Sala di lettura

Libro della divina dottrina (Dialogo della divina provvidenza)

Catherine of Siena

A book dictated by Catherine to her secretaries between late 1377 and October 1378. It opens with a soul that, 'dwelling in the cell of self-knowledge', addresses four petitions to God (for herself, for the reform of the Church, for the world and for a particular case) and the Father answers in a long colloquy. Its great images are the bridge that is Christ, with its three steps (the feet, the side, the mouth), stretched over the river of the world; the doctrine of tears; providence; obedience; and the reform of the Church's ministers, the 'mystical body'. It closes with a prayer to the Trinity as a 'deep sea'. Since Girolamo Gigli (1707) it has usually been divided into treatises (on discretion, prayer, providence and obedience). It is one of the summits of fourteenth-century Italian prose.