The Mystical Element of Religion, as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her friends, Volume 2 (of 2)Hügel, Friedrich, Freiherr von
Religion
The Mystical Element of Religion, as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her friends, Volume 2 (of 2)
Hügel, Friedrich, Freiherr von
Catherine, of Genoa, Saint, 1447-1510
Then there is the corresponding counter-phenomenon of hyper-aesthesia.
“The slightest contact provokes great pains, exclamations, and spasms.
The painful zones have their seat mostly on the abdomen or on the
hips.” And “sensation in these states is not painful in itself, by its
own intensity, but by its quality, its characteristics; it has become
the signal, by association of ideas, for the production of a set of
extremely painful phenomena.” So, with the colour-sense: “one patient
adores the colour red, and sees in its dullest shade ‘sparkling rays
which penetrate to her very heart and warm her through and through.’”
But “another one finds this ‘a repulsive colour and one capable
of producing nausea.’” And similarly with the senses of taste and
odour.[30]
Then, too, the inability to stand or walk, with the conservation,
at times, of the power to crawl; the acceptance, followed by the
rejection, of food, because of certain spasms in the throat or stomach,
and the curious, mentally explicable, exceptions to this incapacity;
the sense, even at other times, of strangulation; heart palpitations,
fever heats, strange haemorrhages from the stomach or even from the
lung; red patches on the skin and emotional jaundice all over it, and
one or two other peculiarities.[31]
Then, as to a particular kind of quietude, from which Catherine warns
her attendants to rouse her, we find a patient who “ceases her reading,
without showing any sign of doing so. She gets taken to be profoundly
attentive; it is, however, but one of her attacks of ‘fixity.’ And she
has promptly to be shaken out of this state, or, in a few minutes,
there will be no getting her out of it.”
As to Catherine’s consciousness of possessing an extraordinary fineness
of discrimination between sensibly identical objects, we see that
“if one points out, to some of these patients, an imaginary portrait
upon a plain white card, and mixes this card with other similar ones,
they will almost always find again the portrait on the same card.” And
similarly as to her attaching a particular quasi-sensible perception
to Marabotto’s hand alone, we find that, if M. Janet touches Léonie’s
hand, he having suggested a nosegay to her, she will henceforth, when
he touches the hand, see that nosegay; whereas, if another person
touches that same hand, Léonie will see nothing special.
As to Catherine’s feelings of criminality and of being already dead, M.
Janet quotes M., who says, “I am like a criminal about to be punished”;
and R., who declares, “It seems to me that I am dead.” As to the
hallucination of a Beast, Marcelle suffers from the same impression.[32]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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