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A Description of
Her Times
Much might be said of the action of Catherine on
her generation. Few individuals perhaps have ever led
so active a life or have succeeded in leaving so
remarkable an imprint of their personality on the
events of their time. Catherine the Peacemaker
reconciles warring factions of her native city and
heals an international feud between Florence and the
Holy See. Catherine the Consoler pours the balm of
her gentle spirit into the lacerated souls of the
suffering wherever she finds them, in the condemned
cell or in the hospital ward.
She is one of the most voluminous of
letter-writers, keeping up a constant correspondence
with a band of disciples, male and female, all over
Italy, and last, but not least, with the distant Pope
at Avignon.
Her lot was cast on evil days for the Church and the
Peninsula. The trecento, the apogee of the middle
ages was over. Francis and Dominic had come and gone,
and though Franciscans and Dominicans remained and
numbered saints among their ranks, still the first
fervor of the original inspiration was a brightness
that had fled.
The moral state of the secular clergy was,
according to Catherine herself, too often one of the
deepest degradation, while, in the absence of the
Pontiff, the States of the Church were governed by
papal legates, mostly men of blood and lust, who
ground the starving people under their heel.
Assuredly it was not from Christian bishops who would
have disgraced Islam that their subjects could learn
the path of peace. The Pope's residence at Avignon,
the Babylonish Captivity, as it was called, may have
seemed, at the time when his departure from Rome was
resolved upon, a wise measure of temporary retreat
before the anarchy which was raging round the city of
St. Peter. But not many years passed before it became
evident that Philip the Fair, the astute adviser to
whose counsel -- and possibly more than counsel --
Clement had submitted in leaving Rome, was the only
one who profited by the exile of the Pope.
Whatever the truth may be about the details of
Clement's election, so far as his subservience to the
French king went, he might have remained Archbishop
of Bordeaux to the end of his days. He accepted for
his relations costly presents from Philip; he placed
the papal authority at his service in the gravely
suspicious matter of the suppression of the Templars.
Gradually the Holy See in exile lost its ecumenical
character and became more and more the vassal of the
French crown.
Such a decline in its position could not fail to
affect even its doctrinal prestige. It was well
enough in theory to apply to the situation such
maxims as Ubi Petrus ibi Ecclesia, or, as the
Avignonese doctors paraphrased it, Ubi Papa ibi Roma;
but, in practice, Christendom grew shy of a French
Pope, living under the eye and power of the French
king. The Romans, who had always treated the Pope
badly, were furious when at last they had driven him
away, and gratified their spite by insulting their
exiled rulers. Nothing could exceed their contempt
for the Popes of Avignon, who, as a matter of fact,
though weak and compliant, were in their personal
characters worthy ecclesiastics.
They gave no credit to John XXII. for his genuine
zeal in the cause of learning, or the energy with
which he restored ecclesiastical studies in the
Western Schools. For Benedict XII., a retiring and
abstemious student, they invented the phrase: bibere
papaliter -- to drink like the Pope. Clement VI. they
called poco religioso, forgetting his noble charity
at the time of the plague, and also the fact that
Rome herself had produced not a few popes whose lives
furnished a singular commentary on the ethics of the
Gospel.
The real danger ahead to Christendom was the
possibility of an Italian anti-Pope who should
fortify his position by recourse to the heretical
elements scattered through the peninsula. Those
elements were grave and numerous. The Fraticelli or
Spiritual Franciscans, although crushed for the time
by the iron hand of Pope Boniface, rather flourished
than otherwise under persecution. These dangerous
heretics had inherited a garbled version of the
mysticism of Joachim of Flora, which constituted a
doctrine perhaps more radically revolutionary than
that of any heretics before or since.
It amounted to belief in a new revelation of the
Spirit, which was to supersede the dispensation of
the Son as that had taken the place of the
dispensation of the Father. According to the Eternal
Gospel of Gerard of San Domino, who had derived it,
not without much adroit manipulation, from the
writings of Abbot Joachim, the Roman Church was on
the eve of destruction, and it was the duty of the
Spirituali, the saints who had received the new
dispensation, to fly from the contamination of her
communion. An anti-Pope who should have rallied to
his allegiance these elements of schism would have
been a dangerous rival to a French Pope residing in
distant Avignon, however legitimate his title.
Nor was there wanting outside Italy matter for
grave anxiety. Germs of heresy were fermenting north
of the Alps; the preaching of Wycliffe, the
semi-Islamism of the Hungarian Beghards, the Theism
of the Patarini of Dalmatia, the erotic mysticism of
the Adamites of Paris, indicated a widespread anarchy
in the minds of Christians. Moreover, the spiritual
difficulties of the Pope were complicated by his
temporal preoccupations.
For good or ill, it had come to be essential to
the action of the Holy See that the successor of the
penniless fisherman should have his place among the
princes of the earth.
The papal monarchy had come about, as most things
come about in this world, by what seems to have been
the inevitable force of circumstances. The decay of
the Imperial power in Italy due to the practical
abandonment of the Western Empire -- for the ruler of
Constantinople lived at too great a distance to be an
effective Emperor of the West -- had resulted in a
natural increase of secular importance to the See of
Rome. To the genius of Pope Gregory I., one of the
few men whom their fellows have named both Saint and
Great, was due the development of the political
situation thus created in Italy.
Chief and greatest of bishops in his day was St.
Gregory the Great. Seldom, if ever, has the papal
dignity been sustained with such lofty enthusiasm,
such sagacious political insight. Himself a Roman of
Rome, Romano di Roma, as those who possess that
privilege still call themselves today, the instinct
of government was his by hereditary right. He had the
defects as well as the qualities of the statesman.
His theological writings, which are voluminous and
verbose, are marked rather by a sort of canonized
common sense than by exalted flights of spirituality.
His missionary enterprise was characterized by a
shrewd and gracious condescension to the limitations
of human nature.
Thus he counsels St. Augustine, who had consulted
him as to the best means of extirpating the pagan
customs of our English forefathers, to deal gently
with these ancient survivals. He ruled that the
celebration of the Festivals of the Sabots should if
possible be held at the times and places at which the
people had been in the habit of meeting together to
worship the gods. They would thus come to associate
the new religion with their traditional
merry-makings, and their conversion would be
gradually, and as it were unconsciously, effected.
It was a kindly and statesmanlike thought. In this
way Gregory may truly be looked upon as the founder
of popular Catholicism, that "pensive use and wont
religion," not assuredly in the entirety of its
details Christian, but at least profoundly Catholic,
as weaving together in the web of its own secular
experience of man so large a proportion of the
many-colored threads that have at any time attached
his hopes and fears to the mysterious unknown which
surrounds him.
No miracle is needed to explain the political
ascendancy which such a man inevitably came to
acquire in an Italy deserted by the Empire, and, but
for him and the organization which depended on him,
at the mercy of the invading Lombard. More and more,
people came to look on the Pope as their temporal
ruler no less than as their spiritual father. In many
cases, indeed, his was the only government they knew.
Kings and nobles had conferred much property on the
Roman Church.
By the end of the sixth century the Bishop of Rome
held, by the right of such donations to his See,
large tracts of country, not only in Italy, but also
in Sicily, Corsica, Gaul, and even Asia and Africa.
Gregory successfully defended his Italian property
against the invaders, and came to the relief of the
starving population with corn from Sicily and Africa,
thus laying deep in the hearts of the people the
foundations of the secular power of the Papacy.
It would be an unnecessary digression from our
subject to work out in detail the stages by which the
Pope came to take his place first as the Italian
vicar of a distant emperor, and at length, as the
result of astute statecraft and the necessities of
the case, among the princes of Europe, as their chief
and arbiter. So much as has been said was, however,
necessary for the comprehension of the task with
which Catherine measured, for the time, successfully
her strength. It was given to the Popolana of Siena,
by the effect of her eloquence in persuading the
wavering will of the Pope to return to his See, to
bring about what was, for the moment, the only
possible solution of that Roman question, which,
hanging perpetually round the skirts of the Bride of
Christ, seems at every step to impede her victorious
advance.
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The Greatness Of
St Catherine
Nevertheless, it is neither the intrinsic
importance nor the social consequences of her actions
that constitute the true greatness of St. Catherine.
Great ends may be pursued by essentially small means,
in an aridity and narrowness of temper that goes far
to discount their actual achievement. History, and in
particular the history of the Church, is not wanting
in such instances.
Savonarola set great ends before himself -- the
freedom of his country and the regeneration of the
state; but the spirit in which he pursued them
excludes him from that Pantheon of gracious souls in
which humanity enshrines its true benefactors. "Soul,
as a quality of style, is a fact," and the soul of
St. Catherine's gesta expressed itself in a "style"
so winning, so sweetly reasonable, as to make her the
dearest of friends to all who had the privilege of
intimate association with her, and a permanent source
of refreshment to the human spirit.
She intuitively perceived life under the highest
possible forms, the forms of Beauty and Love. Truth
and Goodness were, she thought, means for the
achievement of those two supreme ends. The sheer
beauty of the soul "in a state of Grace" is a point
on which she constantly dwells, hanging it as a bait
before those whom she would induce to turn from evil.
Similarly the ugliness of sin, as much as its
wickedness, should warn us of its true nature. Love,
that love of man for man which, in deepest truth, is,
in the words of the writer of the First Epistle of
St. John, God Himself, is, at once, the highest
achievement of man and his supreme and satisfying
beatitude. The Symbols of Catholic theology were to
her the necessary and fitting means of transit, so to
speak.
See, in the following pages, the fine allegory of
the Bridge of the Sacred Humanity, of the soul in vi�
on its dusty pilgrimage towards those gleaming
heights of vision. "Truth" was to her the handmaid of
the spiritualized imagination, not, as too often in
these days of the twilight of the soul, its tyrant
and its gaoler. Many of those who pass lives of
unremitting preoccupation with the problems of truth
and goodness are wearied and cumbered with much
serving. We honor them, and rightly; but if they have
nothing but this to offer us, our hearts do not run
to meet them, as they fly to the embrace of those
rare souls who inhabit a serener, more pellucid
atmosphere.
Among these spirits of the air, St. Catherine has
taken a permanent and foremost place. She is among
the few guides of humanity who have the perfect
manner, the irresistible attractiveness, of that
positive purity of heart, which not only sees God,
but diffuses Him, as by some natural law of
refraction, over the hearts of men. The Divine
nuptials, about which the mystics tell us so much,
have been accomplished in her, Nature and Grace have
lain down together, and the mysteries of her religion
seem but the natural expression of a perfectly
balanced character, an unquenchable love and a
deathless will.
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About The
Dialogue
The Dialogue of St. Catherine of Siena was
dictated to her secretaries by the Saint in ecstasy.
Apart from the extraordinary circumstances of its
production, this work has a special interest.
The composition of the Siennese dyer's daughter,
whose will, purified and sublimated by prayer,
imposed itself on popes and princes, is an almost
unique specimen of what may be called
"ecclesiastical" mysticism; for its special value
lies in the fact that from first to last it is
nothing more than a mystical exposition of the creeds
taught to every child in the Catholic poor-schools.
Her insight is sometimes very wonderful.
How subtle, for instance, is the analysis of the
state of the "worldly man" who loves God for his own
pleasure or profit! The special snares of the devout
are cut through by the keen logic of one who has
experienced and triumphed over them. Terrible, again,
is the retribution prophesied to the "unworthy
ministers of the Blood."
And so every well-known form of Christian life,
healthy or parasitic, is treated of, detailed,
analyzed incisively, remorselessly, and then subsumed
under the general conception of God's infinite
loving-kindness and mercy.
The great mystics have usually taken as their
starting-point what, to most, is the goal hardly to
be reached; their own treatment of the preliminary
stages of spirituality is frequently conventional and
jejune. Compare, for instance, the first book with
the two succeeding ones, of Ruysbrock's Ornement des
Noces spirituelles, that unique breviary of the
Christian Platonician.
Another result of their having done so is that,
with certain noble exceptions, the literature of this
subject has fallen into the hands of a class of
writers, or rather purveyors, well-intentioned no
doubt, but not endowed with the higher spiritual and
mental faculties, whom it is not unfair to describe
as the feuilletonistes of piety. Such works, brightly
bound, are appropriately exposed for sale in the
Roman shop-windows, among the gaudy objets de
religion they so much resemble. To keep healthy and
raise the tone of devotional literature is surely an
eighth spiritual work of mercy.
St. Philip Neri's advice in the matter was to
prefer those writers whose names were preceded by the
title of Saint. In the Dialogo we have a great saint,
one of the most extraordinary women who ever lived,
treating, in a manner so simple and familiar as at
times to become almost colloquial, of the elements of
practical Christianity. Passages occur frequently of
lofty eloquence, and also of such literary perfection
that this book is held by critics to be one of the
classics of the age and land which produced Boccaccio
and Petrarch. To-day, in the streets of Siena, the
same Tuscan idiom can be heard, hardly altered since
the days of St. Catherine.
One word as to the translation. I have almost
always followed the text of Gigli, a learned Siennese
ecclesiastic, who edited the complete works of St.
Catherine in the last century. His is the latest
edition printed of the Dialogo. Once or twice I have
preferred the cinquecento Venetian editor. My aim has
been to translate as literally as possible, and at
the same time to preserve the characteristic rhythm
of the sentences, so suggestive in its way of the
sing-song articulation of the Siennese of today.
St. Catherine has no style as such; she introduces
a metaphor and forgets it; the sea, a vine, and a
plough will often appear in the same sentence,
sometimes in the same phrase. In such cases I have
occasionally taken the liberty of adhering to the
first simile when the confusion of metaphor in the
original involves hopeless obscurity of expression.
VIAREGGIO, September 1906
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