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Sheila Kaye-Smith
Quartet in Heaven
Published by Good Press, 2021
EAN 4066338055576
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These studies in sanctity do not profess to make any special contribution to the life histories of their subjects. St. Catherine of Genoa has been dealt with exhaustively by Baron Friedrich von Hügel in his great work The Mystical Element of Religion, Cornelia Connelly's life has been fully written by a religious of her order, while on St. Rose of Lima the hagiographers have worked for centuries, and a new book on St. Thérèse of Lisieux must appear almost every month.
My object is psychological rather than biographical. I want to see these four women as human beings before I attempt to examine them as saints. The tendency of religious biographers has so often been to enlarge on the spiritual side of their subjects, while smoothing away or even rubbing out the marks of our common humanity, that the supernatural has been deprived of its sacramental base in the natural, and appears in consequence tenuous and uninspiring. Jacob Boehme asks: "How can I, being in nature, attain the supersensual ground without forsaking nature?" I believe that the saints have found the answer to this question, but that the hagiographers have in many instances deprived their answer of half its meaning.