SAINT CATHARINE OF SIENA.*
MRS. BrrLER, as we cannot but believe, has achieved a great success, and of the pages of this remarkable biography it is diffi- cult to say whether they reflect more strikingly the aspects and events of the great century in which Catharine lived and laboured, or the personality of the saint herself. Catharine was born in 1347, and that date will at once suggest to the reader the histori- cal significance of the age in which her lot was cast. Dante had been dead only twenty-six years before the birth of Catharine. Boccaccio, Petrarch, Chaucer, and Wycliffe were her living con- temporaries, and it was in her day, too, that the adventurous, picturesque, and delightful chronicler, Sir John Froissart, with his quick vision and ever busy pen, travelled from court to camp, and from city to city, in many lands, now noting down, -and now reciting to circles of eager listeners, those details of his various experiences which have charmed all succeeding genera- tions. But as specially indicating that element of the time with which her name will for ever be associated, the Papacy had been for forty years enthroned beside the Rhone when Catharine first saw the light, and it was she who was mainly instrumental in .effecting the return of the Popes to Rome, and of thus terminat- ing, what Petrarch and others termed the residence at Avignon, the " Babylonish Captivity." Of course, Gibbon was greatly amused by the fact that a visionary female, and chiefly, as it seemed to him, by means of alleged visions, should succeed in bringing back the Father of Western Christendom to his desolate spouse and children on the banks of the Tiber. But history all through was a great joke to the eupeptic author of floe Decline and Fall, and his enormous reading and curiously remorseless genius for " verification " never apparently received -their just reward, unless he found some passage or allusion which enabled him to " give that which was holy to the dogs." It was not merely " secondary causes " that he studiously -went in search of, in order to account for movements which certainly transformed the world. He was always on the look-out for quite second-rate influences, and thus history to him in the long-run was not, as all human life, its -terrible failures, and sorrows, and sufferings notwithstanding, was to Dante, a " commedia," or great :disciplinary arrange- ment, taking end in the triumph of love ; but a development
• Catharine of Siena. A Biography. By Josephine E. Butler, Author of the _Memoir of John Grey, of Dilston," do. London: Dyer Brothers. 1878.
leading no-whither in particular, in which the infinitely little and the infinitely ludicrous:are perennial and potential factors, which, at best, only shows a Constantine taking up with Christ- ianity very much in the spirit of the Scotch fool, who was over- heard praying behind a hedge, uncertain the while as to which Power might ultimately prove to be the stronger, to " bonny God," and then to "bonny Deevil ;" or which reveals to us the altogether natural phenomenon of the children of Abraham wel- coming the Gospel, because it substituted for the painful initia- tory. rite of the Hebrews the milder prescription of merely wash- ing the the infant with water ! Mrs. Butler has come to the rescue of Catharine from the self-complacent smile of the Sad- du cee, as well as from the the extravagant ascriptions of credulous tradition, and " the dyer's daughter " of the unique and vener- able and picturesque Siena will henceforth take her place, in the regard of all who yet believe in the legacy which Christ has bequeathed to us of immediate communion with the Father of the human heart and conscience, as one of the most pro- foundly loyal and loving disciples of the Founder of our Creed Mrs. Butler apparently undertook her labour of love with the full consciousness that the lights which are streaming iu on all sides on the human soul now were but dimly, if at all, foreseen even by the noblest and most intuitive minds of the fourteenth century ; that Catharine laboured with all her energy in behalf of a system into the heart of which Dante had shot arrows of light- ning, over which Chaucer made the sides of his contemporaries shake with immoderate laughter, which Wycliffe denounced with prophetic indignation, and against which, under the inspiration of Luther, in a later day, some of the more advanced of the subjects of the Papacy lifted up an emphatic protest, resulting in their utter abnegation of the Papal authority. Mrs. Butler was, moreover, aware that not only by ultra-Protestants, who limit the operations of the Divine Spirit, but by dogmatic physiologists, who ignore the spiritual element in man altogether, the claims of Catharine to a grateful recognition by this generation would be more or less seriously contested. But our authoress writes neither as a special pleader nor as a polemic theologian. She has a marvellous story to tell, the more marvellous, if it be not paradoxical to say so, the more it is shorn of its more dis- putable accidents ; and she tells it with admirable simplicity, with great eloquence in many passages, with the most reverent sympathy with the noble subject of her biography, and in a fine spirit of catholic comprehensiveness, which keeps her aloof from the din and smoke and bitterness of sectarian controversy.
Catharine was a great power and a real presence in her day, but the extraordinary influence which flowed from her words, and very looks, as it would seem, alike by the sick-bed of the plague-stricken, from whom others fled in terror, or by the scaf- fold, to which she accompanied the victims whom her tears, her prayers, and her passionate pleadings with themselves had melted into penitence, confession, and trust in the divine mercy, or amid the unspeakable immoralities of Avignon, or in con- verse with theologians or artists who sought an interview with her, in order to puzzle her with speculative questions, or dis- cover the secret of her high pretensions, and left her awed and conscience-stricken, was but the outward and visible sign of a life which was consciously, and with entire self-surrender, rooted in the unseen and eternal. She lived and moved and had her being in God. An ascetic, she had no taint of Pharisaism ; an enthusiast, she was free from the leaven of fanaticism. She early " banished from her heart all anxious thoughts concerning herself and her own salvation," and her love, which burned in her like a consuming fire, left but one great question in her heart, how she could best follow in His steps whose crowning glory was, unconsciously to the speakers, proclaimed in the words,—" He saved others, himself he cannot save."
Forty Lives of St. Catharine, we are told, have already been written, and among these, curiously enough, two bear the follow- ing title-pages :—" The Life of St. Katherine of Senis, Stamp of Caxton," and "The Life of that Glorious Virgin and Martyr [sic] Saint Katharyne off Sene, in fine imprynted at Westmynster by Wynkyn de Wortle." We possess, however, the "narratives" of her contemporaries and very special friends, Raymond of Capua, Stephen Corrado di Macconi, her secretary, Fra Bartolomeo, and Fra Tomaseo, both of Siena, not to mention other names. These are of real value, as direct indications of the immense impression which Catharine produced on all who came in contact with her, and most of all, on those who knew her most intimately. But it has been reserved for Mrs. Butler to give to the world.
the best representation, both of her time, and of herself, of one who was fair to see, though not exactly beautiful ; who, delicate in health from her childhood, possessed an almost preternatural capacity of work and endurance ; whose smile and ingenuous frankness and unfailing courtesy of manner touched all hearts, who loved all creatures with a full, genuine love,—flowers and birds, as well as human beings ; a woman of great spiritual strength, who wrestled day and night to make herself an in- strument as well as a vessel of the divine mercy ; who was in the hospitals of the sick, a Florence Nightingale in her day ; who was great as a preacher, when summoned to discharge the preacher's office ; whose diplomacy as an ambassadress was of wondrous efficacy, and whose presence in the hour of popular agitation was felt to be so necessary, that Pope Urban VI. would not hear of her leaving Rome. There she died, and not in her beloved Siena, on the evening of April 29th, 1380, at the age of thirty-three years. Catharine was one of the people, and in a little valley which lies between the ancient city and a low hill to the west, and known as the Contrada d'Oca, she was born. As doubtless many of our readers know, there still stand her father's house; his workshop, " the Fullonica ;" and the chapel which was erected to her memory, over the entrance of which is inscribed, in letters of gold, the legend," Sposw Christi Katharine; Domus.'' Catharine was, as the Scotch say, " come of a good kin,"—her father, Giacomo, the dyer, and her mother, Lapa, being " high- minded, loyal, fearing God, and separated from every vice." She was one of twenty-five children, and moreover, the twin-sister of one who " winged her way to heaven " a few days after her birth, leaving Catharine to become the darling of her home, and of all the neighbourhood. But referring our readers to Mrs. Butler's narrative for further particulars of Catharine's history, we will only add here that she was haunted from her earliest years by an ideal of self-consecration to the ministry of Christianity ; that with- out any monition, much less constraint, from without, she elected her mission as a Sister in the " Mantellata " Order of St. Dominic ; that her choice was not finally stereotyped, for that is the only predicate which can at all adequately indicate her resolute determination of will, without strugglings from her own passionate Italian nature, and pleadings from the parents whom she always loved and revered, which it is quite pathetic to read of ; that self-taught, and apparently unable to read and write until she had attained womanhood, her letters to her various correspondents, among all sorts and condi- tions of men, materially contributed to the perfecting of the existing Italian language ; that above all, she was a " re- former before the Reformation ;" and that, when in presence of not a few of her spiritual children, and in the arms of her beloved mother, Lapa, she rested from her labours, she died of a broken heart, wounded and grieved by the iniquities of the Church in whose purity and devotion, as she believed, nothing less was concerned than the welfare of mankind. We hear nothing, beyond the passing reference to her with the songs of the Troubadours, of any interest taken by Catharine in the literature of her time. Vauni, the artist, is only brought in relation to her by the fact that she made him a convert to Christianity. Yet he would be a bold critic who would say that, in the deepest sense of the word, she did not advance the culture of Christendom. And to this age of ours, which is in peril of accepting a mere doctrine of involuntary evolution and moral progress, the life of Catharine of Siena is a most whole- some sermon.
Mrs. Butler might have toned down her account of Catharine's last hours. For no doubt physiology has a much more edifying explanation to furnish of the manifestations which occur amid nature's fading functions, than is supplied by introducing the presence of a malignant, dark personality. But mere physio- logy is altogether incapable of rendering a satisfactory account to us of Catharine's life. Water does not rise above its own level, and it is simply absurd, as it is ridiculous, to affirm that in natures like that of Catharine of Siena, who conquer flesh and blood, who postpone all other considerations to those of self- subordination to the Will of an Unseen Presence of infinite truth and charity, we have only a special exemplification of purely material causation. We prefer the belief, however anti- quated the phraseology in which it is expressed may seem to Agnostics, that for man " to live after the flesh " is simply to die to all that is characteristically human, and that he is only true to his " proper make," to use Butler's words, when, recognising the height to which Christ has raised us, he surrenders himself, as
a spiritual being possessing self-consciousness and free-will, to the absolute domination of truth and love, and to the living and sovereign source of both. Agnosticism uttering suspiria de pro- fundis, can only call forth our sympathy; but Agnosticism seated in a chair of dogmatic infallibility is like nothing so much as a colour-blind tailor, who, having patched an old rai- ment of scarlet with a blue piece of new cloth, should claim to make the whole world believe that alleged diversities of colour are mere creations of the fancy become hereditary.
Books written for mere edification are generally of a very wearisome and unedifying character, but a book written, as this one obviously has been, with the primary aim of showing how much of verifiable fact is to be found in the life of a humbly born woman, who, from her exceedingly great virtues, was accorded a solemn canonisation not many years after her death, and by one who believes that in this world of law and order an ounce of fact far outweighs whole ton-loads of fiction, can only be gratefully welcomed by all thoughtful persons.
For our own parts, we will cordially own that we have not read a book for a long time which seems better fitted to awaken in the minds of the readers of it the great question,—Whitt they are doing with their lives, "which fleet so fast?" And perhaps few better answers are to be obtained, for our guidance, than those which Catharine of Siena, in her latest hours, prescribed to her " children "
" Catharine, finding her end approaching, pronounced a discourse to her spiritual sons and daughters, exhorting them to brotherly love, and giving them also certain rules for advancing them in the way of the Lord. And first (she told them) that any one who truly desired to be the servant of God, and wished really to possess him, must strip his heart of all selfish love of human creatures, and with a simple and entire heart must approach God. Secondly, that no soul can arrive at such a state without the medium of prayer, founded on humility ; that no one should have any confidence in his own works, but ac- knowledging himself to be nothing, should commit himself entirely to the keeping and leading of God. She asserted that all virtues and progress are invigorated only through prayer, and that without it they decay and fail. Thirdly, that in order to attain to purity of conscience, it is necessary to abstain from all rash judgments and evil- speaking against our neighbours ; that we must neither despise nor condemn any creature, even if it be the case of one whom we know to be guilty and vile, but to bear with him, and to pray for him because there is no one, however sinful, who may not amend his life. Fourthly, that we must exercise a perfect trust in the providence•of God, knowing that all things which happen to us, through his ap- pointment, spring, not from his ill-will to his creatures, but from his infinite love for them."
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