Читать книгу The Mystical Element of Religion (Vol. 1&2) - Friedrich von Hügel - Страница 70

All the biographies of St. Catherine, and all the editions or translations of her “Works,” are based upon the Vita e Dottrina published in Genoa, by Jacobo Genuti, in 1551. I work from the thirteenth Genoese edition, a reprint of that of 1847 (Tipi dei Sordo-Muti). All our knowledge of her mental and physical condition, and of her spiritual doctrine, is practically restricted to this book, and indeed, as we shall see, to its first two parts, the “Vita” and the “Trattato.”

The Vita is, in its fundamental portions, the joint production of her devoted disciples, Cattaneo Marabotto, a Secular Priest, her Confessor; and Ettore Vernazza, a Lawyer, her “spiritual son.” Its fifty-two chapters (166 octavo pages) are only in small part narrative; quite thirty-five of them are filled with discourses and contemplations of the Saint, evidently, in the simpler of the many parallel versions accumulated here, taken down, at the time of the Saint’s communication of them, with quite remarkable fidelity. But the whole suffers from the inclusion of much secondary, amplifying, repetitive matter; is badly arranged; is kept, almost throughout, above all definite indications of the precise successions, dates, and places; and is deficient in unity of view and literary organization. The result is, of necessity, largely insipid and monotonous.

The first of the “Works” is the Treatise on Purgatory, the seventeen chapters of which (17 pages) are again hard reading, owing to their evidently consisting of but a mosaic of detached, sometimes parallel sayings, spoken on various occasions and according to the experience and fulness of the moment, and without any reference to the previous one. I shall show reason for holding that this little collection of sayings was originally shorter still (consisting probably of but the matter which now makes up the first seven of its seventeen chapters); that the original chronicler and first redactor of these sayings was Vernazza; and that certain obvious and formal contradictions which appear in the present text must be theological glosses introduced some time between 1520 (or rather 1526) and say 1530 (at latest 1547).

The second of the “Works,” the Spiritual Dialogue between the Soul, the Body, Self-love, the Spirit, the Natural Man, and the Lord God, is divided into three parts, and fills forty-five chapters (120 pages). I hope to show conclusively that this Dialogue was at first no longer than its present Part I; that even this did not exist before 1547; that the whole was written by one and the same person, some one who had never (at least intimately) known the Saint, and who had no other direct material than our present Vita and Trattato; that this person was the Augustinian canoness, Battista Vernazza, Ettore’s eldest daughter; and that the whole has been written for the purpose of attempting some unification and systematization of what in the Vita appeared to the writer as wanting in unity and in correctness of wording or of feeling. In this case we get a fairly continuous re-statement, in part a heightening, in part a minimizing of the historical facts of Catherine’s life, which, just because we have thus a pragmatic, theological transfiguration of the older materials, caused by a penetrating admiration, and resulting in some true increase of insight into its subject-matter, forms a precious document for the psychology and the effect of such states of mind.

The Oratorian Giacinto Parpera’s book: B Caterina da Genova … Illustrata, Genova, 1682, gives, in its three parts, respectively the opinions of Saints and Theologians concerning the Saint; a systematic analysis of her doctrine; and an explanation of certain terms and declarations more or less peculiar to her. It is decidedly learned and in parts still useful; but pompously rhetorical and full of “anatomia,” i.e. much wearisome numbering and indefinite sub-division. The Jesuit Padre Maineri’s Vita de S. Caterina di Genova, Genova, 1737,—written on occasion of her canonization,—contains nothing new.