The rival Pope was a brother of the reigning prince of Genoa, related to the French royal family and several other reigning royal houses. This naturally influenced his career in the Church—he was created cardinal while he was still very young. But as long as he was a prelate in France he had maintained an unstained name—that he had to run his house on luxurious lines was considered only natural; a man is forced to live up to his social position; even people who otherwise condemned the luxury of the prelates were agreed on this. He was a handsome man, with a most winning manner, and was well liked by his countrymen. But for the Italians he was the “Butcher from Cesena”—he had not protested against the terrible reprisals taken by the mercenary soldiers of Gregory XI against the rebellious towns in the Romagna and Umbria.
A day or two before the rival Pope was elected, Catherine had sent Urban a letter full of consolation and good advice. She points for consolation to the Eternal Truth which loved us before we were created. The soul which has freed itself from the mists of self-love sees this truth and understands that God wishes for nothing but what is of value to the soul. Such a soul receives with respect burdens, calumny, scorn, injustice, offences and defeat, and bears everything with patience, because it only seeks God through the salvation of the soul. (She makes a variation on her usual phrase “the glory of God and the salvation of souls”; for the Pope the glory of God consists in the salvation of souls.) Such a soul is patient, but not indifferent when its Creator is offended. Through its patience a soul is deprived of its self-love and clothed in divine love. The light of eternal truth will arm us with the two-edged sword, the sword of love and hate—hatred for vice and love of virtue, for this virtue is the bond which attaches us to God and love of our neighbour. “Oh, Most Holy Father, this is the sword which I beg you to take in your hand. Now is the time to draw it from its sheath, and to hate vice in yourself, in your children, and in the Holy Church. I say ‘yourself’, because in this life none dare say that he is free from sin, and love should begin with oneself.” She encourages him to continue with his reforms, and tells him how she suffers from the present state of affairs. “When I look at the places where Christ should be the very breath of everything, I see before you, who are Christ on earth, a hell of abominations. All are infected with self-love. It is this self-love which causes them to rise in rebellion against you, so that they will no longer support Your Holiness.” She advises him to surround himself with true servants of God who will advise him faithfully and honestly without passion, and without listening to the poisonous advice of self-love. “I would rather not say any more, but go into the battle myself, to suffer agony and to fight at your side to the death, for truth, for the glory and majesty of God, and for the reformation of the Holy Church.”
Catherine had foreseen the schism. When she received the news of it, she must have known that her longing to throw herself into the tumult of battle would soon be fulfilled. She certainly knew in advance that this would lead her to the goal she desired—complete unification with her heavenly Bridegroom whom her soul had longed for so long. Soon she was to enjoy the eternal blessedness which consists of the sight of God As He Is, seen without the veil of our flesh and blood. Soon there was to be an end of her fluttering back and forth over the abyss between heaven and earth, and her eagle soul should find rest on the Bridegroom’s breast. But she had still much to do here on earth. Because she knew the time was approaching when she should depart from this life, she had to write her last will and testament for her spiritual children.
XXII
SHE WENT OUT to Fra Santo’s solitary dwelling somewhere outside the gates of Siena, intending to remain there some days. She asked her secretaries to listen intently when she was in ecstasy, which was more often now than ever before, and write down all she said. During these periods of ecstasy her body always became stiff and without feeling, sight or hearing, but sometimes words streamed from her lips, and she had on occasion dictated letters while in this condition. Now she knew that the whole of the spiritual knowledge which had been poured into her soul when, transported from this world, she talked with her Lord, would be revealed again to her in a concentrated form which she was intended to give to her children as their inheritance.
Raimondo understood the importance of this book, the Dialogue, for he begins the third part of his book on Catherine—the story of her death—by telling how the book came into being. As a suitable quotation from the Bible he used as a motto for this part a quotation from the Canticle of Canticles: “Who is she that cometh up from the desert, flowing with delights, leaning upon her beloved?”
In a long letter to Raimondo in Rome, Catherine told him how the book came into existence and sketched the main themes of it for her understanding confessor. On St. Francis’ day, that is to say, October 4, she had felt terribly depressed at the thought of the Church’s great misery, and because of something Raimondo had written to her of his own unhappiness: “So I asked a serving-woman of the Lord to offer her tears and her sweat before the face of God for the Bride of Christ and for her spiritual father’s weakness.” It is Catherine who is the serving-woman. The Saturday after, the Virgin Mary’s day, she was in her usual place at Mass. Because she knew the truth about herself, she blushed for her imperfections before God, but soon lost all knowledge of herself through her passionate desire. She fastened the eyes of her understanding on the Eternal Truth, and as she offered herself and her father (Raimondo) for the Church, she turned to God and asked for four things.
First she prayed for the Holy Church, and God condescended to be moved by her tears and her desire, and said to her: “My very dear daughter, see how her face is soiled with vice and self-love, how it is swollen with the pride and avarice which approaches her breast. But cast your tears and sweat over it and draw from the well of My divine love to wash her face, for I promise you, her beauty will never return to her through the sword, violence or war, but through peace—through the humble and persevering prayers of My servants, and their sweat and passionate desire. In this way I will fulfil your longings, and My Providence will never fail you.”
And although this prayer for the Church of Christ included the whole world, this woman still had other special requests to make. But God showed her with what great love He had created mankind and how none can escape Him, however many there may be who persecute and offend Him by all kinds of terrible sins: “Open the eyes of your understanding and look at My hand.” She looked, and saw the whole world shut in His hand. And God said to her: “You must know that no one can escape me. All things belong to Me because of My righteousness and mercy, and because they have come from Me I love them with indescribable love and will be merciful unto them, and My servants shall be My tools.”
In the same way Julian of Norwich in her Revelations of Divine Love had seen the world lying in the hand of Christ, a small, dark object resembling a nut. And He had said to the English hermit that this little thing was “everything created”, and that He loved it. Both the visionaries had perhaps got this picture from some lines in one of the hymns in the breviary:
Beata Mater munere
Cuius Superbus Artifex
Mundum pugillo continens
Ventris sub arca clausus est.
(O Mother blessed with gifts, in the ark of whose womb He was contained, the Divine Creator who holds the universe in His closed hand.)
But in the book itself Catherine prays first for herself. For how could she achieve anything for the Church or for her neighbour if she did not receive God’s grace? As in the Old Testament fire fell from heaven and consumed the sacrifices on the altar, the Eternal Truth must send the fire of His mercy, the Holy Spirit, and let it burn up her sacrificial gifts of desire and longing. For by ourselves we can achieve nothing which is perfect. Catherine quotes (rather freely) St. Paul’s words: “Though I speak with the tongues of angels, though I give all I possess to the poor, my body to be burned in the fire, though I know the future—and have not love, so is all the other as
nothing.” For her these words meant that temporal actions are insufficient both as expiation and as a means of obtaining grace, if they are not sprinkled with the spices of love, the divine love which God gives us gratuitously.
Catherine calls the manuscript “the book” or “my book”. It was Raimondo who first gave it a title and called it the Dialogue. The first Latin translation, by Cristofano di Gano Guidini and Stefano Maconi, had been called by the translators the Book of Divine Learning. Since then the various transcriptions and unprinted editions in several different languages have gone under several names. But Père Hurtaud chose the most appropriate when he decided to call his French translation The Book of Mercy. The undercurrent beneath the waves of shifting ideas in these conversations between the Eternal Father and her whom He calls His very dear daughter, and His much loved child, is the belief in God’s mercy. With her heart crushed by compassion Catherine begs for mercy—for all this world which sin has laid waste, for all Christians and heathens and the infidel too. And finally, when the Eternal Father compresses all He has taught His daughter into a few sentences, He says: “I have told you that I will show the world mercy so that you can see that mercy is the sign by which I am known.” God is inseparable in His being, but we must speak of Him as we experience His actions in different ways: thus St. Thomas speaks of one of God’s qualities which is neither love nor goodness, nor righteousness, nor providence, but which perfects all God’s perfections, which is the root of all His actions towards that part of His creation which He has given the ability to think and judge—His mercy.
In the Dialogue the Lord repeats for Catherine all that He has taught her before of the knowledge of God and the knowledge of one’s own ego and the way to perfection: “Your service is of no use to Me, it is by serving your neighbour that you can serve Me.” The soul which has once experienced the bliss of being united with God in love, which has reached the point where it only loves itself in God, will expand and embrace the whole world with its love. Once it has won for itself the virtue which brings a life of grace it will work with the utmost zeal to help its neighbour. But this is an inner virtue; outward action, physical work, diligent penitence, self-chastisement and all kinds of self-denial are nothing more than tools of virtue—God is not interested in them for themselves. On the contrary—they can be an obstacle on the way to perfection if the soul begins to love penitential exercises for their own sake. One must do penitence from love, with true humility and perfect patience. And it must be done with understanding, that is to say with a true knowledge of God and one’s own self.
That the soul knows itself means among other things that it understands the great honour that was done to men when they, through no merit of their own, were created in God’s image. In the mirror of God’s goodness the soul sees how badly it has degraded and crippled itself by love of the wrong things. When she saw herself in this mirror Catherine realised that her guilt was so great that it was enough to have caused all the misery of the world and the Church which she wept over. Therefore she begged God that His vengeance might fall on her head, but His mercy over His people. “I will not go from Your presence before I have seen that You will have mercy on them. What would it help me if I knew that I was sure of my own blessedness, if Your people are to be given to death, and darkness shrouds your Bride, for my sake and no one else’s?” So she prayed for the Holy Church and for all men, calling on the love which caused Him to give His Word, His only Son, so that He might be a mediator between Him and us. “O abyss of mercy, we are Your image, and You became our image when You united Yourself with man and unveiled the eternal divinity in the dark clouds of Adam’s degenerate flesh.”
When she saw that she had been given a new and deeper understanding of the love which caused the redemption by Christ Crucified, Catherine was filled with holy joy and prayed again for the whole world—although if the Holy Church should regain the outward beauty which is an expression of its eternal inner beauty, the whole world would be saved, for it would draw all men to itself so irresistibly that it would lead to the conversion of all men, both Christians and heathens. But when Adam rebelled against God the old royal road which led innocent man from earth to heaven was destroyed. An abyss opened between the two kingdoms, and through this abyss runs a dark and tumultuous river—all the unreal, fleeting things to which mankind’s contorted desire aspires. For we cannot live without desire; our soul’s actions are desire, holy or unholy. So when mankind had rebelled against God it immediately rebelled against itself; the flesh rebelled against the spirit and mankind drowned in the dark and bitter waters of sin. Because these waters lack solidity, none can live in them without drowning. These waters are the joys and honours of this world: in all eternity they stream past and are carried away in the current. Man thinks it is the things he loves which float, but in reality it is he himself who is swept by the stream towards the end of his life. He would like to stop, to keep his hold of this life and the things he loves, so that they are not washed out of his reach. He reaches out blindly to whatever he happens to touch, but he cannot tell the difference between the valuable and the valueless. Then comes death and takes him from all he loves, or Providence takes a hand, and even before his death he may be robbed of all his beloved worldly treasures. And because he has run after unreality he has followed the way of lies and is the child of the devil who is the Father of Lies. And so he is carried forward to the gates of lies and eternal damnation.
God made a bridge over this abyss when He gave the world His Son. For God, who created us without our having anything to do with it, demands of us that we should work with Him for our salvation. We are all bound to work in the vineyard where God is the husbandman. We have all been given our little vineyard, but the way in which we cultivate it is of great importance for the prosperity of our neighbour’s vineyard. Out in the country Catherine had certainly seen how a piece of earth overgrown with weeds and infested with insects was a source of infection for the neighbouring fields. In fact all our vineyards are a part of the Lord’s great vineyard, the Holy Church, and we are all bound to work here too.
But because it is through the grace which God gives us that we are able to work with Him for our salvation, Catherine prays for light. This too she is given, and then she sees how one can receive and increase the grace which God gives freely. It is the old teaching of the mystics on the Via Purificativa, the way to cleanse the soul, the Via Illuminativa, the way to enlightenment of the eternal truths, and the Via Unitiva, the way to unification with God in love.
She develops the bridge symbol in several ways. The soul steps onto the bridge by three steps. Sometimes, according to her, the steps mean the three grades of intimacy with Christ, which are also expressed by the kiss on His feet, the kiss on the wound in His side and the kiss on His mouth. Then she lets the three steps mean three stages towards perfect union with God: slavish fear of God’s punishment is what leads most souls to the bridge. The next step is the faithfulness of a servant who follows his kind lord through love, even though this love is still imperfect, because the servant thinks of his reward—the blessedness which God gives His faithful servants. This leads to the third step, where the soul loves God with the love of a son—for what He is, not for His gifts. At another time, the three steps become a symbol for the qualities of the soul—memory, intelligence and will. With an interpretation, entirely her own, of a phrase in the Bible, Catherine declares that when these three qualities of the soul run together in the desire for unity with God, Christ will fulfil His promise: “When two or three are gathered together in my name, I am among them.” She compares memory with a pitcher full of the impressions which we obtain through our emotional life; fill it with nothing, and the empty pitcher is easily broken, or it emits a shrill clang if anyone knocks it. Or fill it with reality, the love of God, and, like a pitcher filled with water from the well, it can take a knock without being broken or emitting a loud noise. For none here on earth can escape suffering and blows, and the pursuit
of nothingness also brings hard blows and great bitterness for the soul: those who follow the devil have to bear his cross, and there are many who become martyrs for the devil too. But for a heart which is full of God, suffering is sweet, for we know that it is sent to us by love, so that we shall gain by it. For a soul cannot live without loving. It must have something to love, for it was created of love.
No place or position in the world exempts us from the law of love. None may make his inheritance, his office, his authority, marriage or children an obstacle which hinders his attainment of this unity with God. All visible and sensual things are created by Him and are good in themselves; it is only if we love the created things more than the Creator that they become the tools of our damnation. Ceaselessly the devil tries to tempt us to this wrong kind of love, but it is we who condemn ourselves, because we are willing to be led astray. The devil has no power over us if we do not voluntarily give in to his temptations.
Catherine of Siena Page 25