Abstract
Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska's Diary records the words of Christ revealed to her between 1934 and 1938. The frequency of the words used by God and Sor Faustina could be statistically determined by stylometric analysis since each has its own linguistic footprint. To do this, we analyze various parts of the Diary in three different editions (Polish, Spanish, and English). The results show a linguistic style characteristic of Sister Faustina and another to God. So this paper confirms that there was a conversation between the two.
Author Contributions
Copyright © 2024 Raúl Isea
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Competing interests
The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Citation:
Introduction
Maria Faustina Kowalska (1905–1938) was the third daughter of 10 brothers in the family of Mariana Babel and Stanisław Kowalski, born in Głogowiec, Poland. Her spiritual vocation was expressed from the time she was seven years old (Diary, 1404) until she arrived at the final convent of the Sisters of the Mother of God of Mercy on August 1, 1925 (Diary, 1404)
In this convent, she wrote her diary at the express command of Jesus Christ and in obedience to her confessors, Blessed Michał Sopoćko (1888–1975) and Jesuit Józef Andrasz SJ (1891–1963), from 1934 until three months before she death in 1938. At that time, she was the secretary of the Good Lord (Diary, 1695), and although her education was not high, this did not prevent her from rewriting the Gospel of Mercy in the 20th century, as Saint John Paul II expressed 12.
Sister Faustina is not a theologian, but she explained to us that her mission is to bring and announce mercy to the whole world, above all to sinners, and to promote devotion to Divine Mercy. Mercy God. Knowledge of His mercy is gained through faith and reason, but above all through mystical experience. She was canonized by Saint John Paul II in the Holy Year 2000 in
his homily on April 30 of the same year. Saint John Paul II said, "Christ entrusted to him the message of mercy; he transmitted it to everyone so that they might learn to know better the true face of God." 13.
Diary
The Diary is a faithful record of the words of the merciful God, with which he awarded Sister Faustina the title of Secretary of Mercy. (Diary, 1605). It is characterized by the absence of corrections, amendments, blank pages, and grammatical errors. It consists of 477 pages divided into six notebooks, written on both sides and without page numbers. In it are reflected all his thoughts, and she emphasizes the words that the Lord dictated to her.
St. Faustina ordered the publication of her Diary after her death to "console souls" (Diary, 1390). These notebooks remain in the possession of the congregation. It was originally transcribed by Sister Javiera Olszamowską, but it was not a literal transcription, which led to errors. Later, Father Isidor Borkiewicz, together with Sister Beata Piekut, rewrote it from the original and published it in 1981, serving as the basis for all translations.
Stylometry
Stylometry is summarized as a statistical method based on the analysis of each author's word frequency 17, 6, 14. The term was coined by the Polish writer Wincenty 10 when he dated Plato's Dialogues (Lutosławski, 1898) and was originally based on the chi-square method for analyzing relationships between word length and the frequency of their appearance 11.
More recently, it has been used to determine the authorship of certain unknown or questionable works, such as a comedy originally attributed to Miguel Bermúdez in the National Library of the West. Spain, but this method can detect that it belongs to Lope de Vega. 3.
Another example is Ulysses, which was published in 1922 by Irishman James Joyce, but stylistic studies concluded that it was written by five other people not mentioned in the work. 15.
Based on the above, the work analyzes some sentences attributed to the person of Jesus Christ and others to the mystic of Krakow to show that they do not reproduce the same linguistic footprint, and therefore, there was a dialogue between the two persons, which removes the doubt that the passages said by Jesus were the product of the imagination of the Saint.
Methodology
A stylometric study of the Diary written by Santa Maria Faustina Kowalska is carried out in three different versions, corresponding to the Spanish, English, and Polish editions. The fourth edition in Spanish of the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary was used in 2001. The English version is from the 2005 edition of Marian Press Stockbridge (a translation of the 1981 Polish version). The Polish version is published by Zgromadzenie Sióstr Matki Bożej Miłosierdzia (card. Franciszek Macharski metropolitan Krakowski).
This method is described by both 4 and 7, 8 and is roughly summarized below. For each language of the Diary, a corpus was built from the sayings of Sister Faustine and the Lord (presented in Table 1). On that basis, determine the frequency of occurrence of words, then determine the delta function, which is a linguistic measure capable of distinguishing the authorship of text according to the definition proposed by 2.
Table 1. Nomenclature of the passages of the Diary of Sister Faustina used for stylometric analysis in the Spanish, English, and Polish versions of the journal| Spanish version | English version | Polish version | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nomenclature | Paragraph | Nomenclature | Paragraph | Nomenclature | Paragraph |
| JSF1 | 1777 | J1 | 154 | J1 | 229 |
| JSF2 | 300 | J2 | 156 | J2 | 229 |
| JSF3 | 1327 | J3 | 165 | J3 | 229 |
| JSF4 | 1320 | J4 | 169 | J4 | 232 |
| JSF5 | 299 | J5 | 177 | J5 | 282 |
| JSF6 | 1032 | J6 | 178 | J6 | 639 |
| JSF7 | 687 | J7 | 186 | J7 | 687 |
| JSF8 | 367 | J8 | 219 | J8 | 699 |
| SF1 | 450 | J9 | 229 | J9 | 739 |
| SF2 | 529 | SF1 | 154 | J10 | 714 |
| SF3 | 843 | SF2 | 156 | SF1 | 229 |
| SF4 | 462 | SF3 | 165 | SF2 | 230 |
| SF5 | 118 | SF4 | 170 | SF3 | 231 |
| SF6 | 119 | SF5 | 177 | SF4 | 233 |
| SF7 | 303 | SF6 | 178 | SF5 | 236 |
| SF8 | 136 | SF7 | 188 | SF6 | 254 |
| SF9 | 477 | SF8 | 207 | SF7 | 655 |
| SF10 | 208 | SF9 | 220 | SF8 | 677 |
| SF11 | 364 | SF10 | 230 | SF9 | 707 |
| SF12 | 78 | SF11 | 233 | SF10 | 713 |
| SF13 | 78 | SF11 | 720 | ||
| SF14 | 225 | SF12 | 724 | ||
| SF13 | 731 | ||||
| SF14 | 741 | ||||
Some articles have questioned the use of the delta function, but Burrows has shown that it is an excellent technique for determining the authorship of a work 16. This function simply determines the frequency variation of the most frequently occurring words in the text using z-scores 16. Remember that the z-score is a measure of the relative frequency difference minus the value from the mean divided by the standard deviation 19.
In the next step, a distance-based matrix derived from the frequency of occurrence of the words was calculated. 18. Distance calculations are generally of the Manhattan, Euclidean, and other types 18. The results can be displayed using a dendrogram, a type of tree in which similar distances are grouped into a single conglomerate or cluster. In the context of this article, the latter means that sentences written by the same person should be grouped into the same branch or node 5. All calculations were performed using the Python programming language.
Results
Based on the above, the work analyzes some sentences attributed to the person of Jesus Christ and others to the mystic of Krakow to show that they do not reproduce the same footprint. Figure 1 shows the result of the normalization of the frequency of words obtained from the Spanish-translated Diary, where it can be observed that Sister Faustina more often uses the words “de Dios”, “lo que”, “a Dios”, “a la”, rather than the phrases used by God. Instead, the words used by God, which differ from those used by St. Faustina, are “de mi”, “en mi”, “de este”, “la misericordia”, “mi corazón”, “mi misericordia” among others. (Figure 1). From this, you can appreciate the difference in the use of language between the two people.
Figure 1.Normalized frequency of words obtained from the Diary translated into Spanish (bigram equal to 2) grouped in the texts of Sor Faustina (red color) and God (blue color).
Figure 2 shows the results of normalizing the different frequencies of words obtained in the English translation of the journal, in which Sister Faustine often uses the following words: “of god”, “I will”, “is the”, “that is”, “to me”, “it is”, “me like”, “my soul”, “to god”, among others. On the other hand, the expressions used by God are“my heart”, “i desire”, “of mercy”, “in my”, “my daughter”, “my mercy”, “all that” and other words. (no research on this studio since it discovered the idiom).
Figure 2.Normalized frequency of words found in the journal's English texts (bigram equals 2) grouped in the Sister Faustine (red color) and God texts (blue)
Figure 3 shows a rectangular dendogram obtained from the Spanish version of the Diary of Sister Faustina. The first thing that draws attention is that there are two well-defined groups (conglomerates), the first consisting of all the sentences spoken by Jesus (they begin with the letters JSF), while the second corresponds to the words of Sister Faustina (inician con las letras SF). Thus, two different linguistic prints corresponding to a dialogue between two people are observed.
Figure 3.Rectangular dendrogram obtained from stylometric analysis obtained from the Spanish translation of Sister Faustine's Diary, visualized using iTOL 9.
Figure 4 shows a dendrogram obtained from the English translation of the Diary of Sister Faustina, where two large conglomerates are observed, which in turn are divided into two different subgroups. The first of them consists of two other subgroups: the sentences of Jesus (J2, J1, J8, J5, J4, J7) and those spoken by Sister Faustina (SF8 and SF9). The second large conglomerate is in turn divided into two subgroups. The first of them corresponds to a division of the sentences spoken by Sister Faustina (SF11, SF12) and another branch, which in turn is the division between SF7 and two sentences of Jesus (J3, J6), while the rest is formed by the phrases of Sister Faustina Figure 5.
Figure 4.Rectangular dendrogram obtained from stylometric analysis obtained from the English translation of Sister Faustine's Diary, visualized using iTOL 9.
Figure 5.Rectangular dendrogram obtained from stylometric analysis obtained from the Polish translation of Sister Faustine's Diary, visualized using iTOL 9.
Conclusion
The goal of the work was to find the linguistic footprints present in the conversation between Sister Faustina and Christ using a stylometric methodology. There are differences in the frequency of the appearance of words between the two.
According to the dendrogram derived from the Spanish, English, and Polish versions, the linguistic styles did not merge into a single branch, a clear sign that there was dialogue between the two people. On this basis, we conclude that the Diary is not a product of St. Faustina's imagination, but it recreates the enduring dialogue between her and God.
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