The Mystical Element of Religion as Studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and Her Friends

The Mystical Element of Religion is the major work of Baron Friedrich von Hügel, an Austrian-born Catholic layman living in England, published in two volumes in 1908 after more than a decade of labour. Its subject is Catherine of Genoa, born Caterina Fieschi in 1447, married young to Giuliano Adorno, converted suddenly in 1473, and thereafter given to a life of intense prayer joined to hands-on service among the sick of Genoa's Pammatone hospital until her death in 1510. Von Hügel, however, was not writing a conventional saint's life. He wrote during the Modernist crisis in the Catholic Church, in close friendship with George Tyrrell and Alfred Loisy, and he wanted to show how a single human soul could hold together history, thought and experience without any one of them crushing the others.

The book makes two kinds of argument. The first is critical. The texts bearing Catherine's name, the Vita e Dottrina, the Dialogo and the Trattato sul Purgatorio, were assembled after her death by her circle, above all her confessor Cattaneo Marabotto and the notary Ettore Vernazza, with later shaping by Vernazza's daughter Battista. Von Hügel sifts these documents, distinguishing what he judges to be Catherine's own sayings from the devotional and theological additions of her disciples, and sets her teaching in dialogue with Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius and Jacopone da Todi. He also treats frankly the bodily and psychological conditions of her raptures, her long illness and her apparent inability to eat during Lent, refusing both to explain away her sanctity and to pretend that grace works apart from nature. The second argument is constructive and gives the book its title. Religion, he contends, has three elements: the institutional, rooted in history, sense and authority; the intellectual, which questions and systematises; and the mystical, which wills, loves and experiences. Each is necessary; each, left alone, becomes tyrannical. Catherine's greatness lies in her refusal to abandon the sacraments and the hospital ward for private ecstasy, and her purgatory, which von Hügel treats at length, is not a penal sentence but the soul's own ardent and willing purification by love.

The work has remained a touchstone because it took mysticism seriously as a subject of rigorous study without reducing it to pathology or sentiment. Evelyn Underhill, whom von Hügel later directed, drew heavily on it, and his threefold scheme still shapes how many describe a healthy spiritual life. Its reading of Catherine as a saint of both contemplation and costly service continues to correct the picture of the mystic as someone who has left the world.

Who should read this: those willing to work through a long, dense and sometimes repetitive two-volume argument, especially spiritual directors, students of Christian mysticism and anyone trying to hold together liturgy, theology and experience without letting one swallow the rest. It is not for readers wanting a brief introduction to Catherine; for that, go to the Trattato sul Purgatorio itself and come to von Hügel afterwards.