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The following work embodies well-nigh all that the writer has been able to learn and to test, in the matter of religion, during now some thirty years of adult life; and even the actual composition of the book has occupied a large part of his time, for seven years and more.

The precise object of the book naturally grew in range, depth and clearness, under the stress of the labour of its production. This object will perhaps be best explained by means of a short description of the undertaking’s origin and successive stages.

Born as I was in Italy, certain early impressions have never left me; a vivid consciousness has been with me, almost from the first, of the massively virile personalities, the spacious, trustful times of the early, as yet truly Christian, Renaissance there, from Dante on to the Florentine Platonists. And when, on growing up, I acquired strong and definite religious convictions, it was that ampler pre-Protestant, as yet neither Protestant nor anti-Protestant, but deeply positive and Catholic, world, with its already characteristically modern outlook and its hopeful and spontaneous application of religion to the pressing problems of life and thought, which helped to strengthen and sustain me, when depressed and hemmed in by the types of devotion prevalent since then in Western Christendom. For those early modern times presented me with men of the same general instincts and outlook as my own, but environed by the priceless boon and starting-point of a still undivided Western Christendom; Protestantism, as such, continued to be felt as ever more or less unjust and sectarian; and the specifically post-Tridentine type of Catholicism, with its regimental Seminarism, its predominantly controversial spirit, its suspiciousness and timidity, persisted, however inevitable some of it may be, in its failure to win my love. Hence I had to continue the seeking and the finding elsewhere, yet ever well within the great Roman Church, things more intrinsically lovable. The wish some day to portray one of those large-souled pre-Protestant, post-Mediaeval Catholics, was thus early and has been long at work within me.

And then came John Henry Newman’s influence with his Dream of Gerontius, and a deep attraction to St. Catherine of Genoa’s doctrine of the soul’s self-chosen, intrinsic purification; and much lingering about the scenes of Caterinetta’s life and labours, during more than twenty stays in her terraced city that looks away so proudly to the sea. Such a delicately psychological, soaring, yet sober-minded Eschatology, with its striking penetration and unfolding of the soul’s central life and alternatives as they are already here and now, seemed to demand an ampler study than it had yet received, and to require a vivid presentation of the noble, strikingly original personality from whom it sprang.

And later still came the discovery of the apparently hopeless complication of the records of Catherine’s life and doctrine, and how these had never been seriously analyzed by any trained scholar, since their constitution into a book in 1552. Much critical work at Classical and Scriptural texts and documentary problems had, by now, whetted my appetite to try whether I could not at last bring stately order out of this bewildering chaos, by perhaps discovering the authors, dates and intentions of the various texts and glosses thus dovetailed and pieced together into a very Joseph’s coat of many colours, and by showing the successive stages of this, most original and difficult, Saint’s life and legend. All this labour would, in any case, help to train my own mind; and it would, if even moderately successful, offer one more detailed example of the laws that govern such growths, and of the critical method necessary for the tracing out of their operation.

But the strongest motive revealed itself, in its full force, later than all those other motives, and ended by permeating them all. The wish arose to utilize, as fully as possible, this long, close contact with a soul of most rare spiritual depth,—a soul that presents, with an extraordinary, provocative vividness, the greatness, helps, problems and dangers of the mystical spirit. I now wanted to try and get down to the driving forces of this kind of religion, and to discover in what way such a keen sense of, and absorption in, the Infinite can still find room for the Historical and Institutional elements of Religion, and, at the same time, for that noble concentration upon not directly religious contingent facts and happenings, and upon laws of causation or of growth, which constitutes the scientific temper of mind and its specific, irreplaceable duties and virtues. Thus, having begun to write a biography of St. Catherine, with some philosophical elucidations, I have finished by writing an essay on the philosophy of Mysticism, illustrated by the life of Caterinetta Fiesca Adorna and her friends.

The book’s chief peculiarities seem to spring inevitably from its fundamental standpoint: hence their frank enumeration may help towards the more ready comprehension of the work.

The book has, throughout, a treble interest and spirit; historico-critical, philosophical, religious. The historico-critical constituent may attract critical specialists; but will such specialists care for the philosophy? The philosopher may be attracted by the psychological and speculative sections; but will the historical analysis interest him at all? And the soul that is seeking spiritual food and stimulation, will it not readily be wearied by the apparent pettiness of all that criticism, and by the seemingly cold aloofness of all that speculation?—And yet it is the most certain of facts that the human soul is so made as to be unable to part, completely and finally, with any one of these three great interests. Hence, I may surely hope that this trinity of levels of truth and of life, which has so much helped on the growth of my own mind and the constitution of my own character, may, in however different a manner and degree, be found to help others also. This alternation and interstimulation between those three forces and interests within the same soul, and within this soul’s ever-deepening life, is, in any case, too fundamental a feature of this whole outlook for any attempt at its elimination here.

Then there is a look of repetition and of illogical anticipation about the very structure of the book. For the philosophical First Part says, in general, what the biographical Second Part says in detail; this detail is, in reality, based upon the critical conclusions arrived at in the Appendix, which follows the precise descriptions of the biography; and then the Third, once more a philosophical, Part returns, now fortified by the intervening close occupation with concrete contingent matters, to the renewed consideration, and deeper penetration and enforcement, of the general positions with which the whole work began.—Yet is not this circular method simply a frank application, to the problems in hand, of the process actually lived through by us all in real life, wherever such life is truly fruitful? For, in real life, we ever start with certain general intellectual-emotive schemes and critical principles, as so many draw-nets and receptacles for the capture and sorting out of reality and of our experience of it. We next are brought, by choice or by necessity, into close contact with a certain limited number of concrete facts and experiences. And we then use these facts and experiences to fill in, to confirm or to modify that, more or less tentative and predominantly inherited, indeed ever largely conventional, scheme with which we began our quest. In all these cases of actual life, this apparently long and roundabout, indeed back-before, process is, in reality, the short, because the only fully sincere and humble, specifically human way in which to proceed. The order so often followed in “learned” and “scientific” books is, in spite of its appearance of greater logic and conciseness, far longer; for the road thus covered has to be travelled all over again, according to the circular method just described, if we would gain, not wind and shadow, but substance and spiritual food.

Then again, there is everywhere a strong insistence upon History as a Science, yet as a Science possessing throughout a method, type and aim quite special to itself and deeply different from those of Physical Science; and an even greater stress upon the important, indeed irreplaceable function of both these kinds of Science, or of their equivalents, in the fullest spiritual life. Here the insistence upon History, as a Science, is still unusual in England; and the stress upon the spiritually purifying power of these Sciences will still appear somewhat fantastic everywhere.—Yet that conception of two branches of ordered human apprehension, research and knowledge, each (in its delicate and clear contrastedness of method, test, end and result) legitimate and inevitable, so that either of them is ruined if forced into the categories of the other, has most certainly come to stay. And the attempt to discover the precise function and meaning of these several mental activities and of their ethical pre-requisites, within the full and spiritual life of the soul, and in view of this life’s consolidation and growth, will, I believe, turn out to be of genuine religious utility. For I hope to show how only one particular manner of conceiving and of practising those scientific activities and this spiritual life and consolidation allows, indeed requires, the religious passion,—the noblest and deepest passion given to man,—to be itself enlisted on the side of that other noble, indestructible thing, severe scientific sincerity. This very sincerity would thus not empty or distract, but would, on the contrary, purify and deepen the soul’s spirituality; and hence this spirituality would continuously turn to that sincerity for help in purifying and deepening the soul. And, surely, until we have somehow attained to some such interaction, the soul must perforce remain timid and weak; for without sincerity everywhere, we cannot possibly develop to their fullest the passion for truth and righteousness even in religion itself.

And then again a Catholic, one who would be a proudly devoted and grateful son of the Roman Church, speaks and thinks throughout the following pages. Yet it is his very Catholicism which makes him feel, with a spontaneous and continuous keenness, that only if there are fragments, earlier stages and glimpses of truth and goodness extant wheresoever some little sincerity exists, can the Catholic Church even conceivably be right. For though Christianity and Catholicism be the culmination and fullest norm of all religion, yet to be such they must find something thus to crown and measure: various degrees of, or preparations for, their truth have existed long before they came, and exist still, far and wide, now that they have come. Otherwise, Marcion would have been right, when he denied that the Old Testament proceeds from the same God as does the New; and three-fourths or more of the human race would not, to this very moment, be bereft, without fault of their own, of all knowledge of the Historic Christ and of every opportunity for definite incorporation into the Christian Church, since we dare not think that God has left this large majority of His children without any and every glimpse and opportunity of religious truth, moral goodness, and eternal hope. Yet such a recognition of some light and love everywhere involves no trace of levelling down, or even of levelling up; it is, in itself, without a trace of Indifferentism. For if some kinds or degrees of light are thus found everywhere, yet this light is held to vary immensely in different times and places, from soul to soul, and from one religious stage, group or body to another; the measure and culmination of this light is found in the deepest Christian and Catholic light and holiness; and, over and above the involuntary, sincere differences in degree, stage and kind, there are held to exist, also more or less everywhere, the differences caused by cowardice and opposition to the light,—cowardices and oppositions which are as certainly at work within the Christian and Catholic Church as they are amongst the most barbarous of Polytheists. I may well have failed adequately to combine these twin truths; yet only in some such, though more adequate apprehension and combination resides the hope for the future of our poor storm-tossed human race,—in a deep fervour without fanaticism, and a generous sympathy without indifference.

And lastly, a lay lover of religion speaks throughout, a man to whom the very suspicion that such subjects should or could, on that account, be foreign to him has ever been impossible. A deep interest in religion is evidently part of our very manhood, a thing previous to the Church, and which the Church now comes to develop and to save. Yet such an interest is, in the long run, impossible, if the heart and will alone are allowed to be active in a matter so supremely great and which claims the entire man. “Where my heart lies, let my brain lie also”: man is not, however much we may try and behave as though he were, a mere sum-total of so many separable water-tight compartments; he can no more fruitfully delegate his brains and his interest in the intellectual analysis and synthesis of religion, than he can commission others to do his religious feeling and willing, his spiritual growth and combat, for him.—But this does not of itself imply an individualistic, hence one-sided, religion. For only in close union with the accumulated and accumulating experiences, analyses and syntheses of the human race in general, and with the supreme life and teaching of the Christian and Catholic Church in particular, will such growth in spiritual personality be possible on any large and fruitful scale: since nowhere, and nowhere less than in religion, does man achieve anything by himself alone, or for his own exclusive use and profit.

And such a layman’s views, even when thus acquired and expressed with a constant endeavour to be, and ever increasingly to become, a unit and part and parcel of that larger, Christian and Catholic whole, will ever remain, in themselves and in his valuation of them, unofficial, and, at best, but so much material and stimulation for the kindly criticism and discriminating attention of his fellow-creatures and fellow-Christians and (should these views stand such informal, preliminary tests) for the eventual utilization of the official Church. To this officiality ever remains the exclusive right and duty to formulate successively, for the Church’s successive periods, according as these become ripe for such formulations, the corporate, normative forms and expressions of the Church’s deepest consciousness and mind. Yet this officiality cannot and does not operate in vacuo, or by a direct recourse to extra-human sources of information. It sorts out, eliminates what is false and pernicious, or sanctions and proclaims what is true and fruitful, and a development of her own life, teaching and commission, in the volunteer, tentative and preliminary work put forth by the Church’s unofficial members.

And just because both these movements are within, and necessary to, one and the same complete Church, they can be and are different from each other. Hence the following book would condemn itself to pompous unreality were it to mimic official caution and emphasis, whilst ever unable to achieve official authority. It prefers to aim at a layman’s special virtues and function: complete candour, courage, sensitiveness to the present and future, in their obscurer strivings towards the good and true, as these have been in their substance already tested in the past, and in so far as such strivings can be forecasted by sympathy and hope. And I thus trust that the book may turn out to be as truly Catholic in fact, as it has been Catholic in intention; I have striven hard to furnish so continuous and copious a stream of actions and teachings of Christian saints and sages as everywhere to give the reader means of correcting or completing my own inferences; and I sincerely submit these my own conclusions to the test and judgment of my fellow-Christians and of the Catholic Church.

My obligations to scholars, thinkers and great spiritual souls are far too numerous and great for any exhaustive recognition. Yet there are certain works and persons to whom I am especially indebted; and these shall here be mentioned with most grateful thanks.

In my Biographical and Critical Part Second, I have had, in Genoa itself, the help of various scholars and friends. Signor Dottore Ridolfo de Andreis first made me realize the importance of Vallebona’s booklet. Padre Giovanni Semeria, the Barnabite, put me in touch with the right persons and documents. The Cavallière L. A. Cervetto, of the Biblioteca Civica, referred me to many useful works. The Librarian of the Biblioteca della Missione Urbana copied out for me the inventory of St. Catherine’s effects. And Signor Dottore Augusto Ferretto, of the Archivio di Stato, made admirably careful, explicitated copies for me, from the originals, so full of difficult abbreviations, of the long series of legal documents which are the rock-bed on which my biography is built.

The courteous help of the Head Librarian of the Genoese University Library extended to beyond Genoa. For it was owing to his action, in conjunction with that of the Italian Ministry, of the English Embassy in Rome, and of the British Museum Authorities, that the three most important of the manuscripts of St. Catherine’s life were most generously deposited for my use at the latter institution. I was thus enabled to study my chief sources at full leisure in London.

The Rev. Padre Calvino, Canon Regular of the Lateran, made many kind attempts to trace any possible compositions concerning St. Catherine among the Venerable Battista Vernazza’s manuscripts, preserved by the spiritual descendants of Battista’s Augustinian Canonesses in Genoa; it was not his fault that nothing could be found.

The Society of Bollandists lent me, for a liberal length of time, various rare books. I shall indeed be proud if my Appendix wins their approbation, since it deals with subject-matters and methods in which they are past-masters. Father Sticker’s pages on St. Catherine, in their Acta Sanctorum (1752), are certainly not satisfactory; they are, however, quite untypical of the Bollandists’ best work, or even of their average performances.

My obligations in my Psychological and Philosophical Parts First and Third are still more numerous and far more difficult to trace. Indeed it is precisely where these obligations are the most far-reaching that I can least measure them, since the influence of the books and persons concerned has become part of the texture of my own mind.

But among the great religious spirits or stimulating thinkers of Classical and Patristic times, I am conscious of profound obligations to Plato generally; to Aristotle on two points; to St. Paul; to Plotinus; to Clement of Alexandria; and to St. Augustine. And the Areopagite Literature has necessarily been continuously in my mind. Among Mediaeval writers St. Thomas Aquinas has helped me greatly, in ways both direct and indirect; Eckhart has, with the help of Father H. S. Denifle’s investigations, furnished much food for reflection by his most instructive doctrinal excesses; and the extraordinarily deep and daring spirituality of Jacopone da Todi’s poetry has been studied with the greatest care.

The Renaissance times have given me Cardinal Nicolas of Coes, whose great Dialogue de Idiota has helped me in various ways. And in the early post-Reformation period I have carefully studied, and have been much influenced by, that many-sided, shrewdly wise book, St. Teresa’s Autobiography. Yet it is St. John of the Cross, that massively virile Contemplative, who has most deeply influenced me throughout this work. St. Catherine is, I think, more like him, in her ultimate spirit, than any other Saint or spiritual writer known to me; she is certainly far more like him than is St. Teresa.

Later on, I have learnt much from Fénelon’s Latin writings concerning Pure Love, of 1710 and 1712; together with Abbé Gosselin’s admirably lucid Analyse de la Controverse du Quiétisme, 1820, and the Jesuit Father Deharbe’s solid and sober die vollkommene Liebe Gottes, 1856.

Among modern philosophers I have been especially occupied with, and variously stimulated or warned by, Spinoza, with his deep religious intuition and aspiration, and his determinist system, so destructive because taken by him as ultimate; Leibniz, with his admirably continuous sense of the multiplicity in every living unity, of the organic character, the inside of everything that fully exists, and of the depth and range of our subconscious mental and emotional life; Kant, with his keen criticisms and searching analyses, his profound ethical instincts, and his curious want of the specifically religious sense and insight; Schopenhauer, with his remarkable recognition of the truth and greatness of the Ascetic element and ideal; Trendelenburg, with his continuous requirement of an operative knowledge of the chief stages which any principle or category has passed through in human history, if we would judge this principle with any fruit; Kierkegaard, that certainly one-sided, yet impressively tenacious re-discoverer and proclaimer of the poignant sense of the Transcendent essential to all deep religion, and especially to Christianity, religion’s flower and crown; and Fechner, in his little-known book, so delightfully convincing in its rich simplicity, die drei Motive und Gründe des Glaubens, 1863.

Of quite recent or still living writers, two have been used by me on a scale which would be unpardonable, had the matters treated by them been the direct subjects of my book. In Part First whole pages of mine are marked by me as little but a précis of passages in Dr. Eduard Zeller’s standard Philosophy of the Greeks. I have myself much studied Heracleitus, Parmenides, Plato and Plotinus; and I have, also in the case of the other philosophers, always followed up and tested such passages of Zeller as I have here transcribed. But I did not, for by far the most part, think it worth while, on these largely quite general and practically uncontested matters, to construct fresh appreciations of my own, rather than to reproduce, with due consideration and acknowledgments, the conclusions of such an accepted authority. And already in Part First, but especially in Part Third, I have utilized as largely, although here with still more of personal knowledge and of careful re-examination, considerable sections of Professor H. J. Holtzmann’s Lehrbuch der Neutestamentlichen Theologie, 1897—sections which happen to be, upon the whole, the deepest and most solid in that great but often daring work. The same Professor Holtzmann is, besides, a most suggestive religious philosopher; and his penetrating though very difficult book Richard Rothe’s Speculatives System, 1899, has also been of considerable use.

Other recent or contemporary German writers to whom I owe much, are Erwin Rhode, in his exquisite great book, Psyche, 2nd ed., 1898; Professor Johannes Volkelt, in his penetratingly critical Kant’s Erkenntnisstheorie, 1879; Professor Hugo Münsterberg, in his largely planned although too absolute Grundzüge der Psychologie, Vol. I., 1900; Professor Heinrich Rickert, in his admirably discriminating Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung, 1902; and also two friends whose keen care for religion never flags—Professors Rudolf Eucken of Jena and Ernst Troeltsch of Heidelberg. Eucken’s Lebensanschauungen der grossen Denker, 1st ed., 1890; der Kampf um einen geistigen Lebensinhalt, 1896; and the earlier sections of der Wahrheitsgehalt der Religion, 1902, have greatly helped me. And Troeltsch’s Grund-probleme der Ethik, 1902, has considerably influenced certain central conceptions of my book, notwithstanding the involuntary, rough injustice manifested by him, especially elsewhere, towards the Roman Church.

Among present-day French writers, my book owes most to Professor Maurice Blondel’s, partly obscure yet intensely alive and religiously deep, work L’Action, 1893; to Dr. Pierre Janet’s carefully first-hand observations, as chronicled in his Etat Mental des Hystériques, 1894; to Monsieur Emil Boutroux’s very suggestive paper Psychologie du Mysticisme, 1902; to various pregnant articles of the Abbé L. Laberthonnière in the Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne, 1898-1906; and to M. Henri Bergson’s delicately penetrating Essai sur les Données Immédiates de la Conscience, 2nd ed., 1898.

And amongst living Englishmen, the work is most indebted to Professor A. S. Pringle-Pattison, especially to his eminently sane Hegelianism and Personality, 2nd ed., 1893; to Professor James Ward, in his strenuous Naturalism and Agnosticism, 1st ed., 1899; to the Reverend George Tyrrell’s Hard Sayings, 1898, and The Faith of the Millions, 2 vols., 1901, so full of insight into Mysticism; and, very especially, to Dr. Edward Caird, in his admirably wide and balanced survey, The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers, 1904.

But further back than all the living writers and friends lies the stimulation and help of him who was later on to become Cardinal Newman. It was he who first taught me to glory in my appurtenance to the Catholic and Roman Church, and to conceive this my inheritance in a large and historical manner, as a slow growth across the centuries, with an innate affinity to, and eventual incorporation of, all the good and true to be found mixed up with error and with evil in this chequered, difficult but rich world and life in which this living organism moves and expands. Yet the use to which all these helps have here been put, has inevitably been my own doing: nowhere except in direct quotations have I simply copied, and nowhere are these helpers responsible for what here appears.

And then there have been great souls, whom I cannot well name here, but whom I would nevertheless refer to in reverent gratitude; souls that have taught me that deepest of facts and of lessons,—the persistence, across the centuries, within the wide range of the visible and indeed also of the invisible Church, of that vivid sense of the finite and the Infinite, of that spacious joy and expansive freedom in self-donation to God, the prevenient, all-encompassing Spirit, of that massively spontaneous, elemental religion, of which Catherine is so noble an example. Thus a world-renouncing, world-conquering, virile piety, humble and daring, humane, tender and creatively strong, is at no time simply dead, but it merely sleepeth; indeed it ever can be found, alive, open-eyed irresistible, hidden away here and there, throughout our earthly space and time.

In matters directly connected with the publication of the work I have especially to thank Messrs. Sciutto of Genoa, the photographers to whom I owe the very successful photographs from which the plates that stand at the head of my volumes have been taken; Mr. Sidney E. Mayle, publisher, of Hampstead, for permission to use the photogravure of St. Catherine’s portrait which appeared as an illustration to a paper of mine, in his scholarly Hampstead Annual, 1898; Miss Maude Petre, who helped me much towards achieving greater lucidity of style, by carefully reading and criticizing all my proofs; and my publisher, who has not shrunk from undertaking the publication of so long a work on so very serious, abstruse-seeming a subject. Even so, I have had to suppress the notes to my chapter on “Catherine’s Teaching,” which throughout showed the critical reasons that had determined my choice of the particular sayings, and the particular text of the sayings, adopted by me in the text; and have had to excise quite a third of my Appendix, which furnished the analysis of further, critically instructive texts of the Vita e Dottrina, the Dicchiarazione and the Dialogo. If a new edition is ever called for, this further material might be added, and would greatly increase the cogency of my argument.

The work that now at last I thus submit to the reader, is doubtless full of defects; and I shall welcome any thoughtful criticism of any of its parts as a true kindness. Yet I would point out that all these parts aim at being but so many constituents of a whole, within which alone they gain their true significance and worth. Hence only by one who has studied and pondered the book as a whole, will any of its parts be criticized with fairness to that part’s intention. To gain even but a dozen of such readers would amply repay the labour of these many years.

I take it that the most original parts are Chapter Eight, with its analysis of Battista Vernazza’s interesting Diary; the Appendix, with its attempts at fixing the successive authors and intentions that have built up the Vita e Dottrina; Chapter Nine, which attempts to assign to psycho-physical matters, as we now know them, their precise place and function within the vast life-system, and according to the practical tests, of the great Mystical Saints; and Chapter Fifteen, with its endeavour to picture that large Asceticism which alone can effect, within the same soul, a fruitful co-habitation of, and interaction between, Social Religion, the Scientific Habit of Mind, and the Mystical Element of Religion.

Kirkegaard used to claim that he ever wrote existentially, pricked on by the exigencies of actual life, to attempt their expression in terms of that life, and in view of its further spiritual development. More than ever the spiritual life appears now as supremely worth the having, and yet it seems to raise, or to find, the most formidable difficulties or even deadlocks. I can but hope that these pages may have so largely sprung from the exigencies of that life itself,—that they may have caught so much of the spirit of the chief livers of the spiritual life, especially of St. Catherine of Genoa and of St. John of the Cross, and, above all, of the One Master and Measure of Christianity and of the Church,—as to stimulate such life, its practice, love and study, in their readers, and may point them, spur them on, through and beyond all that here has been attempted, missed or obscured, to fuller religious insight, force and fruitfulness.

Friedrich Von Hügel.

Kensington, Easter 1908.

“Grant unto men, O God, to perceive in little things the indications, common-seeming though they be, of things both small and great.”

St. Augustine, Confessions, Bk. XI, ch. xxiii, 1.