ST. CATHERINE AS AN AUTHOR.

The literary phase of Catherine's career and character, especially as seen in her letters, is by no means its least curious and suggestive aspect. The indications of what she herself was, and yet more, the evidences obtainable from them of the undeniably exceptional and extraordinary position she held among her contemporaries, are valuable, and yet at the same time not a little puzzling.

Her works consist of a treatise occupying a closely printed quarto volume, which Father Raymond describes as "a Dialogue between a Soul, which asked four questions of the Lord, and the same Lord, who made answer, and gave instruction in many most useful truths;" of her letters, three hundred and seventy-three in number; and of twenty-six prayers.

This Dialogue is entitled, "The book of Divine Doctrine, given in person by God the Father, speaking to the mind of the most glorious and holy Virgin, Catherine of Siena, and written down as she dictated it in the vulgar tongue, she being the while entranced, and actually hearing that which God spoke in her." It is stated to have been dictated by the Saint in her father's house in Siena, a little before she went to Rome, and to have been completed the 13th of October, 1378. This dialogue has been divided into five parts, though no such division existed in it, as it fell from her lips. The first part treats of Discretion; the second of Prayer; the third of the Divine Providence; the fourth of Obedience; and the fifth of Consummate Perfection. The four first exist in manuscript in the original Italian, as they were taken down from the lips of the entranced Saint; though these ancient manuscript copies abound, we are told by the modern editor of them, Girolamo Gigli, with such errors as frequently not only to alter the sense, but to render it inconsistent with true orthodoxy. Of course nothing but the purest doctrine could have been uttered by the Saint, and these dangerous errors have been corrected. But the fifth treatise is not extant in the original, but only in Father Raymond's Latin translation of it, from which the published Italian version has been re-translated.

The French oratorian, Father Casimir Oudin,[23] in his Supplement of Ecclesiastical writers, omitted by Bellarmine, quietly says, "She wrote, or Raymond de Vineis wrote in her name, a work inscribed," &c. &c. It is very possible, that the Frenchman's suspicion may be just. But, with the exception of some allusions and subtleties, indicating, perhaps, a greater acquaintance with scholastic theology than the Saint may be thought to have possessed, there is nothing in the work itself to belie the origin attributed to it. It could not, indeed, have been written down from the Saint's dictation, as it professes to have been, in the form and sequence in which we have it printed; because it is intermingled (without any typographical or other advertisement, that the reader is about to enter on matter of a different authorship and pretensions)—with long passages descriptive of the Saint's mode of receiving the revelation, written in the person of the secretary, and bearing a strong likeness to Father Raymond's style and phraseology. But the Saint's own utterances are exactly such as might have been expected from such a patient, and much resemble in many respects those which many readers have probably heard in these latter days, from persons in all likelihood similarly affected in greater or less degree. As the latter have often been found to bear a singular resemblance in quality and manner to the verbose and repetitive inanities of some very slenderly gifted extempore preacher, so these ecstatic outpourings of St. Catherine are like the worst description of the pulpit eloquence of her day and country. Low and gross as the taste and feeling of the age were, especially in matters spiritual and theological, it is difficult to imagine that Catherine could have gained any part of the great reputation and influence she undeniably exercised in high places from this production. The reader may see from the following passage, taken quite at haphazard from its pages, whether his impression on this point agrees with that of the writer.

Catherine dictates these sentences as hearing them word for word as she repeats them, from the mouth of God!

"Know, O daughter! that no one can escape from my hands, because I am He, who I am; and ye do not exist by yourselves, but only in so far as ye are created by Me, who am the Creator of all things that have existence, except only Sin, which does not exist, and therefore has not been created by me. And because it is not in me, it is not worthy of being loved. And therefore the Creature offends, because he loves that which he ought not to love, which is sin, and hates Me, whom he is bound and obliged to love; for I am supremely good, and have given him existence by the so ardent fire of my love. But from Me men cannot escape. Either they fall into my hands for justice on their sins, or they fall into my hands for mercy. Open therefore the eyes of your mind, and look at my hand, and you will see that what I have said to you is the truth." Then she raising her eyes in obedience to the supreme Father, "saw enclosed in his hand the entire universe," &c., &c.[24]

It is evident, that this could not have been written from the Saint's dictation. But the work may have been composed from notes taken down while she poured forth her trance-talk. And such an hypothesis would not be incompatible with Oudin's supposition, that the book, as we have it, was composed by Father Raymond. In any case the staple of its contents, if not inferior to the generality of the theological literature of the time, shows at least no such superiority to it as to place the author in the high and exceptional position Catherine is proved to have occupied.

Twenty-six prayers have been preserved among the works of Saint Catherine; and it might be supposed, that such a record of the secret outpourings of an ardent heart in its communion with the infinite God, sole object of its fervent aspirations and daily and nightly meditations, would have been calculated to throw considerable light on the character, capabilities, and mental calibre of the worshipper. But these documents afford no glimpse of any such insight. They are not the sort of utterances that could ever bring one human heart nearer to another: and no assimilating power of sympathy will enable the reader of them to advance one jot towards a knowledge of the heart from which they proceeded. The impression they are calculated to produce, is either that the Saint was a self-conscious actor and pretender, or that they are not her compositions. And the latter, perhaps, may be considered the more probable hypothesis.

Though addressed in form to the Deity, there is little that can be accurately called prayer. The speaker, or writer rather, seems continually to forget his avowed object, and runs off into long statements of the nature and attributes of the Deity, and ecclesiastical propositions based thereon, evidently prompted rather by didactic views on mortal hearers, than by effort to hold communion with the Almighty. It is all dry, cold, repetitive, verbose theology, instead of the spontaneous warm utterances of either a thankful or a contrite heart;—neither the expression of an earnest spirit, nor the production of an eloquent writer.

There remain the letters, by far the most interesting and valuable of the Saint's reputed works. They are 373 in number, and form two stout quarto volumes of the Lucca edition. In the four octavo volumes of the cheap Milan reprint before mentioned, only the first 198 are given; though there is no word of notice or explanation to indicate, that the work is not complete. On the contrary, the fourth volume is entitled "fourth and last;" and we are left to the hopeful conjecture, that the devout editors found the speculation so bad a one commercially, that they thought fit to close the publication suddenly, and leave their subscribers to discover as late as might be, that they had purchased an imperfect book.

The 373 letters of the entire collection have among them many addressed to kings, popes, cardinals, bishops, conventual bodies, and political corporations, as well as a great number written to private individuals. And it seems strange, that among so many correspondents of classes, whose papers are likely to be preserved, and many of whom, especially the monastic communities, would assuredly have attached a high value to such documents, no one original of any of these letters should have been preserved.

Girolamo Gigli, the editor of the quarto edition of the Saint's works, printed at Lucca and Siena, in 1707–13, an enthusiastic and laborious investigator and collector of every description of information regarding her, gives in his Preface to the letters, a careful account of the manuscript collections from which they have at different times been printed, but has not a word to say of any scrap of original document. "As soon," he writes, "as the saintly Virgin had ascended to heaven in the year 1380, some of her secretaries and disciples collected from one place and another some of her letters and writings." But the words which follow this seem to indicate that even these earliest collectors did not possess any of the original manuscripts, but made copies of them, in most cases probably from other copies. "The blessed Stefano Maconi," he says, "having transcribed the book of the Dialogue, added at the end of it some epistles; and another larger collection was made, also by him as I think, in a certain volume which exists in the library of the Certosa at Pavia. Buonconti also collected not a few, as may be seen by an ancient copy in his writing, which was among the most notable things left by the Cardinal Volunnio Bandinelli, and now belongs to the Signor Volunnio, his nephew and heir. We have another abundant collection in an ancient manuscript preserved in the library of St. Pantaleo at Rome; and this is one of the most faithful of all those I have seen in its orthography and style; and as far as can be judged by the character of the writing, the scribe must have been contemporary with the Saint. But the blessed Raymond of Capua, her confessor, left to the Dominicans of Siena two very large volumes of her letters neatly copied out on parchment, in which nearly all those collected by the others are contained. And these most precious documents are rendered more valuable by the testimony given to their authenticity by the blessed Tomaso Caffarini in the above cited reports made at Venice."[25]

The epistles were first printed by Aldus in 1500, just 180 years after Catherine's death, and afterwards in many other editions, all, according to Gigli, exceedingly incorrect, and requiring much critical care both in the restoration of the text to its original Tuscan purity, and in the arrangement of the letters, as far as possible, in their due chronological order. This, however, is made subsidiary in Gigli's edition to a division of them according to the persons to whom they were addressed. Thus those to the two Popes, Gregory XI. and Urban VI., come first; then those written to cardinals; then those to bishops and other ecclesiastical authorities; and lastly those to private individuals.

And this is the substance of all the Sienese editor has to tell us respecting the texts, manuscript and printed, on which his own has been formed. But the Saint's confessor, and one or two of her disciples, have recorded some circumstances respecting the lost originals of these letters which require to be noticed.

It is stated in perfect accordance with all probability, that Catherine had never learned to read or write, as was in those days the case with the great majority of women in stations of life far superior to her own. Her biographer's account of her miraculously acquiring the power of reading by sudden endowment has been related in the preceding chapter. And at a later period of her life we are told that she similarly acquired the power of writing, "in order that she might be able," writes Girolamo Gigli in his Preface to the Letters, "to carry out the office of her apostolate by more agencies than one, and in more places than one, at the same time, Christ gave her by a wonderful method the use of the pen, in the short schooling of a trance, and by the teaching of St. John the Evangelist, and of the blessed Doctor, Aquinas, as the Saint herself affirms in a letter to the above-mentioned blessed Raymond her confessor."

One of the most interesting points of inquiry in the life of St. Catherine turns on the question, more fully examined in a subsequent chapter, how far was she, or was she not, entirely sincere in her statements and pretensions. Now if she makes the statement attributed to her respecting her acquisition of the art of writing, it must be concluded that she was guilty of wilful imposture. No possible self-deception could have misled her as to the fact of her previous ignorance of writing, and as little as to that of her writing after the trance. It will be well therefore to observe accurately what she really does say herself upon the subject. In 1377, when she was in the thirtieth year of her age, after her return from Avignon, and before her final journey to Rome, she was inhabiting a villa belonging to the noble Sienese family of Salimbeni, situated on an isolated eminence overlooking the road to Rome, and called "Rocca d'Orcia." Hence she wrote a very long letter—the longest probably in the whole collection—occupying, as it does, twelve full octavo pages—to Father Raymond; and concludes it with the following lines.

"This letter, and another which I sent you, I have written with my own hand from this isolated fortress, with many sighs and abundance of tears, so that seeing with my eyes, I did not see. But I was full of admiration at myself, and at the goodness of God, considering his mercy towards creatures, who have reason in them, and his providence, which abounded upon me, giving and providing me with the aptitude for writing for my comfort, I having been deprived of that consolation, which by reason of my ignorance I knew not. So that on descending from the height (does this mean 'on coming out of my trance,' or 'on leaving this fortress?') I might have some little vent for the feelings of my heart, so that it should not burst. Not being willing to take me as yet out of this darksome life, God formed it in my mind in a wonderful manner, as the master does to the child, to whom he gives an exemplar. So that, as soon as ever he was gone from me, together with the glorious Evangelist John, and Thomas Aquinas, sleeping I began to learn."

Now the entire value of this incident in the eyes of the fourteenth, and the entire incredibility of it in the eyes of the nineteenth century, and consequently its stringency as evidence against the sincerity of St. Catherine, depends on the length of time intervening between the moment when she began to learn in her sleep, and that at which she first wrote. All her own admiration of herself and of God's providence in the matter, all her own belief in miracle, and her beginning to learn in her sleep, we may admit without founding thereon any impeachment of her sincerity. Nor need we be accurate in taking the sense of her statement, that she then began to learn. Most people would find it difficult to say when they began to learn most things. And on the other hand the phrase would seem to express, that she did not complete her learning to write in that same trance. We have other indications also of a gradual advance in the art. The long letter, in which the Saint makes the above statement, is certainly not the first product of her new acquirement. She speaks of having written a former letter to the same correspondent. But neither was that her first writing.

In the evidence given by the Beato Tomaso Caffarini on the occasion of the examination of her pretensions to canonization, he deposes: "I further testify, that I heard from Master Stephen,[26] of Siena," by means of letters from him, how that this Virgin, after that she miraculously learned to write, rising up from prayer with a desire of writing, wrote with her own hand a little letter (litterulam), which she sent to the said Master Stephen, and in which was the following conclusion, written, that is to say, in her own vernacular: "Know, my son, that this is the first letter, which I ever wrote;"—much such a first attempt as the most unmiraculously taught of penmen might be likely to make.

Consistently then with all that Catherine distinctly asserts on the subject, we may believe, that despite her ready credence of her own environment with the supernatural at every moment of her life, the only miracle on the occasion of her newly acquired power of writing was worked by that intensely strong will, which works so many miracles in this world, and which all Catherine's history shows her to have eminently possessed.

The same witness further testifies that the above-mentioned Stephen informed him that Catherine had after that frequently written in his presence both letters and some sheets of the book[27] she composed in the vulgar tongue, all which writings he—Stephen—had preserved in the Carthusian convent of Pontignano near Siena, over which he presided. And there, according to Girolamo Gigli, "they were known to have been in existence for many years, until, not long ago," says he, writing in 1707, "they were transported to Grenoble, at the time when the monks of Pontignano, as well as all those of the Carthusian order, were obliged to send all their papers to the Grande Chartreuse." And so they vanish out of our sight.

Further Caffarini testifies, that he saw and had in his own possession at Venice a prayer, written miraculously, as he says, by Catherine, with a piece of cinnabar, immediately on waking from a trance; meaning, apparently, that trance, during which she obtained the faculty of writing. He gives the prayer in Latin prose. But Gigli says that it ought to be written in the Tuscan as verse, in the manner in which it is printed by Crescimbeni in the third volume of his "Volgare Poesia," as follows:—

"O Spirito santo, vieni nel mio cuore;
Per la tua potenzia trailo a te, Dio:
E concedemi caritÀ con timore.
Custodimi Christo da ogni mal pensiere,
Riscaldami e rinfiammami del tuo dolcissimo amore,
SicchÈ ogni pena mi paja leggiere.
Santo il mio padre, e dolce il mio Signore,
Ora ajutami in ogni mio mestiere,
Christo amore, Christo amore."

This writing, in cinnabar, Caffarini declares is "now," 1411, in the Dominican nunnery at Venice. But this also has shared the ill fortune which seems to have attended every scrap of the Saint's writing. For Gigli states that all his efforts to obtain any tidings of it in his own time had been in vain.

A few other letters are recorded to have been written by her own hand, especially one to Pope Urban. But it is admitted, that the great bulk of the letters were written by her secretaries, of whom she seems to have kept three regularly employed, besides occasionally using the assistance of several other of her companions and disciples. A few of the letters are recorded to have been dictated by her, when in a state of trance or extasy; but there is nothing in either their matter or manner to distinguish them from the rest. Whatever may have been the true physical characteristics of these trances, it is perfectly clear, that the mind which dictated the letters in question, was pursuing the habitual tenor of its daily thoughts, neither obscured nor intensified by the condition of the body. They are neither more nor less argumentative, neither more nor less eloquent, than the others of the collection. And it seems strange, that the same state of abstraction from all bodily clog or guidance, which so often left her mind impressionable by visions and hallucinations having to her all the vivid reality of material events, should on other occasions have been compatible with the conduct of mental operations, in no respect differing from those of her ordinary waking state. But it is to be observed, that the authority on which it is stated, that these letters were dictated by the Saint in a state of extasy, is only that of her amanuenses; and that, admitting them to have been of perfect good faith in the matter, nothing is more probable, than that, all agape, as they were ever for fresh wonders, and evidences of Saintship, any trifling circumstance, such as long continuance in the same attitude, or closed eyes, may have been considered sufficient evidence of trance.

The very high reputation, and that not altogether of a pietistic or ecclesiastical nature, which this large mass of writings has enjoyed for several centuries has appeared to the present writer an extremely singular fact. It will justify him however in occupying some pages, and the reader's attention with a translation[28] of one of the most esteemed of the collection. Be it what it may, it can hardly be otherwise than interesting to any reader to see a specimen of compositions, said to have produced so widely spread and important results, and praised by so many men of note; and the means, which it will give him of comparing his impressions of it with those of the writer, will in some degree lessen the diffidence with which the latter must express an opinion wholly at variance with so large a quantity of high authority.

A great deal of the praise bestowed on St. Catherine's writings by Italian critics has reference to their style and diction. Written at a time when the language, fresh from the hands of Dante, of Petrarch, and of Boccaccio, was still in its infancy, and in a city in all times celebrated for the purity of its vernacular, they have by the common consent of Italian scholars taken rank as one of the acknowledged classics of the language;—"testa di lingua," as the Tuscan purists say. The Della Cruscans have placed them on the jealously watched list of their authorities; and an enthusiastic Sienese compatriot has compiled a "vocabalario Caterineano," after the fashion of those consecrated to the study of the works of Homer and Cicero. Of course no one from the barbarous side of the Alps can permit themselves any word of observation on this point. Had no such decisive opinion been extant to guide his ignorance, it might probably have seemed to a foreigner, that the Saint's style was loose in its syntax, intricate in its construction, and overloaded with verbosity. But we are bound to suppose, that any such opinion could be formed only by one ignorant of the real beauties of the language: especially as we know how great and minute is the attention paid to diction by Italian critics.

But these philological excellences are after all the least part of the praise that has been lavished on Catherine as an author. Her admirers enlarge on the moving eloquence, the exalted piety, the noble sentiments, the sound argumentation of her compositions, especially her letters. And it is not from an Italian, or a Dominican, but from a French Jesuit and historian, Papire Masson, that we have the following enthusiastic praise of that letter more especially, which it is intended to submit to the reader of these pages.

"Several epistles are extant," writes this sixteenth century Frenchman, "from Catherine of Siena to Urban, and one to King Charles V., written on the 6th of May, 1379, to uphold that Pope's cause. And certainly nothing more weighty or more elegant could have been conceived or written by any man of that time, not even excepting Petrarch, whose genius I admire, and whose works I generally prefer to those of any other writer of that age."

To the present writer such an opinion appears perfectly monstrous, and wholly unaccountable on any simply literary consideration of the matter. It may be admitted to be no little extraordinary that a poor dyer's daughter in the fourteenth century should write these letters, such as they are; that she should possess so much knowledge of the general state of Church politics in Europe, as they evince; and most of all that having popes, kings, and cardinals for her correspondents, she should be listened to by them with respect and attention. Even to the Pope, she on more than one occasion ventures on a tone of very decided reproof; and it should seem, that Urban VI., a choleric and violent tempered man, received from her in good part communications couched in language such as rarely reaches Papal ears. "The blessed Christ," she says, in writing to Urban of the vices of the ecclesiastics, a topic to which she returns again and again, "complains of this, that his Church is not swept clean of vices, and your Holiness has not that solicitude on the subject which you ought to have." Again, when there had been riots in Rome, in consequence of the Pope having failed to keep certain promises he had made to the people, she "humbly begs him to take care, prudently to promise only what it will be possible for him to perform in its entirety."

All this is curious enough, and abundantly sufficient to prove that Catherine was an influential power in her generation. It will be the business of a following chapter to offer some suggestions as to the explanation of this remarkable fact. But let the causes of it have been what they may, it is difficult to suppose that they can be found in the persuasive eloquence, or literary merit of her appeals to those in power.