OF SIENA. J CATHERINE 231 fulness. The monk s statement that he had known what was taking place from the movements of her body would eaem to be very suggestive of a foregone purpose and plan. On the other hand it may be argued that this is so obvious, that the monk would never have committed himself to such a statement had not it been the simple truth. The celebrated and learned Tomasseo, whose literary reputation probably stands higher with his countrymen than that of any other living writer, and who is the latest writer on St Catherine, accepting her works and character in the spirit of an enthusiastic devotee, writes in the essay on St Catherine, which he has prefixed to the latest edition of her works (4T vols., Florence, 1860), as follows : "If by the mere play of the imagination a person, who has had a limb cut off, feels, nevertheless, pain in the part which has been removed ; if the force of thought often creates bodily ills and cures them, it would be in contradic tion to all philosophy and all the laws of criticism to deny that a woman rendered by love profoundly apprehensive of the sufferings of another, may feel pain in her own person, in that same spot of the body where the loved person feels or felt it. It would be to deny to Catherine that privilege of sympathizing piety and tender humanity, which wo grant to the French mother, who exclaims, J ai mal a la poitrine de ma fillc ! And for Catherine Jesus was alive, was present in her heart, in her eyes. All her being, as all the world, was full of him." The recognized phenomenon, however, to which the eloquent philologist reiers is a purely physiological one ; and it is for physiologists to determine what amount of analogy may be discoverable between that known fact and the sensation of bodily pain from which Catherine declared herself to be suffering, when she had recovered from her trance ; or rather that respecting which Catherine is said to have made such a declaration by the Dominican her confessor and biographer. For in weighing the extremely curious question of the amount of conscious imposture which may probably be supposed to have been mingled with other elements in the extraordinary narrative, it is very necessary to remember that we have the testimony and statements of Catherine only through the medium of the general of the order, to the fame and glory of which Catherine s saintly fame and glory was so all-important. It is important to observe in this connection that various statements of her confessor will leave little doubt on the minds of t^ose who have made that form of malady called catalepsy their study, or even of those who have witnessed the phenomena attending it, that Catherine was subject to constantly-recurring attacks of catalepsy. And physicians will probably deem the hint above thrown out, to the effect that the saint was in the habit of throwing herself into this state "as much as she could," not unimportant. It is unnecessary in this place to do more than call attention by a passing word to the very remark able similarity between some of the phenomena described by Father Raimondo and those attending many very well- known cases of animal magnetism. But if uoubts and difficulties crowd thickly about the whole of that portion of Saint Catherine s story which has obtained for her the pre-eminence of saintship, it may be said that the public events of her life, which make part of the undoubted history of her time, are hardly less extra ordinary and surprising. In the year 1376, the 29th of Catherine s life, Gregory XI. was living and holding the Papal court at Avignon. He was the last of seven French Popes in succession who had done so, and had perpetuated for seventy-three years what ecclesiastical writers are fond of terming " the Babylonian captivity of the church." To put an end to this absenteeism, and to bring back the Papacy to Italy was the cherished and anxious wish of all good Italians, and especially of all Italian churchmen. Petrarch had urgently pressed Urban V., Gregory s imme diate predecessor, to accomplish the desired change ; and Dante had at an earlier date laboured to bring about the same object. But both had failed in front of the great difficulties which attended the step. The French cardinals, who surrounded the Pope, were anxious, of course, to detain him in France. The king of France threw all his influence into the same scale. The French Pope s own prejudices and wishes were, of course, enlisted on the same side. Rome itself and the dominions of the church, which the violences and usurpations of the Roman barons kept in a chronic state of rebellion, made the Eternal City anything but an inviting residence. There was also considerable truth in the representations insisted on by several of the French Popes, that the rising importance of the northern churches had in a great degree changed the central point of the ecclesiastical world, and that the church could more advantageously be governed from a French than from an Italian city. Thus all the influences which Italy had for many years past striven to bring to bear upon the popes, to induce them to return to their own city had failed. And it was under these circumstances that Catherine, the illiterate daughter of an obscure Sienese dyer, determined to try her powers of persuasion and argument for the accomplishment of that which the princes of the church and the greatest men of Italy bad in vain attempted. For this purpose Catherine proceeded to Avignon in the summer of 1376. And in the September of that year the Pope set out on his return to Rome. It is true that he did this, intending after a sojourn in the Eternal City to return to France, and he would almost certainly have done so, had he not been prevented by death. But the dyer s daughter did, as things fell out, succeed in her enterprise, and moved the centre of Europe back again once more to its old place in Rome ! Of course it may be said that to attribute the Pope s return to Rome to Catherine s intervention is a notable instance of a, post hoc ergo propter hoc inference. But many proofs might be given from various writers to show that it was unquestionably believed in her own day that Catherine had been the real moving cause of the restoration of the Papacy to Rome. (See especially Ammirato, Istorie Florentine, vol. v. p. 130, ed. Flor., 1824.) After many other journeyings she arrived in Rome on the 28th of November 1378, in obedience to the commands of the Pope ; and there she died on the 29th of April 1380, at the age of thirty-three. Father Raimondo was then at Genoa, and declares that in that city, at the hour of her death, he heard a voice communicating to him a last message from Catherine, which he afterwards found she had uttered on her deathbed word for word as he heard it, " and of this," he adds solemnly, " let that Eternal Truth, which can neither deceive nor be deceived, be witness." Catherine s works consist of a treatise occupying a closely-printed quarto volume, which Father Raimoudo describes as "a dialogue between a soul, which asked four questions of the Lord, and the same Lord, who made answer and gave instruction in many most useful truths," of her letters, 373 in number, and of 26 prayers. The dialogue is entitled, The Book of Divine Doctrine, given in person by God the Father, speaking to the mind of the most glorious and holy virgin Catherine of Siena, and written down as she dictated it in the vulgar tongue, she being the while entranced, and actually hearing what God spoke in her. The work is declared to have been dictated by the saint in her father s house in Siena, a little before she went to Rome, and to have been completed on the 13th of October 1378. This dialogue has been divided into five parts, though no such division existed in it as it fell from her lips. The first four parts exist in manuscript, as taken down from the lips of the entranced saint ; but the fifth treatise is not extant in the original, but only in the Latin version of Father Raimondo, from which the published Italian version has been re-translated.
The French oratorian, Father Casimir Oudin, in his supplement of