Evidently here again, as with the Confessions and Indulgences, her life and practice were indefinitely varied and spontaneous, and incomparably richer than the preconceptions and logic of at least some of her biographers will admit, or indeed than many of her own fervent sayings, so vividly expressive of certain moments or sides of her career or character, suggest or even seem to leave possible. But the underlying meaning and ultimate harmonization of these apparent inconsistencies between her doctrine and her practice, we can only gradually hope to find.
Let us now attempt, as far as the often scanty and obscure evidence permits, to give, in the following two chapters, some general account of the changes and growth observable in her external surroundings, her human intercourse and social occupation, her physical health and psychical mood, and above all of those inner experiences and spiritual apprehensions of hers which dominated all the rest, during each of the three main periods of her convert life. This general account will, I trust, suggest the main points for our later investigations, and will show at once how largely artificial, though necessary, all such dividing into periods must be, in the case of so deeply unified and diversified an inner life as Catherine’s.
The first six months of her first period (this latter we take to have extended from March 1473 to May 1477) were still spent in Giuliano’s Palace of the Via Agnese and in his country mansion at Prà.[79] But all was now swiftly changing, or already greatly changed, both around her and within. Anxiety, hope, grief, consolation—inasmuch as such feelings could still for her cluster around events external to her deepest spiritual life, and could make themselves at all separately felt during this period of profound absorption in her new large life of love and penance—must all have centred in her husband. For Giuliano had by now got his affairs into such disorder as to be unable to keep up his great social position; and by the autumn of 1473 he had sold his mansion at Prà, and had vacated and let his palace in Genoa itself.[80] He was also by now a very sincere convert, in his own manner and degree; and it was no doubt now that he told Catherine, although she can hardly have failed to know already, of the existence of a poor little girl whom, with an apparently ominous indication of weak indulgence on the part of his widowed mother, he had called Tobia.
We shall be able to prove Catherine’s grand magnanimity and true, cordial forgiveness—directly, no doubt only for and at a later period; but the documents will show that she knew all the decisive circumstances long before, and there is no room for doubt that her dispositions had changed or grown as little as had her knowledge.
Catherine and Giuliano had now, in the autumn of 1473, moved into a humble little house, in the midst of artisans, mostly dyers, and of the poor of various sorts, close to the Hospital of the Pammatone, even then already a vast Institution. This dwelling is probably identical, as to the site, with the house still standing at the junction of the Via S. Giuseppe with the Via Balilla, and which bears on its front a picture of Saints Catherine Adorna and Camillus of Lellis[81] at the feet of the Madonna. Since the income remaining to them still amounted, up to Giuliano’s death in 1497, to the equivalent of some £1,200 a year,[82] this self-abnegation and humble identification with the lives of the toiling, nameless poor, must have been an act of deliberate choice, and not one of any degree of necessity. It was never suspended or revoked by either of them.
They now agreed together to a life of perpetual continence; and Giuliano became a Tertiary of the Order of St. Francis,[83] amongst those attached to the Hospital-Church of the Santissima Annunciata in Portoria, itself served by Observant Franciscans. Their only little servant-maid, Benedetta Lombarda, was also a Franciscan Tertiary. But Catherine herself now shows, in this matter of the Religious State, an interesting clearing-up of her own special way and form of sanctity. We saw how much the fervent but inexperienced girl of sixteen had been moved and had longed to be an Augustinian nun; and now the sadly experienced wife of twenty-six, even in the midst of her first convert days, and though surrounded at home, in Church, and in the Hospital, by Religious of the popular and expansive type presented by the Franciscans, (a type which her own deep sympathy with, indeed penetration by, the teaching of the great Franciscan Mystic Jacopone da Todi, will show to have been closely akin to her own,) manifests no thought of becoming a Religious, even in the slight degree represented by the Third Order. And up to her death, thirty-seven years later, she never wavers on this point. A highly characteristic scene and declaration illustrative of this attitude of hers will be given further on.
The Hospital of Pammatone had been founded by Bartolommeo Bosco, one of those large-hearted merchant princes of whom Genoa has had not a few, in 1424, in the street of that name; and only quite recently, in 1472, the Friars of the adjoining Church of the Annunciata had agreed to the incorporation of their own infirmary for sick poor with Bosco’s larger institution. Hence Catherine and Giuliano found 130 sick-beds always occupied by patients, and over 100 foundling girls, who were being trained as silk-workers, all ready to their hands and service.[84] Catherine was besides gradually introduced to the poor of the district, by the Donne della Misericordia—ladies devoted to such works of mercy—and betook herself to her tasks with characteristic directness and thoroughness.[85] She must first, and once for all, completely master all squeamishness in this her lowly work. So she betook herself to cleansing their houses from the most disgusting filth; and she would take home with her the garments of the poor, covered with dirt and vermin, and, having cleansed them thoroughly, would herself return them to their owners. And yet nothing unclean was ever found upon herself. She also tended the sick in the Hospital and in their homes, with the most fervent affection, speaking to them of spiritual things and ministering to their bodily wants, and never avoiding any form of disease, however terrible.[86]
And throughout this first period of four years, her penances were great. She wore a hair-shirt; she never touched either flesh-meat or fruit, whether fresh or dried; she lay at night on thorns. And by nature courteous and affable, she would do great violence to herself by conversing as little as possible with her relations when they visited her, and, as to anything further, paying heed neither to herself nor to them; and she acted thus for the purpose of self-conquest; and if any one was surprised at it, she took no notice.[87]
But one visitor must, even during this period, have been treated by her with much of her natural spontaneity and ardent expansiveness. She was a cousin of her own age, a Fiesca and a married woman like herself; like herself, too, in the wish, just now awakened, to belong entirely to God, and in her ultimate complete conversion and ardent love of God. We can attempt to describe her here, as throwing further light upon Catherine’s idiosyncrasies, at this period in particular.
Tommasina was different from Catherine in the slow, tentative character of her first turning to God; and different, too, in the eventual form of her life; for, when later on a widow, she became first, in 1490, an Augustinian Canoness at Santa Maria delle Grazie; and then, in 1497, a Dominican Nun at the Monastero Nuovo di San Domenico. This latter convent she had been given to reform and became its Prioress. In both houses she was known as Suor Tommasina (Fieschi).[88] She was different again in that she there spent some of her time in painting many a religious picture, chiefly of the Pietà, and a highly symbolical composition, illustrative of the moment of Consecration at Mass.[89] She executed also in exquisitely fine needlework a piece which represented, above, God the Father surrounded by many Angels, and, below, Christ with other figures of Saints. Finally she occupied herself in writing and produced in original composition a treatise on the Apocalypse, and another on Denys the Areopagite.
And the future Suor Tommasa showed now some of that precious gift of humour, denied to her otherwise greater cousin. For, no doubt with a bright twinkle in her eyes at the sight of Catherine’s characteristic vehemence of onslaught, Tommasa would declare that Catherine was pushing her and giving her no quarter; and that it would be a great humiliation for herself if, after all said and done, she were to turn back. But any such feeling of even the possibility of such a relapse, was amazing to Catherine, and she said: “If I were to turn back, I would wish that my eyes might be put out, and that I should be treated with every other kind of indignity.”[90]
But such intercourse as this must, during this first period, have been the exception. For her dominant, closely interrelated characteristics were now a continuous striving to do things contrary to her natural bias and an alert looking to do the will of others rather than her own. She moved about with her eyes bent upon the ground. Six hours a day were spent in prayer, and this although—perhaps just now in part because—the body greatly felt the strain: the strongly willing spirit had dominated the weak flesh. Indeed, during this time she was so full of interior feeling and so occupied within herself, that she was unable to speak, except in a tone so low as to be barely audible; she seemed dead to all exterior things.[91]
And these external circumstances and practices are all only the setting, material, occasion and expression of this her first period’s actively penitential spirit, when she was persistently pursued by the detailed sight of her own particular inclinations, her own particular sins against God, and God’s particular graces towards her own self. Her very acts of charity and of friendliness, her very prayers, get all restricted or prolonged, willed or suffered, as, at least in part, but so many occasions for a love-impelled, yet still reflective self-mastery and mortification. And it was no doubt during this time that, when present one day at a sermon in which the conversion of the Magdalen was recounted, her heart seemed to whisper to her: “Indeed I understand,” so similar did her own conversion appear to her to that of the Magdalen.[92]
As to her physical health, the fire which she felt in her heart seemed to dry up and burn her interiorly. And so great a physical hunger would possess her, that she appeared insatiable; and so quickly did she digest her food, that it looked as if she could have consumed iron. Yet she had no inclination to other than ordinary food, and did not fail to keep all the ordinary fasts and abstinences.[93]
Time wears on, and Catherine is still in the same house, and with the same health, and with the same companions and occupations, penances and prayers. But the interior dispositions and emotional promptings, and the mental apprehension of them all, are gradually changing and are growing wider and freer and less particularized. “She now began to experience a more affective way, so that she was often as though beside herself; and” though still “moved by a great interior thirst after self-hatred, and by a penetrating contrition, she would often lie prostrate on the ground”; she would do so, “hardly knowing what she was doing, yet somehow gaining thus some relief for her heart,” overflowing as it was with a boundless, profound, but now more and more general, sorrow and tender love.[94] The note of a spontaneous, expansive, instinctive love is now growing in predominance in her prayer and human intercourse; and her very penances, though still performed, are now often practised from a general unreflective instinct of love-impelled self-hatred, without any conscious application to any particular inclinations or sins.
For as to her intercourse with others, she will probably already now have practised many an act of that beautiful and characteristic, impulsive, expansive tenderness, of which we shall have a good many examples from the end of her second period. And as to the character of her mortifications, we hear the following: “Whilst engaged on such great and numerous mortifications of all her senses, she was sometimes asked, ‘Why are you doing this (particular) thing?’ And she would answer, ‘I do not know, except that I feel myself interiorly drawn to do so, without any opposition from within. And I think that this is the will of God; but it is not His will, that I should propose to myself any (particular) object in so doing.’”[95] I take it that, with this growing intermittence in the sight of her particular sins, her Confessions, though still practised, will have become less frequent, and her Holy Communions more so.
And a little later on, again on the Feast of the Annunciation (March 25, 1476),[96] another change took place, a change primarily concerned with her health, but one which brought out also the deep spirituality of her religion. On this day she experienced one of those interior locutions, which are so well authenticated in the lives of so many interior souls; and “her Love said that He wanted her to keep the Forty Days, in His company in the Desert. And then she began to be unable to eat till Easter; on the three Easter Days she was able to eat; and after these she again did not eat, till she had fulfilled as many days as are to be found in Lent.”[97] Similarly with regard to Advent. “Up to Martinmas” (November 12) “she would eat like all the world; and then her fast would begin, and would continue up to Christmas-Day.” Her subsequent Lenten fasts are described as beginning with Quinquagesima Monday and ending on Easter Sunday morning.[98]
I take it that there can be no reasonable doubt as to the substantial accuracy of this account. But the following three facts must be borne in mind as regards the physical aspect of the matter.
The fast, for one thing, is not an absolute one. The account itself declares that she now and then drank a tumblerful of water, vinegar, and pounded rock-salt.[99] And to this must be added both the daily reception of wine—I suppose as much as a wineglassful—which was, according to a Genoese custom of that time, received by her, as a kind of ablution, immediately after her Communion;[100] and such slight amount of solid food as, when in company, she would force herself to take and would sometimes, though rarely, manage to retain.[101]
Again, the fast varies partly, in different years, in the date of its inception; and partly it does not synchronize with the beginning of the ecclesiastical fast. In the first year her Lenten fast begins on Lady-Day, in the following years on Quinquagesima Sunday; her Advent fast begins throughout on Martinmas, November 12.
And finally, the number of such fasts cannot be more than twenty-three Lents and twenty-two Advents. The MS. of 1547 has preserved the right tradition of a difference in the numbers of the Lenten and Advent fasts, but has raised the number of the former to a round, symmetrical one. It gives twenty-five Lents and twenty-two Advents. The printed Vita of 1551 levels the numbers respectively down and up to twenty-three Lents and as many Advents.[102] Some further minor physical points will be considered in a later chapter.
But two other matters are here of direct spiritual interest: the effect of these fasts on her spiritual efficiency, and her own two-fold attitude towards them. For we are told, again I think quite authentically, that during these fasts she was more active in good works, and felt more bright and strong in health, than usual;[103] answering thus to one of the tests put forward by Pope Benedict XIV, for discriminating supernatural, spiritually valuable fasts from simply natural ones. But with him we can find our surest tests in what is altogether beyond the range of the physical and psychical: in her own moral estimate of all these matters. For one thing, there appears here again that noble shrinking from any singularity of this kind within herself, and from all notice on the part of others. “This inability to eat gave her many a scruple at first, ignorant as she was as to its cause, and ever suspecting some delusion; and she would force herself to eat, considering that nature required it. And though this invariably produced vomiting, yet she would make the attempt again and again.” “She would go to table with the others, and would force herself to eat and drink a little, so as to escape notice and esteem as much as possible.”[104] And again here, as in all matters visible and tangible, she shows an impressive loneliness in the midst of her more carnal-minded disciples. “She would say within herself, in astonishment” at their stopping to wonder at things so much on the surface: “If you but knew another thing, which I feel within myself!” And she would declare: “If we would rightly estimate the operations of God, we should wonder more at interior than at exterior things. This incapacity to eat is indeed an operation of God, but one in which my will has no part; hence I cannot glory in it. Nor is there cause for our wondering at it, since for God this is as though a mere nothing.”[105]
These fasts, although beginning within her first period are not characteristic of it; and her biographers rightly put them into a chapter distinct from her penances, properly speaking. These penances will have continued alongside of, and in between, these fasts for about a year after the beginning of the latter. And then at last, at the end of this first period of four years, “all thought of such (active) mortifications was, in an instant, taken from her mind in such guise that, even had she wished to carry out such mortifications, she would have been unable.” For “the sight of her sins was now taken from her mind, so that she henceforth did not catch a glimpse of them,—as though they had all been cast into the depths of the sea.”[106]
We now come to the second, longest, and central period of her life, 1477-1499. But though at first sight Chapters VI to XLII, and XLV of the Vita would seem exclusively to treat of these twenty-two years, examination proves this to be far from the case. If little or nothing from the first period is to be found there, very much from the third is embedded in those pages. And this scantiness of information springs from the simple fact that, during these twenty-two years, her inner life is led by herself alone, without any direct human aid of companionship; and her sufficient health, and the correspondingly large amount of external activity among the sick and poor, leave her but little or no time for those conferences and discourses amongst friends, of which her last period is full. This dearth of evidence is all the more to be regretted, since these central years represent the culmination of her balance and many-sided power.
For the first two years of this time she and Giuliano continued to live in their small house of the Portoria quarter, very busy, both of them, amongst the sick and poor, as well in the houses round about as in the Hospital. Indeed, externally, little or no change can have been apparent. It was the interior change, the moving away from the actively and directly penitential state into one of expansive love and joy, which alone, as yet, marked a new period.
Some time during these new beginnings it must have been that “her Love once said within her mind: ‘Observe, little daughter, these three rules. Never say “I will,” or “I will not.” Never say “mine,” but ever say “our.” Never excuse thyself, but be ever ready to accuse thyself.’” And another time He said: “When thou sayest the ‘Our Father,’ take for thy foundation ‘Thy Will be done.’ In the Hail Mary, take ‘Jesus.’ In Holy Scripture take ‘Love,’ with which thou wilt ever go straightly, exactly, lightly, attentively, swiftly, enlightenedly, without error, without guide, and without the means of other creatures, since Love suffices unto itself to do all things without fear or weariness, so that martyrdom itself appears unto it a joy.”[107]
But this her love, just because it is so real and from God, appears indeed to fill her at any given moment, yet it grows and shows her, at each fresh stage, both its own incompleteness and her own imperfection, in her and its former stages. “At any one moment the love of that moment seemed to me to have attained to its greatest possible perfection. But then, in the course of time, my spiritual sight having become clearer, I saw that it had had many imperfections.” “Day by day I perceive that motes have been removed, which this Pure Love casts out and eliminates. This work is done by God, and man is not aware of it at the time, and cannot then see these imperfections; indeed God continuously allows man to see his (momentary) operation as though it were without imperfection, whilst all the time He, before Whom the heavens are not pure, is not ceasing from removing imperfections from his soul.”[108]
As ever throughout her life so now also, consolations are not the aim and end, but only the actual effects of her devotedness, and the ever fresh incentives to increased disinterestedness and self-surrender. And, with regard to these consolations, she again strove to escape all notice. “She would at times have her mind so full of divine love, as to be all but incapable of speaking; and would be in so great a transport of feeling as to be obliged to hide herself so as not to be seen. She would lose the use of her senses and remain like one dead; and, to escape the occurrence of such things, she would force herself to remain in company as much as possible. And she would say to her Lord: ‘I do not want that which proceedeth from Thee, but I want Thee alone, O tender Love.’ But just because her love was so sincere and she fled from consolations, her Lord gave her of them all the more.”[109]
If on one of the many occasions when she had hidden herself away in some secret spot, she was ever discovered by any one, they would find her walking up and down, and seeming as though she would wish to do so without end; or they would come upon her with her face in her hands, prostrate on the ground, entranced, and with feelings beyond description or conception. “These ecstasies would almost always last three or four hours; and if, on coming to herself, she spoke of the wonders she had seen, there was no one to understand her, and so she kept silence.” “And if called during one of these trances, she would not hear, even though they did so loudly.”[110]
This inattention would, however, occur only in case the call was simply one of curiosity. For on other occasions “she would remain as though dead for six hours; but on being called to the doing of any duty, however trifling it might seem, she would instantly arise and respond and go about the doing of this her obligation. And she would thus leave all, without any kind of trouble, according to her wont of flying from self-will as though it were the devil. And coming thus forth from her hiding-place she would have her face flushed, so as to look like a cherub, and to seem to have upon her lips the ‘who then shall separate me from the love of Christ?’ of the glorious Apostle.” And “on thus arising from those trances, she seemed to feel stronger both in body and in soul,”[111] as in the case of the fasting.
Even in the midst of her work absorptions would occur like unto these in all but their length of duration: “At times her hands would sink, unable to go on, and weeping she would say, ‘O my Love, I can no more’; and would thus sit for a while with her senses alienated, as though she had been dead. And this would occur oftener at one time than at another, according to the varying fulness of experience present in that purified mind.”[112]
And she was full of the conviction, and cared much for the formal acknowledgment on the part of others, that the possession and the increase of the most perfect love is independent of any particular state or form of life, and is directly dependent upon two things only, the grace of God and the generosity of the human will. “One day a Friar and Preacher,[113] perhaps to test her or because of some mistaken notion, told her that he himself was better fitted for loving than she, because he having entered Religion and renounced all things both within and without, and she being married to the world as he was to Religion, he found himself more free to love God, and more acted upon by Him. And the Friar went on, and alleged many other reasons. But when had spoken much and long, an ardent flame of pure love seized upon Catherine, and she sprang to her feet with such fervour as to appear beside herself, and she said: ‘If I thought that your habit had the power of gaining me one single additional spark of love, I should without fail take it from you by force, if I were not allowed to have it otherwise. That you should merit more than myself, is a matter that I concede and do not seek, I leave it in your hands; but that I cannot love Him as much as you, is a thing that you will never by any means be able to make me understand.’ And she said this with such force and fervour, that all her hair came undone, and, falling down, was scattered upon her shoulders. And yet all the while this her vehement bearing was full of grace and dignity.—And when back at home, and alone with her Lord, she exclaimed: ‘O Love, who shall impede me from loving Thee? Though I were, not only in the world as I am, but in a camp of soldiers, I could not be impeded from loving Thee.’”[114]
There is probably no scene recorded for us, so completely characteristic of Catherine at her deepest: the breadth and the fulness, the self-oblivion and the dignity, the claimlessness and the spiritual power—all are there.
The special character, both in form and content, of Catherine’s spiritual life and doctrine will occupy us in Chapter VI. Here we have as yet specially to busy ourselves with its external and social occasions and effects. And these effects were both large and constant; indeed they were on the increase up to 1497, two years before this second period comes to a close.
For in 1479 the couple shift their quarters from outside the Hospital to within that great building, and there, for eleven years, they together occupy two little rooms, living without pay and at their own expense, but entirely devoted to the care of the poor sick and dying and of the orphans collected there.[115] Indeed Catherine never again lived outside the walls of the Hospital during the thirty-one years that still remained to her on earth.
And here in these rooms, and for eleven years, she worked among the sick, as but one of their many nurses. The spacious, high, white-washed, stone-flagged wards, with the great tall windows shedding floods of glaring light or cheering sunshine, according to the season without and to the mood of the poor sick within, stand still as they stood in Catherine’s day. True, new wards have been added; the lay female Nurses of her time have been in part replaced by Nursing Sisters, and the Observant Friars by Capuchins; much, very much has been discovered since, both as to man’s body and as to the facts and functions of his mind; all things, and man’s interpretation of all things, seem as though irretrievably changed. And yet the mystery of devoted love, its necessity, difficulty, and actual operative presence, as an occasional pang and aspiration in us all, as a visible, dominant influence in some of us, remain with and in us still unchanged, with all the freshness of an elemental force, indestructible, inexhaustible. This devoted work of Catherine, this her serving of the sick “with the most fervent affection, and immense solicitude,”[116] had also the remarkable circumstance about it that, “notwithstanding all this her attentive,” outward-looking “care, she never was without the consciousness of her tender Love; nor again did she, because of this consciousness, fail in any practical matter concerning the Hospital.”[117]
And this double life continued thus, and grew in depth and breadth. And at the end of fourteen years of such humble service, she was, in 1490, appointed Matron (Rettora) of the whole Institution, apparently the same year as that in which her now widowed cousin Tommasina entered the Augustinian Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie. During the six years in which she held this office, she had much administrative business and responsibility weighing upon her. Large sums of money passed through her hands, and she always managed to spend and to account for them with the greatest care and success. Indeed “her accounts were never found wrong by a single danaro (farthing).”[118]
It must have been after she had thus shown a rare devotedness and talent in an ordinary Nurse’s work, and had next, as Matron, manifested, for some years, a remarkable administrative ability, that, in 1493, she rose, in both capacities, to the very height of heroism and efficiency.
Early in January of that year, quite exceptionally cold weather visited the city: the harbour was frozen over; and early in the spring the Plague broke out so fiercely, and raged so long—till the end of August—that of those who remained in the stricken city, four-fifths succumbed to the terrible disease. Most of the rich and noble, all those that did not occupy any official post, fled from the town. But Catherine not only remained at her post, but she it was no doubt who organized, or helped to organize, the out-of-door ambulance and semi-open-air wards which we know to have been instituted at this juncture on the largest scale. The great open space immediately at the back of and above the Hospital, where now still stretch the public gardens of the Acquasola, she managed to cover with rows of sailcloth tents, and appointed special Doctors (mostly Lombards), Nurses, and Priests and Franciscan Tertiaries, for the physical and spiritual care of their occupants. Throughout the weeks and months of the visitation she was daily in their midst, superintending, ordering, stimulating, steadying, consoling, strengthening this vast crowd of panic-stricken poor and severely strained workers.
And “on one occasion, she found” here, “a very devout woman, a Tertiary of St. Francis, dying of” this “pestilential fever. The woman lay there in her agony, speechless for eight days. And Catherine constantly visited her, and would say to her, ‘Call Jesus.’ Unable to articulate, the woman would move her lips; and it was conjectured that she was calling Him as well as she could. And Catherine, when she saw the woman’s mouth thus filled, as it were, with Jesus, could not restrain herself from kissing it with great and tender affection. And in this way she herself took this pestilential fever, and very nearly died of it. But, as soon as ever she had recovered, she was back again at her work, with the same great attention and diligence.”[119]
How much there is in this little scene! Beautiful, utterly self-oblivious impulsiveness; a sleepless sense of the omnipresence of Christ as Love, and of this Love filling all things that aspire and thirst after it, as spontaneously as the liberal air and the overflowing mother’s breast fill and feed even the but slightly aspiring or the painfully labouring lungs and the eager, helpless infant mouth; swift, tender, warm, whole-hearted affection for this outwardly poor and disfigured, but inwardly rich and beautiful fellow-creature and twin-vessel of election; an underlying virile elasticity of perseverance and strenuous, cheerful, methodical laboriousness; all these things are clearly there.
Only when everything had again returned to its normal condition did she once more restrict herself to the administrative work of the Hospital.[120]
It must have been during this epidemic of 1493 that Catherine first got to know, or at least first to work with, a man hardly less remarkable than herself.
The Genoese notary Ettore Vernazza, Catherine’s junior by some twenty-three years, (as in the cases of his still greater contemporaries and compatriots, Columbus, Pope Julius II, and Andrea Doria, the year of his birth remains uncertain, but is probably 1470,) was a scion of the ancient house of Vernaccia, which derived its name from a wine-producing village on the Eastern Riviera. A Riccobono Vernaccia had been Chancellor of Genoa, as far back as 1345. Ettore, the first of the family to write his name Vernazza, was the son of the Notary Pietro Vernaccia and of Battistina Spinola, his wife. A sister of his, Marietta, married into the Fieschi family.[121] And if Catherine really did go among the pestiferous sick, she can hardly have failed to meet Ettore, now twenty-three years old. For his eldest daughter, the Augustinian Canoness, the Venerable Battista Vernazza, a most careful writer and one full of a life-long vivid remembrance of her father, in an account of Ettore, written by her in Genoa in 1581 (she was born in 1497, four years after the event she describes), tells of “a great compassion which he had conceived when still very young, at the time that the pestilence raged in Genoa, and when he used to go around to aid the poor, and when he found that, by means of a preparation of cassia, he could bring them back from (certain) death to life.”[122]
Ettore was, and he kept and made himself, and rare graces fashioned him ever increasingly into, a man of fine and keen, deep and world-embracing mind and heart, of an overflowing, ceaseless activity, and of a will of steel. To him, the earliest and perhaps up to the end the most intimate, certainly the most perceptive, of Catherine’s disciples and chroniclers, we owe the transmission of many of the reminiscences of her conversion and early strivings (no doubt primarily derived from her own self), and of probably more than half of such authentic sayings and discourses of hers, as were recorded contemporaneously with their utterance. Indeed all that remains to us of written testimony, contemporaneous in this strict sense of the word, and that is other than legal documents, can, up to 1499, be safely attributed to him. And all such constituents of the now sadly mixed up, and most varyingly valuable, materials and successive layers of the Vita ed Opere as can with probability be assigned to his composition, are characterized by a remarkable clearness and consistency, restraint and refinement, elasticity and freshness of spiritual apprehension and sympathy. Thus Ettore’s influence back upon the formation of Catherine’s literary image and of our entire, especially of our authentic, conception of her, was predominant, and her influence upon his whole life was decisive; and hence his life can be rightly taken as an indefinite extension and new application and necessary supplementation of her own life and doctrine. I shall then, for both these reasons, try and work up what we can recover concerning the successive stages of his intercourse with Catherine and of the growth of his own life up to her death, into the corresponding vicissitudes of her remaining years.
It must have been two years later (1495) that Vernazza became her disciple; and probably some two or three years still further on, that Ettore began to keep (no doubt at first only quite occasional) records of her Sayings and Doings.[123]
The year 1496 is marked by various events external and internal.
In June, or some time before, Vernazza marries the beautiful Bartolommea Ricci, of the distinguished family of that name. On the 17th of June Giuliano sells his Palace in the Via St. Agnese. And, probably at Midsummer, perhaps at Michaelmas, Catherine, forced to do so by increasing physical infirmities, resigns her office of Matron.[124]
Catherine “was now no more able to have a care of the government of the Hospital or of her own little house” (within its precincts) “owing to her great bodily weakness. She would now find it necessary, after Communion, to take some food to restore her bodily strength, and this even if it was a fast day.” We thus get the beginning of a third period with regard to such fasting powers. In the first, she had done as all the world, but had been able to keep all the Church fasts and abstinences. In the second, she had, during Lent and Advent, eaten little or nothing, and had, during the remainder of the time, lived as she had done before. And now, for the rest of her life, her eating and fasting are entirely fitful and intermittent, and she has to abandon all (at least systematic) attempts to keep even the ordinary Church fasts and abstinences.
If we are determined to insist on the accuracy of the “twenty-three Lents and twenty-two Advents” of her extraordinary fasts affirmed already by MS. “A,” we shall have to understand this present inability to fast as applying, till after Lent 1496, only to the times outside of Lent and Advent, since this fasting period cannot be made to begin earlier than Lent 1476. I take it that in this, as certainly in most other cases, there was, in reality, a much more gradual transition than the Vita accounts would lead one to expect.
Catherine had ceased to be Matron, but she did not leave the ample precincts of the Hospital; indeed she continued in the separate little house, which she had, probably since 1490, been occupying with Giuliano. But it will be better to describe her abode a little later on, when we can be quite sure as to its identity.
She had now, as I think had been the case since soon after she had left her Palace, two maids in her service: the widow and Franciscan Tertiary, Benedetta Lombarda, who appears, already then as an old and valued servant, in Giuliano’s will of October 1494, and who never left Catherine till her death; and a younger, unmarried maid, either Mariola Bastarda or a certain Antonietta. Argentina del Sale, too, will have often, perhaps continually, been about Catherine, aiding her in various ways; but she will not as yet have been living under the same roof with her. As we shall find, this little perfervid and untrained intelligence became the instrument, or at least the occasion, of the introduction of the largest legendary incident into the ultimate Vita of her mistress.
The next year, 1497, is marked by two events, of all but contradictory import and effect.
On April 15 Vernazza’s first child, a daughter, is born; and Catherine is her God-mother and holds her at the Font. Dottore Tommaso Moro, a learned lawyer friend of Ettore, is the God-father, and the child is given his name and is called Tommasina. What would Catherine have felt or said had she foreseen the vicissitudes—they will occupy us in due course—through which this, her fellow God-parent, was to pass, during the storms of that Religious Revolution which were to break out so soon after her death? She would, we may be sure, have at all events been glad at the action and influence of her God-daughter towards and upon her God-father, in those sad and most difficult times.
And Giuliano was gravely ill ever since the beginning of the year, if not before; and some time in August or September he died.[125] He had been suffering long from a chronic and most painful illness; and towards the end, “he became very impatient; and Catherine, fearful lest he should lose his soul, withdrew into another chamber, and there cried aloud for his salvation unto her tender Love, ever repeating with tears and sighs these words alone: ‘O Love, I demand this soul of Thee; I beg Thee, give it me, for indeed Thou canst do so.’ And having persevered thus for about half-an-hour with many a plaint, she was given at last an interior assurance of having been heard. And returning to her husband, she found him all changed and peaceful in his ways, and giving clear indications, both by words and signs, that he was fully resigned to the will of God.” And “some time after his death she said to a spiritual son of hers,” no doubt Vernazza: “‘My son, Messer Giuliano has gone; and you know well that he was of a somewhat wayward nature, whence I suffered much mental pain. But my tender Love, before that he passed from this Life, certified me of his salvation.’ And Catherine, having spoken these words, showed signs of regret at having uttered them; and he was discreet and did not answer this remark of hers, but turned the conversation to other topics.”[126] At all events this conversation is thoroughly authentic, and Catherine’s reserve, and her regret at having somewhat broken through her usual restraint, are profoundly characteristic: the contributors to and redactors of her Life have been increasingly blind, or even opposed, to all such beautifully spontaneous and human little shynesses and regrets for momentary indiscretions.
Giuliano had, by his Will of the 20th October 1494, ordered his body to be buried in the Hospital Church; and this was now carried out by Catherine. A vault of some dimensions must have been made or bought, since later both she herself and Argentina del Sale declared their wish to be buried in Giuliano’s “monument.” Perhaps the wish of the latter was carried out.
But Giuliano had left two far more important and difficult matters to the management of Catherine,—matters which, indeed, were respectively full of pain and of anxiety for her,—Thobia, and his share in the Island of Scios. As to Thobia, he had left £500 to the Protectors of the Hospital, among which were reckoned £200 which he had already paid them through his late mother, Thobia Adorna, for the keep of this daughter of his, and had warmly recommended her to their kind care; and had arranged, in case they refused this responsibility, that Thobia (who must by now have been quite twenty-six years of age) should be regularly paid the interest on this money. He also left to Catherine, for payment to “a certain person in Religion,”—possibly a member of a Third Order, and whose identity is carefully concealed, but who cannot fail to be Thobia’s mother—“£150, in repayment of the same sum, borrowed from her by himself and the said Catherine,”—money which this poor mother will have spent on the child’s keep, up to the time when Giuliano told his story to Catherine.
As to his two carati (shares) in the lands of the Island of Scios, farmed by the Genoese Merchant Company “Maona,” he desires that, if sold, his cousins Agostino and Giovanni Adorno shall be able to buy these carati for a lower price than would be required of any other purchaser. There are also elaborate conditions and alternatives attached to a legacy of £2,000 to his unmarried nephew Giovanni Adorno, with a view to his marrying and having legitimate children: an anxiety which of itself would show how sincere had been Giuliano’s own conversion, and which was evidently not far-fetched, since in this very Will he leaves £125 to a natural sister of his, Catherine, daughter of his father Jacobo, for the boarding (no doubt during the latter years of her life) of his late mother, Thobia Adorna.
Giuliano had also left Catherine herself £1,000,—a return of her marriage dowry, and £100 from himself; and in addition “all garments, trinkets, gold, silver, cash, furniture, and articles of vertu, which might be found either in his dwelling-place or elsewhere.” And he does so because he “knows and recognizes that the said Catherine, his beloved wife and heiress, has ever behaved herself well and laudably towards himself,” and “wants to provide the means for her continuing to lead, after his death, her quiet, peaceful, and spiritual mode of life.” And he adds the condition that, “if the said Catherine were to proceed to a second marriage (a thing which he does not think she will ever do), then he deprives her of all the legacies and rights and duties of heirship mentioned in this Will, and confers them upon the honourable Office of the Misericordia of Genoa,”—a society with and for which, as we have seen, Catherine had worked so much and so well.
Altogether Giuliano had left by this Will about £6,000 for Catherine to allot and appropriate; and quite £4,000 of this sum-total demanded careful and even anxious consideration, whilst £650 of it could not but provoke painful memories and make a call upon all her generosity. And by his Codicil of January 1497, he had given her still greater latitude of action, by declaring that, as regarded his legacy to the Hospital, Catherine should have full power and leave to abrogate or to modify it, according to her will and pleasure.[127] Thus these documents constitute an impressive proof of Giuliano’s full trust in the wisdom, balance of mind and magnanimity of his wife, now herself already so broken in health.
It is nine months after Giuliano’s death, on May 19, 1498, that we can watch and see how Catherine has been attempting to execute her trust, and how her nature has responded to these various difficult calls upon it, and to the claims of her own family. She first of all, then, orders her body to be buried in the same grave with her husband, in the Hospital Church; and that only the Friars and Clergy of the Hospital shall be present at the funeral; and leaves £10 for her obsequies and £50 for Masses for herself. She next leaves to the Priest Blasio Cicero four shares of the Bank of St. George (about £200), of which he is to pay £150 to a certain female Religious, in satisfaction for a certain debt. And she abrogates Giuliano’s legacy to the Hospital, and, in its place, herself leaves it four shares of St. George’s (at the time about £200, but always tending to increase in value), in liquidation of the £300 that remained unpaid from among the £500 of that legacy. She next leaves to Benedetta Lombarda one share of Saint George’s, in addition to the similar share left her by Giuliano; and to “Antonietta, dwelling with Testatrix, £25, in case she shall live with her up to her death.” As to the two carati, she leaves them to Giovanni Adorno, in lieu of the money bequeathed to him by Giuliano. As to her own relations, she leaves two shares of St. George’s apiece to her two nieces Maria and Battista, the daughters of her eldest brother Jacobo, for their marriage portions; and, if they all die before marriage, then all this money is to go to their father. She leaves £10 to her Augustinian Canoness sister Limbania; and institutes her three brothers Jacobo, Giovanni and Lorenzo, and their heirs, her residuary legatees.
Here four things are noticeable. Catherine has herself undertaken the expenses of Thobia’s keep; the apparent lessening on her part of the sum originally apportioned for the purpose by Giuliano is doubtless only apparent, and must proceed from the same cause which has produced a similar apparent diminution in the amount of Giuliano’s legacy to his nephew from £2,000 to £1,500. In the next place, this is the only one out of the couple’s four Wills, in which the second maid is not Mariola Bastarda, but a certain Antonietta. Catherine feels uncertain as to whether Antonietta will persevere in her service to the end; and we shall find that she has again disappeared in Catherine’s next Will of 1506, and that Mariola has again taken up her old place. We shall find that a story, of which the authenticity and significance are most difficult to fix, attaches without doubt to one or the other of these maids. In the third place, Catherine does not sell the two carati, but leaves them, in lieu of the money bequeathed to him, to Giovanni Adorno; no doubt from the feeling that thus, at her death, this her share in the government and exploitation of the Greek island would be in the hands of a man in the prime of life, who could help to check malpractices. And lastly, she shows a generous forgiveness of Giuliano, a delicate magnanimity towards Thobia and Thobia’s mother, and a thoughtful affection for all her own near and grown-up relations, by ordering her body to be buried in the same grave with Giuliano; by herself undertaking the charges of Thobia’s keep, and appointing a priest by name for handing over Giuliano’s legacy to the still unnamed mother of Thobia; and by remembering her sister, although she had long been provided for in her Convent, her three brothers, who were no doubt indefinitely richer than herself, and especially her two marriageable nieces. Altogether, of the £2,304 definitely accounted for in the Will, she leaves £69 for her own funeral and for Masses for herself; £400 for Thobia and her mother; £210 to her own relations; £125 to servants; and £1,500 to her husband’s nephew. There is no trace here of any indifference to the natural ties of kindred, or of an abstraction of mind rendering her incapable of a careful consideration and firm decision in matters of business: a point which we shall find to be of much importance, later on.
In this year, too, if not already in the previous one, Vernazza founded the institution of the “Mandiletto.” Still a young man—for he was now at most but twenty-eight—Ettore had been noticing, in his work among the poor, how much misery of all kinds obtained in commercial, money-making, hazard-loving Genoa, amongst persons who, even though ill, refused to take refuge in the hospitals; and who, however poor at present, had known better, even brilliant days, and were too proud to beg, or even to accept alms from any one who could recognize them. And hence he now organized a system for discovering and visiting such persons in their own homes and for minimizing their pain in accepting help, by arranging that the members of this little fraternity should never visit such houses, except with some kind of little veil or handkerchief (fazzoletto, mandiletto) applied to their faces.[128]
Catherine, who had helped the Uffizio della Misericordia so much, and who herself so greatly disliked being noticed or even simply seen whenever she was doing or suffering anything at all out of the common, had no doubt, at least in a general way, inspired this beautifully delicate means of preserving and sparing the bashfulness of the giver and the dignity of the recipient. Throughout the remaining years of her life she must have cared to hear Vernazza’s report as to the progress of this work.
But it is in the next year, 1499, that we reach the actual beginning of the third and last period of Catherine’s Convert life.
Some of the events of this year are again predominantly external, or but continuations or consequences of previous inclinations of her will. It must have been at the end of the Lent of this spring-time that all extraordinary fasting-power, of a kind that could be foreseen and that more or less synchronized with the ecclesiastical season, left her for good and all. And she had gone on feeling strongly her share of responsibility for the government of that far-off island. Hence she betook herself, on September 18 of this year, with the Notary Battista Strata, who has drawn up nine out of the fourteen Legal Acts of Giuliano and herself, to the great palace of the Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, who, four years later, became Pope Julius II. This palace stood by the (now destroyed) Church of San Tommaso, and was at this time the residence of Giovanni Adorno. And there, in the great Loggia looking south, Catherine dictated the substance of an Act of Cession then and there to her husband’s nephew of those two carati, which weighed so heavily on her mind. Perhaps Giovanni was in poor health, and Catherine was too eager to eschew her responsibility in the matter to be willing to wait any longer.[129]
The chief event, however, from the point of view of her inner life, and which gives us a second close and most important eyewitness for her last period, was the beginning of her spiritual relations with Don Marabotto.[130] “At the end of the twenty-five years during which she had persevered the way of God without the means of any creature,” says the Vita, “the Lord gave her a priest, to take care both of her soul and of her body; a spiritual man and one of holy life, to whom God gave light and grace to understand His operations within her. He had been appointed Rector of the Hospital; and hence was in a position to hear her Confession, say Mass for her, and give her Holy Communion according to her convenience.”[131] Now the rare and profound isolation and independence of her middle period render this turning to and finding of human help specially significant; the numerous sayings addressed to her Confessor to be found throughout the Vita were all, with the sole exception of those contained in the Conversion-scene, spoken to Marabotto and transmitted by him to us;[132] and probably at least half of the narrative of her Life and well-nigh all her Passion are due to Don Marabotto’s pen. It is then important, and it is possible to get a fairly clear idea as to the sort of man he was.
Don Cattaneo came from a stock even more ancient and distinguished than that of Vernazza. A Marabotto had had a lawsuit with the Bishop of Genoa in 1128; Roggiero Marabotto had lent money to the King of Sardinia in 1164; Martino Marabotto had been Ambassador to Rome, Florence, and Lucca in 1256; Pelagio of that name had been Notary to the Mint in 1435; Giorgio, a Doctor of Medicine in 1424; Ambrosio, Lieutenant-Governor of Corsica in 1459. And the family, like the Fieschi, had always been Guelph: Federico Marabotto had armed nine galleys against the Ghibellines and had had a narrow escape from the latter, during a dark night of 1330; and Antonio and Domenico were known Guelph leaders in 1450 and 1452. Indeed the latter was Procurator to the Fieschi family in 1443, and thus anticipated, by sixty years and on a larger scale, Don Cattaneo’s management of Catherine Fiesca’s modest affairs.[133]
Don Cattaneo himself we find ever gentle, patient, devoted and full of unquestioning reverence towards Catherine; most valuably accurate and detailed in his reproduction of things, in proportion to their tangibleness; naïf and without humour, thoroughly matter of fact, readily identifying the physical with the spiritual, and thus often, unconsciously, all but succeeding in depriving Catherine’s spirit, for us who have so largely to see her with his eyes, of much of its specially characteristic transcendence and of its equally characteristic ethical and spiritual immanence. Such a mind would appear better fitted to follow,—at a respectful distance,—than to lead such a spirit, as Catherine’s; and, indeed, to be more apt to help her as a man of business than as a man of God. As a matter of fact, however, he was quite evidently of very great help and consolation, even in purely spiritual matters, to Catherine, during these last eleven years of her life. Not as though there were any instances of his initiating, stimulating, or modifying any of her ideals or doctrines: she entirely remains, in purely spiritual matters, her own old self, and continues to grow completely along the lines of her previous development. And again he did attend, with an all but unbroken assiduity, to matters not directly belonging to his province qua priest,—to her much-tried, ever-shifting bodily health, and, probably some three or four years later on, to her financial affairs, which latter were still of some variety and complication, owing to her generous anxiety to do much for others, with but little of her own. But between these two opposite extremes of possible help or influence lay another middle level, in which his aid was considerable. For “whenever God worked anything within her, which impressioned her much either in soul or body, she would confer about it all with her Confessor; and he, with the grace and light of God, understood well-nigh all, and would give her answers which seemed to show that he himself felt the very thing that she was feeling herself.” “And she would say, that even simply to have him by, gave her great comfort, because they understood each other, even by just looking each other in the face without speaking.”[134] Marabotto’s Direction consists, then, in giving her the human support of human understanding and sympathy, and, no doubt, in reminding her, in times of darkness, of the lights and truths received and communicated by her in times of consolation. Never does Marabotto see, or think he sees, as far or as clearly as she sees, when she sees at all; and it is the light derived by him from herself at one time, which he administers to her soul at another.
The general tone and character of her first Confession to him are described to us, no doubt from his own contemporary record. “She said: ‘Father, I know not where I am, either as to my soul or as to my body. I should like to confess, but I cannot perceive any offence committed by me.’” “And as to the sins which she mentioned,” adds Marabotto, “she was not allowed to see them as so many sins, thought or said or done by herself. But her state of soul was like unto that of a small boy, who would have committed some slight offence in simple ignorance; and who, if some one told him: You have done evil, would at these words suddenly change colour and blush, and yet not because he has now an experimental knowledge of evil.” “And many a time she would say to her Confessor: ‘I do not want to neglect Confession, and yet I do not know to whom to give the blame of my sins; I want to accuse myself, and cannot manage it.’ And yet, with all this, she made all the acts appropriate to Confession.”[135]
We shall see, indeed, how keen, right up to the end, was her sense of her frailty and of her general and natural inclination to evil. And her teaching as to numerous positive and active imperfections remaining in the soul, in every soul, up to the very end, is so clear and constant, and so admittedly derived from her own experience, that we can explain the above only by the supplementary part of her doctrine (also derived from her own experience), which insists that some greatly advanced souls do not, at the time of committing them, as yet see these their imperfections, and that, by the time they have so far further advanced as to see these imperfections, they are no more inclined to commit them. In this way, then, there would be no fully formal sin or deliberate imperfection to confess.
It is probably during the next two years of her life, that occurred the beautiful scene and conversation,—so typical of her relations with her disciples during this first part of her last period (1499 to 1501), which we can think of as her spiritual Indian summer, her Aftermath. The scene has been recorded for us by her chief interlocutor, Vernazza. Probably Bartolommea, Ettore’s wife, was present, and possibly also Don Marabotto. “This blessed soul,” he writes, “all surrounded though she was by the deep and peaceful ocean of her Love, God, desired nevertheless to express in words, to her spiritual children, the sentiments that were within her. And many a time she would say to them: ‘O would that I could tell what my heart feels!’ And her children would say: ‘O Mother, tell us something of it.’ And she would answer: ‘I cannot find words appropriate to so great a love. But this I can say with truth, that if of what my heart feels but one drop were to fall into Hell, Hell itself would altogether turn into Eternal Life.’”[136] “And one of these her spiritual children, an interior soul (un Religioso),”—Vernazza, present on this occasion,—“dismayed at what she was saying, replied: ‘Mother, I do not understand this; if it were possible, I would gladly understand it better.’ But Catherine answered: ‘My son, I find it impossible to put it otherwise.’ Then he, eager to understand further, said: ‘Mother, supposing we gave your word some interpretation, and that this corresponded to what is in your mind, would you tell us if it was so?’ ‘Willingly, dear son,’ rejoined Catherine, with evident pleasure.”