Читать книгу The Mystical Element of Religion - Friedrich von Hügel - Страница 131

Catherine “was now no more able to have a care of the government of the Hospital or of her own little house” (within its precincts) “owing to her great bodily weakness. She would now find it necessary, after Communion, to take some food to restore her bodily strength, and this even if it was a fast day.” We thus get the beginning of a third period with regard to such fasting powers. In the first, she had done as all the world, but had been able to keep all the Church fasts and abstinences. In the second, she had, during Lent and Advent, eaten little or nothing, and had, during the remainder of the time, lived as she had done before. And now, for the rest of her life, her eating and fasting are entirely fitful and intermittent, and she has to abandon all (at least systematic) attempts to keep even the ordinary Church fasts and abstinences.

If we are determined to insist on the accuracy of the “twenty-three Lents and twenty-two Advents” of her extraordinary fasts affirmed already by MS. “A,” we shall have to understand this present inability to fast as applying, till after Lent 1496, only to the times outside of Lent and Advent, since this fasting period cannot be made to begin earlier than Lent 1476. I take it that in this, as certainly in most other cases, there was, in reality, a much more gradual transition than the Vita accounts would lead one to expect.