THE AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES
Moving on now to the questions concerning the After-Life, it
will be convenient to consider them under five heads: the chief
present-day positions and perplexities with regard to belief in
the After-Life in General; the main implications and convictions
inherent to an Eschatology such as Catherine’s; and then the principal
characteristics, difficulties, and helps of her tendencies and
teachings concerning Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. And throughout the
Chapter we shall busy ourselves directly only with the After-Life in
the sense of a heightened, or at least an equal, consciousness after
death, as compared to that which existed before death: the belief in
a shrunken state of survival, in non-annihilation, appearing to be as
certainly the universal minimum of belief as such a minimum is not
Immortality.
I. THE CHIEF PRESENT-DAY PROBLEMS, PERPLEXITIES, AND REQUIREMENTS WITH
REGARD TO THE AFTER-LIFE IN GENERAL.
Now I take our chief present-day problems, perplexities, and resultant
requirements with regard to the After-Life in general, to fall into
three groups, according as those problems are predominantly Historical,
or Philosophical, or directly Practical and Ethical.
1. _Three Historical Difficulties._
The Historical group now brings very clearly and certainly before
us the striking non-universality, the startling lateness, and
the generally strange fitfulness and apparent unreasonableness
characterizing the earliest stage of belief in the soul’s heightened,
or at least equivalent, consciousness after death.
(1) Now with respect to the Non-Universality of the doctrine, it
is true that, in China, Confucianism is full of care for the dead.
“Throughout the Empire, the authorities are obliged to hold three
annual sacrifices for the refreshment and rest of the souls of the dead
in general.” “It is hardly doubtful that the cultus of Ancestors formed
the chief institution in classical Confucianism, and constituted the
very centre of religion for the people. Even now ancestor-worship is
the only form of religion for which rules, applicable to the various
classes among the Emperor’s subjects, are laid down in the Dynastic
Statutes.” And Professor De Groot, from whom I am quoting, gives an
interesting conspectus of the numberless ways in which the religious
service of the dead penetrates Chinese life.[191]--Yet we hear of
Kong-Tse (Confucius) himself (551-478 B.C.), that, though he insisted
upon the most scrupulous execution of the three hundred rules of the
then extant temple-ceremonial, which were no doubt largely busy with
the dead, and though he said that one should sacrifice to the spirits
as if they were present, he designated, in several of his sayings,
occupation with theological problems as useless: “as long as we do not
know men, how shall we know spirits? As long as we do not understand
life, how should we fathom death?” And to questions relative to the
spirits and the dead, he would give evasive answers.[192] Thus the
founder of the most characteristic of the Chinese religions was without
any clear and consistent conviction on the point in question.
In India we find, for Brahmanic religion, certain unmistakable
Immortality-Doctrines (in the sense of the survival of the soul’s
self-consciousness), expressed in the hymns of the _Rig-Veda_.--But
already, in the philosophizings of the _Upanishads_, we get a
world-soul, and this soul’s exclusive permanence: “to attain to true
unity, the very duality of subject and object is to disappear. The
terms Atman and Brahman here express the true Being which vivifies all
beings and appearances, and with which cognizing man reunites himself
whilst losing his individual existence.”[193]
And if we move on to Buddhism, with its hundreds of millions of
adherents in Burmah, Tibet, China, and Japan, we can learn, from the
classical work of Oldenberg, how interestingly deep down lies the
reason for the long conflict between scholars as to whether Nirvana
is or is not to be taken for the complete extinction of the individual
soul. “Everything, in the Buddhist dogmatic system, is part and parcel
of a circle of Becoming and of Dissolution: all things are but a
Dhamma, a Sankhara; and all Dhamma, all Sankhara are but temporary.…
The Mutable, Conditioned is here thinkable only as conditioned by
another Mutable and Conditioned. If we follow the dialectic consequence
alone, there is no seeing how, according to this system, there can
remain over, when a succession and mutual destruction of things
conditioning and of things conditioned has run its course, anything
but a pure vacuum.” And we have also such a saying of the Buddha as
the following. “Now if, O disciples, the Ego (_atta_) and anything
appertaining to the Ego (_attaniya_) cannot be comprehended with
accuracy and certainty, is not then the faith which declares: ‘This is
the world, and this is the Ego; this shall I become at death,--firm,
constant, eternal, unchangeable,--thus shall I be there, throughout
eternity,’--is not this sheer empty folly?” “How should it not, O
Lord, be sheer empty folly?” answer the disciples. “One who spoke
thus,” is Oldenberg’s weighty comment, “cannot have been far from the
conviction that Nirvana is annihilation. Yet it is understandable how
the very thinkers, who were capable of bearing this consequence, should
have hesitated to raise it to the rank of an official dogma of the
community.… Hence the official doctrine of the Buddhist Church attained
the form, that, on the question of the real existence of the Ego, of
whether or not the perfected saint lives on after death, the exalted
Buddha has taught nothing. Indeed the legally obligatory doctrine of
the old community required of its votaries an explicit renunciation of
all knowledge concerning the existence or non-existence of completely
redeemed souls.”
“Buddhism,” so Oldenberg sums up the matter, with, I think, the
substantial adhesion of all present-day competent authorities, “teaches
that there is a way out of the world of created things, out into the
dark Infinite. Does this way lead to new being? or does it lead to
nothingness? Buddhist belief maintains itself on the knife’s edge
of these alternatives. The desire of the heart, as it longs for the
Eternal, is not left without something, and yet the thinking mind is
not given a something that it could grasp and retain. The thought
of the Infinite, the Eternal, could not be present at all, and yet
vanish further away than here, where, a mere breath and on the
point of sinking into sheer nothingness, it threatens to disappear
altogether.”[194] This vast Buddhist community, numbering, perhaps, a
third of the human race, should not, then, be forgotten, when we urge
the contrary instances of the religions of Assyria and Babylonia; of
Egypt; of Greece and Rome; and, above all, of the Jews and Christianity.
Yet it is well to remember that such non-universality of belief is at
least as real, to this very hour, for such a fundamental religious
truth and practice as Monotheism and Monolatry; such purely Ethical
convictions as Monogamy and the Illicitness of Slavery; such a plain
dictate of the universal humanitarian ideal as the illegitimacy
of the application of physical compulsion in matters of religious
conviction; and such directly demonstrable psychical and natural facts
as subconsciousness in the human soul, the sexual character of plants,
and the earth’s rotundity and rotation around the sun. In none of these
cases can we claim more than that the higher, truer doctrine,--that is,
the one which explains and transcends the element of truth contained in
its predecessor and opposite,--is explicitly reached by a part only of
humanity, and is but implied and required by other men, at their best.
Yet this is clearly enough for leaving us free to decide,--reasonably
conclusive evidence for their truth being forthcoming,--in favour of
the views of the minority: since the assumption of an equality of
spiritual and moral insight and advance throughout mankind is as little
based upon fact, as would be the supposition of men’s equal physical
strength or height, or of any other quality or circumstance of their
nature and environment.
(2) The lateness of the doctrine’s appearance, precisely in the cases
where there can be no doubt of its standing for a conviction of an
endless persistence of a heightened consciousness after death,--that
is, amongst the Greeks (and Romans) and the Jews (and Christians),--has
now been well established by critical historical research.
With regard to the Greeks,[195] the matter is particularly plain,
since we can still trace even in Plato, (427 to 347 B.C.), who, next
to Our Lord Himself and to St. Paul, is doubtless the greatest and
most influential teacher of full individual Immortality that the world
has seen, two periods of thought in this matter, and can show that
the first was without any such certain conviction. In his _Apology of
Socrates_, written soon after the execution in 399 B.C., he makes his
great master, close to his end, declare that death would bring to man
either a complete unconsciousness, like to a dreamless sleep, or a
transition into another life,--a life here pictured like to the Homeric
Hades. Both possibilities Socrates made to accept resignedly, in full
reliance on the justice of the Gods, and to look no further; how should
he know what is known to no man?--And this is Plato’s own earlier
teaching. For in the very _Republic_ which, in its chronologically
later constituents, (especially in Book V, 471_c_, to the end of
Book VIII, Book IX, 560_d_ to 588_a_, and Book X up to 608_b_), so
insists upon and develops the truth and importance of Immortality in
the strictest, indeed the sublimest sense: we get, in its earlier
portions, (especially in Book II, 10_c_, to Book V, 460_c_), no trace
of any such conviction. For, in these earlier passages, the Guardians
in the Ideal State are not to consider what may come after death: the
central theme is the manner in which Justice carries with it its own
recompense; and the rewards, that are popularly wont to be placed
before the soul, are referred to ironically,--Socrates is determined to
do without such hopes. In those later portions, on the contrary, there
is the greatest insistence upon the importance of caring, not for this
short life alone, but for the soul’s “whole time” and for what awaits
it after death. And in the still later parts, (as in Books VI and VII),
the sublimest form of Immortality is presupposed as true and actual
throughout. Thus in Greece it is not till about 390-380 B.C., and in
Plato himself not till his middle life, that we get a quite definite
and final doctrine of the Immortality of all souls, and of a blessed
after-existence for every just and holy life here below.
For the survival after the body’s death, indubitably attributed to
the Psyche in the Homeric Poems, is conceived there, throughout,
as a miserably shrunken consciousness, and one which is dependent
for its continuance upon the good offices bestowed by the survivors
upon the corpse and grave. And the translation of the still living
Menelaus to Elysium (Od. IV, 560-568) is probably a later insertion;
belongs to a small class of exceptional cases; implies the writer’s
inability to conceive a heightened consciousness for the soul, after
the soul’s separation from the body; and is based, not upon any virtue
or reward, but upon Menelaus’s family-relationship to Zeus. Ganymede
gets similarly translated because of his physical beauty (II. XX, 232
_seq._).
Hesiod, though later than Homer as a writer, gives us, in his account
of the Five Ages of the World (_Works and Days_, ll. 109-201), some
traces of an Animistic conception of a heightened life of the bodiless
soul beyond the grave,--a conception which had been neglected or
suppressed by Homer, but which had evidently been preserved alive in
the popular religion of, at least, Central Greece. Yet Hesiod knows of
such a life only for the Golden and for the Silver Ages, and for some
miraculous, exceptional cases of the fourth, the Heroic Age: already
in the third, the Bronze Age, and still more emphatically in his own
fifth, the Iron Age, there are no such consolations: nothing but the
shrunken consciousness of the Homeric after-death Psyche is, quite
evidently, felt by him to be the lot of all souls in the hard, iron
present.
The Cultus of the Heroes is already registered in Draco’s Athenian
Laws, in about 620 B.C., as a traditional custom. And these Heroes have
certainly lived at one time as men upon earth, and have become heroes
only after death; their souls, though severed from the body, live a
heightened imperishable life, indeed one that can mightily help men
here below and now,--so at Delphi and at Salamis against the Persians.
Yet here again each case of such an elevation was felt to be a miracle,
an exception incapable of becoming a universal law: not even the germ
of a belief in the Immortality of the soul as such seems to be here.
The Cultus of the Nether-World Deities, of the Departed generally, and,
as the culmination of all this movement, the Eleusinian Mysteries,
must not be conceived as involving or as leading to, any belief in the
ecstatic elevation of the soul, or consciousness of its God-likeness;
and such unending bliss as is secured, is gained by men, not because
they are virtuous and devout, but through their initiation into the
Mysteries. Rhode assures us, rightly I think, that “it remains unproved
that, during the classical period of Greek culture, the belief in
Judges and a Judgment to be held in Hades over the deeds done by men on
earth, had struck root among the people”; Professor Percy Gardner adds
his great authority to the same conclusion.[196] Here again it is Plato
who is the first to take up a clearly and consistently spiritual and
universalistic position.
Indeed it is only in the predominantly neuropathic, indeed largely
immoral and repulsive, forms of the Dionysiac sect and movement, (at
work, perhaps, already in the eighth century B.C. and which leads
on to the formation of the more aristocratic and priestly Orphic
communities) that a demonstrable and direct belief arose in the soul’s
intrinsic God-likeness, or even divinity, and in its immortality,
or even eternity; and that stimulations, materials, and conceptions
were furnished to Greek thought, which are traceable wheresoever it
henceforth inclines to belief in the soul’s intrinsic Immortality.
Yet the leaven spread but slowly into philosophy. For the Ionian
philosophers, and among them Heraclitus, the impressive teacher of
the flux of all things, flourish from about 600 to 430 B.C.; but,
_naïve_ Materialists and Pantheists as they are, they frankly exclude
all survival of individual consciousness after death. The Eleatic
philosophers live between 550 and 450 B.C., and are all busy with _a
priori_ logical constructions of the physical world, conceived as sole
and self-explanatory; and amongst them is Parmenides, the powerful
propounder of the complete identity and immutability of all reality.
Those transcendent spiritual beliefs appear first as part, indeed as
the very foundation, although still rather of a mode of life than of
a formal philosophy, in the teaching and community of Pythagoras, who
seems to have lived about 580 to 490 B.C., and who certainly emigrated
from Asia Minor to Croton in Southern Italy. The soul appears here
as intrinsically immortal, indeed without beginning and without end.
And then Immortality forms one (the mystical) of the two thoroughly
heterogeneous elements of the, otherwise predominantly Ionic and
Materialistic, philosophy of Empedocles of Agrigentum in Sicily, about
490 to 435 B.C. In both these cases the Dionysiac-Orphic provenance of
the “Immortality”-doctrines is clearly apparent.
And then, among the poets who bridge over the period up to Plato, we
find Pindar, who, alongside of reproductions of the ordinary, popular
conceptions, gives us at times lofty, Orphic-like teachings as to
the eternity, the migration, and the eventual persistent rest and
happiness of the just Soul, and as to the suffering of the unjust one;
Aeschylus, who primarily dwells upon the Gods’ judgment in this life,
and who makes occasional allusions to the after-life which are partly
still of the Homeric type; Sophocles, who indeed refers to the special
privileges which, in the after-life, attend upon the souls that have
here been initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries, and who causes
Oedipus to be translated, whilst still alive, to Other-World happiness,
but who knows nothing of an unceasing heightened consciousness
for all men after death; and Euripides, who, showing plainly the
influence of the Sophists, gives expression, alongside of Pantheistic
identifications of the soul and of the aether, to every kind of
misgiving and doubt as to any survival after death.
And as to the appearance of the doctrine among the Jews, we again find
a surprising lateness. I follow here, with but minor contributions
and modifications from other writers and myself, the main conclusions
of Dr. Charles’s standard _Critical History of the Doctrine of a
Future Life_, London, 1899, whose close knowledge of the subject is
unsurpassed, and who finds as many and as early attestations as are
well-nigh findable by serious workers.[197]
“The primitive beliefs of the individual Israelite regarding the future
life, being derived from Ancestor-worship, were implicitly antagonistic
to Yahwism, from its first proclamation by Moses.… This antagonism
becomes explicit and results in the final triumph of Yahwism.” And
to the early Israelite, even under Yahwism, “the religious unit was”
not the individual but “the family or tribe.” Thus, even fully six
centuries after Moses, “the message of the prophets of the eighth
century,” Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, “is still directed to the
nation, and the judgments they proclaim are collective punishment for
collective guilt. It is not till late in the seventh century B.C. that
the problem of individual retribution really emerged, and received
its first solution in the teaching of Jeremiah.” And “the further
development of these ideas,” by the teaching of Ezekiel and of some
of the Psalms and Proverbs, as regards individual responsibility
and retribution in this life, and by the deep misgivings and keen
questionings of Job and Ecclesiastes, as to the adequacy of this
teaching, “led inevitably to the conception of a blessed life beyond
the grave.”
Yet throughout the Hebrew Old Testament the Eschatology of the Nation
greatly predominates over that of the Individual. Indeed in pre-Exilic
times “the day of Yahwe,” with its national judgments, constitutes
the all but exclusive subject of the prophetic teaching as to the
future. Only from the Exile, (597 to 538 B.C.), onwards, does the
eschatological development begin to grow in complexity, for now the
individualism first preached by Jeremiah begins to maintain its claim
also. But not till the close of the fourth century, or the beginning of
the third century B.C., do the separate eschatologies of the individual
and of the nation issue finally in their synthesis: the righteous
individual will participate in the Messianic Kingdom, the righteous
dead of Israel will arise to share therein,--thus in Isaiah xxvi, 1-19,
a passage which it is difficult to place earlier than about 334 B.C.
The resurrection is here limited to the just. In Daniel xii, 2, which
is probably not earlier than 165 B.C., the resurrection is extended,
not indeed to all members of Israel, but, with respective good and evil
effects, to its martyrs and apostates.
And the slowness and incompleteness of the development throughout the
Hebrew Old Testament is strikingly illustrated by the great paucity
of texts which yield, without the application of undue pressure, any
clear conviction or hope of a heightened, or even a sheer, maintenance
of the soul’s this-life consciousness and force after death. Besides
the passages just indicated, Dr. Charles can only find Psalms xlix and
lxxiii, and Job xix, 25-27, all three, according to him, later than
Ezekiel, who died in 571 B.C.[198] The textually uncertain and obscure
Job-passage (xix, 25, 26) must be discounted, since it evidently
demands interpretation according to the plain presupposition and point
of the great poem as a whole.--And the same result is reached by the
numerous, entirely unambiguous, passages which maintain the negative
persuasion. In the hymn put into the mouth of the sick king Hezekiah,
for about 713 B.C., (a composition which seems to be very late,
perhaps only of the second century B.C.), we hear: “The grave cannot
praise Thee … they that go down into the pit cannot hope for truth.
The living, the living, he shall praise Thee, as I do this day.” And
the Psalter contains numerous similar declarations. Thus vi, 5: “In
death there is no remembrance of Thee: in the grave who shall give Thee
thanks?” and cxv, 17: “The dead praise not the Lord, neither any that
go down into silence; but _we_ praise the Lord.” See also Psalms xxx,
19; lxxxviii, 11.
Indeed the name for the Departed is Rephaim, “the limp, the powerless
ones.” Stade well says: “According to the ancient Israelitish
conception the entire human being, body and soul, outlasts death,
whilst losing all that makes life worth living. That which persists
in Sheol for all eternity is the form of man, emptied of all content.
Antique thought ignores as yet that there exists no such thing as a
form without substance. The conception has as little in common with
the conviction of the Immortality of the Soul, which found its chief
support in Greek ideas, as with the expectation of the Resurrection,
which grew out of the Jewish Messianic hope, or with the Christian
anticipation of Eternal Life, which is also based upon religious
motives.”[199]
Yet, with respect to this objection from the lateness of the doctrine,
we must not forget that fully consistent Monotheism and Monogamy are
also late, but not, on that account, less true or less precious; and
indeed that, as a universal rule, the human mind has acquired at all
adequate convictions as to most certain and precious truths but slowly
and haltingly. This process is manifest even in Astronomy, Geology,
Botany, Human Anatomy. It could not fail to be, not less but more
the case in a matter like this which, if it concerns us most deeply,
is yet both too close to us to be readily appreciated in its true
proportions, and too little a matter of mathematical demonstration
or of direct experience not to take much time to develop, and not to
demand an ever-renewed acquisition and purification, being, as it is,
the postulate and completion of man’s ethical and spiritual faiths, at
their deepest and fullest.
(3) And with regard to the unsatisfactory character of some of the
earliest manifestations of the belief, this point is brought home to
us, with startling vividness, in the beginnings of the doctrine in
ancient Greece. For Rhode’s very careful and competent examination of
precisely this side of the whole question shows conclusively (even
though I think, with Crusius, that he has overlooked certain rudiments
of analogous but healthy experiences and beliefs in pre-Dionysiac
Greece) how new and permanently effective a contribution to the full
doctrine was made, for the Hellenic world and hence indirectly for
all Western humanity, by the self-knowledge gained in that wildly
orgiastic upheaval, those dervish-like dances and ecstatic fits during
the Dionysian night-celebrations on the Thracian mountain-sides.
Indeed Rhode traces how from these experiences, partly from the
continuation of them, partly from the reaction against them, on the
part of the intensely dualistic and ascetic teaching and training of
the Orphic sect, there arose, and filtered through to Pythagoras, to
Plato, and to the whole Neo-Platonist school, the clear conception
and precise terminology concerning ecstatic, enthusiastic states,
the divinity and eternity of the human soul, its punitive lapse
into and imprisonment within the body, and its need of purification
throughout the earthly life and of liberation through death from this
its incurably accidental and impeding companion.--Thus we get here,
concerning one of the chief sources of at least the formulation of our
belief in Immortality, what looks a very nest of suspicious, repulsive
circumstances:--psycho-physical phenomena, which, quite explicable to,
and indeed explained by, us now as in nowise supernatural, could not
fail to appear portentous to those men who first experienced them;
unmoral or immoral attitudes and activities of mind and will; and
demonstrable excesses of feeling and conception as regards both the
static goodness, the downright divinity, eternity, and increateness
of the soul, and the unmixed evil of the body with its entirely
disconnected alongsideness to the soul. Does not all this spell a mass
of wild hallucination, impurity, fanaticism, and superstition?
Yet here again it behoves us, if not to accept, yet also not to reject,
in wholesale fashion and in haste. For the profoundly experienced
Professor Pierre Janet shows[200] us, what is now assumed as an axiom,
and as the ultimate justification of the present widespread interest
in the study of Hysteria, that “we must admit for the moral world the
great principle universally admitted for the physical world since
Claude Bernard,--viz. that the laws of illness are, at bottom, the
same as those of health, and that, in the former, there is but the
exaggeration or the diminution of phenomena which existed already in
the latter.”
And if thus our recent studies of morbid mentalities have been able
to throw a flood of light upon the mechanism and character of the
healthy mind, a mind more difficult to analyze precisely because
of the harmonious interaction of its forces, there is nothing very
surprising if man, in the past, learnt to know his own fundamental
nature better in and through periods of abnormal excitation than in
those of normal balance. And the resultant doctrines in the case in
question only required, and demand again and again, a careful pruning
and harmonizing to show forth an extraordinary volume of abiding
truth. The insuppressible difference between mind and matter, and the
distinction between the fully recollected soul (intuitive reason), and
explicit reasoning; the immeasurable superiority of mind over matter,
and the superiority of that full reason over this “thin” reasoning;
the certainty, involved in all our inevitable mental categories and
assumptions and in all our motives for action, of this mind and
intuition being more like the cause of all things than are those
other inferior realities and activities; the indestructibleness of
the postulates and standards of objective and infinite Beauty, Truth,
Goodness, of our consciousness of being intrinsically bound to them,
and of our inmost humanity and its relative greatness being measurable
by just this our consciousness of this our obligation, and hence
by the keenness of our sense of failure, and by our striving after
purification and the realization of our immanental possibilities: all
this remains deeply fruitful and true.
And those crude early experiences and analyses certainly point to
what, even now, are our most solid reasons for belief in Immortality:
for if man’s mind and soul can thus keenly suffer from the sense
of the contingency and mutability of all things directly observed
by it without and within, it must itself be, at least in part or
potentially, outside of this flux which it so vividly apprehends
as _not_ Permanence, _not_ Rest, _not_ true Life. Let us overlook,
then, and forgive the first tumultuous, childishly rude and clumsy,
mentally and emotionally hyper-aesthetic forms of apprehension of
these great spiritual facts and laws, forms which are not, after all,
more misleading than is the ordinary anaesthetic condition of our
apprehending faculties towards these fundamental forces and testimonies
of our lot and nature. Not the wholesale rejection, then, of even those
crude Dionysian witnessings, still less of the already more clarified
Orphic teaching, and least of all of Plato’s great utilizations and
spiritualizations can be required of us, but only a reinterpretation
of those first impressions and of mankind’s analogous experiences, and
a sifting and testing of the latter by the light of all that has been
deeply lived through, and seriously thought out, by spiritually awake
humanity ever since.--And we should remember that the history of the
doctrine among the Jews is, as has already been intimated, grandly free
from any such suspicious occasions and concomitances.
2. _Two Philosophical Difficulties._
Yet it is precisely this latter, social, body-and-soul-survival
doctrine which brings the second group of objections, the philosophical
difficulties, to clear articulation. For thus we are unavoidably driven
to one or other of the equally difficult alternatives, of a bodiless
life of the soul, and of a survival or resurrection of the body.
(1) Christianity, by its explicit teachings, and even more by its whole
drift and interior affinities, requires the survival of all that is
essential to the whole man, and conceives this whole as constituted,
not by thought alone but also by feeling and will and the power of
effectuation; so that the body, or some unpicturable equivalent to
it, seems necessary to this physico-spiritual, ultimately organic
conception of what man is and must continue to be, if he is to remain
man at all.--And Psychology, on its part, is showing us, more and more,
how astonishingly wide and deep is the dependence, at least for their
actuation, of the various functions and expressions of man’s character
and spirit upon his bodily frame. For not only is the reasoning
faculty seen, ever since Aristotle, to depend, for its material and
stimulation, upon the impressions of the senses, nor can we represent
it to ourselves otherwise than as seated in the brain or in some
such physical organism, but the interesting Lange-James observations
and theory make it likely that also the emotions,--the feelings as
distinct from sensations,--ever result, as a matter of fact, from
certain foregoing, physico-neural impressions and modifications, which
latter follow upon this or that perception of the mind, a perception
which would otherwise, as is the case in certain neural lesions and
anaesthesias, remain entirely dry and unemotional.[201]--And the
sense of the Infinite, which we have had such reason to take as the
very centre of religion, arises ever, within man’s life here below,
in contrast to, and as a concomitant and supplementation of, his
perception of the Finite and Contingent, and hence not without his
senses being alive and active.
Now all this fits in admirably with the whole Jewish-Christian respect
for, high claims upon, and constant training of the body, the senses,
the emotions, and with the importance attached to the Visible and
Audible,--History, Institutions, Society.--Yet our difficulties are
clear. For however spiritually we may conceive a bodily survival or
resurrection; however completely we may place the identity of the
various stages of the body in this life, and the sameness between
the body before death and after the resurrection, in the identity of
its quasi-creator, the body-weaving soul, we can in nowise picture
to ourselves such a new, indefinitely more spiritual, incorporation,
and we bring upon ourselves acute difficulties, for both before and
after this unpicturable event. Before the resurrection there would
have to be unconsciousness between death and that event; but thus
the future life is broken up, and for no spiritual reason. Or there
would be consciousness; but then the substitute for the body, that
occasions this consciousness, would, apparently, render all further
revivification of the body unnecessary. And if we take the resurrection
as effected, we promptly feel how mixed and clumsy, how inadequate,
how less, and not more, than the best and noblest elements of our
experience and aspirations even here and now, is such a, still
essentially temporal and spacial, mode of existence.
I take it that, against all this, we can but continue to maintain
two points. The soul’s life after bodily death is not a matter of
experience or of logical demonstration, but a postulate of faith and a
consequence from our realization of the human spirit’s worth; and hence
is as little capable of being satisfactorily pictured, as are all the
other great spiritual realities which can nevertheless be shown to be
presupposed and implicitly affirmed by every act of faith in the final
truth and abiding importance of anything whatsoever.--And again, it is
not worth while to attempt to rescue, Aristotle-wise, just that single,
and doubtless not the highest, function of man’s spirit and character,
his dialectic faculty, or even his intellectual intuitive power, for
the purpose of thus escaping, or at least minimizing, the difficulties
attendant upon the belief in Immortality. If we postulate, as we do,
man’s survival, we must postulate, without being able to fill in or to
justify any details of the scheme, the survival of all that may and
does constitute man’s true and ultimate personality. How much or how
little this may precisely mean, we evidently know but very imperfectly:
but we know enough to be confident that it means more than the
abstractive, increasingly dualistic school of Plato, Philo, Plotinus,
Proclus would allow.
(2) But speculative reason seems also to raise a quite general
objection, based upon man’s littleness within the immense Universe, and
upon the arbitrariness of excepting those tiny points, those centres of
human consciousness, men’s souls, from the flux, the ceaseless becoming
and undoing, of all the other parts of that mighty whole, immortal,
surely, only _as_ a whole.
Here we can safely say that, at least in this precise form, the
difficulty springs predominantly not from reason or experience, but
from an untutored imagination. For all our knowledge of that great
external world, which this objection supposes to englobe our small
internal world, as a part inferior, or at most but equal, to the other
parts of that whole, is dependent upon this interior world of ours; and
however truly inherent in that external world we may hold that world’s
laws to be, those laws can, after all, be shown to be as truly the
result of our own mind’s spontaneous work,--an architectonic building
up by this mind of the sense-impressions conveyed to it from without.
And that whole Universe, in so far as it is material, cannot be
compared, either in kind or in dignity, to Mind: only the indications
there, parallel in this to our experiences within our own mind, of a
Mind and Spirit infinitely greater and nobler than, yet with a certain
affinity to, our own,--only these constitute that outer world as great
as this our inner world. Indeed it is plain that Materialism is so
far from constituting the solution to the problem of existence, that
even Psycho-Physical Parallelism, even the attribution of any ultimate
reality to Matter, are on their trial. It is anyhow already clear that,
of the two, it is easier and nearer to the truth to maintain that
Matter and its categories are simply modes in the manifestation of Mind
to minds and in the apprehension of Mind by minds, than to declare Mind
to be but a function or resultant of Matter.[202]
But if all this is so, then no simply sensible predominance of the
sensible Universe, nor even any ascertainment of the mere flux and
interchange of and between all things material and their elements,
can reasonably affect the question as to the superiority and
permanence of Mind. But we shall return, in the next chapter, to the
difficulties special to the Immortality of individual human spirits or
personalities,--for this is, I think, the point at which the problem is
still acute.
3. _Three Ethico-Practical Difficulties._
The last group of objections is directly practical and ethical, and
raises three points: the small space and influence occupied and
exercised, apparently, by such a belief, in the spiritual life of even
serious persons; the seemingly selfish, ungenerous type of religion and
of moral tone fostered by definite belief in, or at least occupation
with, the thought of an individual future life, as contrasted with the
nobility of tone engendered by such denials or abstractions from all
such beliefs as we find in Spinoza and Schleiermacher; and, finally,
the plausibility of the teaching, on the part of some distinguished
thinkers and poets, that a positive conviction of this our short
earthly life being the sole span of our individual consciousness
is directly productive of a certain deep tenderness, an heroic
concentration of attention, and a virile truthfulness, which are
unattainable, which indeed are weakened or rendered impossible by,
the necessarily vague anticipation of an unending future life; a hope
which, where operative at all, can but dwarf and deaden all earthly
aspiration and endeavour.
(1) As to the first point, which has perhaps never been more
brilliantly affirmed than by Mr. Schiller,[203] I altogether doubt
whether the numerous appearances, which admittedly seem to point that
way, are rightly interpreted by such a conclusion. For it is, for one
thing, most certainly possible to be deeply convinced of the reality
and importance of the soul’s heightened after-life, and to have no
kind of belief or interest in Psychical Research, at least in such
Research as an intrinsically valuable aid to any specifically religious
convictions. No aloofness from such attempts to find spiritual
realities at the phenomenal level can, (unless it is clear that the
majority of educated Western Europeans share the naïve assumptions of
this position), indicate negation of, or indifference to, the belief in
Immortality.--And next, it is equally certain that precisely the most
fruitful form of the belief is that which conceives the After-life as
already involved in this one, and which, therefore, dwells specially,
not upon the posteriority in time, but upon the difference in kind
of that spiritual life of the soul which, even _hic et nunc_, can be
sought after and experienced, in ever imperfect degrees no doubt, yet
really and more and more. Here we ever get an approach to Simultaneity
and Eternity, instead of sheer succession and clock-time: and here
the fundamental attitude of the believer would appear only if pressed
to deny or exclude the deathlessness of the spirit and its life,--the
usual latency and simple implication of the positive conviction, in
nowise diminishing this conviction’s reality.--And, finally, it would
have to be seen whether those who are indifferent or sceptical as to
Immortal or Eternal Life, are appreciably fewer and largely other
than those who are careless as to the other deep implications and
requirements of spiritual experience. We may well doubt whether they
would turn out to be so.
(2) As to the second point, we have already found how utterly
insuppressible is the pleasure, normally concomitant upon every act of
noble self-conquest; and how, though we can and should perform such
and all other acts, as far as possible, from the ultimate, determining
motive of thereby furthering the realization of the Kingdom of God,
there can be no solid truthfulness or sane nobility in insisting upon
attempts at thinking away and denying the fact and utility of that
concomitant pleasure. But if so, then a further, other-world extension
of that realization and of this concomitant happiness, and a belief
here below in such an eventual extension, cannot of themselves be
ignoble or debasing. Occasions for every degree and kind of purely
selfish and faultily natural acts, of acts inchoatively supernatural
but still predominantly slavish, reappear here, in close parallel to
the variety of disposition displayed by men towards every kind of
reality and ideal, towards the Family, Science, the State, Humanity,
where the same concomitances and the same high uses and mean abuses are
ever possible and actual. Neither here nor there should we attempt to
impoverish truth and life, in order to exclude the possibility of their
abuse.--And it would, of course, be profoundly unfair to contrast such
a rarely noble spirit as Spinoza among the deniers with the average
mind from among the affirmers. The average or the majority of the
deniers would not, I think, appear as more generous and devoted than
the corresponding average or majority on the other side.
(3) And as to the supposed directly beneficial effects of a positive
denial of Immortality, such as have been sung for us by George
Eliot and Giovanni Pascoli, we can safely affirm that the special
tendernesses and quiet heroisms, deduced by them from such a negation,
are too obviously dependent upon spiritual implications and instincts,
for us to be able to put them directly to the credit of that denial.
Only in so far as Immortality were not a postulate intrinsically
connected with belief in objective and obligatory Beauty, Truth, and
Goodness,--in God as our origin and end,--could its persistent and
deliberate denial not be injurious to these fundamental convictions
and to the ultimate health of the soul’s life: and of this intrinsic
non-connection there is no sufficient evidence.--Certainly, in such
a case as Spinoza’s, the same strain of reasoning which makes him
abandon individual Immortality Ought, in logic, to prevent him, a
mere hopelessly determined link in the _Natura Naturata_, from ever
attaining to the free self-dedication of himself, as now a fully
responsible member of the _Natura Naturans_. And if not all the grand
depth of his spiritual instinct and moral nobility, and its persistence
in spite of its having no logical room in the fixedly naturalistic
element of his teaching, can be urged as an argument in favour of the
ultimate truth and ethical helpfulness of that whole element, neither
can it be urged with respect to what is presumably one part of that
element, his denial of personal Immortality.
II. CATHERINE’S GENERAL AFTER-LIFE CONCEPTIONS.
Now Catherine’s general After-Life Conceptions in part bring into
interesting prominence, in part really meet and overcome, the
perplexities and mutually destructive alternatives which we have just
considered. I shall here again leave over to the next chapter the
simply ultimate questions, such as that of the pure Eternity _versus_
the Unendingness of the soul; but shall allow myself, as to one set
of her general ideas, a little digression as to the probability of
their ultimate literary suggestion by Plato.--These Platonic passages
probably reached her too indirectly, and by means and in forms which I
have too entirely failed to discover, for me to be able to discuss them
in my chapter devoted to her assured and demonstrably direct literary
sources. But these sayings of Plato greatly help to illustrate the
meaning of her doctrine.--I shall group these, her general, positions
and implications under four heads, and shall consider three of these
as, in substance, profoundly satisfactory, but one of them, the second,
as acceptable only with many limitations, although this second has
obviously much influenced the form given by her to several of those
other conceptions.
1. _Forecasts of the Hereafter, based upon present experience._
First, then, we get, as the fundamental presupposition of the
whole Eschatology, a grandly sane, simple, and profound doctrine
formulated over and over again and applied throughout, with a splendid
consistency, as the key and limit to all her anticipations and
picturings. Only because of the fact, and of our conviction of the
fact, of the unbroken continuity and identity of God with Himself,
of the human soul with itself, and of the deepest of the relations
subsisting between that God and the soul, across the chasm formed by
our body’s death, and only in proportion as we can and do experience
and achieve, during this our earthly life, certain spiritual laws and
realities of a sufficiently elemental, universal, and fruitful, more or
less time- and space-less character, can we (whilst ever remembering
the analogical nature of such picturings even as to the soul’s life
here) safely and profitably forecast certain general features of the
future which is thus already so largely a present. But, given these
conditions in the present, we can and should forecast the future,
to the extent implied. And as Plato’s great imaginative projection,
his life-work, the _Republic_, achieves its original end, (of making
more readily understandable, by objectivizing on a large scale, the
life of the inner city of our own soul), in so far as he has rightly
understood the human soul and has found appropriate representations
of its powers, laws, and ideals in his future commonwealth, even
if we cannot accept this picture for political purposes and in all
its details: so is it also with Catherine’s projection, which, if
bolder in its subject-matter, is, most rightly, indefinitely more
general in its indications than is Plato’s great diagram of the soul.
Man’s spiritual personality, being held by her to survive death,--to
retain its identity and an at least equivalent consciousness, of that
identity,--the deepest experiences of that personality before the
body’s death are conceived as re-experienced by it, in a heightened
degree and form, after death itself. Hence these great pictures, of
what the soul will experience then, would remain profoundly true of
what the soul seeks and requires now, even if there were no _then_ at
all.
And note particularly how only with regard to one stage and condition
of the spirit’s future life,--that of the purification of the imperfect
soul,--does she indulge in any at all direct doctrine or detailed
picturing; and this, doubtless, not only because she has experienced
much concerning this matter in her own life here, but also because
the projection of these experiences would still give us, not the
ultimate state, but more or less only a prolongation of our mixed,
joy-in-suffering life upon earth. As to the two ultimate states, we get
only quite incidental glimpses, although even these are strongly marked
by her general position and method.
2. _Catherine’s forecasts and present experience correspondingly
limited._
And next, coming to the projection itself, we naturally find it
to present all the strength and limitations of her own spiritual
experiences which are thus projected: her attitude towards the body
and towards human fellowship, (two subjects which are shown to be
closely inter-related by the continuous manner in which they stand
and fall together throughout the history of philosophy and religion,)
thus constitute the second general peculiarity of her Eschatology. We
have already noted, in her life, her strongly ecstatic, body-ignoring,
body-escaping type of religion; and how, even in her case, it tended to
starve the corporate, institutional conceptions and affections. Here,
in the projection, we find both the cause and the effect again, and on
a larger scale. Her continuous psycho-physical discomforts and keen
thirst for a unity and simplicity as rapid and complete as possible,
the joy and strength derived from ecstatic habits and affinities, would
all make her, without even herself being aware of it, drop all further
thought as to the future fate of that oppressive “prison-house” from
which her spirit had at last got free.
Now such non-occupation with the fate of the body and of her
fellow-souls may appear quite appropriate in her Purgatorial
Eschatology, yet we cannot but find that, even here, it already
possesses grave disadvantages, and that it persists throughout all her
After-life conceptions. For in all the states and stages of the soul we
get a markedly unsocial, a _sola cum solo_ picture. And yet there is,
perhaps, no more striking difference, amongst their many affinities,
between Platonism and Christianity than the intense Individualism
which marks the great Greek’s doctrine, and the profoundly social
conception which pervades Our Lord’s own teaching,--in each case as
regards the next life as well as this one. Plotinus’s great culminating
commendation of “the flight of the alone to the Alone” continues
Plato’s tradition; whereas, if even St. Paul and the Joannine writings
speak at times as though the individual soul attained to its full
personality in and by direct intercourse with God alone, the Synoptic
Gospels, and at bottom also those two great lovers of Our Lord’s
spirit, never cease to emphasize the social constituent of the soul’s
life both here and hereafter. The Kingdom of Heaven, the Soul of
the Church, as truly constitutes the different personalities, their
spirituality and their joy, as they constitute it,--that great Organism
which, as such, is both first and last in the Divine thought and love.
Here, in the at least partial ignoring of these great social facts,
we touch the main defect of most mystical outlooks; yet this defect
does not arise from what they possess, but from what they lack. For
solitude, and the abstractive, unifying, intuitive, emotional, mystical
element is also wanted, and this element and movement Catherine
exemplifies in rare perfection. Indeed, in the great classical,
central period of her life she had, as we know, combined all this
with much of the outward movement, society, detailed observation,
attachment, the morally _en-static_, the immanental type. Unfortunately
the same ill-health and ever-increasing predominance of the former
element, which turned her, quite naturally, to these eschatological
contemplations, and which indeed helped to give them their touching
tone of first-hand experience, also tended, of necessity, to make her
drop even such slight and lingering social elements as had formerly
coloured her thought. It is, then, only towards the understanding and
deepening of the former of these two necessary movements of religion,
that these, her latter-day enlargements of some of her deepest
experiences and convictions will be found true helps.
Yet if the usual _ad extra_ disadvantages of such an abstractive
position towards the body are thus exemplified by her, in this her
unsocial, individualistic attitude, it is most interesting to note
how entirely she avoids the usual _ad intra_ drawbacks of this same
position. For if her whole attention, and, increasingly, even her
consciousness are, in true ecstatic guise, absorbed away from her
fellows and concentrated exclusively upon God in herself and herself
in God, yet this consciousness consists not only of _Noûs_, that dry
theoretic reason which, already by Plato, but still more by Aristotle,
is alone conceived as surviving the body, but contains also the upper
range of _Thumos_,--all those passions of the noblest kind,--love,
admiration, gratitude, utter self-donation, joy in purifying suffering
and in an ever-growing self-realization as part of the great plan of
God,--all the highest notes in that wondrous scale of deep feeling and
of emotionally coloured willing which Plato made dependent, not for its
character but for the possibility of its operation, upon the body’s
union with the soul.--And thus we see how, in her conception of the
soul’s own self within itself and of its relation to God, the Christian
idea of Personality, as of a many-sided organism in which Love and
Will are the very flower of the whole, has triumphed over the Platonic
presentation of the Spirit, in so far as this is taken to require and
achieve an ultimate sublimation free from all emotive elements. Thus
in her doctrine the whole Personality survives death, although this
Personality energizes only, as it were upwards, to God alone, and
not also sideways and downwards, towards its fellows and the lesser
children of God.
3. _Catherine’s forecast influenced by Plato._
Catherine’s third peculiarity consists in a rich and profound
organization of two doctrines, the one libertarian, the other
determinist; and requires considerable quotation from Plato, whose
teachings, bereft of all transmigration-fancies, seem clearly to
reappear here, (however complex may have been the mediation,) in
Catherine’s great conception.
The determinist doctrine maintains that virtue and vice, in proportion
as they are allowed their full development, spontaneously and
necessarily attain to their own congenital consummation, a consummation
which consists, respectively, in the bliss inseparable from the final
and complete identity between the inevitable results upon itself of
the soul’s deliberate endeavours, and the indestructible requirements
of this same soul’s fundamental nature; and in the misery of the, now
fully felt but only gradually superable, or even, in other cases,
insuperable, antagonism between the inevitable consequences within its
own self of the soul’s more or less deliberate choosings, and those
same, here also ineradicable, demands of its own truest nature.
As Marsilio Ficino says, in his _Theologia Platonica_, published in
Florence in 1482: “Virtue is reward in its first budding, reward is
virtue full-grown. Vice is punishment at the moment of its birth;
punishment is vice at its consummation. For, in each of these cases,
one and the same thing is first the simple seed and then the full ear
of corn; and one and the same thing is the full ear of corn and then
the food of man. Precisely the very things then that we sow in this our
(earthly) autumn, shall we reap in that (other-world) summer-day.”[204]
It is true that forensic terms and images are also not wanting in
Catherine’s sayings; but these, in part, run simply parallel to the
immanental conception without modifying it; in part, they are in
its service; and, in part, they are the work of the theologians’
arrangements and glosses discussed in my Appendix.
And the libertarian doctrine declares that it is the soul itself which,
in the beyond and immediately after death, chooses the least painful,
because the most expressive of her then actual desires, from among the
states which the natural effects upon her own self of her own earthly
choosings have left her interiorly free to choose.
Now it is in this second doctrine especially that we find so detailed
an anticipation by Plato of a whole number of highly original and
characteristic points and combinations of points, as to render a
fortuitous concurrence between Catherine and Plato practically
impossible. Yet I have sought in vain, among Catherine’s authentic
sayings, actions, possessions, or friends, for any trace of direct
acquaintance with any of Plato’s writings. But Ficino’s Latin
translation of Plato, published, with immense applause, in Florence in
1483, 1484, must have been known, in those intensely Platonizing times,
to even non-professed Humanists in Genoa, long before Catherine’s death
in 1510, so that one or other of her intimates may have communicated
the substance of these Platonic doctrines to her.[205] Plotinus, of
whom Ficino published a Latin translation in 1492, contains but a
feeble echo of Plato on this point. Proclus, directly known only very
little till much after Catherine’s time, is in even worse case. The
Areopagite, who has so continuously taken over whole passages from
all three writers, although directly almost exclusively from Proclus,
contains nothing more immediately to the purpose than his impressive
sayings concerning Providence’s continuous non-forcing of the human
personality in its fundamental constitution and its free elections with
their inevitable consequences; hence Catherine cannot have derived her
ideas, in the crisp definiteness which they retain in her sayings, from
her cousin the Dominican nun and the Areopagite. And it is certain, as
we have seen, how scattered and inchoate are the hints which she may
have found in St. Paul, the Joannine writings, and Jacopone da Todi.
St. Augustine contains nothing that would be directly available,--an
otherwise likely source considering Catherine’s close connection with
the Augustinian Canonesses of S. Maria delle Grazie.
In Plato, then, we get five conceptions and symbolic pictures that are
practically identical with those of Catherine.
(1) First we get the conception of souls having each, in exact
accordance with the respective differences of their moral and spiritual
disposition and character, as these have been constituted by them here
below, a “place” or environment, expressive of that character, ready
for their occupation after the body’s death. “The soul that is pure
departs at death, herself invisible, to the invisible world,--to the
divine, immortal and rational: thither arriving, she lives in bliss.
But the soul that is impure at the time of her departure and is …
engrossed by the corporeal …, is weighed down and drawn back again into
the visible place (world).”
And this scheme, of like disposition seeking a like place, is then
carried out, by the help of the theory of transmigration, as a
re-incarnation of these various characters into environments, bodies,
exactly corresponding to them: gluttonous souls are assigned to asses’
bodies, tyrannous souls to those of wolves, and so on: in a word,
“there is no difficulty in assigning to all ‘a whither’ (a place)
answering to their general natures and propensities.”[206] For this
corresponds to a law which runs throughout all things,--a determinism
of consequences which does not prevent the liberty of causes. “The King
of the universe contrived a general plan, by which a thing of a certain
nature found a seat and place of a certain kind. But the formation of
this nature, he left to the wills of individuals.”
Or, with the further spacial imagery of movements up, level, or down,
we get: “All things that have a soul change … and, in changing, move
according to law and the order of destiny. Lesser changes of nature
move on level ground, but great crimes sink … into the so-called lower
places …; and, when the soul becomes greatly different and divine, she
also greatly changes her place, which is now altogether holy.”[207] The
original, divinely intended “places” of souls are all high and good,
and similar to each other though not identical, each soul having its
own special “place”; and for this congenital “place” each soul has a
resistible yet ineradicable home-sickness. “The first incarnation” of
human souls which “distributes each soul to a star,” is ordained to
be similar for all.… “And when they have been of necessity implanted
in bodily forms, should they master their passions … they live in
righteousness; if otherwise, in unrighteousness. And he who lived well
through his allotted time shall be conveyed once more to a habitation
in his kindred star, and there shall enjoy a blissful and congenial
life; but failing this he shall pass into … such a form of (further)
incarnation as fits his disposition … until he shall overcome, by
reason, all that burthen that afterwards clung around him.”[208]
If from all this we exclude the soul’s existence before any
beginning of its body, its transmigration into other bodies, and the
self-sufficiency of reason; and if we make it all to be penetrated
by God’s presence, grace, and love, and by our corresponding or
conflicting emotional and volitional as well as intellectual attitude:
we shall get Catherine’s position exactly.
(2) But again, in at least one phase of his thinking, Plato pictures
the purification of the imperfect soul as effected, of at least as
begun, not in a succession of “places” of an extensionally small but
organic kind, bodies, but in a “place” of an extensionally larger but
inorganic sort,--the shore of a lake, where the soul has to wait.
“The Acherusian lake is the lake to the shores of which the many go
when they are dead; and, after waiting an appointed time, which to
some is longer and to others shorter, they are sent back to be born
as animals.” Here we evidently get a survival of the conception,
predominant in Homer, of a pain-and-joyless Hades, but limited here to
the middle, the imperfect class of souls, and followed, in their case,
by transmigration, to which alone, apparently, purification is directly
attached.
In the same Dialogue we read later on: “Those who appear to have lived
neither well nor ill … go to the river Acheron, and are carried to the
lake; and there they dwell and are purified of their evil deeds … and
are absolved and receive the rewards of their good deeds according to
their deserts.” Here we have, evidently, still the same “many” and the
same place, the shores of the Acherusian lake, but also an explicit
affirmation of purification effected there, for this purification is
now followed directly, not by re-incarnation, but by the ultimate
happiness in the soul’s original and fundamentally congenial “place.”
And this scheme is far more conformable to Plato’s fundamental
position: for how can bodies, even lower than the human, help to purify
the soul which has become impure precisely on occasion of its human
body?--We can see how the Christian Purgatorial doctrine derives some
of its pictures from the second of these parallel passages; yet that
the “longer or shorter waiting” of the first passage also enters into
that teaching,--especially in its more ordinary modern form, according
to which there is, in this state, no intrinsic purification.
And lower down we find: “Those who have committed crimes which,
although great, are not unpardonable,--for these it is necessary to
plunge (ἐμπεσεῖν) into Tartarus, the pains of which they are compelled
to undergo for a year; but at the end of the year they are borne to
the Acherusian lake. But those who appear incurable by reason of the
greatness of their crimes … such their appropriate destiny hurls
(ῤίπτει) into Tartarus, whence they never come forth.” Here we get a
Purgatory, pictured as a watery substance in which the more gravely
impure of the curable souls are immersed before arriving at the easier
purification, the waiting on the dry land alongside the lake; this
Purgatory is, as a “place” and, in intensity, identical with Hell; and
into this place the curable souls “plunge” and the incurable ones are
“hurled.”--Of this third passage Catherine retains the identification
of the pains of Purgatory and those of Hell; the “plunge,” or
“hurling,” of two distinct classes of souls into these pains; and
the mitigation, after a time, previous to complete cessation, of the
suffering in the case of the curable class. But the “plunge,” with her,
is common to all degrees of imperfectly pure souls; there is, for all
these souls, no change of “place” during their purgation, but only a
mitigation of suffering; and this mitigation is at work gradually and
from the first. And the ordinary modern Purgatorial teaching is like
this passage, in that it keeps the curable souls in Tartarus, say, for
one year, and lets them suffer there, apparently without mitigation,
throughout that time: and that, in the case of both classes of souls,
it conceives the punishment as extrinsic, vindictive, and inoperative.
And a fourth _Phaedo_ passage tells us: “Those who are remarkable for
having led holy lives are released from this earthly prison, and go
to their pure home, which is above, and dwell in the purer earth,”
the Isles of the Just, in Oceanus. “And those, again, amongst these
who have duly purified themselves with philosophy, live henceforth
altogether without the body, in mansions fairer far than these.” Here
we get, alongside of the two Purgatories and the one Hell, two Heavens,
of which the first is but taken over from Homer and Pindar, but of
which the second is Plato’s own conception. Catherine, in entire accord
with the ordinary teaching, has got but one “place” of each kind; and
her Heaven corresponds, apart from his formal and final exclusion of
every sort of body, to the second of these Platonic Heavens; whilst,
here again, the all-encompassing presence of God’s love for souls as
of the soul’s love for God, which, in her teaching, is the beginning,
means, and end of the whole movement, effects an indefinite difference
between the two positions.[209]
(3) Yet Plato, in his most characteristic moods, explicitly anticipates
Catherine as to the intrinsic, ameliorative nature and work of
Purgatory: “The proper office of punishment is two-fold: he who
is rightly punished ought either to become better … by it, or he
ought to be made an example to his fellows, that they may see what
he suffers and … become better. Those who are punished by Gods and
men and improved, are those whose sins are curable … by pain and
suffering:--for there is no other way in which they can be delivered
from evil, as in this world so also in the other. But the others are
incurable--the time has passed at which they can receive any benefit
themselves.… Rhadamanthus,” the chief of the three nether-world judges,
“looks with admiration on the soul of some just one, who has lived in
holiness and truth … and sends him” without any intervening suffering
“to the Isles of the Blessed.… I consider how I shall present my soul
whole and undefiled before the Judge, in that day.”[210] Here the last
sentence is strikingly like in form as well as in spirit to many a
saying of St. Paul and Catherine.
(4) But the following most original passages give us a sentiment and an
image which, in their special drift, are as opposed to St. Paul, and
indeed to the ordinary Christian consciousness, as they are dear to
Catherine, in this matter so strongly, although probably unconsciously,
Platonist, indeed Neo-Platonist, in her affinities. “In the time of
Kronos, indeed down to that of Zeus, the Judgment was given on the day
on which men were to die,” _i.e._ immediately _before_ their death;
“and the consequence was, that the judgments were not well given,--the
souls found their way to the wrong places. Zeus said: ‘The reason is,
that the judged have their clothes on, for they are alive.… There are
many, having evil souls, who are apparelled in fair bodies or wrapt
round in wealth and rank.… The Judges are awed by them; and they
themselves too have their clothes on when judging: their eyes and
ears and their whole bodies are interposed, as a veil, before their
own souls. What is to be done? … Men shall be entirely stript before
they are judged, for they shall be judged when dead; the Judge too
shall be naked, that is, dead: he, with his naked soul, shall pierce
into the other naked soul immediately _after_ each man dies … and is
bereft of all his kith and kin, and has left behind him all his brave
attire upon earth, and thus the Judgment will be just.’”[211]--If we
compare this with St. Paul’s precisely contrary instinct and desire to
be “clothed upon” at death, “lest we be found naked,” i.e. without the
protection of any kind of body; and then realize Catherine’s intense
longing for “nudità,”--to strip herself here, as far as possible, from
all imperfection and self-delusion before the final stripping off of
the body in death, and to appear, utterly naked, before the utterly
naked eye of God, so that no “clothes” should remain requiring to
be burnt away by the purifying fires,[212] the profound affinity of
sentiment and imagery between Catherine and Plato--and this on a point
essentially Platonic,--is very striking.
(5) But, above all, in his deep doctrine as to the soul’s spontaneous
choice after death of that condition, “place,” which, owing to the
natural effects within her of her earthly willings and self-formation,
she cannot but now find the most congenial to herself, Plato appears as
the ultimate source of a literary kind for Catherine’s most original
view, which otherwise is, I think, without predecessors. “The souls,”
he tells us in the _Republic_, “immediately on their arrival in the
other world, were required to go to Lachesis,” one of the three Fates.
And “an interpreter, having taken from her lap a number of lots and
plans of life, spoke as follows: ‘Thus saith Lachesis, the daughter of
Necessity.… “Your destiny shall not be allotted to you, but you shall
choose it for yourselves. Let him who draws the first lot, be the first
to choose a life which shall be his irrevocably.… The responsibility
lies with the chooser, Heaven is guiltless.”’” “No settled character
of soul was included in the plans of life, because, with the change
of life, the soul inevitably became changed itself.” “It was a truly
wonderful sight, to watch how each soul selected its life.… When all
the souls had chosen their lives, Lachesis dispatched with each of
them the Destiny he had selected, to guard his life and satisfy his
choice.”[213] And in the _Phaedrus_ Plato tells us that “at the end of
the first thousand years” (of the first incarnation) “the good souls
and also the evil souls both come to cast lots and to choose their
second life; and they may take any that they like.”[214]
In both the dialogues the lots are evidently taken over from popular
mythology, but are here made merely to introduce a certain orderly
succession among the spontaneous choosings of the souls themselves,
whilst the lap of the daughter of Necessity, spread out before all
the choosers previous to their choice, and the separate, specially
appropriate Destiny that accompanies each soul after its choice,
indicate plainly that, although the choice itself is the free act
and pure self-expression of each soul’s then present disposition,
yet that this disposition is the necessary result of its earthly
volitions and self-development or self-deformation, and that the
choice now made becomes, in its turn, the cause of certain inevitable
consequences,--of a special environment which itself is then productive
of special effects upon, and of special occasions for, the final
working out of this soul’s character.--Plotinus retains the doctrine:
“the soul chooses there” in the Other world,--“its Daemon and its kind
of life.”[215] But neither Proclus nor Dionysius has the doctrine,
whilst Catherine, on the contrary, reproduces it with a penetrating
completeness.
4. _Simplifications characteristic of Catherine’s Eschatology._
And under our last, fourth head, we can group the simplifications
characteristic of Catherine’s Eschatology.
(1) One simplification has, of course, for now some fifteen hundred
years, been the ordinary Christian conception: I mean the elimination
of the time-element between the moment of death and the beginning of
the three states. Yet it is interesting to note how by far the greatest
of the Latin Fathers, St. Augustine, who died in A.D. 430, still clings
predominantly to the older Christian and Jewish conception of the soul
abiding in a state of shrunken, joy-and-painless consciousness from
the moment of the body’s death up to that of the general resurrection
and judgment. “After this short life, thou wilt not yet be where the
saints will be,” _i.e._ in Heaven. “Thou wilt not yet be there: who
is ignorant of this? But thou canst straightway be where the rich
man descried the ulcerous beggar to be a-resting, far away,” _i.e._
in Limbo. “Placed in that rest, thou canst await the day of judgment
with security, when thou shalt receive thy body also, when thou shalt
be changed so as to be equal to an Angel.”[216] Only with regard to
Purgatory, a state held by him, in writings of his last years, 410-430
A.D., to be possible, indeed probable, does he make an exception to
his general rule: for such purification would have to take place” in
the interval of time between the death of the body and the last day of
condemnation and reward.”[217]
It is doubtless the still further fading away of the expectation, so
vivid and universal in early Christian times, of the proximity of Our
Lord’s Second Advent, and the tacit prevalence of Greek affinities and
conceptions concerning the bodiless soul, that helped to eliminate,
at last universally, this interval of waiting, in the case of souls
too good or too bad for purgation, from the general consciousness
of at least Western Christendom. The gain in this was the great
simplification and concentration of the immediate outlook and interest;
the loss was the diminished apprehension of the essentially complex,
concrete, synthetic character of man’s nature, and of the necessity for
our assuming that this characteristic will be somehow preserved in this
nature’s ultimate perfection.
(2) There is a second simplification in Catherine which, though here
St. Augustine leads the way, is less common among Christians: her three
other-world “places” are not, according to her ultimate thought, three
distinct spacial extensions and localities, filled, respectively, with
ceaselessly suffering, temporarily suffering, and ceaselessly blessed
souls; but they are, (notwithstanding all the terms necessitated by
such spacial picturings as “entering,” “coming out,” “plunging into”),
so many distinct states and conditions of the soul, of a painful,
mixed, or joyful character. We shall have these her ultimate ideas very
fully before us presently. But here I would only remark that this her
union of a picturing faculty, as vivid as the keenest sense-perception,
and of a complete non-enslavement to, a vigorous utilization of,
these life-like spacial projections, by a religious instinct and
experience which never forgets that God and souls are spirits, to whom
our ordinary categories of space and extension, time and motion, do
not and cannot in strictness apply, is as rare as it is admirable;
and that, though her intensely anti-corporeal and non-social attitude
made such a position more immediately easy for her than it can be for
those who remain keenly aware of the great truths involved in the
doctrines of the Resurrection of the Body and the Communion of Saints,
this her trend of thought brings into full articulation precisely the
deepest of our spiritual apprehensions and requirements, whilst it is
not her fault if it but further accentuates some of our intellectual
perplexities.
We get much in St. Augustine, which he himself declares to have
derived, in the first instance, from “the writings of the Platonists,”
which doubtless means above all Plotinus, (that keen spiritual thinker
who can so readily be traced throughout this part of the great
Convert’s teaching), as to this profound incommensurableness between
spiritual presence, energizing, and affectedness on the one hand, and
spacial position, extension, and movement on the other. “What place is
there within me, to which my God can come? … I would not exist at all,
unless Thou already wert within me.” “Thou wast never a place, and yet
we have receded from Thee; and we have drawn near to Thee, yet Thou
art never a place.” “ Are we submerged and do we emerge? Yet it is not
places into which we are plunged and out of which we rise. What can be
more like to places and yet more unlike? For here the affections are in
case,--the impurity of our spirit, which flows downwards, oppressed by
the love of earthly cares; and the holiness of Thy Spirit, which lifts
us upwards with the love of security.”[218] For, as he teaches “the
spiritual creature can only be changed by times,”--a succession within
a duration: “by remembering what it had forgotten, or by learning
what it did not know, or by willing what it did not will. The bodily
creature can be changed by times and places,” by spacial motion, “from
earth to heaven, from heaven to earth, from east to west.” “That thing
is not moved through space which is not extended in space … the soul is
not considered to move in space, unless it be held to be a body.”[219]
In applying the doctrine just expressed to eschatological matters, St.
Augustine concludes: “If it be asked whether the soul, when it goes
forth from the body, is borne to some corporeal places, or to such as,
though incorporeal, are like to bodies, or to what is more excellent
than either: I readily answer that, unless it have some kind of body,
it is not borne to bodily places at all, or, at least, that it is not
borne to them by bodily motion.… But I myself do not think that it
possesses any body, when it goes forth from this earthly body.… It gets
borne, according to its deserts, to spiritual conditions, or to penal
places having a similitude to bodies.”[220]
The reader will readily note a curiously uncertain frame of mind
in this last utterance. I take it that Plotinian influences are
here being checked by the Jewish conception of certain, definitely
located, provision-chambers (_promptuaria_), in which all souls are
placed for safe keeping, between the time of the body’s death and its
resurrection. So in the Fourth Book of Esra (of about 90 A.D.), “the
souls of the just in their chambers said: ‘How long are we to remain
here?’”; and in the Apocalypse of Baruch (of about 150-250 A.D.), “at
the coming of the Messiah, the provision-chambers will open, in which
the” whole, precise “number of the souls of the just have been kept,
and they will come forth.”[221]
But it is St. Thomas Aquinas who, by the explicit and consistent
adoption and classification of these _promptuaria receptacula_, reveals
to us more clearly the perplexities and fancifulnesses involved in
the strictly spacial conception. “Although bodies are not assigned
to souls (immediately) after death, yet certain bodily places are
congruously assigned to these souls in accordance with the degree of
their dignity, in which places they are, as it were, locally, in the
manner in which bodiless things can be in space: each soul having a
higher place assigned to it, according as it approaches more or less
to the first substance, God, whose seat, according to Scripture, is
Heaven.” “In the Scriptures God is called the Sun, since He is the
principle of spiritual life, as the physical sun is of bodily life;
and, according to this convention, … souls spiritually illuminated have
a greater fitness for luminous bodies, and sin-darkened souls for dark
places.” “It is probable that, as to local position, Hell and the Limbo
of the Fathers constitute one and the same place, or are more or less
continuous.” “The place of Purgatory adjoins (that of) Hell.” “There
are altogether five places ready to receive (_receptanda_) souls bereft
of their bodies: Paradise, the Limbo of the Fathers, Purgatory, Hell,
and the Limbo of Infants.”[222]
No doubt all these positions became the common scholastic teaching. But
then, as Cardinal Bellarmine cogently points out: “no ancient, as far
as I know, has written that the Earthly Paradise was destroyed … and I
have read a large number who affirm its existence. This is the doctrine
of all the Scholastics, beginning with St. Thomas, and of the Fathers.
… St. Augustine indeed appears to rank this truth amongst the dogmas
of faith.”[223] We shall do well, then, not to press these literal
localization-schemes, especially since, according to St. Augustine’s
penetrating analysis, our spiritual experiences, already in this our
earthly existence, have a distinctly non-spacial character. Catherine’s
position, if applied to the central life of man here, and hence
presumptively hereafter, remains as true and fresh and unassailable as
ever.
(3) And her last simplification consists in taking the Fire of Hell,
the Fire of Purgatory, and the Fire and Light of Heaven as profoundly
appropriate symbols or descriptions of the variously painful or joyous
impressions produced, through the differing volitional attitudes of
souls towards Him, by the one God’s intrinsically identical presence
in each and all. In all three cases, throughout their several grades,
there are ever but two realities, the Spirit-God and the spirit-soul,
in various states of inter-relation.
Here again it is Catherine’s complete abstraction from the body which
renders such a view easy and, in a manner, necessary for her mind. But
here I would only emphasize the impressive simplicity and spirituality
of view which thus, as in the material world it finds the one sun-light
and the one fire-heat, which, in themselves everywhere the same, vary
indefinitely in their effects, owing to the varying condition of the
different bodies which meet the rays and flames; so, in the Spiritual
World it discovers One supreme spiritual Energy and Influence which,
whilst ever self-identical, is assimilated, deflected, or resisted by
the lesser spirits, with inevitably joyous, mixed, or painful states
of soul, since they can each and all resist, but cannot eradicate that
Energy’s impression within their deepest selves. And though, even with
her, the Sun-light image remains quasi-Hellenic and Intellectual, and
the Fire-heat picture is more immediately Christian and Moral: yet
she also frequently takes the sunlight as the symbol of the achieved
Harmony and Peace, and the Fire-heat as that of more or less persisting
Conflict and Pain. She is doubtless right in keeping both symbols, and
in ever thinking of each as ultimately implying the other, for God is
Beauty and Truth, as well as Goodness and Love, and man is made with
the indestructible aspiration after Him in His living completeness.
And here again Catherine has a complicated doctrinal history behind her.
We have already considered the numerous Scriptural passages where
God and His effects upon the soul are symbolized as light and fire;
and those again where joy or, contrariwise, trial and suffering are
respectively pictured by the same physical properties. And Catherine
takes the latter passages as directly explanatory of the first, in
so far as these joys and sufferings are spiritual in their causes or
effects.
Among the Greek Fathers, Clement of Alexandria tells us that “the Fire”
of Purgatory,--for he has no Eternal Damnation,--“is a rational,”
spiritual, “fire that penetrates the soul”; and Origen teaches that
“each sinner himself lights the flame of his own fire, and is not
thrown into a fire that has been lit before that moment and that exists
in front of him.… His conscience is agitated and pierced by its own
pricks.” Saints Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzum are more or
less influenced by Origen on this point. And St. John Damascene, who
died in about 750 A.D., says explicitly that the fire of Hell is not a
material fire, that it is very different from our ordinary fire, and
that men hardly know what it is.[224]
Among the Latins, St. Ambrose declares: “neither is the gnashing, a
gnashing of bodily teeth; nor is the everlasting fire, a fire of bodily
flames; nor is the worm, a bodily one.”--St. Jerome, in one passage,
counts the theory of the non-physical fire as one of Origen’s errors;
but elsewhere he mentions it without any unfavourable note, and even
enumerates several Scripture-texts which favour it, and admits that
“‘the worm which dieth not and the fire which is not quenched,’ is
understood, by the majority of interpreters (_a plerisque_), of the
conscience of sinners which tortures them.”[225]--St. Augustine, in
413 A.D., declares: “In the matter of the pains of the wicked, both
the unquenchable fire and the intensely living worm are interpreted
differently by different commentators. Some interpreters refer both
to the body, others refer both to the soul; and some take the fire
literally, in application to the body, and the worm figuratively,
in application to the soul, which latter opinion appears the more
credible.” Yet when, during the last years of his life, he came,
somewhat tentatively, to hold an other-world Purgatory as well, he
throughout assimilated this Purgatory’s fire to the fire of this-world
sufferings. Thus in 422 A.D.: “Souls which renounce the wood, hay,
straw, built upon that foundation (I Cor. iii, 11-15), not without pain
indeed (since they loved these things with a carnal affection), but
with faith in the foundation, a faith operative through love … arrive
at salvation, through a certain fire of pain.… Whether men suffer these
things in this life only, or such-like judgments follow even after
this life--in either case, this interpretation of that text is not
discordant with the truth.” “‘He shall be saved yet so as by fire,’
because the pain, over the loss of the things he loved, burns him. It
is not incredible that some such thing takes place even after this life
… that some of the faithful are saved by a certain purgatorial fire,
more quickly or more slowly, according as they have less or more loved
perishable things.”[226]
St. Thomas, voicing and leading Scholastic opinion, teaches that the
fire of Purgatory is the same as that of Hell; and Cardinal Bellarmine,
who died in 1621, tells us: “The common opinion of theologians is that
the fire of Purgatory is a real and true fire, of the same kind as an
earthly fire. This opinion, it is true, is not of faith, but it is very
probable,”--because of the “consent of the scholastics, who cannot be
despised without temerity,” and also because of “the eruptions of Mount
Etna.”[227] Yet the Council of Florence had, in 1439, restricted itself
to the quite general proposition that “if men die truly penitent,
in the love of God, before they have satisfied … for their sins …
their souls are purified by purgatorial pains after death”; thus
very deliberately avoiding all commitment as to the nature of these
pains.[228] Cardinal Gousset, who died in 1866, tells us: “The more
common opinion amongst theologians makes the sufferings of Purgatory
to consist in the pain of fire, or at least in a pain analogous to
that of fire.”[229] This latter position is practically identical with
Catherine’s.
As to the fire of Hell, although here especially the Scholastics, old
and new, are unanimous, it is certain that there is no definition or
solemn judgment of the Church declaring it to be material. On this
point again we find St. Thomas and those who follow him involved in
practically endless difficulties and in, for us now, increasingly
intolerable subtleties, where they try to show how a material fire
can affect an immaterial spirit. Bossuet, so severely orthodox in all
such matters, preaching, before the Court, about sin becoming in Hell
the chastisement of the sinner, does not hesitate to finish thus: “We
bear within our hearts the instrument of our punishment. ‘I shall
produce fire from thy midst, which shall devour thee’ (Ezek. xxviii,
18). I shall not send it against thee from afar, it will ignite in
thy conscience, its flames will arise from thy midst, and it will be
thy sins which will produce it.”[230]--And the Abbé F. Dubois, in a
careful article in the Ecclesiastical _Revue du Clergé Français_ of
Paris, has recently expressed the conviction that “the best minds of
our time, which are above being suspected of yielding to mere passing
fashions, feel the necessity of abandoning the literal interpretation,
judged to be insufficient, of the ancient symbols; and of returning
to a freer exegesis, of which some of the Ancients have given us the
example.”[231] Among these helpful “Ancients” we cannot but count
Catherine, with her One God Who is the Fire of Pain and the Light of
Joy to souls, according as they resist Him or will Him, either here or
hereafter.
III. CATHERINE AND ETERNAL PUNISHMENT.
_Introductory: four doctrines and difficulties to be considered._
Taking now the three great after-life conditions separately, in the
order of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, I would first of all note that
some readers may be disappointed that Catherine did not, like our
own English Mystic, the entirely orthodox optimist, Mother Juliana
of Norwich--her _Revelations_ belong to the year 1373 A.D.--simply
proclaim that, whilst the teaching and meaning of Christ and His
Church would come true, all, in ways known to God alone, would yet
be well.[232] In this manner, without any weakening of traditional
teaching, the whole dread secret as to the future of evil-doers is
left in the hands of God, and a beautifully boundless trust and hope
glows throughout those contemplations.
Yet, as I hope to show as we go along, certain assumptions and
conceptions, involved in the doctrine of Eternal Punishment, cannot
be systematically excluded, or even simply ignored, without a grave
weakening of the specifically Christian earnestness; and that,
grand as is, in certain respects, the idea of the Apocatastasis,
the Final Restitution of all Things and Souls--as taught by Clement
and Origen--it is not, at bottom, compatible with the whole drift,
philosophy, and tone, (even apart from specific sayings) of Our Lord.
And this latter teaching--of the simply abiding significance and effect
of our deliberate elections during this our one testing-time,--and
not that of an indefinite series of chances and purifications with
an ultimate disappearance of all difference between the results of
the worst life and the best, answers to the deepest postulates and
aspirations of the most complete and delicate ethical and spiritual
sense. For minds that can discriminate between shifting fashions and
solid growth in abiding truth, that will patiently seek out the deepest
instinct and simplest implications underlying the popular presentations
of the Doctrine of Abiding Consequences, and that take these
implications as but part of a larger whole: this doctrine still, and
now again, presents itself as a permanent element of the full religious
consciousness.
It would certainly be unfair to press Catherine’s rare and incidental
sayings on Hell into a formal system. Yet those remarks are deep and
suggestive, and help too much to interpret, supplement, and balance
her central, Purgatorial teaching, and indeed to elucidate her general
religious principles, for us to be able to pass them over. We have
already sufficiently considered the question as to the nature of the
Fire; and that as to Evil Spirits is reserved for the next Chapter.
Here I shall consider four doctrines and difficulties, together with
Catherine’s attitude towards them: the soul’s final fate, dependent
upon the character of the will’s act or active disposition at the
moment of the body’s death; the total moral perversion of the lost; the
mitigation of their pains; and the eternity of their punishment.