There of pure Virgins none
Is fairer seen,
Save One,
Than Mary Magdalene.
Gaze without doubt or fear
Ye to whom generous Love, by any name, is dear.
Love makes the life to be
A fount perpetual of virginity;
For, lo, the Elect
Of generous Love, how named soe’er, affect
Nothing but God,
Or mediate or direct,
Nothing but God,
The Husband of the Heavens:
And who Him love, in potency great or small
Are, one and all,
Heirs of the Palace glad,
And inly clad
With the bridal robes of ardor virginal.
From Deliciae Sapientiae de Amore by Coventry Patmore
The Sign of Magdalene
God proclaimed His creation good. With this decree He has put, in the mouths of babes and the simple, a direct retort against the Gnostic slander of the world and the tempting murmuring of the sorrowful heart. Even in the vale of tears, in the Babylonian exile, we know deep within that when all things are made new, something of this present goodness will be preserved in the general redemption of all flesh. Something distinctively our own will survive, through all the age of the ages.
That has been signified in the poetry and art of the Church by the figure of Mary Magdalene, the sinful woman redeemed, collapsing many women from the Gospel proclamation into one name. Saint Paul assures us that the sorrows and martyrdoms of the believers on earth fill up whatever is lacking in the suffering of Christ, the second Adam. This being so, then the repentance of Mary Magdalene and her spiritual heirs, completes whatever was left unfinished in the Ave of the Blessed Mother, the second Eve. The experience, the evidence, and the glory of the renewed virginity of the fallen confirms to us the reality of the past, present, and future workings of the Maiden Queen in the body of the Church.
It is common to view the sin and the repentance of Mary Magdalene in terms of dealing through the complexities of sensuality – a rich and powerful theme. But the restored and spiritualized virginity that Catherine stands for goes beyond that. She represents the hope that worldliness itself (lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and pride of life) can be made whole. The lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes have often been meditated upon by Catholic writers, particularly in the wake of the development of the Theology of the Body. But pride of life, the joy of existence and the self, deserves greater attention. The glory, spezazzutra and swagger of a great soul—-even these are not without the gleam of a divine promise. This condemned land of the psyche might one day be drained of the abysmal sea and reclaimed. Despite the vast difference in character and circumstance, the paired subjects of this piece embody the Magdalene spirit. Both have something of the waters of this creation about them, even as they step up onto the dry land of the New Israel.
St. Catherine of Baron Von Hügel: Companions in Aeternum
In a sacramental world, our sense of linear time is constantly overthrown. In the order of the living God, the past is not even past, nor the future arrived. In the offering of the present moment, we constantly stumble upon long dead or long awaited truths. We wander in woods of symbols, who whisper to us tales of our ancestors and children yet unborn. Cosmic friendships disrupt our normal sense of time, making us sense the resurrection of the dead as a reality that is already at work in our fallen state
My discovery of Catherine of Genoa occurred this summer when meeting with a homeless man who I saw outside a local Starbucks and 7 Eleven compound in my neighborhood. I thought only to give him some money but he repaid me with a rich conversation about life, politics, books, and religion. It was a meeting of souls that I had not anticipated but turned out to be a favorable moment that unloosed both of our minds and hearts. In passing, I mentioned my personal devotion to Catherine of Siena. He said that he never read about her, but he had read Catherine of Genoa on Purgatory. Suddenly I was intrigued. Upon returning home I researched this saint and downloaded The Life and Doctrine of St. Catherine of Genoa and read the biographical portion of it eagerly in a day.
One light leads to another. Looking for a secondary source on her, I stumbled upon Friedrich von Hügel, a Catholic intellect who I had no prior knowledge of but who apparently enjoyed a stature like John Henry Newman in his day. I ordered his magnum opus The Mystical Element of Religion as Studied in St. Catherine of Genoa and Her Friends. This unexpected pairing of two figures separated by centuries formed a pattern in my mind. And with my first introduction to them both in 2021, a third voice was added to the polyphony.
Catherine of Genoa: Her Life
Catherine was born in 1447 to Jacopo Fieschi and Francesca di Negro, both of noble lineage. They were a family already bound intimately to the history of the Church. On her father’s side of her family were two popes — Innocent IV and Adrian V. Catherine was inclined to holiness from a young age, especially to the mystery of the Cross and the suffering Christ. When she was thirteen, she wished to enter the convent, but the nuns declined her because of her youth, and with that rejection the inspiration never recurred again. We can only guess at the disappointment and frustration this event inflicted on this young soul so full of love to give. Shortly thereafter, a new cross was imposed on her at age sixteen, when her parents set her up in an arranged marriage to a local nobleman, Giuliano Adorno, who turned out to be full of wrath, adulterous, and prodigal with his household’s wealth. The sorrows of the next 10 years wore her down. For the first five years she sought to silently obey husband. The next five years she looked for the worldly pleasures of a woman of her age and station in life. These were distractions from her spiritual emptiness. It seems that the gratifications she indulged in were not decadent in nature though the testimonies on this point are ambiguously silent. But relative to the holy aspirations of her youth, they were years of wandering in the dark woods. She was losing herself in her efforts to save herself. And her heart was filled with weariness and melancholy. Then one day, on the recommendation of her sister (a nun) she went to a particular confessor. As soon as she knelt down, she was pierced with divine love and a consciousness of her own sin, throwing her into an ecstasy. She murmured “no more world, no more sin.” And as her first biography states, “And at that moment if she had possessed a thousand worlds, she would have thrown them all away.” From then onward she lived in a state of continual knowledge of God’s presence that never abandoned her again in life. She was in a state of perpetual refinement of the clear life of the Lord in her heart, leading her outward to devote herself to the city hospital and it’s sick. She became the center of a circle of friends and relations (including her converted husband), and when, in 1510, she died in sanctity, perhaps of Love as some contemporaries said, she left behind already an ardent cultus that would transmit her legacy (Capes, 2021).
Her Doctrine
Despite the relative simplicity of her arc in life, Catherine of Genoa is a rich subject for contemplation. She is a sign of living out sanctity in the World. In her life of total abandonment to Christian charity that does not despise the human condition, she stands for the dignity of the life of the laity, purity of love as an achievable state, and, in the end, of theosis within the sacrament of the present moment.
To the late medieval/early modern era where the assumption was that the cloister was the highest and most sure state for holiness, Catherine of Genoa’s exceptional piety as a lay married/widowed woman was a radical and fruitful challenge. Nevertheless, she was more consecrated in heart than most members of religious orders. She was part of a general movement in that era among all branches of Western Christendom to show the sanctity of the mundane and what in a later epoch would be called the universal call to holiness. This notion was not hidden by her contemporaries, but rather dramatically illustrated in a story they have passed down where a friar tells the future saint that he was more fitted for God’s love because of his renunciation, in contrast to her, who was “wedded to the world.” In response came an outpouring of the Spirit:
“An ardent flame of pure love seized the blessed Catherine, with which her heart was so inflamed, that she rose to her feet and fervently exclaimed:
“If I believed that your habit would add one spark to my love, I would not hesitate to tear it from you, if I could obtain it in no other way. Whatever you merit more than I, through the renunciation you have made for God’s sake, and through your religious life, which continually enables you to merit, I do not seek to obtain; these are yours; but that I cannot love God as much as yourself, you can never make me believe.” She uttered these words with so much fervor and effect, that her hair burst from the band that confined it, and fell disheveled over her shoulders, so that, in her burning zeal, she seemed almost beside herself; and yet so graceful and decorous was her bearing, that all persons present were amazed, edified, and pleased; and she added: “Love cannot be checked, and if checked it is not pure and simple love (The Life and Doctrine of Catherine of Genoa).”
The Second Eve redivivus with a wild yet measured beauty. This is all the more daring because she is a woman speaking to a man in a position of ecclesiastical authority. In this we can see a prophecy of the spirit of Vatican II, with its renewed call to lay holiness to balance out the heavyweight of a complacent clericalism, as well as a greater appreciation for the religious life of women in general.
Even more profoundly, in defense of the extraordinary hidden in the ordinary, Catherine raised up the epistemological standard that the day-to-day operations of the soul were the touchstone of the knowledge of its creator. Special revelations were less important than what the order of creation chanted in each passing moment.
“So long as anyone can speak of divine things, enjoy and understand them, remember and desire them, he has not yet arrived in port; yet there are ways and means to guide him thither. But the creature can know nothing but what God gives him to know from day to day(The Life and Doctrine of Catherine of Genoa).”
Central to the doctrine of Catherine of Genoa was Pure Love as a possible state of being in the world. Even if she had not lived in Augustine in Carthage levels of excess in her pre- conversion phase, she had still divided her heart with affection for many things and persons. Key to her new life, however, was radical concentration of her soul on God and God alone. Catherine even sought to renounce the ordinary and licit joys of piety in her desire for the essence of her One and Only Lord:
“At one time, on receiving [Holy Communion], she perceived such an odor and such sweetness, that she believed herself in Paradise, when suddenly she turned towards her Lord, and humbly said: “O Lord perhaps thou wouldst draw me to thee by this fragrance? I do not desire it; I desire nothing but thee, and thee wholly; thou knowest, that from the beginning I have asked of thee the grace that I might never see visions, nor receive external consolations, for so clearly do I perceive thy goodness, that I do not seem to walk by faith but by a true and heartfelt experience (Ibid).”
By a wonderful paradox, the less she wanted to receive the comforts of God in her pursuit of His stripped Being, the more she found them, like a cup overflowing:
“[St. Catherine of Genoa] wished to love God without soul and without body, and unsustain by them, with a direct, pure, and sincere, love; but the more she shunned these consolations, the more her Lord bestowed them upon her (Ibid.).”
Those who seek no signs will receive them in abundance. For all that will be added to those who seek the kingdom of heaven first. And with this filled her with a spirit of fortitude that made her despise all anxieties and temptations, regardless of their source.
“Whoever believes that anything good or bad can befall him, which can separate him from God, shows that he is not yet strong in divine charity; for man should fear nothing but to offend God, and all beside should be to him as if it were not.”
To embrace this Pure Love is not just a change of affection but a change of the soul’s being. As explained in her own words:
“When God sees the Soul pure as it was in its origins, He tugs at it with a glance, draws it, and binds it to Himself with a fiery love that by itself could annihilate the immortal soul. In so acting, God so transforms the soul in Him that it knows nothing other than God; and He continues to draw it up into His fiery love until He restores it to that pure state from which it first issued. These rays purify and then annihilate. The soul becomes like gold that becomes purer as it is fired, all dross being cast out. Having come to the point of twenty-four carats, gold cannot be purified any further; and this is what happens to the soul in the fire of God’s love (Ibid.)”
Finally, this embrace of single minded dedication to God did not end in the mere absorption of the soul with its lover, but inspired towards an outward facing evangelical and charitable zeal. The soul does not want rest in herself but looks to inspire all human beings, all creatures, with the same fiery passion for their maker.
“This is the beatitude that the blessed might have, and yet they have it not, except insofar as they are dead to themselves and absorbed in God. They have it not in so far as they remain in themselves and can say: `I am blessed.’ Words are wholly inadequate to express my meaning, and I reproach myself for using them. I would that everyone could understand me, and I am sure that if I could breathe in creatures, the fire of love burning within me would inflame them all with divine desire. O thing most marvelous! (Ibid.)”
Related to the doctrine of Pure Love was Saint Catherine’s focus on becoming ever more united to, and like, God, as a reality already available before the beatific vision within the New Jerusalem. This drive to theosis was experienced both as a radical loss of all the normal senses and the grace of being Lord of all things, as is eloquently expressed in the following passage:
“I see without eyes, and I hear without ears. I feel without feeling and taste without tasting. I know neither form nor measure; for without seeing I yet behold an operation so divine that the words I first used, perfection, purity, and the like, seem to me now mere lies in the presence of truth. . . . Nor can I any longer say, “My God, my all.” Everything is mine, for all that is God’s seems to be wholly mine. I am mute and lost in God…God so transforms the soul in Him that it knows nothing other than God, and He continues to draw it up into His fiery love until He restores it to that pure state from which it first issued (Ibid.).”
The first stage of this absorption into the Godhead was to see the divine at work in all elements of her life. Each moment, each deed, was a manifestation of the Divine Master, as her biography recounts:
“[Catherine of Genoa] knew no longer whether her mere human acts were good or bad, but saw all things in God. But this desire for union with God carried her beyond this acquiescence to God being closer to us than we are to ourselves. It took the form of a bold shameless desire by the soul to achieve a true glorious metamorphosis of its being into what it loved (Ibid.).”
“All things which have being, have it from the essence of God by his participation: but pure love cannot stop to contemplate this general participation coming from God, nor to consider whether in itself, considered as a creature, it receives it in the same way as do the other creatures which more or less participate with God. Pure love cannot endure such comparison; on the contrary, it exclaims with a great impetus of love; my being is God, not by participation only but by a true transformation and annihilation of my proper being (Ibid.).”
In her lowliness Saint Catherine reached the summit of all earthly ambition. And in her nakedness of will she was clothed with the highest honor. The world that she had renounced in her first moments of conversion was restored to her, not as a fantasy of ultimate power but as a gift of love that she wanted to share with all. She was a Caesar of the spirit who knew something beautiful that was hidden from all mere earthly kings.
Catherine’s call to sanctity to live in but not of the world raised up the status of the laity. It held up the possibility of pure love on this side of the grave. And finally, it presented a means of elevating the soul to God that was open to all with eyes to see and ears to hear.
In the context of Counter-Reformation and Baroque era Catholicism, she won the hearts of people in all stations of life as a simple but beautiful soul that transmitted the spirit of the Lord to those who had suffered from the excesses of distraction or subtlety. But her influence was not exhausted in the 16th and 17th century. Catherine also won over the 19th century intellect and heart of Baron von Hugel, one of the leading models of the modern Catholic intellectual.
Hugel: The Faithful Dissident, the Pious Scholar
Friedrich von Hügel was born in Florence, Italy, in 1852, to Charles von Hügel, an Austrian ambassador and a Scottish mother, Elizabeth Farquharson, a convert to Roman Catholicism. In 1867 he moved with his family to England and made it his primary home for the rest of his life (de la Bedoyère, 17).
In 1873 he married Lady Mary Catherine Herbert, a convert to Catholicism (Ibid. 9). They had three daughters, one of whom became a Carmelite nun. Hügel remained an Austrian citizen until he found himself labeled a “hostile alien” after the UK declared war on his birth homeland of Austria, with the advent of World War I (Ibid. 279). He applied for naturalization and received it without difficulty, such was the success of his adaptation to the environment of England.
Hügel was intimately tied to the international culture of Continental Europe. A true polyglot and multidisciplinary scholar despite never earning a university degree, he was a master of the prose of the English language. In Italy, Hügel frequently met two future popes, Achille Ratti and Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pius XI and Pius XII (Ibid. 125). The former aided Hugel with his research for The Mystical Element of Religion. Hügel, despite the prejudices of the English audience, sought to transfer the highest of German thought and philosophy to his adopted nation. In 1925, several years after the World War which ended the European high culture that had shaped him, he passed away, widely respected by Catholics and non-Catholics alike.
Hügel has been classified as a modernist theologian. But unlike many modernist theologians, then and now, he remained unfailingly loyal to the Church. And his loyalty was not a mere dead compliance with an atavistic heirloom. He was an enthusiastic participant in the sacramental, liturgical, and theological life of his inherited faith. His criticisms of the reigning interpretation of dogmas and mundane governance of the Church came from a place of love and unwavering fidelity
The Three Religious Elements of Hügel
Key to Hügel’s understanding of religion and the Catholic faith in particular were the three components/states of supernatural nature: the historical-institutional, the intellectual-speculative, and the mystical-experiential. These were articulated as part of his theoretical approach to understanding Catherine of Genoa (Hügel, 50-53).
Essential to religion, including the Christian revelation, was its occurrence within a particular time and place. Human beings are temporal creatures and, equally, they must be saved in a temporal fashion. Further, man, as a social animal, must have the mediation of social forms, giving him a horizontal relationship with his fellows in addition to the vertical one with God. All of this amounted to what Hugel described as the essential enduring childhood phase of the human soul
The subsequent adolescence of religion was the intellectual element, in which the individual and the society sought to understand the nature and purpose of what they did and believed. From this came the rationalization of orthopraxy and orthodoxy–not as mere arbitrary rules but as rooted in the eternal truths of God, self, and the nature of things.
Finally, at the pinnacle of the religious experience, was the mystical, direct encounter with the Divine. Before the soul had only heard by second hand reports the nature of her true homeland; but now she sees with her own eyes. The mystical is the experiential encounter with God that both discloses the supernatural and the receptivity of the human to the same higher reality. The mystical is not the excess of religion, but its living heart, which justifies all the other phases of the life of faith. It is the full-fledged adulthood of the spirit.
Importantly, none of these phases were independent of the other. Each provided the scaffolding for the next. The higher states gave their blessing to the ones below them. The point was not to separate the mystical as the “real” religious content from history or the intellect. To do that would be the path of perfidy, one-sided pathology, and, ultimately, disintegration. The aim of Hügel was to see all these parts as creating an organic whole, supporting each other and together aiding the life of all. This is in keeping with his status as a piously loyal modernist, someone who is honest about the contradictions of life without denying the signs of the Sovereignty of the Divine Life that lets nothing go to waste.
All of these different elements Hügel found richly expressed in the life of Catherine of Genoa, who was the subject of his magnum opus, the product of many years of research, meditation, and prayer.
The Encounter with Catherine of Genoa and Hügel
In many ways, Hügel and Catherine of Genoa could not be further from each other. Hugel was a refined and respected intellectual. He was a happily married man with children, possessing vistas of experience that were not available to the subject of his vast biography. Yet, Hugel was drawn to this saint nevertheless. To him, Catherine embodied religious unity in the threefold merging of the elements of spiritual life. She never ceased to obey the institutions of Holy Mother Church and many of her deepest religious experiences came from the sacraments:
“Catherine’s states of absorption in prayer, such as we find ever since her conversion, were transparently real and sincere, and were as swift and spontaneous as to appear quasi involuntary. They were evidently, together with, and largely on the occasion of, her reception of the Holy Eucharist, the chief means and the ordinary form of the accessions of strength and growth to her spiritual life (Ibid.226-227).”
At the same time she enthusiastically used the Franciscan and Neoplatonic/Dionynsian theological paradigms of her age and context to articulate her understanding of God. She was reflective about what her life meant in terms of the articulated theology of the Church. And above all she cultivated the individuality of the mystical life, the direct experience of God, an experience that grew up organically within the boundaries placed by historical and speculative religion. The differences and similarities between the two pedagogy were eloquently if indirectly expressed by Hügel himself:
“Catherine’s teaching, as we have it, is, at first sight, strangely abstract and impersonal. God nowhere appears in it, at least in so many words, either as Father, or as Friend, or as Bridegroom of the soul. This comes to no doubt, in part, from the circumstance that she had never known the joys of maternity, and had never, for one moment, experienced the soul-entrancing power of full conjugal union. It comes, perhaps, even more, from her somewhat abnormal temperament, the (in some respects) exclusive mentality which we have already noted. But it certainly springs at its deepest from one of the central requirements and experiences of her spiritual life; and must be interpreted by the place and the function which this apparently abstract teaching occupies within this large experimental life of hers which stimulates, utilizes, and transcends it all. For here again we are brought back to her rare thirst, her imperious need, for unification; to the fact that she was a living, closely knit, an ever-increasing spiritual organism, if there ever was one (Ibid. 229).”
What can be further argued is that both Catherine and Hügel were united by the sign of the Magdalene. Each had been touched by the world – Catherine by the frivolous life of a noblewoman of her class and day, Hügel by the advantages of his privilege and the life of the mind of a late 19th century/early 20th century scholar. But they translated their worldliness into a richness of spirit that was emptied out daily in love of God. Their lives were an offering of a free spirit to the Lord that did not involve a desecration of nature but nature perfected. Some are not so blessed. Some indeed must give up their eyes and limbs to enter the kingdom of Heaven. And on this side of eternity, there is no assurance whether that is not us.
The very existence of souls like Catherine and Hügel shows us that it is possible to harmonize the strength and beauty of the spirit with the love of God. I like to think of such harmony as being analogous to the majestic human figures of Michelangelo, resplendent in their baptized beauty. To conclude with a terrible but hopeful irony of Saint Catherine of Genoa herself:
“I see God to have so great a conformity to the rational creature that if the Devil could but rid himself of those garments of sin, in that instant God would unite Himself to him, and make him into that which he, the Devil, attempted to achieve by his own power (Ibid. 261).”
Bibliography
Capes, Florence. “St. Catherine of Genoa.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 3. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1908. 18 Nov. 2021 <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03446b.htm>.
de la Bedoyère, Michael (1951), The Life of Baron von Hügel, London: J. M. Dent & Sons
Hugel, Von Hügel, Friedrich (1908) The Mystical Elements of Religion As Studied In Saint Catherine of Genoa and Her Friends, New York : The Crossword Publishing Company.