Part 3 — CHAPTER IX PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL QUESTIONS

Introductory.

1. Plan of Part Three.

The picture of Catherine’s life and teaching which was attempted in the previous volume will, I hope, have been sufficiently vivid to stimulate in the reader a desire to try and go deeper, and to get as near as may be to the driving forces, the metaphysical depths of her life. And yet it is obvious that, if we would understand something of these, we must proceed slowly and thoroughly, and must begin with comparatively superficial questions. Or rather, we must begin by studying her temperamental and psycho-physical endowment and condition, and then the literary influences that stimulated and helped to mould these things, as though all this were not secondary and but the material and occasion of the forces and self-determinations to be considered later on.

2. Defects of ancient psycho-physical theory.

Now as to those temperamental and neural matters, to which this chapter shall be devoted, the reader will, no doubt long ago, have discovered that it is precisely here that not a little of the Vita e Dottrina is faded and withered beyond recall, or has even become positively repulsive to us. The constant assumption, and frequent explicit insistence, on the part of more or less all the contributors, upon the immediate and separate significance, indeed the directly miraculous character, of certain psycho-physical states—states which, taken thus separately, would now be inevitably classed as most explicable neural abnormalities,—all this atmosphere of nervous high-pitch and tremulousness has now become a matter demanding a difficult historical imagination and magnanimity, if we would be just to those who held such views, and would thus benefit to the full from these past positions and misconceptions.

Thus when we read the views of perhaps all her educated attendants: “this condition, in which her body remained alive without food or medicine, was a supernatural thing”; “her state was clearly understood to be supernatural when, in so short a time, so great a change was seen”; and “she became yellow all over,—a manifest sign that her humanity was being entirely consumed in the fire of divine love”:[1] we feel indeed that we can no more follow. And when we read, as part of one of the late additions, the worthless legends gathered from, or occasioned by, the uneducated Argentina: “in proof that she bore the stigmata within her,—on putting her hands in a cup of cold water, the latter became so boiling hot that it greatly heated the very saucer beneath it”:[2] we are necessarily disgusted. And when, worst of all, she is made, by a demonstrable, probably double misinterpretation of an externally similar action, to burn her bare arm with a live charcoal or lighted candle, with intent to see which fire, this external one or that interior one of the divine love, were the greater:[3] we can, even if we have the good fortune of being able, by means of the critical analysis of the sources, to put this absurd story to the discredit of her eulogists, but feel the pathos of such well-meant perversity, which took so sure a way for rendering ridiculous one who, take her all in all, is so truly great.[4]

3. Slow growth of Neurology.

We should, of course, be very patient in such matters: for psycho-physical knowledge was, as yet, in its very infancy, witness the all-important fact that the nerves were, in our modern sense of the term, still as unknown as they were to the whole of Graeco-Roman antiquity, with which “neuron” and “nervus” ever meant “muscle” or “ligament” and, derivatively, “energy,” but never consciously what they now mean in the strict medical sense. Thus the Vita (1551) writes: “There remained no member or muscle (nervo) of her body that was not tormented by fire within it”; “one rib was separated from the others, with great pains in the ligaments (nervi) and bones”; and “all her body was excruciated and her muscles (nervi) were tormented”:[5] where, in the first and last case, visible muscular convulsive movements are clearly meant. St. Teresa, in her own Life (1561 or 1562), writes: “Nervous pains, according to the physicians, are intolerable; and all my nerves were shrunk”; and “if the rapture lasts, all the nerves are made to feel it.”[6] Even Fénelon (died 1715) can still write of the human body: “The bones sustain the flesh which envelops them; the nerves” (ligaments, minor muscles) “which are stretched along them, constitute all their strength; and the muscles, by inflation and elongation at the points where the nerves are intertwined with them, produce the most precise and regular movements.”[7] Here the soul acts directly upon the muscles, and, through these and their dependent ligaments, upon the bones and the flesh.

4. Permanent values of the ancient theory.

And yet that old position with regard to the rarer psycho-physical states has a right to our respectful and sympathetic study.

For one thing, we are now coming again to recognize, more and more, how real and remarkable are certain psycho-physical states and facts, whether simply morbid or fruitfully utilized states, so long derided, by the bulk of Scientists, as mere childish legend or deliberate imposture; and to see how natural, indeed inevitable it was, that these, at that time quite inexplicable, things should have been attributed to a direct and discontinuous kind of Divine intervention. We, on our part, have then to guard against the Philistinism both of the Rationalists and of the older Supernaturalists, and will neither measure our assent to facts by our ability to explain them, nor postulate the unmediated action of God wherever our powers of explanation fail us. On this point we have admirable models of sympathetic docility towards facts, in the works of Prof. Pierre Janet, in his medico-psychological investigations of present-day morbid cases; of Hermann Gunkel and Heinrich Weinel, in their examination of mostly healthy psycho-physical phenomena in early Christian times and writings; and of William James, in his study of instances of various kinds, both past and present.[8]

And next, these (at first sight physical) phenomena are turning out, more and more, to be the direct or indirect consequence of the action of mind: no doubt, in the first instance, of the human mind, but still of mind, both free-willing and automatically operative. And at the same time this action is, more and more, seen to be limited and variously occasioned by the physical organism, and to be accompanied or followed, in a determinist fashion, by certain changes in that organism. Yet if we have now immeasurably more knowledge than men had, even fifty years ago, of this latter ceaselessly active, limiting, occasioning influence of the body upon the mind, we have also immeasurably more precise and numerous facts and knowledge in testimony of the all but boundless effect of mind over body. Here, again, Prof. Janet’s writings, those of Alfred Binet, and the Dominican Père Coconnier’s very sensible book register a mass of material, although of the morbid type.[9]

And further, such remarkable peripheral states and phenomena are getting again to be rightly looked for in at least some types of unusual spiritual insight and power (although such states are found to be indicative, in exact proportion to the spiritual greatness of their subject, of a substantially different mental and moral condition of soul). Witness again the Unitarian Prof. James’s Varieties, and the Church-Historical works of the Broad Lutheran German scholars Weinel, Bernoulli, and Duhm.[10]

And lastly, the very closeness with which modern experimental and analytical psychology is exploring the phenomena of our consciousness is once more bringing into ever-clearer relief the irrepressible metaphysical apprehensions and affirmations involved and implied by the experience of every human mind, from its first dim apprehension in infancy of a “something,” as yet undifferentiated by it into subjective and objective, up to its mature and reflective affirmation of the trans-subjective validity of its “positions,” or at least of its negations—pure scepticism turning out to be practically impossible. Here we have, with respect to that apprehension, such admirable workers as Henri Bergson in France, and Professors Henry Jones and James Ward in England; and, for this affirmation, such striking thinkers as the French Maurice Blondel, and the Germans Johannes Volkelt and Hugo Münsterberg. And Mgr. Mercier of Louvain, now Cardinal Mercier, has contributed some valuable criticism of certain points in these positions.[11]

5. Difficulties of this inquiry.

Now here I am met at once by two special difficulties, the one personal to myself and to Catherine, and the other one of method. For, with regard to those three first sets of recent explorations of a psycho-physical kind, I am no physician at all, and not primarily a psychologist. And again, in Catherine’s instance, the evidence as to her psycho-physical states is not, as with St. Teresa and some few other cases, furnished by writings from the pen of the very person who experienced them, and it is at all copious and precise only for the period when she was admittedly ill and physically incapacitated.—And yet these last thirteen years of her life occupy a most prominent place in her biography; it is during, and on occasion of, those psycho-physical states, and largely with the materials furnished by them, that, precisely in those years, she built up her noblest legacy, her great Purgatorial teaching; the illness was (quite evidently) of a predominantly psychical type, and concerns more the psychologist than the physician, being closely connected with her particular temperament and type of spirituality, a temperament and type to be found again and again among the Saints. All this and more makes it simply impossible for me to shrink from some study of the matter, and permits me to hope for some success in attempting, slowly and cautiously, to arrive at certain general conclusions of a spiritually important kind.

But then there is also the difficulty of method. For if we begin the study of these psycho-physical peculiarities and states by judging them from the temperamental and psychological standpoint, we can hardly escape from treating them, at least for the moment, as self-explanatory, and hence from using these our preliminary conclusions about such neural phenomena as the measure, type, and explanation of and for all such other facts and apprehensions as our further study of the religious mind and experience may bring before us. In this wise, these our psychological conclusions would furnish not only a negative test and positive material, but also the exclusive standard for all further study. And such a procedure, until and unless it were justified in its method, would evidently be nothing but a surreptitious begging of the question.—Yet to begin with the fullest analysis of the elementary and normal phenomena of consciousness and of its implications and inviolable prerequisites, would too readily land us in metaphysics which have themselves to operate in and with those immediate and continuous experiences; and hence these latter experiences, whether normal and healthy, or, as here, unusual and in part maladif, must be carefully studied first. We have, however, to guard most cautiously against our allowing this, our preliminary, analysis and description of psycho-physical states from imperceptibly blocking the way to, or occupying the ground of, our ultimate analysis and metaphysical synthesis and explanation. Only this latter will be able, by a final movement from within-outwards, to show the true place and worth of the more or less phenomenal series, passed by us in review on our previous movement from outside-inwards.

6. Threefold division.

I propose, then, in this chapter, to take, as separately as is compatible with such a method, the temperamental, psycho-physical side of Catherine’s life. I shall first take those last thirteen years of admitted illness, as those which are alone at all fully known to us by contemporary evidence.—I shall then make a jump back to her first period,—to the first sixteen years up to her marriage, with the next ten years of relaxation, and the following four years of her conversion and active penitence. I take these next, because, of these thirty years, we have her own late memories, as registered for us by her disciples, at the time of her narration of the facts concerned.—And only then, with these materials and instruments thus gathered from after and before, shall I try to master the (for us very obscure) middle period, and to arrive at some estimate of her temperamental peripheral condition during these twenty years of her fullest expansion.—I shall conclude the chapter by taking Catherine in her general, lifelong temperament, and by comparing and contrasting this type and modality of spiritual character and apprehension with the other rival forms of, and approaches to, religious truth and goodness as these are furnished for us by history.

The ultimate metaphysical questions and valuation are reserved for the penultimate chapter of my book.

I. Catherine’s Third Period, 1497 to 1510.

1. Increasing illness of Catherine’s last years.

Beginning with her third and last period (1497-1510), there can be no doubt that throughout it she was ill and increasingly so. Her closest friends and observers attest it. It is presumably Ettore Vernazza who tells us, for 1497, “when she was about fifty years of age, she ceased to be able to attend either to the Hospital or to her own house, owing to her great bodily weakness. Even on Fast-days she was obliged, after Holy Communion, to take some food to sustain her strength.” Probably Marabotto it is who tells us that, in 1499, “after twenty-five years she could no further bear her spiritual loneliness, either because of old age or because of her great bodily weakness.” We hear from a later Redactor that, “about nine years before her death (i.e. about 1501), there came to her an infirmity.” And then, especially from November 1509, May 1510, and August 1510 onwards, she is declared and described as more and more ill.[12] Indeed she herself, both by her acts and by her words, emphatically admits her incapacitation. For it is clearly ill-health which drives her to abandon the Matronship and even all minor continuous work for the Hospital. In her Wills we find indeed that, as late as May 21, 1506, she was able to get to the neighbouring Hospital for Incurables; and that even on November 27, 1508 she was “healthy in mind and body.” But her Codicil of January 5, 1503, was drawn up in the presence of nine witnesses at midnight,—a sure sign of some acute ill-health. Indeed already on July 23, 1484, she is lying “infirm in bed, in her room in the Women’s quarter of the Hospital, oppressed with bodily infirmity.”[13]

2. Abnormal sensations, impressions and moods.

Her attendants are all puzzled by the multitude and intensity, the mobility and the self-contradictory character of the psycho-physical manifestations. Perhaps already before 1497 “she would press thorny rose-twigs in both her hands, and this without any pain”; and so late as about three weeks before her death “she remained paralyzed (manca),” and no doubt anaesthetic “in one (the right) hand and in one finger of the other hand.”—Probably again before 1497 “her body could not,” at times, “be moved from the sitting posture without the application of force.” In February or March 1510 “she could not move out of her bed”; in August, “on some occasions she could not move the lips or the tongue, or the arms or legs, unless helped to do so,—especially on the left side,—and this would, at times, last three or four hours.”—In December 1509 “she suffered from great cold,” as part of her peculiar condition; on September 4, 1510, “she suffered from great cold in the right arm.”[14]

On other occasions she is, on the contrary, intensely hyper-aesthetic. Some time in February or March 1510, “for a day and a night, her flesh could not be touched, because of the great pain that such touching caused her.” At the end of August “she was so sensitive, that it was impossible to touch her very bedclothes or the bedstead, or a single hair on her head, because in such case she would cry out as though she had been grievously wounded.”—These states seem to have been usually accompanied by sensations of great heat: for on the former occasion “she seemed like a creature placed in a great flame of fire”; whilst on the latter “she had her tongue and lips so inflamed, that they seemed as though actual fire.”

And movement appears to have been more often increased than diminished. In the last case indeed “she did not move nor speak nor see; but, when thus immovable, she suffered more than when she could cry out and turn about in her bed.” But in the former instance “she could not be kept in bed”; and in April 1510 “she cried aloud, and could not keep herself from moving about, on her bed, on hands and feet.”—There are curious localizations of apparently automatic movements. During an attack somewhere in March 1510 “her flesh was all in a tremble, particularly the right shoulder”; on later occasions “an arm, a leg, a hand would tremble, and she would seem to have a spasm within her, with all-but-unbroken acute pains in the flanks, the shoulders, the abdomen, the feet and the brain.” On an earlier occasion “her body writhed in great distress.” On another day “she seemed all on fire and lost her power of speech, and made signs with her head and hands.” On one day in February or March 1510 “she lost both speech and sight, though not her intelligence”; and on September 12 “her sight was so weak, that she could hardly any further distinguish or recognize her attendants.”—The heat is liable to be curiously localized. Early in September 1510 “she had a great heat situated in and on her left ear, which lasted for three hours; the ear was red and felt very hot to the touch of others.”

Various kinds of haemorrhage are not uncommon. On the last-mentioned occasion bloody urine is passed; bleeding of the nose, with loss of bile, occurs in December 1509; very black blood is lost by the mouth, whilst black spots appear all over her person, on September 12, 1510; and more blood is evacuated on the following day. In February or March 1510 “there were in her flesh certain places which had become concave, like as paste looks where a finger has been put into it.” At the end of August 1510 “her skin became saffron-yellow all over.”

Troubles of breathing and of heart-action are frequently acute. Somewhere about March 1510 “she had such a spasm in her throat and mouth as to be unable, for about an hour, to speak or to open her eyes, and that she could hardly regain her breath.” “Cupping-glasses were applied to her side, to ease her heart, and lung-action, but with little effect.” On one occasion “she made signs indicative of feeling as though burning pincers were seizing her heart”; and on a day soon after “she felt like a hard nail at her heart.”[15]

Disturbances of the power of swallowing and of nutrition are often grave and sudden, and in curious contradiction to her abnormally acute and shifting longing for and revulsion from certain specific kinds of food. On August 22, 1510, “she was so thirsty that she felt as though she could drink up the very ocean”; “yet she could not,” in fact, “manage to swallow even one little drop of water.” On September 10 “her attendants continuously gave her drinking water; but she would straightway return it from her mouth.” And on September 12, “whilst her mouth was being bathed, she exclaimed, ‘I am suffocating,’—and this because a drop of water had trickled down her throat—a drop which she was unable to gulp down.” And on a day in August “she saw a melon and had a great desire to eat it; but hardly did she have some of it in her mouth, when she rejected it with intense disgust.” So too with odours. A little later, “on one day the smell of wine would please her, and she would bathe her hands and face in it with great relish; and next day she would so much dislike it, that she could not bear to see or smell it in her room.”—And so too with colours. On September 2 “a physician-friend came to visit her in his scarlet robes; and she bore the sight a little, so as not to pain him.” But she then declared that she could no longer bear it; and he went, and returned to her in his ordinary black habit. And yet we have seen, from the Inventory of her effects, that she loved to have vermilion colour upon her bed and person.[16]

And her emotional moods are analogously intense and rapidly shifting. In the spring of 1510 “she cried aloud because of the great pain: this attack lasted a day and a night”; in the night of August 10 “she tossed about with many exclamations”; and at the beginning of September “she cried out with a loud voice.” At other times, she laughs for joy. So at the end of April “she would laugh without speaking”; on August 11 “she fixed her eyes steadily on the ceiling; and for about an hour she abode all but immovable, and spoke not, but kept laughing in a very joyous fashion”; on August 17 great interior jubilation “expressed itself in merry laughter”; and on the evening of September 7 “her joy appeared exteriorly in laughter which lasted, with but small interruptions, for some two hours.”—And her entire apparent condition would shift from one such extreme to the other with extraordinary swiftness. In the autumn of 1509 “she many times remained as though dead; and at other times she would appear as healthy,—as though she had never had anything the matter with her.” Already in December 1509 she herself, after much vomiting and loss of blood, had sent for her Confessor and had declared that “she felt as though she must die in consequence of these many accidents.” Yet even on September 10, 1510, “when she was not being oppressed and tormented by her accidents (attacks), she seemed to be in good health; but when she was being suffocated by them, she seemed as one dead.”[17]

II. Conclusions Concerning Catherine’s Psycho-physical Condition During This Last Period.

1. Her illness not primarily physical. Her self-diagnosis.

Now we saw, at the beginning of this chapter, how readily her attendants concluded, from all these extreme, multiple, swift-changing and self-contradictory states, to their directly and separately supernatural origin.—And indeed the diagnosis and treatment of her case showed clearly that it was not primarily physical. So in the case, probably in November 1509, of the cupping-glasses, when “she got medically treated for a bodily infirmity, whilst her real trouble was fire of the spirit”; so with a medicine given to her by the resident Hospital physician, some time in April 1510, “from taking which she nearly died”; so with Giovanni Boerio’s three-weeks’ treatment of her, in May 1510, a treatment which led to no other results than momentary additional distress; and so with the declaration of the ten Physicians who, even on September 10, four days before her death, “could find no trace of disease in her pulse, secretions, or any other symptom,” and who consequently abstained from prescribing anything. And hence, more or less throughout her last nine years, “there was confusion in the management of her, not on her own part, but on that of those who served her.”[18]

For—and these two further points are of primary importance—the tending of her, as distinct from physic, was throughout held by herself to be of great importance; and yet this care was declared by her to be often useless or harmful, owing to the powers of discrimination possessed by her attendants being as much below their good-will, as her own knowledge as to the differences between her healthy and maladif states exceeded her power of herself acting upon this knowledge against these sickly conditions. “She would often appear to be asleep; and would awake from such a state, at one time, quite refreshed, and, at another time, so limp and broken down as to be unable to move. Those that served her knew not how to distinguish one state from the other; and on recovering from an attack of the latter sort, she would say to them: ‘Why did you let me continue in that state of quiet, from which I have all but died?’” So, on September 5, “she cried aloud on waking from a state of quiet, which had appeared to be (healthy) quietude, but had not been so.” And indeed, already on January 10 previous, she had shut herself off from her Confessor, “because it seemed to her that he bore with her too much in her sayings and doings.”

Yet, at least after this time, Marabotto does oppose her sometimes. Thus on two, somewhat later, occasions she respectively makes signs, and asks, that Extreme Unction be given her; but only some four months later did she actually receive it. In these cases, then, she either had not, even at bottom, a correct physical self-knowledge; or her requests had been prompted, at the time, by her secondary, maladif consciousness alone.—When first visited by Boerio, she takes pleasure in the thought of getting possibly cured by him; but “in the following night, when great pain came upon her, she reproved herself, saying, ‘You are suffering this, because you allowed yourself to rejoice without cause.’” But this declaration distinctly falls short of any necessary implication of a directly supernatural origin of her malady, as the Vita here will have it, and but refers, either to the continuance of earthly existence not deserving such joy, or to her persistent fundamental consciousness that the phenomena were partly the fruitful, profitable occasions, and partly the price paid, for the mind’s close intercourse with things divine.

Indeed her (otherwise unbroken) attitude is one, both of quiet conviction that physic cannot help her, and of gentle readiness to let the physicians try whatever they may think worth the trying: so with the cupping-glasses, and the various examinations and physickings. Especially is this disposition clear in her short dialogue with Boerio, where, in answer to his assertion that she ought to beware of giving scandal to all the world by saying that her infirmity had no need of remedies, and that she ought to look upon such an attitude as “a kind of hypocrisy,” she declares: “I am sorry if any one is scandalized because of me; and I am ready to use any remedy for infirmity, supposing that it can be found.”[19]

2. Her preoccupation with the spiritual suggestions afforded by the phenomena.

It would, indeed, be a grave misreading of her whole character and habits of mind to think of her as at all engrossed in her psycho-physical states as such, and as having ever formally considered and decided that they must either come directly from God or be amenable to medicine. On the contrary, she is too habitually absorbed in the consideration and contemplation of certain great spiritual doctrines and realities, to have the leisure or inclination for any such questions.—Indeed it is this very absorption in those spiritual realities which has ended by suggesting, with an extraordinary readiness, frequency and vividness, through her mind to her senses, and by these back to her mind, certain psycho-physical images and illustrations for those very doctrines, until her whole psycho-physical organism has been, all but entirely, modified and moulded into an apt instrument and manifestation for and of that world unseen.

Thus, after her greatest psycho-physical and spiritual experience in November 1509, she declares to Vernazza, when he urges her to let him write down the graces she has received from God, that “it would, strictly speaking, be impossible to narrate those interior things; whilst, of exterior ones, few or none have happened to me.” And she never entirely loses her mental consciousness in any state not recognized by herself as maladif. So, on a day of great psycho-physical trouble in February or March 1510, “they thought she must expire; but, though she lost both sight and speech, she never lost her intelligence.” And even on September 11 and 12, amidst foodlessness and suffocations, her intelligence still persists.—In the March previous “her mind appeared to grow daily in contentment.” Some days later, her attendants “saw how, after an hour of spasm and breathlessness, and then a great restriction of all her being, she returned to her normal condition, and addressed many beautiful words to them.” And later on, “her attendants were amazed at seeing a body, which seemed to be healthy, in such a tormented condition.” But “soon after she laughed and spoke as one in health, and told them not to distress themselves about her, since she was very contented; but that they should see to it that they did much good, since the way of God is very narrow.”[20]

3. Interaction and mutual suggestion of her spiritual and physical states.

As to the extraordinary closeness and readiness for mutual response between her sensible impressions and her thoughts and emotions—her sensations turning, all but automatically, into religious emotions, and her thoughts and feelings translating themselves into appropriate psycho-physical states—we have a mass of interesting evidence.

Thus when, about the end of November 1509, in response to her seeing, on some wall of the Hospital, a picture of Our Lord at the Well of Samaria, and to her asking Him for one drop of that Divine water, “instantly a drop was given to her which refreshed her within and without.” The spiritual idea and emotion is here accompanied and further stimulated by the keenest psycho-physical impression of drinking. And such an impression can even become painful through its excessive suggestiveness. Thus she herself explains to Maestro Boerio, on September 2, 1510, that she cannot long bear the sight of his scarlet robe “because of what it suggests (represents) to my memory,”—no doubt the fire of divine love. Three days later, on the contrary, “she mentally saw herself lying upon a bier, surrounded by many Religious robed in black,” and greatly rejoiced at the sight. Here the very impression of black, the colour of death, will have conveyed, during this special mood of hers, a downright psycho-physical pleasure, somewhat as Boerio’s reappearance, on the former occasion, in a black gown, had been a sensible relief to her.

So also with scents. When, certainly after 1499, “she perceived, on the (right) hand of her Confessor, an odour which penetrated her very heart,” and “which abode with her and restored both mind and body for many days,” we have again a primarily mental act and state which she herself knows well to be untransferable, even to Don Marabotto himself. Here the association of ideas was, no doubt, the right hand of the Priest and her daily reception, by means of it, of the Holy Eucharist. For the latter, “the Bread from heaven, having within it all manner of delight,” is already connected in her mind with an impression of sweet odour. “One day, on receiving Communion, so much odour and sweetness came to her, that she seemed to herself to be in Paradise.” Probably the love for, and then the disgust at, the smell of wine, was also connected with her Eucharistic experiences. Certainly “one day, having received Holy Communion, she was granted so great a consolation as to fall into an ecstasy, so that when the Priest wanted to give her to drink from the Chalice (with unconsecrated wine) she had to be brought back by force to her ordinary consciousness.” Vivid memories of both sets of psycho-physical impressions are, I think, at work when she says: “If a consecrated Host were to be given to me amongst unconsecrated ones, I should be able to distinguish it by the very taste, as I do wine from water.” And as the sight of red rapidly became painful from the very excess of its mental suggestiveness, so will the smell of wine have been both specially dear and specially painful to her.[21]

Indeed her psycho-physical troubles possess, for the most part, a still traceable, most delicate selectiveness as to date, range, form, combination, and other peculiarities. Thus some of the most acute attacks coincide, in their date of occurrence and general character, as the biographers point out, with special saint’s and holy days: so in the night leading into St. Lawrence’s day, August 9 and 10, 1510; so on the Vigil of St. Bartholomew’s day, August 24; and so in the night previous to and on the Feast (August 28) of St. Augustine, special Patron of her only sister’s Order and of the Convent in which her own Conversion had taken place thirty-seven years before. Yet we have also seen how that these synchronisms did not rise to the heights which were soon desired by her biographers, for we know that she died, not (as they would have it) on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, September 14, but early on the day following.

Thus too as to her incapacity to swallow and retain food, we find that, up to the end, with the rarest exceptions of a directly physical kind, she retained the most complete facility in receiving Holy Communion: so on September 2, 1510, when “all ordinary food was returned, but the Holy Eucharist she retained without any difficulty”; and so too on September 4, when, after “lying for close upon twelve hours with closed eyes, speechless and all but immovable,” Marabotto himself feared to communicate her, but “she made a sign to him, with a joyous countenance, to have no fear, and she communicated with ease, and soon after began to speak, owing to the vigour given to her by the Sacrament.” Yet here too the abnormality is not complete: some ordinary food is retained, now and then; so, minced chicken, specially mentioned for December 1509, and on September 3, 1510.

As to her heat-attacks and the corresponding extreme—the sense of intense cold,—it is clear how close is their connection with her profound concentration upon the conception of God as Love, and upon the image of Love as fire. It is these sudden and intense psycho-physical, spiritually suggestive because spiritually suggested, heat-attacks which are, I think, always meant by the terms “assault” (assalto), “stroke” (ferita), and “arrow” (saetta): terms which already indicate the mental quality of these attacks. And these heats are mostly localized in a doctrinally suggestive manner: they centre in and around the heart, or on the tongue and lips, or they envelop the whole person “as though it were placed in a great flame of fire,” or “in a glowing furnace.” Indeed these heats are often so described, by her attendants or herself, as to imply their predominantly psycho-physical nature: “it was necessary, with a view to prolonging her life, to use many means for lightening the strain of that interior fire upon her mind”; and “I feel,” she says herself, on occasion of such an attack, “so great a contentment on the part of the spirit, as to be unutterable; whilst, on the part of my humanity, all the pains are, so to say, no pains.”

As to her boundless thirst, her inability to drink, and her sense of strangulation, their doctrinal suggestions are largely clear. Thus when “she was so thirsty as to feel able to drink up all the waters of the sea,” and when she calls out “I am suffocating” (drowning, io affogo), we are at once reminded of her great saying: “If the sea were all so much love, there would not live man or woman who would not go to drown himself in it (si affogasse).” And when, at the end of August 1510, unable to drink, she herself declares “all the water that is on earth could not give me the least refreshment,” there is, perhaps, an implied contrast to that “little drop of divine water” which had so much refreshed her a year before.

And finally, the various paralyses and death-like swoons seem, at least in part, to follow from, and to represent, the death of the spirit to the life of the senses, and to mirror the intensity with which perfection has been conceived and practised as “Love going forth out of self, and abiding all in God and separated from man.” Thus when, on August 22, 1510, “she had a day of great heat, and abode paralyzed in one hand and in one finger of the other hand for about sixteen hours, and she was so greatly occupied (absorbed), that she neither spoke, nor opened her eyes, nor could take any food.”[22]

4. Only two cases of spiritually unsuggestive impressions.

It is indeed profoundly instructive to note how that, in exact proportion as a human-mental mediation and suggestion of a religious kind is directly traceable or at least probable in any or all of these things, is that thing also worthy of being considered as having ultimately the Divine Spirit Itself for its first cause as well as last end; and that, in exact proportion as this kind of human mediation and suggestion is impossible or unlikely, the thing turns out to be unworthy of being attributed, in any special sense, to the spirit of God Himself.

Of such spiritually opaque, religiously unused and apparently unuseable, hysteriform impressions, I can, even during the last days of these nine years of admitted infirmity, find but two clear instances,—instances which, by their very unlikeness to the mass of her spiritually transparent, readily used impressions, strongly confirm our high estimate of the all but totality of her psycho-physical states, as experienced and understood and used by herself. On September 7, 1510, after having seen and wisely utilized the spiritually suggestive image of “a great ladder of fire,” she ends by having so vivid an hallucination of the whole world being on fire “that she asked whether it were not so, and caused her windows to be opened that the facts might be ascertained;” and “she abode the whole night, possessed by that imagination,” as the Vita itself calls this impression. At night, on September 11, she complained of a very great heat, and cast forth from her mouth very black blood; and black spots came out all over her body. And on the 13th, “she was seen with her eyes fixed upon the ceiling, and with much movement of the lips and hands; and she answered her attendants’ queries as to what she was seeing with ‘Drive away that beast.…’ the remaining words being inaudible.”[23]

Here we have, I think, the only two merely factual, unsuggestive, and hence simply delusive, impressions really experienced by herself and recorded in the Vita, a book whose very eagerness to discover things of this kind and readiness to take them as directly supernatural is a guarantee that no other marked instances of the kind have been omitted or suppressed. And these two impressions both take place within a week of her death, and respectively four days before, and two days after, the first clear case of organic disease or lesion to be found anywhere in the life.

III. Catherine’s Psycho-physical Condition, its Likeness and Unlikeness To Hysteria.

Only by a quite unfair magnifying or multiplying of the two incidents just described could we come to hold, with Mr. Baring-Gould, that Catherine was simply a sufferer from hysteria, and that the Roman Church did well to canonize her on the ground of her having, in spite of this malady, managed to achieve much useful work amongst the sick and poor.[24] Here we shall do well to consider three groups of facts.

1. Misapprehensions as to hysteria.

The first group gives the reasons why we should try and get rid of the terror and horror still so often felt in connection with the very name of this malady. This now quite demonstrably excessive, indeed largely mythical, connotation of the term springs from four causes.

First, the very name still tends to suggest, as the causes or conditions of the malady, things fit only for discussion in medical reviews. But then, ever since 1855, all limitation to, or special connection with, anything peculiarly female, or indeed generally sexual, has been increasingly shown to be false, until now no serious authority on the matter can be found to espouse the old view. The malady is now well known to attack men as well as women, and to have no special relation to things of sex at all.[25]

Next, probably as a consequence from the initial error, this disorder was supposed to predominantly come from, or to lead to, moral impurity, or at least to be ordinarily accompanied by strong erotic propensions. But here the now carefully observed facts are imperatively hostile: of the 120 living cases most carefully studied by Prof. Janet, only four showed the predominance of any such tendencies, a proportion undoubtedly not above the percentage to be found amongst non-hysterical persons.[26]

And again, the term was long synonymous with untruthfulness and deceit. But here again Prof. Janet shows how unfounded is this prejudice, since it but springs from the misplaced promptitude with which the earlier observers refused to believe what they had not as yet sufficiently examined and could not at all explain, and from the malady being itself equivalent to a more or less extensive breaking-up of the normal inter-connection between the several, successive or simultaneous states, and, as it were, layers of the one personality. He is convinced that real untruthfulness is no commoner among such patients than it is among healthy persons.[27]

And, finally, it is no doubt felt that, apart from all such specifically moral suspicions, the malady involves all kinds of fancies and inaccuracies of feeling and of perception, and that it frequently passes into downright insanity. And this is no doubt the one objection which does retain some of its old cogency. Still, it is well to note that, as has now been fully established, the elements of the human mind are and remain the same throughout the whole range of its conditions, from the sanest to the maddest, whilst only their proportion and admixture, and the presence or absence and the kind of synthesis necessary to hold them together differentiate these various states of mind. In true insanity there is no such synthesis; in hysteria the synthesis, however slight and peculiar, is always still traceable throughout the widespread disgregation of the elements and states.[28] And it is this very persistence of the fundamental unity, together with the strikingly different combination and considerable disaggregation of its elements, that makes the study of hysteria so fruitful for the knowledge of the fully healthy mind and of its unity; whilst the continuance of all the elements of the normal intelligence, even in insanity, readily explains why it is apparently so easy to see insanity everywhere, and to treat genius and sanctity as but so much degeneracy.

2. Hysteriform phenomena observable in Catherine’s case.

The second group of facts consists in the phenomena which, in Catherine’s case, are like or identical to what is observable in cases of hysteria.

There is, perhaps above all else, the anaesthetic condition, which was presumably co-extensive with her paralytic states. “Anaesthesia,” says Prof. Janet, “can be considered as the type of the other symptoms of hysteria; it exists in the great majority of cases, it is thoroughly characteristic of the malady. In its most frequent localization (semi-anaesthesia) it affects one of the lateral halves of the body, and this half is usually the left side.” Or, “a finger or hand will be affected.” Such “insensibility can be very frequent and very profound”; but “it disappears suddenly” and even “varies from one moment to another.”[29]

Then there is the corresponding counter-phenomenon of hyper-aesthesia. “The slightest contact provokes great pains, exclamations, and spasms. The painful zones have their seat mostly on the abdomen or on the hips.” And “sensation in these states is not painful in itself, by its own intensity, but by its quality, its characteristics; it has become the signal, by association of ideas, for the production of a set of extremely painful phenomena.” So, with the colour-sense: “one patient adores the colour red, and sees in its dullest shade ‘sparkling rays which penetrate to her very heart and warm her through and through.’” But “another one finds this ‘a repulsive colour and one capable of producing nausea.’” And similarly with the senses of taste and odour.[30]

Then, too, the inability to stand or walk, with the conservation, at times, of the power to crawl; the acceptance, followed by the rejection, of food, because of certain spasms in the throat or stomach, and the curious, mentally explicable, exceptions to this incapacity; the sense, even at other times, of strangulation; heart palpitations, fever heats, strange haemorrhages from the stomach or even from the lung; red patches on the skin and emotional jaundice all over it, and one or two other peculiarities.[31]

Then, as to a particular kind of quietude, from which Catherine warns her attendants to rouse her, we find a patient who “ceases her reading, without showing any sign of doing so. She gets taken to be profoundly attentive; it is, however, but one of her attacks of ‘fixity.’ And she has promptly to be shaken out of this state, or, in a few minutes, there will be no getting her out of it.”

As to Catherine’s consciousness of possessing an extraordinary fineness of discrimination between sensibly identical objects, we see that “if one points out, to some of these patients, an imaginary portrait upon a plain white card, and mixes this card with other similar ones, they will almost always find again the portrait on the same card.” And similarly as to her attaching a particular quasi-sensible perception to Marabotto’s hand alone, we find that, if M. Janet touches Léonie’s hand, he having suggested a nosegay to her, she will henceforth, when he touches the hand, see that nosegay; whereas, if another person touches that same hand, Léonie will see nothing special.

As to Catherine’s feelings of criminality and of being already dead, M. Janet quotes M., who says, “I am like a criminal about to be punished”; and R., who declares, “It seems to me that I am dead.” As to the hallucination of a Beast, Marcelle suffers from the same impression.[32]

And,—perhaps the most important of all these surface-resemblances,—there is Catherine’s apparent freedom from all emotion at the deaths of her brothers and sister, and her extraordinary dependence upon, and claimfulness towards, her Confessor alone. “These patients rapidly lose the social feelings: Berthe, who for some time preserved some affection for her brother, ends by losing all interest in him; Marcelle, at the very beginning of her illness, separates herself from every one.” “It is always their own personality which dominates their thoughts.” Yet these patients have “an extraordinary attachment to their physician. For him they are resolved to do all things. In return, they are extremely exacting,—he is to occupy himself entirely with each one alone. Only a very superficial observer would ascribe this feeling to a vulgar source.”[33]

3. Catherine’s personality not disintegrated.

But a third group of facts clearly differentiates Catherine’s case, even in these years of avowed ill-health, from such patients; and these facts become clearer and more numerous in precise proportion as we move away from peripheral, psycho-physical phenomena and mechanisms, and dwell upon her practically unbroken mental and moral characteristics, and upon the use and meaning, the place and context of these things within her ample life.

For as to her relations with her attendants, even now it is still she who leads, who suggests, who influences; a strong and self-consistent will shows itself still, under all this shifting psycho-physical surface. Thus Don Marabotto now administers, it is true, all her money and charitable affairs for her. But it is she who insists, alone and unaided, upon the true spiritual function of that impression of odour on his hand.—Vernazza, no doubt, has now to help her in the fight against subtle scruples, on occasion of her deepest depressions. But her far more frequent times of light and joy are in nowise occasions of a simply subjective self-engrossment or of a purely psycho-physical interest, for her mind is absorbed if in but a few, yet in inexhaustibly fruitful and universally applicable ideas and experiences of a spiritual kind, such as helped to urge this friend on to his world-renewing impulses and determinations.—Her closest relations and friends, one must admit, succeed by their action, taken eighteen months and then again two days before her death, in getting her to desist from ordering her burial by the side of her husband. But we have seen, in the one case, how indirectly, and, in the other case, how suddenly and even then quite informally, they had to gain their point.—Her attendants in general, and Marabotto in particular, certainly paid her an engrossed attention, and the all but endlessness of her superficial fancies and requirements have been chronicled by them with a naïve and wearisome fulness. But then she herself is well aware that, had they but the requisite knowledge as to how and when to apply them, some sturdy opposition and a greater roughness of handling would, on their part, be of the greatest use to her, in this her psychical infirmity; indeed her shutting herself away from Marabotto, as late as January 1510, is directly caused by her sense and fear of being spoilt by him.

It is true again that, already in 1502, we hear, in a probably exaggerated but still possibly semi-authentic account, of her indifference of feeling with regard to the deaths of two brothers and of her only sister; and that, from January 1510 onwards, she gradually excludes all her attendants from her sick-room, with, eventually, the sole exceptions of Marabotto or Carenzio and Argentina. But her Wills show conclusively how persistent were her detailed interest in, and dispositions for, the requirements of her surviving brother, nephews, and nieces; of poor Thobia and the girl’s hidden mother; of her priest-attendants, and of each and all of her humblest domestics; of the natives in the far-away Greek Island of Scios; and, above all, of the Hospital and its great work which she had ever loved so well.

We have indeed found two cases, both from within the last week of her life, of mentally opaque and spiritually unsuggestive and unutilized impressions which are truly analogous to those characteristic of hysteria. But we have also seen how forcibly these two solitary cases bring out, by contrast, the spiritual transparency and fruitfulness of her usual, finely reflective picturings of these last years. For here it is her own deliberate and spiritual mind which joyously greets, and straightway utilizes and transcends, the psycho-physical occurrences; and it does so, not because these occurrences are, or are taken to be, the causes or requisites or objects of her faith and spiritual insight, but because, on the contrary, they meet and clothe an already exuberant faith and insight—spiritual certainties derived from quite another source.

And finally, if the monotony and superficial pettiness of the sick-room can easily pall upon us, especially when presented with the credulities and hectic exaggerations which disfigure so much of the Vita’s description of it; we must, in justice, as I have attempted to do in my seventh and eighth chapters, count in, as part of her biography, her deep affection for and persistent influence with Ettore and Battista Vernazza, and the exemplification of her doctrine by these virile souls, makers of history in the wide, varied world of men.[34]

In a word, it is plain at once that, given the necessarily limited number of ways in which the psycho-physical organism reacts under mental stimulations, certain neural phenomena may, in any two cases, be, in themselves, perfectly similar, although their respective mental causes or occasions may be as different, each from the other, as the Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven, or the working out of the Law of Gravitation by Newton, or the elaboration of the implications of the Categorical Imperative by Kant, are different from the sudden jumping of a live mouse in the face of an hysterically-disposed young woman, or as the various causes of tears and laughter throughout the whole world.

IV. First Period of Catherine’s Life, 1447 to 1477, in its Three Stages.

If we next go back to the first period of her life, in its three stages of the sixteen years of her girlhood, 1447-1463, the first ten years of her married life, 1463-1473, and the four years of her Conversion and active Penitence, 1473-1477, we shall find, I think, in the matter of temperament and psycho-physical conditions, little or nothing but a rare degree of spiritual sensitiveness, and an extraordinary close-knittedness of body and mind.

1. From her childhood to her conversion.

Thus, already in her early childhood, that picture of the Pietà seems to have suggested religious ideas and feelings with the suddenness and emotional solidity of a physical seizure—an impression still undimmed when she herself recounted it, some fifty years later, to her two intimates.—It is true that during those first, deeply unhappy ten years of marriage, we cannot readily find more than indications of a most profound and brooding melancholy, the apparent result of but two factors,—a naturally sad disposition and acutely painful domestic circumstances. Yet it is clear, from the sequel, that more and other things lay behind. It is indeed evident that she possessed a congenitally melancholy temperament; that nothing but the rarest combination of conditions could have brought out, into something like elastic play and varied exercise, her great but few and naturally excessive qualities of mind and heart; that these conditions were not only absent, but were replaced by circumstances of the most painful kind; and that she will hardly, at this time, have had even a moment’s clear consciousness of any other sources than just those conditions for her deep, keen, and ever-increasing dissatisfaction with all things, her own self included: all peace and joy, the very capacity for either seemed gone, and gone for ever. But it is only the third stage, with its sudden-seeming conversion on March 20, 1473, and the then following four years of strenuously active self-immolation and dedication to the humblest service of others, which lets us see deep into those previous years of sullen gloom and apparently hopeless drift and dreary wastage.

The two stages really belong to one another, and the depth of the former gloom and dreariness stood in direct proportion and relation to the capacities of that nature and to the height of their satisfaction in the later light and vigour brought to and assimilated by them. It was the sense, at that previous time still inarticulate, but none the less mightily operative, of the insufficiency of all things merely contingent, of all things taken as such and inevitably found to be such, that had been adding, and was now discovered to have added, a quite determining weight and poignancy to the natural pressure of her temperament and external lot. And this temperament and lot, which had not alone produced that sadness, could still less of themselves remove it, whatever might be its cause. Her sense of emptiness and impotence could indeed add to her sense of fulness and of power, once these latter had come; but of themselves the former could no more give her the latter, than hunger, which indeed makes bread to taste delicious, can give us real bread and, with it, that delight.

And it was such real bread of life and real power which now came to her. For if the tests of reality in such things are their persistence and large and rich spiritual applicability and fruitfulness, then something profoundly real and important took place in the soul of that sad and weary woman of six-and-twenty, within that Convent-chapel, at that Annunciation-tide. Her four years of heroic persistence; her unbroken Hospital service of a quarter of a century; her lofty magnanimity towards her husband, Thobia and Thobia’s mother; her profound influence upon Vernazza, in urging him on to his splendid labours throughout Italy, and to his grand death in plague-stricken Genoa; her daringly original, yet immensely persuasive, doctrine,—nearly all this dates back, completely for her consciousness and very largely in reality, to those few moments on that memorable day.

2. Her conversion not sudden nor visionary.

But two points, concerning the manner and form of this experience, are, though of but secondary spiritual interest, far more difficult to decide. There is, for one thing, the indubitable impression, for her own mind and for ours, of complete suddenness and newness in her change. Was this suddenness and newness merely apparent, or real as well? And should this suddenness, if real, be taken as in itself and directly supernatural?

Now it is certain that Catherine, up to ten years before, had been full of definitely religious acts and dispositions. Had she not, already at thirteen, wanted to be a Nun, and, at eight or so, been deeply moved by a picture of the dead Christ in His Mother’s lap? Hence, ideas and feelings of self-dedication and of the Christ-God’s hatred of sin and love for her had, in earlier and during longer times than those of her comparative carelessness, soaked into and formed her mental and emotional bent, and will have in so far shaped her will, as to make the later determination along those earlier lines of its operation, comparatively easy, even after those years of relaxation and deviation. Yet it is clear that there was not here, as indeed there is nowhere, any mere repetition of the past. New combinations and an indefinitely deeper apprehension of the great religious ideas and facts of God’s holiness and man’s weakness, of the necessity for the soul to reach its own true depth or to suffer fruitlessly, and of God having Himself to meet and feed this movement and hunger which He has Himself implanted; new combinations and depths of emotion, and an indefinite expansion and heroic determination of the will: were all certainly here, and were new as compared with even the most religious moments in the past.

As to the suddenness, we cannot but take it as, in large part, simply apparent,—a dim apprehension of what then became clear having been previously quite oppressively with her. And, in any case, this suddenness seems to belong rather to the temperamental peculiarities and necessary forms of her particular experiences than to the essence and content of her spiritual life. For, whatever she thinks, feels, says or does throughout her life, she does and experiences with actual suddenness, or at least with a sense of suddenness; and there is clearly no more necessary connection between such suddenness and grace and true self-renouncement, than there is between gradualness and mere nature; both suddenness and gradualness being but simple modes, more or less fixed for each individual, yet differing from each to each, modes in which God’s grace and man’s will interact and manifest themselves in different souls.[35]

And then there is the question as to whether or not this conversion-experience took the form of a vision. We have seen, in the Appendix, how considerable are the difficulties which beset the account of the Bleeding Christ Vision in the Palace; and how the story of the previous visionless experience in the Chapel is free from all such objections. But, even supposing the two accounts to be equally reliable, it is the first, the visionless experience, which was demonstrably the more important and the more abidingly operative of the two. More important, for it is during those visionless moments that her conversion is first effected; and more abiding, for, according to all the ancient accounts, the impression of the Bleeding Christ Vision disappeared utterly at the end of at longest four years, whereas the memory of the visionless conversion moments remained with her, as an operative force, up to the very last. Witness the free self-casting of the soul into painful-joyous Purgation, into Love, into God (without any picturing of the historic Christ), which forms one of the two constituents of her great latter-day teaching; and how entirely free from directly historic elements all her recorded visions of the middle period turn out to be.[36]

3. Peculiarities of her Active Penitence.

As to the four years of Active Penitence, we must beware of losing the sense of the dependence, the simple, spontaneous instrumentality, in which the negative and restrictive side of of her action stood towards the positive and expansive one. An immense affirmation, an anticipating, creative buoyancy and resourcefulness, had come full flood into her life; and had shifted her centre of deliberate interest and willing away from the disordered, pleasure-seeking, sore and sulky lesser self in which her true personality had for so long been enmeshed. Thus all this strenuous work of transforming and raising her lower levels of inclinations and of habit to the likeness and heights of her now deliberate loftiest standard was not taking place for the sake of something which actually was, or which even seemed to be, less than what she had possessed or had, even dimly, sought before, nor with a view to her true self’s contraction. But, on the contrary, the work was for the end of that indefinite More, of that great pushing upwards of her soul’s centre and widening out of its circumference, which she could herself confirm and increase only by such ever-renewed warfare against what she now recognized as her false and crippling self.

And it is noticeable how soon and how largely, even still within this stage, her attitude became “passive.” She pretty early came to do these numerous definite acts of penance without any deliberate selection or full attention to them. As in her third period her absorption in large spiritual ideas spontaneously suggests certain corresponding psycho-physical phenomena, which then, in return, stimulate anew the apprehensions of the mind; so here, towards the end of the first period, penitential love ends by quite spontaneously suggesting divers external acts of penitence, which readily become so much fresh stimulation for love.

I take this time to have been as yet free from visions or ecstasies—at least of the later lengthy and specific type. For the Bleeding Christ experience, even if fully historical, occurred within the first conversion-days, and only its vivid memory prolonged itself throughout those penitential years; whilst all such other visions, as have been handed down to us, do not treat of conversion and penance, at least in any active and personal sense. And only towards the end of these years do the psycho-physical phenomena as to the abstention from food begin to show themselves. The consideration of both the Visions and the Fasts had, then, better be reserved for the great central period.

V. The Second, Great Middle Period of Catherine’s Life, 1477 to 1499.

It is most natural yet very regrettable that we should know so little as to Catherine’s spiritual life, or even as to her psycho-physical condition, during these central twenty-two years of her life. It is natural, for she had, at this time, neither Physician nor Confessor busy with her, and the very richness and balanced fulness of this epoch of her life may well have helped to produce but little that could have been specially seized and registered by either. Yet it is regrettable, since here we have what, at least for us human observers, constitutes the culmination and the true measure of her life, the first period looking but like the preparation, and the third period, like the price paid for such a rich expansion.—Yet we know something about three matters of considerable psycho-physical and temperamental interest, which are specially characteristic of this time: her attitude towards food; her ecstasies and visions; and certain peculiarities in her conception and practice of the spiritual warfare.

1. Her extraordinary fasts.

As to food, it is clear that, however much we may be able or bound to deduct from the accounts, there remains a solid nucleus of remarkable fact. During some twenty years she evidently went, for a fairly equal number of days,—some thirty in Advent and some forty in Lent, seventy in all annually,—with all but no food; and was, during these fasts, at least as vigorous and active as when her nutrition was normal. For it is not fairly possible to make these great fasts end much before 1496, when she ceased to be Matron of the Hospital; and they cannot have begun much after 1475 or 1476: so that practically the whole of her devoted service and administration in and of that great institution fell within these years, of which well-nigh one-fifth was covered by these all but total abstentions from food. Yet here again we are compelled to take these things, not separately, and as directly supernatural, but in connection with everything else; and to consider the resultant whole as the effect and evidence of a strong mind and will operating upon and through an immensely responsive psycho-physical organism.

For here again we easily find a significant system and delicate selectiveness both in the constant approximate synchronisms—these incapacities occurring about Advent and Lent; and in the foods exempted—since there is no difficulty in connection with the daily Holy Eucharist, with the unconsecrated wine given to her, as to all Communicants in that age at Genoa, immediately after Communion, or with water when seasoned penitentially with salt or vinegar. And if the actual heightening of nervous energy and balance, recorded as having generally accompanied these two fasts, is indeed a striking testimony to the extraordinary powers of her mind and will, we must not forget that these fruitful fasts were accompanied, and no doubt rendered possible, by the second great psychical peculiarity of these middle years, her ecstasies.

2. Her ecstasies and visions.

It is indeed remarkable how these two conditions and functions, her fasts and her ecstasies of a definite, lengthy and strength-bringing kind, arise, persist and then fade out of her life together. And since, in ecstasy, the respiration, the circulation, and the other physical functions are all slackened and simplified; the mind is occupied with fewer, simpler, larger ideas, harmonious amongst themselves; and the emotions and the will are, for the time, saved the conflict and confusion, the stress and strain, of the fully waking moments; and considering that Catherine was peculiarly sensitive to all this flux and friction, and that she was now often in a more or less ecstatic trance from two up to eight hours: it follows that the amount of food required to heal the breach made by life’s wear and tear would, by these ecstasies, be considerably reduced. And indeed it will have been these contemplative absorptions which directly mediated for her those accessions of vigour: and that they did so, in such a soul and for the uses to which she put this strength, is their fullest justification as thoroughly wholesome, at least in their ultimate outcome, in and for this particular life.

And the visions recorded have these two characteristics, that they all deal with metaphysical realities and relations—God as source and end of all things, as Light and food of the soul, and similar conceptions, and never directly with historical persons, scenes, or institutions; and that, whereas the non-ecstatic picturings of her last period are grandly original, and demonstrably based upon her own spiritual experience, these second-period ecstatic visions are readily traceable to New Testament, Neo-Platonist, and Franciscan precursors, and have little more originality than this special selection from amongst other possible literary sources.

3. Special character of her spiritual warfare.

Catherine’s ecstasies lead us easily on to the special method of her spiritual warfare, which can, I think, be summed up in three maxims: “One thing, and only one at a time”; “Ever fight self, and you need not trouble about any other foe”; and “Fight self by an heroic indirectness and by love, for love,—through a continuous self-donation to Pure Love alone.”

Studying here these great convictions simply in their temperamental occasions, colouring, and limitations, we can readily discover how the “one thing at a time” maxim springs from the same disposition as that which found such refreshment in ecstasy. For here too, partly from a congenital incapacity to take things lightly, partly from an equally characteristic sensitiveness to the conflict and confusion incident to the introduction of any fresh multiplicity into the consciousness, she requires, even in her non-ecstatic moments, to have her attention specially concentrated upon one all-important idea, one point in the field of consciousness. And, by a faithful wholeness of attention to the successive spiritually significant circumstances and obligations, interior impressions and lights, which her praying, thinking, suffering, actively bring round to her notice, she manages, by such single steps, gradually to go a very long way, and, by such severe successiveness, to build up a rich simultaneity. For each of these faithfully accepted and fully willed and utilized acts and states, received into her one ever-growing and deepening personality, leave memories and stimulations behind them, and mingle, as subconscious elements, with the conscious acts which follow later on.

4. Two remarkable consequences of this kind of warfare.

There were two specially remarkable consequences of this constant watchful fixation of the one spiritually significant point in each congeries of circumstances, and of the manner in which (partly perhaps as the occasion, but probably in great part as the effect of this attention) one interior condition of apparent fixity would suddenly shift to another condition of a different kind but of a similar apparent stability. There was the manner in which, during these years, she appears to have escaped the committing of any at all definite offences against the better and best lights of that particular moment; and there was the way in which she would realize the faultiness and subtle self-seeking of any one state, only at the moment of its disappearing to make room for another.

I take the accounts of both these remarkable peculiarities to be substantially accurate, since, if the first condition had not obtained, we should have found her practising more or less frequent Confession, as we find her doing in the first and third, but not in this period; and if the second condition had not existed, we should have had, for this period also, some such vivid account of painful scruples arising from the impression of actually present unfaithfulnesses, such as has been preserved for her last years. And indeed, as soon as we have vividly conceived a state in which a soul (by a wise utilization of the quite exceptional successiveness and simplification to which it has been, in great part, driven by its temperamental requirements, and by a constant heroic watchfulness) has managed to exclude from its life, during a long series of years, all fully deliberate resistances to, or lapses from, its contemporaneous better insight: one sees at once that a consciousness of faultiness could come to her only at those moments when, one state and level giving place to another, she could, for the moment, see the former habits and their implicit defects in the clear light of their contrast to her new, deeper insights and dispositions.

Now it is evident that here again we have in part (in the curious quasi-fixity of each state, and then the sudden replacement of it by another) something which, taken alone, is simply psychically peculiar and spiritually indifferent. The persistent sense of gradual or of rapid change in the midst of a certain continuity and indeed abidingness, characteristic of the average moments of the average soul, is, taken in itself, more true to life and to the normal reaction of the human mind, and not less capable of spiritual utilization, than is Catherine’s peculiarity. Her heroic utilization of her special psychic life for purposes of self-fighting, and the degree in which, as we shall find in a later chapter, she succeeded in moulding this life into a shape representative of certain great spiritual truths: these things it is which constitute here the spiritually significant element.

And her second peculiarity of religious practice was her great simplification and intensification of the spiritual combat. Simplification: for she does not fight directly either the Devil or the World; she directly fights the “Flesh” alone, and recognizes but one immediate opponent, her own lower self. Hence the references to the world are always simply as to an extension or indefinite repetition of that same self, or of similar lower selves; and those to the devil are, except where she declares her own lower self “a very devil,” extraordinarily rare, and, in their authentic forms, never directly and formally connected with her own spiritual interests and struggles. And Intensification: for she conceives this lower self, against which all her fighting is turned, as capable of any enormity, as actually cloaking itself successively in every kind of disguise, and as more or less vitiating even the most spiritual-seeming of her states and acts.

And here again we can, I think, clearly trace the influence of her special temperament and psycho-physical functioning, yet in a direction opposite to that in which we would naturally expect it. For it is not so much that this temperament led her to exaggerate the badness of her false self, or to elaborate a myth concerning its (all but completely separate) existence, as that, owing in large part to that temperament and functioning, her false self was both unusually distinct from her true self and particularly clamorous and claimful. It would indeed be well for hagiography if, in all cases, at least an attempt were made to discover and present the precise and particular good and bad selves, worked for and fought by the particular saint: for it is just this double particularization of the common warfare in every individual soul that gives the poignant interest and instructiveness, and a bracing sense of reality to these lonely yet typical, unique yet universal struggles, defeats, and victories.

And in Catherine’s case her special temperament; her particular attitude during the ten years’ laxity, and again during the last years’ times of obscurity and scruple; even some of her sayings probably still belonging to this middle period; but above all the precise point and edge of her counter-ideal and attrait: all indicate clearly enough what was her congenital defect. A great self-engrossment of a downrightly selfish kind; a grouping of all things round such a self-adoring Ego; a noiseless but determined elimination from her life and memory of all that would not or could not, then and there, be drawn and woven into the organism and functioning of this immensely self-seeking, infinitely woundable and wounded, endlessly self-doctoring “I” and “Me”: a self intensely, although not sexually, jealous, envious and exacting, incapable of easy accommodation, of pleasure in half successes, of humour and brightness, of joyous “once-born” creatureliness: all this was certainly to be found, in strong tendency at least, in the untrained parts and periods of her character and life.

And then the same peculiarity and sensitiveness of her psycho-physical organism which, in her last period, ended by mirroring her mental spiritual apprehensions and picturings in her very body, and which, even at this time, has been traced by us in the curious long fixities and rapid changes of her fields of consciousness, clearly operates also and already here, in separating off this false self from the good one and in heightening the apprehension of that false self to almost a perception in space, or to an all but physical sensation.

We thus get something of which the interesting cases of “doubleness of personality,” so much studied of late years, are, as it were, purely psychical, definitely maladif caricatures; the great difference consisting in Catherine herself possessing, at all times, the consciousness and memory of both sides, of both “selves,” and of each as both actual and potential, within the range of her one great personality. Indeed it is this very multiplicity thus englobed and utilized by that higher unity, which gives depth to her sanity and sanctity.[37]

5. Precise object and end of her striving.

And all this is confirmed and completed, as already hinted, by the precise object of her ideal, the particular means and special end of the struggle. Here, at the very culmination of her inner life and aim, we find the deepest traces of her temperamental requirements; and here, in what she seeks, there is again an immense concentration and a significant choice. The distinctions between obligation and supererogation, between merit and grace, are not utilized but transcended; the conception of God having anger as well as love arouses as keen a sense of intolerableness as that of God’s envy aroused in Plato, and God appears to her as, in Himself, continuously loving.

This love of God, again, is seen to be present everywhere, and, of Itself, everywhere to effect happiness. The dispositions of souls are indeed held to vary within each soul and between soul and soul, and to determine the differences in their reception, and consequently in the effect upon them, of God’s one universal love: but the soul’s reward and punishment are not something distinct from its state, they are but that very state prolonged and articulated, since man can indeed go against his deepest requirements but can never finally suppress them. Heaven, Purgatory, Hell are thus not places as well as states, nor do they begin only in the beyond: they are states alone, and begin already here. And Grace and Love, and Love and Christ, and Christ and Spirit, and hence Grace and Love and Christ and Spirit are, at bottom, one, and this One is God. Hence God, loving Himself in and through us, is alone our full true self. Here, in this constant stretching out and forward of her whole being into and towards the ocean of light and love, of God the All in All, it is not hard to recognize a soul which finds happiness only when looking out and away from self, and turning, in more or less ecstatic contemplation and action, towards that Infinite Country, that great Over-Againstness, God.

And, in her sensitive shrinking from the idea of an angry God, we find the instinctive reaction of a nature too naturally prone itself to angry claimfulness, and which had been too much driven out of its self-occupation by the painful sense of interior self-division consequent upon that jealousy, not to find it intolerable to get out of that little Scylla of her own hungry self only to fall into a great Charybdis, an apparent mere enlargement and canonization of that same self, in the angry God Himself.

And if her second peculiarity, the concentration of the fight upon an unusually isolated and intense false self, had introduced an element of at least relative Rigorism and contraction into her spirituality, this third peculiarity brings a compensating movement of quasi-Pantheism, of immense expansion. Here the crushed plant expands in boundless air, light and warmth; the parched seaweed floats and unfolds itself in an immense ocean of pure waters—the soul, as it were, breathes and bathes in God’s peace and love. And it is evident that the great super-sensible realities and relations adumbrated by such figures, did not, with her, lead to mere dry or vague apprehensions. Even in this period, although here with a peaceful, bracing orderliness and harmony, the reality thus long and closely dwelt on and lived with was, as it were, physically seen and felt in these its images by a ready response of her immensely docile psycho-physical organism.

6. Catherine possessed two out of the three conditions apparently necessary for stigmatization.

And in this connection we should note how largely reasonable was the expectation of some of her disciples of finding some permanent physical effects upon her body; and yet why she not only had not the stigmata of the Passion, but why she could not have them. For, of the three apparently necessary conditions for such stigmatization, she had indeed two—a long and intense absorption in religious ideas, and a specially sensitive psycho-physical temperament and organization of the ecstatic type; but the third condition, the concentration of that absorption upon Our Lord’s Passion and wounds, was wholly wanting—at least after those four actively penitential and during those twenty-two ecstatic years. We can, however, say most truly that although, since at all events 1477, her visions and contemplations were all concerning purely metaphysical, eternal realities, or certain ceaselessly repeated experiences of the human soul, or laws and types derived from the greatest of Christian institutions, her daily solace, the Holy Eucharist: yet that these verities ended by producing definite images in her senses, and certain observable though passing impressions upon her body, so that we can here talk of sensible shadows or “stigmata” of things purely spiritual and eternal.

And if, in the cases of some ecstatic saints, mental pathologists of a more or less materialistic type have, at times, shown excessive suspicion as to some of the causes and effects of these saints’ devotion to Our Lord’s Humanity under the imagery and categories of the Canticle of Canticles—all such suspicions, fair or unfair, have absolutely no foothold in Catherine’s life, since not only is there here no devotion to God or to Our Lord as Bridegroom of the Bridal soul: there is no direct contemplative occupation with the historic Christ and no figuring of Him or of God under human attributes or relations at all. I think that her temperament and health had something to do with her habitual dwelling upon Thing-symbols of God: Ocean—Air—Fire—picturings which, conceived with her psycho-physical vividness, must, in their expanse, have rested and purified her in a way that historical contingencies and details would not have done. The doctrinal and metaphysical side of the matter will be considered later on.

VI. Three Rules which seem to govern the Relations between Psycho-physical Peculiarities and Sanctity in general.

If we next inquire how matters stand historically with regard to the relations between ecstatic states and psycho-physical peculiarities on the one hand, and sanctity in general on the other hand, we shall find, I think, that the following three rules or laws really cover, in a necessarily general, somewhat schematic way, all the chief points, at all certain or practically important, in this complex and delicate matter.

1. Intense spiritual energising is accompanied by auto-suggestion and mono-ideism.

It is clear, for one thing, that as simply all and every mental, emotional, and volitional energizing is necessarily and always accompanied by corresponding nerve-states, and that if we had not some neural sensitiveness and neural adaptability, we could not—whilst living our earthly life—think, or feel, or will in regard to anything whatsoever: a certain special degree of at least potential psycho-physical sensitiveness and adaptability must be taken to be, not the productive cause, but a necessary condition for the exercise, of any considerable range and depth of mind and will, and hence of sanctity in general; and that the actual aiming at, and gradual achievement of, sanctity in these, thus merely possible cases, spiritualizes and further defines this sensitiveness, as the instrument, material, and expression of the soul’s work.[38] And this work of the heroic soul will necessarily consist, in great part, in attending to, calling up, and, as far as may be, both fixing and ever renovating certain few great dominant ideas, and in attempting by every means to saturate the imagination with images and figures, historical and symbolic, as so many incarnations of these great verities.

We get thus what, taken simply phenomenally and without as yet any inquiry as to an ultimate reality pressing in upon the soul,—a divine stimulation underlying all its sincere and fruitful action,—is a spiritual mono-ideism and auto-suggestion, of a more or less general kind. But, at this stage, these activities and their psycho-physical concomitants and results will, though different in kind, be no more abnormal than is the mono-ideism and auto-suggestion of the mathematician, the tactician, and the constructive statesman. Newton, Napoleon, and Richelieu: they were all dominated by some great central idea, and they all for long years dwelt upon it and worked for it within themselves, till it became alive and aflame in their imaginations and their outward-moving wills, before, yet as the means of, its taking external and visible shape. And, in all the cases that we can test in detail, the psycho-physical accompaniments of all this profound mental-volitional energy were most marked. In the cases of Newton and Napoleon, for instance, a classification of their energizings solely according to their neural accompaniments would force us to class these great discoverers and organizers amongst psycho-physical eccentrics. Yet the truth and value of their work and character has, of course, to be measured, not by this its neural fringe and cost, but by its central spiritual truth and fruitfulness.

2. Such mechanisms specially marked in Philosophers, Musicians, Poets, and Mystical Religionists.

The mystical and contemplative element in the religious life, and the group of saints amongst whom this element is predominant, no doubt give us a still larger amount of what, again taking the matter phenomenally and not ultimately, is once more mono-ideism and auto-suggestion, and entails a correspondingly larger amount of psycho-physical impressionableness and reaction utilized by the mind. But here also, from the simplest forms of the “prayer of quiet” to absorptions of an approximately ecstatic type, we have something which, though different in kind and value, is yet no more abnormal than are the highest flights and absorptions of the Philosopher, the Musician, and the Poet. And yet, in such cases as Kant and Beethoven, a classifier of humanity according to its psycho-physical phenomena alone would put these great discoverers and creators, without hesitation, amongst hopeless and useless hypochondriacs. Yet here again the truth of their ideas and the work of their lives have to be measured by quite other things than by this their neural concomitance and cost.

3. Ecstatics possess a peculiar psycho-physical organization.

The downright ecstatics and hearers of voices and seers of visions have all, wherever we are able to trace their temperamental and neural constitution and history, possessed and developed a definitely peculiar psycho-physical organization. We have traced it in Catherine and indicated it in St. Teresa. We find it again in St. Maria Magdalena dei Pazzi and in St. Marguerite Marie Alacocque, in modern times, and in St. Catherine of Siena and St. Francis of Assisi in mediaeval times. For early Christian times we are too ignorant as regards the psycho-physical organization of St. Ignatius of Antioch, Hermas, and St. Cyprian, to be able to establish a connection between their temperamental endowments and their hearing of voices and seeing of visions—in the last two cases we get much that looks like more or less of a mere conventional literary device.[39]

We are, however, in a fair position for judging, in the typical and thoroughly original case of St. Paul. In 2 Cor. xiii, 7, 8, after speaking of the abundant revelations accorded to him, he adds that “lest I be lifted up, a thorn” (literally, a stake) “in the flesh was given to me, an Angel of Satan to buffet me.” And though “I thrice besought the Lord that it might depart from me, the Lord answered me, ‘My grace is sufficient for thee; for grace is perfected in infirmity.’” And he was consequently determined “rather” to “glory in his infirmities, so that the power of Christ may dwell within” him. And in Gal. iv, 14, 15, written about the same time, he reminds his readers how he had “preached to them through the infirmity of the flesh,” commending them because they “did not despise nor loathe their temptation in his flesh” (this is no doubt the correct reading), “but had received him as an Angel of God, as Christ Jesus.”

Now the most ancient interpretation of this “thorn” or “stake” is some kind of bodily complaint,—violent headache or earache is mentioned by Tertullian de Pudicitia, 13, and by St. Jerome, Comm. in Gal. loc. cit. Indeed St. Paul’s own description of his “bodily presence” as “weak,” and his “spoken word” as “contemptible” (2 Cor. x, 10), points this way. It seems plain that it cannot have been carnal temptations (only in the sixth century did this interpretation become firmly established), for he could not have gloried in these, nor could they, hidden as they would be within his heart, have exposed him to the contempt of others. Indeed he expressly excludes such troubles from his life, where, in advising those who were thus oppressed to marry, he gives the preference to the single life, and declares, “I would that all men were even as myself” (1 Cor. vii, 7).

The attacks of this trouble were evidently acutely painful: note the metaphor of a stake driven into the live flesh and the Angel of Satan who buffeted him. (And compare St. Teresa’s account: “An Angel of God appeared to me to be thrusting at times a long spear into my heart and to pierce my very entrails”; “the pain was so great that it made me moan”; “it really seems to the soul as if an arrow were thrust through the heart or through itself; the suffering is not one of sense, neither is the wound physical”; and how, on another occasion, she heard Our Lord answer her: “Serve thou Me, and meddle not with this.”)[40]

These attacks would come suddenly, even in the course of his public ministry, rendering him, in so far, an object of derision and of loathing. (Compare here St. Teresa’s declaration: “During the rapture, the body is very often perfectly powerless; it continues in the position it was in when the rapture came upon it: if sitting, sitting; if the hands were open, or if they were shut, they will remain open or shut”; “if the body” was “standing or kneeling, it remains so.”)[41]

Yet these attacks were evidently somehow connected, both in fact and in his consciousness, with his Visions; and they were recurrent. The vision of the Third Heaven and his apparently first attack seem to have been practically coincident,—about A.D. 44. We find a second attack hanging about him for some time, on his first preaching in Galatia, about A.D. 51 or 52 (see 1 Thess. ii, 18; 1 Cor. ii, 3). And a third attack appears to have come in A.D. 57 or 58, when the Second Epistle to the Corinthians and that to the Galatians were written; note the words (2 Cor. i, 9), “But” (in addition to his share in the public persecution) “we ourselves had the sentence of death within ourselves, in order that we might not trust in ourselves but in God who raiseth the dead to life.” (And compare here St. Teresa: in July 1547 “for about four days I remained insensible. They must have regarded me as dead more than once. For a day and a half the grave was open in my monastery, waiting for my body. But it pleased Our Lord I should come to myself.”)[42] Dr. Lightfoot gives as a parallel the epileptiform seizures of King Alfred, which, sudden, acutely painful, at times death-like, and protracted, tended to render the royal power despicable in the eyes of the world.[43] Yet, except for the difference of sex and of relative privacy, St. Teresa’s states, which I have given here, are more closely similar, in so much as they are intimately connected with religious visions and voices.

And, amongst Old Testament figures, we can find a similar connection, on a still larger scale, in the case of Ezekiel, the most definitely ecstatic, though (upon the whole) the least original, of the literary Prophets. For, as to the visionary element, we have his own records of three visions of the glory of Jahve; of five other ecstasies, three of which are accompanied by remarkable telepathic, second-sight activities; and of twelve symbolic (better: representative) prophetic actions, which are now all rightly coming to be considered as having been externally carried out by him.[44] And we get psycho-physical states, as marked as in any other ecstatic saint. For we hear how Jahve on one occasion says to him: “But thou, son of man, lay thyself on thy left side” (i.e. according to Jewish orientation, towards the North) “and I shall lay the guilt of the house of Israel” (the Northern Kingdom) “upon thee; the number of days that thou shalt lie upon it, shalt thou bear their guilt. But I appoint unto thee the years of their guilt, as a (corresponding) number of days, (namely) one hundred and fifty days.… And, when thou hast done with them, thou shalt lay thyself on thy right side” (i.e. towards the South), “and thou shalt bear the guilt of the house of Judah” (the Southern Kingdom); “one day for each year shall I appoint unto thee. And behold I shall lay cords upon thee, that thou shalt be unable to turn from one side to the other, till thou hast ended the days of thy boundness” (iv, 4-8). Krätzschmar, no doubt rightly, finds here a case of hemiplegia and anaesthesia, functional cataleptic paralysis lasting during five months on the left side, and then shifting for about six weeks to the right side. And the alalia (speechlessness), which no doubt accompanied this state, is referred to on three other occasions: xxiv, 27; xxix, 31; xxxiii, 22. And note how Jahve’s address to Ezekiel, “son of man,” which occurs in this book over ninety times, and but once in the whole of the rest of the Old Testament (Dan. viii, 17), evidently stands here for the sense of his creaturely nothingness, so characteristic of the true ecstatic.[45]

Now, at this last stage, the analogy of the other non-religious activities of the healthy mind and of their psycho-physical conditions and effects forsakes us; but not the principle which has guided us all along. For here, as from the very first, some such conditions and effects are inevitable; and the simple fact of this occurrence, apart from the question of their particular character, is something thoroughly normal. And here again, and more than ever, the emphasis and decision have to lie with, and to depend upon, the mental and volitional work and the spiritual truth and reality achieved in and for the recipient, and, through him, in and for others.

Even at the earlier stages, to cling to the form, as distinct from the content and end, of these things was to be thoroughly unfair to this their content and end, within the spacious economy of the spirit’s life; at this stage such clinging becomes destructive of all true religion. For if the mere psycho-physical forms and phenomena of ecstasy, of vision, of hearing of voices is, in proportion to their psycho-physical intensity and seeming automatism and quasi-physical objectivity, to be taken as necessarily a means and mark of sanctity or of insight, or, at least, as something presumably sent direct by God or else as diabolical, something necessarily super- or preter-natural: then the lunatic asylums contain more miracles, saints, and sages, or their direct, strangely similar antipodes, than all the most fervent or perverted churches, monasteries, and families upon God’s earth. For in asylums we find ecstasies, visions, voices, all more, not less marked, all more, not less irresistibly objective-seeming to the recipient, than anything to be found outside.

Yet apply impartially to both sets the test, not of form, but of content, of spiritual fruitfulness and of many-sided applicability—and this surface-similarity yields at once to a fundamental difference. Indeed all the great mystics, and this in precise proportion to their greatness, have ever taught that, the mystical capacities and habits being but means and not ends, only such ecstasies are valuable as leave the soul, and the very body as its instrument, strengthened and improved; and that visions and voices are to be accepted by the mind only in proportion as they convey some spiritual truth of importance to it or to others, and as they actually help it to become more humble, true, and loving.