Let us, then, betake ourselves to a systematic examination of one example of these world-wide three laws: the trouble taken will be well spent.
Had I found room to print my notes in justification of the text adopted by me, the reader would have gained some idea of the exceeding complexity of the materials furnished by the printed Vita e Dottrina. Indeed the original Preface to that book (1551) finds it necessary to conclude with the words “we therefore” (because of the book’s utility, indeed necessity, “in these turbulent times”) “beg the devout reader not to be disturbed” (stomacharsi now changed to meravigliarsi) “if he finds here matters which appear to be out of their proper order” (non ben ordinate), “and which are sometimes repeated; since attention has been given, neither to much precision” (distinzione), “nor to the order of events, nor to elegance of form, but only to that truth and simplicity with which its facts and discourses were gathered by devout spiritual persons” (“her Confessor and a Spiritual Son of hers”) “from the very lips of that Seraphic Woman.” Both the praise and the blame of this pregnant sentence will appear to be most fully deserved.
In our Second Part we have, in imitation of all experience in life itself, been thrown in medias res, and have thus gained some general idea and curiosity as to the sources of our knowledge; in this Appendix we will now, without repeating details already given, take this evidence, as much as possible, in its chronological order. And at each stage I shall attempt so to analyze the evidence of that stage, as to be able to use it as a check and test of the evidence of the next stage.—We shall, however, have to bear in mind that this method has necessarily, at each earlier stage, somewhat to beg the question; for, in order to make its meaning everywhere sufficiently clear, it has from the first to assume a confidence of tone, which can be justified only by the whole argument, and which therefore has its logical place only at the very end.
This Appendix shall consist of two Divisions, of seven stages and eight sections respectively. The first Division gives the dated Documents, or such as can readily be restricted to within certain years; and the second Division analyses the remaining, undated Corpus and attempts to fix its origin and value.
The documents of the first stage are all legal papers, and entirely contemporary and authentic. They have to furnish the skeleton which receives its clothing of flesh from the other documents. I shall here describe only those not described in Part II, and shall refer back to that Part for those already described there.
There is, first, a deed of August 27, 1456. From amongst the shares belonging to Pomera (formerly) wife to (the late) Bartolommeo de Auria (Doria), but now (Sister) Isabella, in the convent of St. David; at the instance of Andrea de Auria, her only son, her heir, and of Francesca, the mother of Catherine, daughter of Jacobo de Fiesco: two shares of the Bank of St. George (£200) are set apart, for the benefit of the said Catherine, for her marriage, if she marries according to her Mother’s advice.[360] Note how early (Catherine is not yet nine years old) her mother, Francischetta (so a note to the copy of this document, no doubt correctly, calls her, and suspects Pomera to have been her sister), is thinking of Catherine’s marriage; and how, although Catherine’s father is still alive, nothing is said as to his consent, perhaps simply because, this money coming from a maternal aunt and cousin, only the mother’s wishes are considered to be important here.
There is, next, Catherine’s marriage settlement, made “at Genoa, in the quarter of St. Laurence, to wit in the sitting-room (caminata) of the residence of Francisca, formerly wife to the late Don Jacobo de Fiescho,” “with the public street in front, the house of Urbano de Negro at its right, and that of Sebastiano de Negro at its left and back”; “in the evening of Thursday, January 13, 1463”; between Giuliano Adorno, son of the late Don Jacobo, on the one hand, and Francisca, mother of Caterinetta and Jacobo and Giovanni de Fiesco, brothers of the same. Giuliano thereby pledges himself to give Catherine on their marriage, £1,000, and he “mortgages to her,” up to this amount, “a certain house of his own, situate in Genoa in the quarter of St. Agnes, with the public street in front, the house of Baldassare Adorno at the right hand” (it belonged before this to Don Georgio Adorno), “and on the other hand the public street.” And Francesca, Jacobo, and Giovanni promise to pay Giuliano, in bare money and in wedding outfit for Catherine, £400 on completion of the marriage, and another £400 in the course of the following two years; and they mortgage to him, up to this amount, the house in which the settlement is being made. Giuliano is to be free to live with his wife and her family in this same house, for these first two years after his marriage, without any payment.
At this date, then, Giuliano is already fatherless, and Catherine’s brother Lorenzo is still too young to have any legal voice in the matter. Although Catherine is, after the first two years, not guaranteed anything beyond £1,000 capital, or say £40 a year income, her outfit is a handsome one.
Then there is Catherine’s first Will, June 23, 1484, after twenty-one years of marriage. She is “lying” although “fully herself in mind, intellect, and memory,” yet “languid in body and weighted down by bodily infirmity, in the room, her residence, in the women’s quarters of the Hospital of the Pammatone,” which “she has inhabited for a considerable time (jamdiu).” “And knowing herself to be without children, and without hope of future offspring,” she leaves the life-interest in her marriage-dowry of £1,000 to her husband, Giuliano; bids divide up, at his death, the bulk of this capital between the Hospital and her eldest brother Jacobo (£300 to each), and her two younger brothers Giovanni and Lorenzo (£150 to each); and orders her body to be buried in the Hospital Church.[361]
Ten years, then, after her Conversion, Catherine had already been living for a considerable time within the Hospital. They do not as yet occupy a separate building, or even a set of rooms within the Hospital; and, though both live within it, they evidently occupy separate rooms in different parts of the great complex of buildings; for the room here mentioned is simply Catherine’s (camera residentiae testatricis, where residentiae must be a descriptive and not a partitive genitive), and forms part and parcel of the women’s wards (in domibus mulierum). Her absence of hope as to offspring evidently arises primarily from the life of continence she is leading. Yet this latter determination is clearly not caused by any specific knowledge of her husband’s past infidelity: for Thobia must have been now some ten years old, yet there is no kind of mention of her; whilst, later on, Catherine never fails to remember her, with one exception to be presently explained. There is no mention of nephews and nieces, doubtless because her brothers were, as yet, either unmarried or childless, or, at least, daughterless. She is fairly well off, for besides this possession of £1,000 she gets her room and board free, and Giuliano has still some property of his own more considerable than hers. And the share left by her to relations is large—£600—as over against £300 to a public charity (the Hospital), and £100, presumably, for the funeral, minor charities, and Masses. If she says nothing, as yet, as to burial in the same grave with her husband, this is doubtless because she herself appears now to be the one likely to die first.
There is, fourthly, the first and last Will, October 20, 1494, of “the Reverend Sir, Brother Giuliano Adorno, professing the Third Order of St. Francis, under the care of the Friars Minor Observants,” already described on pages 151, 152. The will is drawn up in the “sitting-room” (caminata) of the “habitation” of the Testator. Now the Notary, Battista Strata, in a foot-note to a first draft of an (unfinished) Will of Catherine, writes: “On the day on which I drew up Don Giuliano’s”; which words (owing to a multiplicity of converging indications) can only refer to this Will of October 2, 1494. And in this draft Catherine leaves legacies to the servants Benedetta (Lombarda) and Mariola Bastarda, as “abiding with, and dwelling in the house with, Testatrix.” It is clear then that, by now, Catherine and Giuliano are living under the same roof, in a distinct house within the hospital precincts, with two personal attendants for their common use. They will have moved, out of their separate single rooms, into this house, upon Catherine becoming Matron, in 1490. In this draft there appear also, for the first time, her brother Jacobo’s two daughters (£100 each); and her sister, the Augustinianess Limbania (£10).
There are, next, certain minor documents of 1496-1497, which modify points of previous Wills and clear up details of her life. Thus, on June 17, 1496 Catherine signs a deed of consent to the sale of the Palace in the S. Agnese (Adorni) quarter.—On January 10, 1496, Giuliano, “sane in mind although languid in body,” orders, in a Codicil, that Catherine shall carry out, according to the directions of a certain Friar Minor, a vow made by himself to St. Anthony of Padua; notes that the Palace has been sold; and declares that she is to be free to annul, amend or diminish, according to her own judgment, his legacy of £500 to the Hospital.[362] And, in the Cartulary of the Bank of St. George, Catherine’s name appears as an Investor: on July 14, 1497 as “wife of Giuliano Adorno”; but on October 6 as “wife and testamentary heiress of the late Giuliano Adorno.”[363] These entries were considered on page 149 note. On the second occasion she orders that the Bank shall, after her death, annually pay over the interest of the fourteen shares (£1,400), now bought by her, to the Hospital of the Pammatone, in return for “the enjoyment and usufruct of a house and a greenhouse (viridario) of (within) the said Hospital,” which had been conceded to her for her lifetime. The sum (about £56 a year) thus ceded by her is a handsome one, as she had, by now, well earned the use of this house by her constant labours for the Hospital, including her matronship from 1490 to 1496. I take it that she was again thinking of Thobia; so that this relatively large sum would cover at least part of the Hospital’s expenses incurred for this poor girl.
This has been studied on pages 152-154.
These have been studied on pages 155, and 168, 169.
These have been described on pages 172-174; and 175, 176.
These have been described on pages 185-187; 202, 203; and 212-214, respectively.
We have thus described all the fifteen documents which alone still bear dates within the range of Catherine’s lifetime, and whose contemporaneousness is above all challenge. They all have the pedantic, at first sight unmoving, indeed repulsive, form of legal documents. Yet the substance of quite ten of them undoubtedly proceeds from Catherine; and they all give us a most precious, precise certainty with regard to many cardinal points of locality, date, sequence, and self-determination in her life. True, neither the day, nor even the month, of her Birth or Baptism; nor the year of her Conversion; nor the date of the beginning of her Daily Communions; nor the facts as to the rarity or frequency of her Confessions; nor the day or month of Giuliano’s death, have been recoverable by any contemporary attestations. But on other points we thus possess a series of absolutely reliable documents, ranging from 1456 to 1510, whose testimony nothing can be allowed to shake.
And this first stage of the evidence is followed by a second, as dry and legal, and as absolutely reliable, as the other; yet which still does not refer to any chronicle or notes of her life, (as either already extant or as in process of registration or radaction), but only to the fate of her remains and to certain turning-points in the lives of her disciples and eyewitnesses. I note here only those documents which fix for us the dates of the beginning of her Cultus, and which give us the latest contemporary proof for those persons being still alive.
1. We get thus the Hospital Account for the Moneys spent on the Religious Clothing of the Maid-Servant Mariola Bastarda, July 7, 1511; the entry in the Hospital Cartulary of the expenses incurred for the transport of stone and for a picture, in connection with the first opening of Catherine’s Deposito, July 10, 1512; the account, in the same book, concerning the funeral of Don Jacobo Carenzio, who had died occupying Catherine’s little house within the Hospital precincts, on January 7, 1513; a Will of the little widow-attendant Argentina del Sale, of January 15, 1522; and the Will of Don Cattaneo Marabotto, still “in good bodily and mental health,” May 11, 1526,—a document drawn up in his dwelling-place, the house belonging to his friends, the Salvagii.[364]
2. And to this group we can add four further dates, the first and last two of which are completely certain. Ettore Vernazza died on June 26 or 27, 1524; the year is fixed by the great plague epidemic which carried him off, and the month and day, by his daughter’s letter. Cattaneo Marabotto died, there is no reason to doubt, in 1528. Catherine’s Dominican cousin and close friend, Suor Tommasa Fiesca, died, eighty-six years of age, in 1534. And Battista Vernazza died, aged ninety, on May 9, 1587.[365]
Hence, up to eighteen years after her death, the two closest of Catherine’s confidants were alive; whilst one who had known her, and had been thirteen at the time of Catherine’s death, was still alive seventy-seven years after that event.
Our third stage is in strikingly manifold contrast to the other two. It is represented by but one single, largely vague and rhetorical, but human and directly psychological, document; and is the first that tells us of a Life.
Monsignore Agostino Giustiniano, Bishop of Nibio, published his Castigatissimi Annali … della Republica di Genova, in Genoa, in 1537. There, on p. 223, he tells us that he was born (of socially distinguished parents) in that city in 1470. And under the date of 1510 (p. 266) he writes: “And in the month of September, it pleased God to draw to Himself Madonna Catarinetta Adorna, who was daughter of Giacobo di Flisco, Vice-Roy of Naples for King René, and wife to Giuliano Adorno, with whom she lived many years in marital chastity. And her life, after the Divine goodness had touched her heart in the years of her youth, was all charity, love, meekness, benignity, patience, incredible abstinence, and a mirror of every virtue, so that she can be compared to St. Catherine of Siena. And all the city has participated in, and has perceived, the odour of the virtues of this holy matron, who, when rapt in the spirit, spoke, amongst other matters, of the state of the souls that are in Purgatory, things excellent and rare and worthy of being attended to by such persons as have a taste for the religious and spiritual life. Her body is deposited in the Oratory of the larger Hospital, and offers a spectacle no less admirable than venerable, appearing (come che sia) all entire with its flesh, so that she looks alive,—as though she had been placed there to-day; and yet full twenty-five years have passed since she began to lie there dead. The great consciousness of God, the special virtues, the saintly deeds, accompanied by an immense love, which were manifested by this venerable matron, would furnish matter well worthy of being recorded here. Yet we shall pass them over, for the sake of brevity; especially since a book worthy of respect (un digno libro) has been composed, concerning these things exclusively, by persons worthy of confidence (digne di fede).”
Now this is a statement which we have every reason to trust. For Bishop Giustiniano, himself a native of Genoa, forty years of age at the time of Catherine’s death, was a man of education, of solid character, and of social position; who, throughout his long book, is uniformly truthful and generally accurate; and who had here no conceivable reason for inventing or seriously misstating the few facts alleged by him. These facts, as regards the matter in hand, are three: that she spoke of various (evidently various spiritual) matters, and, amongst these, of the state of the souls in Purgatory; that a Book was extant at the end of 1535, which concerned itself exclusively with Catherine; and that persons worthy of trust had produced this Book.
(1) Giustiniano knows of no writings of hers: she had not written, but had only “spoken excellent and rare things,” and she had done so “when rapt in the spirit.” The exaggeration here (for when in ecstasy, she spoke nothing, or but a few broken words at most) is interesting, since it probably grew up as an explanation of, and consolation for, her not having herself written anything; since during the ecstasy she would be incapable of anything but speech, and out of the ecstasy she would not remember the sights and sounds perceived during the trance. And yet, thus, what had to be written down by others, whilst she was in ecstasy, would be more precious, because more immediately “inspired,” than what she herself could have thought, remembered, and written down, in her ordinary psycho-physical condition.
(2) The Book, in existence at the end of 1535, not only contained sayings concerning the state of the souls in Purgatory, but must have contained these sayings already collected together in a separate chapter or division. For her sayings concerning this matter by no means form the larger, or the most immediately striking, part of her authentic teaching, taken as a whole; and only if already collected into a more or less separate corpus would they have been singled out in this manner.—But, if this reasoning is sound and proves the existence of the Trattato, already more or less separate as at present, similar reasoning will prove the non-existence of the Dialogo. For the Trattato, even in its present length, fills but fifteen large-print octavo pages; while the Dialogo fills ninety. It is practically inconceivable that the latter document, which can never have existed otherwise than more or less separately, should have been overlooked here, where another, so much shorter, and at first sight less authoritative, is dwelt on with emphasis.
(3) More than one hand had participated in the production of the Book. It is characteristic of the rhetorically loose phraseology of the times that the word “composto” is so used as to leave it quite uncertain whether several original contributors of materials and but one Redactor who constituted these materials into a Book are meant, or whether a succession of Redactors is already implied.
Certainly by this time the three chief eyewitnesses of her later earthly existence, Carenzio, Vernazza, and Marabotto were all dead, since respectively twenty-two, eleven, and seven years. Tommasa Fiesca had died in the previous year. Only Mariola Bastarda and Argentina del Sale, her old maid-servants, were probably still alive, from among the circle of Catherine’s constant companions; and Battista Vernazza, who was but thirteen when her God-mother died, had still fifty-two years to live. Yet we have to come still later down amongst extant documents before we can get any further evidence, whether external or internal, as to which of these persons, or who else (probably or certainly) wrote down the original contemporary notes; and as to who constituted these notes, (on one or on successive occasions) into this “Giustiniano-book,” as I shall call the manuscript “Vita e Dottrina,” extant in 1535.
The fourth stage of evidence is, as to its contents, the most important of all: but it is, as we shall see, twelve years younger: it belongs to the years 1547, 1548. It consists of two Manuscripts, the duodecimo-volume B. 1. 29 of the University Library; and the square octavo-volume of the Archives of the Cathedral Chapter, both in Genoa. Here, at last, we are face to face with an actual Life of our Saint. I have carefully collated them both upon the ninth Genoese Edition of the Vita ed Opere, Genova, Sordi Muti: the first MS., throughout, and the second one, sufficiently to make sure of its entire dependence upon the first. I have named them MS. A and MS. B respectively.
Manuscript A is very interesting. It opens out as follows: “Jesus. Here beginneth the book in which is contained the admirable life and holy conversation of Madonna Catherinetta Adorna.… This book was begun and written at the request of her Magnificent Ladyship, the Lady Orientina, Consort to the most magnificent and generous, illustrious Lord Adam Centurione, when she was being vexed by a grave and well-nigh incurable infirmity, during now already thirteen months, by a Religious of the Observance … on the 7th of October of the year fifteen hundred and forty-seven.”—And Catherine’s Life concludes with the words: “Laus Deo semper. This book was written at the request of the Consort, of happy memory, of the … Lord Adam Centurione, who lay vexed by a most grave infirmity, during now two years. Many a time she would sit and find consolation, in her most painful torments, by reading of the burnings (incendii) which were suffered, for so long a time, by this holy woman.… At the thirteenth hour of the fourth of February God took her to Himself. She, a few days before she passed away, begged me with tears, in the presence of the Magnificent Lady, the Lady Ginetta, her most beloved daughter, to finish that which I had undertaken to produce for her own self. And so it will be of use to the latter, and will help her to bear her pains and travails, which may the Lord alleviate, by giving her good patience.”—After this follow thirty pages; containing an Italian version of St. Bernard’s Sermon on the death of his Brother Gerard, (Chapter XXVI of his Sermons on the Canticle of Canticles). And the whole concludes with the words: “Finished in the year Fifteen hundred and forty-eight, on the thirteenth of February.”
We have here, then, very precise dates: this Life was written between October 7, 1547, and February 4-13, 1548, by a Franciscan Observant, first for the wife, and then for the daughter, of a Doge of Genoa.
Now the whole forty-two chapters of this Life, together with the Sermon, are engrossed throughout, in a careful and upright uncial script. On close comparison with the Printed Life the differences turn out to consist, either of vocabulary and dialect, of a simply formal kind; or of additions and variations in the subject-matter, of an exceedingly trite and would-be edifying character; or of a very few additional passages of genuine importance; or of divisions, transpositions, and lacunae—the latter mostly of a significant and primitive kind; or, finally, of one highly interesting change, effected in his own copy, by the copyist himself.
(i) Vocabulary.
The Observant’s vocabulary is a curious mixture of downright (late) Latin, old French, and modern Italian. So “pagura” (paura); “in si” (se, Fr. soi); “despecto” (dispetto); “alchuna,” “anchora” (alcuna, ancora); “lingeriare” (ligare, Fr. lier); “summissa” (sommessa, Fr. soumise); “una fiata” (una volta, Fr. une fois); “dido” (digito, o. Fr. doight).[366] Some of these and such-like forms no doubt stood in his Prototype. Thus, whilst he simply copies, he writes—“pecto” and “licet”; when he makes up sentences of his own, he writes “petto” and “abenchè.” And his single Chapter XIII has, on two pages, “per il che”; but, on its last two pages, it has the elsewhere universal “perochè” (perchè).—Yet his language is, upon the whole, so uniform, whilst his sources (as we shall see) are so varied; and again his uniform language is in such marked contrast to Giustiniano’s educated Genoese Italian of 1535, and to that of the Printed Vita of 1551: that much of it, even where he is copying the substance of his Prototype, must be his own.
(ii) Worthless additions and variations, of two kinds.
The additions and variations are mostly of two kinds. They are either of a directly edificatory character. So the three pages descriptive of the devotion of the crowd, on occasion of the opening of the coffin, in the spring of 1512; the very general statement as to the miracles that occurred on that occasion; and, further back, the expansion (by this Franciscan scribe) of Catherine’s comments on (the Franciscan) Jacopone da Todi’s “la superbia in cielo c’è.”[367] And in one place, to produce edification by a sense of contrast, he adopts a touch of (doubtless legendary) gossip against Giuliano, for the heading of his Chapter XXIV runs: “How she comported herself towards her husband, who was very contrary to her temperament; and concerning her indefatigable patience in bearing with him, and even with the beatings which he gave her”;[368]—where the end marked off by me is no doubt the Observant’s own addition,—possibly, as we shall see, on the authority of Argentina del Sale.—Or these additions are introduced to minimize or ward off scandal. So when, after expanding the parallel between the conversions of St. Paul and Catherine, he adds: ‘“For He spoke, and they were (re-)made’ (Ps. xxxii, 9). But we must not curiously seek for the reason of this action”; and then proves his point by three further Biblical texts. So too when, after giving an abbreviated account of the contrast between Thommasina’s and Catherine’s rate of spiritual advancement, he again adds some Bible text and some moralizing of his own. And so again where, after reproducing the passage as to her being linked to God with a thread of gold, he expatiates, once more in Scriptural words, on the presence of filial fear and the absence of all servile fear within her. And so where, after following his Prototype (as still preserved in the Printed Life), and declaring his belief that it is reasonable and licit to believe her soul to have entered Heaven immediately after death, he continues: “Hence he who does believe this, does not lose in merit” (non demerita; an obvious litotes for “merits”), “and he who believes it not, does not offend.” In all these cases the Biblical texts appear in the Vulgate Latin.[369]
There can be no doubt that it is this slight recasting of the language, and this insertion of trite and timid moralizing of his own, which, together with the careful engrossing of his copy throughout, and its occasional pretty decoration and illumination, permitted the Observant to talk (although, even thus, in a manner most misleading for our present habits of language) of having “written this Book.”
(iii) Two genuine dates and accounts.
Yet, even amongst the passages which appear in his MS. as additional to the later texts, are two evidently genuine and suggestive dates and accounts. There is a description of Catherine’s great attack of “fire at her heart,” more full and primitive, and more definitely dated than any one of its many variants and echoes to be found in the Printed Life: the slip in the date (he writes November 11, 1506, when his own age-indications, and the position of the anecdote, clearly require 1509) will have had something to do with the strangely uncertain position of this episode in the Printed Life.[370]—And further back, in opening out the beautiful story of Marco and Argentina, he writes: “There being in the quarter of the Quay (contrada del Molo) one Marco del Sale, suffering from a cancer in the nose, who, fourteen months before his infirmity, had taken to wife a virtuous young woman named Argentina, spiritual daughter of Madonna Catherinetta, as is said above.”[371] This very precise distance of time, between that humble wedding and the poor navvy’s illness, will have been derived by the Observant from Argentina herself, probably still living at the time of his writing, even now hardly sixty years old.—Hence his long-winded addition, as to the mediation of the “spiritual daughter” (certainly Argentina), in the matter of our knowledge of Catherine’s prayer for the dying Giuliano,[372] may also have been derived from that gossipy little woman.
(iv) Divisions and transpositions.
As to the divisions and transpositions, the chief of these consist in the first six chapters of the Printed Vita appearing here broken up into (the first) ten chapters; in the MS. Chapters XI to XVI being gradually caught up by the Printed series,—indeed the MS. Chapter XVI corresponds to Chapters XVI to XVIII of the published book; in the Chapters XVII to XIX of the MS. corresponding to Chapters XX and XXI of the Print; and Chapters XX, XXI, and XXII of the MS., corresponding respectively to Chapters XXIV, XXV, and XXVII of the Print. Then for three Chapters follows considerable variation: the MS. Chapters XXIII, XXIV, and XXV hold the positions respectively of the Printed Chapters XXXVII, XLV and XLVI there. And then again there is likeness for three Chapters—MS. Chapters XXVI to XXVIII corresponding to Printed Chapters XXVIII and XXIX there. And once more three MS. Chapters (XXIX to XXXI), quite different in sequence to anything there, are followed by two Chapters (XXXII and XXXIII) corresponding to the Printed Chapters XXIX and XXX. Four more MS. Chapters (XXXIV to XXXVII), without any match, as to order, in the Printed book, are followed by two Chapters (XXXVIII and XXXIX), corresponding, respectively, to the beginning and end of Chapter XXXI there; and by Chapter XL, identical with the opening of Chapter XL and with Chapter XLI there. And, above all, Chapter XLI here, corresponds to the Dicchiarazione (Trattato) there; and is followed here by a final Chapter (XLII), made up of a bewilderingly different succession of paragraphs,—paragraphs which, in the Printed Life, stand in Chapters XLIX; XVII; and XLVIII to LII. And, whereas the first forty Chapters of this MS. average six or seven pages in length, Chapters XLI and XLII are respectively forty-five and forty-eight pages long.
(v) Lacunae.
These transpositions would alone suffice to show how complicated is the textual history of the Vita: we may have to consider some of them later on. But it is the lacunae which are especially interesting. One of these is quite certainly right, as against the printed text. Paragraphs 23 to 25 of Chapter L of the Print are wanting here. Those pages give an entirely fantastic, and formally vague, account of a supposed interior stigmatization of Catherine, and of a preposterous elongation of one of her arms,—both “facts” based explicitly upon the authority of Argentina.[373] And the circumstance of the scribe being a disciple of the stigmatized St. Francis, and the probability that Argentina was still accessible, conjoin to render the absence of these paragraphs from this MS. simply decisive against their historical character.—The longest of all the omissions, that of the Dialogo, must, even more, be explained on the ground of its non-existence at this time, or, at least, of its not being known to the Scribe, or again, of its having as yet no kind of authority. For not only does he make no use of, or allusion to this, very long, and (were it primitive) simply supreme document, but, as we shall find, quite a number of his facts contradict the Dialogo’s version of them; and we shall soon see that, had he known and esteemed the document, he would not have allowed such a defiance of it to remain without correction.
Over against these two non-appearances of spurious or secondary matter, we have to set three omissions of highly valuable material. The two interconnected, obviously entirely historical, paragraphs concerning Maestro Boerio,—his attempt to cure Catherine, and the excessive impression made upon her by his scarlet robes,[374]—are both wanting here. But we shall see that they were probably not incorporated in any Vita, till the preparation of the Printed Life of 1551.—Matters stand differently with respect to the third omission,—the beautifully vivid, inimitably daring and characteristic, Chapter XIX, containing Catherine’s dialogue with the Friar, who, according to the well-informed Parpera, was a Franciscan Observant.[375] It is impossible to hold that this, most historical and well-preserved, story did not stand in the Observant’s Prototype, or that it was otherwise unknown to him; its omission is doubtless deliberate and “prudential.”—An interesting instance of demonstrable omission on his part, is indeed furnished also by his version of the beautiful story of Suor Tommasa’s life: his abbreviation of it is so obvious and yet so unintelligent, that only a reference to the full account, which lay certainly before him and is still preserved in the Printed Life, makes any satisfactory sense of what he has retained.[376]
But the most interesting of all the differences between this MS. A of 1547 and the Printed Life of 1551 is another group of omissions, connected, as these are, with the one single modification introduced into his own text by the Scribe himself. The whole of the matter corresponding to the Printed Life’s Chapter XLIV (all but the first seven lines) and that corresponding to the first three paragraphs of its Chapter XLIX, which treat consecutively, and with an inimitable vividness and a daring, unreflective truthfulness, of her most unusual self-revelations to her Confessor Don Marabotto,[377] is omitted—possibly, again, in part at least, from fear of scandal; but more probably because, even at this time, this (the most private and consecutive) contribution to the Life, still existed separately, perhaps from all, and presumably from most, copies of the Vita then in circulation. And such a copy will have been the Observant’s Prototype.—Only when he had finished copying out his manuscript, will he have discovered that, if he would take any, even though silent, account of that contribution, which, by now, will have become known to him, he must, at all costs, break up and seriously modify one of his chapters. We have already studied the treble, most solemn affirmation, by Catherine and her Confessor themselves, in that Printed Chapter XLIV, as to her twenty-five years of spiritual loneliness and guidance by God alone;[378] and we have seen that (since we cannot place her Conversion before 1474, nor the beginning of her later practice of Confession after 1499) we are forced (if we take her words in their obvious sense, as applying to Confession as well as to Direction, and assume her First Convert-Period, the penitential time, to have been accompanied throughout by repeated Confessions) to make this first Period very short.
Now the volume of 1547, 1548, consists throughout of paper, all but the first three leaves and the tenth leaf, which are of parchment. The first leaf remains blank; the second contains the Observant’s Preface on its obverse; the third holds, on its two sides, the first two pages of the Vita. That Preface was certainly written before all the rest, or at least certainly during the lifetime of Donna Orientina Centurione, i.e. before February 4, 1548; nor does anything in those first two (parchment and paper) pages of text suggest that they are an insertion subsequent to the following (paper) pages. At first, then, the copy will have consisted of three parchment leaves, and then of nothing but paper leaves; and the Observant will have made the last of these parchment leaves the sole and opening parchment leaf of the text of the Book.
But matters stand differently with the tenth leaf, pp. 19, 20 of the MS., which begins with the words “bisogna, sono apparecchiata a confessar”—“(if) necessary, I am prepared to confess my sins in public” (Catherine’s words, on occasion of her Conversion); and ends with “(abru) savano insino al core. Poi fù tirata al Petto”—“Love, with those penetrating rays of its own, which burnt her, even to the heart. She was then drawn to the Breast” (narrative words which, in the scheme of her Life that follows upon the Conversion-story, mark the transition from one of this scheme’s stages to another).
Now here we have clear indications that these two parchment pages hold a modified text. For that last parchment-leaf word “Petto” is picked up, on the paper continuation, by “Pecto,” the ordinary form of the Observant’s Prototype: see his page 81. And the whole book (all but this parchment leaf and its highly restricted effects), still attributes four years to her First Convert-Period, her Penitential, Purgative Stage.
Indeed, this solitary parchment leaf itself still allows us to trace, (as though the leaf were a Palimpsest), both this, the original, length of that Period, and the fact of that Period having then been the first of three, and not, as now, of four such periods.—For this leaf, in finishing up the manuscript’s fourth chapter, the history of her Conversion,[379]—declares that “this sight (of her sins) and this contrition (for them) lasted fourteen months, during which she went on confessing herself, continually increasing her self-accusation (aggravando la colpa); after the passing of which months, all sadness was lifted from her, nor did she have any memory of her sins,—as though she had cast them into the depths of the sea.” And then, in the opening of the fifth chapter,[380] the scheme and conspectus of her Convert Life runs as follows. She is first “drawn to the feet of Christ” and abides there “one year until she had satisfied her conscience by Contrition, Confession, and Satisfaction.”—“She next felt herself drawn, with St. John, to repose on the Breast of her Loving Lord.… The sight of the sins committed by her against God would come to her, so that she would be, as it were, wild (arrabbiava) with grief, and would lick the ground with her tongue; and in this wise she appeared to derive relief for her tempestuous feelings (affannato cuore). And she abode thus for three years, during which she was, as it were, wild with grief and love, with those penetrating rays of its own, which burned her to the very heart.[381] She was then drawn to the Breast”—which last parchment-leaf word is taken up by the next, ordinary paper-leaf: “Breast; and here she was shown the Heart of Christ.… And she abode many years with this impression of His burning Heart.—And then she was drawn (still) further up, that is, to the Mouth; and there she was found worthy of being kissed by the true Solomon.… And she no more (directly) recognized her human acts, whether they had been done well or evilly; but she saw all in God.”[382]
We see here how the original four years of her First Period, which are still retained elsewhere by the Printed Vita,[383] have been broken up by the scribe of this Manuscript into two shorter (first and second) Periods, of fourteen months (one year), and three years respectively; how the copyist, both in his first apportionment of length to his new First Period, “fourteen months,” and in his second assignment, now of one year (since he has to divide up the original Four years so as to get them again by addition, “one year” and “three years”), leaves us two curious echoes of the “Four” of his Prototype; how his amended description of his new second Period is still largely the old Penitential description, for she still sees her sins (a sight which is here an anachronism), and she is still prostrate on the ground (a prostration which exactly suits the Feet, but in no way the Breast of Christ); how the Observant has been half-hearted and clumsy, for he has now left two successive Breast-Periods, hardly differentiated from each other; and how he was able to shift (though not to change) the original single Breast-Period (now his second Breast-Period), because of its conveniently vague time-note of “many years.” All this laborious, yet timid, incomplete and ineffectual change, thus forced upon an evidently long-established, toughly resisting composition, can only have taken place under some severe pressure of evidence; and the root-causes of the change are somehow connected with the question as to the duration, in her life, of the perception and Confession of her sins. For the Confession of her sins, which (in the old scheme) extended over four years, is now restricted to fourteen months or one year; and if contemplative and restful love are now anticipated (from the original second Period) in the new second Period of three years, yet an intense sight of her particular sins, piercing contrition for them, and a complete prostration on the ground, are all indeed retained, from the original Feet-Period, for this new second Period, but Confession has disappeared from these three years.
Now we have precisely such absolutely constraining evidence in Marabotto’s treble chronicle of Catherine’s own words, with regard to the twenty-five years during which she was led by God’s spirit alone. It is clear then that the most important of Marabotto’s notes did not exist incorporated with, or at least had not originally formed part of, and did not dominate, the scheme of the Vita which the Observant had before him; and that, upon his later knowledge of, or pondering over them, he understood Catherine’s words to have applied, not simply to Direction but to (at least at all habitual) Confession as well.
Manuscript B starts indeed with a heading demonstrably older than that of MS. A. For its “De la Mirabile Conversione et Vita de la q(uondam) donna Catherinetta Adorna” is more primitive, because of its “the late,” which indicates a time of writing not yet far removed from the date of her death; its “Donna,” less honorific than the “Madonna” of the other MSS.; and, above all, its giving “Conversione” before “Vita,” instead of “Conversatione” after “Vita,” since thus we are assured of “Conversione” being no slip of the pen for “Conversatione,”—Conversion coming necessarily before, and holy Conversation coming after, in consequence of, an admirable life.—And this title will originally have headed a booklet containing simply the story of her Conversion and early Convert life, say, up to the end of Chapter VI of the Printed Vita, p. 17b; or, since even the “et Vita” of this title reads like a later addition, only up to the end of the present printed Chapter II, p. 6c. I think there is no doubt that we have here the original heading of a tract put together on occasion of the first public Cultus, in the summer of 1512.
But the body of MS. B is demonstrably later than, indeed dependent upon, MS. A; for here the scribe silently adopts the modification, effected by the writer of MS. A in his own text, with regard to doubling the Breast-Period; and yet, even here, we have still the Observant’s “Petto” for the first period, and the “Pecto” of the Observant’s Prototype for the second period.[384] “Come” now appears throughout, in lieu of MS. A’s “Como.” And Giuliano’s name is omitted (all but once, in Catherine’s mouth) in the Husband-Chapter.[385]
The order, division, and numeration of the Chapters is identical with those of MS. A, all but that Chapter XXXIX of MS. A (equivalent to the unimportant pp. 82b-83a of Chapter XXXI in the Printed Life) is here omitted. No Chapter numbered XXXIX appears here, but, after a small break behind Chapter XXXVIII, the Trattato follows, as Chapter XL.
And this Chapter XL is abruptly broken off in the midst of a penultimate paragraph: “et per gratia li sono monstrati et” are the last words. The authentication of the MS., appended immediately after this rough ending, shows this laceration to be at least as old as 1672. Nor is it a case of some complete set or sets of leaves being lost, since one leaf has had to be torn off, from the still remaining other half-sheet.[386] The last part, no doubt, contained the end of the Trattato and the Passion-Chapter; and will, like its Prototype, MS. A, have been without a trace of the Dialogo. Indeed I suspect that it was the latter circumstance which, when once this elaborate composition had come to be prized, gave rise to the, surely deliberate, destruction of the evidence for its absence here. MS. A will, in that case, have been saved from a similar fate, by its special appropriation to a powerful family; by its superior, uncial kind of script; and, above all, by its important contemporary date and dedication at the end.
Our next, deeply interesting stage, is represented by one single MS. in the University Library, Genoa,—catalogued as B. VII 17. It is a careful copy, made throughout by the Protonotary Angelo Luigi Giovo, and subscribed by himself on April 20, 1671, of, as he there says, “Another ancient MS. received from the Signora ——, Matron of the Great Hospital, who declared that she had herself received it from the Nuns of the Madonna delle Grazie; and which is believed, with great probability, to be the MS. copied by Ettore Vernazza and sent to the Venerable Donna Battista, his daughter. The book, in view of the antiquity of the paper, of the character of the binding of the copy, and of the other peculiarities, has been judged by experts to belong to the above-mentioned Period.” The reader will soon see why I place (not necessarily the execution, but the text of) the MS. thus copied by Giovo, before the printing of the Vita in 1551, and will thus be helped to a decision as to the “greatly probable” attribution to Ettore Vernazza.
Giovo’s Copy (my MS. C) follows, up to the end of its Chapter XLI (the Trattato), the division, number, and sequence of the chapters, and the peculiarities of the text, of MS. A, with an all but unbroken closeness: even the slip, of 1506 (for 1509), in the date of the great attack of “fire at heart,” reappears here as it stands there (fol. 33v of MS. C, compared with p. 193 of MS. A). But the “Petto” and “Pecto,” of respectively the first and second Breast-Periods in MSS. A and B, read here, in both cases, as simply “Petto” (MS. C, fol. 3).—There is but one at all remarkable addition in this, the Vita-part of the MS. In the account of the refusal to accept Catherine on the part of the Nuns of the very Convent where, as we shall see, the Prototype copied by Giovo was no doubt written, there occur the new words: “Although her Confessor was instant with them (to take her), knowing her, as he did, better than the Nuns knew her” (MS. C, fol. 1v).—And, in concluding further on (on its fol. 71v seq.) with the Passion-Chapter, as this stands in MS. A (Chapter XLII), a Chapter which here (for a reason to be given in a minute) is not numbered, the MS. still follows closely (although now with a few generally unimportant additions, omissions, and transpositions of paragraphs), the matter, order, and literary form of MS. A.—Only one, formally slight, but materially significant, difference exists here between Giovo’s text and the Printed Life. The Printed Life, p. 142b, reads: “After this, she felt a hard nail at heart”; to this MS. C adds (fol. 72r) “so that she seemed nailed to the Cross.” Neither set of words occurs in MSS. A and B. MS. C here gives us something unlike Catherine’s, but very like Battista’s, special spirit.
But it is in the pages intermediate between the Trattato and the Passion (foll. 53v to 71v), that lies the interest of this MS. For here we get, for the first time, the Dialogo, although, as yet, only its eventual First Part (pp. 185-225 in the Printed Life). Chapter XLI (the Trattato) has just finished, by only six lines short of its printed form, with the words “because that occupation with Himself which God gives to the soul, slight though it be, keeps the soul so occupied, that it exceeds everything, nor can the soul esteem anything else.” And immediately next there come (53v) the title-words: “Here follows a certain beautiful Allegory (Figura) which this holy soul institutes (fà) concerning the Soul and the Body.”—The eventual division into (17) chapters is still absent, and the work seems, at this time, to have been planned to be no longer than it is here. For it concludes with the emphatic climax: “Now the Spirit, having come to hold this creature in this manner, declared: ‘I am determined henceforth no more to call her a human creature, because I see her (to be) all in God, without any (mere) humanity.’” For these words simply re-cast the last words of the scheme of her entire life, given by the Vita: “She said: ‘I live no more, but Christ lives in me.’ Hence she could no more recognize the quality of her human acts, in themselves—whether they were good or evil; but she saw all in God” (Pr. L., p. 6c).
Now the Dialogo, as here given, consists of two chief stages, and each stage contains two steps.
Chapters I to VI give the first stage—the history of a soul in a state of moral and spiritual decline and contraction: all this, in the form of a Dialogue between the Soul, the Body, and Self-Love.—Throughout this first stage Self-Love holds dominion. But, during the first step, the Soul (although it already distinguishes, with regard to what it intends to practise, between simply avoiding grave sin and striving after perfection) still continues fairly determined not to commit sin, and still leads the Body. During the second step, on the contrary, even this simple avoidance of grave sin has ceased, for now the Body leads the Soul. Thus first the Soul, and then the Body, each leads the other during one step, for “one week.”—These two steps or weeks stand for the two lustres of Catherine’s pre-Conversion-Period, for the lukewarm, and then the positively dissipated, lustre respectively. Chapters I to III give the first week, equivalent to the first five years of her married life, 1463 to 1468; and Chapters IV to VI give the second week, and correspond to the second five years, 1468 to 1473.[387]
Chapters VII to XXI describe the second stage, that of Conversion and Transformation, which (notwithstanding its appearance of instantaneous and complete attainment of its end) is here presented as, in reality, by far the longer and the more difficult, although the alone fruitful and happy one. Chapters VII to XIII describe the first step. Chapters VII to IX give us the Soul’s longing for Light; the spark of Pure Love shown to it, on its conversion-day; and a long address by the Soul to the Body and Self-Love, and the answers of these two.[388] In this address the Soul for the first time speaks of “the Spirit.”[389] Chapter X makes the Soul for the first time address “the Lord,” “O Signore,” on the one hand: and her “Humanity” “O Umanità,” on the other.[390] In Chapters XI and XII the Soul stands alone, face to face with the Lord, who appears to it in two successive visions,—first as Christ alive and walking along all stained with blood from head to foot; and, on a later occasion, as Christ evidently motionless and presumably dead, with His five fountain-wounds, which are sending drops of burning blood towards mankind. And these two visions, so carefully kept apart, doubtless typify the two periods of Catherine’s Convert life,—the two steps of her second stage: the moving, scourged and cross-bearing Christ stands for the active penance of the first four years or fourteen months; and the motionless, crucified Christ stands for the passive purification of the rest of her life.[391] Chapter XIII has no dialogue, but describes her active penances and good works, and mentions the Soul, Humanity, and the Spirit.[392]
And then, up to the end, in Chapters XIV to XXI, which give us the second step, the dialogue reappears, but now no more between the three Dramatis Personae (Soul, Body, and Self-Love) of the pre-Conversion-Period; but between the two interlocutors of the post-conversion time (the Spirit and Humanity).[393] And there is here but one sporadic mention, an invocation, of “the Lord” (p. 214c).
Thus only after its Conversion does the Soul itself become aware of, or does it name, either the Spirit or its “Humanity”; and only after the two successive Christ-Visions do these two new experiences and conceptions entirely replace the three old ones of Soul, Body, and Self-Love. In a word, we have here, carefully carried through, the scheme, so clearly enunciated by Battista Vernazza in 1554, of the two successive divisions effected by God in Man, during the process of Man’s purification: first, the separation (division) of the Soul from the Body; and then the separation (division) of the Spirit from the Soul.[394] And, in strict accordance with this scheme, the Soul here becomes conscious of being, in its upper reaches, Spirit, only on the day that it has broken away from the domination of the downward-tending Body, and of Self-Love. And once the Soul has thus affirmed the Spirit and denied the Body, the “Body” and the “Soul” cease to be directly mentioned; the one term “Humanity” now takes the Soul’s and the Body’s place. For now the Soul, in so far as it has still not completely identified itself with the Spirit, does not any more attach itself directly to the Body and the Body’s pleasures,—to, as it were, the upper fringe of the Body,—but to the sensible-spiritual consolations which are the necessary concomitants and consequences of the Soul’s affirmation and acceptance of the Spirit,—hence, as it were, to the lower fringe of the Spirit. “I would have thee know,” the Spirit now says to Catherine, “that I fear much more an attachment to the spiritual than to the bodily taste and feeling. Man goes his way ‘feeding’ his spiritual sensuality upon the things which proceed from God, and yet these things are a very poison for the Pure Love of God.”[395]
Now these interesting forty pages of the first Dialogo derive (with the sole exception of three little touches) their entire historical materials from the Vita e Dottrina, and, indeed, from but those parts of this corpus which already appear in MSS. A and B, and in the previous pages of MS. C itself. But all these materials have been re-thought, re-pictured, re-arranged throughout, by a new, powerful, and experienced mind, a mind dominated by certain very definite, schematic conceptions as to the constitution of the human personality, the nature of holiness, and the laws of its growth, and which is determined to find or form concrete examples of these conceptions, in and from the life of Catherine.
There are, first, five cases of the intensifying of authentic Vita-accounts, intensifications necessary, or at least ancillary, to the scheme underlying the whole Dialogo-composition.
As to the pre-conversion sinfulness, during her second “week,” Catherine’s soul is made to say: “In a short time I was enveloped in sin; and, abiding in that snare, I lost the grace (of God) and remained blind and heavy, and from spiritual I became all earthly.”[396] Yet there is no evidence that Catherine, even at that time, ever committed grave sin; nor does there exist an authentic saying of hers which, however intense its expressions of contrition, conveys an impression really equivalent to this passage.—As to the form of her contrition, “so greatly was this soul alienated (from her own self) and submerged in the sight of the offence of God, that she no longer seemed a rational creature, but a terrified animal.”[397] Yet the earlier accounts, which certainly do not minimize here, keep well within the limits of normal, though intense, human feeling and expression of feeling.—As to the forcible means taken by her to overcome her fastidiousness in the matter of cleanliness and in the sense of taste, “she would put the impurities into her mouth, as though they had been precious pearls.”[398] Yet the original versions, drastic enough in all conscience, nowhere imply that there was any such relish, even of a merely apparent kind.—As to her post-conversion poverty, the Spirit says to her: “Thou shalt work to provide for thy living,” and the narrative declares: “The Spirit made her so poor, that she would have been unable to live, had not God provided for her by the means of alms.”[399] Yet we know from her wills that (though the Hospital authorities gave her free lodging, and perhaps, at first, free board as well) she retained, up to the last, an appreciable little income, and herself conferred many an alms out of these her own means.
Nevertheless, in each of these cases, the Dialogo exaggeration is suggested by some phrase or word in the Vita which has been taken up into the new context and medium of this other mind, and has come to mean something curiously (though often in form but slightly) different from that older account.—Thus, in this fourth instance, the Vita-accounts had said: “nel principio di sua conversione, molto si esercitò.” “Viveva ancora molto sottomessa ad ogni creatura.” “Quantunque ella fosse in tutto dedicata ed occupata negli esercizii di esso Spedale, nondimeno mai volle godere ne usare una minima cosa di quello per viver suo; ma, per quel poco che abbisognava, si serviva della povera sostanza sua: onde ben si scorgeva che il suo dolce Amore era quello il quale operava in lei ogni cosa per vera unione.” “Si esercitò nelle opere pie, cercando i poveri, essendo condotta delle Donne della Misericordia, e le davano danari ed altre provvisioni.”[400] The Dialogo-writer has worked all this up as follows: “Io (lo Spirito) ti avviso primieramente voler io che tu pruovi che cosa sia esser ubbidiente, acciò tu divenghi umile e soggetta ad ogni creatura; ed acciochè ti possi esercitare, lavorerai per provedere al viver tuo.” “Primieramente la fece tanto povera, che non avrebbe potuto vivere, se Dio non l’avvesse provveduta per via di limosine. Poi quando le Signore della Misericordia l’addimandavano per andare a’poveri … ella sempre con loro andava.”[401] I have italicized the words taken over by the Dialogo. Thus her own poor substance (i.e. her own modest income), and the money given to her by the Misericordia-ladies for distribution among the poor, becomes a substance, alms and money, given to herself as to a poor person.
The fifth case concerns the affections. In the Vita-proper nothing is more characteristic of Catherine, up to the spring of 1509, than her swift and deep affective sympathy, and the fearless forms of its manifestation. True, Catherine “would” (certainly up to 1490, perhaps more or less up to 1496) “abide at times,” up to six hours on end, “as though dead.” But, “on hearing herself called, she would suddenly arise and betake herself, in answer, to whatever was required of her, however small a service this might be.” And indeed “she served the sick with most fervent affection:” thus she attended throughout a week upon a poor pestiferous woman; and at the end, “unable further to contain herself, kissed” the dying woman “upon the mouth with great affection of heart, and so caught the pestilential fever, and well-nigh died of it.”[402]—Then, too, there is the Vita’s quite general, indeterminate remark, “she (Catherine) felt no pain at the deaths of her (two elder) brothers and of her sisters” (the latter should be “sister,” unless, perhaps, a sister-in-law is included) in 1502.[403] But her extant wills have shown us how actively thoughtful she remained, even in 1506 and 1509, for her brother, nephews and nieces, and humble retainers; and the deeply affectionate scenes with Marco and Argentina occurred between 1503 and 1506. Marco, the poor navvy, was dying “of a cancer in the face,” and Catherine, at Argentina’s asking, “as though with prompt obedience, betook herself to him”; and he “threw his arms round Catherine’s neck, and, pressing her with sobs, seemed unable to have done with weeping.[404] And then, still weeping, with great tenderness he besought Catherine to adopt his wife as her spiritual daughter,” and Catherine did so, and “loved this spiritual daughter much.”[405]—Only in the very late actions, the change as to her burial-place (Will of March 1509), and the exclusion of all her attendants on January 10, and of most of them on and after August 27, 1510,[406] are there indications of any absence or renunciation of tender and spontaneous human affection.
But here again the Dialogo both closely presses and profoundly changes the original accounts. For here the Spirit declares to her: “in these exercises” of work among the poor, “I shall keep thee … as though thou wast dead. I will not allow thee to make friends with any one, nor that thou shouldst have any particular affection for any relative; but I want thee to love all men, and this without affection, both poor and rich, both friends and relatives. I do not want thee, in thine interior, to know one person from the other, nor would I have thee go to any one from motives of friendship; it will suffice to go when thou art called.” And thus “she went, when the Misericordia-ladies asked her to go into dwellings that would have frightened away all ordinary mortals. But she, on the contrary, deliberately touched these sick (voleva toccarli), for the purpose of giving them some refreshment to soul and body.”[407]—Note how skilfully the call, and the going at the call, the affection and its spontaneous manifestations in the original accounts, have been altered and crossed by the Dialogue’s re-statement.—Here again we are strongly reminded of Battista, in her letter to the Signora Andronica in 1575, encouraging her to “abandon all things,” her children included, “interiorly,” and “to mortify the most pleasing consolation which arises from the children’s company.” Indeed, already in 1554, Battista has, in one of her own Colloquies, refused to accept every avoidable consolation arising from her pure election by God.[408] Only by such a reference of these Dialogo-passages to Battista, the many-sided, the ever-affectionate daughter and public-spirited woman, can we come to see them in a wider context; indeed only thus can they cease to be profoundly repulsive.
There are two instances of the softening of (doubtless authentic) doctrinal sayings given by the Vita-proper. Her evidently impulsive exclamation: “I would not have grace or mercy, but justice and vengeance exercised against the malefactor,”—has here become: “She did not attach any importance to her sins, on the ground of the punishment awaiting them, but solely because they had been enacted against the infinite goodness of God.”—And her bold declaration: “If any creature could be found which did not participate in the divine goodness, that creature would be as malignant as God is good,” here reads: “The soul bereft of the Divine love becomes well-nigh as malignant as the Divine love is good and delightful. I say ‘well-nigh,’ for God shows it a little mercy.”[409] The proclamation of some moral good even in lost souls, is thus weakened to an admission of some consolation in the latter.