Читать книгу The Mystical Element of Religion - Friedrich von Hügel - Страница 94

But in this matter of Direction and Confession, the Vita, if we were to take its present constituents as of uniform value, is astonishingly vague, ambiguous, and contradictory. Let us take the facts, in the order of their certainty, moving from the quite certain to the less and less certain ones; and let us then try and appraise the upshot of the whole examination.

We are then, first, absolutely certain that Catherine herself, not later than 1499,—this date shall be justified later on,—said to Don Marabotto, (and that he then and there, or shortly afterwards, wrote down,) the following words: “I have persevered for twenty-five years in the spiritual way, without the aid of any creature.” And he, in this matter which concerns his own Confessing and Directing of her during the last eleven years of her life (1499-1510), twice over solemnly reaffirms and drives home the reality of the fact thus communicated to him by herself. “She was guided and taught interiorly by her tender Love alone, without the means of any [fellow-]creature, either Religious or Secular”; “she was instructed and governed thus by God, for about twenty-five years.”[64] And conformably with this, we get the short dialogue between herself and Love, as just given, and such words as the following, which she declared that Love itself spoke to her mind,—evidently during, and probably at the beginning, of these many years: “Take from the remainder of Scripture this one word ‘Love,’ with which thou shalt ever walk straight … enlightened, without error, and (all this) without guide or means provided by any other creature.”[65]

In the next place, it is equally certain that, with all her biographers down to this day (e.g. Monseigneur Fliche, pp. 350, 351), her words must be understood to exclude at least all Direction from those years. And it is, moreover, practically certain that at least the second Redactor (R. 2) of the Vita understood her words to apply to Confession also. For whereas, in the older tripartite scheme of R. 1, the four years of Penance of her first period were filled by her labours for “satisfying her conscience by means of contrition, confession, and satisfaction,” R. 2 breaks up those four years into two periods,—the first, of “a little over a year”; and the second, of (no doubt) three years,—and does so with a view to thus making room for the “about twenty-five years” of Catherine’s affirmation. Now whereas R. 2 in his first period talks thus of Confession; in his second one, he talks twice of Contrition, and twice of Sorrow, but nowhere of Confession; and again, whereas in his third (R. 1’s second) period “many” (no doubt twenty-one) years, there is still no reference to Confession, indeed here not even to Sin or Contrition in general; in the fourth (R. 1’s third) period (of eleven years), when she was being regularly confessed and directed by Marabotto, she, it is true, “was incapable of recognizing, by direct examination, the nature of her acts, whether they were good or bad,” but still she was able to see, and actually “saw all things,” hence also these acts and their difference, “in God.”[66]

Thirdly, it is certain that some reasonable doubt can be entertained as to whether Catherine’s words, solemnly emphatic though they are, were not understood too literally by Marabotto and the second Redactor. Nothing is, indeed, more obvious and striking throughout all the authentic memorials of her, than the delightfully simple, grandly fearless veracity of her mind. She never speaks but according to the fulness of her conviction: like with all souls most near unto the childlike Master, Christ, it can be said of her that “one never knows what she is going to say next.” And we shall find her insight into herself at any given moment, even with regard to such partly medical matters as her psycho-physical condition, to be quite astonishing in its depth and delicacy. Yet the fact remains, that she was as truly a person of intense and swiftly changing feelings, exaltations, and depressions, as she was one of a rich balanced doctrine and of a quite heroic objectivity and healthy spiritual utilization of all such intensities. This very heroism and objectivity of hers, so constant and watchful in all her practical decisions and general doctrinal statements, no doubt helped to make her feel both the need and the licitness of giving full and truthful utterance also to the intense and swiftly passing feelings of her heart.

One such utterance is specially to the point. She had already been for eleven years the much-helped penitent of that utterly devoted priest-friend Don Marabotto, when, in January 1510, he overheard her (the extant report of the scene is certainly his own and contemporary with the event) saying to God, shut up alone, as she thought, in one of her rooms: “There is no creature that understands me. I find myself alone, unknown, poor, naked, a stranger and different from all the world.” Yet this does not prevent her finding comfort and, indirectly, even physical improvement, in and from Marabotto’s sympathy and words, when these are offered to her not many hours later on.[67] The abnormally rapid and complete change of feeling depicted here, no doubt occurred during the last eight months of her life, long after her health had begun to break up permanently; and cannot directly illustrate her frame of mind during the years 1474-1499, when she was in health and relatively strong. Still, she was clearly ever of a high-strung, intense temperament; and her health was already seriously impaired when, in 1499, she spoke the words concerning the utter loneliness of that whole quarter of a century. And if the emphatic words, spoken to God Himself in 1510, were compatible with confession, and, indeed, a certain kind of continuous direction, at the very time and during eleven years before they were spoken: her words uttered in 1499 to Marabotto, will have been compatible with at least some confession during a period of years of which the first lay almost a whole generation behind her. And we shall find at least two other cases in which Marabotto appears, on Catherine’s own authority, as having clearly misunderstood the nature of some phenomena connected with herself.[68]

Yet for all this, the account which we shall have to give later on of the characteristics of her confessions to Marabotto,—an account directly derived from himself,—makes it practically impossible to assume that even simple confession was practised, at all or otherwise than quite exceptionally, during those many years.

Now we have, as a fourth point, to remember that although the Fourth Council of the Lateran, in the year 1215, had decreed that “All the Faithful of either sex, after coming to years of discretion, are bound to confess all their sins at least once a year”:[69] yet already St. Thomas Aquinas had, in his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, composed in 1252-1257, taught that, since the divine institution and obligation extends, strictly speaking, only to the confession of mortal sins, “he that has not committed any mortal sins is not bound to confess venial sins, but it is sufficient for the fulfilling of the Church’s precept, for him to present himself to the priest, and to declare himself free from the consciousness of mortal sin.”[70] And nothing has changed, as to the nature and extent of this obligation, since Catherine’s time. The Council of Trent, the decrees of which were confirmed by Pope Pius IV in 1564, more than half-a-century after her death, carefully explains that “all the sins” of the decree of 1215 means all “mortal sins”; and further declares that “the Church did not, by the Lateran Council, decree that the faithful should confess,—a thing she knew to be instituted and necessary by divine right,” but had simply determined the circumstances and conditions under which this obligatory confession was to take place.[71] And Father Antonio Ballerini, S.J. (d. 1881), gives us the conclusions, identical with that of St. Thomas, of those great authorities Francis Suarez (d. 1617), Cardinal John de Lugo (d. 1660), and Hermann Busenbaum (d. 1668),—all three, Jesuits like himself,—and himself endorses their decision. Suarez indeed declares this view to be the common opinion of Theologians.[72]