II. Conclusions Concerning Catherine’s Psycho-physical Condition During This Last Period

1. Her illness not primarily physical. Her self-diagnosis.

Now we saw, at the beginning of this chapter, how readily her attendants concluded, from all these extreme, multiple, swift-changing and self-contradictory states, to their directly and separately supernatural origin.—And indeed the diagnosis and treatment of her case showed clearly that it was not primarily physical. So in the case, probably in November 1509, of the cupping-glasses, when “she got medically treated for a bodily infirmity, whilst her real trouble was fire of the spirit”; so with a medicine given to her by the resident Hospital physician, some time in April 1510, “from taking which she nearly died”; so with Giovanni Boerio’s three-weeks’ treatment of her, in May 1510, a treatment which led to no other results than momentary additional distress; and so with the declaration of the ten Physicians who, even on September 10, four days before her death, “could find no trace of disease in her pulse, secretions, or any other symptom,” and who consequently abstained from prescribing anything. And hence, more or less throughout her last nine years, “there was confusion in the management of her, not on her own part, but on that of those who served her.”

For—and these two further points are of primary importance—the tending of her, as distinct from physic, was throughout held by herself to be of great importance; and yet this care was declared by her to be often useless or harmful, owing to the powers of discrimination possessed by her attendants being as much below their good-will, as her own knowledge as to the differences between her healthy and maladif states exceeded her power of herself acting upon this knowledge against these sickly conditions. “She would often appear to be asleep; and would awake from such a state, at one time, quite refreshed, and, at another time, so limp and broken down as to be unable to move. Those that served her knew not how to distinguish one state from the other; and on recovering from an attack of the latter sort, she would say to them: ‘Why did you let me continue in that state of quiet, from which I have all but died?’” So, on September 5, “she cried aloud on waking from a state of quiet, which had appeared to be (healthy) quietude, but had not been so.” And indeed, already on January 10 previous, she had shut herself off from her Confessor, “because it seemed to her that he bore with her too much in her sayings and doings.”

Yet, at least after this time, Marabotto does oppose her sometimes. Thus on two, somewhat later, occasions she respectively makes signs, and asks, that Extreme Unction be given her; but only some four months later did she actually receive it. In these cases, then, she either had not, even at bottom, a correct physical self-knowledge; or her requests had been prompted, at the time, by her secondary, maladif consciousness alone.—When first visited by Boerio, she takes pleasure in the thought of getting possibly cured by him; but “in the following night, when great pain came upon her, she reproved herself, saying, ‘You are suffering this, because you allowed yourself to rejoice without cause.’” But this declaration distinctly falls short of any necessary implication of a directly supernatural origin of her malady, as the Vita here will have it, and but refers, either to the continuance of earthly existence not deserving such joy, or to her persistent fundamental consciousness that the phenomena were partly the fruitful, profitable occasions, and partly the price paid, for the mind’s close intercourse with things divine.

Indeed her (otherwise unbroken) attitude is one, both of quiet conviction that physic cannot help her, and of gentle readiness to let the physicians try whatever they may think worth the trying: so with the cupping-glasses, and the various examinations and physickings. Especially is this disposition clear in her short dialogue with Boerio, where, in answer to his assertion that she ought to beware of giving scandal to all the world by saying that her infirmity had no need of remedies, and that she ought to look upon such an attitude as “a kind of hypocrisy,” she declares: “I am sorry if any one is scandalized because of me; and I am ready to use any remedy for infirmity, supposing that it can be found.”

2. Her preoccupation with the spiritual suggestions afforded by the phenomena.

It would, indeed, be a grave misreading of her whole character and habits of mind to think of her as at all engrossed in her psycho-physical states as such, and as having ever formally considered and decided that they must either come directly from God or be amenable to medicine. On the contrary, she is too habitually absorbed in the consideration and contemplation of certain great spiritual doctrines and realities, to have the leisure or inclination for any such questions.—Indeed it is this very absorption in those spiritual realities which has ended by suggesting, with an extraordinary readiness, frequency and vividness, through her mind to her senses, and by these back to her mind, certain psycho-physical images and illustrations for those very doctrines, until her whole psycho-physical organism has been, all but entirely, modified and moulded into an apt instrument and manifestation for and of that world unseen.

Thus, after her greatest psycho-physical and spiritual experience in November 1509, she declares to Vernazza, when he urges her to let him write down the graces she has received from God, that “it would, strictly speaking, be impossible to narrate those interior things; whilst, of exterior ones, few or none have happened to me.” And she never entirely loses her mental consciousness in any state not recognized by herself as maladif. So, on a day of great psycho-physical trouble in February or March 1510, “they thought she must expire; but, though she lost both sight and speech, she never lost her intelligence.” And even on September 11 and 12, amidst foodlessness and suffocations, her intelligence still persists.—In the March previous “her mind appeared to grow daily in contentment.” Some days later, her attendants “saw how, after an hour of spasm and breathlessness, and then a great restriction of all her being, she returned to her normal condition, and addressed many beautiful words to them.” And later on, “her attendants were amazed at seeing a body, which seemed to be healthy, in such a tormented condition.” But “soon after she laughed and spoke as one in health, and told them not to distress themselves about her, since she was very contented; but that they should see to it that they did much good, since the way of God is very narrow.”

3. Interaction and mutual suggestion of her spiritual and physical states.

As to the extraordinary closeness and readiness for mutual response between her sensible impressions and her thoughts and emotions—her sensations turning, all but automatically, into religious emotions, and her thoughts and feelings translating themselves into appropriate psycho-physical states—we have a mass of interesting evidence.

Thus when, about the end of November 1509, in response to her seeing, on some wall of the Hospital, a picture of Our Lord at the Well of Samaria, and to her asking Him for one drop of that Divine water, “instantly a drop was given to her which refreshed her within and without.” The spiritual idea and emotion is here accompanied and further stimulated by the keenest psycho-physical impression of drinking. And such an impression can even become painful through its excessive suggestiveness. Thus she herself explains to Maestro Boerio, on September 2, 1510, that she cannot long bear the sight of his scarlet robe “because of what it suggests (represents) to my memory,”—no doubt the fire of divine love. Three days later, on the contrary, “she mentally saw herself lying upon a bier, surrounded by many Religious robed in black,” and greatly rejoiced at the sight. Here the very impression of black, the colour of death, will have conveyed, during this special mood of hers, a downright psycho-physical pleasure, somewhat as Boerio’s reappearance, on the former occasion, in a black gown, had been a sensible relief to her.

So also with scents. When, certainly after 1499, “she perceived, on the (right) hand of her Confessor, an odour which penetrated her very heart,” and “which abode with her and restored both mind and body for many days,” we have again a primarily mental act and state which she herself knows well to be untransferable, even to Don Marabotto himself. Here the association of ideas was, no doubt, the right hand of the Priest and her daily reception, by means of it, of the Holy Eucharist. For the latter, “the Bread from heaven, having within it all manner of delight,” is already connected in her mind with an impression of sweet odour. “One day, on receiving Communion, so much odour and sweetness came to her, that she seemed to herself to be in Paradise.” Probably the love for, and then the disgust at, the smell of wine, was also connected with her Eucharistic experiences. Certainly “one day, having received Holy Communion, she was granted so great a consolation as to fall into an ecstasy, so that when the Priest wanted to give her to drink from the Chalice (with unconsecrated wine) she had to be brought back by force to her ordinary consciousness.” Vivid memories of both sets of psycho-physical impressions are, I think, at work when she says: “If a consecrated Host were to be given to me amongst unconsecrated ones, I should be able to distinguish it by the very taste, as I do wine from water.” And as the sight of red rapidly became painful from the very excess of its mental suggestiveness, so will the smell of wine have been both specially dear and specially painful to her.

Indeed her psycho-physical troubles possess, for the most part, a still traceable, most delicate selectiveness as to date, range, form, combination, and other peculiarities. Thus some of the most acute attacks coincide, in their date of occurrence and general character, as the biographers point out, with special saint’s and holy days: so in the night leading into St. Lawrence’s day, August 9 and 10, 1510; so on the Vigil of St. Bartholomew’s day, August 24; and so in the night previous to and on the Feast (August 28) of St. Augustine, special Patron of her only sister’s Order and of the Convent in which her own Conversion had taken place thirty-seven years before. Yet we have also seen how that these synchronisms did not rise to the heights which were soon desired by her biographers, for we know that she died, not (as they would have it) on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, September 14, but early on the day following.

Thus too as to her incapacity to swallow and retain food, we find that, up to the end, with the rarest exceptions of a directly physical kind, she retained the most complete facility in receiving Holy Communion: so on September 2, 1510, when “all ordinary food was returned, but the Holy Eucharist she retained without any difficulty”; and so too on September 4, when, after “lying for close upon twelve hours with closed eyes, speechless and all but immovable,” Marabotto himself feared to communicate her, but “she made a sign to him, with a joyous countenance, to have no fear, and she communicated with ease, and soon after began to speak, owing to the vigour given to her by the Sacrament.” Yet here too the abnormality is not complete: some ordinary food is retained, now and then; so, minced chicken, specially mentioned for December 1509, and on September 3, 1510.

As to her heat-attacks and the corresponding extreme—the sense of intense cold,—it is clear how close is their connection with her profound concentration upon the conception of God as Love, and upon the image of Love as fire. It is these sudden and intense psycho-physical, spiritually suggestive because spiritually suggested, heat-attacks which are, I think, always meant by the terms “assault” (assalto), “stroke” (ferita), and “arrow” (saetta): terms which already indicate the mental quality of these attacks. And these heats are mostly localized in a doctrinally suggestive manner: they centre in and around the heart, or on the tongue and lips, or they envelop the whole person “as though it were placed in a great flame of fire,” or “in a glowing furnace.” Indeed these heats are often so described, by her attendants or herself, as to imply their predominantly psycho-physical nature: “it was necessary, with a view to prolonging her life, to use many means for lightening the strain of that interior fire upon her mind”; and “I feel,” she says herself, on occasion of such an attack, “so great a contentment on the part of the spirit, as to be unutterable; whilst, on the part of my humanity, all the pains are, so to say, no pains.”

As to her boundless thirst, her inability to drink, and her sense of strangulation, their doctrinal suggestions are largely clear. Thus when “she was so thirsty as to feel able to drink up all the waters of the sea,” and when she calls out “I am suffocating” (drowning, io affogo), we are at once reminded of her great saying: “If the sea were all so much love, there would not live man or woman who would not go to drown himself in it (si affogasse).” And when, at the end of August 1510, unable to drink, she herself declares “all the water that is on earth could not give me the least refreshment,” there is, perhaps, an implied contrast to that “little drop of divine water” which had so much refreshed her a year before.

And finally, the various paralyses and death-like swoons seem, at least in part, to follow from, and to represent, the death of the spirit to the life of the senses, and to mirror the intensity with which perfection has been conceived and practised as “Love going forth out of self, and abiding all in God and separated from man.” Thus when, on August 22, 1510, “she had a day of great heat, and abode paralyzed in one hand and in one finger of the other hand for about sixteen hours, and she was so greatly occupied (absorbed), that she neither spoke, nor opened her eyes, nor could take any food.”

4. Only two cases of spiritually unsuggestive impressions.

It is indeed profoundly instructive to note how that, in exact proportion as a human-mental mediation and suggestion of a religious kind is directly traceable or at least probable in any or all of these things, is that thing also worthy of being considered as having ultimately the Divine Spirit Itself for its first cause as well as last end; and that, in exact proportion as this kind of human mediation and suggestion is impossible or unlikely, the thing turns out to be unworthy of being attributed, in any special sense, to the spirit of God Himself.

Of such spiritually opaque, religiously unused and apparently unuseable, hysteriform impressions, I can, even during the last days of these nine years of admitted infirmity, find but two clear instances,—instances which, by their very unlikeness to the mass of her spiritually transparent, readily used impressions, strongly confirm our high estimate of the all but totality of her psycho-physical states, as experienced and understood and used by herself. On September 7, 1510, after having seen and wisely utilized the spiritually suggestive image of “a great ladder of fire,” she ends by having so vivid an hallucination of the whole world being on fire “that she asked whether it were not so, and caused her windows to be opened that the facts might be ascertained;” and “she abode the whole night, possessed by that imagination,” as the Vita itself calls this impression. At night, on September 11, she complained of a very great heat, and cast forth from her mouth very black blood; and black spots came out all over her body. And on the 13th, “she was seen with her eyes fixed upon the ceiling, and with much movement of the lips and hands; and she answered her attendants’ queries as to what she was seeing with ‘Drive away that beast.…’ the remaining words being inaudible.”

Here we have, I think, the only two merely factual, unsuggestive, and hence simply delusive, impressions really experienced by herself and recorded in the Vita, a book whose very eagerness to discover things of this kind and readiness to take them as directly supernatural is a guarantee that no other marked instances of the kind have been omitted or suppressed. And these two impressions both take place within a week of her death, and respectively four days before, and two days after, the first clear case of organic disease or lesion to be found anywhere in the life.