The Mystical Element of Religion by Baron Friedrich von Hügel

First published: London: J. M. Dent, 1908, 2 vols.

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Biography; critical analysis; mysticism

Core issue(s): Asceticism; charity; devotional life; mysticism; problem of evil

Overview

The son of an Austrian diplomat and a Scottish gentlewoman, Friedrich von Hügel spent his childhood and youth mainly on the Continent. His marriage to Lady Mary Herbert, a recent convert, drew him into English Catholic circles, among whom he established himself as a moderating influence.

A prolific writer, von Hügel became interested in Catherine Fiesca Adorna (1447-1510), known to history as Saint Catherine of Genoa, in 1884 when he picked up a copy of her life and teachings at the British Museum. However, fourteen years elapsed before he published a small book on questions suggested by her life, and another ten years before the present two-volume The Mystical Element of Religion appeared. Why, one might ask, was this relatively minor saint chosen as the subject of such a monumental work? Among the reasons that the author puts forward are that she represents not the Middle Ages nor the Counter-Reformation from which the more notable mystics have come, but the high tide of the Italian Renaissance; she was never a member of a religious order and owed almost nothing to spiritual directors; and she was highly intelligent and able to interpret her own experience in the light not merely of Scripture but also of Renaissance Platonism. As has been said, she was the perfect heroine for a Victorian novel and Hügel was the complete Victorian.

The book is divided into three parts. Part 1, “Introduction,” sets forth the three elements that the author believes are essential in a religion that is to meet our needs. The first or historical element corresponds to the needs of childhood, which demand that religion be founded on fact and embodied in a social institution. The second or intellectual element corresponds to the needs of youth, when the argumentative and reflective capacities come into play and eventuate in a system of doctrine and a view of the world. The third or experimental element corresponds to the needs of maturity, when belief and reason ripen into volition and action, and when religion is felt rather than seen and argued about. The author returns to these elements in his conclusion.

In part 2, “Biography,” Hügel takes up the life and teachings of the saint and the beginnings of her official cultus. As a beautiful girl of sixteen, Catherine was married by her aristocratic family to Giuliano Adorno, the wealthy but irresponsible scion of a rival clan. The marriage was unhappy. However, ten years of loneliness and of frantic activity went by before, in a moment of transport, “she was drawn away from the miseries of the world; and, as it were beside herself, she kept crying out within herself: ’No more world; no more sins!’” For four years she lived as a penitent, giving herself to menial tasks among the poor, wearing a hair shirt, and moving with downcast eyes, seemingly dead to all around her. Meanwhile, Giuliano had suffered financial ruin and had become a convert, and they moved from their palace to a humble house near the great hospital of the Pammatone where they ministered to the sick and the poor. Later they moved into the hospital, living without pay and at their own expense. Catherine served as matron for a number of years, including the plague year 1493, during which she caught the fever as a result of kissing the lips of a dying woman. In 1497 Giuliano died, and Catherine, although still living within the hospital, was gradually forced by illness to give up her work. During these last years of her life, she had a small following of disciples; these, when she died, arranged for her to be buried, not beside her husband as she had desired, but in the pilgrimage church of San Nicolo.

It is to two of these disciples that we owe the Life and Doctrine, published in Genoa in 1551, but based on material gathered by Ettore Vernazzo (1470?-1524), a notary who helped Catherine during the plague and who devoted the remainder of his life to charitable work, and Don Cattaneo Marabotto (1450?-1528), a secular priest who was Catherine’s confessor for the last ten years of her life. Vernazzo’s daughter Battista (1497-1587), an able and saintly woman, seems to have taken the work in hand and given it final shape. According to Hügel, only a small part of the book is narrative, the rest being discourses by the saint; and although it contains brief passages that must have been recorded when they were spoken, most of the book is secondary so that the whole is “largely insipid and monotonous.” The two “works” usually attributed to Saint Catherine are from the same hands: The Treatise on Purgatory is a seventeen-page excerpt from the Life and Doctrine, and the Spiritual Dialogue is a composition of Battista Vernazza designed to systematize the teachings found in the Life and Doctrine.

Apart from the desire to record her teaching, Catherine’s biographers were guided by two main interests. One was to put divine favors on record. These were not many. On one occasion, when asked by Vernazzo to narrate graces shown to her, she replied that it was impossible to describe her interior experiences and that “as to exterior things, few or none had taken place in her case.” Still, it was reported that she would lie on the ground for hours in a state of trance, that during her fasts (forty days twice a year) her stomach rejected food, that she could tell unconsecrated from consecrated wine, and that the hand with which Don Cattaneo blessed the elements had for her a sweet odor. The other main concern was to put in a favorable light certain of Catherine’s departures from conventional piety: that she took Communion daily, that she went for years without confessing to a priest, that she did not take advantage of indulgences, and that she would not pray to saints. Both of these concerns were important in the eyes of the cult that grew up soon after Catherine’s death, notably after her body was found not to have undergone decay.

Hügel goes into every detail. Of Catherine’s absorption in prayer he notes that from the time of her conversion until her health failed (some twenty-six years of active life) these absorptions (she did not like the word “ecstasy”), which occurred almost daily and lasted up to six hours, were controlled by herself although they came and went so quickly as to seem involuntary. Often they were occasioned by her reception of the Eucharist, together with which they constituted her chief source of spiritual growth. In Hügel’s judgment she seems to have experienced only one form of absorption, that which is known as the Prayer of Quiet. These, he says,

are treated substantially as times when the conscious region of her soul, a region always relatively shallow, sinks down into the ever-present deep regions of subconsciousness; and hence as experiences which can only be described indirectly,—in their effects, as traced by and in the conscious soul, after its rising up again . . . to its more ordinary condition.

Hügel denies that Catherine’s teachings are “pneumatic,” in the sense that they were given to her during these absorptions. Rather, he suggests, the soul itself was fed on these occasions, and its capacities for intellectual expression were increased when she returned to ordinary consciousness. He further notes that in Catherine’s later years, when she was no longer able to work and when the rhythm of her life was broken, her protracted absorptions diminished and, toward the end, were interspersed with a different kind of trance, outwardly indistinguishable from her healthy absorptions, but which she recognized as alien and complained that they did her harm. It was, however, in the last year of her life that Catherine was granted what was perhaps the most stirring of all her experiences.

There came upon her an insupportable fire of infinite love; and she declared that there had been shown to her one single spark (scintilla) of Pure Love, and that this had been but for a short moment; and that, had it lasted longer, she would have expired because of its great force.

According to Hügel this “scintilla-experience,” the richest in her life, must be kept in mind if we are to understand her most profound teachings. Yet essentially it was no different in kind from her earlier experiences, being “a gift of herself by herself to God; and yet her very power and determination to give herself were rendered possible and became actual through the accompanying gift of God.”

Catherine was never a teacher in the formal sense. What her followers called her doctrine is simply a compilation of detached sayings without context. To aid in deciding which are authentic, Hügel used the tests of rhythm, simplicity, and originality. (We are told that she often “made rhymed sayings in her joy.”) The sayings, while touching many matters and giving vent to many moods, are all true to Catherine’s central experience of God’s unifying love and can easily be grouped under the great theological heads of God and Creation, sin and redemption, and last things.

For Catherine, God is a “living fountain of goodness.” All creatures participate in this goodness even when they are in mortal sin; otherwise they would perish. God, she says, seems to have “nothing else to do than to unite Himself to us.” As for man, “lift sin off from his shoulders and then allow the good of God to act.” True self-love is love of God, and all other love is self-hatred. It is nonsensical to say that God is offended by our acts; say rather that we damage ourselves. God is the true center of each rational creature. “My Me is God, . . . not by simple participation but by a true transformation of my Being.”

How there can be evil in the presence of an all-loving God is not easy to understand, especially for those who are consumed with the thirst for unity that Catherine shares with all the Neoplatonist school, for reality constitutes a graduated series with the sensible world at the bottom and with God at the top. “Listen,” she says, “to what Fra Jacapone says in one of his Lauds: ’True elevation is in heaven; earthly lowness leads to the soul’s destruction.’” On this view, everything is good in its place; evil is merely displacement. However, this solution to the problem does not represent Catherine’s better thinking, for she recognized in self-determining creatures not only the varying degrees of goodness but also the capacity for self-making and self-marring. Indeed, nothing is more characteristic of her own experience than the continuous awareness of her own bad side, which must be fought with and subdued again and again. With the aid of God’s grace one makes progress but never attains perfection. Time and again she had thought her love was complete, but when she saw more clearly she was aware of great imperfections. “God-Love was determined to achieve the whole only little by little, for the sake of preserving my physical life, and so as to keep my behavior tolerable for those with whom I lived.”

Catherine’s doctrine of last things is closely connected with her teachings concerning sin and redemption. There is no break between our present life and our life after the body’s death. While still in the flesh, the penitent soul experiences God’s love as refining fire, even as souls in purgatory are cleansed of such stains as remain after death. Voluntary acceptance of the suffering necessarily attaching to the pleasure seeking of the false self renders suffering wholesome. Impenitent souls are those who have so far unmade themselves as to be no longer capable of recognizing God’s love. To these nothing remains but to endure the pain, although even in these there must remain a residue of moral goodness that cannot but mitigate what they have to bear. This is hell; and it is the same whether it be experienced here or hereafter.

Part 3, “Critical,” is a wide-ranging survey of scientific and philosophical opinions as they bear on religion in general and on mysticism in particular. There are interesting comparisons between Saint Catherine (canonized in 1737) and other mystics, most notably Saint Teresa of Ávila; learned discussions of Pseudo-Dionysius and other Neoplatonists; and a sympathetic presentation of quietism (Madame Guyon) and the doctrine of pure love (Fénelon). Catherine’s doctrines are discussed at length and compared not merely with received doctrines of the Church but also with the teachings of many of Hügel’s contemporaries. Hügel saw no difficulty in reconciling mysticism and science, insisting that, as over against various schools of Idealism, it is a leading characteristic of Catholic teaching to insist on the full reality of the “determinist Thing” alongside the freedom of Spirit—a principle he finds illustrated in Catherine’s karmalike doctrine of purgation.

Hügel holds that there are three main elements of religion corresponding to three main forces of the soul. In his final summary he returns to these, arguing that although each of them is necessary to a true religion, any one of them divorced from the other two is destructive of itself and of religion. For example, institutionalism led to the Spanish Inquisition, rationalism to the Goddess of Reason being installed at Notre Dame of Paris, and emotionalism to the apocalyptic orgies of the Münster Anabaptists. Even where the imbalance does not reach these proportions, it leaves the church weak and divided, as in the parties of the Church of England: High, Broad, and Low Church.

Mysticism, which is one manifestation of the third or experimental element of religion, is as susceptible as the other elements of exaggeration and abuse. This is apparent when, as sometimes happens among followers of Pseudo-Dionysius, love of God is thought of as competing with love of God’s creatures, and the inference is drawn that God is not loved until he is loved alone. However, in contrast to exclusive mysticism of this kind there is an inclusive mysticism that places God not alongside his creatures but behind them “as the light which shines through a crystal and lends it whatever lustre it may have.” Among inclusive mystics, says Hügel, in spite of the uncertainty on many points of her life and of defects in her natural character and limited opportunity, Saint Catherine of Genoa “shines forth . . . with a penetrating attractiveness, rarely matched, hardly surpassed, by Saints and Heroes of . . . more massive gifts and actions.”

Christian Themes

Hügel’s selection of Saint Catherine of Genoa as the subject of his biography is made clear when he reveals the importance with which he regards mysticism. Mysticism is an essential element of a developed religion, he says, and the properties of mysticism are best studied in the lives of individual mystics. The traditional lives of mystics are commonly overlaid with legends, and must be subjected to historical criticism. Hügel carefully and critically analyzes the works of earlier writers on the saint as he examines every detail of her life, especially those relating to mystical experiences. He notes that because those who have enjoyed a full mystical experience frequently suffer from mental and nervous illness, care must be taken to distinguish symptoms of illness from spiritual insights.

Hügel especially praises inclusive mysticism, which recognizes the necessity of diverse types of souls and finds in the Kingdom of God the “means of an ever more distinct articulation, within an ever more fruitful interaction, of the various gifts, vocations, and types of souls which constitute its society.” Among inclusive mystics, he notes one of the most prominent to be Saint Catherine of Genoa, which makes her a fitting subject for his study.

Sources for Further Study

De la Bedoyère, Michael. The Life of Baron von Hügel. New York: Scribner, 1951. A full-length biography including a full account of his role in the Modernist controversy as a friend and correspondent of Alfred Loisy and of George Tyrell.

Johns, David L. Mysticism and Ethics in Friedrich von Hügel. Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 2004. Includes a bibliography and index.

Leonard, Ellen M. Creative Tension: The Spiritual Legacy of Friedrich von Hügel. Scranton, Pa.: University of Scranton Press, 1997. This biography focuses on Friedrich von Hügel’s writings and spiritual activities. The author covers his life, philosophy, and spiritual vision. Includes a selective bibliography and index.

Whelan, Joseph P. The Spirituality of Friedrich von Hügel. Foreword by B. C. Butler. New York: Newman Press, 1971. Von Hügel’s teachings concerning Christ, God, and the Church as they help to illuminate the problem of sanctity in the modern world. Includes a bibliography.