Volume 8 — Treatise On Purgatory.

By Saint Catharine Of Genoa.

[Footnote 118]

When the gates of purgatory opened to Dante and his companion with awful thunderous roar, he heard mingling with the sound a chorus of voices—"We praise thee, O God!"—rising and fading away like a solemn chant and sound of the organ under the arches of some vast cathedral.

And afterward, while pursuing their journey, they felt the whole mountain of purgatory tremble. A shout arose—"Glory be to God in the Highest!"—swelled by the voice of every suffering soul in that vast realm. It was the expression of universal, unselfish joy over the deliverance of one soul from its bounds.

Such are the tones that ring all through the Treatise on Purgatory by St. Catharine of Genoa—full of praise, of holy joy, and of unselfish love. It ought to be read beneath the mild eyes of the Madonna in some old church, to the sound of solemn music. If you do not meet in it the dazzling angels of the great Florentine poet, you feel their presence, and you rejoice like him in the nooks of beauty where "spring sweet, pale flowers of penitence," refreshed by the fragrant dews of God's mercy.

The patient, silent suffering of the tried souls she describes, which are living on the glimpse they had of the divine Splendor at the moment of death, is full of eloquence. They suffer intensely, but peace and joy rise above pain, as in the beautiful bay of Spezia, we are told, the sweet water rises up out of the salt and bitter sea.

While reading this production of genius and of inspiration, we no longer shrink from that dark region, lighted up, as it is, by rays of God's wonderful goodness. With St. Catharine, we regard it as a provision of great mercy which the soul gladly avails itself of as a means of purification, which will fit it for the awful presence of him in whose sight the very stars are not pure—a presence the soul could not endure till it had purged "the world's gross darkness off." As Faber says, "The moment that in his sight it perceives its own unfitness for heaven, it wings its voluntary flight to purgatory, like a dove to her proper nest in the shades of the forest." It cries:

"Take me away, and in the lowest deep There let me be, And there in hope the lone night-watches keep, Told out for me. There, motionless and happy in my pain, Lone, not forlorn, There will I sing my sad perpetual strain, Until the morn. There will I sing, and soothe my stricken breast, Which ne'er can cease To throb, and pine, and languish, till possessed Of its sole peace. There will I sing my absent Lord and Love:— Take me away, That sooner I may rise, and go above, And see him in the truth of everlasting day." [Footnote 119]

M. le Vicomte de Bussierre, in writing of this treatise, says: "But is the state described by the saint that of all the souls detained by divine justice in this place of expiation?" The reply to this question requires some preliminary observations.

The dogma of the church respecting purgatory is very brief. The Holy Council of Trent is satisfied with declaring that there is a purgatory, and that the souls therein detained are helped by the suffrages of the faithful.

The church does not define the nature of the sufferings endured there, but this is our idea of them:

This world is a place of probation. In it are prepared the materials for the construction of the New Jerusalem. Not only stones are wanted for its walls, but jewels for its decoration. Diamonds are not cut in the same manner as common stones. Thence we can perceive the necessity of different ways of preparing the righteous for a higher state of existence. The place each one will occupy in heaven is irrevocably fixed at the moment of death, but, before taking possession of it, he must have the highest polish of which he is susceptible, and be without any defect or stain.

Take two persons who are entering purgatory. One has passed his life in gross sensual pleasures, but absolution with the necessary dispositions has restored him to the paths of righteousness; the other has always lived in innocence and in the closest union with God, but slight imperfections deprive him for a time of the beatific vision. Shall it be said that the manner of purifying these two souls is the same, and that their purgatory only differs in point of duration? It does not seem probable. We do not use the same means for removing a stain from a garment that we should for a particle of dust on a polished mirror.

This explanation will better enable us to understand St. Catharine's treatise. Most Christians believe there are sensible pains in purgatory. It is the view commonly taken of that state by our preachers. Our saint does not contradict this opinion. She speaks of a special purification for certain souls, but without excluding any. The soul in question in her treatise is a diamond already cut with wonderful exactness, and from which the Divine Artist is removing the last stain before placing it among his choicest jewels.

Faber says there are two views of purgatory prevailing among Christians, indicative of the peculiar tone of the mind of those who have embraced them.

One is, that it is a place of sensible torture, where the least pain is greater than all the pains of earth put together—an intolerable prison-house, full of wailing and horror; visited by angels, indeed, but only as the instruments of God's awful justice. The spirit of this view is a horror of offending Almighty God, a habitual trembling before his judgments, and a great desire for bodily austerities.

The second view does not deny any of these features, but it gives more prominence to other considerations. "The spirit of this view is love, an extreme desire that God should not be offended, and a yearning for the interests of Jesus." It is not so much a question of selfish consideration with the soul, as of God's will and glory. "Its sweet prison, its holy sepulchre, is in the adorable will of its Heavenly Father, and there it abides the term of its purification with the most perfect contentment and the most unutterable love."

In short, this second view is that of St. Catharine of Genoa, which comes home to our hearts, as we read her treatise, with joyful conviction—giving new conceptions of that holy realm of pain.

This treatise is not the production of human vanity. St. Catharine only wrote by the express wish of her spiritual director, who fathomed her genius and knew her familiarity with the secrets of the Most High. It is, in the estimation of judges of the highest authority, one of the most astonishing and admirable productions of mystical theology, says M. de Bussierre. And it has been approved of by the Holy See, and by the Sacred Congregation of Rites.

It was one of the favorite books of St. Francis de Sales, with whose spirit it is so greatly in harmony, and he calls the authoress a seraph.

And Faber styles her, "The Great Doctress of Purgatory."

St. Catharine was contemporary with Christopher Columbus, being born a few years later in the same city. And she was the grand-niece of Pope Innocent IV., who first gave, authoritatively, the name of Purgatory to the Intermediate State, and who was, like her, of the noble house of the Fieschi.

The French author so often quoted says: "There are many expressions in this work to which a forced meaning is not to be given. St. Catharine represents a soul as strictly united to God as it can be without being absorbed in the divinity. But she does not annihilate individuality. She does not teach pantheism. She only expresses the doctrine of St. Paul, 'In ipso vivimus, et movemur, et sumus:' 'In him we live, and we move, and we are.'"

How she makes us long for that union, and welcome all that hastens it! We would join with all our earth-worn heart in that "liturgy of hallowed pain." "O world!" we cry with Faber—"O weary, clamorous, sinful world! who would not break away, if he could, like an uncaged dove, from thy perilous toils and unsafe pilgrimage, and fly with joy to the lowest place in that most pure, most safe, most holy land of suffering and of sinless love?"

(Hector Vernaccia, who first published the works of St. Catharine of Genoa, wrote the following preface to her Treatise on Purgatory:)

"The soul of Catharine, still clad in the flesh, was plunged in the furnace of God's ardent love, which consumed and purified her from every imperfection, so that at the end of her life she was fitted to pass at once into the presence of God, the only object of her affection. This interior fire made her comprehend that the souls in purgatory are placed there to be purified from the rust and stain of the sins which they had not expiated on earth. Swallowed up in this divine and purging fire, she acquiesced in the will of God, rejoicing in all his love wrought in her; she clearly understood what must be the state of the souls in purgatory, and thus wrote thereof:"