Five times the _Vita_ compares her countenance, which, when she was deeply moved, had a flushed, luminous and transparent appearance, to that of an Angel or Cherub or Seraph;[139] and it even gives a story, which purports to explain how she came to be called the latter. And though this anecdote may be little more than a literary dramatization of this popular appellation of Catherine; and although, even if the scene be historical, Catherine has no kind of active share in bringing it about; yet the passage is, in any case, of some real interest, since it testifies to and typifies Catherine’s abundance of moral and mental sanity and strong, serene restorative influence over unbalanced or tempted souls, and this at a time when she herself had already been in delicate health for about five years.
The story is interesting also in that it shows how strikingly like the superficial psycho-physical symptoms of persons described as possessed by an evil spirit were, and were thought to be, to those of ecstasy, hence to Catherine’s own. Thus when an attack seized this “spiritual daughter of Catherine,--a woman of large mind (_alto intelleto_), who lived and died in virginity, and under the same roof with Catherine” (no doubt Catherine’s second, unmarried servant Mariola Bastarda is meant, and each must have had experience of the other’s powers and wants from or before 1490 till 1497, and again from 1500 onwards),--“she would become greatly agitated and be thrown to the ground. The evil spirit would enter into her mind, and would not allow her to think of divine things. And she would thus be as one beside herself, all submerged in that malign and diabolic will.”--And similarly we are told that Catherine would “throw herself to the ground, altogether beside herself,” “immersed in a sea,”--in this case, “of the deepest peace”; and “she would writhe as though she were a serpent.”[140]
Yet this superficial likeness between these two states,--a likeness apparent already in the similar double series of phenomena described in St. Paul’s Epistles and in the Acts of the Apostles,--serves, here also, but to bring out in fuller relief the profound underlying spiritual and moral difference between the two conditions of soul. For it is precisely in Catherine’s company that, when insufferable to her own self, the afflicted Mariola would recover her peace and self-possession, so that “even a silent look up to Catherine’s face would help to bring relief.”[141]