CHAPTER X

THE MAIN LITERARY SOURCES OF CATHERINE’S CONCEPTIONS

INTRODUCTORY.

1. _The main literary sources of Catherine’s teaching are four._

The main literary sources of Catherine’s conceptions can be grouped

under four heads: the New Testament, Pauline and Joannine writings;

the Christian Neo-Platonist, Areopagite books; and the Franciscan,

Jacopone da Todi’s teachings. And here, as in all cases of such

partial dependence, we have to distinguish between the apparently

accidental occasions (her seemingly fortuitous acquaintance with these

particular writings), and the certainly necessary causes (the intrinsic

requirements of her own mind and soul, and its special reactions under,

and transformations of, these materials and stimulations). And during

this latter process this mind’s original trend itself undergoes, in its

turn, not only much development, but even some modification. She would

no doubt owe her close knowledge of the first two sets of writings to

the Augustinian Canonesses, (her sister Limbania amongst them,) and to

their Augustinian-Pauline tradition; her acquaintance with the third

set, to her Dominican cousin; and her intimacy with the fourth, to the

Franciscans of the Hospital. Yet only her own spiritual affinity for

similar religious states and ideals, and her already at least partial

experience of them, could ever have made these writings to her what

they actually became: direct stimulations, indeed considerable elements

and often curiously vivid expressions, of her own immediate interior

life.

2. _Plan of the following study of these sources._

I shall, in this chapter, first try to draw out those characteristics

of each group, which were either specially accepted or transformed,

neglected or supplanted by her, and carefully to note the particular

nature of these her reactions and refashionings. And I shall end up

by a short account of what she and all four sets have got in common,

and of what she has brought, as a gift of her own, to that common

stock which had given her so much. And since her distinct and direct

use of the Pauline and Joannine writings is quite certain, whereas

all her knowledge of Neo-Platonism seems to have been mediated by

pseudo-Dionysius alone, and all her Franciscanism appears, as far as

literary sources go, to take its rise from Jacopone, I shall give four

divisions to her chief literary sources, and a fifth section to the

stream common to them all.[61]

I. THE PAULINE WRITINGS: THE TWO SOURCES OF THEIR PRE-CONVERSION

ASSUMPTIONS; CATHERINE’S PREPONDERANT ATTITUDE TOWARDS EACH POSITION.

It is well that the chronological order requires us to begin with

St. Paul, for he is probably, if not the most extensive, yet the

most intense of all these influences upon Catherine’s mind. I here

take the points of his experience and teaching which thus concern

us in the probable order of their development in the Apostle’s own

consciousness,--his pre-conversion assumptions and positions, first

and the convictions gained at and after his conversion or clarified

last;[62] and under each heading I shall group together, once for all,

the chief reactions of Catherine’s religious consciousness.

Now those Pauline pre-conversion assumptions and positions come from

two chief sources--Palestinian, Rabbinical Judaism, (for he was the

disciple of the Pharisee, Gamaliel, at Jerusalem), and a Hellenistic

religiousness closely akin to, though not derived from, Philo, (for he

had been born in the intensely Hellenistic Cilician city Tarsus, at

that time a most important seat of Greek learning in general and of

the Stoic philosophy in particular). And we shall find that Catherine

appropriates especially this, his Hellenistic element; indeed, that at

times she sympathizes rather with the still more intensely Hellenistic

attitude exemplified by Philo, than with the limitations introduced by

St. Paul.

1. _St. Paul’s Anthropology in general._

If we take the Pauline Anthropology first, we at once come upon a

profoundly dualistic attitude.

(1) There is, in general, “the outer” and “the inner” man, 2 Cor. iv,

16; and the latter is not the exclusive privilege of the redeemed,--the

contrast is that between the merely natural individual and the moral

personality. And this contrast, foreign to the ancient Hebrews, is

first worked out, with clear consciousness, by Plato, who, _e.g._,

in his _Banquet_, causes one of the characters to say: “Socrates has

thrown this Silenus-like form around himself externally, as in the case

of those Silenus-statues which enclose a statuette of Apollo; but, when

he is opened, how full is he found to be of temperance within”; and who

treats this contrast as typical of the dualism inherent to all human

life here on earth.[63]--This contrast exists throughout Catherine’s

teaching as regards the thing itself, although her terms are different.

She has, for reasons which will appear presently, no one constant term

for “the inner man,” but “the outer man” is continuously styled “la

umanità.”

(2) The “outer man” consists for St. Paul of the body’s earthly

material, “the flesh”; and of the animating principle of the flesh,

“the psyche,” which is inseparably connected with that flesh, and

which dies for good and all at the death of the latter; whereas the

form of “the body” is capable of resuscitation, and is then filled out

by a finer material, “glory.”[64]--Here Catherine has no precise or

constant word for the “psyche”; her “umanità” generally stands for the

“psyche” _plus_ body and flesh, all in one; and her “anima” practically

always means part or the whole of “the inner man,” and mostly stands

for “mind.” And there is no occasion for her to reflect upon any

distinction between the form and the matter of the body, since she

nowhere directly busies herself with the resurrection.

The “inner man” consists for St. Paul in the Mind, the Heart, and the

Conscience. The Mind (_noûs_), corresponding roughly to our theoretical

and practical Reason, has a certain tendency towards God: “The

invisible things of God are seen by the mind in the works of creation,”

Rom. i, 20; and there is “a law of the mind” which is fought by “the

law of sin,” Rom. vii, 23; and this, although there is also a “mind

of the flesh,” Col. ii, 18; “a reprobate mind,” Rom. i, 28; and a

“renovation of the mind,” Rom. xii, 2.--Catherine clings throughout

most closely to the Pauline use of the term, as far as that use is

favourable: note how she perceives invisible things “colla mente mia.”

The Heart is even more accessible to the divine influence,--at least,

it is to it that God gives “the first fruits of the Spirit” and “the

Spirit of His Son, crying Abba, Father,” Gal. iv, 6; 2 Cor. i, 22. As

an organ of immediate perception it is so parallel to the Mind, that we

can hear of “eyes of the heart”; yet it is also the seat of feeling,

of will, and of moral consciousness, Eph. i, 18; 2 Cor. ii, 4; 1 Cor.

iv, 5; Rom. ii, 15. It can stand for the inner life generally; or,

like the Mind, it can become darkened and impenitent; whilst again,

over the heart God’s love is poured out, God’s peace keeps guard, and

we believe with the heart, 1 Cor. xiv, 25; Rom. i, 21; ii, 5; v, 5;

Phil. iv, 7; Rom. x, 9.--All this again, as far as it is favourable, is

closely followed by Catherine; indeed the persistence with which she

comes back to certain effects wrought upon her heart by the Spirit,

Christ,--effects which some of her followers readily interpreted as so

many physical miracles,--was no doubt occasioned or stimulated by 2

Cor. iii, 3, “Be ye an epistle of Christ, written by the Spirit of the

living God … upon the fleshly tables of the heart.”

And Conscience, “Syneidēsis”--that late Greek word introduced

by St. Paul as a technical term into the Christian

vocabulary--includes our “conscience,” but is as comprehensive as

our “consciousness.”--Catherine practically never uses the term: no

doubt because, in the narrower of the two senses which had become

the ordinary one, it was too predominantly ethical to satisfy her

overwhelmingly religious preoccupations.

(3) Now, with regard to this whole dualism of the “outer” and the

“inner man,” its application to the resurrection of the body in

St. Paul and in St. Catherine shall occupy us in connection with

her Eschatology; here I would but indicate the two Pauline moods

or attitudes towards the earthly body, and Catherine’s continuous

reproduction of but one of these. For his magnificent conception of the

Christian society, in which each person, by a different specific gift

and duty, co-operates towards the production of an organic whole, a

whole which in return develops and dignifies those its constituents,

is worked out by means of the image of the human earthly body, in

which each member is a necessary part and constituent of the complete

organism, which is greater than, and which gives full dignity to,

each and all these its factors (1 Cor. xii). And he thus, in his most

deliberate and systematic mood, shows very clearly how deeply he has

realized the dignity of the human body, as the instrument both for the

development of the soul itself and for the work of that soul in and

upon the visible world.

But in his other mood, which remains secondary and sporadic throughout

his writings, his attitude is acutely dualistic. His one direct

expression of it occurs in 2 Cor. v, 1-4: “For we know that, if our

earthly house of this tent be dissolved, we have a building of God, a

house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this also we

groan, desiring to be clothed upon with our habitation that is from

heaven. We who are in this tabernacle do groan, being burthened.” Now

this passage is undoubtedly modelled by St. Paul upon the Book of

Wisdom, ix, 15: “For the corruptible body is a load upon the soul, and

the earthly habitation presseth down the mind that museth upon many

things.” And this latter saying again is as certainly formed upon Plato

(_Phaedo_, 81 _c_): “It behoves us to think of the body as oppressive

and heavy and earthlike and visible. And hence the soul, being of

such a nature as we have seen, when possessing such a body, is both

burthened and dragged down again into the visible world.”[65] And it is

this conception of the Hellenic Athenian Plato (about 380 B.C.) which,

passing through the Hellenistic Alexandrian Jewish Wisdom-writer (80

B.C.?) and then through the Hellenistically tinctured ex-Rabbi, Paul

of Tarsus (52 A.D.), still powerfully, indeed all but continuously,

influences the mind of the Genoese Christian Catherine, especially

during the years from A.D. 1496 to 1510.

Catherine’s still more pessimistic figure of the body as a prison-house

and furnace of purification for the soul, is no doubt the resultant of

suggestions received, probably in part through intermediary literature,

from the following three passages:--(1) Plato, in his _Cratylus_

(400 B.C.), makes Socrates say: “Some declare that the body (_sōma_)

is the grave (_sēma_) of the soul, as she finds herself at present.

The Orphite poets seem to have invented the appellation: they held

that the soul is thus paying the penalty of sin, and that the body is

an enclosure which may be likened to a prison, in which the soul is

enclosed until the penalty is paid.” (2) St. Matt. v, 25, 26, gives

Our Lord’s words: “Be thou reconciled with thine adversary whilst he

is still with thee on the way … lest the Judge hand thee over to the

prison-warder, and thou be cast into prison.… Thou shalt not go forth

thence, until thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.” And (3) St.

Paul declares, 1 Cor. iii, 15: “Every man’s work shall be tested by

fire. If a man’s work be burnt, he shall suffer loss; yet he himself

shall be saved, yet so as by fire.” These three passages combined will

readily suggest, to a soul thirsting for purification and possessed of

an extremely sensitive psycho-physical organization with its attendant

liability to fever heats, the picture of the body as a flame-full

prison-house,--a purgatory of the soul.

2. _St. Paul’s conception of “Spirit.”_

A very difficult complication and varying element is introduced into

St. Paul’s Anthropology by the term into which he has poured all

that is most original, deepest, most deliberate and abiding in his

teaching,--the Spirit, “Pneuma.” For somewhat as he uses the term

“Sarx,” the flesh, both in its loose popular signification of “mankind

in general”; and in a precise, technical sense of “the matter which

composes the earthly body”; so also he has, occasionally, a loose

popular use of the term “spirit,” when it figures as but a fourth

parallel to “mind,” “heart,” and “conscience”; and, usually, a very

strict and technical use of it, when it designates the Spirit, God

Himself.

(1) Now it is precisely in the latter case that his doctrine attains

its fullest depth and its greatest difficulty. For here the Spirit,

the Pneuma, is, strictly speaking, only one--the Spirit of God, God

Himself, in His action either outside or inside the human mind, Noûs.

And in such passages of St. Paul, where man seems to possess a distinct

pneuma of his own, by far the greater number only apparently contradict

this doctrine. For in some, so in 1 Cor. ii, the context is dominated

by a comparison between the divine and the human consciousness, so

that, in v. 11, man’s Noûs is designated Pneuma, and in v. 16, and

Rom. xi, 34, the Lord’s Pneuma is called His Noûs. And the “spirit of

the world” contrasted here, in v. 11, with the “Spirit of God,” is

a still further deliberate laxity of expression, similar to that of

Satan as “the God of this world,” 2 Cor. iv, 4. In other passages,--so

Rom. viii, 16; i, 9; viii, 10, and even in 1 Cor. v, 5 (the “spirit”

of the incestuous Corinthian which is to be saved),--we seem to have

“spirit” either as the mind in so far as the object of the Spirit’s

communications, or as the mind transformed by the Spirit’s influence.

And if we can hear of a “defilement of the spirit,” 2 Cor. vii, 1, we

are also told that we can forget the fact of the body being the temple

of the holy Spirit, 1 Cor. vi, 19; and that this temple’s profanation

“grieves the holy Spirit,” Eph. iv, 30. Very few, sporadic, and short

passages remain in which “the spirit of man” cannot clearly be shown to

have a deliberately derivative sense.

Catherine, in this great matter, completely follows St. Paul. For she

too has loosely-knit moods and passages, in which “spirito” appears

as a natural endowment of her own, parallel to, or identical with,

the “mente.” But when speaking strictly, and in her intense moods,

she means by “spirito,” the Spirit, Christ, Love, God, a Power which,

though in its nature profoundly distinct and different from her entire

self-seeking self, can and does come to dwell within, and to supplant,

this self. Indeed her highly characteristic saying, “my Me is God,”

with her own explanations of it, expresses, if pressed, even more than

this. In these moods, the term “mente” is usually absent, just as in

St. Paul.

Now in his formally doctrinal _Loci_, St. Paul defines the Divine

Pneuma and the human sarx, not merely as ontologically contrary

substances, but as keenly conflicting, ethically contradictory

principles. An anti-spiritual power, lust, possesses the flesh and the

whole outer man, whilst, in an indefinitely higher degree and manner,

the Spirit, which finds an echo in the mind, the inner man, is a

spontaneous, counter-working force; and these two energies fight out

the battle in man, and for his complete domination, Rom. vi, 12-14;

vii, 22, 23; viii, 4-13. And this dualistic conception is in close

affinity to all that was noblest in the Hellenistic world of St. Paul’s

own day; but is in marked contrast to the pre-exilic, specifically

Jewish Old Testament view, where we have but the contrast between

the visible and transitory, and the Invisible and Eternal; and the

consciousness of the weakness and fallibility of “flesh and blood.” And

this latter is the temper of mind that dominates the Synoptic Gospels:

“The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak”; and “Father,

forgive them, for they know not what they do,” are here the divinely

serene and infinitely fruitful leading notes.--And Catherine, on this

point, is habitually on the Synoptist side: man is, for her, far more

weak and ignorant than forcibly and deliberately wicked. Yet her

detailed intensity towards the successive cloaks of self-love is still,

as it were, a shadow and echo of the fierce, and far more massive,

flesh-and-spirit struggle in St. Paul.

3. _The Angry and the Loving God._

And, as against the intense wickedness of man, we find in St. Paul an

emphatic insistence--although this is directly derived from the Old

Testament and Rabbinical tradition--upon the anger and indignation

of God, Rom. ii, 8, and frequently.--Here Catherine is in explicit

contrast with him, in so far as the anger would be held to stand for

an emotion not proceeding from love and not ameliorative in its aim

and operation. This attitude sprang no doubt, in part, from the strong

influence upon her of the Dionysian teaching concerning the negative

character of evil; possibly still more from her continuous pondering

of the text, “As a father hath compassion upon his children, so hath

the Lord compassion on them that fear Him; for He knoweth our frame, He

remembereth that we are dust,” Ps. ciii, 13, 14,--where she dwells upon

the fact that we are all His children rather than upon the fact that

we do not all fear Him; but certainly, most of all, from her habitual

dwelling upon the other side of St. Paul’s teaching, that concerning

the Love of God.

Now the depth and glow of Paul’s faith and love goes clearly back to

his conversion, an event which colours and influences all his feeling

and teaching for some thirty-four years, up to the end. And similarly

Catherine’s conversion-experience has been found by us to determine the

sequence and all the chief points of her Purgatorial teaching, some

thirty-seven years after that supreme event.

Already Philo had, under Platonic influence, believed in an Ideal

Man, a Heavenly Man; had identified him with the Logos, the Word

or Wisdom of God; and had held him to be in some way ethereal and

luminous,--never arriving at either a definitely personal or a simply

impersonal conception of this at one time intermediate Being, at

another time this supreme attribute of God. St. Paul, under the

profound impression of the Historic Christ and the great experience

on the road to Damascus, perceives the Risen, Heavenly Jesus as

possessed of a luminous, ethereal body, a body of “glory,” Acts xxii,

11. And this Christ is, for St. Paul, identical with “the Spirit”:

“the Lord is the Spirit,” 2 Cor. iii, 17; and “to be in Christ” and

“Christ is in us” are parallel terms to those of “to be in the Spirit”

and “the Spirit is within us” respectively. In all four cases we get

Christ or the Spirit conceived as an element, as it were an ocean of

ethereal light, in which souls are plunged and which penetrates them.

In Catherine we have, at her conversion, this same perception and

conception of Spirit as an ethereal light, and of Christ as Spirit;

and up to the end she more and more appears to herself to bathe, to be

submerged in, an ocean of light, which, at the same time, fills her

within and penetrates her through and through.

But again, and specially since his conversion, St. Paul thinks of God

as loving, as Love, and this conception henceforth largely supplants

the Old Testament conception of the angry God. This loving God is

chiefly manifested through the loving Christ: indeed the love of Christ

and the love of God are the same thing. And this Christ-Love dwells

within us.[66] And Catherine, since her mind has perceived Love to be

the central character of God, and has adopted fire as love’s fullest

image, cannot but hold,--God and Love and Christ and Spirit being all

one and the same thing,--that Christ-Spirit-Fire is in her and she

in It. The yellow light-image, which all but alone typifies God’s

friendliness in the Bible, is thus turned into a red fire-image. And

yet this latter in so far retains with Catherine something of its older

connotation of anger, that the Fire and Heat appear in her teaching

more as symbols of the suffering caused by the opposition of man’s

at least partial impurity to the Spirit, Christ, Love, God, and of

the pain attendant upon that Spirit’s action, even where it can still

purify; whereas the Light and Illumination mostly express the peaceful

penetration of man’s spirit by God’s Spirit, and the blissful gain

accruing from such penetration.

4. _The Risen Christ and the Heavenly Adam._

St. Paul dwells continuously upon the post-earthly, the Risen Christ,

and upon Him in His identity with the pre-earthly, the Heavenly Man:

so that the historical Jesus tends to become, all but for the final

acts in the Supper-room and upon the Cross, a transitory episode;--a

super-earthly biography all but supplants the earthly one, since His

death and resurrection and their immediate contexts are all but the

only two events dwelt upon, and form but the two constituents of one

inseparable whole.--Here Catherine is deeply Pauline in her striking

non-occupation with the details of the earthly life (the scene

with the Woman at the Well being the single exception), and in her

continuous insistence upon Christ as the life-giving Spirit. Indeed,

even the death is strangely absent. There is but the one doubtful

contrary instance, in any case a quite early and sporadic one, of the

Vision of the Bleeding Christ. The fact is that, in her teaching,

the self-donation of God in general, in His mysterious love for each

individual soul, and of Christ in particular, in His Eucharistic

presence as our daily food, take all their special depth of tenderness

from her vivid realization of the whole teaching, temper, life, and

death of Jesus Christ; and that teaching derives its profundity of

feeling only from all this latter complexus of facts and convictions.

5. _Reconciliation, Justification, Sanctification._

(1) St. Paul has two lines of thought concerning Reconciliation. In

the objective, juridical, more Judaic conception, the attention is

concentrated on the one moment of Christ’s death, and the consequences

appear as though instantaneous and automatic; in the other, the

subjective, ethical, more Hellenistic conception, the attention

is spread over the whole action of the Christ’s incarnational

self-humiliation, and the consequences are realized only if and when we

strive to imitate Him,--they are a voluntary and continuous process.

Catherine’s fundamental conversion-experience and all her later

teachings attach her Reconciliation to the entire act of ceaseless

Divine “ecstasy,” self-humiliation, and redemptive immanence in Man,

of which the whole earthly life and death of Christ are the centre

and culmination; but though the human soul’s corresponding action is

conceived as continuous, once it has begun, she loves to dwell upon

this whole action as itself the gift of God and the consequence of His

prevenient act.

(2) As to Justification, we have again, in St. Paul, a preponderatingly

Jewish juridical conception of adoption, in which a purely vicarious

justice and imputed righteousness seem to be taught; and an ethical

conception of immanent justice, based on his own experience and

expressed by means of Hellenistic forms, according to which “the

love of God is poured out in our hearts,” Rom. v, 5. And he often

insists strenuously upon excluding every human merit from the moment

and act of justification, insisting upon its being a “free gift” of

God.--Catherine absorbs herself in the second, ethical conception,

and certainly understands this love of God as primarily God’s, the

Spirit’s, Christ’s love, as Love Itself poured out in our hearts; and

she often breaks out into angry protests against the very suggestion of

any act, or part of an act, dear to God, proceeding from her natural or

separate self, indeed, if we press her expressions, from herself at all.

(3) As to Sanctification, St. Paul has three couples of contrasted

conceptions. The first couple conceives the Spirit, either Old

Testament-wise, as manifesting and accrediting Itself in extraordinary,

sudden, sporadic, miraculous gifts and doings--_e.g._ in ecstatic

speaking with tongues; or,--and this is the more frequent and the

decisive conception,--as an abiding, equable penetration and spiritual

reformation of its recipient. Here the faithful “live and walk in the

spirit,” are “driven by the spirit,” “serve God in the spirit,” are

“temples of the Spirit,” Gal. v, 25; Rom. viii, 14; vii, 6; 1 Cor.

vi, 19: the Spirit has become the creative source of a supernatural

character-building.[67]--Here Catherine, in contrast to most of her

friends, who are wedded to the first view, is strongly attached to the

second view, perhaps the deepest of St. Paul’s conceptions.

The second couple conceives Sanctification either juridically, and

moves dramatically from act to act,--the Sacrifice on the Cross and

the Resurrection of the Son of God, the sentence of Justification and

the Adoption as sons of God; or ethically, and presupposes everywhere

continuous processes,--beginning with the reception of the Spirit, and

ending with “the Lord of the Spirit.”--Here Catherine has curiously

little of the dramatic and prominently personal conception: only in

the imperfect soul’s acutely painful moment, of standing before and

seeing God immediately after death, do we get one link in this chain,

in a somewhat modified form. For the rest, the ethical and continuous

conception is present practically throughout her teaching, but in a

curious, apparently paradoxical form, to be noticed in a minute.

And the third couple either treats Sanctification as, at each moment of

its actual presence, practically infallible and complete: “We who have

died to sin, how shall we further live in it?” “Freed from sin, ye have

become the servants of Justice”; “now we are loosed from the law of

death, so as to serve in newness of spirit”; “those who are according

to the flesh, mind the things of the flesh; but they that are according

to the Spirit, mind the things of the Spirit,” Rom. vi, 2, 18; vii, 6;

viii, 5. Or it considers Sanctification as only approximately complete,

so long as man has to live here below, not only in the Spirit, Rom.

viii, 9, but also in the flesh, Gal. ii, 20. The faithful have indeed

crucified the flesh once for all, Gal. v, 24: yet they have continually

to mortify their members anew, Col. iii, 5, and by the Spirit to

destroy the works of the flesh, Rom. viii, 13. The “fear of the Lord,”

“of God,” does not cease to be a motive for the sanctified, 2 Cor. v,

11; vii, 1. To “walk in the Spirit,” “in the light,” has to be insisted

on (1 Thess. v, 4-8; Rom. xiii, 11-14; 2 Cor. vi, 14), as long as the

eternal day has not yet arisen for us. And even in Romans, chapter

vi, we find admonitions, vv. 12, 13, 19, which, if we press the other

conception, are quite superfluous.[68]

And here Catherine, in her intense sympathy with each of these

contrasted conceptions, offers us a combination of both in a state

of unstable equilibrium and delicate tension. I take it that it is

not her immensely impulsive and impatient temperament, nor survivals

of the Old Testament idea as to instantaneousness being the special

characteristic of divine action, but her deep and noble sense of the

givenness and pure grace of religion, and of God’s omnipotence being,

if possible, exceeded only by His overflowing, self-communicative

love, which chiefly determine her curious presentation and emotional

experience of spiritual growth and life as a movement composed of

sudden shiftings upwards, with long, apparently complete pauses in

between. For here this form (of so many instants, of which each is

complete in itself) stands for her as the least inadequate symbol, as a

kind of shattered mirror, not of time at all, but of eternity; whilst

the succession and difference between these instants indicates a growth

in the apprehending soul, which has, in reality, been proceeding also

in between these instants and not only during them. And this remarkable

scheme presents her conviction that, in principle, the work of the

all-powerful, all-loving Spirit cannot, of itself, be other than final

and complete, and yet that, as a matter of fact, it never is so, in

weak, self-deceptive, and variously resisting man, but ever turns

out to require a fresh and deeper application. And this succession

of sudden jerks onwards and upwards, after long, apparently complete

pauses between them, gives to her fundamentally ethical and continuous

conception something of the look of the forensic, dramatic series,

with its separate acts,--a series which would otherwise be all but

unrepresented in her picture of the soul’s life on this side of death

and of its life (immediately after its vivid sight of God and itself,

and its act of free-election) in the Beyond.

6. _Pauline Social Ethics._

As to Social Ethics, St. Paul’s worldward movement is strongly

represented in Catherine’s teaching. Her great sayings as to God being

servable not only in the married state, but in a camp of (mercenary)

soldiers; and as to her determination violently to appropriate the

monk’s cowl, should this his state be necessary to the attainment of

the highest love of God, are full of the tone of Rom. xiv, 14, 20,

“nothing is common in itself, but to him who considereth anything to be

common, to him it is common,”--“all things are clean”; and of 1 Cor.

x, 26, 28, “the earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof.” And her

sense of her soul’s positive relation to nature, _e.g._ trees, was no

doubt in part awakened by that striking passage, Rom. viii, 19, “the

expectation of the creature awaiteth the revelation of the sons of God;

for the creature was made subject to vanity not willingly.”

On the other hand, it would be impossible confidently to identify

her own attitude concerning marriage with that of St. Paul, since,

as we know, her peculiar health and her unhappiness with Giuliano

make it impossible to speak here with any certainty of the mature

woman’s deliberate judgment concerning continence and marriage. Yet

her impulsive protestation, in the scene with the monk, against any

idea of being debarred by her state from as perfect a love of God as

his,--whilst, of course, not in contradiction with the Pauline and

generally Catholic positions in the matter, seems to imply an emotional

attitude somewhat different from that of some of the Apostle’s

sayings. Indeed, in her whole general and unconscious position as to

how a woman should hold herself in religious things it is interesting

to note the absence of all influence from those Pauline sayings which,

herein like Philo (and indeed the whole ancient world) treat man alone

as “the (direct) image and glory (reflex) of God,” and the woman as but

“the glory (reflex) of the man,” 1 Cor. xi, 7. Everywhere she appears

full, on the contrary, of St. Paul’s other (more characteristic and

deliberate) strain, according to which, as there is “neither Jew nor

Gentile, bond nor free” before God, so “neither is the man without the

woman, nor the woman without the man, in the Lord,” 1 Cor. xi, 11.--And

in social matters generally, Catherine’s convert life and practice

shows, in the active mortifications of its first penitential part, in

her persistent great aloofness from all things of sense as regards

her own gratification, and in the ecstasies and love of solitude

which marked the zenith of her power, a close sympathy with, and no

doubt in part a direct imitation of, St. Paul’s Arabian retirement,

chastisement of his body, and lonely concentration upon rapt communion

with God. Yet she as strongly exemplifies St. Paul’s other, the

outward movement, the love-impelled, whole-hearted service of the

poorest, world-forgotten, sick and sorrowing brethren. And the whole

resultant rhythmic life has got such fine spontaneity, emotional and

efficacious fulness, and expansive joy about it, as to suggest at once

those unfading teachings of St. Paul which had so largely occasioned

it,--those hymns in praise of that love “which minds not high things

but consenteth to the humble,” Rom. xii, 16; “becomes all things to

all men,” 1 Cor. ix, 22; “weeps with those that weep and rejoices with

those that rejoice,” _ibid._ xii, 26; and which, as the twin love of

God and man, is not only the chief member of the central ethical triad,

but, already here below, itself becomes the subject which exercises the

other two virtues, for it is “love” that “believeth all things, hopeth

all things,” even before that eternity in which love alone will never

vanish away, _ibid._ xiii, 7, 8. Here Catherine with Paul triumphs

completely over time: their actions and teaching are as completely

fresh now, after well-nigh nineteen and four centuries, as when they

first experienced, willed, and uttered them.

7. _Sacramental Teachings._

In Sacramental matters it is interesting to note St. Paul’s close

correlation of Baptism and the Holy Eucharist: “All (our fathers) were

baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea; and all ate the same

spiritual food and all drank the same spiritual drink,” 1 Cor. x, 3;

“in one Spirit we have all been baptized into one body, and we have all

been made to drink one Spirit,” Christ, His blood, _ibid._ xii, 13.

And Catherine is influenced by these passages, when she represents the

soul as hungering for, and drowning itself in, the ocean of spiritual

sustenance which is Love, Christ, God: but she attaches the similes,

which are distributed by St. Paul among the two Rites, to the Holy

Eucharist alone. Baptism had been a grown man’s deliberate act in

Paul’s case,--an act immediately subsequent to, and directly expressive

of, his conversion, the culminating experience of his life; and, as a

great Church organizer, he could not but dwell with an equal insistence

upon the two chief Sacraments.

Catherine had received baptism as an unconscious infant, and the event

lay far back in that pre-conversion time, which was all but completely

ousted from her memory by the great experience of some twenty-five

years later. And in the latter experience it was (more or less from the

first and soon all but exclusively) the sense of a divine encirclement

and sustenance, of an addition of love, rather than a consciousness of

the subtraction of sins or of a divine purification, that possessed

her. In her late, though profoundly characteristic Purgatorial

teaching, the soul again plunges into an ocean; but now, since the soul

is rather defiled than hungry, and wills rather to be purified than

to be fed, this plunge is indeed a kind of Baptism by Immersion. Yet

we have no more the symbol of water, for the long state and effects

to which that swift act leads, but we have, instead, fire and light,

and, in one place, once again bread and the hunger for bread. And

this is no doubt because, in these Purgatorial picturings, it is her

conversion-experience of love under the symbols of light and of fire,

and her forty years of daily hungering for the Holy Eucharist and Love

Incarnate, which furnish the emotional colours and the intellectual

outlines.

8. _Eschatological matters._

In Eschatological matters the main points of contact and of contrast

appear to be four; and three of the differences are occasioned by St.

Paul’s preoccupation with Christ’s Second Coming, with the Resurrection

of the body, and with the General Judgment, mostly as three events in

close temporal correlation, and likely to occur soon; whilst Catherine

abstracts entirely from all three.

(1) Thus St. Paul is naturally busy with the question as to the Time

when he shall be with Christ. In 1 Thess. iv, 15, he speaks of “we

who are now living, who have been left for the coming of the Lord,”

_i.e._ he expects this event during his own lifetime; whilst in Phil.

i, 23, he “desires to be dissolved and to be with Christ,” _i.e._ he

has ceased confidently to expect this coming before his own death.

But Catherine dwells exclusively, with this latter conception, upon

the moment of death, as that when the soul shall see, and be finally

confirmed in its union with, Love, Christ, God; for into her earthly

lifetime Love, Christ, God, can and do come, but invisibly, and she may

still lose full union with them for ever.

(2) As to the Place, it is notoriously obscure whether St. Paul thinks

of it, as do the Old Testament and the Apocalypse, as the renovated

earth, or as the sky, or as the intervening space. The risen faithful

who “shall be caught in the clouds to meet Christ,” 1 Thess. iv, 16,

seem clearly to be meeting Him, in mid-air, as He descends upon earth;

and “Jerusalem above,” Gal. iv, 26, may well, as in Apoc. iii, 12; xxi,

2, be conceived as destined to come down upon earth. But Catherine,

though she constantly talks of Heaven, Purgatory, Hell as “places,”

makes it plain that such “places” are for her but vivid symbols for

states of soul. God Himself repeatedly appears in her sayings as “the

soul’s place”; and it is this “place,” the soul’s true spiritual

birthplace and home, which, ever identical and bliss-conferring in

itself, is variously experienced by the soul, in exact accordance

with its dispositions,--as that profoundly painful, or that joyfully

distressing, or that supremely blissful “place” which respectively we

call Hell, and Purgatory, and Heaven.

(3) As to the Body, we have already noted St. Paul’s doctrine,

intermediate between the Palestinian and Alexandrian Jewish teaching,

that it will rise indeed, but composed henceforth of “glory” and

no more of “flesh.” It is this his requirement of a body, however

spiritual, which underlies his anxiety to be “found clothed, not

naked,” at and after death, 2 Cor. v, 3. Indeed, in this whole passage,

v, 1-4, “our earthly house of this habitation,” and “a building of God

not made with hands,” no doubt mean, respectively, the present body

of flesh and the future body of glory; just as the various, highly

complex, conceptions of “clothed,” “unclothed,” “clothed upon,” refer

to the different conditions of the soul with a body of flesh, without a

body at all, and with a body of glory.--Now this passage, owing to its

extreme complication and abstruseness of doctrine, has come down to us

in texts and versions of every conceivable form; and this uncertainty

has helped Catherine towards her very free utilization of it. For she

not only, as ever, simply ignores all questions of a risen body, and

transfers the concept of a luminous ethereal substance from the body to

the soul itself, and refers the “nakedness,” “unclothing,” “clothing,”

and “clothing upon” to conditions obtaining, not between the soul and

the body, but between the soul and God; but she also, in most cases,

takes the nakedness as the desirable state, since typical of the soul’s

faithful self-exposure to the all-purifying rays of God’s light and

fire, and interprets the “unclothing” as the penitential stripping from

off itself of those pretences and corrupt incrustations which prevent

God’s blissful action upon it.

(4) And, finally, as to the Judgment, we have in St. Paul a double

current,--the inherited Judaistic conception of a forensic retribution;

Christ, the divine Judge, externally applying such and such statutory

rewards and punishments to such and such good and evil deeds,--so

in Rom. ii, 6-10; and the experimental conception, helped on to

articulation by Hellenistic influences, of the bodily resurrection and

man’s whole final destiny as the necessary resultant and manifestation

of an internal process, the presence of the Spirit and of the power

of God,--so in the later parts of Romans, in Gal. vi, 8, and in 1

Cor. vi, 14; 2 Cor. xiii, 4.--Among Catherine’s sayings also we

find some passages--but these the less characteristic and mostly

of doubtful authenticity,--where reward and punishment, indeed the

three “places” themselves, appear as so many separate institutions

of God, which get externally applied to certain good and evil deeds.

But these are completely overshadowed in number, sure authenticity,

emotional intensity, and organic connection with her other teachings,

by sayings of the second type, where the soul’s fate is but the

necessary consequence of its own deliberate choice and gradually

formed dispositions, the result, inseparable since the first from

its self-identification with this or that of the various possible

will-attitudes towards God.

(5) We can then sum up the main points of contact and of difference

between Paul and Catherine, by saying that, in both cases, everything

leads up to, or looks back upon, a great culminating, directly

personal experience of shortest clock-time duration, whence all

their doctrine, wherever emphatic, is but an attempt to articulate

and universalize this original experience; and that if in Paul there

remains more of explicit occupation with the last great events of

the earthly life of Jesus, yet in both there is the same insistence

upon the life-giving Spirit, the eternal Christ, manifesting His

inexhaustible power in the transformation of souls, on and on, here and

now, into the likeness of Himself.

II. THE JOANNINE WRITINGS.

On moving now from the Pauline to the Joannine writings, we shall

find that Catherine’s obligations to these latter are but rarely as

deep, yet that they cover a wider reach of ideas and images. I take

this fresh source of influence under the double heading of the general

relations of the Joannine teaching to other, previous or contemporary,

conceptions; and of this same teaching considered in itself.[69]

1. _Joannine teaching contrasted with other systems._

(1) As to the general relations towards other positions, we get here,

towards Judaism and Paganism, an emphatic insistence upon the novelty

and independence of Christianity as regards not only Paganism, but even

the previous Judaism, “The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth

came by Jesus Christ,” i, 17; and upon the Logos, Christ, as “the Light

that enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world,” “unto his

own,” _i.e._ men in general; for this Light “was in the world, and the

world was made by Him,” i, 9-11. There is thus a divinely-implanted,

innate tendency towards this light, extant in man prior to the explicit

act of faith, and operative outside of the Christian body: “Every

man who is from the truth, heareth my voice,” xviii, 37: “he who

doeth the truth, cometh to the light,” in, 21: “begotten,” as he is,

not of man but “of God,” i, 13; 1 John iii, 9. And thus Samaritans,

Greeks, and Heathens act and speak in the best dispositions, iv, 42;

xii, 20-24; x, 16; whilst such terms and sayings as “the Saviour of

the World,” “God so loved the world,” iv, 42, iii, 16, are the most

universalistic declarations to be found in the New Testament.--And

this current dominates the whole of Catherine’s temper and teaching:

this certainty as to the innate affinity of every human soul to the

Light, Love, Christ, God, gives a tone of exultation to the musings

of this otherwise melancholy woman. Whereas the Joannine passages of

a contrasting exclusiveness and even fierceness of tone, such as “all

they that came before Me, were thieves and robbers,” x, 8; “ye are

from your father, the devil,” viii, 44; “ye shall die in your sins,”

viii, 21; “your sin remains,” ix, 41, are without any parallel among

Catherine’s sayings. Indeed it is plain that Catherine, whilst as sure

as the Evangelist that all man’s goodness comes from God, nowhere,

except in her own case, finds man’s evil to be diabolic in character.

(2) With regard to Paulinism, the Joannine writings give us a

continuation and extension of the representation of the soul’s mystical

union with Christ, as a local abiding in the element Christ. Indeed

it is in these writings that we find the terms “to abide in” the

light, 1 John ii, 10, in God, 1 John iv, 13, in Christ, 1 John ii, 6,

24, 27, iii, 6, 24, and in His love, John xv, 9, 1 John iv, 16; the

corresponding expressions, “God abideth in us,” 1 John iv, 12, 16,

“Christ abideth in us,” 1 John iii, 24, and “love abideth in us,” 1

John iv, 16; the two immanences coupled together, where the communicant

“abideth in Me and I in him,” vi, 56, and where the members of His

mystical body are bidden to “abide in Me and I in you,” xv, 4; and the

supreme pattern of all these interpenetrations, “I am in the Father,

and the Father is in Me,” xiv, 10.--And it is from here that Catherine

primarily gets the literary suggestions for her images of the soul

plunged into, and filled by, an ocean of Light, Love, Christ, God; and

again from here, more than from St. Paul, she gets her favourite term

μένειν (It. _restare_), around which are grouped, in her mind, most of

the quietistic-sounding elements of her teaching.

(3) As to the points of contact between the Joannine teaching and

Alexandrianism, we find that three are vividly renewed by Catherine.

Philo had taught: “God ceases not from acting: as to burn is the

property of fire, so to act is the property of God,” _Legg. Alleg._ I,

3. And in John we find: “God is a Spirit,” and “My Father worketh ever

and I work ever,” iv, 24; v, 17. And God as pure Spiritual Energy, as

the _Actus Purus_, is a truth and experience that penetrates the whole

life of Catherine.

The work of Christ is not dwelt on in its earthly beginnings; but it is

traced up and back, in the form of a spiritual “Genesis,” to His life

and work as the Logos in Heaven, where He abides “in the bosom of the

Father,” and whence He learns what He “hath declared” to us, i, 18;

just as, in his turn, the disciple whom Jesus loved “was reclining” at

the Last Supper “on the bosom of Jesus,” and later on “beareth witness

concerning the things” which he had learnt there, xiii, 23; xxi, 24. So

also Catherine transcends the early earthly life of Christ altogether,

and habitually dwells upon Him as the Light and as Love, as God in His

own Self-Manifestation; and upon the ever-abiding sustenance afforded

by this Light and Life and Love to the faithful soul reclining and

resting upon it.

And the contrast between the Spiritual and the Material, the Abiding

and the Transitory, is symbolized throughout John, in exact accord

with Philo, under the spacial categories of upper and lower, and of

extension: “Ye are from below, I am from above,” viii, 23; “He that

cometh from above, is above all,” iv, 31; and “in my Father’s house,”

that upper world, “there are many mansions,” abiding-places, xiv,

2. Hence all things divine here below have descended from above:

regeneration, iii, 3; the Spirit, i, 32; Angels, i, 51; the Son of God

Himself, iii, 13: and they mount once more up above, so especially

Christ Himself, iii, 13; vi, 62. And the things of that upper world

are the true things: “the true light,” “ the true adorers,” “the

true vine,” “the true bread from Heaven,” i, ix; iv, 23; xv, 1; vi,

32: all this in contrast to the shadowy semi-realities of the lower

world.--Catherine is here in fullest accord with the spacial imagery

generally; she even talks of God Himself, not only as in a place, but

as Himself a place, as the soul’s “loco.” But she has, for reasons

explained elsewhere, generally to abandon the upper-and-lower category

when picturing the soul’s self-dedication to purification, since, for

this act, she mostly figures a downward plunge into suffering; and

she gives us a number of striking sayings, in which she explicitly

re-translates all this quantitative spacial imagery into its underlying

meaning of qualitative spiritual states.

(4) As to the Joannine approximations and antagonisms to Gnosticism,

Catherine’s position is as follows. In the Synoptic accounts, Our Lord

makes the acquisition of eternal life depend upon the keeping of the

two great commandments of the love of God and of one’s neighbour, Luke

x, 26-28, and parallels. In John Our Lord says: “this is eternal life,

that they may know Thee, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom Thou

hast sent,” xvii, 3. To “know,” γινώσκειν, occurs twenty-five times in

1 John alone. Here the final object of every soul is to believe and to

know: “they received and knew truly and believed,” xvii, 8; “we have

believed and have known,” vi, 69; or “we have known and have believed,”

1 John iv, 16. And Catherine also lays much stress upon faith ending,

even here below, in a certain vivid knowledge; but this knowledge is,

with her, less doctrinally articulated, no doubt in part because there

was no Gnosticism fronting her, to force on such articulation.

And the Joannine writings compare this higher mental knowledge to the

lower, sensible perception: “He who cometh from heaven, witnesseth to

what he hath seen and heard,” iii, 31; “when He shall become manifest,

we shall see Him as He is,” 1 John iii, 2. And they have three special

terms, in common with Gnosticism, for the object of such knowledge:

Life, Light, and Fulness (_Plerōma_),--the latter, as a technical term,

appearing in the New Testament only in John i, 16, and in the Epistles

to the Colossians and Ephesians. Catherine, also, is ever experiencing

and conceiving the mental apprehensions of faith, as so many

quasi-sensible, ocular, perceptions; and Life and Light are constantly

mentioned, and Fulness is, at least, implied in the psycho-physical

concomitants or consequences of her thinkings.

On the other hand, she does not follow John in the intensely dualistic

elements of his teaching,--the sort of determinist, all but innate,

distinction between “the darkness,” “the men who loved the darkness

rather than the light,” and the Light itself and those who loved it, i,

4, 5; iii, 19,--children of God and children of the devil--the latter

all but incapable of being saved, viii, 38-47; x, 26; xi, 52; xiv,

17. Rather is she like him in his all but complete silence as to “the

anger of God,”--a term which he uses once only, iii, 36, as against the

twenty-two instances of it in St. Paul.

And she is full to overflowing of the great central, profoundly un- and

anti-Gnostic, sensitively Christian teachings of St. John: as to the

Light, the only-begotten Son, having been given by God, because God so

loved the world; as to Jesus having loved his own even to the end; as

to the object of Christ’s manifestation of His Father’s name to men,

being that God’s love for Christ, and indeed Christ Himself, might

be within them; and as to how, if they love Him, they will keep His

commandments,--His commandment to love each other as He has loved them,

iii, 21; iii, 16; xiii, 1; xvii, 26; xiv, 15; xv, 17. In this last

great declaration especially do we find the very epitome of Catherine’s

life and spirit, of her who can never think of Him as Light and

Knowledge only, but ever insists on His being Fire and Love as well;

and who has but one commandment, that of Love-impelled, Love-seeking

loving.

(5) And lastly, in relation to organized, Ecclesiastical Christianity,

the Joannine writings dwell, as regards the more general principles, on

points which, where positive, are simply presupposed by Catherine; and,

where negative, find no echo within her.

The Joannine writings insist continually upon the unity and

inter-communion of the faithful: “There shall be one fold, one

shepherd”; Christ’s death was in order “that He might gather the

scattered children of God into one”; He prays to the Father that

believers “may be one, as we are one”; and He leaves as His legacy

His seamless robe, x, 16; xi, 52; xvii, 21; xix, 24. And these same

writings have a painfully absolute condemnation for all outside of

this visible fold: “The whole world lies in evil”; its “Prince is the

Devil”; “the blood of Jesus cleanseth us from all sin,” within the

community alone; false prophets, those who have gone forth from the

community, are not to be prayed for, are not even to be saluted, 1

John, v, 19; John xii, 31; John i, 7; v, 16; 2 John, 10. For the great

and necessary fight with Gnosticism has already begun in these writings.

But Catherine dies before the unity of Christendom is again in jeopardy

through the Protestant Reformation, and she never dwells--this is

doubtless a limit--upon the Christian community, as such. And her

enthusiastic sympathy with the spiritual teachings of Jacopone da

Todi, who, some two centuries before, had, as one of the prophetic

opposition, vehemently attacked the intensely theocratic policy of

Pope Boniface VIII, and had suffered a long imprisonment at his hands;

her tender care for the schismatic population of the far-away Greek

island of Chios; and her intimacy with Dre. Tommaso Moro, who, later

on, became for a while a Calvinist; all indicate how free from all

suspiciousness towards individual Catholics, or of fierceness against

other religious bodies and persons, was her deeply filial attachment to

the Church.

In the Synoptists Our Lord declares, as to the exorcist who worked

cures in His name, although not a follower of His, that “he that is

not against us, is for us,” and refuses to accede to His disciples’

proposal to interfere with his activity, Mark ix, 38-41; and He points,

as to the means of inheriting eternal life, to the keeping of the

two great commandments, as these are already formulated in the Old

Testament, and insists that this neighbour, whom here we are bidden

to love, is any and every man, Luke x, 25-37. The Joannine writings

insist strongly upon the strict necessity of full, explicit adhesion:

the commandment of love which Our Lord gives is here “My commandment,”

“a new commandment,” one held “from the beginning”--in the Christian

community; and the command to “love one another” is here addressed to

the brethren in their relations to their fellow-believers only, xiii,

34; xiii, 35; xv, 12, 17. Catherine’s feeling, in this matter, is

clearly with the Synoptists.

2. _Joannine teaching considered in itself._

If we next take the Joannine teachings in themselves, we shall find the

following interesting points of contact or contrast to exist between

John and Catherine.

(1) In matters of Theology proper, she is completely penetrated by

the great doctrine, more explicit in St. John even than in St. Paul,

that “God is Love,” 1 John iv, 8; and by the conceptions of God and of

Christ “working always” as Life, Light, and Love.--But whereas, in the

first Epistle of John, God Himself is “eternal life” and “light,” v,

20; i, 5; and, in the Gospel, it is Christ Who, in the first instance,

appears as Life and as Light, xi, 25; viii, 12: Catherine nowhere

distinguishes at all between Christ and God. And similarly, whereas in

St. John “God doth not give” unto Christ “the Spirit by measure”; and

Christ promises to the disciples “another Paraclete,” _i.e._ the Holy

Spirit, iii, 34; xiv, 16; and indeed the Son and the Spirit appear,

throughout, as distinct from one another as do the Son and the Father:

in Catherine we get, practically everywhere, an exclusive concentration

upon the fact, so often implied or declared by St. Paul, of Love,

Christ, being Himself Spirit.

(2) The Joannine Soteriology has, I think, influenced Catherine as

follows. Christ’s redemptive work appears, in the more original current

of that teaching, under the symbols of the Word, Light, Bread, as

the self-revelation of God. For in proportion that this Logos-Light

and Bread enlightens and nourishes, does He drive away darkness and

weakness, and, with them, sin, and this previously to any historic

acts of His earthly life. And, in this connection, there is but little

stress laid upon penance and the forgiveness of sins as compared

with the Synoptic accounts, and the term of turning back, στρέφειν,

is absent here.--But that same redemptive work appears, in the more

Pauline of the two Joannine currents, as the direct result of so many

vicarious, atoning deeds, the historic Passion and Death of Our Lord.

Here there is indeed sin, a “sin of the world,” and specially for this

sin is Christ the propitiation: “God so loved the world, as to give His

only-begotten Son”--Him “the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of

the world,” i, 29; 1 John ii, 2; John ii, 16; i, 29, 36.

Catherine, with the probably incomplete exception of her Conversion

and Penance-period, concentrates her attention, with a striking degree

of exclusiveness, upon the former group of conceptions. With her too

the God-Christ is--all but solely--conceived as Light which, in so far

as it is not hindered, operates the healing and the growth of souls.

And in her great picture of all souls inevitably hungering for the

sight of the One Bread, God, she has operated a fusion between two of

the Joannine images, the Light which is seen and the Bread which is

eaten: here the bare sight (in reality, a satiating sight) of the Bread

suffices. If, for the self-manifesting God-Christ, she has, besides the

Joannine Light-image, a Fire-symbol, which has its literary antecedents

rather in the Old Testament than in the New, this comes from the fact

that she is largely occupied with the pain of the impressions and

processes undergone by already God-loving yet still imperfectly pure

souls, and that fierce fire is as appropriate a symbol for such pain as

is peaceful light for joy.

Now this painfulness is, in Catherine’s teaching, the direct result

of whatever may be incomplete and piecemeal in the soul’s state and

process of purification. And this her conception, of Perfect Love being

mostly attained only through a series of apparently sudden shifts,

each seemingly final, is no doubt in part moulded upon the practically

identical Joannine teaching as to Faith.

True, we have already seen that her conception of the nature of God’s

action upon the soul, and of the soul’s reaction under this His

touch, is more akin to the rich Synoptic idea of a disposition and

determination of the soul’s whole being, (a cordial trust at least as

much as an intellectual apprehension and clear assent), than to the

Joannine view, which lays a predominant stress upon mental apprehension

and assent. And again, she nowhere presents anything analogous to the

Joannine, already scholastic, formulations of the object of this Faith

and Trust,--all of them explicitly concerned with the nature of Christ.

But, everywhere in the Joannine writings, the living Person and Spirit

aimed at by these definitions is considered as experienced by the

soul in a succession of ever-deepening intuitions and acts of Faith.

Already at the Jordan, Andrew and Nathaniel have declared Jesus to be

the Christ, the Son of God, i, 41, 49; yet they, His disciples, are

said to have believed in Him at Cana, in consequence of His miracle

there, ii, 11. Already at Capernaum Peter asserts for the twelve, “We

have believed and known that Thou art the Holy One of God,” vi, 69;

yet still, at the Last Supper, Christ exhorts them to believe in Him,

xiv, 10, 11, and predicts future events to them, in order that, when

these predictions come true, their faith may still further increase,

xiii, 19; xiv, 29. And, as far on as after the Resurrection we hear

that the Beloved Disciple “saw” (the empty tomb) “and believed,” xx,

8, 29. We thus get in John precisely the same logically paradoxical,

but psychologically and spiritually most accurate and profound,

combination of an apparent completeness of Faith at each point of

special illumination, with a sudden re-beginning and impulsive upward

shifting of the soul’s Light and Believing, which is so characteristic

of Catherine’s experience and teaching as to the successive levels of

the soul’s Fire, Light and Love. And the opposite movement--of the

fading away of the Light and the Faith--can be traced in John, as the

corresponding doctrine of the going out of the Fire, Light and Love

within the Soul can be found in Catherine.

Again, both John and Catherine are penetrated with the sense that this

Faith and Love is somehow waked up in souls by a true touch of God, a

touch to which they spontaneously respond, because they already possess

a substantial affinity to Him. “His,” the Good Shepherd’s, “sheep hear

His voice,” x, 16; they hear it, because they are already His: the

Light solicits and is accepted by the soul, because the soul itself

is light-like and light-requiring, and because it proceeds originally

from this very Light which would now reinforce the soul’s own deepest

requirements. This great truth appears also in those profound Joannine

passages: “No man can come to Me, unless the Father Who sent Me draw

him”; and “I have manifested Thy name, to those men whom Thou didst

give Me from out of the world,” vi, 44; xvii, 6.

And this attractive force is also a faculty of Christ: “I shall draw

all men unto Myself,” xii, 32. And note how Catherine, ever completely

identifying God, Christ, Light, Love, and, where these work in

imperfectly pure souls, Fire, is stimulated by the last-quoted text

to extend God’s, Christ’s, Love’s drawing, attraction, to all men;

to limit only, in various degrees, these various men’s response to

it; and to realize so intensely that a generous yielding to this our

ineradicable deepest _attrait_ is our fullest joy, and the resisting it

is our one final misery, as to picture the soul, penitent for this its

mad resistance, plunging itself, now eagerly responsive to that intense

attraction, into God and a growing conformity with Him.

(3) As to points concerning the Sacraments where Catherine is

influenced by John, we find that here again Baptismal conceptions are

passed over by her. She does not allude to the water in the discourse

to Nicodemus, iii, 5, although she is full of other ideas suggested

there; but she dwells upon the water in the address to the Woman at

the Well, iv, 10-15, that “living water,” which is, for her, the

spirit’s spiritual sustenance, Love, Christ, God, and insensibly glides

over into the images and experiences attaching, for her, to the Holy

Eucharist.

But, as to this the greatest of the Sacraments and the all-absorbing

devotion of her life, her symbols and concepts are all suggested by

the Fourth Gospel, in contrast to the Synoptists and St. Paul. For the

Holy Eucharist is, with her, ever detached from any direct memory of

the Last Supper, Passion, and Death, the original, historical, unique

occasions which still form its setting in the pre-Joannine writings,

although those greatest proofs of a divinely boundless self-immolation

undoubtedly give to her devotion to the Blessed Sacrament its beautiful

enthusiasm and tenderness. The Holy Eucharist ever appears with her,

as with St. John, attached to the scene of the multiplication of the

breads,--a feast of joy and of life, with Christ at the zenith of His

earthly hope and power. For not “a shewing of the death” in “the

eating of this bread,” 1 Cor. xi, 26, is dwelt on by John; but we have:

“I am the Bread of Life; he that eateth this bread, shall live for

ever,” John vi, 51, 52.

And Catherine follows John in thinking predominantly of the single

soul, when dwelling upon the Holy Eucharist. For if John presents

a great open-air Love-Feast in lieu of Paul’s Upper Chamber and

Supper with the twelve, he, as over against Paul’s profoundly social

standpoint, has, throughout this his Eucharistic chapter, but three

indications of the plural as against some fourteen singulars.

And, finally, John’s change from the future tense, with its reference

to a coming historic institution, “the food which … the Son of Man

will give you,” vi, 27, to the present tense, with its declaration

of an eternal fact and relation, “I am” (now and always) “the living

bread which hath come down from heaven,” vi, 51, will have helped

Catherine towards the conception of the eternal Christ-God offering

Himself as their ceaseless spiritual food to His creatures, possessed

as they are by an indestructible spiritual hunger for Himself. For if

the Eucharistic food, Bread, Body, has already been declared by St.

Paul to be “spiritual,” 2 Cor. iii, 17, in St. John also it has to be

spiritual, for it is here “the true bread from heaven” and “the bread

of life”; and Christ declares here “it is the Spirit that giveth life,

the flesh (alone) profiteth nothing,” vi, 61, 69. Hence Catherine is,

again through the Holy Eucharist and St. John, brought back to her

favourite Pauline conception of the Lord as Himself “Spirit,” “the

Life-giving Spirit,” 2 Cor. iii, 17; 1 Cor. xv, 45.

(4) And if we conclude with the Joannine Eschatology, we shall find

that Catherine has penetrated deep into the following conceptions,

which undoubtedly, even in their union, present us with a less rich

outlook than that furnished by the Synoptists, but which may be said to

constitute the central spirit of Our Lord’s teaching.

Like John, who has but two mentions of “the Kingdom of God,” iii, 3,

5, and who elsewhere ever speaks of “Life,” Catherine has nowhere “the

Kingdom,” but everywhere “Life.” Like him she conceives the process of

Conversion as a “making alive” of the moribund, darkened, cold soul, by

the Light, Love, Christ, God, v, 21-29, when He, Who is Himself “the

Life,” xi, 25, and “the Spirit,” iv, 24, speaks to the soul “words”

that are “spirit and life,” vi, 63; for then the soul that gives ear

to His words “hath eternal life,” v, 24.

Again Catherine, for the most part, appropriates and develops that one

out of the two Joannine currents of doctrine concerning the Judgment,

which treats the latter as already determined and forestalled by Man’s

present personal attitude towards the Light. The judgment is thus

simply a discrimination, according to the original meaning of the noun

κρίσις--like when God in the beginning “discriminated the light from

the darkness,” Gen. i, 5; a discrimination substantially effected

already here and now, “he that believeth in Him, is not judged; he

that believeth not, is already judged,” iii, 18. But the other current

of doctrine, so prominent in the Synoptists, is not absent from St.

John,--the teaching as to a later, external and visible, forensic

judgment. And Catherine has a similar intermixture of two currents, yet

with a strong predominance of the immanental, present conception of the

matter.

And even for that one volitional act in the beyond, which, according

to her doctrine, has a certain constitutive importance for the whole

eternity of all still partially impure souls--for that voluntary

plunge--we can find an analogue in the Joannine writings, although here

there is no reference to the after life. For throughout the greater

part of his teaching--from iii, 15, 16, apparently up to the end of the

Gospel,--the possession of spiritual Life is consequent upon the soul’s

own acts of Faith, and not, as one would expect from his other, more

characteristic teaching, upon its Regeneration from above, iii, 3. And

the result of such acts of Faith is a “Metabasis,” a “passing over from

death to life,” v, 24; 1 John iii, 14. Catherine will have conceived

such an act of Faith as predominantly an act of Love, and the act as

itself already that Metabasis; and will, most characteristically,

have quickened the movement, and have altered its direction from the

horizontal to the vertical, so that the “passing, going over,” becomes

a “plunge down into” Life. For indeed the Fire she plunges into is, in

her doctrine, Life Itself; since it is Light, Love, Christ, and God.

Catherine, once more, is John’s most faithful disciple, where he

declares that Life to stream out immediately from the life-giving

object of Faith into the life-seeking subject of that Faith, from the

believed God into the believing soul: “I am the Bread of Life; he who

cometh to Me, shall not hunger”; “he who abideth in Me, and I in him,

beareth much fruit”; vi, 35; xv, 5.

And finally, she follows John closely where he insists upon

Simultaneity and Eternity as contrasted with Succession and

Immortality, so as even to abstract from the bodily resurrection. He

who “hath passed over from death to life” (already) “possesses eternal

life”; “every one who liveth and believeth in Me, shall not die for

ever (at any time)”; “this,” already and of itself, “is eternal life,

to know Thee, the one true God and Jesus Christ Whom Thou hast sent”;

and the soul’s abiding in such an experience is Christ’s own joy,

transplanted into it, and a joy which is full, v, 24; xi, 26; xvii, 3;

xv, 11. And there is here such an insistence upon an unbroken spiritual

life, in spite of and right through physical death, that, to Martha’s

declaration that her brother will arise at the last day, xi, 24, Jesus

answers, “I am the Resurrection and the Life: he who believeth in Me,

even if he die” the bodily death, “shall live” on in his soul; indeed

“every man who liveth” the life of the body, “and who believeth in Me,

shall not die for ever (at any time)” in his soul, xi, 25, 26. John’s

other line of thought, in which the bodily resurrection is prominent,

remains without any definite or systematic response in Catherine’s

teaching.

(5) We can then summarize the influence exercised by John upon

Catherine by saying that he encouraged her to conceive religion as

an experience of eternity; as a true, living knowledge of things

spiritual; indeed as a direct touch of man’s soul by God Himself,

culminating in man’s certainty that God is Love.

III. THE AREOPAGITE WRITINGS.

Catherine’s close relations to the Areopagite, the Pseudo-Dionysius,

are of peculiar interest, in their manifold agreement, difference, or

non-responsiveness; and this although the ideas thus assimilated are

mostly of lesser depth and importance than those derived from the New

Testament writings just considered. They can be grouped conveniently

under the subject-matters of God’s creative, providential, and

restorative, outgoing, His action upon souls and all things extant,

and of the reasons for the different results of this action; of

certain symbols used to characterize that essential action of God

upon His creatures; of the states and energizings of the soul, in so

far as it is responsive to that action; of certain terms concerning

these reactions of the soul; and of the final result of the whole

process. I shall try and get back, in most cases, to the Areopagite’s

Neo-Platonist sources, the dry, intensely scholastic Proclus, and that

great soul, the prince of the non-Christian Mystics, Plotinus.[70]

1. _God’s general action._

As to God’s action, we have in Dionysius the Circle with the

three stages of its movement,--a conception so dear to Catherine.

“Theologians call Him the Esteemed and the Loved, and again Love and

Loving-kindness, as being a Power at once propulsive and leading up”

and back “to Himself; a loving movement self-moved, which pre-exists in

the Good, and bubbles forth from the Good to things existing, and which

again returns to the Good--as it were a sort of everlasting circle

whirling round, because of the Good, from the Good, in the Good, and

to the Good,--ever advancing and remaining and returning in the same

and throughout the same.” This is “the power of the divine similitude”

present throughout creation, “which turns all created things to their

cause.”[71] The doctrine is derived from Proclus: “Everything caused

both abides in its cause and proceeds from it and returns to it”;

and “everything that proceeds from something returns, by a natural

instinct, to that from which it proceeds.”[72] And Plotinus had led

the way: “there” in the super-sensible world, experienced in moments

of ecstasy, “in touch and union with the One, the soul begets Beauty,

Justice, and Virtue: and that place and life is, for it, its principle

and end: principle, since it springs from thence; end, because the Good

is there, and because, once arrived there, the soul becomes what it was

at first.”[73]

And Dionysius has the doctrine, so dear to Catherine, that “the Source

of Good is indeed present to all, but all are not,” by their intention,

“present to It; yet, by our aptitude for Divine union, we all,” in a

sense, “are present to It.” “It shines, on Its own part, equally upon

all things capable of participation in It.”[74] Already Plotinus had

finely said: “The One is not far away from any one, and yet is liable

to be far away from one and all, since, present though It be, It is”

efficaciously “present only to such as are capable of receiving It, and

are so disposed as to adapt themselves to It and, as it were, to seize

and touch It by their likeness to It, … when, in a word, the soul is in

the state in which it was when it came from It.”[75]

We have again in Dionysius the combination, so characteristic of

Catherine, of a tender respect for the substance of human nature, as

good and ever respected by God, and of a keen sense of the pathetic

weakness of man’s sense-clogged spirit here below. “Providence, as

befits its goodness, provides for each being suitably: for to destroy

nature is not a function of Providence.” “All those who cavil at the

Divine Justice, unconsciously commit a manifest injustice. For they

say that immortality ought to be in mortals, and perfection in the

imperfect … and perfect power in the weak, and that the temporal should

be eternal … in a word, they assign the properties of one thing to

another.”[76]

2. _Symbols of God’s action._

(1) As to the symbols of God’s action, we have first the Chain or Rope,

Catherine’s “fune,” that “rope of His pure Love,” of which “an end was

thrown to her from heaven.”[77] This symbol was no doubt suggested by

Dionysius: “Let us then elevate our very selves by our prayers to the

higher ascent of the Divine … rays; as though a luminous chain (rope,

σειρά) were suspended from the celestial heights and reached down

hither, and we, by ever stretching out to it up and up … were thus

carried upwards.”[78] And this passage again goes back to Proclus,

who describes the “chain (rope) of love” as “having its entirely

simple and hidden highest point fixed amongst the very first ranks of

the Gods”; its middle effluence “amongst the Gods higher than the

(sensible) world”; and its third, lowest, part, as “divided multiformly

throughout the (sensible) world.” “The divine Love implants one common

bond (chain) and one indissoluble friendship in and between each soul

(that participates in its power), and between all and the Beautiful

Itself.”[79] And this simile of a chain from heaven, which in Dionysius

is luminous, and in Catherine and Proclus is loving, goes back, across

Plato (_Theaetetus_ 153_c_ and _Republic_, X, 61_b_, 99_c_) to Homer,

where it again is luminous (golden). For, in the _Iliad_, viii, 17-20,

Zeus says to the Gods in Olympus, “So as to see all things, do you, O

Gods and Goddesses all, hang a golden chain from heaven, and do you all

seize hold of it”--so as thus to descend to earth.

(2) We have next the symbol of the Sun and its purifying, healing

Light, under which God and His action are rapturously proclaimed by

Dionysius. “Even as our sun, by its very being, enlightens all things

able to partake of its light in their various degrees, so also the

Good, by its very existence, sends unto all things that be, the rays

of its entire goodness, according to their capacity for them. By means

of these rays they are purified from all corruption and death … and

are separated from instability.” “The Divine Goodness, this our great

sun, enlightens … nourishes, perfects, renews.” Even the pure can

thus be made purer still. “He, the Good, is called spiritual light

… he cleanses the mental vision of the very angels: they taste, as

it were, the light.”[80] All this imagery goes back, in the first

instance, to Proclus. For Proclus puts in parallel “sun” and “God,” and

“to be enlightened” and “to be deified”; makes all purifying forces

to coalesce in the activity of the Sun-God, Apollo Katharsios, the

Purifier, who “everywhere unifies multiplicity … purifying the entire

heaven and all living things throughout the world”; and describes how

“from above, from his super-heavenly post, Apollo scatters the arrows

of Zeus,--his rays upon all the world.”[81] The Sun’s rays, here as

powerful as the bolts of Zeus, thus begin to play the part still

assigned to them in Catherine’s imagery of the “Saëtte” and “Radii” of

the divine Light and Love. And the substance of the whole symbol goes

back, through fine sayings of Plotinus and through Philo, to Plato, who

calls the Sun “the offspring of the Good and analogous to it,” and who

(doubtless rightly) takes Homer’s “golden chain” to be nothing but the

Sun-rays,--thus identifying the two symbols.[82]

(3) Fire, as a symbol for God and His action, is thus praised by

Dionysius: “The sacred theologians often describe the super-essential

Essence in terms of Fire.… For sensible fire is, so to say, present

in all things, and pervades them all without mingling with them, and

is received by all things; … it is intolerable yet invisible; it

masters all things by its own might, and yet it but brings the things

in which it resides to (the development of) their own energy; it has

a transforming power; it communicates itself to all who approach it

in any degree; … it has the power of dividing (what it seizes); it

bears upwards; it is penetrating; … it increases its own self in a

hidden manner; it suddenly shines forth.”[83]--All these qualities,

and the delicate transitions from fire to light and from light back to

fire, and from heat immanent to heat applied from without, we can find

again, vividly assimilated and experienced, in Catherine’s teaching

and emotional life. But the Sun-light predominates in Dionysius, the

Fire-heat in Catherine; and whereas the former explicitly attaches

purification only to the Sun-light, the latter connects the cleansing

chiefly with Fire-heat, no doubt because the Greek man is busy chiefly

with the intellectually cognitive, and the Italian woman with the

morally ameliorative, activities and interests of the mind and soul.

3. _The soul’s reaction._

(1) As to the soul’s reaction under God’s action, and its return to

Him, we first get, in Dionysius, the insistence upon Mystical Quietude

and Silence, which, according to him, are strictly necessary, since

only like can know and become one with like, and God is “Peace and

Repose” and, “as compared with every known progression, Immobility,”

and “the one all-perfect source and cause of the Peace of all”; and

He is Silence, “the Angels are, as it were, the heralds of the Divine

Silence,”--teaching not unlike that of St. Ignatius of Antioch,

“Jesus Christ … the Word which proceeds from Silence.”[84] Hence “in

proportion as we ascend to the higher designations of God, do our

expressions become more and more circumscribed”; and at last “we shall

find, not a little speaking, but a complete absence of speech and

of conception.”[85] As Proclus has it: “Let this Fountain of Godhead

be honoured on our part by silence and by the union which is above

silence.”[86] And Plotinus says: “This,” the Divine, “Light comes not

from anywhere nor disappears any whither, but simply shines or shines

not: hence we must not pursue after it, but must abide in quietness

till it appears.” And when it does appear, “the contemplative, as one

rapt and divinely inspired, abides here with quietude in a motionless

condition, … being entirely stable, and becoming, as it were, stability

itself.”[87]--All this still finds its echo in Catherine.--But the

treble (cognitive) movement of the Angelic and human mind,--the

circular, the straight-line, and the spiral,--which Dionysius, in

direct imitation of Proclus, carefully develops throughout three

sections, is quite absent from Catherine’s mind.[88]

(2) We next get, in Dionysius, the following teachings as to Mystical

Vision and Union. “The Unity-above-Mind is placed above the minds;

and the Good-above-word is unutterable by word.” “There is, further,

the most divine knowledge of Almighty God, which is known through

not knowing … when the mind, having stood apart from all existing

things, and having then also dismissed itself, has been made one with

the super-luminous rays.” “We must contemplate things divine by our

whole selves standing out of our whole selves, and becoming wholly

of God.” “By the resistless and absolute ecstasy, in all purity,

from out of thyself and all things, thou wilt be carried on high, to

the super-essential ray of the divine darkness.” “It is during the

cessation of every mental energizing, that such a union of the deified

minds and of the super-divine light takes place.”[89] And the original

cause and final effect of such a going forth from self, are indicated

in words which were worked out in a vivid fulness by Catherine’s whole

convert life: “Divine Love is ecstatic, not permitting any lovers to

belong to themselves, but only to those beloved by them. And this

love, the superior beings show by being full of forethought for their

inferiors; those equal in rank, by their mutual coherence; and the

inferior by a looking back and up to the superior ones.”[90]

Dionysius here everywhere follows Proclus. Yet the noblest

Neo-Platonist sayings are again furnished by Plotinus: “We are not cut

off or severed from the Light, but we breathe and consist in It, since

It ever enlightens and bears us, as long as It is what It is.” In the

moments of Union, “we are able to see both Him and ourself,--ourself

in dazzling splendour, full of spiritual light, or rather one with the

pure Light Itself … our life’s flame is then enkindled.” “There the

soul rests, after it has fled up, away from evil, to the place which

is free from evils … and the true life is there.” “Arrived there,

the soul becomes that which she was at first.”[91] And if Plotinus

has thus already got the symbolism of place, he is as fully aware as

Catherine herself that, for purposes of vivid presentation, he is

spacializing spiritual, that is, unextended, qualitative states and

realities. “Things incorporeal do not get excluded by bodies; they are

severed only by otherness and difference: hence, when such otherness is

absent, they, not differing, are near each other.” And already, as with

Catherine, there is the apparent finality, and yet also the renewed

search for more. “The seer and the seen have become one, as though it

were a case not of vision but of union.” “When he shall have crossed

over as the image to its Archetype, then he will have reached his

journey’s end.” And yet this “ecstasy, simplification, and donation of

one’s self,” this “quiet,” is still also “a striving after contact,” “a

musing to achieve union.”[92]

4. _Terminology of the soul’s reaction._

(1) Certain terms and conceptions in connection with the soul’s return

to God, which are specially dear to Catherine, already appear, fully

developed, in Dionysius, Proclus, and Plotinus; in part, even in Plato.

Her “suddenly “ (_subito_) appears but rarely in Dionysius, _e.g._ in

_Heavenly Hierarchy_ xv, 2; but it is carefully explained by him in

his Third Epistle, specially devoted to the subject.[93] It is common

in Plotinus: “Suddenly the soul saw, without seeing how it saw”;

“suddenly thou shalt receive light,” “suddenly shining.”[94] And in

Plato we find: “He who has learnt to see the Beautiful in due order

and succession, when he comes towards the end, will suddenly perceive

a Nature of wondrous beauty--Beauty alone, absolute, separate, simple

and everlasting”: a passage which derives its imagery from the Epopteia

of the Eleusynian Mysteries,--the sudden appearance, the curtain being

withdrawn, upon the stage whereon the Heathen Mystery-play was being

performed, under a peculiar fairy-illumination, of the figures of

Demeter, Kore, and Iacchus, as the culmination of a long succession of

purifications and initiations.[95]

Catherine’s “wound,” or “wounding stroke,” (_ferita_), is, in part, the

necessary consequence of the “arrow” conception already considered;

in part, the echo of that group of terms which, in Dionysius and

Proclus even more than in Plotinus, express the painfully sudden

and overwhelming, free-grace character of God’s action upon the

soul,--especially of ἐπιβολή, “immissio,” a “coming-upon,” a “hitting,”

a very common word in the Areopagite; μετοχή, “communication,” and

παραδοχή, “reception,” being the corresponding terms for God’s and the

soul’s share in this encounter respectively. Thus: “Unions, whether we

call them immissions or receptions from God.”[96]

“Presence,” “presenza,” παρουσιά, is another favourite term, as with

Catherine so also with Dionysius and Proclus. Thus the Areopagite:

“The presence of the spiritual light causes recollection and unity in

those that are being enlightened with it,” “His wholly inconceivable

presence.”[97] And Proclus: “Every perfect spiritual contact and

communion is owing to the presence of God.”[98] And the conception of a

sudden presence goes back, among the Neo-Platonists, to Plato and the

Greek Mysteries, in which the God was held suddenly to arrive and to

take part in the sacred dance. Such rings of sacred dancers, “choirs,”

are still characteristic of Dionysius--_e.g._ _Heavenly Hierarchy_,

vii, 4--but they are quite wanting in Catherine.--But “contact,”

“touch,” ἐπαφή,--said of God’s direct action upon the soul,--a

conception so intensely active in Catherine’s mind and life, is again

a favourite term with Dionysius and Proclus. The former declares this

“touch” to be neither “sensible” nor “intelligible” and that “we are

brought into contact with things unutterable”; the latter talks of

“perfect spiritual contact.”[99]

The symbols of “Nakedness” and “Garments,” as indicative respectively

of the soul’s purity and impurity or self-delusion, are, though most

prominent in Catherine, rare in Dionysius. But his declaration:

“The nakedness of the (Angels’) feet indicates purification from

the addition of all things external and assimilation to the divine

simplicity” exactly expresses her idea.[100] And Proclus has it more

fully: The soul, on descending into the body, forsakes unity, “and

around her, from all sides, there grow multiform kinds of existence

and manifold garments”; “love of honour is the last garment of souls”;

and “when,” in mounting up, “we lay aside our passions and garments

which, in coming down, we had put on, we must also strip off that

last garment, in order that, having become (entirely) naked, we may

establish ourselves before God, having made ourselves like to the

divine life.”[101]

(2) Again, as to Triads, it is interesting to note that Catherine has

nothing about the three stages or ways of the inner life,--purgative,

illuminative, unitive,--of which Dionysius is full, and which are

already indicated in Proclus; for we can find but two in her life, the

purgative and unitive, and in her teaching these two alone appear,

mostly in close combination, sometimes in strong contrast. Nor has

she anything about the three degrees or kinds of prayer,--Meditation,

Contemplation, Union,--as indicated in Dionysius: “It behoves us, by

our prayers, to be lifted into proximity with the Divine Trinity; and

then, by still further approaching it, to be initiated…; and (lastly)

to make ourselves one with it”; and as taught by Proclus: “Knowledge

leads, then follows proximity, and then union.”[102] With her we

only get Contemplation and Union.--Nor do we get in her anything

about thrice three choirs of Angels, or three orders of Christian

Ministrants, or three classes of Christian people, or thrice three

groups of Sacraments and Sacramental acts. For she is too intensely

bent upon immediate intercourse with God, and too much absorbed in the

sense of profound unity and again of innumerable multiplicity, to be

attracted by Dionysius’s Neo-Platonist ladder of carefully graduated

intermediaries, or by his continuous interest in triads of every kind.

Catherine thus follows the current in Dionysius which insists upon

direct contact between the soul and the transcendent God, and ignores

the other, which bridges over the abyss between the two by carefully

graduated intermediaries: these intermediaries having become, with her,

successive stages of purification and of ever more penetrating union of

the one soul with the one God.

5. _Deification, especially through the Eucharist._

As to the end of the whole process, we find that Deification, so

frequently implied or suggested by Catherine, is formally taught by

Dionysius: “A union of the deified minds” (ἐκθεουμένων); the heavenly

and the earthly Hierarchy have the power and task “to communicate

to their subjects, according to the dignity of each, the sacred

deification” (ἐκθέωσις); “we are led up, by means of the multiform of

sensible symbols, to the uniform Deification.”[103] “The One is the

very God,” says Proclus, “but the Mind (the Noûs) is the divinest of

beings, and the soul is divine, and the body is godlike.… And every

body that is God-like is so through the soul having become divine; and

every soul that is divine, is so through the Mind being very divine;

and every Mind that is thus very divine, is so through participation

in the Divine One.”[104] There are preformations of this doctrine in

Plotinus and echoes of it throughout Catherine’s sayings.

And the Areopagite’s teaching that the chief means and the culmination

of this deification are found and reached in the reception of the

Holy Eucharist will no doubt also have stimulated Catherine’s mind:

“The Communicant is led to the summit of deiformation, as far as this

is possible for him.”[105] And her soul responds completely to the

beautiful Dionysian-Proclian teaching concerning God’s presence in all

things, as the cause of the profound sympathy which binds them all

together. “They say,” declares Dionysius, “that He is in minds … and

in bodies, and in heaven and in earth; (indeed that He is) sun, fire,

water, spirit … all things existing, and yet again not one of all

things existing.” “The distribution of boundless power passes from

Almighty God all things, and no single being but has intellectual,

or rational, or sensible, or vital, or essential power.” “The gifts

of the unfailing Power pass on to men and (lesser) living creatures,

to plants, and to the entire nature of the Universe.”[106] This

latter passage was suggested by Proclus: “One would say that, through

participation in the One, all things are deified, each according to

its rank, inclusive of the very lowest of beings.” “The image of the

One and the inter-communion existing through it,--this it is that

produces the extant sympathy” which permeates all things.[107]--But

Catherine has nowhere the term “echo,” which is so dear to Dionysius:

“His all-surpassing power holds together and preserves even the

remotest of its echoes”; “the sun and plants are or hold most distant

echoes of the Good and of Life”; indeed even the licentious man still

possesses, in his very passion, “as it were a faint echo of Union and

of Friendship.”[108]

6. _Dionysius and Catherine; three agreements and differences._

I conclude with three important points of difference and similarity

between Catherine and Dionysius.

(1) Catherine abstains from the use of those repulsive, impossibly

hyperbolic epithets such as “the Super-Good,” “the Above-Mind,” which

Dionysius is never weary of applying to God, and is content with ever

feeling and declaring how high above the very best conception which

she can form of mind and of goodness He undoubtedly is; thus wisely

moderated, I take it, by her constant experience and faith as to

God’s immediate presence within the human soul, which soul cannot,

consequently, be presented as entirely remote from the nature of God.

(2) Catherine transforms over-intense and impoverishing insistence upon

the pure Oneness of God, such as we find it even in Dionysius and still

more in Proclus, into a, sometimes equally over-intense, conception as

to the oneness of our union with Him, leaving Him to be still conceived

as an overflowing richness of all kinds.

(3) And Catherine keeps, in an interesting manner, Hellenic, and

specifically Platonic, formulation for the deepest of her experiences

and teachings, since her standing designation of God and of Our

Lord is never personal, “My Lover” or “My Friend”; but, as it were,

elemental, “Love” or “My Love.” Her keen self-purifying instinct

and reverence for God will have spontaneously inclined her thus to

consider Him first as an Ocean of Being in which to quench and drown

her small, clamorous individuality, and this as a necessary step

towards reconstituting that true personality, which, itself spirit,

would be penetrated and sustained by the Spirit, Christ, God. And then

the Pauline-Joannine picturings of God as a quasi-place and extended

substance (“from Him and in Him and to Him,” “in the Spirit,” “in

Christ,” “God is Charity and he that abideth in Charity, abideth in

Him”) will have strongly confirmed this trend. Yet Dionysius too must

have greatly helped on this movement of her mind. For in Dionysius

the standing appellations for God are, in true Neo-Platonist fashion,

derived from extended or diffusive material substances or conditions,

Light, Fire, Fountain, Ocean; and from that pervasive emotion, Love,

strictly speaking Desire, Eros.

Now this, for our modern and Christian feeling, curiously impersonal,

general and abstract method goes back, through Proclus and Plotinus,

to Plato, who, above all in his _Symposium_, is dominated by the two

tendencies and requirements, of identifying the First and Perfect

with the most General and the most Abstract; and of making the very

prerequisites and instruments of the search for It,--even the earthly

Eros, still so far from the Heavenly Eros and from the Christian

Agapē,--into occasions, effects or instalments of and for the great

Reality sought by them. And since it is thus the love, the desire, the

eros, of things beautiful, and true, and good,--a love first sensible,

then intellectual, and at last spiritual, which makes us seek and find

It, the Beauty, Truth, and Goodness which is First Cause and Final End

of the whole series, this Cause and End will be considered not as a

Lover but as Love Itself. It is plain, I think, that it is specially

this second motive, this requirement of a pervading organization and

circle of and within the life of spirits and of the Spirit, which has

also determined Catherine to retain Plato’s terminology.

IV. JACOPONE DA TODI’S “LODE.”

In the case of Jacopone, the suddenly wife-bereft and converted lawyer,

an ardent poet doubled by a soaring, daring mystic, with an astonishing

richness of simultaneous symbols and conceptions and rapidity of

successive complements and contrasts, it will really be simplest if

I take the chief touches which have characteristically stimulated

Catherine or have left her unaffected, in the order and grouping in

which they appear in his chief “Lode,” as these latter are given in the

first printed edition, probably the very one used by Catherine.[109]

1. _Lode XIII, XXIII, XXXV, XLV._

In Loda XIII “the vicious soul is likened unto Hell,” vv. 1-7; and “the

soul that yesterday was Hell, to-day has turned into Heaven,” v. 8. We

thus get here, precisely as in Catherine, the spaceless conditions of

the soul and their modifications treated under the symbols of places

and of the spacial change from one place to the other.

In Loda XXIII we first have five successive purifications and purities

of Love, “carnal, counterfeit, self-seeking, natural, spiritual,

transformed,” vv. 1-6; and then the symbols of spacial location

and movement reappear, “if height does not abase itself, it cannot

participate with, nor communicate itself to, the lowest grade”; all

which is frequent with Catherine. But she nowhere echoes the teaching

reproduced here, v. 10, as to the Divine Trinity being figured in man’s

three faculties of soul.

Loda XXXV gives us a sort of Christian Stoicism very dear dear to

Catherine: “Thou, my soul, hast been created in great elevation; thy

nature is grounded in great nobility (_gentilezza_),” v. 7; “thou hast

not thy life in created things; it is necessary for thee to breathe in

other countries, to mount up to God thine inheritance, Who (alone) can

satisfy thy poverty,” v. 10; “great is the honour which thou doest to

God, when thou abidest (stare) in Him, in thy (true) nobility,” v. 11.

Loda XLV gives “the Five Modes in which God appears in the Soul”--“the

state of fear”; mercenary, “beggar-love”; “the way of love”; “the

paternal mode”; “the mode of espousals.” Catherine leaves the last two,

anthropomorphic and familial, conceptions quite unused, and passes in

her life, at one bound, from the first to the third mode.

2. _Lode LVIIIa, LVIIIb._

The fine Loda LVIII_a_, “Of Holy Poverty, Mistress of all Things,” has

evidently suggested much to Catherine. “Waters, rivers, lakes, and

ocean, fish within them and their swimming; airs, winds, birds, and all

their flying: all these turn to jewels for me,” v. 10. How readily the

sense of water, and of rapid movement within it, passes here into that

of air, and of swift locomotion within _it_! And both these movements,

are felt to represent, in vivid fashion, certain very different

experiences of the soul.--“Moon, Sun, Sky, and Stars,--even these are

_not_ amongst my treasures; above the very sky those things abide,

which are the object of my song,” v. 11. The positive, “analogic”

method has here turned suddenly into the negative, “apophatic” one;

and yet, even here, we still have the spacial symbolism, for the best

is the highest up,--indeed it is this very symbolism which is made to

add point to the negative declaration, a declaration which nevertheless

clearly implies the mere symbolism of that spacialization. All this is

fully absorbed by Catherine.--“Since God has my will, … my wings have

such feathers that from earth to heaven there is no distance for me,”

v. 12. Here we see how Plato filters through, complete, to Jacopone;

but only in his central idea to Catherine. For the _Phaedrus_, 246_b_,

_c_, teaches: “The perfect soul then, having become winged, soars

upwards, and is the ruler of the universe; whilst the imperfect soul

sheds her feathers and is borne downwards, till it settles on the solid

ground.” Catherine never mentions wings nor feathers, but often dwells

upon flying.

The great Loda LVIII_b_, “Of Holy Poverty and its Treble Heaven,”

(one passage of which is formally quoted and carefully expounded

by Catherine), is a combination of Platonism, Paulinism, and

Franciscanism, and has specially influenced her through its Platonist

element. Verses 1-9 contain a fine apostrophe to Poverty. “O Love of

Poverty, Reign of tranquillity! Poverty, high Wisdom! to be subject

to nothing; through despising to possess all things created!” v. 1:

all this is echoed by Catherine. But the ex-lawyer’s declaration that

such a soul “has neither judge nor notary,” v. 3, did certainly not

determine her literally, for we have had before us some fifteen cases

in which she had recourse to lawyers. “God makes not His abode in a

narrow heart; thou art, oh man, precisely as great as thine affection

may be. The spirit of poverty possesses so ample a bosom, that Deity

Itself takes up its dwelling there,” v. 8. Catherine’s deepest self

seems to breathe from out of this profound saying.

Verses 10 to 30 describe the three heavens of successive

self-despoilments. The firmamental heaven, which typifies the four-fold

renouncement,--of honour, riches, science, reputation of sanctity,

has left no echo in Catherine. The stellar heaven is “composed of

solidified clear waters (_aque solidate_)”; here “the four winds”

cease “that move the sea,--that perturb the mind: fear and hope, grief

and joy,” 11-14. Here Plato again touches Catherine through Jacopone.

For the _Symposium_, 197_a_, declares: “Love it is that produces

peace among men and calm on the sea, a cessation of the winds, and

repose and sleep even in trouble”; and Jacopone identifies the middle

“crystalline” heaven, (“the waters above” of Genesis, chap, i,) with

Plato’s “sea”; takes Plato’s (four) winds as the soul’s chief passions;

and considers Plato’s “peace” and “windlessness” as equivalent to the

“much silence,” which, says the Apocalypse, “arose in heaven,” viii, 1,

interpreted here as “in mid-heaven.” “Not to fear Hell, nor to hope for

Heaven, to rejoice in no good, to grieve over no adversity,” v. 16, is

a formulation unlike Catherine, although single sayings of hers stand

for sentiments analogous to the first and last.--“If the virtues are

naked, and the vices are not garmented,--mortal wounds get given to the

soul,” v. 19, has a symbolism exactly opposite to Catherine’s, who, we

know, loves to glorify “nakedness” as the soul’s purity.--“The highest

heaven” is “beyond even the imagings of the mortified fancy”; “of every

good it has despoiled thee, and has expropriated thee from all virtue:

lay up as a treasure this thy gain,--the sense of thine own vileness.”

“O purified Love! it alone lives in the truth!” These verses, 20-22,

have left a deep impress upon Catherine, although she wisely does

not press that “expropriation from virtue,” which goes back at least

to Plotinus, for whom the true Ecstatic is “beyond the choir of the

virtues.”[110]

“That which appears to thee (as extant), is not truly, existent:

so high (above) is that which truly is. True elevation of soul

(_la superbia_) dwells in heaven above, and baseness of mind

(_humilitade_) leads to damnation,” v. 24, is a saying to which we

still have Catherine’s detailed commentary. In its markedly Platonic

distinction between an upper true and a lower seeming world, and in its

characteristically mystical love of paradox and a play upon words, it

is more curious than abidingly important; but in its deeply Christian

consciousness of “pride” and “humility,” in their ordinary ethical

sense, being respectively the subtlest vice and the noblest virtue, it

rises sheer above all Platonist and Neo-Platonist apprehension.

“Love abides in prison, in that darksome light! All light there is

darkness, and all darkness there is as the day,” vv. 26, 27. Here

Catherine no doubt found aids towards her prison-conception,--of the

loving soul imprisoned in the earthly body, and of the imperfect,

yet loving, disembodied souls imprisoned in Purgatory; and towards

articulating her strong sense of the change in the meaning and value of

the same symbols, as the soul grows in depth and experience. But her

symbolization of God, and of our apprehension of Him as Light and Fire,

is too solidly established in her mind, to allow her to emphasize the

darkness-symbol with any reference to Him.

“There where Christ is enclosed (in the soul), all the old is changed

by Him,--the one is transformed into the Other, in a marvellous union.

To live as I and yet not I; and my very being to be not mine: this is

so great a cross-purpose (_traversio_), that I know not how to define

it,” vv. 28-30. This vivid description, based of course upon St. Paul,

of the apparent shifting of the very centre of the soul’s personality,

has left clear echoes in Catherine’s sayings; but the explicit

reference to Christ is here as characteristically Franciscan as it is

unlike Catherine’s special habits.--And the great poem ends with a

_refrain_ of its opening apostrophe.

3. _Lode LXXIV, LXXIX, LXXXI, LXXXIII._

In the dramatically vivid Dialogue between the Old and the Young Friar

“Concerning the divers manners of contemplating the Cross,” Loda

LXXIV, the elder says to the younger man: “And I find the Cross full

of arrows, which issue from its side: they get fixed in my heart. The

Archer has aimed them at me; He causes me to be pierced,” v. 6. The

Cross is here a bow; and yet the arrows evidently issue not from it,

but, as so many rays, from the Sun, the Light-Christ, Who is laid upon

it,--from the heart of the Crucified. Catherine maintains the rays and

arrows, and the Sun and Fire from which they issue; but the Cross and

the Crucified, presupposed here throughout, appear not, even to this

extent, in her post-conversion picturings.--“You abide by the warmth,

but I abide within the fire; to you it is delight, but I am burning

through and through, I cannot find a place of refuge in this furnace,”

v. 13. All this has been echoed throughout by Catherine.

Loda LXXIX, “Of the Divine Love and its Praises,” has evidently much

influenced her. “O joyous wound, delightful wound, gladsome wound, for

him who is wounded by Thee, O Love!” “O Love, divine Fire! Love full

of laughter and playfulness!” “O Love, sweet and suave; O Love, Thou

art the key of heaven! Ship that Thou art, bring me to port and calm

the tempest,” vv. 3, 6, 16. All this we have found reproduced in her

similes and experiences. “Love, bounteous in spending Thyself; Love

with widespread tables!” “Love, Thou art the One that loves, and the

Means wherewith the heart loves Thee!” vv. 24, 26. These verses give us

the wide, wide world outlook, the connection between Love and the Holy

Eucharist, and the identity of the Subject, Means, and Object of Love,

which are all so much dwelt upon by Catherine.

Loda LXXXI is interesting by the way in which, although treating of

“the love of Christ upon the Cross,” it everywhere apostrophizes Love

and not the Lover, and treats the former, again like Catherine, as a

kind of boundless living substance; indeed v. 17 must have helped to

suggest one of her favourite conceptions: “O great Love, greater than

the great sea! Oh! the man who is drowned within it, under it, and with

it all around him, whilst he knows not where he is!”

Loda LXXXIII has two touches dear to Catherine. “O Love, whose name is

‘I love’--the plural is never found,” v. 5,--a saying which evidently

is directed, not against a social conception of religion, but against

a denial of the Divine Love being Source as well as Object of our

love; and “I did not love Thee with any gain to myself, until I loved

Thee for Thine own sake,” v. 15,--a declaration of wondrous depth and

simplicity.

4. _Lode LXXXVIII, LXXXIX, LXXXX, LXXXXVIII, LXXXXIX._

The great Loda LXXXVIII, “How the soul complains to God concerning

the excessive ardours of the love infused into it,” contains numerous

touches which have been interestingly responded to or ignored by

Catherine. “All my will is on fire with Love, is united, transformed

(into It); who can bear such Love? Nor fire nor sword can part the

loving soul and her Love; a thing so united cannot be divided; neither

suffering nor death can henceforth mount up to that height where the

soul abides in ecstasy,” vv. 5, 6: a combination of St. Paul and

Plotinus, quite after Catherine’s heart. But “the light of the sun

appears to me obscure, now that I see that resplendent Countenance,”

v. 7, has an anthropomorphic touch to which she does not respond;

and “I have given all my heart, that it may possess that Lover who

renews me so,--O Beauty ancient and ever new!” v. 10, has the personal

designation “Lover,” which, again, is alien to her vocabulary.

“Seeing such Beauty, I have been drawn out of myself … and the heart

now gets undone, melted as though it were wax, and finds itself again,

with the likeness of Christ upon it,” v. 11, must have stimulated, by

its first part, some of her own experiences, and will, by its second

part, taken literally, have helped on the fantastic expectations of

her attendants. “Love rises to such ardour, that the heart seems to

be transfixed as with a knife,” v. 14, no doubt both expressed an

experience of Jacopone and helped to constitute the form of a similar

experience on the part of Catherine. “As iron, which is all on fire,

as dawn, made resplendent by the sun, lose their own form (nature) and

exist in another, so is it with the pure mind, when clothed by Thee, O

Love,” v. 21, contains ideas, (all but the symbol of clothing,) very

dear to Catherine. But the astonishingly daring words: “Since my soul

has been transformed into Truth, into Thee, O Christ alone, into Thee

Who art tender Loving,--not to myself but to Thee can be imputed what I

do. Hence, if I please Thee not, Thou dost not please Thine Own Self,

O Love!” v. 22, remain unechoed by her, no doubt because her states

shift from one to another, and she wisely abstains from pushing the

articulation of any one of them to its own separate logical limit.

“Thou wast born into the world by love and not by flesh, O Love

become Man (_humanato Amore_),” v. 27, is like her in its interesting

persistence in the “Love” (not “Lover”) designation, but is unlike her

in its definite reference to the historic Incarnation. “Love, O Love,

Jesus, I have reached the haven,” v. 32, is closely like her, all but

the explicit mention of the historic name; and “Love, O Love, Thou art

the full-orbed circle,” “Thou art both warp and woof,” beginning and

end, material and transforming agency, v. 33, is Catherine’s central

idea, expressed in a form much calculated to impress it upon her.

The daring and profound Loda LXXXIX, “How the soul, by holy

self-annihilation and love, reaches an unknowable and indescribable

state,” contains again numerous touches which have been assimilated by

Catherine. So with: “Drawn forth, out of her natural state, into that

unmeasurable condition whither love goes to drown itself, the soul,

having plunged into the abyss of this ocean, henceforth cannot find,

on any side, any means of issuing forth from it,” vv. 12, 13. So also

with: “Since thou dost no longer love thyself, but alone that Goodness

… it has become necessary for thee again to love thyself, but with

His Love,--into so great an unity hast thou been drawn by Him,” vv.

52-54. So too with: “All Faith ceases for the soul to whom it has been

given to see; and all Hope, since it now actually holds what it used

to seek,” v. 70, although this is more absolute than are her similar

utterances.--But especially are the startling words interesting: “In

this transformation, thou drinkest Another, and that Other drinketh

thee (_tu bevi e sei bevuto, in transformazione_),” v. 98, which, in

their second part, are identical with R. Browning’s “My end, to slake

Thy thirst”:[111] for they will have helped to support or to encourage

Catherine’s corresponding inversion--the teaching of an eating, an

assimilation, not of God by man, but of man by God. Both sets of images

go back, of course, to the Eucharistic reception by the soul of the

God-man Christ, under the forms of Bread eaten and of Wine drunk.

The striking Loda LXXXX, “How the soul arrives at a treble state of

annihilation,” has doubtless suggested much to Catherine. “He who

has become the very Cause of all things” (_chi è cosa d’ogni cosa_)

“can never more desire anything,” v. 4, is, it is true, more daring,

because more quietly explicit, than any saying of hers. But v. 13 has

been echoed by her throughout: “The heavens have grown stagnant; their

silence constrains me to cry aloud: ‘O profound Ocean, the very depth

of Thine Abyss has constrained me to attempt and drown myself within

it,’”--where note the interestingly antique presupposition of the music

of the spheres, which has now stopped, and of the watery constitution

of the crystalline heaven, which allows of stagnation; and the rapidity

of the change in the impressions,--from immobility to silence, and from

air to water. Indeed that Ocean is one as much of air as of water, and

as little the one as the other; and its attractive force is still that

innate affinity between the river-soul and its living Source and Home,

the Ocean God, which we have so constantly found in Plotinus, Proclus,

and Dionysius. “The land of promise is, for such a soul, no longer one

of promise only: for the perfect soul already reigns within that land.

Men can thus transform themselves, in any and every place,” v. 18, has,

in its touching and lofty Stoic-Christian teaching, found the noblest

response and re-utterance in and by Catherine’s words and life.

Loda LXXXXVIII, “Of the Incarnation of the Divine Word,” full though

it is of beautiful Franciscanism, has left her uninfluenced. But the

fine Loda LXXXXIX, “How true Love is not idle,” contains touches which

have sunk deep into her mind. “Splendour that givest to all the world

its light, O Love Jesus … heaven and earth are by Thee; Thine action

resplends in all things and all things turn to Thee. Only the sinner

despises Thy Love and severs himself from Thee, his Creator,” v. 6,

is, in its substance, taken over by her. “O ye cold sinners!” v. 12,

is her favourite epithet. And vv. 13, 14, with their rapid ringing of

the changes on the different sense-perceptions, will, by their shifting

vividness, have helped on a similar iridescence in her own imagery: “O

Odour, that transcendest every sweetness! O living river of Delight …

that causest the very dead to return to their vigour! In heaven Thy

lovers possess Thine immense Sweetness, tasting there those savoury

morsels.”

And finally Loda LXXXVII, “Of true and false discretion,” which, in vv.

12-20, consists of a dialogue between “the Flesh” and “the Reason,”

will have helped to suggest the slight beginnings of this form of

apprehension to Catherine which we have found amongst her authentic

sayings and experiences, and which were, later on, developed on so

large a scale, by Battista Vernazza, throughout her long _Dialogo della

Beata Caterina_.

5. Jacopone it is, then, who furnished Catherine with much help towards

that rare combination of deep feeling with severely abstract thinking

which, if at times it somewhat strains and wearies us moderns who would

ever end with the concrete, gives a nobly virile, bracing note to even

the most effective of her sayings.

V. POINTS COMMON TO ALL FIVE MINDS; AND CATHERINE’S MAIN DIFFERENCE

FROM HER FOUR PREDECESSORS.

If we now consider for a moment the general points common to the four

writers just considered and to Catherine, we readily note that all

five are profoundly reflective and interpretative in their attitude

towards the given contingencies of traditional religion; that they

all tend to find the Then and There of History still at work, in

various degrees, Here and Now, throughout Time and Space, and in the

last resort, above and behind both these categories, in a spaceless,

timeless Present. And if only three, Paul, Jacopone, and Catherine,

bear marks, throughout all they think and feel and do and are, of the

cataclysmic conversion-crisis through which they had passed,--the

temporally intermediate two, John and Dionysius, have also got, but in

a more indirect form, much of a similar Dualism. All five are, in these

and other respects, indefinitely closer to each other than any one of

them is to the still richer, more complete, and more entirely balanced

though less articulated, Synoptic teaching, which enfolds all that

is abiding in those other five, whilst they, even if united, do not

approximately exhaust the substance of that teaching.

And if we would briefly define the main point on which Catherine holds

views additional to, or other than, those other four, we must point to

her Purgatorial teaching, which has received but little or no direct

suggestion from any one of them, and which, whatever may have been its

literary precursors and occasions, gives, perhaps more than anything

else, a peculiarly human and personal, original and yet still modern,

touch to what would otherwise be, to our feeling, too abstract and

antique a spiritual physiognomy.