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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MYSTICAL

ELEMENT OF RELIGION, AS STUDIED IN SAINT CATHERINE OF
GENOA AND HER FRIENDS, VOLUME 1 (OF 2) ***
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE: Volume II is available as Project Gutenberg ebook number
50206.

THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT

OF RELIGION

All rights reserved.

Walker & Boutall, ph, sc

St. Catherine of Genoa.

(Caterina Fiesca Adorna.)
 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT
OF RELIGION AS STUDIED
IN SAINT CATHERINE OF
GENOA AND HER FRIENDS

By BARON FRIEDRICH VON HÜGEL

MEMBER OF THE CAMBRIDGE PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY

VOLUME FIRST
INTRODUCTION AND BIOGRAPHIES

LONDON: J. M. DENT & CO.

NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
 MCMVIII

Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,

BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND
BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
 PREFACE
The following work embodies well-nigh all that the writer has been
able to learn and to test, in the matter of religion, during now some
thirty years of adult life; and even the actual composition of the
book has occupied a large part of his time, for seven years and
more.

The precise object of the book naturally grew in range, depth and
clearness, under the stress of the labour of its production. This
object will perhaps be best explained by means of a short
description of the undertaking’s origin and successive stages.
Born as I was in Italy, certain early impressions have never left
me; a vivid consciousness has been with me, almost from the first,
of the massively virile personalities, the spacious, trustful times of
the early, as yet truly Christian, Renaissance there, from Dante on to
the Florentine Platonists. And when, on growing up, I acquired
strong and definite religious convictions, it was that ampler pre-
Protestant, as yet neither Protestant nor anti-Protestant, but deeply
positive and Catholic, world, with its already characteristically
modern outlook and its hopeful and spontaneous application of
religion to the pressing problems of life and thought, which helped
to strengthen and sustain me, when depressed and hemmed in by
the types of devotion prevalent since then in Western Christendom.
For those early modern times presented me with men of the same
general instincts and outlook as my own, but environed by the
priceless boon and starting-point of a still undivided Western
Christendom; Protestantism, as such, continued to be felt as ever
more or less unjust and sectarian; and the specifically post-
Tridentine type of Catholicism, with its regimental Seminarism, its
predominantly controversial spirit, its suspiciousness and timidity,
persisted, however inevitable some of it may be, in its failure to win
my love. Hence I had to continue the seeking and the finding
elsewhere, yet ever well within the great Roman Church, things
more intrinsically lovable. The wish some day to portray one of those
large-souled pre-Protestant, post-Mediaeval Catholics, was thus early
and has been long at work within me.
And then came John Henry Newman’s influence with his Dream of
Gerontius, and a deep attraction to St. Catherine of Genoa’s doctrine
of the soul’s self-chosen, intrinsic purification; and much lingering
about the scenes of Caterinetta’s life and labours, during more than
twenty stays in her terraced city that looks away so proudly to the
sea. Such a delicately psychological, soaring, yet sober-minded
Eschatology, with its striking penetration and unfolding of the soul’s
central life and alternatives as they are already here and now,
seemed to demand an ampler study than it had yet received, and to
require a vivid presentation of the noble, strikingly original
personality from whom it sprang.
And later still came the discovery of the apparently hopeless
complication of the records of Catherine’s life and doctrine, and how
these had never been seriously analyzed by any trained scholar,
since their constitution into a book in 1552. Much critical work at
Classical and Scriptural texts and documentary problems had, by
now, whetted my appetite to try whether I could not at last bring
stately order out of this bewildering chaos, by perhaps discovering
the authors, dates and intentions of the various texts and glosses
thus dovetailed and pieced together into a very Joseph’s coat of
many colours, and by showing the successive stages of this, most
original and difficult, Saint’s life and legend. All this labour would, in
any case, help to train my own mind; and it would, if even
moderately successful, offer one more detailed example of the laws
that govern such growths, and of the critical method necessary for
the tracing out of their operation.
 But the strongest motive revealed itself, in its full force, later than
all those other motives, and ended by permeating them all. The wish
arose to utilize, as fully as possible, this long, close contact with a
soul of most rare spiritual depth,—a soul that presents, with an
extraordinary, provocative vividness, the greatness, helps, problems
and dangers of the mystical spirit. I now wanted to try and get down
to the driving forces of this kind of religion, and to discover in what
way such a keen sense of, and absorption in, the Infinite can still
find room for the Historical and Institutional elements of Religion,
and, at the same time, for that noble concentration upon not directly
religious contingent facts and happenings, and upon laws of
causation or of growth, which constitutes the scientific temper of
mind and its specific, irreplaceable duties and virtues. Thus, having
begun to write a biography of St. Catherine, with some philosophical
elucidations, I have finished by writing an essay on the philosophy of
Mysticism, illustrated by the life of Caterinetta Fiesca Adorna and her
friends.

The book’s chief peculiarities seem to spring inevitably from its

fundamental standpoint: hence their frank enumeration may help
towards the more ready comprehension of the work.
The book has, throughout, a treble interest and spirit; historico-
critical, philosophical, religious. The historico-critical constituent may
attract critical specialists; but will such specialists care for the
philosophy? The philosopher may be attracted by the psychological
and speculative sections; but will the historical analysis interest him
at all? And the soul that is seeking spiritual food and stimulation, will
it not readily be wearied by the apparent pettiness of all that
criticism, and by the seemingly cold aloofness of all that speculation?
—And yet it is the most certain of facts that the human soul is so
made as to be unable to part, completely and finally, with any one of
these three great interests. Hence, I may surely hope that this trinity
of levels of truth and of life, which has so much helped on the
growth of my own mind and the constitution of my own character,
may, in however different a manner and degree, be found to help
others also. This alternation and interstimulation between those
three forces and interests within the same soul, and within this soul’s
ever-deepening life, is, in any case, too fundamental a feature of this
whole outlook for any attempt at its elimination here.
Then there is a look of repetition and of illogical anticipation about
the very structure of the book. For the philosophical First Part says,
in general, what the biographical Second Part says in detail; this
detail is, in reality, based upon the critical conclusions arrived at in
the Appendix, which follows the precise descriptions of the
biography; and then the Third, once more a philosophical, Part
returns, now fortified by the intervening close occupation with
concrete contingent matters, to the renewed consideration, and
deeper penetration and enforcement, of the general positions with
which the whole work began.—Yet is not this circular method simply
a frank application, to the problems in hand, of the process actually
lived through by us all in real life, wherever such life is truly fruitful?
For, in real life, we ever start with certain general intellectual-
emotive schemes and critical principles, as so many draw-nets and
receptacles for the capture and sorting out of reality and of our
experience of it. We next are brought, by choice or by necessity, into
close contact with a certain limited number of concrete facts and
experiences. And we then use these facts and experiences to fill in,
to confirm or to modify that, more or less tentative and
predominantly inherited, indeed ever largely conventional, scheme
with which we began our quest. In all these cases of actual life, this
apparently long and roundabout, indeed back-before, process is, in
reality, the short, because the only fully sincere and humble,
specifically human way in which to proceed. The order so often
followed in “learned” and “scientific” books is, in spite of its
appearance of greater logic and conciseness, far longer; for the road
thus covered has to be travelled all over again, according to the
circular method just described, if we would gain, not wind and
shadow, but substance and spiritual food.
 Then again, there is everywhere a strong insistence upon History
as a Science, yet as a Science possessing throughout a method, type
and aim quite special to itself and deeply different from those of
Physical Science; and an even greater stress upon the important,
indeed irreplaceable function of both these kinds of Science, or of
their equivalents, in the fullest spiritual life. Here the insistence upon
History, as a Science, is still unusual in England; and the stress upon
the spiritually purifying power of these Sciences will still appear
somewhat fantastic everywhere.—Yet that conception of two
branches of ordered human apprehension, research and knowledge,
each (in its delicate and clear contrastedness of method, test, end
and result) legitimate and inevitable, so that either of them is ruined
if forced into the categories of the other, has most certainly come to
stay. And the attempt to discover the precise function and meaning
of these several mental activities and of their ethical pre-requisites,
within the full and spiritual life of the soul, and in view of this life’s
consolidation and growth, will, I believe, turn out to be of genuine
religious utility. For I hope to show how only one particular manner
of conceiving and of practising those scientific activities and this
spiritual life and consolidation allows, indeed requires, the religious
passion,—the noblest and deepest passion given to man,—to be
itself enlisted on the side of that other noble, indestructible thing,
severe scientific sincerity. This very sincerity would thus not empty
or distract, but would, on the contrary, purify and deepen the soul’s
spirituality; and hence this spirituality would continuously turn to
that sincerity for help in purifying and deepening the soul. And,
surely, until we have somehow attained to some such interaction,
the soul must perforce remain timid and weak; for without sincerity
everywhere, we cannot possibly develop to their fullest the passion
for truth and righteousness even in religion itself.
And then again a Catholic, one who would be a proudly devoted
and grateful son of the Roman Church, speaks and thinks
throughout the following pages. Yet it is his very Catholicism which
makes him feel, with a spontaneous and continuous keenness, that
only if there are fragments, earlier stages and glimpses of truth and
goodness extant wheresoever some little sincerity exists, can the
Catholic Church even conceivably be right. For though Christianity
and Catholicism be the culmination and fullest norm of all religion,
yet to be such they must find something thus to crown and
measure: various degrees of, or preparations for, their truth have
existed long before they came, and exist still, far and wide, now that
they have come. Otherwise, Marcion would have been right, when
he denied that the Old Testament proceeds from the same God as
does the New; and three-fourths or more of the human race would
not, to this very moment, be bereft, without fault of their own, of all
knowledge of the Historic Christ and of every opportunity for definite
incorporation into the Christian Church, since we dare not think that
God has left this large majority of His children without any and every
glimpse and opportunity of religious truth, moral goodness, and
eternal hope. Yet such a recognition of some light and love
everywhere involves no trace of levelling down, or even of levelling
up; it is, in itself, without a trace of Indifferentism. For if some kinds
or degrees of light are thus found everywhere, yet this light is held
to vary immensely in different times and places, from soul to soul,
and from one religious stage, group or body to another; the
measure and culmination of this light is found in the deepest
Christian and Catholic light and holiness; and, over and above the
involuntary, sincere differences in degree, stage and kind, there are
held to exist, also more or less everywhere, the differences caused
by cowardice and opposition to the light,—cowardices and
oppositions which are as certainly at work within the Christian and
Catholic Church as they are amongst the most barbarous of
Polytheists. I may well have failed adequately to combine these twin
truths; yet only in some such, though more adequate apprehension
and combination resides the hope for the future of our poor storm-
tossed human race,—in a deep fervour without fanaticism, and a
generous sympathy without indifference.
And lastly, a lay lover of religion speaks throughout, a man to
whom the very suspicion that such subjects should or could, on that
account, be foreign to him has ever been impossible. A deep interest
in religion is evidently part of our very manhood, a thing previous to
the Church, and which the Church now comes to develop and to
save. Yet such an interest is, in the long run, impossible, if the heart
and will alone are allowed to be active in a matter so supremely
great and which claims the entire man. “Where my heart lies, let my
brain lie also”: man is not, however much we may try and behave as
though he were, a mere sum-total of so many separable water-tight
compartments; he can no more fruitfully delegate his brains and his
interest in the intellectual analysis and synthesis of religion, than he
can commission others to do his religious feeling and willing, his
spiritual growth and combat, for him.—But this does not of itself
imply an individualistic, hence one-sided, religion. For only in close
union with the accumulated and accumulating experiences, analyses
and syntheses of the human race in general, and with the supreme
life and teaching of the Christian and Catholic Church in particular,
will such growth in spiritual personality be possible on any large and
fruitful scale: since nowhere, and nowhere less than in religion, does
man achieve anything by himself alone, or for his own exclusive use
and profit.
And such a layman’s views, even when thus acquired and
expressed with a constant endeavour to be, and ever increasingly to
become, a unit and part and parcel of that larger, Christian and
Catholic whole, will ever remain, in themselves and in his valuation
of them, unofficial, and, at best, but so much material and
stimulation for the kindly criticism and discriminating attention of his
fellow-creatures and fellow-Christians and (should these views stand
such informal, preliminary tests) for the eventual utilization of the
official Church. To this officiality ever remains the exclusive right and
duty to formulate successively, for the Church’s successive periods,
according as these become ripe for such formulations, the corporate,
normative forms and expressions of the Church’s deepest
consciousness and mind. Yet this officiality cannot and does not
operate in vacuo, or by a direct recourse to extra-human sources of
information. It sorts out, eliminates what is false and pernicious, or
sanctions and proclaims what is true and fruitful, and a development
of her own life, teaching and commission, in the volunteer, tentative
and preliminary work put forth by the Church’s unofficial members.
And just because both these movements are within, and
necessary to, one and the same complete Church, they can be and
are different from each other. Hence the following book would
condemn itself to pompous unreality were it to mimic official caution
and emphasis, whilst ever unable to achieve official authority. It
prefers to aim at a layman’s special virtues and function: complete
candour, courage, sensitiveness to the present and future, in their
obscurer strivings towards the good and true, as these have been in
their substance already tested in the past, and in so far as such
strivings can be forecasted by sympathy and hope. And I thus trust
that the book may turn out to be as truly Catholic in fact, as it has
been Catholic in intention; I have striven hard to furnish so
continuous and copious a stream of actions and teachings of
Christian saints and sages as everywhere to give the reader means
of correcting or completing my own inferences; and I sincerely
submit these my own conclusions to the test and judgment of my
fellow-Christians and of the Catholic Church.

My obligations to scholars, thinkers and great spiritual souls are

far too numerous and great for any exhaustive recognition. Yet there
are certain works and persons to whom I am especially indebted;
and these shall here be mentioned with most grateful thanks.
In my Biographical and Critical Part Second, I have had, in Genoa
itself, the help of various scholars and friends. Signor Dottore Ridolfo
de Andreis first made me realize the importance of Vallebona’s
booklet. Padre Giovanni Semeria, the Barnabite, put me in touch
with the right persons and documents. The Cavallière L. A. Cervetto,
of the Biblioteca Civica, referred me to many useful works. The
Librarian of the Biblioteca della Missione Urbana copied out for me
the inventory of St. Catherine’s effects. And Signor Dottore Augusto
Ferretto, of the Archivio di Stato, made admirably careful,
explicitated copies for me, from the originals, so full of difficult
abbreviations, of the long series of legal documents which are the
rock-bed on which my biography is built.
The courteous help of the Head Librarian of the Genoese
University Library extended to beyond Genoa. For it was owing to his
action, in conjunction with that of the Italian Ministry, of the English
Embassy in Rome, and of the British Museum Authorities, that the
three most important of the manuscripts of St. Catherine’s life were
most generously deposited for my use at the latter institution. I was
thus enabled to study my chief sources at full leisure in London.
The Rev. Padre Calvino, Canon Regular of the Lateran, made many
kind attempts to trace any possible compositions concerning St.
Catherine among the Venerable Battista Vernazza’s manuscripts,
preserved by the spiritual descendants of Battista’s Augustinian
Canonesses in Genoa; it was not his fault that nothing could be
found.
The Society of Bollandists lent me, for a liberal length of time,
various rare books. I shall indeed be proud if my Appendix wins their
approbation, since it deals with subject-matters and methods in
which they are past-masters. Father Sticker’s pages on St. Catherine,
in their Acta Sanctorum (1752), are certainly not satisfactory; they
are, however, quite untypical of the Bollandists’ best work, or even
of their average performances.
My obligations in my Psychological and Philosophical Parts First
and Third are still more numerous and far more difficult to trace.
Indeed it is precisely where these obligations are the most far-
reaching that I can least measure them, since the influence of the
books and persons concerned has become part of the texture of my
own mind.
But among the great religious spirits or stimulating thinkers of
Classical and Patristic times, I am conscious of profound obligations
to Plato generally; to Aristotle on two points; to St. Paul; to Plotinus;
to Clement of Alexandria; and to St. Augustine. And the Areopagite
Literature has necessarily been continuously in my mind. Among
Mediaeval writers St. Thomas Aquinas has helped me greatly, in
ways both direct and indirect; Eckhart has, with the help of Father H.
S. Denifle’s investigations, furnished much food for reflection by his
most instructive doctrinal excesses; and the extraordinarily deep and
daring spirituality of Jacopone da Todi’s poetry has been studied with
the greatest care.
The Renaissance times have given me Cardinal Nicolas of Coes,
whose great Dialogue de Idiota has helped me in various ways. And
in the early post-Reformation period I have carefully studied, and
have been much influenced by, that many-sided, shrewdly wise
book, St. Teresa’s Autobiography. Yet it is St. John of the Cross, that
massively virile Contemplative, who has most deeply influenced me
throughout this work. St. Catherine is, I think, more like him, in her
ultimate spirit, than any other Saint or spiritual writer known to me;
she is certainly far more like him than is St. Teresa.
Later on, I have learnt much from Fénelon’s Latin writings
concerning Pure Love, of 1710 and 1712; together with Abbé
Gosselin’s admirably lucid Analyse de la Controverse du Quiétisme,
1820, and the Jesuit Father Deharbe’s solid and sober die
vollkommene Liebe Gottes, 1856.
Among modern philosophers I have been especially occupied with,
and variously stimulated or warned by, Spinoza, with his deep
religious intuition and aspiration, and his determinist system, so
destructive because taken by him as ultimate; Leibniz, with his
admirably continuous sense of the multiplicity in every living unity, of
the organic character, the inside of everything that fully exists, and
of the depth and range of our subconscious mental and emotional
life; Kant, with his keen criticisms and searching analyses, his
profound ethical instincts, and his curious want of the specifically
religious sense and insight; Schopenhauer, with his remarkable
recognition of the truth and greatness of the Ascetic element and
ideal; Trendelenburg, with his continuous requirement of an
operative knowledge of the chief stages which any principle or
category has passed through in human history, if we would judge
this principle with any fruit; Kierkegaard, that certainly one-sided,
yet impressively tenacious re-discoverer and proclaimer of the
poignant sense of the Transcendent essential to all deep religion,
and especially to Christianity, religion’s flower and crown; and
Fechner, in his little-known book, so delightfully convincing in its rich
simplicity, die drei Motive und Gründe des Glaubens, 1863.
Of quite recent or still living writers, two have been used by me on
a scale which would be unpardonable, had the matters treated by
them been the direct subjects of my book. In Part First whole pages
of mine are marked by me as little but a précis of passages in Dr.
Eduard Zeller’s standard Philosophy of the Greeks. I have myself
much studied Heracleitus, Parmenides, Plato and Plotinus; and I
have, also in the case of the other philosophers, always followed up
and tested such passages of Zeller as I have here transcribed. But I
did not, for by far the most part, think it worth while, on these
largely quite general and practically uncontested matters, to
construct fresh appreciations of my own, rather than to reproduce,
with due consideration and acknowledgments, the conclusions of
such an accepted authority. And already in Part First, but especially
in Part Third, I have utilized as largely, although here with still more
of personal knowledge and of careful re-examination, considerable
sections of Professor H. J. Holtzmann’s Lehrbuch der
Neutestamentlichen Theologie, 1897—sections which happen to be,
upon the whole, the deepest and most solid in that great but often
daring work. The same Professor Holtzmann is, besides, a most
suggestive religious philosopher; and his penetrating though very
difficult book Richard Rothe’s Speculatives System, 1899, has also
been of considerable use.
Other recent or contemporary German writers to whom I owe
much, are Erwin Rhode, in his exquisite great book, Psyche, 2nd ed.,
1898; Professor Johannes Volkelt, in his penetratingly critical Kant’s
Erkenntnisstheorie, 1879; Professor Hugo Münsterberg, in his largely
planned although too absolute Grundzüge der Psychologie, Vol. I.,
1900; Professor Heinrich Rickert, in his admirably discriminating
Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung, 1902; and also
two friends whose keen care for religion never flags—Professors
Rudolf Eucken of Jena and Ernst Troeltsch of Heidelberg. Eucken’s
Lebensanschauungen der grossen Denker, 1st ed., 1890; der Kampf
um einen geistigen Lebensinhalt, 1896; and the earlier sections of
der Wahrheitsgehalt der Religion, 1902, have greatly helped me. And
Troeltsch’s Grund-probleme der Ethik, 1902, has considerably
influenced certain central conceptions of my book, notwithstanding
the involuntary, rough injustice manifested by him, especially
elsewhere, towards the Roman Church.
Among present-day French writers, my book owes most to
Professor Maurice Blondel’s, partly obscure yet intensely alive and
religiously deep, work L’Action, 1893; to Dr. Pierre Janet’s carefully
first-hand observations, as chronicled in his Etat Mental des
Hystériques, 1894; to Monsieur Emil Boutroux’s very suggestive
paper Psychologie du Mysticisme, 1902; to various pregnant articles
of the Abbé L. Laberthonnière in the Annales de Philosophie
Chrétienne, 1898-1906; and to M. Henri Bergson’s delicately
penetrating Essai sur les Données Immédiates de la Conscience, 2nd
ed., 1898.
And amongst living Englishmen, the work is most indebted to
Professor A. S. Pringle-Pattison, especially to his eminently sane
Hegelianism and Personality, 2nd ed., 1893; to Professor James
Ward, in his strenuous Naturalism and Agnosticism, 1st ed., 1899; to
the Reverend George Tyrrell’s Hard Sayings, 1898, and The Faith of
the Millions, 2 vols., 1901, so full of insight into Mysticism; and, very
especially, to Dr. Edward Caird, in his admirably wide and balanced
survey, The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers, 1904.
But further back than all the living writers and friends lies the
stimulation and help of him who was later on to become Cardinal
Newman. It was he who first taught me to glory in my appurtenance
to the Catholic and Roman Church, and to conceive this my
inheritance in a large and historical manner, as a slow growth across
the centuries, with an innate affinity to, and eventual incorporation
of, all the good and true to be found mixed up with error and with
evil in this chequered, difficult but rich world and life in which this
living organism moves and expands. Yet the use to which all these
helps have here been put, has inevitably been my own doing:
nowhere except in direct quotations have I simply copied, and
nowhere are these helpers responsible for what here appears.
And then there have been great souls, whom I cannot well name
here, but whom I would nevertheless refer to in reverent gratitude;
souls that have taught me that deepest of facts and of lessons,—the
persistence, across the centuries, within the wide range of the visible
and indeed also of the invisible Church, of that vivid sense of the
finite and the Infinite, of that spacious joy and expansive freedom in
self-donation to God, the prevenient, all-encompassing Spirit, of that
massively spontaneous, elemental religion, of which Catherine is so
noble an example. Thus a world-renouncing, world-conquering, virile
piety, humble and daring, humane, tender and creatively strong, is
at no time simply dead, but it merely sleepeth; indeed it ever can be
found, alive, open-eyed irresistible, hidden away here and there,
throughout our earthly space and time.

In matters directly connected with the publication of the work I

have especially to thank Messrs. Sciutto of Genoa, the
photographers to whom I owe the very successful photographs from
which the plates that stand at the head of my volumes have been
taken; Mr. Sidney E. Mayle, publisher, of Hampstead, for permission
to use the photogravure of St. Catherine’s portrait which appeared
as an illustration to a paper of mine, in his scholarly Hampstead
Annual, 1898; Miss Maude Petre, who helped me much towards
achieving greater lucidity of style, by carefully reading and criticizing
all my proofs; and my publisher, who has not shrunk from
undertaking the publication of so long a work on so very serious,
abstruse-seeming a subject. Even so, I have had to suppress the
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