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Presented to the 
LIBRARY of the 

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO 

by 


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THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT 
OF RELIGION 


A II rights reserved. 


14.97 - 


THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT 
OF RELIGION AS STUDIED 
IN SAINT CATHERINE OF 
GENOA AND HER FRIENDS 


BY BARON FRIEDRICH VON HUGEL 

MEMBER OF THE CAMBRIDGE PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY 


VOLUME SECOND 
CRITICAL STUDIES 


LONDON: J. M. DENT & CO. 

NEW YORK : E. P. DUTTON & CO, 

MCMIX 


-AT 

fh&gt; 

IT 


First Edition, December 1908. 
Reprinted March 1909. 


CONTENTS OF THE SECOND VOLUME 

THE frontispiece consists of a reduced facsimile, in photogravure, of 
a lithograph by F. Scotto, entitled "Ven. Batt a . Vernazza," which was 
printed and owned by the firm of Gervasoni, and which appeared in the 
large 4to volume, Ritratti, ed Elogi di Liguri Illustri, with the text 
printed by Ponthenier, all in Genoa. This book was published there, in 
monthly parts, from 1 823 to 1 830. Scotto s highly characteristic lithograph 
no doubt reproduces an authentic likeness ; and probably the original 
portrait was, in the first instance, owned by the Canonesses of S. Maria 
delle Grazie, Battista s own convent in Genoa. The picture now in the 
possession of the Nuns of S. Maria in Passione, the successors of those 
Canonesses, is of a quite conventional, secondary type. 

PART III. CRITICAL 

PAGE 

CHAPTER IX. PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 

QUESTIONS 3-61 

Introductory 3-9 

I. Catherine s Third Period, 1497-1510 .... 9-13 

II. Conclusions concerning Catherine s Psycho-physical 

Condition during this Last Period . . . . 14-21 

III. Catherine s Psycho-physical Condition, its Likeness and 

Unlikeness to Hysteria 22-27 

IV. First Period of Catherine s Life, 1447-1477, in its Three 

Stages 28-32 

V. The Second, Great Middle Period of Catherine s Life, 

1477-1499 32-40 

VI. Three Rules which seem to govern the Relations be 
tween Psycho-physical Peculiarities and Sanctity in 

general 40-47 

VII. Perennial Freshness of the Great Mystics Main Spiritual 
Test, in Contradistinction to their Secondary, Psycho 
logical Contention. Two Special Difficulties . . 47-6i 

CHAPTER X. THE MAIN LITERARY SOURCES OF CATHE 
RINE S CONCEPTIONS 62-110 

Introductory 62, 63 

I. The Pauline Writings : the Two Sources of their Pre- 
Conversion Assumptions ; Catherine s Preponderant 

Attitude towards each Position 63-79 

II. The Joannine Writings 79~9o 

III. The Areopagite Writings . . . . 90-101 

IV. Jacopone da Todi s " Lode " . . . 102-110 
V. Points common to all Five Minds; and Catherine s Main 

Difference from her Four Predecessors 1 10 


vi 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER XL- CATHERINE S LESS ULTIMATE THIS- WORLD 
DOCTRINES . 

Introductory 

I. Interpretative Religion . 
II. Dualistic Attitude towards the Body 

III. Quietude and Passivity. Points in this Tendency to be 

considered here 

IV. Pure Love, or Disinterested Religion : its Distinction 
from Quietism . ... 

CHAPTER XII. THE AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOC 
TRINES .... 

I. The Chief Present-day Problems, Perplexities, and Re 
quirements with Regard to the After-Life in General . 
II. Catherine s General After-Life Conceptions . 

III. Catherine and Eternal Punishment . 

IV. Catherine and Purgatory 

V. Catherine and Heaven Three Perplexities to be con 
sidered .... - t 

CHAPTER XIII. THE FIRST THREE ULTIMATE QUESTIONS 
I. The Relations between Morality and Mysticism, Phi 
losophy and Religion ... . 
II. Mysticism and the Limits of Human Knowledge and 

Experience .... 
III. Mysticism and the Question of Evil 

CHAPTER XIV. THE Two FINAL PROBLEMS : MYSTICISM 
AND PANTHEISM. THE IMMANENCE OF GOD, AND 
SPIRITUAL PERSONALITY, HUMAN AND DIVINE . 

Introductory 

I. Relations between the General and the Particular, God 
and Individual Things, according to Aristotle, the 
Neo-Platonists, and the Medieval Strict Realists 
II. Relations between God and the Human Soul . 

III. Mysticism and Pantheism : their Differences and Points 

of Likeness 

IV. The Divine Immanence ; Spiritual Personality 

CHAPTER XV. SUMMING-UP OF THE WHOLE BOOK. BACK 
THROUGH ASCETICISM, SOCIAL RELIGION, AND THE 
SCIENTIFIC HABIT OF MIND, TO THE MYSTICAL 

ELEMENT OF RELIGION 

I. Asceticism and Mysticism . . . . . . 
II. Social Religion and Mysticism , . . 

III. The Scientific Habit and Mysticism .... 

IV. Final Summary and Return to the Starting-point of the 

Whole Inquiry : the Necessity, and yet the Almost 
Inevitable Mutual Hostility, of the Three Great Forces 
of the Soul and of the Three Corresponding Elements 

of Religion 

INDEX 


111-181 

III, 112 
II2-I2I 
I2I-I29 

129-152 
I52-I8I 

182-258 

182-199 
199-218 
218-230 
230-246 

246-258 
259-308 

259-275 

275-20X) 
290-308 


309-340 
309, 310 


310-319 
319-325 

325-335 
336-340 


341-396 

341-351 
351-366 
367-386 


387-396 

397 


PART III 
CRITICAL 


VOL. 


THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT 
OF RELIGION 

CHAPTER IX 

PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL QUESTIONS 
INTRODUCTORY. 

1. Plan of Part Three. 

The picture of Catherine s life and teaching which was 
attempted in the previous volume will, I hope, have been 
sufficiently vivid to stimulate in the reader a desire to try and 
go deeper, and to get as near as may be to the driving forces, 
the metaphysical depths of her life. And yet it is obvious 
that, if we would understand something of these, we must pro 
ceed slowly and thoroughly, and must begin with comparatively 
superficial questions. Or rather, we must begin by studying 
her temperamental and psycho-physical endowment and con 
dition, and then the literary influences that stimulated and 
helped to mould these things, as though all this were not 
secondary and but the material and occasion of the forces and 
self-determinations to be considered later on. 

2. Defects of ancient psycho-physical theory. 

Now as to those temperamental and neural matters, to 
which this chapter shall be devoted, the reader will, no doubt 
long ago, have discovered that it is precisely here that not a 
little of the Vita e Dottrina is faded and withered beyond 
recall, or has even become positively repulsive to us. The 
constant assumption, and frequent explicit insistence, on the 
part of more or less all the contributors, upon the immediate 
and separate significance, indeed the directly miraculous 
character, of certain psycho-physical states states which, 
taken thus separately, would now be inevitably classed as 
most explicable neural abnormalities, all this atmosphere of 
nervous high-pitch and tremulousness has now become a 


4 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION 

matter demanding a difficult historical imagination and 
magnanimity, if we would be just to those who held such 
views, and would thus benefit to the full from these past 
positions and misconceptions. 

Thus when we read the views of perhaps all her educated 
attendants : " this condition, in which her body remained 
alive without food or medicine, was a supernatural thing " ; 
"her state was clearly understood to be supernatural when, 
in so short a time, so great a change was seen " ; and " she 
became yellow all over, a manifest sign that her humanity 
was being entirely consumed in the fire of divine love " : l 
we feel indeed that we can no more follow. And when we 
read, as part of one of the late additions, the worthless legends 
gathered from, or occasioned by, the uneducated Argentina : 
" in proof that she bore the stigmata within her, on putting 
her hands in a cup of cold water, the latter became so boiling 
hot that it greatly heated the very saucer beneath it " : 2 we 
are necessarily disgusted. And when, worst of all, she is 
made, by a demonstrable, probably double misinterpretation 
of an externally similar action, to burn her bare arm with a 
live charcoal or lighted candle, with intent to see which fire, 
this external one or that interior one of the divine love, were 
the greater : 3 we can, even if we have the good fortune of 
being able, by means of the critical analysis of the sources, to 
put this absurd story to the discredit of her eulogists, but feel 
the pathos of such well-meant perversity, which took so sure a 
way for rendering ridiculous one who, take her all in all, is so 
truly great. 4 

3. Slow growth of Neurology. 

We should, of course, be very patient in such matters : for 
psycho-physical knowledge was, as yet, in its very infancy, 
witness the all-important fact that the nerves were, in our 
modern sense of the term, still as unknown as they were to 
the whole of Graeco-Roman antiquity, with which " neuron " 
and "nervus" ever meant "muscle" or "ligament" and, deriva- 


1 Vita, pp. 143^ ; 149^, 159^; 153^ 2 Ibidt p&gt; 

3 Ibid. pp. 129,:, 134^. 

4 I have already traced the steps in the growth of this legend. It is no 
doubt this element in the biography which irritated John Wesley, the 
man of absolute judgments ; although he himself, with shrewd good 
sense, indicates its possible secondary origin. " I am sure this was a 
fool of a Saint ; that is, if it was not the folly of her historian, who has 
aggrandized her into a mere idiot " (Journal, ed. P. L. Parker, London. 
1903). 


PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 5 

tively, " energy," but never consciously what they now mean 
in the strict medical sense. Thus the Vita (1551) writes: 
" There remained no member or muscle (nervd) of her body 
that was not tormented by fire within it " ; " one rib was 
separated from the others, with great pains in the ligaments 
(nervi) and bones"; and "all her body was excruciated and 
her muscles (nervt) were tormented " : x where, in the first and 
last case, visible muscular convulsive movements are clearly 
meant. St. Teresa, in her own Life (1561 or 1562), writes: 
" Nervous pains, according to the physicians, are intolerable ; 
and all my nerves were shrunk " ; and " if the rapture lasts, 
all the nerves are made to feel it." : Even Fenelon (died 1715) 
can still write of the human body : " The bones sustain the 
flesh which envelops them ; the nerves " (ligaments, minor 
muscles) " which are stretched along them, constitute all their 
strength; and the muscles, by inflation and elongation at the 
points where the nerves are intertwined with them, produce 
the most precise and regular movements." 3 Here the soul 
acts directly upon the muscles, and, through these and their 
dependent ligaments, upon the bones and the flesh. 

4. Permanent values of the ancient theory. 

And yet that old position with regard to the rarer psycho- 
physical states has a right to our respectful and sympathetic 
study. 

For one thing, we are now coming again to recognize, more 
and more, how real and remarkable are certain psycho- 
physical states and facts, whether simply morbid or fruitfully 
utilized states, so long derided, by the bulk of Scientists, as 
mere childish legend or deliberate imposture ; and to see how 
natural, indeed inevitable it was, that these, at that time quite 
inexplicable, things should have been attributed to a direct 
and discontinuous kind of Divine intervention. We, on our 
part, have then to guard against the Philistinism both of the 
Rationalists and of the older Supernaturalists, and will neither 
measure our assent to facts by our ability to explain them, 
nor postulate the unmediated action of God wherever our 
powers of explanation fail us. On this point we have admir 
able models of sympathetic docility towards facts, in the 
works of Prof. Pierre Janet, in his medico-psychological 

1 Vita, pp. 127*:, 1430, 144$. 

2 Life, tr. by D. Lewis, London, ed. 1888, pp. 27, 420. 

3 Existence de Dieu, I, i, 31 : (Euvres, ed. Versailles, 1820, Vol. I, 
p. 51. 


6 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION 

investigations of present-day morbid cases ; of Hermann 
Gunkel and Heinrich Weinel, in their examination of mostly 
healthy psycho-physical phenomena in early Christian times 
and writings ; and of William James, in his study of instances 
of various kinds, both past and present. 1 

And next, these (at first sight physical) phenomena are 
turning out, more and more, to be the direct or indirect conse 
quence of the action of mind : no doubt, in the first instance, 
of the human mind, but still of mind, both free-willing and 
automatically operative. And at the same time this action 
is, more and more, seen to be limited and variously occasioned 
by the physical organism, and to be accompanied or followed, 
in a determinist fashion, by certain changes in that organism. 
Yet if we have now immeasurably more knowledge than men 
had, even fifty years ago, of this latter ceaselessly active, 
limiting, occasioning influence of the body upon the mind, we 
have also immeasurably more precise and numerous facts 
and knowledge in testimony of the all but boundless effect of 
mind over body. Here, again, Prof. Janet s writings, those 
of Alfred Binet, and the Dominican Pere Coconnier s very 
sensible book register a mass of material, although of the 
morbid type. 2 

And further, such remarkable peripheral states and 
phenomena are getting again to be rightly looked for in at 
least some types of unusual spiritual insight and power 
(although such states are found to be indicative, in exact 
proportion to the spiritual greatness of their subject, of a 
substantially different mental and moral condition of soul). 
Witness again the Unitarian Prof. James s Varieties, and the 
Church-Historical works of the Broad Lutheran German 
scholars Weinel, Bernouilli, and Duhm. 3 

And lastly, the very closeness with which modern experi 
mental and analytical psychology is exploring the phenomena 

1 Pierre Janet, Automatisme Psychologique, ed. 1903 ; Etat Metital 
des Hysteriques, i vols., 1892, 1893. Hermann Gunkel, Die Wirkungen 
des heiligen Geistes, Gottingen, 1899. Heinrich Weinel, Die Wirkungen 
des Geistes und der Geister, Freiburg, 1899. William James, The Varieties 
of Religious Experience, London, 1902. 

2 Pierre Janet, op. tit. Alfred Binet, Les Alterations de la Personnalite, 
Paris, 1902. M. Th. Coconnier, L Hypnotisme Franc, Paris, 1897. 

3 W. James, op. tit., especially pp. 1-25. H. Weinel, op. tit., especially 
pp. ^i 28- 1 37 ; 161-208. Bernouilli, Die Heilige7i der Merowinger, 
Tubingen, 1900, pp. 2-6. B. Duhm, Das Geheimniss in der Religion. 
Tubingen, 1896. 


PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 7 

of our consciousness is once more bringing into ever-clearer 
relief the irrepressible metaphysical apprehensions and 
affirmations involved and implied by the experience of every 
human mind, from its first dim apprehension in infancy of 
a "something," as yet undifferentiated by it into subjective 
and objective, up to its mature and reflective affirmation of 
the trans-subjective validity of its " positions," or at least of 
its negations pure scepticism turning out to be practically 
impossible. Here we have, with respect to that apprehension, 
such admirable workers as Henri Bergson in France, and 
Professors Henry Jones and James Ward in England ; and, 
for this affirmation, such striking thinkers as the French 
Maurice Blondel, and the Germans Johannes Volkelt and 
Hugo Miinsterberg. And Mgr. Mercier of Louvain, now 
Cardinal Mercier, has contributed some valuable criticism of 
certain points in these positions. 1 
5. Difficulties of this inquiry. 

Now here I am met at once by two special difficulties, the 
one personal to myself and to Catherine, and the other one of 
method. For, with regard to those three first sets of recent 
explorations of a psycho-physical kind, I am no physician at 
all, and not primarily a psychologist. And again, in Cathe 
rine s instance, the evidence as to her psycho-physical states is 
not, as with St. Teresa and some few other cases, furnished 
by writings from the pen of the very person who experienced 
them, and it is at all copious and precise only for the period 
when she was admittedly ill and physically incapacitated. 
And yet these last thirteen years of her life occupy a most 
prominent place in her biography ; it is during, and on 
occasion of, those psycho-physical states, and largely with 
the materials furnished by them, that, precisely in those 
years, she built up her noblest legacy, her great Purgatorial 
teaching ; the illness was (quite evidently) of a predominantly 
psychical type, and concerns more the psychologist than 
the physician, being closely connected with her particular 
temperament and type of spirituality, a temperament and 
type to be found again and again among the Saints. All this 

1 H. Bergson, Essai sur les Donne"es Imme diates de la Conscience, ed. 
1898. H.Jones, The Philosophy of Lotze, 1895. J. Ward, Naturalism 
and Agnosticism, 2 vols., 1899. M. Blondel, F Action, 1893. J. Volkelt, 
Kant s Erkenntnisstheorie, 1879; Erfahrung und Denken, 1886. H. 
Miinsterberg, Psychology and Life, 1899. D. Mercier Criteriologie 
Gdnerale, ed. 1900. 


8 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION 

and more makes it simply impossible for me to shrink from 
some study of the matter, and permits me to hope for some 
success in attempting, slowly and cautiously, to arrive at 
certain general conclusions of a spiritually important kind. 

But then there is also the difficulty of method. For if we 
b^gin the study of these psycho-physical peculiarities and 
states by judging them from the temperamental and psycho 
logical standpoint, we can hardly escape from treating them, 
at least for the moment, as self-explanatory, and hence from 
using these our preliminary conclusions about such neural 
phenomena as the measure, type, and explanation of and for 
all such other facts and apprehensions as our further study of 
the religious mind and experience may bring before us. In 
this wise, these our psychological conclusions would furnish 
not only a negative test and positive material, but also the 
exclusive standard for all further study. And such a pro 
cedure, until and unless it were justified in its method, would 
evidently be nothing but a surreptitious begging of the 
question. Yet to begin with the fullest analysis of the 
elenientary and normal phenomena of consciousness and of 
its implications and inviolable prerequisites, would too readily 
land us in metaphysics which have themselves to operate in 
and with those immediate and continuous experiences ; and 
hence these latter experiences, whether normal and healthy, 
or, as here, unusual and in part maladif, must be carefully 
studied first. We have, however, to guard most cautiously 
against our allowing this, our preliminary, analysis and descrip 
tion of psycho-physical states from imperceptibly blocking 
the way to, or occupying the ground of, our ultimate analysis 
and metaphysical synthesis and explanation. Only this 
latter will be able, by a final movement from within-outwards, 
to show the true place and worth of the more or less pheno 
menal series, passed by us in review on our previous move 
ment from outside-inwards. 

6. Threefold division. 

I propose, then, in this chapter, to take, as separately as is 
compatible with such a method, the temperamental, psycho- 
physical side of Catherine s life. I shall first take those last 
thirteen years of admitted illness, as those which are alone at 
all fully known to us by contemporary evidence. I shall then 
make a jump back to her first period, to the first sixteen 
years up to her marriage, with the next ten years of relaxa 
tion, and the following four years of her conversion and 


PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 9 

active penitence. I take these next, because, of these thirty 
years, we have her own late memories, as registered for us 
by her disciples, at the time of her narration of the facts 
concerned. And only then, with these materials and instru 
ments thus gathered from after and before, shall I try to 
master the (for us very obscure) middle period, and to arrive 
at some estimate of her temperamental peripheral condition 
during these twenty years of her fullest expansion. I shall 
conclude the chapter by taking Catherine in her general, life 
long temperament, and by comparing and contrasting this 
type and modality of spiritual character and apprehension 
with the other rival forms of, and approaches to, religious 
truth and goodness as these are furnished for us by history. 

The ultimate metaphysical questions and valuation are 
reserved for the penultimate chapter of my book. 


I. CATHERINE S THIRD PERIOD, 1497 TO 

I. Increasing illness of Catherine s last years. 

Beginning with her third and last period (1497-1510), there 
can be no doubt that throughout it she was ill and increasingly 
so. Her closest friends and observers attest it. It is pre 
sumably Ettore Vernazza who tells us, for 1497, " when she 
was about fifty years of age, she ceased to be able to attend 
either to the Hospital or to her own house, owing to her great 
bodily weakness. Even on Fast-days she was obliged, after 
Holy Communion, to take some food to sustain her strength." 
Probably Marabotto it is who tells us that, in 1499, "after 
twenty-five years she could no further bear her spiritual 
loneliness, either because of old age or because of her great 
bodily weakness."- We hear from a later Redactor that, 
"about nine years before her death (i.e. about 1501), there 
came to her an infirmity." And then, especially from November 
1509, May 1510, and August 1510 onwards, she is declared 
and described as more and more ill. 1 Indeed she herself, both 
by her acts and by her words, emphatically admits her 
incapacitation. For it is clearly ill-health which drives her to 
abandon the Matronship and even all minor continuous work 
for the Hospital. In her Wills we find indeed that, as late as 

1 Vita, pp. 96^; 117^; 127*3; 97^, 133^ (dated November 11, 1509, in 
MSS.); 146^; 1480. 


io THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION 

May 21, 1506, she was able to get to the neighbouring 
Hospital for Incurables ; and that even on November 27, 
1508 she was "healthy in mind and body." But her Codicil 
of January 5, 1503, was drawn up in the presence of nine 
witnesses at midnight, a sure sign of some acute ill-health. 
Indeed already on July 23, 1484, she is lying " infirm in bed, 
in her room in the Women s quarter of the Hospital, oppressed 
with bodily infirmity." 

2. Abnormal sensations, impressions and moods. 

Her attendants are all puzzled by the multitude and 
intensity, the mobility and the self-contradictory character 
of the psycho-physical manifestations. Perhaps already before 
1497 "she would press thorny rose-twigs in both her hands, 
and this without any pain" ; and so late as about three weeks 
before her death " she remained paralyzed (manca)" and no 
doubt anaesthetic " in one (the right) hand and in one finger of 
the other hand." Probably again before 1497 " her body could 
not/ at times, " be moved from the sitting posture without the 
application of force." In February or March 1510 " she could 
not move out of her bed " ; in August, " on some occasions 
she could not move the lips or the tongue, or the arms or legs, 
unless helped to do so, especially on the left side, and this 
would, at times, last three or four hours." In December 1509 
"she suffered from great cold," as part of her peculiar con 
dition ; on September 4, 1510, "she suffered from great cold 
in the right arm." 2 

On other occasions she is, on the contrary, intensely hyper- 
aesthetic. Some time in February or March 1510, " for a day 
and a night, her flesh could not be touched, because of the 
great pain that such touching caused her." At the end of 
August " she was so sensitive, that it was impossible to touch 
her very bedclothes or the bedstead, or a single hair on her 
head, because in such case she would cry out as though she 
had been grievously wounded." These states seem to have 

1 From my authenticated copies of the original wills in the Archivio di 
Stato, Genoa. 

2 Vita, pp. 113^, 149^; 143*5, 152^; 138^, 1550:. Note the parallels in 
St. Teresa s Life, written by herself, tr. D. Lewis, ed. 1888. P. 234 : " When 
these (spiritual) impetuosities are not very violent, the soul seeks relief 
through certain penances ; the painfulness of which, and even the shedding 
of blood, are no more felt than if the body were dead." P. 30 : " I was 
unable to move either arm or foot, or hand or head, unless others moved 
me. I could move, however, I think, one finger of my right hand." P. 31 : 
" I was paralytic, though getting better, for about three years." 


PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 11 

been usually accompanied by sensations of great heat : for 
on the former occasion "she seemed like a creature placed 
in a great flame of fire " ; whilst on the latter " she had her 
tongue and lips so inflamed, that they seemed as though 
actual fire." 

And movement appears to have been more often increased 
than diminished. In the last case indeed " she did not move 
nor speak nor see ; but, when thus immovable, she suffered 
more than when she could cry out and turn about in her bed. 1 
But in the former instance "she could not be kept in bed" ; 
and in April 1510 "she cried aloud, and could not keep 
herself from moving about, on her bed, on hands and feet." 
There are curious localizations of apparently automatic move 
ments. During an attack somewhere in March 1510" her flesh 
was all in a tremble, particularly the right shoulder" ; on later 
occasions "an arm, a leg, a hand would tremble, and she 
would seem to have a spasm within her, with all-but-unbroken 
acute pains in the flanks, the shoulders, the abdomen, the 
feet and the brain." On an earlier occasion " her body 
writhed in great distress." On another day " she seemed all 
on fire and lost her power of speech, and made signs with her 
head and hands." On one day in February or March 1510 
" she lost both speech and sight, though not her intelligence " ; 
and on September 12 "her sight was so weak, that she could 
hardly any further distinguish or recognize her attendants." 
The heat is liable to be curiously localized. Early in 
September 1510 "she had a great heat situated in and on 
her left ear, which lasted for three hours ; the ear was red and 
felt very hot to the touch of others." 

Various kinds of haemorrhage are not uncommon. On the 
last-mentioned occasion bloody urine is passed ; bleeding of 
the nose, with loss of bile, occurs in December 1509; very 
black blood is lost by the mouth, whilst black spots appear all 
over her person, on September 12, 1510; and more blood is 
evacuated on the following day. In February or March 1510 
" there were in her flesh certain places which had become 
concave, like as paste looks where a finger has been put into 
it." At the end of August 1510 "her skin became safifron- 
yellow all over." 

Troubles of breathing and of heart-action are frequently 
acute. Somewhere about March 1510 " she had such a spasm 
in her throat and mouth as to be unable, for about an hour, to 
speak or to open her eyes, and that she could hardly regain 


12 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION 

her breath." " Cupping-glasses were applied to her side, to 
ease her heart, and lung-action, but with little effect." On 
one occasion " she made signs indicative of feeling as though 
burning pincers were seizing her heart"; and on a day soon 
after "she felt like a hard nail at her heart." 1 

Disturbances of the power of swallowing and of nutrition 
are often grave and sudden, and in curious contradiction to 
her abnormally acute and shifting longing for and revulsion 
from certain specific kinds of food. On August 22, 1510, 
" she was so thirsty that she felt as though she could drink 
up the very ocean " ; " yet she could not," in fact, " manage to 
swallow even one little drop of water." On September 10 
"her attendants continuously gave her drinking water; but 
she would straightway return it from her mouth." And on 
September 12, "whilst her mouth was being bathed, she 
exclaimed, I am suffocating/ and this because a drop of 
water had trickled down her throat a drop which she was 
unable to gulp down." And on a day in August " she saw a 
melon and had a great desire to eat it ; but hardly did she 
have some of it in her mouth, when she rejected it with 
intense disgust." So too with odours. A little later, " on 
one day the smell of wine would please her, and she would 
bathe her hands and face in it with great relish ; and next 
day she would so much dislike it, that she could not bear to 
see or smell it in her room." And so too with colours. On 
September 2 " a physician-friend came to visit her in his 
scarlet robes ; and she bore the sight a little, so as not to pain 
him." But she then declared that she could no longer bear 
it ; and he went, and returned to her in his ordinary black 

1 Hyper-aesthesia and sensation of heat : Vita, pp. 142^, I53#. Increase 
of movement : ibid, and pp. 145^, 143^, 153^, 141^. Loss of speech and 
sight: pp. 141^, 141^, i59&lt;:. Localization of heat: p. 157^. Haemor 
rhages: 138*:, I59&lt;r, i6oa. Concavities and jaundice: pp. 1440, 1530. 
Spasms : pp. 143*:, 71^ 141?, 1426. Cf. St. Teresa, Ipc. cit. p. 30 : "As to 
touching me, that was impossible, for I was so bruised that I could not 
endure it. They used to move me in a sheet, one holding one end, and 
another the other." P. 31 : "I began to crawl on my hands and feet." 
P. 263 : " I felt myself on fire : this inward fire and despair ..." P. 17: 
" The fainting fits began to be more frequent ; and my heart was so 
seriously affected, that those who saw it were alarmed." P. 27 : " It 
seemed to me as if my heart had been seized by sharp teeth." P. 235 : "I 
saw, in the Angel s hand, a long spear of gold, and at the iron s point 
there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at 
times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails. . . . The pain is not 
bodily, but spiritual." 


PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 13 

habit. And yet we have seen, from the Inventory of her 
effects, that she loved to have vermilion colour upon her bed 
and person. 1 

And her emotional moods are analogously intense and 
rapidly shifting. In the spring of 1510 "she cried aloud 
because of the great pain : this attack lasted a day and a 
night"; in the night of August 10 "she tossed about with 
many exclamations " ; and at the beginning of September 
"she cried out with a loud voice." At other times, she 
laughs for joy. So at the end of April "she would laugh 
without speaking " ; on August 1 1 " she fixed her eyes 
steadily on the ceiling ; and for about an hour she abode all 
but immovable, and spoke not, but kept laughing in a very 
joyous fashion"; on August 17 great interior jubilation 
" expressed itself in merry laughter " ; and on the evening of 
September 7 "her joy appeared exteriorly in laughter which 
lasted, with but small interruptions, for some two hours." And 
her entire apparent condition would shift from one such 
extreme to the other with extraordinary swiftness. In the 
autumn of 1 509 " she many times remained as though dead ; 
and at other times she would appear as healthy, as though 
she had never had anything the matter with her." Already in 
December 1509 she herself, after much vomiting and loss of 
blood, had sent for her Confessor and had declared that " she 
felt as though she must die in consequence of these many 
accidents." Yet even on September 10, 1510, "when she was 
not being oppressed and tormented by her accidents (attacks), 
she seemed to be in good health ; but when she was being 
suffocated by them, she seemed as one dead." 2 

1 Swallow: Vita, pp. 149^, 150^; 159^; 159^; 1500. Odours and 
colours : 153^, 154^. Cf. St. Teresa, loc. cit. p. 27: " I could eat nothing 
whatever, only drink. I had a great loathing for food." P. 43 : " I have 
been suffering for twenty years from sickness every morning." P. 30 : 

" There was a choking in my throat. ... I could not swallow even a 
drop of water." P. 263 : " A sense of oppression, of stifling." 

2 Exclamations: Vita, pp. 144^, 148^, 155^. Laughter: ibid. I45&lt;r, 


, 149^, I57&lt;r. Sudden changes of condition : 135^, 138*:, 159^. Cf. St. 
Teresa, loc. cit. pp. 28, 29: " That very night," Feast of the Assumption, 1 537, 
"my sickness became so acute that, for about four days, I remained insen 
sible. For a day and a half the grave was open, waiting for my body. 
But it pleased Our Lord I should come to myself. I wished to go to 
confession at once. Though my sufferings were unendurable, and my 
perceptions dull, yet my confession was, I believe, complete. I communi 
cated with many tears." 


i 4 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION 


II. CONCLUSIONS CONCERNING CATHERINE S PSYCHO- 
PHYSICAL CONDITION DURING THIS LAST PERIOD. 

I. 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." x 

For and these two further points are of primary import 
ance 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 ; 

1 Vita, pp. 71,:; 145^; 147^; 159^, 159^; 127,2. Cf. St. Teresa, loc. 
cit. p. 23 : "I was in my sister s house, for the purpose of undergoing 
medical treatment they took the utmost care of my comfort." P. 27 : 
" In two months, so strong were the medicines, my life was nearly worn 
out." "The physicians gave me up : they said I was consumptive." 


PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 15 

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 some 
times. 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 dis 
tinctly 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 exist 
ence 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 : " 1 am sorry if any one is scandal 
ized because of me ; and I am ready to use any remedy for 
my infirmity, supposing that it can be found." x 

1 Self-knowledge as to "quietudes": Vita, pp. 153^, 157*2. Marabotto s 
attitude: 139^; 141*:, 143^, 149^. Relations with Boerio: 147^, 147^. 
Cf. St. Teresa, loc. tit. p. 86 : " My health has been much better since I 
have ceased to look after my ease and comforts." 


16 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION 

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 extra 
ordinary 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 1 509, 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 her 
self 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 n 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." x 

1 Remark to Vernazza : Vita, pp. 98^, gga. Persistence of intelligence : 
14IC-, 159$, c ; I43 ; 143*: ; 145^. Cf. St. Teresa, loc. tit. p. 408 : " She " 


PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 17 

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 trans 
lating 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 ex 
cessive 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 (repre 
sents) 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 im 
pression 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 

(Teresa herself) " never saw anything with her bodily eyes, nor heard 
anything with her bodily ears." P. 189 : " The words of the divine locu 
tions are very distinctly formed; but by the bodily ear they are not 
heard." P. 191 : " In ecstasy, the memory can hardly do anything at all, 
and the imagination is, as it were, suspended." P. 142: " You see and feel 
yourself carried away, you know not whither." P. 187: "I fell into a 
trance ; I was carried out of myself. It was most plain." 

VOL. II. C 


IS THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION 

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. 1 

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 

1 Picture: Vita, p. 13 ^a. Red and black robes: 154^, 156^. Suggestions 
of odour : 1 1 8&lt;r, 1 1 ga ; gc^ 8&lt;z, 9^. Cf. St. Teresa, loc, cit. pp. 57, 58 : " One 
day, I saw a picture of Christ most grievously wounded : the very sight of 
it moved me. 3 P. 247 : " I used to pray much to Our Lord for that living 
water of which He spoke to the Samaritan woman : I had always a 
picture of it with this inscription : Domine, da mihi aquam. " P. 231: 
" Once when I was holding in my hand the cross of my rosary, He took 
it from me into His own hand. He returned it; but it was then four 
large stones incomparably more precious than diamonds : the five wounds 
were delineated on them with the most admirable art. He said to me 
that for the future that cross would appear so to me always, and so it did. 
The precious stones were seen, however, only by myself" 


PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 19 

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 u 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 " (assaltd], " 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 1 ; 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 


20 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION 

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." 1 

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 ap 
parently unuseable, hysteriform impressions, I can, even dur 
ing the last days of these nine years of admitted infirmity, 
find but two clear instances, instances which, by their very 


1 Synchronisms: Vita^ pp. 148^; i5o&lt;5; 1520, 160*:, i6i. Communion 
and ordinary food : 1540, 154^, 138^ ; 154^. Heats : " Assalto," e.g. 138^, 
c ; 1430, c ; " ferita 53 and " saetta," e.g. 141*2, c \ 1450. Their localization : 
1350, 141^; 153^ ; 1420, 158*2. Their psycho-physical character : 135^, 
I44& Thirst and its suggestion : 14% 159^ ; ?6c ; 152^, 135^. Paralyses : 
I34&lt;$ ; 149^. Cf. St. Teresa, op. cit. p. 28: her death-swoon occurs on 
evening of the Assumption. P. 235 : Heat, piercing of the heart as by a 
spear, and a spiritual (not bodily) pain, are all united in the experience of 
the heart-piercing Angel. P. 423 : " Another prayer very common is a 
certain kind of wounding; for it really seems to the soul as if an arrow 
were thrust through the heart or through itself. The suffering is not one 
of sense, nor is the wound physical ; it is in the interior of the soul." 


PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 21 

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 n, 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 I3th, "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." l 

Here we have, I think, the only two merely factual, un- 
suggestive, ^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 Jclear case of organic disease or 
lesion to be found anywhere in the life. 


1 Vita, pp. i5&* ; i6oa. Cf. St. Teresa, op. cit. p. 41: " We saw some 
thing like a great toad crawling towards us ... The impression it made 
on me was such, that I think it must have had a meaning." Contrast with 
this naively sensible sight and the absence of all interior assurance, such 
a spiritual vision as " Christ stood before me, stern and grave. I saw Him 
with the eyes of the soul. The impression remained with me that the 
vision was from God, and not an imagination" (pp. 40, 41). Another 
quasi-sensible sight, with no interior assurance, or question as to its 
provenance and value, is given on pp. 248, 249 : " Once 1 Satan, in an 
abominable shape, appeared on my left hand. I looked at his mouth in 
particular, because he spoke, and it was horrible. A huge flame seemed 
to issue out of his body, perfectly bright without any shadow." Another 
such impression is recorded on p. 252 : " I thought the evil spirits would 
have suffocated me one night ... I saw a great troop of them rush away 
as if tumbling over a precipice." 


22 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION 


III. CATHERINE S PSYCHO-PHYSICAL CONDITION, ITS 
LIKENESS AND UNLIKENESS TO HYSTERIA. 

Only by a quite unfair magnifying or multiplying of the 
two incidents just described could we come to hold, with Mr. 
Baring-Gould, that Catherine was simply a sufferer from 
hysteria, and that the Roman Church did well to canonize her 
on the ground of her having, in spite of this malady, managed 
to achieve much useful work amongst the sick and poor. 1 
Here we shall do well to consider three groups of facts. 

I. Misapprehensions as to hysteria. 

The first group gives the reasons why we should try and get 
rid of the terror and horror still so often felt in connection 
with the very name of this malady. This now quite demon- 
strably excessive, indeed largely mythical, connotation of the 
term springs from four causes. 

First, the very name still tends to suggest, as the causes or 
conditions of the malady, things fit only for discussion in 
medical reviews. But then, ever since 1855, all limitation to, 
or special connection with, anything peculiarly female, or 
indeed generally sexual, has been increasingly shown to be 
false, until now no serious authority on the matter can be 
found to espouse the old view. The malady is now well 
known to attack men as well as women, and to have no 
special relation to things of sex at all. 2 

Next, probably as a consequence from the initial error, 
this disorder was supposed to predominantly come from, or to 
lead to, moral impurity, or at least to be ordinarily accom 
panied by strong erotic propensions. But here the now care 
fully observed facts are imperatively hostile : of the 120 living 
cases most carefully studied by Prof. Janet, only four showed 
the predominance of any such tendencies, a proportion 
undoubtedly not above the percentage to be found amongst 
non-hysterical persons. 3 

And again, the term was long synonymous with untruthful- 
ness and deceit. But here again Prof. Janet shows how 
unfounded is this prejudice, since it but springs from the mis- 

1 Lives of the Saints, ed. 1898, Vol. X, September 15. 

2 Pierre Janet, Etat Mental des Hysteriques, 2 vols., Paris, 1892, 1894 : 
Vol. II, pp. 260, 261 ; 280 ; Vol. I, pp. 225, 63. 

3 Ibid. Vol. I, pp. 63, 225, 226. 


PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 23 

placed promptitude with which the earlier observers refused 
to believe what they had not as yet sufficiently examined 
and could not at all explain, and from the malady being itself 
equivalent to a more or less extensive breaking-up of the 
normal inter-connection between the several, successive or 
simultaneous states, and, as it were, layers of the one person 
ality. He is convinced that real untruthfulness is no com 
moner among such patients than it is among healthy 
persons. 1 

And, finally, it is no doubt felt that, apart from all such 
specifically moral suspicions, the malady involves all kinds of 
fancies and inaccuracies of feeling and of perception, and that 
it frequently passes into downright insanity. And this is no 
doubt the one objection which does retain some of its old 
cogency. Still, it is well to note that, as has now been fully 
established, the elements of the human mind are and remain 
the same throughout the whole range of its conditions, from 
the sanest to the maddest, whilst only their proportion and 
admixture, and the presence or absence and the kind of 
synthesis necessary to hold them together differentiate these 
various states of mind. In true insanity there is no such 
synthesis ; in hysteria the synthesis, however slight and 
peculiar, is always still traceable throughout the widespread 
disgregation of the elements and states. 2 And it is this 
very persistence of the fundamental unity, together with 
the strikingly different combination and considerable disag- 
gregation of its elements, that makes the study of hysteria 
so fruitful for the knowledge of the fully healthy mind and of 
its unity ; whilst the continuance of all the elements of the 
normal intelligence, even in insanity, readily explains why it 
is apparently so easy to see insanity everywhere, and to treat 
genius and sanctity as but so much degeneracy. 

2. Hysteriform phenomena observable in Catherine s case. 
The second group of facts consists in the phenomena which, 
in Catherine s case, are like or identical to what is observable 
in cases of hysteria. 

There is, perhaps above all else, the anaesthetic condition, 
which was presumably co-extensive with her paralytic states. 
" Anaesthesia," says Prof. Janet, " can be considered as the 
type of the other symptoms of hysteria ; it exists in the great 
majority of cases, it is thoroughly characteristic of the malady. 

1 Pierre Janet, Etat Mental^ Vol. I, pp. 226, 227. 

2 Ibid. Vol. II, pp. 253, 257. 


24 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION 

In its most frequent localization (semi-anaesthesia) it affects 
one of the lateral halves of the body, and this half is usually 
the left side." Or, " a finger or hand will be affected." Such 
" insensibility can be very frequent and very profound "; but 
" it disappears suddenly " and even " varies from one moment 
to another." 1 

Then there is the corresponding counter-phenomenon of 
hyper-aesthesia. " The slightest contact provokes great pains, 
exclamations, and spasms. The painful zones have their seat 
mostly on the abdomen or on the hips." And " sensation in 
these states is not painful in itself, by its own intensity, but by 
its quality, its characteristics ; it has become the signal, by 
association of ideas, for the production of a set of extremely 
painful phenomena." So, with the colour-sense : " one patient 
adores the colour red, and sees in its dullest shade sparkling 
rays which penetrate to her very heart and warm her through 
and through. " But "another one finds this a repulsive 
colour and one capable of producing nausea/ " And similarly 
with the senses of taste and odour. 2 

Then, too, the inability to stand or walk, with the conserva 
tion, at times, of the power to crawl; the acceptance, followed 
by the rejection, of food, because of certain spasms in the 
throat or stomach, and the curious, mentally explicable, 
exceptions to this incapacity ; the sense, even at other times, 
of strangulation ; heart palpitations, fever heats, strange 
haemorrhages from the stomach or even from the lung ; red 
patches on the skin and emotional jaundice all over it, and 
one or two other peculiarities. 3 

Then, as to a particular kind of quietude, from which 
Catherine warns her attendants to rouse her, we find a 
patient who "ceases her reading, without showing any sign 
of doing so. She gets taken to be profoundly attentive ; it is, 
however, but one of her attacks of fixity/ And she has 
promptly to be shaken out of this state, or, in a few minutes, 
there will be no getting her out of it." 

As to Catherine s consciousness of possessing an extra 
ordinary fineness of discrimination between sensibly identical 

1 Pierre Janet, Etat Mental, Vol. I, pp. 7, 8, u, 12, 57, 21. 

2 Ibid. Vol. II, pp. 82, 91; 70, 71. 

3 Ibid. Vol. II. Troubles of movement, pp. 105, 106 ; of nutrition, pp. 285, 
70, 71 ; strangulation, heart palpitation, fever heats, p. 282 ; haemorrhages 
and red patches, p. 283 ; jaundice (ictere emotionne^ p. 287 ; and note the 
" ischurie, 5 p. 283, top, compared with Vita, p. i2a. 


PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 25 

objects, we see that "if one points out, to some of these 
patients, an imaginary portrait upon a plain white card, and 
mixes this card with other similar ones, they will almost 
always find again the portrait on the same card." And 
similarly as to her attaching a particular quasi-sensible 
perception to Marabotto s hand alone, we find that, if M. 
Janet touches Leonie s hand, he having suggested a nosegay 
to her, she will henceforth, when he touches the hand, see that 
nosegay ; whereas, if another person touches that same hand, 
Leonie will see nothing special. 

As to Catherine s feelings of criminality and of being 
already dead, M. Janet quotes M., who says, " I am like a 
criminal about to be punished"; and R., who declares, "It 
seems to me that I am dead." As to the hallucination of a 
Beast, Marcelle suffers from the same impression. 1 

And, perhaps the most important of all these surface- 
resemblances, there is Catherine s apparent freedom from all 
emotion at the deaths of her brothers and sister, and her 
extraordinary dependence upon, and claimfulness towards, 
her Confessor alone. " These patients rapidly lose the social 
feelings : Berthe, who for some time preserved some affection 
for her brother, ends by losing all interest in him ; Marcelle, 
at the very beginning of her illness, separates herself from 
every one." " It is always their own personality which domin 
ates their thoughts." Yet these patients have " an extra 
ordinary attachment to their physician. For him they are 
resolved to do all things. In return, they are extremely 
exacting, he is to occupy himself entirely with each one 
alone. Only a very superficial observer would ascribe this 
feeling to a vulgar source." 2 

3. Catherine s personality not disintegrated. 

But a third group of facts clearly differentiates Catherine s 
case, even in these years of avowed ill-health, from such 
patients ; and these facts become clearer and more numerous 
in precise proportion as we move away from peripheral, 
psycho-physical phenomena and mechanisms, and dwell upon 
her practically unbroken mental and moral characteristics, 
and upon the use and meaning, the place and context of 
these things within her ample life. 

For as to her relations with her attendants, even now it 
is still she who leads, who suggests, who influences ; a strong 

1 Pierre Janet, Etat Mental, Vol. I, p. 140 ; Vol. II, pp. 14, 72, 165. 

2 Ibid. Vol. I, pp. 218, 219; 158, 159. 


26 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION 

and self-consistent will shows itself still, under all this shifting 
psycho-physical surface. Thus Don Marabotto now adminis 
ters, it is true, all her money and charitable affairs for her. 
But it is she who insists, alone and unaided, upon the true 
spiritual function of that impression of odour on his hand. 
Vernazza, no doubt, has now to help her in the fight against 
subtle scruples, on occasion of her deepest depressions. But 
her far more frequent times of light and joy are in nowise 
occasions of a simply subjective self-engrossment or of a 
purely psycho-physical interest, for her mind is absorbed if 
in but a few, yet in inexhaustibly fruitful and universally 
applicable ideas and experiences of a spiritual kind, such 
as helped to urge this friend on to his world-renewing 
impulses and determinations. Her closest relations and 
friends, one must admit, succeed by their action, taken 
eighteen months and then again two days before her death, 
in getting her to desist from ordering her burial by the side 
of her husband. But we have seen, in the one case, how 
indirectly, and, in the other case, how suddenly and even then 
quite informally, they had to gain their point. Her attend 
ants in general, and Marabotto in particular, certainly paid 
her an engrossed attention, and the all but endlessness of her 
superficial fancies and requirements have been chronicled by 
them with a naive and wearisome fulness. But then she 
herself is well aware that, had they but the requisite know 
ledge as to how and when to apply them, some sturdy 
opposition and a greater roughness of handling would, on 
their part, be of the greatest use to her, in this her psychical 
infirmity ; indeed her shutting herself away from Marabotto, 
as late as January 1510, is directly caused by her sense and 
fear of being spoilt by him. 

It is true again that, already in 1502, we hear, in a probably 
exaggerated but still possibly semi-authentic account, of her 
indifference of feeling with regard to the deaths of two 
brothers and of her only sister; and that, from January 1510 
onwards, she gradually excludes all her attendants from her 
sick-room, with, eventually, the sole exceptions of Marabotto 
or Carenzio and Argentina. But her Wills show conclusively 
how persistent were her detailed interest in, and dispositions 
for, the requirements of her surviving brother, nephews, and 
nieces ; of poor Thobia and the girl s hidden mother ; of her 
priest-attendants, and of each and all of her humblest 
domestics ; of the natives in the far-away Greek Island of 


PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 27 

Scios; and, above all, of the Hospital and its great work 
which she had ever loved so well. 

We have indeed found two cases, both from within the last 
week of her life, of mentally opaque and spiritually un- 
suggestive and unutilized impressions which are truly 
analogous to those characteristic of hysteria. But we have 
also seen how forcibly these two solitary cases bring out, by 
contrast, the spiritual transparency and fruitfulness of her 
usual, finely reflective picturings of these last years. For 
here it is her own deliberate and spiritual mind which joyously 
greets, and straightway utilizes and transcends, the psycho- 
physical occurrences ; and it does so, not because these 
occurrences are, or are taken to be, the causes or requisites 
or objects of her faith and spiritual insight, but because, on 
the contrary, they meet and clothe an already exuberant faith 
and insight spiritual certainties derived from quite another 
source. 

And finally, if the monotony and superficial pettiness of 
the sick-room can easily pall upon us, especially when 
presented with the credulities and hectic exaggerations which 
disfigure so much of the Vitas description of it ; we must, in 
justice, as I have attempted to do in my seventh and eighth 
chapters, count in, as part of her biography, her deep affection 
for and persistent influence with Ettore and Battista Vernazza, 
and the exemplification of her doctrine by these virile souls, 
makers of history in the wide, varied world of men. 1 

In a word, it is plain at once that, given the necessarily 
limited number of ways in which the psycho-physical 
organism reacts under mental stimulations, certain neural 
phenomena may, in any two cases, be, in themselves, perfectly 
similar, although their respective mental causes or occasions 
may be as different, each from the other, as the Moonlight 
Sonata of Beethoven, or the working out of the Law of 
Gravitation by Newton, or the elaboration of the implications 
of the Categorical Imperative by Kant, are different from the 
sudden jumping of a live mouse in the face of an hysterically- 
disposed young woman, or as the various causes of tears and 
laughter throughout the whole world. 

1 The biographical chapters of Volume I give all the facts and 
references alluded to in this paragraph. It would be easy to find parallels 
for most of these peripheral disturbances and great central normalities 
in St. Teresa s life. 


28 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION 


IV. FIRST PERIOD OF CATHERINE S LIFE, 1447 TO 1477, 
IN ITS THREE STAGES. 

If we next go back to the first period of her life, in its 
three stages of the sixteen years of her girlhood, 1447-1463, 
the first ten years of her married life, 1463-1473, and the 
four years of her Conversion and active Penitence, 1473-1477, 
we shall find, I think, in the matter of temperament and 
psycho-physical conditions, little or nothing but a rare degree 
of spiritual sensitiveness, and an extraordinary close-knitted- 
ness of body and mind. 

I . From her childhood to her conversion. 

Thus, already in her early childhood, that picture of the 
Pieta seems to have suggested religious ideas and feelings 
with the suddenness and emotional solidity of a physical 
seizure an impression still undimmed when she herself 
recounted it, some fifty years later, to her two intimates. It 
is true that during those first, deeply unhappy ten years of 
marriage, we cannot readily find more than indications of a 
most profound and brooding melancholy, the apparent result 
of but two factors, a naturally sad disposition and acutely 
painful domestic circumstances. Yet it is clear, from the 
sequel, that more and other things lay behind. It is indeed 
evident that she possessed a congenitally melancholy tempera 
ment ; that nothing but the rarest combination of conditions 
could have brought out, into something like elastic play and 
varied exercise, her great but few and naturally excessive 
qualities of mind and heart ; that these conditions were not 
only absent, but were replaced by circumstances of the 
most painful kind ; and that she will hardly, at this time, 
have had even a moment s clear consciousness of any 
other sources than just those conditions for her deep, keen, 
and ever-increasing dissatisfaction with all things, her own 
self included : all peace and joy, the very capacity for either 
seemed gone, and gone for ever. But it is only the third 
stage, with its sudden-seeming conversion on March 20, 
1473, an d the then following four years of strenuously active 
self-immolation and dedication to the humblest service ot 
others, which lets us see deep into those previous years of 
sullen gloom and apparently hopeless drift and dreary 
wastage. 


PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 29 

The two stages really belong to one another, and the depth 
of the former gloom and dreariness stood in direct proportion 
and relation to the capacities of that nature and to the height 
of their satisfaction in the later light and vigour brought to 
and assimilated by them. It was the sense, at that previous 
time still inarticulate, but none the less mightily operative, of 
the insufficiency of all things merely contingent, of all things 
taken as such and inevitably found to be such, that had been 
adding, and was now discovered to have added, a quite deter 
mining weight and poignancy to the natural pressure of her 
temperament and external lot. And this temperament and 
lot, which had not alone produced that sadness, could still less 
of themselves remove it, whatever might be its cause. Her 
sense of emptiness and impotence could indeed add to her 
sense of fulness and of power, once these latter had come ; 
but of themselves the former could no more give her the 
latter, than hunger, which indeed makes bread to taste deli 
cious, can give us real bread and, with it, that delight. 

And it was such real bread of life and real power which 
now came to her. For if the tests of reality in such things 
are their persistence and large and rich spiritual applic 
ability and fruitfulness, then something profoundly real and 
important took place in the soul of that sad and weary 
woman of six-and-twenty, within that Convent-chapel, at that 
Annunciation-tide. Her four years of heroic persistence ; 
her unbroken Hospital service of a quarter of a century ; her 
lofty magnanimity towards her husband, Thobia and Thobia s 
mother ; her profound influence upon Vernazza, in urging 
him on to his splendid labours throughout Italy, and to his 
grand death in plague-stricken Genoa ; her daringly original, 
yet immensely persuasive, doctrine, nearly all this dates back, 
completely for her consciousness and very largely in reality, 
to those few moments on that memorable day. 

2. Her conversion not sudden nor visionary. 

But two points, concerning the manner and form of this 
experience, are, though of but secondary spiritual interest, far 
more difficult to decide. There is, for one thing, the indubit 
able impression, for her own fciind and for ours, of complete 
suddenness and newness in her change. Was this suddenness 
and newness merely apparent, or real as well ? And should 
this suddenness, if real, be taken as in itself and directly 
supernatural ? 

Now it is certain that Catherine, up to ten years before, 


30 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION 

had been full of definitely religious acts and dispositions. 
Had she not, already at thirteen, wanted to be a Nun, and, at 
eight or so, been deeply moved by a picture of the dead 
Christ in His Mother s lap ? Hence, ideas and feelings of 
self-dedication and of the Christ-God s hatred of sin and love 
for her had, in earlier and during longer times than those of 

o o 

her comparative carelessness, soaked into and formed her 
mental and emotional bent, and will have in so far shaped 
her will, as to make the later determination along those earlier 
lines of its operation, comparatively easy, even after those 
years of relaxation and deviation. Yet it is clear that there 
was not here, as indeed there is nowhere, any mere repetition 
of the past. New combinations and an indefinitely deeper 
apprehension of the great religious ideas and facts of God s 
holiness and man s weakness, of the necessity for the soul to 
reach its own true depth or to suffer fruitlessly, and of God 
having Himself to meet and feed this movement and hunger 
which He has Himself implanted ; new combinations and 
depths of emotion, and an indefinite expansion and heroic 
determination of the will : were all certainly here, and were 
new as compared with even the most religious moments in 
the past. 

As to the suddenness, we cannot but take it as, in large part, 
simply apparent, a dim apprehension of what then became 
clear having been previously quite oppressively with her. 
And, in any case, this suddenness seems to belong rather to 
the temperamental peculiarities and necessary forms of her 
particular experiences than to the essence and content of her 
spiritual life. For, whatever she thinks, feels, says or does 
throughout her life, she does and experiences with actual 
suddenness, or at least with a sense of suddenness ; and there 
is clearly no more necessary connection between such sud 
denness and grace and true self-renouncement, than there 
is between gradualness and mere nature ; both suddenness 
and gradualness being but simple modes, more or less fixed 
for each individual, yet differing from each to each, modes in 
which God s grace and man s will interact and manifest 
themselves in different souls. 1 

And then there is the question as to whether or not this 

1 Prof. W. James has got some very sensible considerations on 
the pace of a conversion (as distinct from its spiritual significance, depth, 
persistence, and fruitfulness) being primarily a matter of temperament : 
Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902, pp. 227-240. 


PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 31 

conversion-experience took the form of a vision. We have 
seen, in the Appendix, how considerable are the difficulties 
which beset the account of the Bleeding Christ Vision in the 
Palace ; and how the story of the previous visionless ex 
perience in the Chapel is free from all such objections. But, 
even supposing the two accounts to be equally reliable, it is 
the first, the visionless experience, which was demonstrably 
the more important and the more abidingly operative of the 
two. More important, for it is during those visionless 
moments that her conversion is first effected ; and more 
abiding, for, according to all the ancient accounts, the im 
pression of the Bleeding Christ Vision disappeared utterly at 
the end of at longest four years, whereas the memory of 
the visionless conversion moments remained with her, as an 
operative force, up to the very last. Witness the free self- 
casting of the soul into painful-joyous Purgation, into Love, 
into God (without any picturing of the historic Christ), 
which forms one of the two constituents of her great latter- 
day teaching ; and how entirely free from directly historic 
elements all her recorded visions of the middle period turn 
out to be. 1 

3 . Peculiarities of her Active Penitence. 

As to the four years of Active Penitence, we must beware 
of losing the sense of the dependence, the simple, spontaneous 
instrumentality, in which the negative and restrictive side of 
her action stood towards the positive and expansive one. An 
immense affirmation, an anticipating, creative buoyancy and 
resourcefulness, had come full flood into her life ; and had 
shifted her centre of deliberate interest and willing away from 
the disordered, pleasure-seeking, sore and sulky lesser self in 

1 By the term " visionless," I do not mean to affirm anything as to the 
presence or absence of ideas or mental images during the times so 
described, but to register the simple fact, that, for her own memory after 
the event, she was, at the time, without any one persistent, external- 
seeming image. Note how St. Ignatius Loyola in his Testament, ed. 
London, 1900, pp. 91, 92, considered the profoundest spiritual experi 
ence of his life to have been one unaccompanied or expressed by any 
vision : "On his way" to a Church near Manresa, "he sat down facing 
the stream, which was running deep. While he was sitting there, the eyes 
of his mind were opened," not so as to see any kind of vision, but "so as 
to understand and comprehend spiritual things . . . with such clearness 
that for him all these things were made new. If all the enlightenment 
and help he had received from God in the whole course of his life . . . 
were gathered together in one heap, these all would appear less than he 
had been given at this one time." 


32 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION 

which her true personality had for so long been enmeshed. 
Thus all this strenuous work of transforming and raising 
her lower levels of inclinations and of habit to the likeness 
and heights of her now deliberate loftiest standard was not 
taking place for the sake of something which actually was, 
or which even seemed to be, less than what she had possessed 
or had, even dimly, sought before, nor with a view to her true 
self s contraction. But, on the contrary, the work was for the 
end of that indefinite More, of that great pushing upwards 
of her soul s centre and widening out of its circumference, 
which she could herself confirm and increase only by such 
ever-renewed warfare against what she now recognized as her 
false and crippling self. 

And it is noticeable how soon and how largely, even still 
within this stage, her attitude became " passive." She pretty 
early came to do these numerous definite acts of penance 
without any deliberate selection or full attention to them. 
As in her third period her absorption in large spiritual ideas 
spontaneously suggests certain corresponding psycho-physical 
phenomena, which then, in return, stimulate anew the appre 
hensions of the mind ; so here, towards the end of the first 
period, penitential love ends by quite spontaneously suggest 
ing divers external acts of penitence, which readily become so 
much fresh stimulation for love. 

I take this time to have been as yet free from visions or 
ecstasies at least of the later lengthy and specific type. 
For the Bleeding Christ experience, even if fully historical, 
occurred within the first conversion-days, and only its vivid 
memory prolonged itself throughout those penitential years ; 
whilst all such other visions, as have been handed down to us, 
do not treat of conversion and penance, at least in any active 
and personal sense. And only towards the end of these years 
do the psycho-physical phenomena as to the abstention from 
food begin to show themselves. The consideration of both 
the Visions and the Fasts had, then, better be reserved for 
the great central period. 


V. THE SECOND, GREAT MIDDLE PERIOD OF CATHERINE S 
LIFE, 1477 TO 1499. 

It is most natural yet very regrettable that we should know 
so little as to Catherine s spiritual life, or even as to her 


PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 33 

psycho-physical condition, during these central twenty-two 
years of her life. It is natural, for she had, at this time, 
neither Physician nor Confessor busy with her, and the very 
richness and balanced fulness of this epoch of her life may 
well have helped to produce but little that could have been 
specially seized and registered by either. Yet it is regret 
table, since here we have what, at least for us human 
observers, constitutes the culmination and the true measure 
of her life, the first period looking but like the preparation, 
and the third period, like the price paid for such a rich 
expansion. Yet we know something about three matters of 
considerable psycho-physical and temperamental interest, 
which are specially characteristic of this time : her attitude 
towards food ; her ecstasies and visions ; and certain peculi 
arities in her conception and practice of the spiritual warfare. 

I. Her extraordinary fasts. 

As to food, it is clear that, however much we may be able 
or bound to deduct from the accounts, there remains a solid 
nucleus of remarkable fact. During some twenty years she 
evidently went, for a fairly equal number of days, some thirty 
in Advent and some forty in Lent, seventy in all annually, 
with all but no food ; and was, during these fasts, at least as 
vigorous and active as when her nutrition was normal. For 
it is not fairly possible to make these great fasts end much 
before 1496, when she ceased to be Matron of the Hospital ; 
and they cannot have begun much after 1475 or 1476 : so 
that practically the whole of her devoted service and ad 
ministration in and of that great institution fell within these 
years, of which well-nigh one-fifth was covered by these all 
but total abstentions from food. Yet here again we are 
compelled to take these things, not separately, and as directly 
supernatural, but in connection with everything else ; and to 
consider the resultant whole as the effect and evidence of 
a strong mind and will operating upon and through an 
immensely responsive psycho-physical organism. 

For here again we easily find a significant system and 
delicate selectiveness both in the constant approximate 
synchronisms these incapacities occurring about Advent 
and Lent ; and in the foods exempted since there is no 
difficulty in connection with the daily Holy Eucharist, with 
the unconsecrated wine given to her, as to all Communicants 
in that age at Genoa, immediately after Communion, or with 
water when seasoned penitentially with salt or vinegar. And 

VOL. II. D 


34 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION 

if the actual heightening of nervous energy and balance, 
recorded as having generally accompanied these two fasts, is 
indeed a striking testimony to the extraordinary powers of 
her mind and will, we must not forget that these fruitful fasts 
were accompanied, and no doubt rendered possible, by the 
second great psychical peculiarity of these middle years, her 
ecstasies. 

2. Her ecstasies and visions. 

It is indeed remarkable how these two conditions and 
functions, her fasts and her ecstasies of a definite, lengthy 
and strength-bringing kind, arise, persist and then fade out 
of her life together. And since, in ecstasy, the respiration, the 
circulation, and the other physical functions are all slackened 
and simplified ; the mind is occupied with fewer, simpler, 
larger ideas, harmonious amongst themselves ; and the 
emotions and the will are, for the time, saved the conflict and 
confusion, the stress and strain, of the fully waking moments ; 
and considering that Catherine was peculiarly sensitive to all 
this flux and friction, and that she was now often in a more 
or less ecstatic trance from two up to eight hours : it follows 
that the amount of food required to heal the breach made by 
life s wear and tear would, by these ecstasies, be considerably 
reduced. And indeed it will have been these contemplative 
absorptions which directly mediated for her those accessions 
of vigour : and that they did so, in such a soul and for the 
uses to which she put this strength, is their fullest justification 
as thoroughly wholesome, at least in their ultimate outcome, 
in and for this particular life. 

And the visions recorded have these two characteristics, 
that they all deal with metaphysical realities and relations 
God as source and end of all things, as Light and food of the 
soul, and similar conceptions, and never directly with his 
torical persons, scenes, or institutions ; and that, whereas the 
non-ecstatic picturings of her last period are grandly original, 
and demonstrably based upon her own spiritual experience, 
these second-period ecstatic visions are readily traceable to 
New Testament, Neo-Platonist, and Franciscan precursors, 
and have little more originality than this special selection 
from amongst other possible literary sources. 

3. Special character of her spiritual warfare. 

Catherine s ecstasies lead us easily on to the special method 
of her spiritual warfare, which can, I think, be summed up in 
three maxims : " One thing, and only one at a time " ; " Ever 


PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 35 

fight self, and you need not trouble about any other foe " ; 
and " Fight self by an heroic indirectness and by love, for 
love, through a continuous self-donation to Pure Love 
alone." 

Studying here these great convictions simply in their 
temperamental occasions, colouring, and limitations, we can 
readily discover how the "one thing at a time" maxim 
springs from the same disposition as that which found such 
refreshment in ecstasy. For here too, partly from a con 
genital incapacity to take things lightly, partly from an 
equally characteristic sensitiveness to the conflict and con 
fusion incident to the introduction of any fresh multiplicity 
into the consciousness, she requires, even in her non-ecstatic 
moments, to have her attention specially concentrated upon 
one all-important idea, one point in the field of consciousness. 
And, by a faithful wholeness of attention to the successive 
spiritually significant circumstances and obligations, interior 
impressions and lights, which her praying, thinking, suffering, 
actively bring round to her notice, she manages, by such 
single steps, gradually to go a very long way, and, by such 
severe successiveness, to build up a rich simultaneity. For 
each of these faithfully accepted and fully willed and utilized 
acts and states, received into her one ever-growing and 
deepening personality, leave memories and stimulations 
behind them, and mingle, as subconscious elements, with the 
conscious acts which follow later on. 

4. Two remarkable consequences of this kind of warfare. 

There were two specially remarkable consequences of this 
constant watchful fixation of the one spiritually significant 
point in each congeries of circumstances, and of the manner 
in which (partly perhaps as the occasion, but probably in 
great part as the effect of this attention) one interior condition 
of apparent fixity would suddenly shift to another condition 
of a different kind but of a similar apparent stability. There 
was the manner in which, during these years, she appears to 
have escaped the committing of any at all definite offences 
against the better and best lights of that particular moment ; 
and there was the way in which she would realize the 
faultiness and subtle self-seeking of any one state, only at 
the moment of its disappearing to make room for another. 

I take the accounts of both these remarkable peculiarities 
to be substantially accurate, since, if the first condition had 
not obtained, we should have found her practising more or 


36 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION 

less frequent Confession, as we find her doing in the first and 
third, but not in this period ; and if the second condition had 
not existed, we should have had, for this period also, some 
such vivid account of painful scruples arising from the 
impression of actually present unfaithfulnesses, such as has 
been preserved for her last years. And indeed, as soon as we 
have vividly conceived a state in which a soul (by a wise 
utilization of the quite exceptional successiveness and simpli 
fication to which it has been, in great part, driven by its 
temperamental requirements, and by a constant heroic watch 
fulness) has managed to exclude from its life, during a long 
series of years, all fully deliberate resistances to, or lapses 
from, its contemporaneous better insight: one sees at once 
that a consciousness of faultiness could come to her only at 
those moments when, one state and level giving place to 
another, she could, for the moment, see the former habits and 
their implicit defects in the clear light of their contrast to her 
new, deeper insights and dispositions. 

Now it is evident that here again we have in part (in the 
curious quasi-fixity of each state, and then the sudden replace 
ment of it by another) something which, taken alone, is simply 
psychically peculiar and spiritually indifferent. The per 
sistent sense of gradual or of rapid change in the midst of 
a certain continuity and indeed abidingness, characteristic of 
the average moments of the average soul, is, taken in itself, 
more true to life and to the normal reaction of the human 
mind, and not less capable of spiritual utilization, than is 
Catherine s peculiarity. Her heroic utilization of her special 
psychic life for purposes of self-fighting, and the degree in 
which, as we shall find in a later chapter, she succeeded in 
moulding this life into a shape representative of certain great 
spiritual truths : these things it is which constitute here the 
spiritually significant element. 

And her second peculiarity of religious practice was her 
great simplification and intensification of the spiritual combat. 
Simplification : for she does not fight directly either the Devil 
or the World ; she directly fights the " Flesh " alone, and re 
cognizes but one immediate opponent, her own lower self. 
Hence the references to the world are always simply as to an 
extension or indefinite repetition of that same self, or of 
similar lower selves ; and those to the devil are, except where 
she declares her own lower self " a very devil," extraordinarily 
rare, and, in their authentic forms, never directly and formally 


PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 37 

connected with her own spiritual interests and struggles. And 
Intensification : for she conceives this lower self, against which 
all her fighting is turned, as capable of any enormity, as 
actually cloaking itself successively in every kind of disguise, 
and as more or less vitiating even the most spiritual-seeming 
of her states and acts. 

And here again we can, I think, clearly trace the influence 
of her special temperament and psycho-physical functioning, 
yet in a direction opposite to that in which we would naturally 
expect it. For it is not so much that this temperament led 
her to exaggerate the badness of her false self, or to elaborate a 
myth concerning its (all but completely separate) existence, as 
that, owing in large part to that temperament and functioning, 
her false self was both unusually distinct from her true self 
and particularly clamorous and claimful. It would indeed be 
well for hagiography if, in all cases, at least an attempt were 
made to discover and present the precise and particular good 
and bad selves, worked for and fought by the particular saint : 
for it is just this double particularization of the common 
warfare in every individual soul that gives the poignant interest 
and instructiveness, and a bracing sense of reality to these 
lonely yet typical, unique yet universal struggles, defeats, and 
victories. 

And in Catherine s case her special temperament ; her par 
ticular attitude during the ten years laxity, and again during 
the last years times of obscurity and scruple ; even some of 
her sayings probably still belonging to this middle period ; 
but above all the precise point and edge of her counter-ideal 
and attrait : all indicate clearly enough what was her con 
genital defect. A great self-engrossment of a downrightly 
selfish kind; a grouping of all things round such a self-adoring 
Ego ; a noiseless but determined elimination from her life and 
memory of all that would not or could not, then and there, be 
drawn and woven into the organism and functioning of this 
immensely self-seeking, infinitely woundable and wounded, 
endlessly self-doctoring " I " and " Me " : a self intensely, 
although not sexually, jealous, envious and exacting, in 
capable of easy accommodation, of pleasure in half successes, 
of humour and brightness, of joyous " once-born " creature- 
liness : all this was certainly to be found, in strong tendency 
at least, in the untrained parts and periods of her character 
and life. 

And then the same peculiarity and sensitiveness of her 


38 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION 

psycho-physical organism which, in her last period, ended by 
mirroring her mental spiritual apprehensions and picturings 
in her very body, and which, even at this time, has been 
traced by us in the curious long fixities and rapid changes of 
her fields of consciousness, clearly operates also and already 
here, in separating off this false self from the good one and in 
heightening the apprehension of that false self to almost a 
perception in space, or to an all but physical sensation. 

We thus get something of which the interesting cases of 
"doubleness of personality," so much studied of late years, 
are, as it were, purely psychical, definitely maladif caricatures; 
the great difference consisting in Catherine herself possessing, 
at all times, the consciousness and memory of both sides, 
of both " selves," and of each as both actual and potential, 
within the range of her one great personality. Indeed it is 
this very multiplicity thus englobed and utilized by that 
higher unity, which gives depth to her sanity and sanctity. 1 

5. Precise object and end of her striving. 

And all this is confirmed and completed, as already hinted, 
by the precise object of her ideal, the particular means and 
special end of the struggle. Here, at the very culmination of 
her inner life and aim, we find the deepest traces of her 
temperamental requirements ; and here, in what she seeks, 
there is again an immense concentration and a significant 
choice. The distinctions between obligation and supereroga 
tion, between merit and grace, are not utilized but tran 
scended ; the conception of God having anger as well as love 
arouses as keen a sense of intolerableness as that of God s 
envy aroused in Plato, and God appears to her as, in Himself, 
continuously loving. 

This love of God, again, is seen to be present everywhere, 
and, of Itself, everywhere to effect happiness. The disposi 
tions of souls are indeed held to vary within each soul and 
between soul and soul, and to determine the differences in 
their reception, and consequently in the effect upon them, of 
God s one universal love : but the soul s reward and punish 
ment are not something distinct from its state, they are but 
that very state prolonged and articulated, since man can 
indeed go against his deepest requirements but can never 

1 I would draw the reader s attention to the very interesting parallels 
to many of the above-mentioned peculiarities furnished both by St. 
Teresa in her Life, passim, and by Battista Vernazza in the Autobio 
graphical statements which I have given here in Chapter VIII. 


PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 39 

finally suppress them. Heaven, Purgatory, Hell are thus not 
places as well as states, nor do they begin only in the beyond : 
they are states alone, and begin already here. And Grace 
and Love, and Love and Christ, and Christ and Spirit, and 
hence Grace and Love and Christ and Spirit are, at bottom, 
one, and this One is God. Hence God, loving Himself in and 
through us, is alone our full true self. Here, in this constant 
stretching out and forward of her whole being into and 
towards the ocean of light and love, of God the All in All, 
it is not hard to recognize a soul which finds happiness only 
when looking out and away from self, and turning, in more 
or less ecstatic contemplation and action, towards that Infinite 
Country, that great Over-Againstness, God. 

And, in her sensitive shrinking from the idea of an angry 
God, we find the instinctive reaction of a nature too naturally 
prone itself to angry claimfulness, and which had been too 
much driven out of its self-occupation by the painful sense 
of interior self-division consequent upon that jealousy, not to 
find it intolerable to get out of that little Scylla of her own 
hungry self only to fall into a great Charybdis, an apparent 
mere enlargement and canonization of that same self, in the 
angry God Himself. 

And if her second peculiarity, the concentration of the 
fight upon an unusually isolated and intense false self, had 
introduced an element of at least relative Rigorism and con 
traction into her spirituality, this third peculiarity brings a 
compensating movement of quasi-Pantheism, of immense 
expansion. Here the crushed plant expands in boundless air, 
light and warmth ; the parched seaweed floats and unfolds 
itself in an immense ocean of pure waters the soul, as it 
were, breathes and bathes in God s peace and love. And it is 
evident that the great super-sensible realities and relations 
adumbrated by such figures, did not, with her, lead to mere 
dry or vague apprehensions. Even in this period, although 
here with a peaceful, bracing orderliness and harmony, the 
reality thus long and closely dwelt on and lived with was, as 
it were, physically seen and felt in these its images by a ready 
response of her immensely docile psycho-physical organism. 

6. Catherine possessed two out of the three conditions 
apparently necessary for stigmatization. 

And in this connection we should note how largely reason 
able was the expectation of some of her disciples of finding 
some permanent physical effects upon her body ; and yet why 


40 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION 

she not only had not the stigmata of the Passion, but why she 
could not have them. For, of the three apparently necessary 
conditions for such stigmatization, she had indeed two a 
long and intense absorption in religious ideas, and a specially 
sensitive psycho-physical temperament and organization of the 
ecstatic type ; but the third condition, the concentration of that 
absorption upon Our Lord s Passion and wounds, was wholly 
wanting at least after those four actively penitential and 
during those twenty-two ecstatic years. We can, however, say 
most truly that although, since at all events 1477, her visions 
and contemplations were all concerning purely metaphysical, 
eternal realities, or certain ceaselessly repeated experiences of 
the human soul, or laws and types derived from the greatest 
of Christian institutions, her daily solace, the Holy Eucharist : 
yet that these verities ended by producing definite images in 
her senses, and certain observable though passing impressions 
upon her body, so that we can here talk of sensible shadows 
or " stigmata " of things purely spiritual and eternal. 

And if, in the cases of some ecstatic saints, mental patholo- 
gists of a more or less materialistic type have, at times, 
shown excessive suspicion as to some of the causes and effects 
of these saints devotion to Our Lord s Humanity under the 
imagery and categories of the Canticle of Canticles all such 
suspicions, fair or unfair, have absolutely no foothold in 
Catherine s life, since not only is there here no devotion to 
God or to Our Lord as Bridegroom of the Bridal soul : there 
is no direct contemplative occupation with the historic Christ 
and no figuring of Him or of God under human attributes or 
relations at all. I think that her temperament and health 
had something to do with her habitual dwelling upon Thing- 
symbols of God : Ocean Air Fire picturings which, con 
ceived with her psycho-physical vividness, must, in their 
expanse, have rested and purified her in a way that historical 
contingencies and details would not have done. The doctrinal 
and metaphysical side of the matter will be considered later on. 


VI. THREE RULES WHICH SEEM TO GOVERN THE RELA 
TIONS BETWEEN PSYCHO-PHYSICAL PECULIARITIES 
AND SANCTITY IN GENERAL. 

If we next inquire how matters stand historically with 
regard to the relations between ecstatic states and psycho- 


PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 41 

physical peculiarities on the one hand, and sanctity in general 
on the other hand, we shall find, I think, that the following 
three rules or laws really cover, in a necessarily general, some 
what schematic way, all the chief points, at all certain or 
practically important, in this complex and delicate matter. 

I. Intense spiritual energizing is accompanied by auto 
suggestion and mono-ideism. 

It is clear, for one thing, that as simply all and every 
mental, emotional, and volitional energizing is necessarily and 
always accompanied by corresponding nerve-states, and that 
if we had not some neural sensitiveness and neural adapta 
bility, we could not whilst living our earthly life think, 
or feel, or will in regard to anything whatsoever : a certain 
special degree of at least potential psycho-physical sensi 
tiveness and adaptability must be taken to be, not the 
productive cause, but a necessary condition for the exercise, 
of any considerable range and depth of mind and will, and 
hence of sanctity in general ; and that the actual aiming at, 
and gradual achievement of, sanctity in these, thus merely 
possible cases, spiritualizes and further defines this sensitive 
ness, as the instrument, material, and expression of the soul s 
work. 1 And this work of the heroic soul will necessarily 
consist, in great part, in attending to, calling up, and, as far as 
may be, both fixing and ever renovating certain few great 
dominant ideas, and in attempting by every means to saturate 
the imagination with images and figures, historical and sym 
bolic, as so many incarnations of these great verities. 

We get thus what, taken simply phenomenally and without 
as yet any inquiry as to an ultimate reality pressing in upon 
the soul, a divine stimulation underlying all its sincere and 
fruitful action, is a spiritual mono-ideism and auto-sug 
gestion, of a more or less general kind. But, at this stage, 
these activities and their psycho-physical concomitants and 
results will, though different in kind, be no more abnormal 
than is the mono-ideism and auto-suggestion of the mathema 
tician, the tactician, and the constructive statesman. Newton, 
Napoleon, and Richelieu : they were all dominated by some 
great central idea, and they all for long years dwelt upon it 
and worked for it within themselves, till it became alive and 

1 The omnipresence of neural conditions and consequences for all and 
every mental and volitional activity has been admirably brought out by 
Prof. W. James, in his Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902, Vol. I, 
pp. 1-25. 


42 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION 

aflame in their imaginations and their outward-moving wills, 
before, yet as the means of, its taking external and visible 
shape. And, in all the cases that we can test in detail, the 
psycho-physical accompaniments of all this profound mental- 
volitional energy were most marked. In the cases of Newton 
and Napoleon, for instance, a classification of their energizings 
solely according to their neural accompaniments would force 
us to class these great discoverers and organizers amongst 
psycho-physical eccentrics. Yet the truth and value of their 
work and character has, of course, to be measured, not by 
this its neural fringe and cost, but by its central spiritual truth 
and fruitfulness. 

2. Such mechanisms specially marked in Philosophers, Mu 
sicians, Poets, and Mystical Religionists. 

The mystical and contemplative element in the religious 
life, and the group of saints amongst whom this element is 
predominant, no doubt give us a still larger amount of what, 
again taking the matter phenomenally and not ultimately, is 
once more mono-ideism and auto-suggestion, and entails a 
correspondingly larger amount of psycho-physical impression- 
ableness and reaction utilized by the mind. But here also, 
from the simplest forms of the " prayer of quiet " to absorp 
tions of an approximately ecstatic type, we have something 
which, though different in kind and value, is yet no more 
abnormal than are the highest flights and absorptions of the 
Philosopher, the Musician, and the Poet. And yet, in such 
cases as Kant and Beethoven, a classifier of humanity accord 
ing to its psycho-physical phenomena alone would put these 
great discoverers and creators, without hesitation, amongst 
hopeless and useless hypochondriacs. Yet here again the 
truth of their ideas and the work of their lives have to be 
measured by quite other things than by this their neural 
concomitance and cost. 

3. Ecstatics possess a peculiar psycho-physical organization. 
The downright ecstatics and hearers of voices and seers of 

visions have all, wherever we are able to trace their tempera 
mental and neural constitution and history, possessed and 
developed a definitely peculiar psycho-physical organization. 
We have traced it in Catherine and indicated it in St. Teresa. 
We find it again in St. Maria Magdalena dei Pazzi and in 
St. Marguerite Marie Alacocque, in modern times, and in St. 
Catherine of Siena and St. Francis of Assisi in mediaeval 
times. For early Christian times we are too ignorant as 


PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 43 

regards the psycho-physical organization of St. Ignatius of 
Antioch, Hermas, and St. Cyprian, to be able to establish a 
connection between their temperamental endowments and 
their hearing of voices and seeing of visions in the last two 
cases we get much that looks like more or less of a mere 
conventional literary device. 1 

We are, however, in a fair position for judging, in the typical 
and thoroughly original case of St. Paul. In 2 Cor. xiii, 7, 8, 
after speaking of the abundant revelations accorded to him, 
he adds that " lest I be lifted up, a thorn " (literally, a stake) 
" in the flesh was given to me, an Angel of Satan to buffet me." 
And though " I thrice besought the Lord that it might depart 
from me, the Lord answered me, My grace is sufficient for 
thee ; for grace is perfected in infirmity. " And he was con 
sequently determined " rather " to " glory in his infirmities, so 
that the power of Christ may dwell within " him. Arid in 
Gal. iv, 14, 15, written about the same time, he reminds his 
readers how he had " preached to them through the infirmity 
of the flesh," commending them because they " did not despise 
nor loathe their temptation in his flesh " (this is no doubt the 
correct reading), " but had received him as an Angel of God, 
as Christ Jesus." 

Now the most ancient interpretation of this "thorn" or 
" stake " is some kind of bodily complaint, violent headache 
or earache is mentioned by Tertullian de Pudicitia, 13, and 
by St. Jerome, Comm. in Gal. loc. cit. Indeed St. Paul s own 
description of his " bodily presence " as " weak," and his 
"spoken word" as "contemptible" (2 Cor. x, 10), points this 
way. It seems plain that it cannot have been carnal tempta 
tions (only in the sixth century did this interpretation become 
firmly established), for he could not have gloried in these, nor 
could they, hidden as they would be within his heart, have 
exposed him to the contempt of others. Indeed he expressly 
excludes such troubles from his life, where, in advising those 
who were thus oppressed to marry, he gives the preference to 
the single life, and declares, " I would that all men were even 
as myself" (i Cor. vii, 7). 

The attacks of this trouble were evidently acutely painful : 
note the metaphor of a stake driven into the live flesh and 
the Angel of Satan who buffeted him. (And compare St. 

1 H. Weinel s Die Wirkungen des Geistes und der Geister im nacha- 
postolischen Zeitalter^ bis auf Irenaus, 1899, contains an admirably 
careful investigation of these things. 


44 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION 

Teresa s account : " An Angel of God appeared to me to be 
thrusting at times a long spear into my heart and to pierce 
my very entrails " ; " the pain was so great that it made me 
moan " ; " it really seems to the soul as if an arrow were thrust 
through the heart or through itself; the suffering is not one 
of sense, neither is the wound physical " ; and how, on another 
occasion, she heard Our Lord answer her : " Serve thou Me, 
and meddle not with this.") l 

These attacks would come suddenly, even in the course of 
his public ministry, rendering him, in so far, an object of 
derision and of loathing. (Compare here St. Teresa s declara 
tion : " During the rapture, the body is very often perfectly 
powerless ; it continues in the position it was in when the 
rapture came upon it: if sitting, sitting ; if the hands were 
open, or if they were shut, they will remain open or shut " ; 
" if the body" was " standing or kneeling, it remains so.") 2 

Yet these attacks were evidently somehow connected, both 
in fact and in his consciousness, with his Visions ; and they were 
recurrent. The vision of the Third Heaven and his apparently 
first attack seem to have been practically coincident, about 
A.D. 44. We find a second attack hanging about him for 
some time, on his first preaching in Galatia, about A.D. 51 
or 52 (see i Thess. ii, 18; i Cor. ii, 3). And a third attack 
appears to have come in A.D. 57 or 58, when the Second 
Epistle to the Corinthians and that to the Galatians were 
written ; note the words (2 Cor. i, 9), " But " (in addition to 
his share in the public persecution) "we ourselves had the 
sentence of death within ourselves, in order that we might 
not trust in ourselves but in God who raiseth the dead to life." 
(And compare here St. Teresa : in July 1547 "for about four 
days I remained insensible. They must have regarded me 
as dead more than once. For a day and a half the grave was 
open in my monastery, waiting for my body. But it pleased 
Our Lord I should come to myself.") 3 Dr. Lightfoot gives as 
a parallel the epileptiform seizures of King Alfred, which, 
sudden, acutely painful, at times death-like, and protracted, 
tended to render the royal power despicable in the eyes of 
the world. 4 Yet, except for the difference of sex and of 

1 Life, written by herself, ed. cit. pp. 235, 423 ; 136. 

2 Ibid. pp. 149, 420. 3 Ibid. pp. xxii, 28. 

4 It is to Dr. Lightfoot s fine Excursus in St. Paul s Epistle to the 
Galdtians, ed. 1881, pp. 186-191, that I owe all the Pauline texts and 
most of the considerations reproduced above. 


PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 45 

relative privacy, St. Teresa s states, which I have given here, 
are more closely similar, in so much as they are intimately 
connected with religious visions and voices. 

And, amongst Old Testament figures, we can find a similar 
connection, on a still larger scale, in the case of Ezekiel, the 
most definitely ecstatic, though (upon the whole) the least 
original, of the literary Prophets. For, as to the visionary 
element, we have his own records of three visions of the glory 
of Jahve ; of five other ecstasies, three of which are accom 
panied by remarkable telepathic, second-sight activities ; and 
of twelve symbolic (better : representative) prophetic actions, 
which are now all rightly coming to be considered as having 
been externally carried out by him. 1 And we get psycho- 
physical states, as marked as in any other ecstatic saint. 
For we hear how Jahve on one occasion says to him : " But 
thou, son of man, lay thyself on thy left side " (/. e. according 
to Jewish orientation, towards the North) " and I shall lay the 
guilt of the house of Israel " (the Northern Kingdom) " upon 
thee ; the number of days that thou shalt lie upon it, shalt 
thou bear their guilt. But I appoint unto thee the years of 
their guilt, as a (corresponding) number of days, (namely) one 
hundred and fifty days. . . . And, when thou hast done with 
them, thou shalt lay thyself on thy right side " (i. e. towards the 
South), "and thou shalt bear the guilt of the house of Judah " 
(the Southern Kingdom) ; " one day for each year shall I 
appoint unto thee. And behold I shall lay cords upon thee, 
that thou shalt be unable to turn from one side to the other, 
till thou hast ended the days of thy boundness " (iv, 4-8). 
Kratzschmar, no doubt rightly, finds here a case of hemi- 
plegia and anaesthesia, functional cataleptic paralysis lasting 
during five months on the left side, and then shifting for 
about six weeks to the right side. And the alalia (speech- 
lessness), which no doubt accompanied this state, is referred to 
on three other occasions: xxiv, 27; xxix, 31 ; xxxiii, 22. 
And note how Jahve s address to Ezekiel, " son of man," 
which occurs in this book over ninety times, and but once in 
the whole of the rest of the Old Testament (Dan. viii, 

1 Visions of Jahve s glory : i, 1-28 ; iii, 22-27 ; xl, i ; xliv, 4. The five 
other Ecstasies and Visions : viii, i foil. ; xi, i foil. ; xxiv, i foil. ; xxxiii, 
22 ; xxxvii, i foil. Second Sight : viii, 16 ; xi, 13 ; xxiv, i. Representative 
Actions : iv, 1-3, 7 ; iv, 4-6, 8 ; iv, 10 j ix, 11-15 ; xii, 1-16; xii, 17-20; 
xxi, u, 12; xxi, 23-32; xxiv, 1-14; xxiv, 15-27; xxxiii, 22; xxxvii, 
15-28. 


46 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION 

17), evidently stands here for the sense of his creaturely 
nothingness, so characteristic of the true ecstatic. 1 

Now, at this last stage, the analogy of the other non- 
religious activities of the healthy mind and of their psycho- 
physical conditions and effects forsakes us ; but not the 
principle which has guided us all along. For here, as from 
the very first, some such conditions and effects are inevitable ; 
and the simple fact of this occurrence, apart from the question 
of their particular character, is something thoroughly normal. 
And here again, and more than ever, the emphasis and de 
cision have to lie with, and to depend upon, the mental and 
volitional work and the spiritual truth and reality achieved 
in and for the recipient, and, through him, in and for others. 

Even at the earlier stages, to cling to the form, as distinct 
from the content and end, of these things was to be thoroughly 
unfair to this their content and end, within the spacious 
economy of the spirit s life ; at this stage such clinging 
becomes destructive of all true religion. For if the mere 
psycho- physical forms and phenomena of ecstasy, of vision, of 
hearing of voices is, in proportion to their psycho-physical 
intensity and seeming automatism and quasi-physical object 
ivity, to be taken as necessarily a means and mark of sanctity 
or of insight, or, at least, as something presumably sent direct 
by God or else as diabolical, something necessarily super- 
or preter-natural : then the lunatic asylums contain more 
miracles, saints, and sages, or their direct, strangely similar 
antipodes, than all the most fervent or perverted churches, 
monasteries, and families upon God s earth. For in asylums 
we find ectasies, visions, voices, all more, not less marked, all 
more, not less irresistibly objective-seeming to the recipient, 
than anything to be found outside. 

Yet apply impartially to both sets the test, not of form, 
but of content, of spiritual fruitfulness and of many-sided 
applicability and this surface-similarity yields at once to 
a fundamental difference. Indeed all the great mystics, and 
this in precise proportion to their greatness, have ever taught 

1 The above translation and interpretation is based upon Kratzschmar s 
admirably psychological commentary, Das Buck Ezechiel, Gottingen, 1900, 
pp. v, vi ; 45, 49. But I think he is wrong in taking that six months 
abnormal condition to have given rise, in Ezekiel s mind, to a belief in a 
previous divine order and to an interpretation of this order. All the 
strictly analogical cases of religious ecstasy, not hysteria, point to a 
strong mental impression, such as that order and belief having preceded 
and occasioned the peculiar psycho-physical state. 


PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 47 

that, the mystical capacities and habits being but means and 
not ends, only such ecstasies are valuable as leave the soul, 
and the very body as its instrument, strengthened and 
improved ; and that visions and voices are to be accepted 
by the mind only in proportion as they convey some spiritual 
truth of importance to it or to others, and as they actually 
help it to become more humble, true, and loving. 

And there can be no doubt that these things worked thus 
with such great ecstatic mystics as Ezekiel, the man of the 
great prophetic schemes and the permanently fruitful picturing 
of the Good Shepherd ; as St. Paul, the greatest missionary 
and organizer ever given to the Christian Church ; as St. 
Francis of Assisi, the salt and leaven and light of the Church 
and of society, in his day and more or less ever since ; as St. 
Catherine of Siena, the free-spoken, docile reinspirer of the 
Papacy; as Jeanne d Arc, the maiden deliverer of a Nation ; 
as St. Teresa, reformer of a great Order. All these, and 
countless others, would, quite evidently, have achieved less, 
not more, of interior light and of far-reaching helpfulness of a 
kind readily recognized by all specifically religious souls, had 
they been without the rest, the bracing, the experience 
furnished to them by their ecstasies and allied states and 
apprehensions. 


VII. PERENNIAL FRESHNESS OF THE GREAT MYSTICS 
MAIN SPIRITUAL TEST, IN CONTRADISTINCTION TO 
THEIR SECONDARY, PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTENTION. 
Two SPECIAL DIFFICULTIES. 

I. A false and a true test of mystical experience. 

Now it is deeply interesting to note how entirely un- 
weakened, indeed how impressively strengthened, by the 
intervening severe test of whole centuries of further experi 
ence and of thought, has remained the main and direct, the 
spiritual test of the great Mystics, in contradistinction to their 
secondary psychological contention with respect to such ex 
periences. The secondary, psychological contention is well 
reproduced by St. Teresa where she says : " When I speak, 
I go on with my understanding arranging what I am saying ; 
but, if I am spoken to by others, I do nothing else but listen 
without any labour." In the former case, " the soul," if it be 
in good faith, " cannot possibly fail to see clearly that itself 


48 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION 

arranges the words and utters them to itself. How then can the 
understanding have time enough to arrange these locutions ? 
They require time." l Now this particular argument for their 
supernaturalness derived from the psychological form from 
the suddenness, clearness, and apparent automatism of these 
locutions has ceased to carry weight, owing to our present, 
curiously recent, knowledge concerning the subconscious 
region of the mind, and the occasionally sudden irruption of 
that region s contents into the field of that same mind s 
ordinary, full consciousness. In the Ven. Battista Vernazza s 
case we have a particularly clear instance of such a long 
accumulation, by means of much, in great part full, atten 
tion to certain spiritual ideas, words, and images, in the 
subconscious regions of a particularly strong and deeply 
sincere and saintly mind ; and the sudden irruption from 
those regions of certain clear and apparently quite spontane 
ous words and images into the field of her mind s full 
consciousness. 2 

But the reference to the great Mystics chief and direct 
test, upon which they dwell with an assurance and self-con 
sistency far surpassing that which accompanies their psycho 
logical argument, the spiritual content and effects of such 
experiences, this, retains all its cogency. St. Teresa tells us : 
" When Our Lord speaks, it is both word and work : His 
words are deeds." " I found myself, through these words 
alone, tranquil and strong, courageous and confident, at rest 
and enlightened: I felt I could maintain against all the world 
that my prayer was the work of God." " I could not believe 
that Satan, if he wished to deceive me, could have recourse to 
means so adverse to his purpose as this, of rooting out my 
faults, and implanting virtues and spiritual strength : for I saw 
clearly that I had become another person, by means of these 
visions." " So efficacious was the vision, and such was the 
nature of the words spoken to me, that I could not possibly 
doubt that they came from Him." " I was in a trance ; and 
the effects of it were such, that I could have no doubt it 
came from God." On another occasion she writes less posi 
tively even of the great test : " She never undertook any 
thing merely because it came to her in prayer. For all 
that her Confessors told her that these things came from 

1 Op. dt. pp. 190*: ; 192^ 1930. 

2 See Prof. W. James s admirable account of these irruptions in his 
Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902, pp. 231-237. 


PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 49 

God, she never so thoroughly believed them that she could 
swear to it herself, though it did seem to her that they were 
spiritually safe, because of the effects thereof." 1 This doctrine 
is still the last word of wisdom in these matters. 

2. First special difficulty in testing ecstasies. 

Yet it is only at this last stage that two special difficulties 
occur, the one philosophical, the other moral. The philoso 
phical difficulty is as follows. As long as the earlier stages 
are in progress, it is not difficult to understand that the soul 
may be gradually building up for herself a world of spiritual 
apprehensions, and a corresponding spiritual and moral char 
acter, by a process which, looked at merely phenomenally 
and separately, appears as a simple case of mono-ideism and 
auto-suggestion, but which can and should be conceived, 
when studied in its ultimate cause and end, as due to the 
pressure and influence of God s spirit working in and 
through the spirit of man, the Creator causing His own 
little human creature freely to create for itself some copy 
of and approach to its own eternally subsisting, substantial 
Cause and Crown. There the operation of such an under 
lying Supreme Cause, and a consequent relation between 
the world thus conceived and built up by the human soul 
and the real world of the Divine Spirit, appears possible, 
because the things which the soul is thus made to suggest 
to itself are ideas, and because even these ideas are clearly 
recognized by the soul as only instruments and approaches 
to the realities for which they stand. But here, in 
this last stage, we get the suggestion, not of ideas, but of 
psycho-physical impressions, and these impressions are, ap 
parently, not taken as but distantly illustrative, but as some 
how one with the spiritual realities for which they stand. Is 
not, e.g., Catherine s joy at this stage centred precisely in the 
downright feeling, smelling, seeing, of ocean waters, penetrat 
ing odours, all-enveloping light ; and in the identification of 
those waters, odours, lights, with God Himself, so that God 
becomes at last an object of direct, passive, sensible per 
ception? Have we not then here at last reached pure 
delusion ? 

Not so, in proportion as the mystic is great and spiritual, 
and as he here still clings to the principles common to all 
true religion. For, in proportion as he is and does this, will 
he find and regard the mind as deeper and more operative 

1 Life, written by Herself, pp. 190^ ; 196^ ; 224^ ; 295^ ; 413$. 
VOL. II. E 


50 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION 

than sense, and God s Spirit as penetrating and transcending 
both the one and the other. And hence he will (at least 
implicitly) regard those psycho-physical impressions as but 
sense-like and really mental ; and he will consider this 
mental impression and projection as indeed produced by the 
presence and action of the Spirit within his mind or of the 
pressure of spiritual realities upon it, but will hold that this whole 
mental process, with these its spacial- and temporal-seeming 
embodiments, these sights and sounds, has only a relation 
and analogical likeness to, and is not and cannot be identical 
with, those realities of an intrinsically super-spacial, super- 
temporal order. And thus here as everywhere, although here 
necessarily more than ever, we find again the conception of 
the Transcendent yet also Immanent Spirit, effecting in the 
human spirit the ever-increasing apprehension of Himself, 
accompanied in this spirit by an ever keener sense of His 
incomprehensibility for all but Himself. And here again the 
truth, and more especially the divine origin of these appre 
hensions, is tested and guaranteed on and on by the conse 
quent deepening of that spiritual and ethical fruitfulness and 
death to self, which are the common aspirations of every 
deepest moment and every sincerest movement within the 
universal heart of man. 

Thus, as regards the mentality of these experiences, Cathe 
rine constantly speaks of seeing " as though with the eyes of 
the body." And St. Teresa tells us of her visions with "the 
eyes of the soul " ; of how at first she " did not know that it 
was possible to see anything otherwise than with the eyes of 
the body " ; of how, in reality " she never," in her true visions 
and locutions, " saw anything with her bodily eyes, nor heard 
anything with her bodily ears " ; and of how indeed she later 
on, on one occasion, " saw nothing with the eyes of the body, 
nothing with the eyes of the soul," she " simply felt Christ 
slose by her," evidently again with the soul. Thus, too, 
Catherine tells us, that " as the intellect exceeds language, 
so does love exceed intellection " ; and how vividly she feels 
that " all that can be said of God," compared to the great 
Reality, " is but tiny crumbs from the great Master s table." 1 

And, as to the inadequacy of these impressions, the class 
ical authority on such things, St. John of the Cross, declares : 
" He that will rely on the letter of the divine locutions or on 
the intelligible form of the vision, will of necessity fall into 

1 Vita, passim ; Life, ed. cit. pp. 40, 41 ; 408 ; 206. Vita, pp. 87^, 77& 


PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 51 

delusion ; for he does not yield to the Spirit in detachment 
from sense." " He who shall give attention to these motes of 
the Spirit alone will, in the end, have no spirituality at all." 
" All visions, revelations, and heavenly feelings, and whatever 
is greater than these, are not worth the least act of humility, 
bearing the fruits of that charity which neither values nor 
seeks itself, which thinketh well not of self but of all others." 
Indeed "virtue does not consist in these apprehensions. Let 
men then cease to regard, and labour to forget them, that 
they may be free." For " spiritual supernatural knowledge 
is of two kinds, one distinct and special," which comprises 
" visions, revelations, locutions, and spiritual impressions " ; 
" the other confused, obscure, and general," which " has but one 
form, that of contemplation which is the work of faith. The 
soul is to be led into this, by directing it thereto through all the 
rest, beginning with the first, and detaching it from them." 

Hence " many souls, to whom visions have never come, are 
incomparably more advanced in the way of perfection than 
others to whom many have been given " ; and " they who are 
already perfect, receive these visitations of the Spirit of God 
in peace ; ecstasies cease, for they were only graces to prepare 
them for this greater grace." Hence, too, " one desire only 
doth God allow and suffer in His Presence : that of perfectly 
observing His law and of carrying the Cross of Christ. In the 
Ark of the Covenant there was but the Book of the Law, the 
Rod of Aaron, and the Pot of Manna. Even so that soul, 
which has no other aim than the pe