The Mystical Element of Religion. Friedrich von Hügel

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СКАЧАТЬ marriage was celebrated soon afterwards in the Cathedral of San Lorenzo, in the Chapel of St. John the Baptist, since the Campanaro family, which had built it in 1299, and the Adorni, who had married into and succeeded the Campanaro, were excepted from the rule prohibiting the access of women to this Chapel. Since Cardinal Giorgio Fieschi had recently died, Bishop Napoleone Fieschi, of Albenga, presided at the ceremony.

      5. Giuliano’s character. Catherine’s pre-conversion married life.

      Giuliano’s father was dead; only his widowed mother, Tobia dei Franchi, remained. It was, however, with Catherine’s mother, in the old Palazzo near the Cathedral, that the young couple were to live, and actually stayed, during the first two years.

      Giuliano was young and rich; his two elder brothers occupied high naval posts; his first cousin, Agostino Adorno, was a man of noble character and great initiative; and a descendant of this cousin, also Agostino, was later on Beatified. But Giuliano himself did at first worse than nothing, and never did much throughout his life. A man of an undisciplined, wayward, impatient, and explosive temper; selfish and self-indulgent; a lover of obscure and useless, in one instance criminal, squandering of his time, money, health, and affections, he did not deserve the rare woman who had been sold to him; and would possibly indeed have managed to be a better man with a wife he had really loved, or with one of a temperament and outlook more ordinary and nearer to his own. As it was, he was hardly ever at home, and, according to his own later penitent admission and testamentary provisions, he was, some time during the first ten years of his marriage, gravely unfaithful to his wife.

      Catherine, on her part, spent the first five of these dreary years in sad and mournful loneliness, at first in her mother’s house, and afterwards, at least in the winter-time, in Giuliano’s own palace, a building which stood exactly where now stands the Church of Saint Philip Neri, in the Via Lomellina (at that time, Via Sant’ Agnese), and near the Piazza Annunziata. In the summer-time she would stay, mostly alone again, at Giuliano’s country seat at Prà on the Western Riviera, just beyond Pegli, and six English miles from Genoa.

      This latter property is still in existence, but was, some twenty years ago, on the extinction of the male line of the Adorni, sold to the Piccardo family. The present moderate-sized house, standing close to the high-road and sea-beach, although evidently rebuilt (probably on a considerably smaller scale) since Catherine’s time, no doubt occupies part at least of the old site. But the Chapel which, in the Saint’s days, adjoined the house, was described by Vallebona (in 1887) as turned into a stable; and in April 1902 an elderly serving-man of the Piccardo family showed me the precise spot, on a now level meadow expanse closely adjoining the house, where he himself, some fifteen years since, had helped to pull down this chapel-stable. He showed me the (probably seventeenth-century) picture representing the scene of the Saint’s conversion, which had, at that time, been still in this building, and which is now hung up in a small Confraternity-Chapel near by in Prà.

      As to money of her own, Catherine had, as we shall see later on, her dowry of £1,000, to which Giuliano had contributed £200. But we have no evidence of any good works performed by her in this decade, although, as we shall find, it must have been during these summers that she, at least occasionally, walked or rode over the wooded hill-path to the old Benedictine Pilgrimage Church and Monastery of San Nicolò in Boschetto, three or four English miles away. These buildings are now secularized and empty, but, even so, impressive still.[47]

      It is but natural to suppose that she was as yet too little at one with her true self, to be able to surmount her lot, or even seriously to attempt such a task, by escaping from the false self and from all attempts at finding happiness within the four corners of the demands of her most sensitive and absolute disposition. To learn to do things well takes time,—and even if it be but the finding out that those things to do are there, ready and requiring to be done; or the seeing that we are doing them badly. Hence above all does the learning to suffer well, the turning pain into self-expansion and self-escape, as well as into fruitful action, require time, special graces, and unusual fidelity of soul. And even the noblest nature will usually begin by thinking of getting, rather than of giving; it will simply thirst to be loved, and to find its happiness in its own heart’s perfect “comprehendedness.”

      Catherine tried to find relief, first in one attitude on her life’s sad couch of mental suffering, and then in another; and neither brought her any alleviation. During the first five years she had hidden herself away, and had moped in solitude; the last five, she had given herself to worldly gaieties and feminine amusements, short, however, of all grave offence against the moral law. And at the end of these experiences and experiments she, noble, deep nature that she was, found herself, of course, sadder than ever, with apparently no escape of any kind from out of the dull oppression, the living death of her existence and of herself.

      V. Her Conversion, with its immediate Preliminaries and Consequences, March 1474.

      1. Her prayer, March 20, 1474. Her conversion, March 22.

      From after Christmas-time in 1472, Catherine’s affliction of mind had become peculiarly intense, and a profound aversion to all the things of this world made her fly anew from all human intercourse; and yet her own company had become insupportable to her, as nothing whatsoever attracted her will.

      And at the end of three months, on the 20th of March 1474—it was the eve of the Feast of St. Benedict—she was praying in his little church still standing close to the sea, at the western end of Genoa, not far beyond Andrea Doria’s Palace, built so soon after her death. And in her keen distress she prayed: “St. Benedict, pray to God that He make me stay three months sick in bed.”[48]

      And two days later, when Catherine was visiting her sister at her Convent, Limbania proposed to her, since she declared herself indisposed to go to confession (although the Feast of the Annunciation was at hand), at least to go and recommend herself in the Chapel to the chaplain of the Convent, who was indeed a saintly Religious. And, at the moment that she was on her knees before him, her heart was pierced by so sudden and immense a love of God, accompanied by so penetrating a sight of her miseries and sins and of His goodness, that she was near falling to the ground. And in a transport of pure and all-purifying love, she was drawn away from the miseries of the world; and, as it were beside herself, she kept crying out within herself: “No more world; no more sins!” And at that moment she felt that, had she had in her possession a thousand worlds, she would have cast them all away.[49]

      2. Views and truths concerning this Experience.

      One of the various writers who have successively, and in great part differently, moralized upon the chief events of her life, dwells on this great moment as achieving in her soul all the usually lengthy and successive effects of the purgative, illuminative, and unitive progression, and as, in that one instant, bringing her soul to that highest state of transformation, in which the will is wholly united to God.[50] But having regard to the fact, patent on every page of her biography and “Works,” that, for the remaining thirty-seven years of her life, her interior history represents one continuous widening and deepening and moving onwards of efforts, trials and pains, of achievements and ideals—a fact actually schematized by another writer (who, as I shall show, is the penultimate Redactor of the Life) not two pages lower down—it is clear that we must be careful to conceive this perfection as relative to her previous state or even to the final goodness of many saintly souls. We must, in a word, try to realize vividly, and constantly to recall, certain complex truths, without which the very greatness of the experience here considered will but help to check or deflect our apprehension of the spiritual life.

      For one thing, the deeper and the more unique the soul’s experience, and the richer such experience is, the more entirely does all that the СКАЧАТЬ