Life of Madame Catharine Adorna

Life of Madame Catharine Adorna is Thomas Cogswell Upham's 1845 presentation of Catherine of Genoa (Caterina Fieschi Adorno, 1447–1510) to a Protestant readership. Upham, professor of mental and moral philosophy at Bowdoin College, had come under the influence of Phoebe Palmer's holiness teaching in New York in 1839 and had already published Principles of the Interior or Hidden Life (1843). He was looking for historical witnesses to the doctrine of sanctification he now held, and he found one in a fifteenth-century Genoese noblewoman who had been unhappily married to Giuliano Adorno, converted suddenly in 1473, and spent the rest of her life serving the sick at the Pammatone hospital while teaching a small circle of followers. Upham's book, drawn from the Italian Vita and her associated writings on purgatory and the spiritual life, appeared two years before his better-known life of Madame Guyon and belongs to the same project.

The work is not primarily biography but argument conducted through biography. Upham narrates the outward facts of Catherine's life briefly and spends most of his attention on her inward experience: the moment of conversion in which she received an overwhelming sense of divine love and her own sinfulness, the years of severe penance that followed, and the later state in which she described her will as absorbed into God's so that she could say she no longer found a self to act from. Upham reads this trajectory as a case study in entire sanctification. He interprets her language of pure love, annihilation of self, and union with the divine will in the vocabulary of American holiness piety, treating her as evidence that the experience Palmer and the Methodists described was not a modern novelty but a recurring work of the Spirit across centuries and confessions. He deliberately passes over or reinterprets the Catholic framework in which Catherine lived, giving little weight to the sacraments, her spiritual directors, or the doctrine of purgatory as such, and more to what he takes to be the universal psychology of a soul brought into perfect love.

The book mattered because it opened a channel between Roman Catholic mysticism and evangelical Protestantism at a time when the two rarely spoke. Through Upham, Catherine of Genoa and Guyon entered the reading of holiness and Keswick circles and shaped a Protestant appetite for the mystics that persisted into the twentieth century. It also drew criticism from Protestants uneasy with his sympathy for Catholic saints and from later scholars who found his Catherine too neatly domesticated. Read today, it is as much a document of nineteenth-century American spirituality as of fifteenth-century Genoa.

Who should read this: those interested in the holiness movement, in Upham's influence, or in how Protestants have appropriated Catholic mystics will find it illuminating. Readers seeking Catherine of Genoa on her own terms should go to her Treatise on Purgatory and the Spiritual Dialogue instead; this is Upham's Catherine, not simply hers.