The Mystical Element of Religion. Friedrich von Hügel

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СКАЧАТЬ school, translated her Dialogue. In our own time Father Isaac Hecker, that striking German-American, loved her as a combination of contemplation and external action; Father Faber strongly endorsed her conception of Purgatory; Cardinal Manning occasioned and prefaced an admirable translation of her Treatise; and Cardinal Newman has incorporated her Purgatorial teaching in the noblest of his poems, “The Dream of Gerontius.” Indeed, General Charles Gordon also can not unfairly be claimed as her unconscious disciple, since her teaching, embodied in Cardinal Newman’s poem, was, besides the Bible and “Imitations,” his one written source of strength and consolation, during that noble Christian captain’s heroic death-watch at Khartoum. And among quite recent or still living writers, Mr. Aubrey de Vere has given us a refined poetic paraphrase of her Treatise, and Father George Tyrrell has developed its theme in one of his most striking Essays.[42]

      I too have, in my own way, long cared for her example and teaching, and for the great questions and solutions suggested by both. A dozen times and more have I visited and lingered over the chief scenes of her activity; and the literary sources of all our knowledge of her life have been dwelt upon by me for twenty years and more.

      I have but very few new details and combinations to offer, in so far as her external life is concerned. It is with regard to the growth of her historic image and the curious vicissitudes which I have been able to trace in the complication of her “Writings”; as to her spirit and teaching; and as to the place and function to be allotted in the religious life to such realities and phenomena as those presented by her, that I hope to be able to contribute something of value. For although the substance and the primary phenomena of religion are eternal, they appear in each soul with an individuality and freshness pathetically unique; and their attempted analysis and apprehension, and their relations to the other departments of human life, necessarily grow and vary. Indeed it would be truly sad, and would rightly tempt to disbelief in an overruling Providence and divine education of the human race, if the four centuries that intervene between our Saint and ourselves had taught us little or nothing of value, in such matters of borderland and interpretation as nervous health, the psychology of religion, and the distinguishing differences between Christian and Neo-Platonic Mysticism. Whole Sciences, indeed the Scientific, above all the Historic spirit itself, have arisen or have come to maturity since her day. Hence the realities of her life, as of every religious life, remain fresh indeed with the deathless vitality of love and grace, and but very partially explicable still; and yet the highest intellectual honour of each successive period should be found in an ever-renewed attempt at an ever less inadequate apprehension and utilization of these highest and deepest manifestations of Authority, Reason, and Experience,—of the Divine in our poor human life.

      II. The Materials and Aids towards such a Study.

      1. The “Vita e Dottrina,” 1551.

      All the biographies of St. Catherine, and all the editions or translations of her “Works,” are based upon the Vita e Dottrina published in Genoa, by Jacobo Genuti, in 1551. I work from the thirteenth Genoese edition, a reprint of that of 1847 (Tipi dei Sordo-Muti). All our knowledge of her mental and physical condition, and of her spiritual doctrine, is practically restricted to this book, and indeed, as we shall see, to its first two parts, the “Vita” and the “Trattato.”

      The Vita is, in its fundamental portions, the joint production of her devoted disciples, Cattaneo Marabotto, a Secular Priest, her Confessor; and Ettore Vernazza, a Lawyer, her “spiritual son.” Its fifty-two chapters (166 octavo pages) are only in small part narrative; quite thirty-five of them are filled with discourses and contemplations of the Saint, evidently, in the simpler of the many parallel versions accumulated here, taken down, at the time of the Saint’s communication of them, with quite remarkable fidelity. But the whole suffers from the inclusion of much secondary, amplifying, repetitive matter; is badly arranged; is kept, almost throughout, above all definite indications of the precise successions, dates, and places; and is deficient in unity of view and literary organization. The result is, of necessity, largely insipid and monotonous.

      The first of the “Works” is the Treatise on Purgatory, the seventeen chapters of which (17 pages) are again hard reading, owing to their evidently consisting of but a mosaic of detached, sometimes parallel sayings, spoken on various occasions and according to the experience and fulness of the moment, and without any reference to the previous one. I shall show reason for holding that this little collection of sayings was originally shorter still (consisting probably of but the matter which now makes up the first seven of its seventeen chapters); that the original chronicler and first redactor of these sayings was Vernazza; and that certain obvious and formal contradictions which appear in the present text must be theological glosses introduced some time between 1520 (or rather 1526) and say 1530 (at latest 1547).

      The second of the “Works,” the Spiritual Dialogue between the Soul, the Body, Self-love, the Spirit, the Natural Man, and the Lord God, is divided into three parts, and fills forty-five chapters (120 pages). I hope to show conclusively that this Dialogue was at first no longer than its present Part I; that even this did not exist before 1547; that the whole was written by one and the same person, some one who had never (at least intimately) known the Saint, and who had no other direct material than our present Vita and Trattato; that this person was the Augustinian canoness, Battista Vernazza, Ettore’s eldest daughter; and that the whole has been written for the purpose of attempting some unification and systematization of what in the Vita appeared to the writer as wanting in unity and in correctness of wording or of feeling. In this case we get a fairly continuous re-statement, in part a heightening, in part a minimizing of the historical facts of Catherine’s life, which, just because we have thus a pragmatic, theological transfiguration of the older materials, caused by a penetrating admiration, and resulting in some true increase of insight into its subject-matter, forms a precious document for the psychology and the effect of such states of mind.

      The Oratorian Giacinto Parpera’s book: B Caterina da Genova … Illustrata, Genova, 1682, gives, in its three parts, respectively the opinions of Saints and Theologians concerning the Saint; a systematic analysis of her doctrine; and an explanation of certain terms and declarations more or less peculiar to her. It is decidedly learned and in parts still useful; but pompously rhetorical and full of “anatomia,” i.e. much wearisome numbering and indefinite sub-division. The Jesuit Padre Maineri’s Vita de S. Caterina di Genova, Genova, 1737,—written on occasion of her canonization,—contains nothing new.

      2. Later books on Catherine.

      A sensible discussion of difficult or obscure points connected with her life occurs in the Bollandists’ Life of the Saint, written by Father Sticken in 1752 (Acta Sanctorum, September, Vol. V, ed. 1866, pp. 123-195). But the greater part of the discussion is vitiated by the assumption of the independent value, indeed of Catherine herself being the author, of the entirely secondary Dialogo; Sticken had not seen a single MS. life or document; and the most important part of her entire personality, her doctrine, had, according to the general plan of the work, to be passed over by him.

      I have also had before me Alban Butler’s accurate compilation; Monseigneur Paul Fliche’s disappointing book, which, though he declares that he has consulted the MSS. Lives, is but a rhetorical amplification of the Life of 1551, with here and there a useful date or other detail added by himself (Paris, 1881); and the Rev. Baring Gould’s hasty and slipshod account, which completely ignores the “Works” (Lives of the Saints, Vol. X, ed. 1898).

      But by far the most important printed matter which has hitherto appeared since 1551, indeed the only one which contains anything at all significant that is not already in the Vita ed Opere, is Sebastiano Vallebona’s booklet, La Perla dei Fieschi, Genova, 2nd ed., 1887, 109 pp. It publishes many a painstaking recovery and identification of various dates and sites, relationships, family documents СКАЧАТЬ