The Dialogue of Saint Catherine of Siena(in the making)

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THE DIALOGUE OF SAINT CATHERINE OF SIENA
Translated by Algar Thorold

"Man is placed above all creatures, and not beneath them, and he cannot be satisfied
or content except in something greater than himself. Greater than himself there is
nothing but Myself, the Eternal God. Therefore I alone can satisfy him, and, because
he is deprived of this satisfaction by his guilt, he remains in continual torment and
pain. Weeping follows pain, and when he begins to weep, the wind strikes the tree
of self-love, which he has made the principle of all his being." (Page 203). This work
was dictated by Saint Catherine of Siena during a state of ecstasy while in dialogue
with God the Father. Saint Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) was declared a Doctor of
the Church on October 4, 1970.

 

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THE DIALOGUE OF THE SERAPHIC VIRGIN
CATHERINE OF SIENA

DICTATED BY HER, WHILE IN A STATE OF ECSTASY,
TO HER SECRETARIES, AND COMPLETED
IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1370

TOGETHER WITH

AN ACCOUNT OF HER DEATH BY AN EYE-WITNESS

TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL ITALIAN, AND PRECEDED BY AN
INTRODUCTION ON THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE SAINT, BY
ALGAR THOROLD

A NEW AND ABRIDGED EDITION
Originally published in 1907 by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., London.

Scanned and edited by Harry Plantinga, planting@cs.pitt.edu, 1994.
The language has been modernized by replacing
the archaic singular with the modern equivalent.

This e-text is in the public domain.

 

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION...................................................Post 4 - Page 1
A TREATISE OF DIVINE PROVIDENCE....................Post 14 - Page 1
A TREATISE OF DISCRETION................................Post 24 - Page 2
A TREATISE OF PRAYER.......................................
A TREATISE OF OBEDIENCE.................................  

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THE DIALOGUE OF
ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA


INTRODUCTION


It would be hard to say whether the Age of the Saints, le moyen âge énorme et
délicat, has suffered more at the hands of friends or foes. It is at least certain that the
medieval period affects those who approach it in the manner of a powerful
personality who may awaken love or hatred, but cannot be passed over with
indifference. When the contempt of the eighteenth century for the subject, the
result of that century's lack of historic imagination, was thawed by the somewhat
rhetorical enthusiasm of Chateaubriand and of the Romanticists beyond the Rhine,
hostility gave place to an undiscriminating admiration. The shadows fell out of the
picture; the medieval time became a golden age when heaven and earth visibly
mingled, when Christian society reached the zenith of perfection which constituted
it a model for all succeeding ages. Then came the German professors with all the
paraphernalia of scientific history, and, looking through their instruments, we, who
are not Germans, have come to take a more critical and, perhaps, a juster view of
the matter. The Germans, too, have had disciples of other nations, and though
conclusions on special points may differ, in every country now at a certain level of
education, the same views prevail as to the principles on which historical
investigation should be conducted. And yet, while no one with a reputation to lose
would venture on any personal heresy as to the standards of legitimate evidence,
the same facts still seem to lead different minds to differing appreciations. For
history, written solely ad narrandum, is not history; the historian's task is not over
when he has disinterred facts and established dates: it is then that the most delicate
part of his work begins. History, to be worthy of the name, must produce the
illusion of living men and women, and, in order to do this successfully, must be
based, not only upon insight into human nature in general, but also upon personal
appreciation of the particular men and women engaged in the episodes with which
it deals. With facts as such, there can indeed be no tampering; but for the
determination of their significance, of their value, as illustrative of a course of
policy or of the character of those who were responsible for their occurrence, we
have to depend in great measure on the personality of the historian. It is evident
that a man who lacks the sympathetic power to enter into the character that he
attempts to delineate, will hardly be able to make that character live for us. For in
Art as well as Life, sympathy is power.

Now, while this is true of all history whatever, it is perhaps truer of the history of
the middle ages than of that of any more recent period, nor is the reason of this far  

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to seek. The middle ages were a period fruitful in great individuals who molded
society, to an extent that perhaps no succeeding period has been. In modern times
the formula, an abstraction such as "Capital" or the "Rights of Man" has largely
taken the place of the individual as a plastic force. The one great Tyrant of the
nineteenth century found his opportunity in the anarchy which followed the
French Revolution. The spoil was then necessarily to the strong. But even
Napoleon was conquered at last rather by a conspiracy of the slowly developing
anonymous forces of his time than by the superior skill or strength of an individual
rival. The lion could hardly have been caught in such meshes in the trecento. Then,
the fate of populations was bound up with the animosities of princes, and, in order
to understand the state of Europe at any particular moment of that period, it is
necessary to understand the state of soul of the individuals who happened, at the
time, to be the political stakeholders.

It must not be thought, however, that the personality of the prince was the only
power in the medieval state, for the prince himself was held to be ultimately
amenable to an idea, which so infinitely transcended earthly distinctions as to level
them all in relation to itself. Religion was in those days a mental and social force
which we, in spite of the petulant acerbity of modern theological controversies,
have difficulty in realizing. Prince and serf would one day appear as suppliants
before the Judgment-seat of Christ, and the theory of medieval Christianity was
considerably in favor of the serf. The Father of Christendom, at once Priest and
King, anointed and consecrated as the social exponent of the Divine Justice, could
not, in his own person, escape its rigors, but must, one day, render an account of his
stewardship. Nor did the medieval mind, distinguishing between the office and the
individual, by any means shrink from contemplating the fate of the faithless
steward. In a "Last Judgment" by Angelico at Florence, the ministers of justice seem
to have a special joy in hurrying off to the pit popes and cardinals and other
ecclesiastics.

For it is an insufficient criticism that has led some to suppose that the medieval
Church weighed on the conscience of Christendom solely, or even primarily, as an
arbitrary fact: that the priesthood, aided by the ignorance of the people, succeeded in
establishing a monstrous claim to control the destinies of the soul by quasi-magical
agencies and the powers of excommunication. Nothing can be further from the
truth. Probably at no period has the Christian conscience realized more profoundly
that the whole external fabric of Catholicism, its sacraments, its priesthood, its
discipline, was but the phenomenal expression, necessary and sacred in its place, of
the Idea of Christianity, that the vitality of that Idea was the life by which the
Church lived, and that by that Idea all Christians, priests as well as laymen, rulers as
well as subjects, would at the last be judged. When Savonarola replied to the Papal
Legate, who, in his confusion, committed the blunder of adding to the formula of
excommunication from the Church Militant, a sentence of exclusion from the
Church Triumphant, "You cannot do it," he was in the tradition of medieval
orthodoxy. Moreover, even though the strict logic of her theory might have
required it, the hierarchical Church was not considered as the sole manifestation of
the Divine Will to Christendom. The unanimity with which the Christian idea was
accepted in those times made the saint a well-known type of human character just
as nowadays we have the millionaire or the philanthropist. Now the saint,
although under the same ecclesiastical dispensation as other Christians, was  

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conceived to have his own special relations with God, which amounted almost to a
personal revelation. In particular he was held to be exempt from many of the
limitations of fallen humanity. His prayers were of certain efficacy; the customary
uniformities of experience were thought to be constantly transcended by the power
that dwelt within him; he was often accepted by the people as the bearer to
Christendom of a Divine message over and above the revelation of which the
hierarchy was the legitimate guardian. Not infrequently indeed that message was
one of warning or correction to the hierarchy. Sabatier points out truly that the
medieval saints occupied much the same relation to the ecclesiastical system as the
Prophets of Israel had done, under the older dispensation, to the Jewish Priesthood.
They came out of their hermitages or cloisters, and with lips touched by coal from
the altar denounced iniquity wherever they found it, even in the highest places. It is
needless to say that they were not revolutionaries -- had they been so indeed the
state of Europe might have been very different today; for them, as for other
Christians, the organization of the Church was Divine; it was by the sacred
responsibilities of his office that they judged the unworthy pastor.

An apt illustration of this attitude occurs in the life of the Blessed Colomba of Rieti.
Colomba, who was a simple peasant, was called to the unusual vocation of
preaching. The local representatives of the Holy Office, alarmed at the novelty,
imprisoned her and took the opportunity of a visit of Alexander VI. to the
neighboring town of Perugia to bring her before his Holiness for examination.
When the saint was brought into the Pope's presence, she reverently kissed the hem
of his garment, and, being overcome with devotion at the sight of the Vicar of
Christ, fell into an ecstasy, during which she invoked the Divine judgment on the
sins of Rodrigo Borgia. It was useless to attempt to stop her; she was beyond the
control of inquisitor or guards; the Pope had to hear her out. He did so; proclaimed
her complete orthodoxy, and set her free with every mark of reverence. In this
highly characteristic episode scholastic logic appears, for once, to have been justified,
at perilous odds, of her children. . . .

* * *

Midway between sky and earth hangs a City Beautiful: Siena, Vetus Civitas Virginis.
The town seems to have descended as a bride from airy regions, and lightly settled
on the summits of three hills which it crowns with domes and clustering towers. As
seen from the vineyards which clothe the slopes of the hills or with its crenellated
wall and slender-necked Campanile silhouetted against the evening sky from the
neighboring heights of Belcaro, the city is familiar to students of the early Italian
painters. It forms the fantastic and solemn background of many a masterpiece of the
trecentisti, and seems the only possible home, if home they can have on earth, of
the glorified persons who occupy the foreground. It would create no surprise to
come, while walking round the ancient walls, suddenly, at a turn in the road, on
one of the sacred groups so familiarly recurrent to the memory in such an
environment: often indeed one experiences a curious illusion when a passing friar
happens for a moment to "compose" with cypress and crumbling archway.

Siena, once the successful rival of Florence in commerce, war, and politics, has,
fortunately for the more vital interests which it represents, long desisted from such
minor matters. Its worldly ruin has been complete for more than five hundred
years; in truth the town has never recovered from the plague which, in the far-off  

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days of 1348, carried off 80,000 of its population. Grassy mounds within the city walls
mark the shrinking of the town since the date of their erection, and Mr. Murray
gives its present population at less than 23,000. The free Ghibelline Republic which,
on that memorable 4th of September 1260, defeated, with the help of Pisa, at Monte
Aperto, the combined forces of the Guelf party in Tuscany, has now, after centuries
of servitude to Spaniard and Austrian, to be content with the somewhat pinchbeck
dignity of an Italian Prefettura. At least the architectural degradation which has
overtaken Florence at the hands of her modern rulers has been as yet, in great
measure, spared to Siena. Even the railway has had the grace to conceal its presence
in the folds of olive which enwrap the base of the hill on which the city is set.

Once inside the rose-colored walls, as we pass up the narrow, roughly paved streets
between lines of palaces, some grim and massive like Casa Tolomei, built in 1205,
others delicate specimens of Italian Gothic like the Palazzo Saracini, others again
illustrating the combination of grace and strength which marked the domestic
architecture of the Renaissance at its prime, like the Palazzo Piccolomini, we find
ourselves in a world very remote indeed from anything with which the experience
of our own utilitarian century makes us familiar. And yet, as we rub our eyes,
unmistakably a world of facts, though of facts, as it were, visibly interpreted by the
deeper truth of an art whose insistent presence is on all sides of us. Here is Casa
Tolomei, a huge cube of rough-hewn stone stained to the color of tarnished silver
with age, once the home of that Madonna Pia whose story lives forever in the verse
of Dante. Who shall distinguish between her actual tale of days and the immortal
life given her by the poet? In her moment of suffering at least she has been made
eternal. And not far from that ancient fortress-home, in a winding alley that can
hardly be called a street, is another house of medieval Siena -- no palace this time,
but a small tradesman's dwelling. In the fourteenth century it belonged to Set
Giacomo Benincasa, a dyer. Part of it has now been converted into a chapel, over the
door of which are inscribed the words: Sponsae Xti Katerinae Domus. Here, on
March 5, 1347, being Palm Sunday, was born Giacomo's daughter Caterina, who still
lives one of the purest glories of the Christian Church under the name of St.
Catherine of Siena. More than 500 years have passed since the daughter of the
Siennese dyer entered into the rest of that sublime and touching symbolism under
which the Church half veils and half reveals her teaching as to the destiny of man.
Another case, but how profoundly more significant than that of poor Madonna Pia,
of the intertwining of the world of fact with the deeper truth of art.

St. Catherine was born at the same time as a twin-sister, who did not survive. Her
parents, Giacomo and Lapa Benincasa, were simple townspeople, prosperous, and
apparently deserving their reputation for piety. Lapa, the daughter of one Mucio
Piagenti, a now wholly forgotten poet, bore twenty-five children to her husband, of
whom thirteen only appear to have grown up. This large family lived together in
the manner still obtaining in Italy, in the little house, till the death of Giacomo in
1368.

There are stirring pages enough in Christian hagiology. Who can read unmoved of
the struggles towards his ideal of an Augustine or a Loyola, or of the heroic courage
of a Theresa, affirming against all human odds the divinity of her mission, and
justifying, after years of labor, her incredible assertions by the steadfastness of her
will? There are other pages in the lives of the saints, less dramatic, it may be, but  

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breathing, nevertheless, a naïve grace and poetry all their own: the childhood of
those servants of Christ who have borne His yoke from the dawn of their days
forms their charming theme. Here the blasting illuminations of the Revelation are
toned down to a soft and tender glow, in which the curves and lines of natural
humanity do but seem more pathetically human. The hymn at Lauds for the Feast
of the Holy Innocents represents those unconscious martyrs as playing with their
palms and crowns under the very altar of Heaven: --

"Vos prima Christi victima
Grex immolatorum tener
Aram sub ipsam simplices
Palma et coronis luditis!"

And so these other saintly babies play at hermits or monasteries instead of the
soldiers and housekeeping beloved of more secular-minded infants. Heaven
condescends to their pious revels: we are told of the Blessed Hermann Joseph, the
Premonstratensian, that his infantile sports were joyously shared by the Divine
Child Himself. He would be a morose pedant indeed who should wish to rationalize
this white mythology. The tiny Catherine was no exception to the rest of her
canonized brothers and sisters. At the age of five it was her custom on the staircase
to kneel and repeat a "Hail Mary" at each step, a devotion so pleasing to the angels,
that they would frequently carry her up or down without letting her feet touch the
ground, much to the alarm of her mother, who confided to Father Raymond of
Capua, the Dominican confessor of the family, her fears of an accident. Nor were
these phenomena the only reward of her infant piety. From the day that she could
walk she became very popular among her numerous relatives and her parents'
friends, who gave her the pet name of Euphrosyne, to signify the grief-dispelling
effect of her conversation, and who were constantly inviting her to their houses on
some pretext or other. Sent one morning on an errand to the house of her married
sister Bonaventura, she was favored with a beautiful vision which, as it has an
important symbolical bearing on the great task of her after-life, I will relate in Father
Raymond's words, slightly abridging their prolixity.

"So it happened that Catherine, being arrived at the age of six, went one day with
her brother Stephen, who was a little older than herself, to the house of their sister
Bonaventura, who was married to one Niccolò, as has been mentioned above, in
order to carry something or give some message from their mother Lapa. Their
mother's errand accomplished, while they were on the way back from their sister's
house to their own and were passing along a certain valley, called by the people
Valle Piatta, the holy child, lifting her eyes, saw on the opposite side above the
Church of the Preaching Friars a most beautiful room, adorned with regal
magnificence, in which was seated, on an imperial throne, Jesus Christ, the Savior
of the world, clothed in pontifical vestments, and wearing on His head a papal tiara;
with Him were the princes of the Apostles, Peter and Paul, and the holy evangelist
John. Astounded at such a sight, Catherine stood still, and with fixed and
immovable look, gazed, full of love, on her Savior, who, appearing in so marvelous
a manner, in order sweetly to gain her love to Himself, fixed on her the eyes of His
Majesty, and, with a tender smile, lifted over her His right hand, and, making the
sign of the Holy Cross in the manner of a bishop, left with her the gift of His eternal
benediction. The grace of this gift was so efficacious, that Catherine, beside herself,  

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and transformed into Him upon whom she gazed with such love, forgetting not
only the road she was on, but also herself, although naturally a timid child, stood
still for a space with lifted and immovable eyes in the public road, where men and
beasts were continually passing, and would certainly have continued to stand there
as long as the vision lasted, had she not been violently diverted by others. But while
the Lord was working these marvels, the child Stephen, leaving her standing still,
continued his way down hill, thinking that she was following, but, seeing her
immovable in the distance and paying no heed to his calls, he returned and pulled
her with his hands, saying: 'What are you doing here? why do you not come?' Then
Catherine, as if waking from a heavy sleep, lowered her eyes and said: 'Oh, if you
had seen what I see, you would not distract me from so sweet a vision!' and lifted
her eyes again on high; but the vision had entirely disappeared, according to the will
of Him who had granted it, and she, not being able to endure this without pain,
began with tears to reproach herself for having turned her eyes to earth." Such was
the "call" of St. Catherine of Siena, and, to a mind intent on mystical significance,
the appearance of Christ, in the semblance of His Vicar, may fitly appear to
symbolize the great mission of her after-life to the Holy See.

* * *

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  

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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.  

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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 merrymakings,
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.

* * *

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  

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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 viâ 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.

* * *

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  

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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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14

A TREATISE OF DIVINE PROVIDENCE

How a soul, elevated by desire of the honor of God, and of the salvation of her
neighbors, exercising herself in humble prayer, after she had seen the union
of the soul, through love, with God, asked of God four requests.

The soul, who is lifted by a very great and yearning desire for the honor of God and
the salvation of souls, begins by exercising herself, for a certain space of time, in the
ordinary virtues, remaining in the cell of self-knowledge, in order to know better
the goodness of God towards her. This she does because knowledge must precede
love, and only when she has attained love, can she strive to follow and to clothe
herself with the truth. But, in no way, does the creature receive such a taste of the
truth, or so brilliant a light therefrom, as by means of humble and continuous
prayer, founded on knowledge of herself and of God; because prayer, exercising her
in the above way, unites with God the soul that follows the footprints of Christ
Crucified, and thus, by desire and affection, and union of love, makes her another
Himself. Christ would seem to have meant this, when He said: To him who will
love Me and will observe My commandment, will I manifest Myself; and he shall be
one thing with Me and I with him. In several places we find similar words, by
which we can see that it is, indeed, through the effect of love, that the soul becomes
another Himself. That this may be seen more clearly, I will mention what I
remember having heard from a handmaid of God, namely, that, when she was
lifted up in prayer, with great elevation of mind, God was not wont to conceal, from
the eye of her intellect, the love which He had for His servants, but rather to
manifest it; and, that among other things, He used to say: "Open the eye of your
intellect, and gaze into Me, and you shall see the beauty of My rational creature. And
look at those creatures who, among the beauties which I have given to the soul,
creating her in My image and similitude, are clothed with the nuptial garment (that
is, the garment of love), adorned with many virtues, by which they are united with
Me through love. And yet I tell you, if you should ask Me, who these are, I should
reply" (said the sweet and amorous Word of God) "they are another Myself,
inasmuch as they have lost and denied their own will, and are clothed with Mine,
are united to Mine, are conformed to Mine." It is therefore true, indeed, that the
soul unites herself with God by the affection of love.

So, that soul, wishing to know and follow the truth more manfully, and lifting her
desires first for herself -- for she considered that a soul could not be of use, whether
in doctrine, example, or prayer, to her neighbor, if she did not first profit herself,
that is, if she did not acquire virtue in herself -- addressed four requests to the
Supreme and Eternal Father. The first was for herself; the second for the
reformation of the Holy Church; the third a general prayer for the whole world, and
in particular for the peace of Christians who rebel, with much lewdness and
persecution, against the Holy Church; in the fourth and last, she besought the
Divine Providence to provide for things in general, and in particular, for a certain
case with which she was concerned.