The Mystical Element of Religion. Friedrich von Hügel

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      3. The Manuscripts.

      It is, however, to the careful analysis of the important still extant MS. material, that I owe far more than to all the printed matter subsequent to 1551. And indeed I can say without exaggeration that this is the first serious attempt at a critical presentation of Catherine’s Life and Teaching. A detailed account of my materials and method will be given in the Appendix to this volume.

      III. Peculiarities of the Genoese Climate And Geographical Position; of the Ligurian Character; and of the Times into which Catherine was born. Her Family, Father and Mother.

      Catherine Fiesca was born in Genoa, towards the end of the year 1447.[43] She thus belonged to a race and a time full indeed of violence and conflict, intrigue and cruelty, excessive in all things; but hence full too of courage and of daring, of boundlessly expansive energies, and of throbbing life.

      1. The Genoese country and character.

      Lying at the foot of imposing mountain terraces, at the great central bend and chief natural harbour of the rocky, sun-baked, mountain-backed Riviera, Genoa formed, from early, pre-Roman days, the natural capital of this thin strip of territory which, eastward from Spezia and westward from Nice, looks all along towards the sea, and towards the broad blue sea alone. And the natural influences of the country seem ever to have been met and doubled by a fierce, explosive strain in the characters of the successive races that peopled this narrow, steep, hot sea-board. The ferocious, wild Ligurians gave the Romans trouble, right up to the end of their dominion; and the subsequent Lombard invasion and subjugation did little to change their character. The keen rivals of Venice, in her trade and power in the East, and the mortal foes of their competitor Pisa, so near to their own gates, the Genoese did much for trade and commerce, but little for science and art, and were feared and hated by the Tuscans, in their rich and fertile lands, and with their large and liberal culture. Sailors, adventurers, free-booters; great merchants and carriers and bankers; conspirators and revolutionaries,—they have produced great admirals, such as Andrea Doria; great administrative and warlike Popes, in the persons of the two masterful, irascible della Roveres, from the twenty miles distant Savona,—Sixtus IV, and Michael Angelo’s friend and patron, Julius II; a great navigator, in Christopher Columbus; a fierce and fanatical, but lofty and utterly disinterested revolutionary, in Mazzini; and a brave, reckless condottiere in Garibaldi, born as far away as Nice, but whose mother came from the near Chiavari.

      2. The times into which Catherine was born.

      And our Saint was born in the midst of singularly active, changeful, far-outward-looking, swift-onward-moving times. Columbus had been born the year before; Fust and Gutenberg were printing the first printed books three years later; Constantinople was taken by the Turks when she was six years old.

      The Mediaeval system was, at last, breaking up fast. That whole conception of life and polity of peoples had rendered services too great, indeed too unique, to civilization and religion; they had been for too long the faithful instrument, expression and result of a certain stage and aspect of human and Christian character and development, for this break-up not to have been slow, reluctant, and intermittent at first, notwithstanding the heavy blows levelled, often unconsciously, at the system from both within and without the Church. Pope Boniface’s Bull, Unam Sanctam, which stretched and strained the Mediaeval conception to breaking-point (1302); the dreary blank and confusion of the seventy years of the Avignon exile of the Papacy (1309-1377); the thirty years’ distraction of the great Papal Schism (1378-1409); the fierce revolts and tragic fates of Wycliffe and of Hus, in 1384 and 1415; the ineffectual Council of Constance (1414-1418),—all this had already taken place. And not even such saintly figures as Tauler and Blessed Henry Suso in Germany, and St. Catherine of Siena in Italy and France; or such nobly reforming characters as the French Chancellor Gerson, who had died eighteen years before our Saint’s birth (1429); or the bold and spiritual German Philosopher-Cardinal Nicolas of Coes, who died when she was seventeen (1464),—could achieve more than to announce and prepare the transition to a great modification of Christendom, and to indicate the eternal and necessary source from which it must spring, and the new temporal, contingent form which it might take.

      But the scandals, revolts, and repressions, on a scale and with results which turned Reform into Revolution, and broke up Western Europe into those two hostile camps, which, towards the end of four centuries, we see, alas! hostile still—these things were yet to come. Roderigo Borgia was to be Pope (1492-1503) only towards the end of her life. And only after she had been seven years dead, was Luther to nail his theses on the University-Church door at Wittenberg (1517), and more than a generation later were Mary Tudor in England and Philip II in Spain (1553-1598) to attempt, for the last time on so large a scale, the task of keeping and winning minds and souls, by ruthless physical repression.

      Catherine lived thus within a period which, in its depths, was already modern, but not yet broken up into seemingly final, institutionalized internecine antagonisms. And hence we can get in her a most restful and bracing pure affirmativeness, an entire absence of religious controversy, such as, of necessity, cannot be found in even such predominantly interior souls as the great Post-Reformation Spanish Mystics. Her whole religion can grow and show itself as simply positive, and in rivalry and conflict with her own false self and with that alone.

      3. The Fieschi family.

      And the particular family from which she sprang, and the period of its history at which she appeared, each helped to bring right into her blood and immediate surroundings the more general conditions of her race and time.

      The Fieschi had indeed a long past story, securely traceable through a good two centuries and a half before Catherine’s birth. They sprang from the little seaside town of Lavagna, twenty English miles east of Genoa, where shipbuilding is still carried on. Here it was that Sinibaldo de’ Fieschi, the first of the two Popes of the family, Innocent IV (1243-1254), was born, whose whole Pontificate was one long vehement struggle with his former friend, the masterful and sceptical Emperor Frederic II of Germany. His nephew was Pope, under the title of Hadrian V, for but a few months (1276). It was from Pope Innocent’s brother Robert that St. Catherine was descended.

      The Fieschi were the greatest of the great Guelph families of Genoa, such as the Grimaldi, Guarchi, and Montaldi. The great Doria family, with the Spinola, Fregosi, and Adorni was as strongly Ghibelline. And the endless, fierce conflict between these two factions, in Genoa itself and along both Rivieras, led to the calling in, and to the temporary supremacy over Genoa, of the Dukes of Milan, the Counts of Montferrat, and of the Kings of Naples and of France. The Revolution of 1339, which put an end to the exclusive rule of the Nobles, and introduced elective Doges or Dukes as life-long heads of the Republic, really altered little or nothing of all this.

      Indeed the Fieschi had, just now at Catherine’s birth, reached the full height of their power and worldly splendour. For the two Popes of the family had already reigned two centuries before, and Cardinal Luca Fieschi lay buried in the Cathedral for over a hundred years; but the Fieschi now possessed numerous fiefs in Liguria, Piedmont, Lombardy, and even in the Kingdom of Naples; Nicolò Fieschi, a cousin of the Saint, was, in Catherine’s time, a prominent member of the College of Cardinals; and her own father was Viceroy of Naples to King René of Anjou. There was indeed exactly a century yet to run, up to the beginning of the downward course of the family,—the disastrous conspiracy of the Fieschi against the Dorias (1547), which forms the subject of Schiller’s well-known play.

      Catherine’s father had been Viceroy of Naples to that René Duc of Anjou, Count of Provence, Duke of Lorraine, and titular King of Naples, whose adventurous career and immensely popular СКАЧАТЬ