Letters of Catherine Benincasa. Saint of Siena Catherine
a warm understanding tenderness for actual men and women. It would be hard to exaggerate her knowledge of the world and of human hearts.
Yet sometimes Catherine appears to us austere and exacting; unsparing in condemnation, and unrelenting in her demands on those she loves. Many of her letters are in a strain of exhortation that rises into rebuke. The impression at first is unpleasant. We are tempted to feel this unfailing candour captious; to resent the note of authority, equally clear whether she write to Pope or Cardinal; to suspect Catherine, in a word, of assuming that very judicial attitude which she constantly deprecates as unbecoming to us poor mortals. And perhaps the very frequency of her plea for tolerance and forbearance suggests a conscious weakness. Like most brilliant and ardent people, she was probably by nature of a critical and impatient disposition; she was, moreover, a plebeian. At times, when she is quite sure that men are on the side of the devil, she allows her instinctive frankness full scope; it must be allowed that the result is astounding. Yet even as we catch our breath we realise that her remarks were probably justified. It is hard for us moderns to remember how crudely hideous were the sins which she faced. In these days, when we are all reduced to one apparent level of moral respectability, and great saintliness and dramatic guilt are alike seldom conspicuous, we forget the violent contrasts of the middle ages. Pure "Religious," striving after the exalted perfection enjoined by the Counsels, moved habitually among moral atrocities, and bold vigour of speech was a practical duty. Catherine handled without evasion the grossest evils of her time, and the spell which she exercised by simple force of direct dealing was nothing less than extraordinary.
It is easy to see why Catherine's plain speaking was not resented. She rarely begins with rebuke. The note of humility is first struck; she is always "servant and slave of the servants of Jesus Christ." Thence she frequently passes into fervent meditation on some special theme: the exceeding wonder of the Divine Love, the duty of prayer, the nature of obedience. We are lifted above the world into a region of heavenly light and sweetness, when suddenly—a blow from the shoulder!—a startling sense of return to earth. From the contemplation of the beauty of holiness, Catherine has swiftly turned us to face the opposing sin. "Thou art the man!" A few trenchant sentences, charged with pain, and the soul which has been raised to celestial places awakes to see in itself the contradiction of all that is so lovely. Into the region of darkness Catherine goes with it. It is not "thou" but "we" who have sinned. She holds that sinful heart so near her own that the beatings are confounded; her words now and again express a shuddering personal remorse for sins of which she could have had no personal knowledge. Her sense of unity with her fellow-men lies deeper than any theory of brotherhood; she feels herself in sober truth guilty of the sins of her brothers: her experience illustrates the profound truth that only purity can know perfect penitence.
Catherine is then saved from any touch of Pharisaism by her remarkable identification of herself with the person to whom she writes. But to understand her attitude we must go further. For she never pauses in reprobation of evil. Full of conviction that the soul needs only to recognise its sin to hate and escape it for ever, she passes swiftly on to impassioned appeal. Her words breathe a confidence in men that never fails even when she is writing to the most hardened. She succeeded to a rare degree in the difficult conciliation of uncompromising hatred toward sin with unstrained fellowship with the sinner, and invincible trust in his responsiveness to the appeal of virtue. When we consider the times in which she lived, this large and touching trustfulness becomes to our eyes a victory of faith. That it was no mere instinct, but an attitude resolutely adopted and maintained, is evident from her frequent discussions of charity and tolerance, some of which will be found in these selections. She constantly urges her disciples to put the highest possible construction on their neighbours' actions; nor is any phase of her teaching more constantly repeated than the beautiful application of the text: "In My Father's House are many mansions," to enjoin recognition of the varieties in temperament and character and practice which may coexist in the House of God.
Catherine had learned a hard lesson. She saw in human beings not their achievements, but their possibilities. Therefore she quickened repentance by a positive method, not by morbid analysis of evil, not by lurid pictures of the consequences of sin, but by filling the soul with glowing visions of that holiness which to see is to long for. She never despaired of quickening in even the most degraded that flame of "holy desire" which is the earnest of true holiness to be. We find her impatient of mint and cummin, of over-anxious self-scrutiny. "Strive that your holy desires increase," she writes to a correspondent; "and let all these other things alone." "I, Catherine—write to you—with desire": so open all her letters. Holy Desire! It is not only the watchword of her teaching: it is also the true key to her personality.
III
We have dwelt on Catherine, the friend and guide of souls; but it is Catherine the mystic, Catherine the friend of God, before whom the ages bend in reverence. The final value of her letters lies in their revelation, not of her dealings with other souls, but of God's dealings with her own.
But in presence of the record of these deep experiences, silence is better than words: is, indeed, for most of us the only possible attitude. The letters that follow must speak for themselves. The clarity of mind which Catherine always preserved, even in moments of highest exaltation, and her loving eagerness to share her most sacred experiences with those dear to her, have given her a power of expression that has produced pages of unsurpassed interest and value, alike for the psychologist and for the believer. Moreover—and this we well may note—her letters enable us to apprehend with singularly happy intimacy, the natural character and disposition of her whom these high things befell. In the very cadence of their impetuous phrasing, in their swift dramatic changes, in their marvellous blending of sweetness and virility, they show us the woman. Some of them, especially those to her family and friends, are of almost childlike simplicity and homely charm; others, among the most famous of their kind, deal with mystical, or if we choose so to put it, with supernatural experience: in all alike, we feel a heart akin to our own, though larger and more tender.
The central fact in Catherine's nature was her rapt and absolute perception of the Love of God, as the supreme reality in the universe. This Love, as manifested in creation, in redemption, and in the sacrament of the Altar, is the theme of her constant meditations. One little phrase, charged with a lyric poignancy, sings itself again and again, enlightening her more sober prose: "For nails would not have held God-and-Man fast to the Cross, had love not held Him there." Her conceptions are positive, not negative, and joyous adoration is the substance of her faith.
But the letters show us that this faith was not won nor kept without sharp struggle. We have in them no presentation of a calm spirit, established on tranquil heights of unchanging vision, above our "mortal moral strife." Catherine is, as we can see, a woman of many moods—very sensitive, very loving. She shows a touching dependence on those she loves, and an inveterate habit of idealising them, which leads to frequent disillusion. She is extremely eager and intense about little things as well as great; hers is a truly feminine seriousness over the detail of living. She is keenly and humanly interested in life on this earth, differing in this respect from some canonized persons who seem always to be enduring it faute de mieux. And, as happens to all sensitive people who refuse to seclude themselves in dreams, life went hard with her. Hers was a frail and suffering body, and a tossed and troubled spirit; wounded in the house of her friends, beset by problem, shaken with doubt and fear by the spectacle presented to her by the world and the Church of Christ. The letters tell us how these, her sorrows and temptations, were not separated from the life of faith, but a true portion of it: how she carried them into the Divine Presence, and what high reassurance awaited her there. Ordinary mortals are inclined to think that supernatural experience removes the saints to a perplexing distance. In Catherine's case, however, we become aware as we study the record that it brings her nearer us. For these experiences, far from being independent of her outer life, are in closest relation with it; even the highest and most mysterious, even those in which the symbolism seems most remote from the modern mind, can be translated by the psychologist without difficulty into modern terms. They spring from the problems of her active life; they bring her renewed strength and wisdom for her practical duties. An age, which like our own places peculiar emphasis and value on the type of sanctity which promptly expresses itself through the deed, should feel for Catherine