters were dictated by the Saint in a state of extasy, is only that of her amanuenses; and that, admitting them to have been of perfect good faith in the matter, nothing is more probable, than that, all agape, as they were ever for fresh wonders, and evidences of Saintship, any trifling circumstance, such as long continuance in the same attitude, or closed eyes, may have been considered sufficient evidence of trance.
The very high reputation, and that not altogether of a pietistic or ecclesiastical nature, which this large mass of writings has enjoyed for several centuries has appeared to the present writer an extremely singular fact. It will justify him however in occupying some pages, and the reader's attention with a translation[28] of one of the most esteemed of the collection. Be it what it may, it can hardly be otherwise than interesting to any reader to see a specimen of compositions, said to have produced so widely spread and important results, and praised by so many men of note; and the means, which it will give him of comparing his impressions of it with those of the writer, will in some degree lessen the diffidence with which the latter must express an opinion wholly at variance with so large a quantity of high authority.
A great deal of the praise bestowed on St. Catherine's writings by Italian critics has reference to their style and diction. Written at a time when the language, fresh from the hands of Dante, of Petrarch, and of Boccaccio, was still in its infancy, and in a city in all times celebrated for the purity of its vernacular, they have by the common consent of Italian scholars taken rank as one of the acknowledged classics of the language;—"testa di lingua," as the Tuscan purists say. The Della Cruscans have placed them on the jealously watched list of their authorities; and an enthusiastic Sienese compatriot has compiled a "vocabalario Caterineano," after the fashion of those consecrated to the study of the works of Homer and Cicero. Of course no one from the barbarous side of the Alps can permit themselves any word of observation on this point. Had no such decisive opinion been extant to guide his ignorance, it might probably have seemed to a foreigner, that the Saint's style was loose in its syntax, intricate in its construction, and overloaded with verbosity. But we are bound to suppose, that any such opinion could be formed only by one ignorant of the real beauties of the language: especially as we know how great and minute is the attention paid to diction by Italian critics.
But these philological excellences are after all the least part of the praise that has been lavished on Catherine as an author. Her admirers enlarge on the moving eloquence, the exalted piety, the noble sentiments, the sound argumentation of her compositions, especially her letters. And it is not from an Italian, or a Dominican, but from a French Jesuit and historian, Papire Masson, that we have the following enthusiastic praise of that letter more especially, which it is intended to submit to the reader of these pages.
"Several epistles are extant," writes this sixteenth century Frenchman, "from Catherine of Siena to Urban, and one to King Charles V., written on the 6th of May, 1379, to uphold that Pope's cause. And certainly nothing more weighty or more elegant could have been conceived or written by any man of that time, not even excepting Petrarch, whose genius I admire, and whose works I generally prefer to those of any other writer of that age."
To the present writer such an opinion appears perfectly monstrous, and wholly unaccountable on any simply literary consideration of the matter. It may be admitted to be no little extraordinary that a poor dyer's daughter in the fourteenth century should write these letters, such as they are; that she should possess so much knowledge of the general state of Church politics in Europe, as they evince; and most of all that having popes, kings, and cardinals for her correspondents, she should be listened to by them with respect and attention. Even to the Pope, she on more than one occasion ventures on a tone of very decided reproof; and it should seem, that Urban VI., a choleric and violent tempered man, received from her in good part communications couched in language such as rarely reaches Papal ears. "The blessed Christ," she says, in writing to Urban of the vices of the ecclesiastics, a topic to which she returns again and again, "complains of this, that his Church is not swept clean of vices, and your Holiness has not that solicitude on the subject which you ought to have." Again, when there had been riots in Rome, in consequence of the Pope having failed to keep certain promises he had made to the people, she "humbly begs him to take care, prudently to promise only what it will be possible for him to perform in its entirety."
All this is curious enough, and abundantly sufficient to prove that Catherine was an influential power in her generation. It will be the business of a following chapter to offer some suggestions as to the explanation of this remarkable fact. But let the causes of it have been what they may, it is difficult to suppose that they can be found in the persuasive eloquence, or literary merit of her appeals to those in power.
CATHERINE'S LETTER TO THE KING OF FRANCE.
The letter selected as a specimen of the vast mass of the Saint's correspondence is perhaps the most specially celebrated of the whole collection. It was to Charles V. of France, on the 6th of May, 1379, on the subject of the favour shown by him to the party of the Anti-pope Clement VII., and runs as follows:—
"Dearest father in sweet Christ Jesus, I Catherine the slave of the servants of Jesus Christ, write to you in his precious blood, with the desire to see in you[29] a true and entirely perfect light, in order that you may know the truth of that which is necessary to you for your salvation. Without this light, we shall go into darkness; darkness which will not permit us to discern that which is hurtful to the soul and to the body, from that which is useful to us; and thus destroys the perceptions of the soul, so that good things are made to seem bad, and bad things good, that is to say, vice. And those things, which lead us to sin, appear to us good and delightful; and virtue, and that which leads us to virtue, appears to us bitter and of great difficulty. But he, who has light, knows well the truth; and accordingly loves virtue, and God, who is the cause of all virtue; and hates vice, and his own sensuality, which is the cause of all vice. What is it, that takes from us this true and sweet light? The self-love which a man has for his own self, which is a cloud that obscures the eye of the intellect, and hides from the pupil the light of the most holy faith. And thus a man goes as one blind and ignorant, following his own frailty, wholly given up to passion, without the light of reason, even as an animal, which, because it has no reasoning powers, allows itself to be guided by its own sensations. Great pity is it that man, whom God has created in his own image and likeness, should voluntarily by his own fault make himself worse than the brute animal, that like an ungrateful and ignorant creature, neither knows nor acknowledges the benefits of God, but attributes them to himself. From self-love proceeds every evil. Whence come injustice, and all the other faults? From self-love. It commits injustice against God, against itself, against its neighbour, and against Holy Church. Against God it commits injustice, in that it does not render glory and praise to his name, as it ought to do. To itself it does not render hatred and dislike of vice, and love of virtue; nor to its neighbour benevolence; and if it is found in a ruler, it does not do justice to its neighbour, because it does so[30] only according to the pleasure of human creatures, or for its own natural pleasure.[31] Nor to the Church does it render obedience, or assistance, but continually persecutes it. All is caused by self-love, which does not permit a man to know the truth, because he is deprived of light. This is very manifest to us, and we see it, and have proofs in ourselves every day that it is so.
"I would not, dearest father, that this cloud should take the light from you; but I wish that there should be in you that light, which is able to make you know and discern the Truth. It appears to me, from what I hear, that you begin to allow yourself to be guided by the counsel of evil men; and you know, that if one blind one leads another, both fall into the ditch. So will it happen to you, if you do not find some better remedy than what I hear of. It is a matter of great wonder to me, that a Catholic man, who is willing to fear God, and to be manlike, should let himself be guided like a child, and should not see how he leads himself and others into so great ruin, as is the contaminating the light of the most Holy Faith according to the word and counsel of those whom we see to be members of the devil, corrupt trees, whose faults are manifest to us by the poison of heresy they have recently disseminated, saying that Pope Urban VI. is not truly Pope. Open the eye of your mind,[32] and see that they lie in their throats,[33] may be put to confusion by their own showing, and be seen to be worthy of heavy punishment, from whatever side we turn ourselves. If we turn to those, who, as they say, elected Urban Pope from fear of the fury of the people, they say what is not the truth, since they, in the first instance, had elected him by an election so canonical and orderly, that never was any other supreme pontiff so elected. They in truth gave out, that they proceeded to elect for fear the people should rise, but not that from this fear they elected Bartholomew, Archbishop of Bari, who is now Urban VI. And this much I confess is the truth, and do not deny it. He whom they elected by fear was the Cardinal of St. Peter,[34] as is evident to every one; but the election of Pope Urban was made in a legitimate manner, as has been said. This election they announced to you, and to us, and to the other rulers of the world, manifesting by their deeds, that which they told us in words, doing reverence to him, that is to say, adoring him as Christ on earth, and crowning him with all solemnity, and by remaking anew the election with great unanimity. From him, as from the supreme Pontiff, they besought favours, and used them. And if it were not true that Urban is Pope, but that he has been elected under the constraint of fear, would not they be worthy eternally of confusion? That the pillars of Holy Church, set up for the spreading of the faith, should for fear of bodily death, be willing to consign themselves and us to eternal death, by showing us as our father one who was not so. And would they not be thieves, taking and using[35] that which they had no right to use? Indeed, if that were true, which they now say, as true it is not, still Urban VI. is truly Pope. But fools and blinded madmen as they are, they have shown and given to us this truth, and hold a lie for themselves. This truth they confessed so long as his Holiness delayed to correct their vices. But as soon as he began to attack them, and to show that their wicked mode of life was displeasing to him, and that he was minded to put an end to it, they immediately raised their heads. And against whom have they raised them? Against the holy faith. They have acted worse than renegade Christians.
"Oh! miserable men! They and those who follow them know not their own ruin; for if they knew it, they would seek the Divine aid; they would acknowledge their fault, and not be obstinate as the devils, as devils they in truth appear, and have taken on them the office of such. The office of the devils is to pervert souls from Christ crucified, to withdraw them from the way of the truth, to lead them into lies, and to gather them through pain and through punishment to himself, who is the father of lies, giving them that fate which he has for himself. In like manner these men go subverting the truth which they themselves have given us; and returning to lies, have introduced division into the whole world. And that evil which they have in themselves, that they propose to us. Have we the will to know thoroughly this truth? Let us look now and consider their life and conduct, and what following they have of themselves, who are followers of the vestiges of iniquity; since one devil is not contrary to another, but on the contrary they agree together. And pardon me, dearest father (for such I will consider you, as long as I see you to be a lover of truth, and confounder of lies), for I speak thus, because grief for the damnation of them and of others, and the desire I have for their salvation, causes me to do so. I say this not in disparagement of them, as God's creatures, but in disparagement of vice and of the heresy which they have sown throughout the world, and of the cruelty of which they are guilty towards themselves, and towards the humble souls that perish by their means, for which they must give an account to the Supreme Judge. For if they had been men having the fear of God, or if not the fear of God, respect for the opinion of the world, they would patiently have borne the worst that Pope Urban could have done to them, or even greater contumely, and would have preferred a thousand deaths to doing what they have done; for to greater shame they cannot come, than to appear to the eyes of mankind schismatics, and heretical despisers of the holy faith. If I look to spiritual and corporeal loss, I see them by heresy deprived of God as regards his mercies, and in the body reasonably deprived of their dignities; and they themselves have done it. If I look to the Divine judgment I see it close upon them, if they do not lift themselves out of this darkness; for every fault is punished, and every good deed is rewarded. It will be hard for them to kick against God, if they possessed the greatest possible human power. God is the supreme strength, which fortifies the weak who confide and trust in Him. And it is the truth; and the truth is that which makes us free. We see that only the truth of the servants of God follows,[36] and holds this truth of Pope Urban VI., confessing him to be truly Pope, as he is. You will not find a servant of God, who is a servant of God, that holds the contrary.[37] I do not speak of such as wear outside the garment of lambs, but inside are ravenous wolves. And do you suppose that, if this were not the truth, God would endure that His servants should walk in such darkness? He would not endure it. If He endures it in the wicked men of the world, He would not endure it in them; and therefore He has given them the light of His truth, for He is no despiser of holy desires but is the accepter of them, like a kind and merciful Father as He is. I would that you would call to you such men as these, and cause them to declare this truth to you; and that you would not choose to walk so ignorantly. Let not your private interest move you; for that would be worse in you than in any other. Have pity on the many souls which you cast into the hands of the devils. If you will not do good, at least do not evil; for evil frequently turns more to the hurt of him who does it, than of him whom the doer of it wishes to injure. So much evil comes of it, that by it we lose the grace of God, temporal wealth is consumed, and the death of men follows from it. Alas me! And it does not seem that we[38] see the light; for the cloud of self-love has taken from us the light, and does not let us see. For this reason we are apt to receive any evil information, that may be given to us against the truth by lovers of themselves. But if we have the light it will not be so; but with great prudence and holy fear of God, you would be willing to know and investigate this truth by means of men of conscience and knowledge. If you choose, ignorance need not fall upon you, since you have where you are the fountain of knowledge,[39] which I fear you may lose if you continue in your present course; and you know well how your kingdom will fare, if they shall be men of good consciences, who will not follow a human will with servile fear, but will maintain the truth. They will declare it to you, and will put your mind and soul at rest. Now act not so any more, most dear Father! consult your own conscience; think that you must die, and that you know not when; put before the eye of your intellect, God and his truth, and not interest, or love of country; for as regards God, we ought not to make any difference between one country and another, since we all proceed from His holy mind, are created in His image and likeness, and redeemed by the precious blood of His only-begotten Son. I am certain that if you have light you will do this, and will not wait for time, for time does not wait for you; and will invite them[40] to return to their holy and true obedience, but otherwise not. And for this reason I said that I desired to see in you a true and perfect light, in order that with the light you may recognise and love and fear the truth. My soul will then be made happy by your safety, at seeing you come out from so great an error. I say to you nothing further. Remain in the holy and sweet love of God. Pardon me if I have been too heavy on you with my words. My desire for your safety urges me to say them to you by my mouth in your[41] presence, rather than by writing. May God fill you with His most sweet grace. Jesus is sweet; Jesus is love."[42]
Such is the composition pronounced to be unsurpassed for weight of reasoning and eloquence, and to be equal to the writings of Petrarch! Can it be supposed that, putting out of the question any influence exercised by the character of the writer, any human mind was ever persuaded to do or to think anything by such an address? As argument it is surely worse than in any other point of view. With the exception of the passage pointing out the insincerity of the cardinals who raised objections to the election of Urban, there were perhaps never strung together so many absurdly glaring instances of begging the question. And as for rhetorical power, surely in this waste of pleonastic phrases, redundant tautology, and trite common-place hack-preacher's topics, there is no faintest trace even of that untaught eloquence which strong feeling and earnest conviction are apt to command.
And yet looking at the matter in hand from the fourteenth century point of view, what a subject it was to call forth an awful and heart-stirring appeal! If a true Pope be anything, how tremendous and infinitely horrible a phenomenon must an Anti-pope be. Think of the adulteration of the infallible with the fallible, of the doubts engendered, where certainty is imperatively needed, of the sacraments nullified, and the one half of sacred Christendom cheated into eternal perdition, as the necessary result of void ordinations, void baptisms, and void absolutions, and think for a moment how Petrarch, or still better how Dante, would have written on such a subject!
But Catherine must have sincerely believed that her utterances were the utterances of inspiration, and must necessarily have effect as such. For that she bestowed on this long and important letter none of the ordinary care and labour which such a composition would naturally claim from a merely human author, is curiously shown by the record which has preserved the fact, that the Saint dictated three other long letters on the same 6th of May on which she composed this! It is recorded also that she occasionally dictated as many as three letters to three secretaries at the same time. Her biographer and commentators consider the excessive outpouring of words one of the most remarkable proofs of her supernatural claims and powers. And more sceptical minds may admit it as at least a proof of wonderful energy, and indomitable strength of volition.
DUPE OR IMPOSTOR?
The official accredited story of this undoubtedly extraordinary and exceptional woman contains, as has been sufficiently seen, a large number of statements, which probably every reader of these pages will, without hesitation, pronounce to be false. Many of the events stated to have happened undoubtedly never did happen; but the question will still remain, how large a portion of the tale must be deemed fraudulent fiction by those who cannot believe things to have happened which contradict the known laws of nature. And when this shall have been answered as satisfactorily as may be under the difficult circumstances of the investigation, it will yet remain to be decided who is to be deemed to have been guilty of fraud.
Before entering on these questions; it may be just suggested to the reader,—as a caution to be borne in mind, not as a point intended to be dwelt on in considering the matter,—that we are perhaps not altogether so well aware what are the laws of nature in the case of persons afflicted as Catherine was, as some of us are apt to imagine.
Looking at the matter, however, from the most ordinary points of view, it may perhaps be found, that as regards Catherine herself, it is not so necessary to consider her an impostor, as it may at first sight of the matter appear.
Of the austerities, mortifications, and abstinences recounted, all perhaps may be admitted to have been possible,—especially bearing in mind that Catherine's life was neither a long nor a healthy one—except the fasting for years, and the sleeping only one quarter-of-an-hour per diem. As to the fasting, it is mentioned incidentally in another part of Father Raymond's book, that she was sustained only by the sacramental bread, which she seems to have been in the habit of taking daily. May it not be possible, that the idea of her living without food, may have been generated by some talk of hers, in quite her usual strain, of this Holy Eucharist being her only nourishment, etc., etc., meaning spiritual nourishment? But then was Father Raymond deceived by any such expressions? Did he really believe that she lived for years without taking food? For in his account, no mistake of meaning is possible. He, at all events, intends his readers to believe the simple fact in its naked absurdity.
As for the sleep, it maybe remarked that in the case of a person subject to daily trances and states of insensibility, it is very difficult to say how many hours are passed in sleep, and what is sleep, and what not.
In the next place, all the relations of visions seen in "extasy," and of conversations held, and sensations suffered during them, may—due consideration being given to what we know of the patient—be accepted as not only possible but exceedingly probable. And this category will comprise the greatest part of the whole budget of wonders. Even in those cases, in which an abiding evidence of what had happened to her in trance is said to have remained appreciable only by her own senses, as in the case of the marriage ring, and the pain after the infliction of the stigmata; those most able to form an opinion on such matters, will not think, probably, that it is attributing too much to the imagination of a cataleptic patient, living on raw vegetables, wholly without active occupation, and engrossed by a series of highly exciting thoughts on one ever-present subject of a mystical and transcendental nature, to suppose that she may have in all sincerity imagined herself to see and to feel as she described.
Of many of the miracles, including some of those most insisted on and boasted of by her biographer,—as for instance of the restoration of her mother to life,—a natural explanation, not necessarily involving any intentional falsehood, is so obvious, as to need no pointing. And others may, without any great improbability, be referred to mistake, inaccuracy, or exaggeration. On the whole, I do not think that the evidence constrains us to convict Catherine of falsehood or imposture in her miraculous pretensions. The impression of her innocence of this cannot, however, I think, be stated in any more forcible form. Few persons, probably, will obtain from an impartial consideration of the story, any satisfactory conviction that she was wholly sincere. We find her guilty of falsehood to her mother at an early period of her life, when she represents herself as frequenting certain hot baths with a different purpose than the real one, which was to burn herself by their heat, as a means of discounting eternal burning hereafter. This deception is related by her confessor as a holy and praiseworthy act. And the whole tenor of his morality, and of that of the school to which he belongs, forbids the idea, that a high reverence for truth, as truth, formed any part of their teaching. There is nothing in all we know of Catherine, either from her own writings, or from those of her biographer, to indicate that her spiritual conceptions, religious system, or theory of morals, differed in any respect from the standard orthodoxy of her time and country. We find no more elevated notions of Deity, no saner views of duty, no nobler beau-ideal of human excellence. Her history may be regarded as the culminating expression of the ascetic divinity of that age. She lived wholly surrounded by, and devoted (very literally) body and soul, to a fiercely fanatical community, eager and conscientiously bound to advance their system and the glory of their order by all and every means. Their thoughts were her thoughts, their interests her interests, and their views of all things in heaven and earth, her views. And it must be admitted, that these considerations make it very difficult to suppose, that she would have felt the least scruple in lending herself to any scheme of pious fraud, which might appear calculated to promote the "glory of God," and of the order of St. Dominic. If she could have felt any such scruple, she assuredly would have been far in advance of the moral theories and feelings of her day; and this, as has been seen, there is every reason to think that she was not.
The same consideration of the story, as it has been handed down to us, which, despite the suspicion that a pupil of Father Raymond and the Dominicans of the fourteenth century could not have had any very strict ideas of the sacredness of truth, leads us nevertheless to believe it more probable that Catherine was no conscious impostor, by no means points to the same conclusion respecting the monk, her biographer and confessor. Of course he could have had no means of ascertaining the reality of the visions she represented herself to be in the daily habit of seeing, beyond the natural probabilities of the case. And it is likely enough, that the cataleptic trances and convulsions witnessed by him, may have appeared to him, as to the generality of his contemporaries, the signs and consequences of supernatural communion with, and especial favour of, heaven. But there remain other portions of the narrative, in which facts are stated as having occurred within the writer's knowledge, which he must have known to be untrue. He could not have been deceived into supposing that Catherine lived for many years without food, though her own expressions on the subject, as has been pointed out, may have been equivocal. In one passage of her letters, referred to as containing authority of her own for the statement, the Saint, in speaking of the bodily sufferings she had recently endured, says that her body remained without food. But she says no word to indicate how long her fast lasted, and the reference is clearly a dishonest one.
Among the vast number of miracles related, it is difficult to find cases on which a charge of wilful fraud against the Dominican biographer can be safely pressed to conviction. In so many instances mistake may have been possible. In so many others, whatever he may have been inclined to believe in his own heart, he had no means of testing with certainty the truth of her statements to him; and, therefore, cannot be convicted of falsehood for repeating them. He may have believed them to be real facts. But one case of fair conviction is enough; and that we have in the statement of the total abstinence from food for many years. It should seem then, that although we may acquit Catherine of conscious deception, we must believe her confessor,—the Barnum, who "brought out" the wonder, introduced her to the world, and reaped the profit of her,—to be a rogue and impostor.
Such a subject as this enthusiastic strong-willed cataleptic girl, was a rare and most valuable catch for the Dominican Order, and was to be turned to the best account accordingly. A real producible miracle-working Saint, who did veritably pass daily into a state of rapt extasy, and whose excitable and diseased brain was in that state ever prompt to impose on her imagination as realities whatever phantasmagoria of hallucinations her ghostly instructors chose to ply her waking fancy with, was a treasure calculated to bring much grist, spiritual as well as temporal, to the Dominican mill. In that remarkable case of the stigmata, which so admirably supplied the sons of St. Dominick with exactly what they needed, to enable them to hold their own against the rival Order of the Stigmatised St. Francis, how readily may be conceived the sort of conversation and suggestions, which must have prepared the mind of Catherine to reproduce the miracle for them as soon as her infirmity should set free her imagination from the world of reality!
And this capability of being played upon, rendered her, it is to be observed, a far more valuable instrument in the hands of those who touched the keys than if she had been a mere accomplice of imposture. Such an every-day cheat would hardly have accomplished the feats, and held the position, which are the most remarkable facts in this strange story, and which present an enigma, that requires some examination in the closing chapter of it.