TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE: Volume II is available as Project Gutenberg ebook number 50206.
THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT
OF RELIGION
All rights reserved.
Walker & Boutall, ph, sc
St. Catherine of Genoa.
(Caterina Fiesca Adorna.)
THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT
OF RELIGION AS STUDIED
IN SAINT CATHERINE OF
GENOA AND HER FRIENDS
By BARON FRIEDRICH VON HÜGEL
MEMBER OF THE CAMBRIDGE PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY
VOLUME FIRST
INTRODUCTION AND BIOGRAPHIES
LONDON: J. M. DENT & CO.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
MCMVIII
Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,
BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND
BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
PREFACE
The following work embodies well-nigh all that the writerhas been able to learn and to test, in the matter of religion,during now some thirty years of adult life; and even theactual composition of the book has occupied a large part ofhis time, for seven years and more.
The precise object of the book naturally grew in range,depth and clearness, under the stress of the labour of its production.This object will perhaps be best explained bymeans of a short description of the undertaking’s origin andsuccessive stages.
Born as I was in Italy, certain early impressions have neverleft me; a vivid consciousness has been with me, almost fromthe first, of the massively virile personalities, the spacious,trustful times of the early, as yet truly Christian, Renaissancethere, from Dante on to the Florentine Platonists. And when,on growing up, I acquired strong and definite religious convictions,it was that ampler pre-Protestant, as yet neither Protestantnor anti-Protestant, but deeply positive and Catholic,world, with its already characteristically modern outlook andits hopeful and spontaneous application of religion to thepressing problems of life and thought, which helped to strengthenand sustain me, when depressed and hemmed in by the typesof devotion prevalent since then in Western Christendom. Forthose early modern times presented me with men of the samegeneral instincts and outlook as my own, but environed bythe priceless boon and starting-point of a still undividedWestern Christendom; Protestantism, as such, continued to befelt as ever more or less unjust and sectarian; and the specificallypost-Tridentine type of Catholicism, with its regimentalSeminarism, its predominantly controversial spirit, its suspiciousnessand timidity, persisted, however inevitable some of it maybe, in its failure to win my love. Hence I had to continuethe seeking and the finding elsewhere, yet ever well within[vi]the great Roman Church, things more intrinsically lovable.