A Catholic Philosophy of History

Extract

The spirit of an epoch or even of a civilization is often concentrated in one artistic production, be it a work of art or of literature. Such works offer us short and direct roads into the heart of that epoch or civilization. This representative character may belong to a book as the sovereign achievement of its spiritual environment, the crown of a long development of thought and feeling. Such books were the Divine Comedy and the Summa of St. Thomas. But a book may also be representative as containing and summarizing precisely the average attainment and outlook. Such is the collection of short lives of the Saints made by an Italian Bishop, Petrus de Natalibus. It is true that his Catalogus Sanctorum did not appear till 1493. My edition, a black letter folio copiously illustrated by the quaintest woodcuts, was printed by Petit and Penet of Lyons, in 1534. Nevertheless the book is entirely mediæval. No breath of the Renaissance has reached it. It is a compilation of utmost industry and equal lack of criticism from all the accepted hagiographic sources. In its pages, therefore, will be found in a manageably condensed form the legends popular with the mediæval reader. If you would know what legend made a particular saint interesting to our ancestors, the Catalogus is almost sure to contain it. It is a key to mediæval art. Its illustrations are one in spirit and treatment with the images and pictures of the northern Gothic church. Its virgins are sisters of the thin-lipped maidens, somewhat prim, but always stately, of Norfolk rood-screens.