Читать книгу The Mystical Element of Religion - Friedrich von Hügel - Страница 106

But one visitor must, even during this period, have been treated by her with much of her natural spontaneity and ardent expansiveness. She was a cousin of her own age, a Fiesca and a married woman like herself; like herself, too, in the wish, just now awakened, to belong entirely to God, and in her ultimate complete conversion and ardent love of God. We can attempt to describe her here, as throwing further light upon Catherine’s idiosyncrasies, at this period in particular.

Tommasina was different from Catherine in the slow, tentative character of her first turning to God; and different, too, in the eventual form of her life; for, when later on a widow, she became first, in 1490, an Augustinian Canoness at Santa Maria delle Grazie; and then, in 1497, a Dominican Nun at the Monastero Nuovo di San Domenico. This latter convent she had been given to reform and became its Prioress. In both houses she was known as Suor Tommasina (Fieschi).[88] She was different again in that she there spent some of her time in painting many a religious picture, chiefly of the Pietà, and a highly symbolical composition, illustrative of the moment of Consecration at Mass.[89] She executed also in exquisitely fine needlework a piece which represented, above, God the Father surrounded by many Angels, and, below, Christ with other figures of Saints. Finally she occupied herself in writing and produced in original composition a treatise on the Apocalypse, and another on Denys the Areopagite.

And the future Suor Tommasa showed now some of that precious gift of humour, denied to her otherwise greater cousin. For, no doubt with a bright twinkle in her eyes at the sight of Catherine’s characteristic vehemence of onslaught, Tommasa would declare that Catherine was pushing her and giving her no quarter; and that it would be a great humiliation for herself if, after all said and done, she were to turn back. But any such feeling of even the possibility of such a relapse, was amazing to Catherine, and she said: “If I were to turn back, I would wish that my eyes might be put out, and that I should be treated with every other kind of indignity.”[90]