CHAPTER XI

CATHERINE’S LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES

INTRODUCTORY: CATHERINE’S LESS ULTIMATE POSITIONS, CONCERNING OUR LIFE

HERE, ARE FOUR.

We have now attempted, (by means of a doubtless more or less artificial

distinction between things that, in real life, constitute parts of one

whole in a state of hardly separable inter-penetration,) a presentation

of Catherine’s special, mental and psycho-physical, character and

temperament, and of the principal literary stimulations and materials

which acted upon, and in return were refashioned by, that character;

and we have also given, in sufficient detail, the resultant doctrines

and world-view acquired and developed by that deep soul and noble mind.

The most important and difficult part of our task remains, however,

still to be accomplished,--the attempt to get an (at least approximate)

estimate of the abiding meaning, place, and worth of this whole, highly

synthesized position, for and within the religious life generally and

our present-day requirements in particular. For the general outline of

the Introduction, (intended there more as an instrument of research

and classification for the literature and history then about to be

examined, than as this history’s final religious appraisement,) cannot

dispense us from now attempting something more precise and ultimate.--I

propose, then, to give the next four chapters to an examination

of Catherine’s principal positions and practices, the first two,

respectively, to “the less ultimate This-World Doctrines”; and “the

Other-World Doctrines,” or “the Eschatology”; and the last two to “the

Ultimate Implications and Problems” underlying both. The last chapter

shall then sum up the whole book, and consider the abiding place and

function of Mysticism, in its contrast to, and supplementation of,

Asceticism, Institutionalism, and the Scientific Habit and Activity of

the Mind.

Now I think the less ultimate spiritual positions, as far as they

concern our life here below, which are specially represented, or at

least forcibly suggested by, Catherine, can reasonably be accounted as

four: Interpretative Religion; a strongly Dualistic attitude towards

the body; Quietude and Passivity; and Pure Love. I shall devote a

section to each position.

I. INTERPRETATIVE RELIGION.

1. _Difficulties of the Subjective element of Religion._

Now, by Interpretative Religion, I do not mean to imply that there

is anywhere, in _rerum natura_, such a thing as a religion which is

not interpretative, which does not consist as truly of a reaction on

the part of the believing soul to certain stimulations of and within

it, as of these latter stimulations and actions. As every (even

but semi-conscious) act and state of the human mind, ever embraces

both such action of the object and such reaction of the subject,--a

relatively crude fact of sensation or of feeling born in upon it, and

an interpretation, an incorporation of this fact by, and into, the

living tissue and organism of this mind: so is it also, necessarily

and above all, with the deepest and most richly complex of all human

acts and states,--the specifically religious ones. But if this

interpretative activity of the mind was present from the very dawn of

human reason, and exists in each individual in the precise proportion

as mind can be predicated as operative within him at all: this mental

activity is yet the last element in the compound process and result

which is, or can be, perceived as such by the mind itself. The process

is too near to the observer, even when he is once awake to its

existence; he is too much occupied with the materials brought before

his mind and with moulding and sorting them out; and this moulding and

sorting activity is itself too rapid and too deeply independent of

those materials as to its form, and too closely dependent upon them as

to its content, for the observation by the mind of this same mind’s

contributions towards its own affirmations of reality and of the nature

of this reality, not ever to appear late in the history of the human

race or in the life of any human individual, or not to be, even when it

appears difficult, a fitful and an imperfect mental exercise.

And when the discovery of this constant contribution of the mind to

its own affirmations of reality is first made, it can hardly fail,

for the time being, to occasion misgivings and anxieties of a more or

less sceptical kind. Is not the whole of what I have hitherto taken

to be a solid world of sense outside me, and the whole of the world

of necessary truth and of obligatory goodness within me,--is it not,

perhaps, all a merely individual creation of my single mind--a mind cut

off from all effective intercourse with reality,--my neighbour’s mind

included? For all having, so far, been held to be objective, the mind

readily flies to the other extreme, and suspects all to be subjective.

Or if all my apprehensions and certainties are the resultants from the

interaction between impressions received by my senses and mind and

reactions and elaborations on the part of this mind with regard to

those impressions, how can I be sure of apprehending rightly, unless

I can divide each constituent off from the other? And yet, how can I

effect such a continuous discounting of my mind’s action by means of my

own mind itself?

And this objection is felt most keenly in religion, when the religious

soul first wakes up to the fact that itself, of necessity and

continuously, contributes, by its own action, to the constitution of

those affirmations and certainties, which, until then, seemed, without

a doubt, to be directly borne in upon a purely receptive, automatically

registering mind, from that extra-, super-human world which it thus

affirmed. Here also, all having for so long been assumed to be purely

objective, the temptation now arises to consider it all as purely

subjective. Or again, if we insist upon holding that, here too, there

are both objective and subjective elements, we readily experience keen

distress at our inability clearly to divide off the objective, which is

surely the reality, from the subjective, which can hardly fail to be

its travesty.

And finally, this doubt and trouble would seem to find specially ready

material in the mystical element and form of religion. For here, as we

have already seen, psycho-physical and auto-suggestive phenomena and

mechanisms abound; here especially does the mind cling to an immediate

access to Reality; and here the ordinary checks and complements

afforded by the Historical and Institutional, the Analytically

Rational, and the Volitional, Practical elements of Religion are at

a minimum. Little but the Emotional and the Speculatively Rational

elements seems to remain; and these, more than any others, appear

incapable of admitting that they are anything other than the pure and

direct effects and expressions of spiritual Reality.

What, then, shall we think of all this?

2. _Answers to the above difficulties._

We evidently must, in the first instance, guard against any attempt

at doing a doctrinaire violence to the undeniable facts of our

consciousness or of its docile analysis, by explaining all our

knowledge, or only even all our knowledge of any single thing, as

either of purely subjective or of purely objective provenance; for

everywhere and always these two elements co-exist in all human

apprehension, reason, feeling, will, and faith. We find, throughout, an

organization, an indissoluble organism, of subjective and objective,

hence a unity in diversity, which is indeed so great that (for our

own experience and with respect to our own minds at all events), the

Subjective does not and cannot exist without the Objective, nor the

Objective without the Subjective.

In the next place, we must beware against exalting the Objective

against the Subjective, or the Subjective against the Objective, as

if Life, Reality, and Truth consisted in the one rather than the

other. Because the subjective element is, on the first showing, a work

of our own minds, it does not follow (as we shall see more clearly

when studying the ultimate problems) that its operations are bereft

of correspondence with reality, or, at least, that they are further

from reality than are our sense-perceptions. For just as the degree

of worth represented by these sense-perceptions can range from the

crudest delusion to a stimulation of primary importance and exquisite

precision, so also our mental and emotional reaction and penetration

represent almost any and every degree of accuracy and value.

And, above all, as already implied, the true priority and superiority

lies, not with one of these constituents against the other, but with

the total subjective-objective interaction and resultant, which is

superior, and indeed gives their place and worth to, those ever

interdependent parts.

Now, in the general human experience, the Objective element is

constituted, in the first instance and for clear and ready analysis,

by the sense-stimulations; and, after some mental response to and

elaboration of these, by the larger psychic moods; and later still, by

the examples of great spiritual attitudes and of great personalities

offered by other souls to the soul that keeps itself open to such

impressions. And though the sense of Reality (as contrasted with

Appearance), of the Abiding and Infinite (as different from the

Passing and the Finite), are doubtless awakened, however faintly and

inarticulately, in the human soul from the first, as the background and

presupposition of the foreground and the middle-distances of its total

world of perceptions and aspirations: yet all these middle-distances,

as well as that great background and groundwork, would remain

unawakened but for those humble little sense-perceptions on the one

hand, and intercourse with human fellow-creatures on the other. And in

such intercourse with the minds and souls, or with the literary remains

and other monuments of souls, either still living here or gone hence

some two thousand years or more, a mass of mental and moral impressions

and stimulations, which, in those souls, were largely their own

elaborations, offer themselves to any one human mind, or to the minds

of a whole generation or country, with the apparent homogeneity of a

purely objective, as it were a sense-impression.

Especially in Religion the Historical and Institutional (as Religion’s

manifestation in space and time), come down to us thus from the past

and surround us in the present, and either press in upon us with a

painful weight, or support us with a comforting solidity, thus giving

them many of the qualities of things physically seen and touched,

say, a mystery play or a vast cathedral. And, on the other hand,

the Rational, (whether Analytic or Synthetic,) and the Emotional

and Volitional Elements, whenever they are at all preponderant or

relatively independent of the other, more objective ones, are liable,

in Religion, to look quite exceptionally subjective,--and this in

the unfavourable sense of the word, as though either superfluous and

fantastic, or as dangerous and destructive.--And yet both that look of

the objective elements being, in Religion, more self-sufficing than

they appear to be in the ordinary psychic, or the artistic, or social,

or scientific life; and that impression conveyed by the subjective

elements in Religion, as being there less necessary or more dangerous

than elsewhere, are doubtless deceptive. These impressions are simply

caused by two very certain facts. Religion is the deepest and most

inclusive of all the soul’s energizings and experiences, and hence

all its constituents reveal a difference, at least in amount and

degree, when compared with the corresponding constituents of the more

superficial and more partial activities of the soul; and Religion,

just because of this, requires the fullest action and co-operation, the

most perfect unity, in and through diversity, of all the soul’s powers,

and all mere non-use of any of these forces, even any restriction to

the use of but one or two, is here, more readily and extensively than

elsewhere, detrimental both to the non-exercised and to the exercised

forces, and, above all, is impoverishing to the soul itself and to its

religion.

Hence, here as elsewhere, but more than anywhere, our ideal standard

will be the greatest possible development of, and inter-stimulation

between, each and all of the religious elements, with the greatest

possible unity in the resulting organism. And yet,--in view of the

very greatness of the result aimed at, and of the fact that its even

approximate attainment can, even for any one age of the world, be

reasonably expected only from the co-operation of the differently

endowed and attracted races and nations, social and moral grades,

sexes, ages and individuals that make up mankind,--we shall not

only be very tolerant of, we shall positively encourage, largely

one-sided developments, provided that each keeps some touch with the

elements which itself knows not how to develop in abundance, and that

it considers its own self, and works out its own special gift and

_attrait_, as but one out of many variously gifted and apportioned

fellow-servants in the Kingdom,--as only one of the countless, mutually

complementary, individually ever imperfect, part-expressions of the

manifold greatness, of the rich unity of spiritual humanity as willed

by God, and of God Himself.

3. _Partial developments of the full Gospel Ideal._

Now in the New Testament we have a most instructive, at first sight

puzzling phenomenon, illustrative of the positions just taken up.

For here it is clear that, with regard to the distinction between

richly many-sided but as yet unarticulated religion, and comparatively

one-sided and limited but profoundly developed religion, we have two

considerably contrasted types of spiritual tone and teaching. We get

the predominantly “Objective” strand of life and doctrine, in the

pre-Pauline parts and in their non-Pauline echoes, _i.e._ in the

substance of the Synoptic tradition, and in the Epistles of St. James

and of St. Peter; and we find the predominantly “Subjective” strain

in the “Pauline” parts, St. Paul’s Epistles and the Joannine Gospel

and Letters.--And it has become more and more clear that it is the

pre-Pauline parts which give us the most immediately and literally

faithful, and especially the most complete and many-sided, picture of

Our Lord’s precise words and actions; whereas the Pauline parts give

us rather what some of these great creative forces were and became for

the first generations of Christians and for the most penetrating of

Christ’s early disciples and lovers. And yet it is the latter documents

which, at first sight, appear to be the deeper, the wider, and the more

profoundly spiritual; whereas the former look more superficial, more

temporal and local, and more simply popular and material.

And yet,--though this first impression has been held to be finally

true by large masses of Christians; although the Greek Fathers

predominantly, and, in the West, the great soul of an Augustine, and

the powerful but one-sided personalities of a Luther and a Calvin

have, in various degrees and ways, helped to articulate and all but

finally fix it for the general Christian consciousness: this view is

yielding, somewhat slowly but none the less surely, to the sense that

it is the Synoptic, the pre-Pauline tradition which contains the fuller

arsenal of the spiritual forces which have transfigured and which still

inspire the world of souls. This, of course, does not mean that the

Pauline-Joannine developments were not necessary, or are not abiding

elements towards the understanding of the Christian spirit.

And, to come to the true answer to our objection, such a judgment

does not mean that the reflective penetration and reapplication of

the original more spontaneous message was, from the very nature of

the case, inferior to the first less articulated announcement of the

Good Tidings. But it merely signifies that this necessary process of

reflection could only be applied to parts of the original, immensely

rich and varied, because utterly living, divinely spiritual, whole; and

that, thus, the special balance and tension which characterized the

original, complete spirit and temper, could, however profoundly, be

reproduced only in part. For the time being this later penetration and

resetting of some elements from among the whole of Our Lord’s divinely

rich and simple life and teaching, necessarily and rightly, yet none

the less most really, ignored, or put for the time into some other

context, certain other sides and aspects of that primitive treasure

of inexhaustible experience. Only the full, equable, and simultaneous

unfolding of all the petals could have realized the promise and

content of the bud; whereas the bud, holding enfolded within itself

such various elements and combinations of truth, could not expand its

petals otherwise than successively, hence, at any one moment only

somewhat one-sidedly and partially. Each and all of these unfoldings

bring some further insight into, and articulation of, the original

spiritual organism; and that they are not more, but less, than the

totality of that primitive experience and revelation, does not prove

that such reflective work is wrong or even simply dispensable,--for, on

the contrary, in some degree or form it was and ever is necessary to

the soul’s apprehension of that life and truth,--but simply implies the

immensity of the spiritual light and impulsion given by Our Lord, and

the relative smallness of even the greatest of His followers.

Thus only if it could be shown that those parts of the New Testament

which doubtless give us the nearest approach to the actual words and

deeds of Our Lord require us to conceive them as having been without

the reflective and emotional element; or again that, in the case of the

more derivative parts of the New Testament, it is their reflectiveness,

and not their relative incompleteness and one-sidedness, that cause

them to be more readily englobed in the former world, than that former

world in the latter: could the facts here found be used as an argument

against the importance and strict necessity for religion of the

reflective and emotional, the “Subjective” elements, alongside of the

“Objective,” the Historical and Institutional ones.

It is a most legitimate ground for consolation to a Catholic when

he finds the necessities of life and those of learned research both

driving us more and more to this conclusion; for it is not deniable

that Catholicism has ever refused to do more than include the Pauline

and Joannine theologies amongst its earliest and most normative

stimulations and expressions; and that it has ever retained, far

more than Protestantism, the sense, which (upon the whole) is most

unbrokenly preserved by the Synoptists, of, if I may so phrase it, the

Christianity of certain true elements in the pre- and extra-Christian

religions. For it is in the Synoptists that we get the clear

presentation of Our Lord’s attitude towards the Jewish Church of His

time, as one, even at its keenest, analogous to that of Savonarola, and

not to that of a Luther, still less of a Calvin, towards the Christian

Church of their day.--Indeed in these documents all idea of limiting

Christianity to what He brought of new, appears as foreign to His mind

as it ever has been to that of the Catholic Church. Here we get the

most spontaneous and many-sided expression of that divinely human,

widely traditional and social, all-welcoming and all-transforming

spirit, which embraces both grace _and_ nature, eternity _and_ time,

soul _and_ body, attachment _and_ detachment. The Pauline strain stands

for the stress necessary to the full spiritualization of all those

occasions and materials, as against all, mere unregenerate or static,

retention of the simple rudiments or empty names of those things;

and predominantly insists upon grace, _not_ nature; eternity, _not_

time; soul, _not_ body; the cross and death here, the Crown and Life

hereafter. No wonder it is this latter strain that gets repeated,

with varying truth and success, in times of acute transition, and by

characters more antithetic than synthetic, more great at developing a

part of the truth than the whole.

Thinkers, of such wide historical outlook and unimpeachable detachment

from immediate controversial interest as Prof. Wilhelm Dilthey and

Dr. Edward Caird, have brought out, with admirable force, this

greater fulness of content offered by the Synoptists, and how the

Pauline-Joannine writings give us the first and most important of

those concentrations upon, and in part philosophic and mystical

reinterpretations of, certain constituents of the original happenings,

actions and message, as apprehended and transmitted by the first

eye-witnesses and believers.[112]--Here I would but try and drive

home the apparently vague, but in reality ever pressing and concrete,

lesson afforded by the clear and dominant fact of these two groups

within the New Testament itself:--of how no mere accumulation of

external happenings, or of external testimony as to their having

happened,--no amount of history or of institutionalism, taken as sheer,

purely positive givennesses,--can anywhere be found, or can anywhere

suffice for the human mind and conscience, in the apprehension and

embodiment of the truth. For although, in Our Lord’s most literally

transmitted sayings and doings, this continuous and inalienable element

of the apprehending, organizing, vitalizing mind and heart,--on

His part above all, but also on the part of His several hearers and

chroniclers,--can mostly still be traced and must everywhere be

assumed: yet it is in the Pauline-Joannine literature that the ever

important, the rightly and fruitfully “subjective,” the speculative and

emotional, the mystical and the volitional strain can best be studied,

both as to its necessity and as to its special character and dangers,

because here it is developed to the relative exclusion of the other

factors of complete religion.

4. _The exclusive emotionalism of Dionysius and Jacopone._

Now if even in St. Paul and St. John there is a strong predominance of

these reflective-emotional elements, in Dionysius and Jacopone they

threaten to become exclusive of everything else. Especially is this

the case with the Pseudo-Areopagite, steeped as he is in reflection

upon reflections and in emotion upon emotions, often of the most

subtle kind: a Christian echo, with curiously slight modifications,

of Neo-Platonism in its last stage,--hence, unfortunately, of the

over-systematic and largely artificial Proclus, instead of the

predominantly experimental and often truly sublime Plotinus. And even

Jacopone, although he has distinctly more of the historic element, is

still predominantly reflective-emotional, and presents us with many a

hardly modified Platonic or Stoic doctrine, derived no doubt from late

Graeco-Roman writers and their mediaeval Christian echoes.

5. _Catherine’s interpretation of the Gospel Ideal._

Catherine herself, although delightfully free from the long scale of

mediations between the soul and God which forms one of the predominant

doctrines of the Areopagite, continues and emphasizes most of what is

common, and much of what is special to, all and each of these four

writers; she is a reflective saint, if ever there was one. And of her

too we shall have to say that she is great by what she possesses, and

not by what she is without: great because of her noble embodiment of

the reflective and emotional, the mystical and volitional elements

of Christianity and Religion generally. Religion is here, at first

sight at least, all but entirely a thought and an emotion; yet all

this thought and emotion is directed to, and occasioned by, an

abiding Reality which originates, sustains, regulates, and fulfils

it. And although this Reality is in large part conceived, in Greek

and specially in Neo-Platonist fashion, rather under its timeless and

spaceless, or at least under its cosmic aspect, rather as Law and

Substance, than as Personality and Spirit: yet, already because of the

strong influence upon her of the noblest Platonic doctrine, it is loved

as overflowing Love and Goodness, as cause and end of all lesser love

and goodness; and the real, though but rarely articulated, acceptance

and influence of History and Institutions, above all the enthusiastic

devotion to the Holy Eucharist with all its great implications, gives

to the whole a profoundly Christian tone and temper.

True, the Church at large, indeed the single soul (if we would take

such a soul as our standard of completeness) requires a larger

proportion of those crisp, definite outlines, of those factual,

historical, and institutional elements; a very little less than what

remains in Catherine of these elements, and her religion would be

a simple, even though deep religiosity, a general aspiration, not

a definite finding, an explicit religion. Yet it remains certain,

although ever readily forgotten by religious souls, especially by

theological apologists, that without some degree and kind of those

outgoing, apprehending, interpreting activities, no religion is

possible. Only the question as to what these activities should be, and

what is their true place and function within the whole religious life,

remains an open one. And this question we can study with profit in

connection with such a life and teaching as Catherine’s, which brings

out, with a spontaneous, childlike profundity and daring, the elemental

religious passion, the spiritual hunger and thirst of man when he is

once fully awake; the depths within him anticipating the heights above

him; the affinity to and contact with the Infinite implied and required

by that nobly incurable restlessness of his heart, which finds its rest

in Him alone Who made it.

II. DUALISTIC ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE BODY.

And if Catherine is profoundly reflective, that reflection is, in its

general drift, deeply dualistic,--at least in the matter of body and

spirit. Their difference and incompatibility; the spirit’s fleeing of

the body; the spirit’s getting outside of it,--by ecstasy, for a little

while, even in this earthly life, and by this earthly body’s death, for

good and all; the body a prison-house, a true purgatory to the soul:

all this hangs well together, and is largely, in its very form, of

ultimately Neo-Platonist or Platonic origin.

1. _New Testament valuations of the body._

Now here is one of the promised instances of a double type--if not of

doctrine, yet at least of emotional valuation in the New Testament.

(1) In the Synoptist documents, (with the but apparent, or at least

solitary, exceptions, of Jesus’ Fasting in the Desert and of His

commendation of those who have made themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom

of Heaven),[113] we find no direct or acute antagonism to the body,

even to the average earthly human body, in the teaching and practice

of Our Lord. The Second Coming and its proximity do indeed, here

also, dwarf all earthly concerns, in so far as earthly.[114] This

background to the teaching and its tradition was, in course of time,

in part abstracted from, in part restated.--The entrance into life is

through the narrow gate and the steep way; only if a man turn, can he

enter into the Kingdom of God; only if he lose his soul, can he find

it:[115] this great teaching and example, as to life and joy being ever

reached through death to self and by the whole-hearted turning of the

soul from its false self to its true source, God: remains, in the very

form of its promulgation as given by the Synoptists, the fundamental

test and standard of all truly spiritual life and progress. But as to

the body in particular, Jesus here knows indeed that “the flesh is

weak,” and that we must pray for strength against its weakness:[116]

but He nowhere declares it evil--an inevitable prison-house or a

natural antagonist to the spirit. The beautiful balance of an unbroken,

unstrained nature, and a corresponding doctrine as full of sober

earnestness as it is free from all concentrated or systematic dualism,

are here everywhere apparent.

(2) It is St. Paul, the man of the strongest bodily passions

and temptations, he who became suddenly free from them by the

all-transforming lightning-flash of his conversion, who, on and on,

remained vividly conscious of what he had been and, but for that

grace, still would be, and of what, through that grace, he had become.

The deepest shadows are thus ever kept in closest contrast to the

highest lights; and the line of demarcation between them runs here

along the division between body and soul. “Unhappy man that I am, who

can liberate me from this body of sin?” “In my flesh dwelleth no good

thing”:[117] are sayings which are both keener in their tone and more

limited in their range than are Our Lord’s. And we have seen how, in

one of his most depressed moods, he transiently adopts and carries

on a specifically Platonist attitude towards the body’s relation to

the soul, as he finds it in that beautiful, profoundly Hellenistic

treatise, the Book of Wisdom.[118] This attitude evidently represents,

in his strenuous and deeply Christian character, only a passing

feeling; for, if we pressed it home, we could hardly reconcile it with

his doctrine as to the reality and nature of the body’s resurrection.

It is indeed clear how the Platonist, and especially the Neo-Platonist,

mode of conceiving that relation excludes any and every kind of body

from the soul’s final stage of purification and happiness; and how

the Synoptic, and indeed the generally Christian conception of it,

necessarily eliminates that keen and abiding dualism characteristic of

the late Greek attitude.

2. _Platonic, Synoptic, and Pauline elements in Catherine’s view._

Now in Catherine we generally find an interesting combination of the

Platonic form with the Synoptic substance and spirit: and this can, of

course, be achieved only because that abiding form itself is made to

signify a changed set and connection of ideas.

(1) We have seen how she dwells much, Plotinus-like, upon the soul’s

stripping itself of all its numerous garments, and exposing itself

naked to the rays of God’s healing light. Yet in the original Platonic

scheme these garments are put on by the soul in its descent from

spirit into matter, and are stripped off again in its ascent back out

of matter into spirit; in both cases, they stand for the body and its

effects. In Catherine, even more than in Plotinus, the garments stand

for various evil self-attachments and self-delusions of the soul;

and against these evils and dangers the Synoptists furnish endless

warnings. And yet she insists upon purity, clear separation, complete

abstraction of the soul, in such terms as still to show plainly enough

the originally Neo-Platonist provenance of much of her form; for

in the Neo-Platonists we get, even more markedly than here, a like

insistence upon the natural dissimilarity of the body and the soul,

and a cognate longing to get away from it in ecstasy and death. But

whilst in the Neo-Platonists there is, at the bottom of all this, a

predominant belief that the senses are the primary source and occasion

of all sin, so that sin is essentially the contamination of spirit

by matter: in Catherine, (although she shares to the full Plotinus’s

thirst for ecstasy, as the escape from division and trouble into unity

and peace), impurity stands primarily for self-complacency,--belief in,

and love of, our imaginary independence of even God Himself; and purity

means, in the first instance, the loving Him and His whole system of

souls and of life, and one’s own self only in and as part of that

system.

It is very instructive to note, in this connection, how, after her four

years of directly penitential and ascetical practice, (an activity

which, even then, extended quite as much to matters of decentralization

of the self as of bodily mortification), her warfare is, in the first

instance, all but exclusively directed against the successive refuges

and ambushes of self-complacency and self-centredness. Thus there is

significance in the secondary place occupied, (even in the _Vita_, and

doubtless still more in her own mind), by the question of continence;

indeed her great declaration to the Friar indicates plainly her

profound concentration upon the continuous practice of, and growth in,

Love Divine, and her comparative indifference to the question of the

systematic renunciation of anything but sin and selfish attachments and

self-centrednesses of any kind. Her conception of sinners as “cold,”

even more than as dark or stained; of God as Fire, even more than

as Light; and of purity as indefinitely increasable, since Love can

grow on and on: all similarly point to this finely positive, flame-,

not snow-conception, in which purity has ceased to be primarily, as

with the Greeks, a simple absence of soiledness, even if it be moral

soiledness, and has become, as with the Synoptic teaching, something

primarily positive, love itself.

In her occasionally intense insistence upon herself as being all evil,

a very Devil, and in some of her picturings of her interior combat,

we get, on the other hand, echoes, not of Plato, nor again of the

Synoptist teaching, but of St. Paul’s “in my flesh there dwelleth no

good thing,” and of his combat between flesh and spirit.--Yet the evil

which she is thus conscious of, is not sensual nor even sensible evil

and temptation, but consists in her unbounded natural claimfulness and

intense inclination to sensitive self-absorption.--And this gives,

indeed, to these feminine echoes of St. Paul a certain thin shrillness

which the original tones have not got, standing there for the massive

experiences of a man violently solicitated by both sense and spirit.

But it leaves her free to note, as regards the flesh, the whole bodily

organism, (and this in beautiful sympathy with Our Lord’s own genially

fervent, homely heroic spirit), not its wickedness, but its weakness,

its short-livedness, and its appeal for merciful allowance to God,

“Who knows that we are dust.” Instead of a direct and pointed dualism

of two distinct substances informed by all but incurably antagonistic

principles, we thus get a direct conflict between two dispositions of

the soul, and a but imperfect correspondence between the body and that

soul.

(2) There is, indeed, no doubt that the very ancient association of the

ideas of Fire and of spiritual Purification goes back, in the first

instance, to the conception of the soul being necessarily stained by

the very fact of its connection with the body, and of those stains

being finally removed by the body’s death and cremation. We find

this severely self-consistent view scattered up and down Hellenic

religion and literature.[119] And even in Catherine the fire, a sense

of fever-heat, still seizes the body, and this body wastes away,

and leaves the soul more and more pure, during those last years of

illness.--Yet the striking identity, between that old cluster of ideas

and her own forms of thought, brings out, all the more clearly, the

immense road traversed by spirituality between the substance of those

ideas and the essence of this thought. For in her teaching, which

is but symbolized or at most occasioned by those physico-psychical

fever-heats, the Fire is, at bottom, so spiritual and so directly

busy with the soul alone, that it is ever identical with itself in

Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and on earth, and stands for God Himself; and

that its effects are not the destruction of a foreign substance, but

the bringing back, wherever and as far as possible, of the fire-like

soul’s disposition and quality to full harmony with its Fire-source and

Parent, God Himself.

(3) Only the Prison-house simile for the body, as essentially an

earthly purgatory for the soul, must be admitted, I think, to remain

a primarily Platonic, not fully Christianizable conception; just as

the absence of all reference by her to the resurrection of the body

will have been, in part, occasioned by the strong element of Platonism

in her general selection and combination of ideas. Yet it would

obviously be unfair to press these two points too much, since, as to

the resurrection, her long illness and evidently constant physical

discomfort must, even of themselves, have disinclined her to all

picturing of an abiding, even though highly spiritualized, bodily

organization; and as to the likeness of her body to a prison and

purgatory of the soul, we are expressly told that it began only with

the specially suffering last part of her life.

3. _Dualism pragmatic, not final. Its limits._

Now, for this whole matter of the right conception as to the relations

of body and soul, it is clear that any more than partial and

increasingly superable antagonism between body and spirit cannot be

accepted.

(1) A final Dualism is unsound in Psychology, since all the first

materials, stimulations, and instruments for even our most abstract

thinking are supplied to us by our sense-perceptions, hence also

through the body. It is narrow in Cosmology, for we do not want to

isolate man in this great universe of visible things; and his link

with animal- and plant-life, and even with the mineral creation, is,

increasingly as we descend in the scale of beings, his body. It is

ruinous for Ethics, because purity, in such a physical-spiritual being

as is man, consists precisely in spiritual standards and laws extending

to and transforming his merely physical inclinations. It is directly

contradictory of the central truth and temper of Christianity, since

these require a full acceptance of the substantial goodness and the

thorough sanctifiableness of man’s body; of God’s condescension to

man’s whole physico-spiritual organism; and of the persistence or

reanimation of all that is essential to man’s true personality across

and after death. And it is, at bottom, profoundly un-Catholic; the

whole Sacramental system, the entire deep and noble conception of the

normal relations between the Invisible and the Visible being throughout

of the Incarnational type,--an action of the one in the other, which

develops the agent and subject at the same time that it spiritualizes

the patient, the object, is in direct conflict with it. Neo-Platonism

came more and more to treat the body and the entire visible creation

as an intrinsic obstacle to spirit, to be eliminated by the latter as

completely as possible; at least this very prominent strain within it

was undoubtedly pushed on to this extreme by the Gnostic sects. But

Christianity has ever to come back to its central presupposition--the

substantial goodness and spiritual utility and transfigurableness of

body and matter; and to its final end,--the actual transformation of

them by the spirit into ever more adequate instruments, materials, and

expressions of abiding ethical and religious values and realities.

(2) The fact is that here, as practically at every chief turning-point

in ethical and religious philosophy, the movement of the specifically

Christian life and conviction is not a circle round a single

centre,--detachment; but an ellipse round two centres,--detachment and

attachment. And precisely in this difficult, but immensely fruitful,

oscillation and rhythm between, as it were, the two poles of the

spiritual life; in this fleeing and seeking, in the recollection back

and away from the visible (so as to allay the dust and fever of growing

distraction, and to reharmonize the soul and its new gains according

to the intrinsic requirements and ideals of the spirit), and in the

subsequent, renewed immersion in the visible, (in view both of gaining

fresh concrete stimulation and content for the spiritual life, and of

gradually shaping and permeating the visible according to and with

spiritual ends and forces): in this combination, and not in either

of these two movements taken alone, consists the completeness and

culmination of Christianity.[120]

(3) It no doubt looks, at first sight, as though the Church, by her

canonization of the Monastic Ideal, gave us, for the ultimate pattern

and measure of all Christian perfection, as pure and simple a flight of

the soul from the body and the world, as (short of insanity or suicide)

can be made in this life. But here we have to remember three things.

In the first place, the Church not only forbids all attacks upon

the legitimacy, indeed sanctity of marriage, or upon its necessity,

indeed duty, for mankind at large; but St. Augustine and St. Thomas

only articulate her ordinary, strenuously anti-Manichean teaching,

in declaring that man was originally created by God, in body and in

soul, not for celibacy but for marriage; and that only owing to the

accidental event of the Fall and of its effects,--the introduction of

disorder and excess into human nature, but not any corruption of its

substance and foundations,--does any inferiority,--the dispositions,

motives, and circumstances being equal,--attach to marriage as compared

with virginity.[121] Hence, still, the absolute ideal would be that man

could and did use marriage as all other legitimate functions and things

of sense, as a necessary, and ever more and more perfected, means and

expression of truly human spirituality, a spirituality which ever

requires some non-spiritual material in which to work, and by working

in which the soul itself, not only spiritualizes it, but increasingly

develops its own self.

And secondly, detachment, unification, spiritual recollection is the

more difficult, and the less obviously necessary, of the two movements,

and yet is precisely the one which (by coming upon the extant or

inchoate attachments, and by suppressing or purifying them according

as they are bad or good) first stamps any and every life as definitely

religious at all. No wonder, then, that it is this sacred detachment

and love of the Cross that we notice, first of all, in the life and

doctrine of Our Lord and of all His followers, indeed in all truly

religious souls throughout the world; and that the Church should, by

her teaching and selection of striking examples, ever preach and uphold

this most necessary test and ingredient, this very salt of all virile

and fruitful spirituality.

But, in the third place, a man need only directly attack the family,

society, the state; or art, literature, science,--as intrinsically

evil or even as, in practice, true hindrances to moral and religious

perfection,--and the Church,--both the learning and experimenting,

and the official and formulating Church,--will at once disavow him:

so strong is, at bottom, the instinct that attachment and variety

of interests,--variety both in kind and in degree--that materials,

occasions, and objects for spirituality to leaven and to raise, and to

work on in order to be itself deepened and developed,--are as truly

essential to the spiritual life as are detachment, and unity, and

transcendence of ultimate motive and aim; these latter furnishing to

the soul the power gradually to penetrate all that material, and, in

and through this labour, more and more to articulate its own spiritual

character.

(4) No man can become, or is proclaimed to have become, a Christian

saint, who has not thus achieved a profound spiritualization and

unification of a more or less recalcitrant material and multiplicity.

In some cases, it is the unity and detachment that greatly predominate

over the multiplicity and attachment,--as, say, in the Fathers of the

Desert. In other cases, it is the variety and attachment that strikes

us first of all,--as, for instance, in Sir Thomas More and Edmund

Campion. And, in a third set of cases, it is the depth of the unity and

detachment, in the breath of the variety and attachment, which is the

dominant characteristic, so with St. Paul and St. Augustine. Catherine

herself belongs, for her great middle period, rather to the third

group than to either of the other two; only during her penitential

period and her last long illness does she clearly belong to the group

of intensely detached and unified saints.--It is evidently impossible

in such a matter to do more than insist upon the necessity of both

movements; upon the immensely fruitful friction and tension which

their well-ordered alternation introduces into the soul’s inner life;

and upon the full ideal and ultimate measure for the complete and

perfected man, humanity at large, being a maximum of multiplicity and

attachment permeated and purified by a maximum of unity and detachment.

The life which can englobe and organize both these movements, with

their manifold interaction, will have a multitude of warm attachments,

without fever or distraction, and a great unity of pure detachment,

without coldness or emptiness: it will have the, winning because rich,

simplicity and wondrous combination of apparent inevitableness and of

seeming paradox furnished by all true life, hence exhibited in its

greatest fulness by the religious life which, at its deepest, is deeper

any other kind of life.

III. QUIETUDE AND PASSIVITY. POINTS IN THIS TENDENCY TO BE CONSIDERED

HERE.

We have inevitably somewhat anticipated another matter, in which

Catherine shows all the true Mystic’s affinities: the craving for

simplification and permanence of the soul’s states,--her practice

and teaching as to Quietude and Passivity. Pushed fully home, this

tendency involves four closely related, increasingly profound,

convictions and experiences. Utter unification of the soul’s functions,

indeed utter unity of its substance: _i.e._ the soul does one single

thing, and seems to do it by one single act; itself is simply one, and

expresses itself by one sole act. Passivity of the soul: _i.e._ the

soul does not apparently act at all, it simply _is_ and receives--it

is now nothing but one pure immense recipiency. Immediacy of contact

between the soul and God: _i.e._ there seems to be nothing separating,

or indeed in any way between, the soul and God. And, finally, an

apparent coalescence of the soul and God: _i.e._ the soul _is_ God, and

God _is_ the soul.--Only the first two points, and then the closely

related question of Pure Love, shall occupy us here; the last two

points must stand over for our penultimate chapter.

1. _Distinction between experiences, their expression, and their

analysis._

We have already studied the psycho-physical occasions, concomitants,

and embodiments of Catherine’s keen desire for, and profound experience

of, spiritual unification and passivity; and we can have no kind of

doubt as to the factual reality and the practical fruitfulness of the

state so vividly described by her. Here we have only to inquire into

the accuracy of the analysis and terminology effected and employed by

her, in so far as they seem to claim more than simply to describe the

soul’s own feeling and impression as to these states thus experienced

by itself. We have then to consider the nature and truth of what can

roughly be styled Quietism and Passivity.

Now here especially will it be necessary for us carefully to

distinguish between the direct experiences, impressions, and

instinctive requirements of the soul,--here all souls, in precise

proportion to their depth and delicacy of holiness and of

self-knowledge are our masters, and furnish us with our only materials

and tests; and, on the other hand, the implications and analysis of

these states, as, in the first instance, psychological, and then as

requiring elucidation with regard to their ontological cause and

reality by means of a religious philosophy,--here, psychology, and

religious philosophy, especially also the discriminations and decisions

of theologians and Church authorities as expressive of these ultimate

questions, will be our guides.[122]

(1) If we start from the history of the nomenclature which, (though

present only partially in Catherine’s sayings, for she nowhere uses the

term “passivity”), runs, with however varying a completeness, right

through the Christian Mystics more or less from the first, we shall

find that it consists, roughly, of three stages, and, throughout,

of two currents. There is the Pre-Pauline and Pre-Philonian stage;

the stage of Paul, Philo, and John, through Clement and Origen,

on to Gregory of Nyssa and St. Augustine; and the stage from the

Pseudo-Dionysius onward, down to Nicolas of Coes inclusive, and which,

to this hour, still largely influences us all.--And there are the two

currents. The one tends so to emphasize the sense and reality of the

soul’s simple receptivity, and of what the soul receives at such,

apparently, purely receptive times, as to ignore, or even practically

deny, the undeniable fact that this very receptivity is, inevitably,

an act of its own. Its decisive terms are Passivity, Fixedness,

Oneness. The other current realizes that Grace does not destroy,

violate, or supplant Nature, either entirely or in part, but that it

awakens, purifies, and completes it, so that every divine influx is

also ever a stimulation of all the good and true energy already, even

though latently, present in the soul. And its characteristic terms are

“Action” (as distinguished from “Activity”), Growth, Harmony.

(2) And we should note with care that these two currents are not simply

Heathen and Christian respectively. For if that great, indeed all but

central, term and conception of “Action” has been wisely generalized

by most Christian Mystics, as the truly Christian substitute for the

strongly Neo-Platonist term “Passivity”: that term and conception of

“Action” was first fixed and elucidated by Aristotle, who, as Mr.

Schiller well puts it, “has packed into his technical term ‘Energeia,’

and especially into the combination ‘Unmoving Energy,’ all that

was most distinctive, most original, most fundamental, and most

profound in his philosophy”;[123] whilst the second term, “Passivity,”

goes on figuring in Christian Mystics and Mystical Theologies--(in

spite of its demonstrably dangerous suggestions and frequently

scandalous history)--because the religious, especially the Christian,

consciousness requires a term for the expression of one element of all

its deepest experiences, that character of “giveness” and of grace, of

merciful anticipation by God, which marks all such states, in exact

proportion to their depth and to the soul’s awakeness.

(3) Now Aristotle’s conception of God’s Unmoving Energy, is taken over

by St. Thomas in the form of God being One Actus Purus,--sheer Energy,

His very peace and stillness coming from the brimming fulness of His

infinite life. And even finite spirit, whilst fully retaining, indeed

deepening, its own character, can and does penetrate finite spirit

through and through,--the law of Physics, which does not admit more

than one body in any one place, having here no kind of application,--so

that the Infinite Spirit is at once conceived unspiritually, if He

is conceived as supplanting, and not as penetrating, stimulating,

and transforming the finite spirits whom He made into an increasing

likeness to Him, their Maker. And hence according to the unanimous

teaching of the most experienced and explicit of the specifically

Theistic and Christian Mystics, the appearance, the soul’s own

impression, of a cessation of life and energy of the soul in periods

of special union with God or of great advance in spirituality, is an

appearance only. Indeed this, at such times strong, impression of rest

springs most certainly from an unusually large amount of actualized

energy, an energy which is now penetrating, and finding expression

by, every pore and fibre of the soul. The whole moral and spiritual

creature expands and rests, yes; but this very rest is produced by

Action “unperceived because so fleet,” so near, so all fulfilling; or

rather by a tissue of single acts, mental, emotional, volitional, so

finely interwoven, so exceptionally stimulative and expressive of the

soul’s deepest aspirations, that these acts are not perceived as so

many single acts, indeed that their very collective presence is apt to

remain unnoticed by the soul itself.

(4) Close parallels to such a state are abundant in all phases and

directions of the soul’s life. The happiest and most fruitful moments

for our aesthetic sense, those in which our mind expands most and

grows most, hence is most active in aesthetic “action” (though not

“activity”) are those in which we are unforcedly and massively absorbed

in drinking in, with a quiet intentness, the contrasts and harmonies,

the grand unity in variety, the very presence and spirit of an alpine

upland, or of a river’s flowing, or of the ocean’s outspread, or of

the Parthenon sculptures or of Rafael’s madonnas. At such moments

we altogether cease to be directly conscious of ourselves, of time

or of the body’s whereabouts; and when we return to our ordinary

psychical and mental condition, we do so with an undeniable sense

of added strength and youthfulness,--somewhat as though our face,

old and haggard, were, after gazing in utter self-oblivion upon some

resplendent youthfulness, to feel, beyond all doubt, all its many

wrinkles to have gone. And so too with the mind’s absorption in some

great poem or philosophy or character.--In all these cases, the mind or

soul energizes and develops, in precise proportion as it is so absorbed

in the contemplation of these various over-againstnesses, these

“countries” of the spirit, as to cease to notice its own overflowing

action. It is only when the mind but partially attends that a part of

it remains at leisure to note the attention of the other part; when

the mind is fully engrossed, and hence most keenly active, there is no

part of it sufficiently disengaged to note the fact of the engrossment

and action of, now, the whole mind. And, with the direct consciousness

of our mind’s action, we lose, for the time being, all clear

consciousness of the mind’s very existence. And let it be carefully

noted, this absence of the direct consciousness of the self is as

truly characteristic of the deepest, most creative, moments of full

external action: the degree of mind and will-force operating in Nelson

at Trafalgar and in Napoleon at Waterloo, or again in St. Ignatius

of Antioch in the Amphitheatre, and in Savonarola at the stake, was

evidently in the precisely contrary ratio to their direct consciousness

of it or of themselves at all.

(5) Now if such “Passivity,” or Action, is in reality the condition

in which the soul attains to its fullest energizing, we can argue

back, from this universal principle, to the nature of the various

stages and kinds of the Prayer and States of Quiet. In each case, that

is, we shall combat the still very common conception that,--though

orthodoxy, it is admitted, requires _some_ human action to remain

throughout,--such Prayer and States consist (not only as to the

immediate feeling of their subjects, but in reality and in their

ultimate analysis) in an ever-increasing preponderance of divine action

within the soul, and an ever-decreasing remnant of acts of the soul

itself. For such a view assumes that God supplants man, and that, so

to speak, His Hand appears unclothed alongside of the tissue woven by

man’s own mind; whereas God everywhere but stimulates and supports man

whom He has made, and His Hand moves ever underneath and behind the

tissue,--a tissue which, at best, can become as it were a glove, and

suggest the latent hand. The Divine Action will thus stimulate and

inform the human action somewhat like the force that drives the blood

within the stag’s young antlers, or like the energy that pushes the

tender sap-full fern-buds up through the hard, heavy ground.

Thus a special intensity of divine help and presence, and an unusual

degree of holiness and of union, have nothing to do with the fewness

of the soul’s own acts at such times, but with their quality,--with

the preponderance amongst them of divinely informed acts as against

merely natural, or wrongly self-seeking, or downrightly sinful acts.

And since it is certain that living simplicity is but the harmony and

unification, the synthesis, of an organism, and hence is great in

precise proportion to the greater perfection of that synthesis, it

follows that the living, utterly one-seeming Action or State will,

at such times, contain a maximum number of interpenetrating acts and

energies, all worked up into this harmonious whole.

2. _Four causes of inadequate analysis._

It is plain, I think, that one thoroughly normal, one accidental, and

two mischievous, causes have all conspired to arrest or to deflect the

analysis of most of the Mystics themselves concerning Simplicity.

For one thing, the soul, as has just been shown, at such moments of

harmonious concentration and of willing and thinking in union with

God’s Light and Will, necessarily ceases, more or less, to be conscious

of its own operations, and, in looking back, braced and rested as it

now is, it cannot but think that it either did not act at all, or that

its action was reduced to a minimum. For how otherwise could it now

feel so rested, when, after its ordinary activity, it feels so tired

and dissatisfied? and how otherwise could it be so unable to give

any clear account of what happened in those minutes of union? Yet it

is, on the contrary, the very fulness of the action which has rested,

by expanding, the soul; and which has made the soul, returned to its

ordinary distractedness, incapable of clearly explaining that, now

past, concentration.

The accidental cause has been the fairly frequent, though not

necessary, connection of the more pronounced instances of such habits

of mind with more or less of the psycho-physical phenomena of ecstasy,

in the technical sense of the word. For, in such trances, the breathing

and circulation are retarded, and the operation of the senses is in

part suspended. And it was easy to reason, from such visible, literal

simplification of the physical life, to a similar modification of

the soul’s action at such times; and, from the assumed desirableness

of that psycho-physical condition, to the advantage of the supposed

corresponding state of the soul itself. Any tendency to an extreme

dualism, as to the relations between body and soul, would thus

directly help on an inclination to downright Quietism.--Here it is,

on the contrary, certain that only in so far as those psycho-physical

simplifications are the results of, or conditions for, a deepening

multiplicity in unity, a fuller synthetic action of the soul, or,

at least, of a fuller penetration by the soul of even one limited

experience or idea--an operation which entails not less, but more,

energizing of the soul,--are such psycho-physical simplifications of

any spiritual advantage or significance. And in such cases they could

not be indications of the cessation or diminution of the deepest and

most docile energizing of the soul.

And the mischievous causes were a mistake in Psychology and a mistake

in Theology. For, as to Psychology, not only was simplicity assumed,

(through a mistaken acceptance of the soul’s own feeling, as furnishing

the ultimate analysis of its state), to consist, at any one moment,

of an act materially and literally one, instead of a great organism

of various simultaneous energizings; but this one act was often

held to require no kind of repetition. Since the act was one as

against any simultaneous multiplicity, so was it one as against any

successive multiplicity, even if this latter were taken as a repetition

differentiated by number alone. And yet here again energizing _is_

energizing; and though the soul’s acts overlap and interpenetrate

each other, and though when, by their number and harmony, they

completely fill and pacify the soul, many of them are simultaneously

or successively present to the soul in their effects alone: it is

nevertheless the renewal, however peaceful and unperceived, of these

acts, which keeps the state of soul in existence. For these acts are

not simply unowned acts that happen to be present within the soul; they

are the soul’s own acts, whether, in addition, the soul is directly

conscious of them or not.

And, theologically, the idea was often at work that it was more

worthy of God to operate alone and, as it were, _in vacuo_; and more

creaturely of man to make, or try to make, such a void for Him. Yet

this is in direct conflict with the fundamental Christian doctrine,

of the Condescension, the Incarnation of God to and in human nature,

and of the persistence, and elevation of this humanity, even in the

case of Christ Himself. God’s action does not keep outside of, nor

does it replace, man’s action; but it is,--Our Lord Himself has told

us,--that of yeast working in meal, which manifests its hidden power in

proportion to the mass of meal which it penetrates and transforms.

3. _Four Quietistic aberrations._

Now it is certain that the error of Quietism has, in no doubt many

cases, not remained confined to such mistakes in psychological analysis

and theological doctrine, but that these have joined hands with, and

have furnished a defence to, sloth and love of dreamy ease, or to some

impatience of the necessary details of life, or to fanatical attachment

to some one mood and form of experience; and that they have, thus

reinforced, ravaged not a few wills and souls.

Four chief Quietistic aberrations can be studied in history.

(1) The neglect or even contempt of vocal prayer, and of the historical

and institutional elements of religion, at least in the case of

more advanced souls, is one of these abuses.--Now it is true, and

Catherine has been a striking instance, that the proportion of all

these different elements towards one another vary, and should vary,

considerably between soul and soul, according to the _attrait_ and

degree of advance of each; that the soul’s most solid advance is in the

direction of an ever-deepened spiritual devotedness, and not in that of

a multiplication of particular devotions; that the use of even the more

central of those elements and means may, for souls called to the prayer

of Quiet, become remarkably elastic and largely unmethodized; and that,

for such souls (and, in various degrees and ways, sooner or latter, for

perhaps most other souls), a prayer of peacefully humble expectation

and of all but inarticulate, practically indescribable, brooding of

love, and of dim, expansive trust and conformity is possible, sometimes

alone possible, and is proved right and useful, if it leaves them

strengthened to act and to suffer, to help and to devote themselves to

their fellows, to Christ, and to God.

But it remains equally true, even for these as for all other souls,

that the historical and institutional elements must ever remain

represented, and sufficiently represented; indeed the persistence in

these elements of religion will be one of the chief means for avoiding

delusion. We have St. Teresa’s experience and teaching here, as a truly

classical instance. And if the prayer of Quiet will give a special

colour, depth, and unity to those more contingent-seeming practices,

these practices will, in return, give a particular definiteness,

content, and creaturely quality to that prayer. And thus too the

universally and profoundly important union and interchange with souls

of other, equally legitimate, kinds and degrees of spirituality will

be kept up. Only the sum-total of all these souls, only the complete

invisible Church, is the full Bride of Christ; and though the souls

composing her may and should each contribute a varying predominance of

different elements, no soul should be entirely without a certain amount

of each of these constituents.

(2) Another abuse is the neglect, contempt, or misapplied fear

of not directly religious occupations and labours which, however

otherwise appropriate or even necessary to this soul’s growth and

destination, tend to disturb its quiet and to absorb a part of its

time and attention. Here it is doubtless true that the other elements

of religion are also all more or less apprehensive and jealous with

regard to actual, or even only possible, non-religious rival interests.

And it is certain that they are all right in so far as that a certain

interior leisureliness and recollection, a certain ultimate preference

for the spiritualizing religious force of the soul as against the

materials, non-religious and other, which that force is to penetrate,

are necessary to the soul that would advance.

But the fear that characterizes the Historical and Institutional

elements is rather a fear, respectively, of error and of disobedience

and singularity, whereas on the part of the Mystical element it is a

fear of distraction and absorption away from the _Unum Necessarium_ of

the soul. Perhaps even among the Canonized Mystics there is none that

has more impressively warned us, both by word and example, against

this insidious danger, than the distinguished Platonist scholar and

deep spiritual writer, Père Jean Nicolas Grou, who, right through the

long mystical period of his life, alternated his prayer of Quiet with

extensive and vigorous critical work on the Graeco-Latin classics,

and whose practice only wants further expansion and application,

(according to the largely increased or changed conditions of such not

directly religious work), in order to bear much fruit, not only for

criticism and science, but, (by the return-effect of such occupations

upon the soul’s general temper and particular devotional habits), for

spirituality itself. But we must return to this point more fully in our

last chapter.

(3) The third abuse is the neglect or contempt of morality, especially

on its social, visible, and physical sides. Particular Mystics, and

even whole Mystical schools and movements, have undoubtedly in some

instances, and have, possibly, in many more cases, been maligned on

this point, since even such a spotless life as Fénelon’s, and that of

such a profoundly well-intentioned woman as Madame Guyon, did not,

for a time, escape the most unjust suspicions. It is also true that,

as a man advances in spirituality, he lays increasing stress upon the

intention and general attitude of the agent, and increasingly requires

to be judged by the same interior standard, if he is to be rightly

understood at all. God may and does, to humble and purify him, allow

painful temptations and trials from within to combine, apparently,

against him, with persecutions and much isolation from without. And

the difference, rather than the similarity, between Religion and

Morality,--the sense of pure grace, of free pardon, of the strange

profound “givenness” of even our fullest willings and of our most

emphatically personal achievements,--can and should grow in him more

and more.

And yet it is clear that there must have been some fire to account

for all that smoke of accusation; that the material and the effect

outwards, the _body_ of an action, do matter, as well as does that

action’s _spirit_; that this body does not only act thus outwards,

but also inwards, back upon the spirit of the act and of the agent;

and that temptations and trials are purifying, not by their simple

presence but in proportion as they are resisted, or, if they have been

yielded to, in proportion as such defeats are sincerely deplored and

renounced. Thus everywhere the full development of any one part of

life, and the true unity of the whole, have to be achieved through the

gradual assimilation of at first largely recalcitrant other elements,

and within an ever-abiding multiplicity--a maximum number of parts and

functions interacting within one great organism. And hence not the

outrage, neglect, or supersession of morality, but, on the contrary,

its deeper development, by more precise differentiation from, and more

organic integration into, religion proper, must, here again and here

above all, be the final aim. Once more again it is the Incarnational

type which is the only fully true, the only genuinely Christian one.

(4) And, finally, there are certain hardly classifiable fanaticisms,

which are nevertheless a strictly logical consequence from a wrongly

understood Quiet and Passivity,--from Quietism in its unfavourable,

condemned sense. I am thinking of such a case as that of Margarethe

Peters, a young Quietist, who caused herself to be crucified by her

girl-companions, at Wildenspuch, near Schaffhausen, in 1823,--in order

to carry out, in full literalness and separateness, the utmost and

most painful passivity and dependence and resistless self-donation, in

direct imitation of the culminating act of Christ’s life on earth and

of His truest followers.[124] Here, in the deliberate suicide of this

undoubtedly noble Lutheran girl, we get an act which but brings out

the strength and weakness of Quietism wherever found. For the greatest

constituents of the Christian spirit are undoubtedly there: free

self-sacrifice, impelled by love of God, of Christ, and of all men,

and by hatred of self.--Yet, because they here suppress other, equally

necessary, constituents, and are out of their proper context and bereft

of their proper checks, they but render possible and actual a deed of

piteous self-delusion. How terrible is false simplification, the short

cut taken by pure logic, operating without a sufficient induction from

facts, and within an ardent, self-immolating temperament!

4. _Rome’s condemnation of Quietism._

All this is abundantly sufficient to explain and justify Rome’s

condemnation of Quietism. The term “Quietists” appears, I think, for

the first time,--at least in an invidious sense,--in the Letter which

Cardinal Caraccioli, Archbishop of Naples, addressed to Pope Innocent

XI (Odescalchi) on June 30, 1682, and in which he graphically describes

the abuses which, (under pretext or through the misapplication of

spiritual Quiet and Passivity), had now appeared in his Diocese: souls

apparently incapable of using their beads or making the sign of the

Cross; or which will neither say a vocal prayer nor go to Confession;

or which, when in this prayer of Quiet, even when at Holy Communion,

will strive to drive away any image, even of Our Lord Himself, that may

present itself to their imagination; or which tear down a Crucifix, as

a hindrance to union with God; or which look upon all the thoughts that

come to them in the quietude of prayer, as so many rays and effluences

from God Himself, exempting them henceforth from every law.[125]

Yet it is important to bear well in mind, the special circumstances,

the admitted limits, and the probable signification of Rome’s

condemnations.

(1) As to the circumstances of the time, it appears certain that it was

the ready circulation of the doctrines of the Spanish priest, Miguel de

Molinos in the _Guida Spirituale_, 1675, and the abuses of the kind we

have just now detailed, and that sprang from this circulation, which

formed the primary reason and motive for the otherwise excessively

severe treatment of a man and a book, which had both received the very

highest and the most deliberate ecclesiastical approbations. That these

two circumstances were the determining causes of at least the severity

of his condemnation is well brought out by the circumstance that,

during his two years’ trial (1685-1687), not only the short _Guida_ but

his whole obtainable correspondence (some twenty thousand letters) were

examined, and that it is at least as much on such occasional manuscript

material, and on Molinos’s own oral admissions,--in prison and

doubtless, in part at least, under torture,--that the condemnation was

based, containing, as it does, certain revoltingly immoral propositions

and confessions, admittedly absent from his published writings.

But if at least some shadow of doubt rests upon the moral character

of Molinos, not a shadow of such suspicion or of doubt concerning his

perfectly Catholic intentions can, in justice, be allowed to rest

upon his chief follower and the most distinguished apologist for his

doctrine, the saintly Oratorian and Bishop, the much-tried Cardinal

Petrucci; any more than Fénelon’s moral and spiritual character, or

deeply Catholic spirit and intentions, can, (in spite of the painfully

fierce and unjust attack upon both by Bossuet in his formally classic

invective, _Relation sur le Quiétisme_), for one moment be called

in question.[126] Other admittedly deeply spiritual and entirely

well-intentioned Catholics, whose writings were also condemned during

this time when devotional expressions having an at all quietistic tinge

or drift were very severely judged, are Mère Marie de l’Incarnation

(Marie Guyard), a French Ursuline Religious, who died in Canada in

1672, and the process of whose Beatification has been introduced; the

saintly French layman, Jean de Bernières-Louvigny, much admired by

Fénelon, who died in 1659; the very interior, though at times somewhat

fantastic, Secular Priest, Henri Marie Boudon, who died in 1702; and

the very austere but highly experienced ascetical writer, the Jesuit

Père Joseph Surin, whom Bossuet had formally approved, and who died in

1668.[127] But Madame Guyon herself, that much-tried and vehemently

opposed woman, was held, by many an undoubtedly Catholic-minded,

experienced and close observer, to be (in spite of the largely

misleading and indeed incorrect character of many of her analyses and

expressions) a truly saintly, entirely filial Catholic.[128]

(2) As to the limits of these condemnations, we must remember that only

two of them,--those of Molinos and of Fénelon,--claim to be directly

doctrinal at all; and that Fénelon was never really compromised in

the question of Quietism proper, but was condemned on questions of

Pure Love alone. Bossuet himself was far less sound as against the

central Quietist doctrine of the One Act, which, unless formally

revoked, lasts on throughout life, and hence need never be repeated;

Fénelon’s early criticism of the Molinos propositions remains one of

the clearest extant refutations of that error. Again in the matter of

the Passivity of advanced souls, Bossuet was distinctly less normal and

sober than Fénelon: for whilst Fénelon taught that in no state does

the soul lose all capacity, although the facility may greatly vary,

to produce distinct acts of the virtues or vocal prayers and other

partially external exercises, Bossuet taught that, in some cases, all

capacity of this kind is abolished.[129] “I take,” says Fénelon, “the

terms ‘Passive’ and ‘Passivity’ as they actually appear everywhere

in the language of the (sound) Mystics, as something opposed to the

terms ‘active’ and ‘activity’: ‘Passivity,’ taken in the sense of an

entire inaction of the will, would be a heresy.” And he then opposes

“Passivity,” not to “Action,” but to that “Activity,” which is a merely

natural, restless, and hurried excitation.[130]

(3) And as to the abiding significance of the whole anti-quietist

decisions and measures, we shall do well to consider the following

large facts. From St. Paul and St. John to Clement of Alexandria and

Origen; from these to Dionysius the Areopagite; from the Areopagite to

St. Bernard of Clairvaux and then the Franciscan and Dominican Mystics;

from these, again, on to the great Renaissance and Counter-Reformation

saints and writers of this type,--the German Cardinal Nicolas of Coes

and the Italian St. Catherine of Genoa, the Spaniards St. Teresa and

St. John of the Cross, and the French Saint Francis de Sales and

Saint Jane Frances de Chantal, we get a particular type of religious

experience and doctrine, which but unfolds and concentrates, with an

unusual articulation, breadth, and depth, what is to be found, on

some sides of their spiritual character and teaching, among Saints

and religious souls of the more mixed type, such as St. Augustine,

St. Anselm, St. Thomas of Aquin, and St. Ignatius Loyola. And this

mixed type, bearing within it a considerable amount of that mystical

quiet and emotional-speculative element, is again but a deepening, a

purification and a realization of one of the profoundest affinities and

constituents of every human heart and will.

Hence, even in the thickest of the quietist controversy, when that

mystical element must have seemed, to many, to be discredited once for

all, those best acquainted with the rich history of the Church, and

with the manifold requirements of the abiding religious consciousness,

could not and did not doubt that all that was good, deep, and true

in that element would continue to be upheld by, and represented in,

the Church.--And it is not difficult to point to the more or less

Mystical souls furnished by the Monks, the Friars; the Clerks-Regular,

specially the Jesuits; the Secular Clergy; and the Laity, down to

the present day. Such writers and Saints as Père de Caussade (_d._

about 1770) on the one hand, and Père Jean N. Grou (_d._ 1803) and

the Curé d’Ars (_d._ 1859) on the other hand, carry on the two

streams of the predominantly mystical and of the mixed type,--streams

so clearly observable before 1687 and 1699. Quietism, the doctrine

of the One Act; Passivity in a literal sense, as the absence or

imperfection of the power and use of initiative on the soul’s part in

any and every state: these doctrines were finally condemned, and most

rightly and necessarily condemned; the Prayer of Quiet, and various

states and degrees of an ever-increasing predominance of Action over

Activity,--an Action which is all the more the soul’s very own,

because the more occasioned, directed, and informed by God’s action

and stimulation,--these, and the other chief lines of the ancient

experience and practice, remain as true, correct, and necessary as ever.

5. _Rome’s alleged change of front._

And yet it is undeniable that the Roman events between 1675 and 1688 do

seem, at first sight, to justify the strongly Protestant Dr. Heppe’s

contention that those twelve years,--not to speak of the later troubles

of Madame Guyon and of Fénelon--witnessed a complete _volte face_, a

formal self-stultification, of the Roman teaching and authority, on

these difficult but immediately important matters.

(1) Let us put aside the many passages in Molinos’s _Guida_ which

were but (more or less) literal reproductions of the teachings

of such solemnly approved authorities as Saints Teresa, Peter of

Alcantara, John of the Cross, Francis de Sales and Jane Frances de

Chantal,--passages which, of course, remained uncondemned even in

Molinos’s pages, but which it would often be difficult to distinguish

from the parts of his book that were censured. Yet there still remain

such facts as the following.

Juan Falconi’s _Alfabeto_ and _Lettera_ were at their Fifth Italian

edition, 1680, and all five editions had been approved by the Master

of the Apostolic Palace; but only in 1688 were these writings

forbidden. Yet the _Lettera_ contains, with unsurpassed directness and

clearness, the central doctrine of Quietism: an exhortation to the

production of one single lively Act of Faith, which will then continue

uninterruptedly through the whole earthly life into eternity, and

which, consequently, is not to be repeated.[131]

Molinos’s _Guida_ and _Breve Trattato_ appeared in Rome, respectively

in 1675 and 1681, with the approbations of five theologians, four of

whom were Consultors of the Holy Office,--the Archbishop of Reggio;

the Minister-General of the Franciscans; the late General of the

Carmelites; Father Martin Esparza, the same Jesuit Theologian-Professor

of the Roman College who, some years before, had been one of those who

had examined and approved St. Catherine’s _Vita ed Opere_; and the

actual General of the Carmelites.[132]

Even after these two writings of Molinos had been criticised by the

Jesuits Bell Huomo and Segneri and the Clerk Regular Regio, (Segneri

enjoying a deservedly immense reputation, and showing in this affair

much moderation and a strong sense of the legitimate claims of

Mysticism), the Inquisition examined these criticisms, and forbade, not

the incriminated writings of Molinos and Petrucci, but the critique of

Bell Huomo _donec corrigatur_, and those of Regio and of Segneri (in

his _Lettera_ of 1681) absolutely. Segneri’s subsequent _Concordia_

almost cost him his life, so strong was the popular veneration of

Molinos.

Molinos indeed was the guest of Pope Innocent XI himself, and the

friend and confidant, amongst countless other spiritually-minded souls,

of various Cardinals, especially of the deeply devout Petrucci, Bishop

of Jesi, who was raised to the Cardinalate eighteen months after the

beginning of Molinos’s trial. The imprisonment of Molinos began in May

1685, but the trial did not end till August 1687, when (after nineteen

“Principal Errors of the New Contemplation” had been censured by the

Holy Office in February 1687) sixty-eight propositions, out of the

two hundred and sixty-three which had been urged against him, were

solemnly condemned: of these the clearly and directly immoral ones

being admittedly not derived from any printed book, or indeed any ever

published letter of his Molinos.[133]