The Mystical Element of Religion. Friedrich von Hügel

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СКАЧАТЬ 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]

      II. Catherine and Tommasa Fiesca: their Difference of Character and attrait. Peculiarity of Catherine’s Penitence and Health during this time.

      1. Catherine’s penances.

      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]

      2. Catherine and Tommasina.

      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]

      3. Peculiarity of Catherine’s penitence.

      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]

      4. Her physical health.

      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]

      III. Change in the Temper of Catherine’s Penitence, from May 1474 onwards.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ