Читать книгу The Mystical Element of Religion - Friedrich von Hügel - Страница 79

We have, as only too often in such older biographies, but very few precise and characteristic details concerning her early years. She had in her room a Pietà, a representation of the Dead Christ in His Mother’s arms, and we are told how deeply it affected her every time she entered this room, and raised her eyes up to it. The other points mentioned, her early bodily penances, silence, and gift of prayer (the latter said to have been communicated to her at twelve years of age), read suspiciously like simple assumptions made by her biographers, and in any case do not help to individualize her, in these years of uncertain, tentative, or as yet but little characteristic, forms of goodness.

But from thirteen, for three years onwards, the young girl is very certainly and deeply drawn to the Conventual life, as she sees it practised by her sister Limbania, who, true to the example of her own Genoese Augustinian Patron Saint, had become a member of the Augustinian Canonesses of our Lady of Graces, and now lived there happy and devoted in the midst of that very fervent and cultivated Community. Limbania was one of the nineteen Foundresses of this Convent, who, on August 5, 1451, received the habit of Canonesses Regular of the Lateran, from the hands of Padre Giovanni de’ Gatti, at that time Superior of S. Teodoro outside the walls of Genoa, a house of the same Order. Among these Novices occur a Simonetta di Negro, no doubt a cousin of Catherine, and Nicola and Lucia da Nove, two sisters; these facts will have helped Catherine to hope for admission together with her own sister Limbania.[45]

The Convent and its Chapel, both secularized, are still in existence, at a quarter of an hour’s walk from Catherine’s palace-home. Moving from here, along the Vico Chiabrera, up the Via dei Maruffi (now San Bernardo), and across the latter, up one of the many steep, very narrow little alleys, to the Piazza dei Embriaci, and again up by the tall, slim, grey tower of the Crusader Guilielmo Embriaco, we arrive at last at a level, all but deserted, sun-baked piazza, called, after its Church, Sta Maria in Passione. Face this Church, and the long, tall house on your left hand, covered with dim, faded frescoes, is Limbania’s Convent, so loved by Catherine. The right door leads into the Chapel, which Vallebona[46] found in 1887 in use as a wood-store, and which I saw in May 1900 turned into a music-hall: where the altar had stood, were a dingy stage, and tawdry wings. The pompous frescoes and stuccos on the walls and ceiling are evidently of the seventeenth century or even later. The adjoining Convent still retains a small figure of St. Augustine sculptured on a corbel on the vault of the first landing. The Byzantine, dark brown Madonna-and-Child picture, which Catherine so often prayed before in the Chapel, can still be seen, on the left-hand wall of the Chapel of St. Thomas Aquinas, in the Church of S. Maria di Castello, which is close by, at a lower level than the Piazza of the Convent.