Letters of Catherine Benincasa | Page 4

to earth. From the contemplation of the beauty of

holiness, Catherine has swiftly turned us to face the opposing sin.
"Thou art the man!" A few trenchant sentences, charged with pain, and
the soul which has been raised to celestial places awakes to see in itself
the contradiction of all that is so lovely. Into the region of darkness
Catherine goes with it. It is not "thou" but "we" who have sinned. She
holds that sinful heart so near her own that the beatings are confounded;
her words now and again express a shuddering personal remorse for
sins of which she could have had no personal knowledge. Her sense of
unity with her fellow-men lies deeper than any theory of brotherhood;
she feels herself in sober truth guilty of the sins of her brothers: her
experience illustrates the profound truth that only purity can know
perfect penitence.
Catherine is then saved from any touch of Pharisaism by her
remarkable identification of herself with the person to whom she writes.
But to understand her attitude we must go further. For she never pauses
in reprobation of evil. Full of conviction that the soul needs only to
recognise its sin to hate and escape it for ever, she passes swiftly on to
impassioned appeal. Her words breathe a confidence in men that never
fails even when she is writing to the most hardened. She succeeded to a
rare degree in the difficult conciliation of uncompromising hatred
toward sin with unstrained fellowship with the sinner, and invincible
trust in his responsiveness to the appeal of virtue. When we consider
the times in which she lived, this large and touching trustfulness
becomes to our eyes a victory of faith. That it was no mere instinct, but
an attitude resolutely adopted and maintained, is evident from her
frequent discussions of charity and tolerance, some of which will be
found in these selections. She constantly urges her disciples to put the
highest possible construction on their neighbours' actions; nor is any
phase of her teaching more constantly repeated than the beautiful
application of the text: "In My Father's House are many mansions," to
enjoin recognition of the varieties in temperament and character and
practice which may coexist in the House of God.
Catherine had learned a hard lesson. She saw in human beings not their
achievements, but their possibilities. Therefore she quickened
repentance by a positive method, not by morbid analysis of evil, not by
lurid pictures of the consequences of sin, but by filling the soul with
glowing visions of that holiness which to see is to long for. She never

despaired of quickening in even the most degraded that flame of "holy
desire" which is the earnest of true holiness to be. We find her
impatient of mint and cummin, of over-anxious self-scrutiny. "Strive
that your holy desires increase," she writes to a correspondent; "and let
all these other things alone." "I, Catherine--write to you--with desire":
so open all her letters. Holy Desire! It is not only the watchword of her
teaching: it is also the true key to her personality.
III
We have dwelt on Catherine, the friend and guide of souls; but it is
Catherine the mystic, Catherine the friend of God, before whom the
ages bend in reverence. The final value of her letters lies in their
revelation, not of her dealings with other souls, but of God's dealings
with her own.
But in presence of the record of these deep experiences, silence is better
than words: is, indeed, for most of us the only possible attitude. The
letters that follow must speak for themselves. The clarity of mind
which Catherine always preserved, even in moments of highest
exaltation, and her loving eagerness to share her most sacred
experiences with those dear to her, have given her a power of
expression that has produced pages of unsurpassed interest and value,
alike for the psychologist and for the believer. Moreover--and this we
well may note--her letters enable us to apprehend with singularly happy
intimacy, the natural character and disposition of her whom these high
things befell. In the very cadence of their impetuous phrasing, in their
swift dramatic changes, in their marvellous blending of sweetness and
virility, they show us the woman. Some of them, especially those to her
family and friends, are of almost childlike simplicity and homely charm;
others, among the most famous of their kind, deal with mystical, or if
we choose so to put it, with supernatural experience: in all alike, we
feel a heart akin to our own, though larger and more tender.
The central fact in Catherine's nature was her rapt and absolute
perception of the Love of God, as the supreme reality in the universe.
This Love, as manifested in creation, in redemption, and in the
sacrament