1. _Eternity dependent on the earthly life’s last moment._

Now as to the soul’s final fate being made dependent upon the

character of that soul’s particular act or disposition at the last

moment previous to death, this teaching, prominent in parts of the

_Trattato and Vita_, goes back ultimately to Ezekiel, who, as Prof.

Charles interestingly shows, introduces a double individualism into

the older, Social and Organic, Eschatology of the Hebrew Prophets.

For Man is seen, by him, as responsible for his own acts alone, and

as himself working out separately his own salvation or his own doom;

and this individual man again is looked at, not in his organic unity,

but as repeating himself in a succession of separate religious acts.

The individual act is taken to be a true expression of the whole man

at the moment of its occurrence: and hence, if this act is wicked at

the moment of the advent of the Kingdom, the agent will rightfully be

destroyed; but if it be righteous, he will be preserved.[233]--Now

the profound truth and genuine advance thus proclaimed, who can doubt

them? And yet it is clear that the doctrine here is solidly true, only

if taken as the explicitation and supplement, and even in part as the

corrective, of the previously predominant teaching. Take the Ezekielian

doctrine as complete, even for its own time, or as final over against

the later, the Gospel depth of teaching, (with its union of the social

body and of individual souls, and of the soul’s single acts and of the

general disposition produced by and reacting upon these acts), and you

get an all but solipsistic Individualism and an atomistic Psychology,

and you offend Christianity and Science equally.

It is evident that Catherine, if she can fairly be taxed with what,

if pressed, would, in her doctrine rather than in her life, be an

excessive Individualism, is, in her general teaching and practice,

admirably free from Psychological Atomism; indeed did any soul ever

understand better the profound reality of habits, general dispositions,

tones of mind and feeling and will, as distinct from the single acts

that gradually build them up and that, in return, are encircled and

coloured by them all? Her whole Purgatorial doctrine stands and falls

by this distinction, and this although, with a profound self-knowledge,

she does not hesitate to make the soul express, in one particular act

after death,--that of the Plunge,--an even deeper level of its true

attitude of will and of its moral character than is constituted by

those imperfect habits of the will, habits which it will take so much

suffering and acceptance of suffering gradually to rectify.

Thus the passages in which Catherine seems to teach that God can and

does, as it were, catch souls unawares, calling them away, and finally

deciding their fate on occasion of any and every _de facto_ volitional

condition at the instant of death, however little expressive of the

radical determination of that soul such an act or surface-state may be,

will have, (even if they be genuine, and most of them have doubtlessly

grown, perhaps have completely sprung up, under the pen of sermonizing

scribes), to be taken as hortatory, hence as partly hyperbolical.

And such an admission will in nowise deny the possibility for the

soul to express its deliberate and full disposition and determination

in a single act or combination of acts; nor that the other-world

effects will follow according to such deep, deliberate orientations

of the character: it will only deny that, at any and every moment,

any and every act of the soul sufficiently expresses its deliberate

disposition. Certainly it is comparatively rarely that the soul exerts

its full liberty, in an act of true, spiritual self-realization; and

an analogous rarity cannot but be postulated by religious philosophy

for contrary acts, of an approximately equal fulness of deliberation

and accuracy of representation, with regard to the soul’s volitional

state. And yet the operative influence towards such rare, fully

self-expressive acts of the right kind, and the aid towards similar,

massive, and truly representative volitions of the wrong kind, afforded

by even quite ordinary half-awake acts and habits of respectively good

or evil quality are so undeniable, and it is so impossible to draw

a general line as to where such wishes pass into full willings and

deliberate states: that the prevalence of a hortatory attitude towards

the whole subject is right and indeed inevitable.

2. _The reprobate will of the lost._

As to Moral Perversion, the reprobate will of the lost, we find that

Catherine approaches the question from two different, and at bottom,

on this point, incompatible, systems; but some incidental and short

sayings of hers give us suggestive hints towards a consistent position

in this difficult matter.

Catherine has a double approach. For, consistently with the strong

Neo-Platonist, Dionysian strain in her mind, she frequently teaches and

implies that Evil is the absence of Good, of Love, and nothing positive

at all. In this case Evil would not only be less strong than good--only

Manichaeans would maintain that they were equal--but, as against the

constructive force of good, it would have no kind even of destructive

strength. Varying amounts, degrees, and kinds of good, but good and

only good, everywhere, would render all, even transitory, pollution of

the soul, and all, even passing, purification of it, so much actual

impossibility and theoretical superstition. All that survived at all,

could but be good; and at most some good might be added, but no evil

could be removed, since none would exist.--Yet all this is, of course,

strongly denied and supplanted by the, at first sight, less beautiful,

but far deeper and alone fully Christian, position of her specifically

Purgatorial teaching. Here Evil is something positive, an active

disposition, orientation, and attachment of the will; it is not without

destructive force; and its cure is a positive change in that will and

its habits, and not a mere addition of good. Yet it is plain that, even

exclusively within the implications of this deeper conviction, there

is no necessity to postulate unmixed evil in the disposition of any

soul. In some the evil would be triumphing over the good; in others

good would be triumphing over evil,--each over the other, in every

degree of good or of evil, up to the all but complete extinction of all

inclinations to evil or to good respectively.

And Catherine has suggestive sayings. For one or two of them go, at

least in their implications, beyond a declaration as to the presence

of God’s extrinsic mercy in Hell, a presence indicated by a mitigation

of the souls’ sufferings to below what these souls deserve; and even

beyond the Areopagite’s insistence upon the presence of some real good

in these souls, since he hardly gets beyond their continuous possession

of those non-moral goods, existence, intelligence, and will-power.[234]

For when she says, “The ray of God’s mercy shines even in Hell,” she

need not, indeed, mean more than that extrinsic mercy, and its effect,

that mitigation. But when she declares: “if a creature could be found

that did not participate in the divine Goodness,--that creature would,

as it were, be as malignant as God is good,” we cannot, I think, avoid

applying this to the moral dispositions of such souls.[235]

Now I know that St. Thomas had already taught, in at first sight

identical terms: “Evil cannot exist (quite) pure without the admixture

of good, as the Supreme Good exists free from all admixture of evil.…

Those who are detained in Hell, are not bereft of all good”;[236] and

yet he undoubtedly maintained the complete depravation of the will’s

dispositions in these souls. And, again, after Catherine’s first

declaration there follow, (at least in the text handed down in the

_Vita_), words which explain that extrinsic mercy, not as mitigating

the finite amount of suffering due to the sinner, but as turning the

infinite suffering due to the sinner’s infinite malice, into a finite,

though indefinite amount; and hence, in the second declaration, a

corresponding interior mercy may be signified--God’s grace preventing

the sinner from being infinitely wicked.

But Catherine, unlike St. Thomas, expressly speaks not only of Good and

Evil, but of Good and Malignancy; and Malignancy undoubtedly refers

to dispositions of the will. And even if the words, now found as the

sequel to the first saying, be authentic, they belong to a different

occasion, and cannot be allowed to force the meaning of words spoken

at another time. In this latter saying the words “as it were” show

plainly that she is not thinking of a possible infiniteness of human

wickedness which has been changed, through God’s mercy, to an actual

finitude of evil; but is simply asking herself whether a man could be,

not infinitely but wholly, malignant. For she answers that, were this

possible, a man would “as it were” be as malignant as God is good, and

thus shows that the malignancy, which she denies, would only in a sense

form a counterpart to God’s benevolence: since, though the man would be

as entirely malignant as God is entirely good, God would still remain

infinite in His goodness as against the finitude of Man’s wickedness.

The difficulties of such a combination of convictions are, of course,

numerous and great. Psychologically it seems hard to understand why

this remnant of good disposition should be unable to germinate further

and further good, so that, at last, good would leaven the whole

soul. From the point of view of any Theodicy, it appears difficult

to justify the unending exclusion of such a soul from growth in, and

the acquirement of, a predominantly good will and the happiness that

accompanies such a will. And the testimony of Our Lord Himself and of

the general doctrine of the Church appear definitely opposed: for does

not His solemn declaration: “Hell, where their worm dieth not” (Mark

ix, 48), find its authoritative interpretation in the common Church

teaching as to the utterly reprobate will of the lost? And indeed

Catherine herself, in her great saying that if but one little drop of

Love could fall into Hell (that is, surely, if but the least beginning

of a right disposition towards God could enter those souls) Hell would

be turned into Heaven, seems clearly to endorse this position.

And yet, we have full experience in this life of genuinely good

dispositions being present, and yet not triumphing or even spreading

within the soul; of such conditions being, in various degrees, our own

fault; and of such defeat bringing necessarily with it more or less of

keen suffering.--There would be no injustice if, after a full, good

chance and sufficient aid had been given to the soul to actualize its

capabilities of spiritual self-constitution, such a soul’s deliberately

sporadic, culpably non-predominant, good did not, even eventually, lead

to the full satisfaction of that soul’s essential cravings.--The saying

attributed to Our Lord, which appears in St. Mark alone, is a pure

quotation from Isaiah lxvi, 24 and Ecclesiasticus vii, 17, and does not

seem to require more than an abiding distress of conscience, an eternal

keenness of remorse.

Again, the common Church-teaching is undoubtedly voiced by St. Thomas

in the words, “Since these souls are completely averse to the final end

of right reason, they must be declared to be without any good will.”

Yet St. Thomas himself (partly in explanation of the Areopagite’s

words, “the evil spirits desire the good and the best, namely, to

be, to live, and to understand”), is obliged to distinguish between

such souls’ deliberate will and their “natural will and inclination,”

and to proclaim that this latter, “which is not from themselves but

from the Author of nature, who put this inclination into nature … can

indeed be good.”[237] And, if we would not construct a scheme flatly

contradictory of all earthly experience, we can hardly restrict the

soul, even in the beyond, to entirely indeliberate, good inclinations,

and to fully deliberate, bad volitions, but cannot help interposing

an indefinite variety of inchoative energizings, half-wishes, and

the like, and thinking of these as mixed with good and evil. Indeed

this conclusion seems also required by the common teaching that the

suffering there differs from soul to soul, and this because of the

different degrees of the guilt: for such degrees depend undoubtedly

even more upon the degree of deliberation and massiveness of the will

than upon the degree of objective badness in the deed, and hence can

hardly fail to leave variously small or large fragments of more or less

good and imperfectly deliberate wishings and energizings present in the

soul.

And finally Catherine’s “little drop of Love” would, she says, “at

once” turn Hell into Heaven, and hence cannot mean some ordinary good

moral disposition or even such supernatural virtues as theological

Faith and Hope, but Pure Love alone, which latter queen of all the

virtues she is explicitly discussing there. Thus she in nowise requires

the absence from these souls of a certain remnant of semi-deliberate

virtue of a less exalted, and not necessarily regenerative kind.

3. _Mitigation of the sufferings of the lost._

As to the Mitigation of the Suffering, it is remarkable that Catherine,

who has been so bold concerning the source of the pains, and the

dispositions, of the lost souls, does not more explicitly teach such

an alleviation. I say “remarkable,” because important Fathers and

Churches, that were quite uninfected by Origenism, have held and have

acted upon such a doctrine. St. Augustine, in his _Enchiridion_ (A.D.

423 (?)) tells us that “in so far as” the Offering of the Sacrifice of

the Altar and Alms “profit” souls in the beyond, “they profit them by

procuring a full remission (of the punishment), or at least that their

damnation may become more tolerable.” And after warning men against

believing in an end to the sufferings of the lost, he adds: “But let

them consider, if they like, that the sufferings of the damned are

somewhat mitigated during certain intervals of time.”[238]--Saints

John Chrysostom and John Damascene, thoroughly orthodox Greek Fathers,

and the deeply devout hymn-writer Prudentius among the Latins, teach

similar doctrine; and in many ancient Latin missals, ranging from the

eleventh to the fourteenth century, prayers for the Mitigation of the

Sufferings of the Damned are to be found.[239]

Hence the great Jesuit Theologian Petau, though not himself

sharing this view, can declare: “Concerning such a breathing-time

(_respiratio_) of lost souls, nothing certain has as yet been decreed

by the Catholic Church, so that this opinion of most holy Fathers

should not temerariously be rejected as absurd, even though it be

foreign to the common opinion of Catholics in our time.”[240] And the

Abbé Emery, that great Catholic Christian, the second founder of St.

Sulpice, who died in 1811, showed, in a treatise _On the Mitigation

of the Pains of the Damned_, that this view had also been held by

certain Scholastic Theologians, and had been defended, without any

opposition, by Mark of Ephesus, in the Sessions of the Council of

Florence (A.D. 1439); and concluded that this doctrine was not contrary

to the Catholic Faith and did not deserve any censure. The most learned

Theologians in Rome found nothing reprehensible in this treatise, and

Pope Pius VII caused his Theologian, the Barnabite General, Padre

Fontana, to thank M. Emery for the copy sent by him to the Holy

Father.[241]

Catherine herself cannot well have been thinking of anything but some

such Mitigation when she so emphatically teaches that God’s mercy

extends even into Hell. Indeed, even the continuation of this great

saying in the present _Vita_-text formally teaches such Mitigation, yet

practically withdraws it, by making it consist in a rebate and change,

from an infinitude in degree and duration into a finitude in degree

though not in duration.[242] But, as we have already found, this highly

schematic statement is doubtless one of the later glosses, in which

case her true meaning must have been substantially that of the Fathers

referred to, viz. that the suffering, taken as anyhow finite in its

degree, gets mercifully mitigated for these souls.--And, if she was

here also faithful to her general principles, she will have conceived

the mitigation, not as simply sporadic and arbitrary, but as more or

less progressive, and connected with the presence in these souls of

those various degrees of semi-voluntary good inclinations and wishes,

required by her other saying. Even if these wishings could slowly and

slightly increase, and the sufferings could similarly decrease, this

would in nowise imply or require a final full rectification of the

deliberate will itself, and hence not a complete extinction of the

resultant suffering. Hell would still remain essentially distinct

from Purgatory; for in Purgatory the deliberate, active will is good

from the first, and only the various semi-volitions and old habits are

imperfect, but are being gradually brought into full harmony with that

will, by the now complete willing of the soul; and hence this state

has an end; whereas in Hell the deliberate, active will is bad from

the first, and only various partially deliberate wishes and tendencies

are good, but cannot be brought to fruition in a full virtuous

determination of the dominant character of the soul, and hence _this_

state has no end.

4. _The Endlessness of Hell._

And lastly, as to the Endlessness of this condition of the Lost, it is,

of course, plain that Catherine held this defined doctrine; and again,

that “the chief weight, in the Church-teaching as to Hell, rests upon

Hell’s Eternity.”[243]

Here I would suggest five groups of considerations:

(1) Precisely this Eternity appears to be the feature of all others

which is ever increasingly decried by contemporary philosophy and

liberal theology as impossible and revolting. Thus it is frequently

argued as though, not the indiscriminateness nor the materiality nor

the forensic externality nor the complete fixity of the sufferings, nor

again the complete malignity of the lost were incredible, and hence

the unendingness of such conditions were impossible of acceptance;

but, on the contrary, as though,--be the degree and nature of those

sufferings conceived as ever so discriminated, spiritual, interior, and

relatively mobile, and as occasioned and accompanied by a disposition

in which semi-voluntary good is present,--the simple assumption of

anything unending or final about them, at once renders the whole

doctrine impossible to believe. It is true that Tennyson and Browning

take the doctrine simply in its popular Calvinistic form, and then

reject it; and even John Stuart Mill and Frederick Denison Maurice

hardly consider the eternity separately. But certainly that thoughtful

and religious-minded writer, Mr. W. R. Greg, brings forward the

eternity-doctrine as, already in itself, “a _curiosa infelicitas_ which

is almost stupidity on the part of the Church.”[244]

(2) Yet it is plain how strongly, even in Mr. Greg’s case, the supposed

(local, physical, indiscriminate, etc.) nature of the state affects

the writer’s judgment as to the possibility of its unendingness,--as

indeed is inevitable. And it is even clearer, I think, that precisely

this eternity-doctrine stands for a truth which is but an ever-present

mysterious corollary to every deeply ethical or spiritual, and,

above all, every specifically Christian view of life. For every such

view comes, surely, into hopeless collision with its own inalienable

requirements if it _will_ hold that the deepest ethical and spiritual

acts and conditions are,--avowedly performed though they be in time

and space--simply temporary in their inmost nature and effects;

whereas every vigorously ethical religion, in so far as it has reached

a definite personal-immortality doctrine at all, cannot admit that

the soul’s deliberate character remains without any strictly final

and permanent results. The fact is that we get here to a profound

ethical and spiritual postulate, which cannot be adequately set aside

on the ground that it is the product of barbarous ages and vindictive

minds, since this objection applies only to the physical picturings,

the indiscriminateness, non-mitigation, and utter reprobation; or on

the ground that a long, keen purification, hence a temporally finite

suffering, would do as well, since, when all this has completely

passed away, there would be an entire obliteration of all difference

in the consequences of right and wrong; or that acts and dispositions

built up in time cannot have other than finite consequences, since

this is to naturalize radically the deepest things of life; or finally

that “Evil,” as the Areopagite would have it, “is not,”[245] since

thus the very existence of the conviction as to free-will and sin

becomes more inexplicable than the theoretical difficulties against

Libertarianism are insoluble.--Against this deep requirement of the

most alert and complete ethical and spiritual life the wave of any

Apocatastasis-doctrine or -emotion will, in the long run, ever break

itself in vain.

(3) The doctrine of Conditional Immortality has, I think, many

undeniable advantages over every kind of Origenism. This view does not,

as is often imputed to it, believe in the annihilation by Omnipotence

of the naturally immortal souls of impenitent grave sinners; but simply

holds that human souls begin with the capacity of acquiring, with the

help of God’s Spirit, a spiritual personality, built up out of the mere

possibilities and partial tendencies of their highly mixed natures,

which, if left uncultivated and untranscended, become definitely fixed

at the first, phenomenal, merely individual level,--so that spiritual

personality alone deserves to live on and does so, whilst this animal

individuality does not deserve and does not do so. The soul is thus

not simply born as, but can become more and more, that “inner man” who

alone persists, indeed who “is renewed day by day, even though our

outward man perish.”[246]

This conception thus fully retains, indeed increases, the profound

ultimate difference between the results of spiritual and personal, and

of animal and simply individual life respectively,--standing, as it

does, at the antipodes to Origenism; it eliminates all unmoralized,

unspiritualized elements from the ultimate world, without keeping souls

in an apparently fruitless suffering; and it gives full emphasis to a

supremely important, though continually forgotten fact,--the profoundly

expensive, creative, positive process and nature of spiritual

character. No wonder, then, that great thinkers and scholars, such

as Goethe, Richard Rothe, Heinrich Holtzmann, and some Frenchmen and

Englishmen have held this view.[247]

Yet the objections against this view, taken in its strictness, are

surely conclusive. For how can an originally simply mortal substance,

force, or entity become immortal, and a phenomenal nature be leavened

by a spiritual principle which, _ex hypothesi_, is not present within

it? And how misleadingly hyperbolical, according to this, would be

the greatest spiritual exhortations, beginning with those of Our Lord

Himself!

(4) And yet the conception of Conditional Immortality cannot be

far from the truth, since everything, surely, points to a lowered

consciousness in the souls in question, or at least to one lower

than that in the ultimate state of the saved. This conception of the

shrunken condition of these souls was certainly held by Catherine,

even if the other, the view of a heightened, consciousness, appears

in hortatory passages which just _may_ be authentic; and indeed only

that conception is conformable with her fundamental position that

love alone is fully positive and alone gives vital strength, and that

all fully deliberate love is absent from the lost souls. And if we

consider how predominantly hortatory in tone and object the ordinary

teaching on this point cannot fail to be; and, on the other hand, how

close to Manichaeism, any serious equating of the force and intensity

of life and consciousness between the Saved and the Lost would be, we

can hardly fail to find ourselves free, indeed compelled, to hold a

lesser consciousness for the Lost than for the Saved. Whilst the joyful

life of the Saved would range, in harmonious intensity, beyond all that

we can experience here, the painful consciousness of the Lost would

be, in various degrees, indefinitely less. The Saved would thus not be

only _other_ than the Lost, they would actually be _more_: for God is

Life supreme, and, where there is more affinity with God, there is more

life, and more consciousness.

(5) But, if the view just stated is the more likely one, then we

cannot soften the sufferings of those souls, by giving them a sense of

Eternity, of one unending momentary Now, instead of our earthly sense

of Succession, as Cardinal Newman and Father Tyrrell have attempted to

do, in a very instructive and obviously orthodox manner.[248] I shall

presently argue strongly in favour of some consciousness of Eternity

being traceable in our best moments here, and of this consciousness

being doubtless more extended in the future blessed life. But here I

have only to consider whether for one who, like Catherine, follows the

analogy of earthly experience, the Lost should be considered nearer to,

or farther from, such a _Totum-Simul_ consciousness than we possess

now, here below, at our best? And to this the answer must, surely, be

that they are further away from it. Yet God in His mercy may allow

this greater successiveness, if unaccompanied by any keen memory or

prevision, to help in effecting that mitigation of the suffering which

we have already allowed.

IV. CATHERINE AND PURGATORY.

1. _Introductory._

(1) _Changed feeling concerning Purgatory._

In the matter of a Purgatory, a very striking return of religious

feeling towards its normal equilibrium has been occurring in the most

unexpected, entirely unprejudiced quarters, within the last century

and a half. In Germany we have Lessing, who, in the wake of Leibniz,

encourages the acceptance of “that middle state which the greater part

of our fellow-Christians have adopted”: Schleiermacher, who calls the

overpassing of a middle state by a violent leap at death “a magical

proceeding”; David F. Strauss, who entirely agrees; Carl von Hase, who,

in his very Manual of Anti-Roman Polemics admits that “most men when

they die are probably too good for Hell, but they are certainly too bad

for Heaven”; the delicately thoughtful philosopher Fechner who, in the

most sober-minded of his religious works, insists upon our “conceiving

the life beyond according to the analogy of this-life conditions,” and

refers wistfully to “the belief which is found amongst all peoples

and is quite shrunken only among Protestants--that the living can

still do something to aid the dead”; and Prof. Anrich, probably the

greatest contemporary authority on the Hellenic elements incorporated

in Christian doctrine, declares, all definite Protestant though he

is, that “legitimate religious postulates underlie the doctrine of

Purgatory.”[249] And in England that sensitively religious Unitarian,

W. R. Greg, tells us “Purgatory, ranging from a single day to a century

of ages, offers that borderland of discriminating retribution for which

justice and humanity cry out”; and the Positivist, John Stuart Mill,

declares at the end of his life: “All the probabilities in case of a

future life are that such as we have been made or have made ourselves

before the change, such we shall enter into the life hereafter.… To

imagine that a miracle will be wrought at death … making perfect every

one whom it is His will to include among His elect … is utterly opposed

to every presumption that can be adduced from the light of nature.”[250]

(2) _Causes of the previous prejudice._

Indeed the general principle of ameliorative suffering is so obviously

true and inexhaustibly profound that only many, long-lived abuses

in the practice, and a frequent obscuration in the teaching, of the

doctrine, can explain and excuse the sad neglect, indeed discredit,

into which the very principle and root-doctrine has fallen among

well-nigh one-half of Western Christendom. As to the deplorably

widespread existence, at the time of the Protestant Reformation, of

both these causes, which largely occasioned or strengthened each other,

we have the unimpeachable authority of the Council of Trent itself: for

it orders the Bishops “not to permit that uncertain doctrines, or such

as labour under the presumption of falsity, be propagated and taught,”

and “to prohibit, as so many scandals and stones of stumbling for the

faithful, whatever belongs to a certain curiosity or superstition or

savours of filthy lucre.”[251] The cautious admissions of the strictly

Catholic scholar-theologian, Dr. N. Paulus, and the precise documentary

additions and corrections to Paulus furnished, directly from the

contemporary documents, by the fair-minded Protestant worker at

Reformation History, Prof. T. Brieger, now furnish us, conjointly, with

the most vivid and detailed picture of the sad subtleties and abuses

which gave occasion to that Decree.[252]

(3) _Catherine’s purgatorial conceptions avoid those causes. Her

conceptions harbour two currents of thought._

It is surely not a small recommendation of Catherine’s mode of

conceiving Purgatory, that it cuts, as we shall see, at the very root

of those abuses. Yet we must first face certain opposite dangers and

ambiguities which are closely intertwined with the group of terms

and images taken over, for the purpose of describing an immanental

Purgation, by her and her great Alexandrian Christian predecessors,

from the Greek Heathen world. And only after the delimitation of the

defect in the suggestions which still so readily operate from out of

these originally Hellenic ideas, can we consider the difficulties and

imperfections peculiar to the other, in modern times the predominant,

element in the complete teaching as to the Middle State, an element

mostly of Jewish and Roman provenance, and aiming at an extrinsically

punitive conception. Both currents can be properly elucidated only if

we first take them historically.

1. _Jewish prayers for the dead._

It is admitted on all hands that, in the practical form of Prayers for

the Dead, the general doctrine of a Middle State can be traced back, in

Judaism, up to the important passage in the Second Book of Maccabees,

c. ii, vv. 43-45, where Judas Maccabaeus sends about two thousand

drachms of silver to Jerusalem, in order that a Sin-Offering may be

offered up for the Jews fallen in battle against Gorgias, upon whose

bodies heathen amulets had been found. “He did excellently in this …

it is a holy and devout thought. Hence he instituted the Sin-Offering

for the dead, that they might be loosed from their sins.” That battle

occurred in B.C. 166, and this book appears to have been written in

B.C. 124, in Egypt, by a Jew of the school of the Pharisees.

Now it is difficult not to recognize, in the doctrinal comment upon the

facts here given, rather as yet the opinions of a Judaeo-Alexandrian

circle, which was small even at the time of the composition of the

comment, than the general opinion of Judaism at the date of Judas’s

act. For if this act had been prompted by a clear and generally

accepted conviction as to the resurrection, and the efficacy of prayers

for the dead, the writer would have had no occasion or inclination to

make an induction of his own as to the meaning and worth of that act;

and we should find some indications of such a doctrine and practice in

the voluminous works of Philo and Josephus, some century and a half

later on. But all such indications are wanting in these writers.

And in the New Testament there is, with regard to helping the dead,

only that curious passage: “If the dead do not arise, what shall they

do who are baptized for the dead?”[253] where St. Paul refers, without

either acceptance or blame, to a contemporary custom among Christian

Proselytes from Paganism, who offered up that bath of initiation for

the benefit of the souls of deceased relatives who had died without any

such purification. Perhaps not till Rabbi Akiba’s time, about 130 A.D.,

had prayers for the dead become part of the regular Synagogue ritual.

By 200 A.D. Tertullian speaks of the practice as of an established

usage among the Christian communities: “we make oblations for the Dead,

on their anniversary, every year”; although “if you ask where is the

law concerning this custom in Scripture, you cannot read of any such

there. Tradition will appear before you as its initiator, custom as its

confirmer, and faith as its observer.”[254]

It is interesting to note how considerably subsequent to the practice

is, in this instance also, its clear doctrinal justification. Indeed

the Jews are, to this hour, extraordinarily deficient in explicit,

harmonious conceptions on the matter. Certainly throughout Prof. W.

Bacher’s five volumes of Sayings of the Jewish Rabbis from 30 B.C.

to 400 A.D., I can only find the following saying, by Jochanan the

Amoraean, who died 279 A.D.: “There are three books before God, in

which men are inscribed according to their merit and their guilt: that

of the perfectly devout, that of the perfect evil-doers, and that of

the middle, the uncertain souls. The devout and the evil-doers receive

their sentence on New Year’s day … the first, unto life; the second,

unto death. As to middle souls, their sentence remains in suspense

till the day of Atonement: if by then they have done penance, they get

written down alongside of the devout; if not, they are written down

alongside of the evil-doers.”[255]

2. _Alexandrine Fathers on Purgatory._

Yet it is the Platonizing Alexandrian Fathers Clement and Origen,

(they died, respectively, in about 215 and in 254 A.D.), who are the

first, and to this hour the most important, Christian spokesmen for

a state of true intrinsic purgation. We have already deliberately

rejected their Universalism; but this error in no way weakens the

profound truth of their teaching as to the immanental, necessary

inter-connection between suffering and morally imperfect habits, and

as to the ameliorative effects of suffering where, as in Purgatory, it

is willed by a right moral determination. Thus Clement: “As children

at the hands of their teacher or father, so also are we punished by

Providence. God does not avenge Himself, for vengeance is to repay

evil by evil, but His punishment aims at our good.” “Although a

punishment, it is an emendation of the soul.” “The training which

men call punishments.”[256] And Origen: “The fury of God’s vengeance

profits unto the purification of souls; the punishment is unto

purgation.” “These souls receive, in the prison, not the retribution

of their folly, but a benefaction in the purification from the evils

contracted in that folly,--a purification effected by means of salutary

troubles.”[257]

Now Clement is fully aware of the chief source for his formulation of

these deeply spiritual and Christian instincts and convictions. “Plato

speaks well when he teaches that ‘men who are punished, experience in

truth a benefit: for those who get justly punished, profit through

their souls becoming better.’”[258] But Plato, in contradistinction

from Clement, holds that this applies only to such imperfect souls as

“have sinned curable sins”; he has a Hell as well as a Purgatory: yet

his Purgatory, as Clement’s, truly purges: the souls are there because

they are partially impure, and they cease to be there when they are

completely purified.

And Plato, in his turn, makes no secret as to whence he got his

suggestions and raw materials, _viz._ the Orphic priesthood and

its literature, which, ever since the sixth century B.C., had been

succeeding to and supplanting the previous Orgiastic Dionysianism.[259]

Plato gives us vivid pictures of their doings in Athens, at the time

of his writing, in about 380 B.C. “Mendicant prophets go to rich men’s

doors, and persuade these men that they have a power committed to them

of making an atonement for their sins, or for those of their fathers,

by sacrifices and incantations … and they persuade whole cities that

expiations and purifications of sin may be made by sacrifices and

amusements which fill a vacant hour, and are equally at the service of

the living and the dead.”[260]--Yet from these men, thus scorned as

well-nigh sheer impostors, Plato takes over certain conceptions and

formulations which contribute one of the profoundest, still unexhausted

elements to his teaching,--although this element is, at bottom, in

conflict with that beautiful but inadequate, quite anti-Orphic,

conception of his--the purely negative character of Evil. For the

Orphic literary remains, fragmentary and late though they be, plainly

teach that moral or ritual transgressions are a defilement of the soul,

an infliction of positive stains upon it; that these single offences

and “spots” produce a generally sinful and “spotted” condition;

and that this condition is amenable to and requires purification by

suffering,--water, or more frequently fire, which wash or burn out

these stains of sin. So Plutarch (who died about 120 A.D.) still

declares that the souls in Hades have stains of different colours

according to the different passions; and the object of the purificatory

punishment is “that, these stains having been worn away, the soul may

become altogether resplendent.” And Virgil, when he declares “the

guilt which infects the soul is washed out or burnt out … until a

long time-span has effaced the clotted stain, and leaves the heavenly

conscience pure”: is utilizing an Orphic-Pythagorean Hades-book.[261]

This conception of positive stains is carefully taken over by the

Alexandrian Fathers: Clement speaks of “removing, by continuous prayer,

the stains (κηλίδας) contracted through former sins,” and declares

that “the Gnostic,” the perfect Christian, “fears not death, having

purified himself from all the spots (σπίλους) on his soul.” And Origen

describes “the pure soul that is not weighed down by leaden weights of

wickedness,” where the spots have turned to leaden pellets such as were

fastened to fishing-nets. Hence, says Clement, “post-baptismal sins

have to be purified out” of the soul; and, says Origen, “these rivers

of fire are declared to be of God, who causes the evil that is mixed up

with the whole soul to disappear from out of it.”[262]

In Pseudo-Dionysius the non-Orphic, purely negative, view prevails:

“Evil is neither in demons nor in us as an existent evil, but as a

failure and dearth in the perfection of our own proper goods.” And St.

Thomas similarly declares that “different souls have correspondingly

different stains, like shadows differ in accordance with the difference

of the bodies which interpose themselves between the light.”[263]

But Catherine, in this inconsistent with her own general

Privation-doctrine, again conceives the stain, the “macchia del

peccato,” as Cardinal Manning has acutely observed, not simply as a

deprivation of the light of glory, but “as the cause, not the effect,

of God’s not shining into the soul”: it includes in it the idea of

an imperfection, weakness with regard to virtue, bad (secondary)

dispositions, and unheavenly tastes.[264]

3. _The true and the false in the Orphic conception._

Now precisely in this profoundly true conception of Positive Stain

there lurk certain dangers, which all proceed from the original Orphic

diagnosis concerning the source of these stains, and these dangers will

have to be carefully guarded against.

(1) The conviction as to the purificatory power of fire was no doubt,

originally, the direct consequence from the Orphic belief as to the

intrinsically staining and imprisoning effect of the body upon the

soul. “The soul, as the Orphics say, is enclosed in the body, in

punishment for the punishable acts”; “liberations” from the body,

and “purifications” of the living and the dead, ever, with them,

proceed together. And hence to burn the dead body was considered

to purify the soul that had been stained by that prison-house: the

slain Clytemnestra, says Euripides, “is purified, as to her body, by

fire,” for, as the Scholiast explains, “fire purifies all things,

and burnt bodies are considered holy.”[265] And such an intensely

anti-body attitude we find, not only fully developed later on into a

deliberate anti-Incarnational doctrine, among the Gnostics, but, as we

have already seen, slighter traces of this same tone may be found in

the (doubtless Alexandrian) Book of Wisdom, and in one, not formally

doctrinal passage, a momentary echo of it, in St. Paul himself.

And Catherine’s attitude is generally, and often strongly, in this

direction.

(2) A careful distinction is evidently necessary here. The doctrine

that sin defiles,--affects the quality of the soul’s moral and

spiritual dispositions, and that this defilement and perversion, ever

occasioned by the search after facile pleasure or the flight from

fruitful pain, can normally be removed and corrected only by a long

discipline of fully accepted, gradually restorative pain, either here,

or hereafter, or both: are profound anticipations, and have been most

rightly made integral parts, of the Christian life and conception. The

doctrine that the body is essentially a mere accident or superaddition

or necessary defilement to the soul, is profoundly untrue, in its

exaggeration and one-sidedness: for if the body is the occasion of

the least spiritual of our sins, it can and should become the chief

servant of the spirit; the slow and difficult training of this servant

is one of the most important means of development for the soul itself;

and many faults and vices are not occasioned by the body at all, whilst

none are directly and necessarily caused by it. Without the body, we

should not have impurity, but neither should we have specifically

human purity of soul; and without it, given the persistence and

activity of the soul, there could be as great, perhaps greater, pride

and _solipsism_, the most anti-Christian of all the vices. Hence if,

in Our Lord’s teaching, we find no trace of a Gnostic desire for

purification from all things bodily as essentially soul-staining, we do

find a profound insistence upon purity of heart, and upon the soul’s

real, active “turning,” conversion, (an interior change from an un- or

anti-moral attitude to an ethical and spiritual dependence upon God),

as a _sine qua non_ condition for entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven.

And the Joannine teachings re-affirm this great truth for us as a

_Metabasis_, a moving from Death over to Life.

4. _Catherine’s conceptions as to the character of the stains and of

their purgation._

And this idea, as to an intrinsic purgation through suffering of

impurities contracted by the soul, can be kept thoroughly Christian,

if we ever insist, with Catherine in her most emphatic and deepest

teachings, that Purgation can and should be effected in this life,

hence in the body,--in and through all the right uses of the body,

as well as in and through all the legitimate and will-strengthening

abstentions from such uses; that the subject-matter of such purgation

are the habits and inclinations contrary to our best spiritual lights,

and which we have largely ourselves built up by our variously perverse

or slothful acts, but which in no case are directly caused by the body,

and in many cases are not even occasioned by it; and, finally, that

holiness consists primarily, not in the absence of faults, but in the

presence of spiritual force, in Love creative, Love triumphant,--the

soul becoming flame rather than snow, and dwelling upon what to do,

give and be, rather than upon what to shun.--Catherine’s predominant,

ultimate tone possesses this profound positiveness, and corrects all

but entirely whatever, if taken alone, would appear to render the

soul’s substantial purity impossible in this life; to constitute the

body a direct and necessary cause of impurity to the soul; and to find

the ideal of perfection in the negative condition of being free from

stain. In her greatest sayings, and in her actual life, Purity is

found to be Love, and this Love is exercised, not only in the inward,

home-coming, recollective movement,--in the purifying of the soul’s

dispositions, but also in the outgoing, world-visiting, dispersive

movement,--in action towards fellow-souls.

5. _Judaeo-Roman conception of Purgatory._

And this social side and movement brings us to the second element and

current in the complete doctrine of a Middle State,--a constituent

which possesses affinities and advantages, and produces excesses

and abuses, directly contrary to those proper to the element of an

intrinsic purgation.

(1) Here we get early Christian utilizations, for purposes of a

doctrine concerning the Intermediate State, of sayings and images which

dwell directly only upon certain extrinsic consequences of evil-doing,

or which, again, describe a future historical and social event,--the

Last Day. For already Origen interprets, in his beautiful _Treatise on

Prayer_, XXIX, 16, Our Lord’s words as to the debtor: “Thou shalt be

cast into prison, thou shalt not come forth from thence, until thou

hast paid the uttermost farthing,” Matt, v, 25, 26, as applying to

Purgatory. And in his _Contra Celsum_, VII, 13, he already takes, as

the Biblical _locus classicus_ for a Purgatory, St. Paul’s words as to

how men build, upon the one foundation Christ, either gold, silver,

gems, or wood, hay, stubble; and how fire will test each man’s work;

and, if the work remain, he shall receive a reward, but if it be burnt,

he shall suffer loss and yet he himself shall be saved yet so as by

fire, 1 Cor. iii, 10-15. It appears certain, however, that St. Paul

is, in this passage, thinking directly of the Last Day, the End of the

World, with its accompaniment of physical fire, and as to how far the

various human beings, then on earth, will be able to endure the dread

stress and testing of that crisis; and he holds that some will be fit

to bear it and some will not.

Such a destruction of the world by fire appears elsewhere in

Palestinian Jewish literature,--in the Book of Enoch and the Testament

of Levi; and in the New Testament, in 2 Peter iii, 12: “The heavens

being on fire shall be dissolved, the elements shall melt with fervent

heat.” Josephus, _Antiquities_, XI, ii, 3, teaches a destruction by

fire and another by water. And the Stoics, to whom also Clement and

Origen appeal, had gradually modified their first doctrine of a simply

cosmological Ekpyrōsis, a renovation of the physical universe by fire,

into a moral purification of the earth, occasioned by, and applied

to, the sinfulness of man. Thus Seneca has the double, water-and-fire,

instrument: “At that time the tide” of the sea “will be borne along

free from all measure, for the same reason which will cause the future

conflagration. Both occur when it seems fit to God to initiate a better

order of things and to have done with the old.… The judgment of mankind

being concluded, the primitive order of things will be recalled, and to

the earth will be re-given man innocent of crimes.”[266]

(2) It is interesting to note how--largely under the influence of the

forensic temper and growth of the Canonical Penitential system, and

of its successive relaxations in the form of substituted lighter good

works, Indulgences,--the Latin half of Christendom, ever more social

and immediately practical than the Greek portion, came, in general,

more and more to dwell upon two ideas suggested to their minds by

those two, Gospel and Pauline, passages. The one idea was that souls

which, whilst fundamentally well-disposed, are not fit for Heaven at

the body’s death, can receive instant purification by the momentary

fire of the Particular Judgment; and the other held that, thus already

entirely purified and interiorly fit for Heaven, they are but detained

(in what we ought, properly, to term a _Satisfactorium_), to suffer

the now completely non-ameliorative, simply vindictive, infliction of

punishment,--a punishment still, in strict justice, due to them for

past sins, of which the guilt and the deteriorating effects upon their

own souls have been fully remitted and cured.

In this way it was felt that the complete unchangeableness of the

condition of every kind of soul after death, or at least after the

Particular Judgment (a Judgment held practically to synchronize with

death), was assured. And indeed how could there be any interior growth

in Purgatory, seeing that there is no meriting there? Again it was

thought that thus the vision of God at the moment of Judgment was given

an operative value for the spiritual amelioration of souls which,

already in substantially good dispositions, could hardly be held to

pass through so profound an experience without intrinsic improvement,

as the other view seemed to hold.--And, above all, this form of the

doctrine was found greatly to favour the multiplication among the

people of prayers, Masses and good-works for the dead; since the _modus

operandi_ of such acts seemed thus to become entirely clear, simple,

immediate, and, as it were, measurable and mechanical. For these souls

in their “Satisfactorium,” being, from its very beginning, already

completely purged and fit for Heaven,--God is, as it were, free to

relax at any instant, in favour of sufficiently fervent or numerous

intercessions, the exigencies of his entirely extrinsic justice.

(3) The position of a purely extrinsic punishment is emphasized, with

even unusual vehemence, in the theological glosses inserted, in about

1512 to 1529, in Catherine’s _Dicchiarazione_. Yet it is probably

the very influential Jesuit theologian Francesco Suarez, who died

in 1617, who has done most towards formulating and theologically

popularizing this view. All the guilt of sin, he teaches, is remitted

(in these Middle souls) at the first moment of the soul’s separation

from the body, by means of a single act of contrition, whereby the

will is wholly converted to God, and turned away from every venial

sin. “And in this way sin may be remitted, as to its guilt, in

Purgatory, because the soul’s purification dates from this moment”;--in

strictness, from before the first moment of what should be here termed

the “Satisfactorium.” As to bad habits and vicious inclinations,

“we ought not to imagine that the soul is detained for these”: but

“they are either taken away at the moment of death, or expelled by an

infusion of the contrary virtues when the soul enters into glory.”[267]

This highly artificial, inorganic view is adopted, amongst other

of our contemporary theologians, by Atzberger, the continuator of

Scheeben.[268]

6. _The Judaeo-Roman conception must be taken in synthesis with the

Alexandrine._

Now it is plain that the long-enduring Penitential system of the Latin

Church, and the doctrine and practice of Indulgences stand for certain

important truths liable to being insufficiently emphasized by the Greek

teachings concerning an intrinsically ameliorative _Purgatorium_, and

that there can be no question of simply eliminating these truths.

But neither are they capable of simple co-ordination with, still

less of super-ordination to, those most profound and spiritually

central immanental positions. As between the primarily forensic and

governmental, and the directly ethical and spiritual, it will be the

former that will have to be conceived and practised as, somehow, an

expression and amplification of, and a practical corrective and means

to, the latter.[269]

(1) The ordinary, indeed the strictly obligatory, Church teaching

clearly marks the suggested relation as the right one, at three, simply

cardinal points. We are bound, by the Confession of Faith of Michael

Palaeologus, 1267 A.D., and by the Decree of the Council of Florence,

1429 A.D., to hold that these Middle souls “are purged after death by

purgatorial or cathartic pains”; and by that of Trent “that there is

a Purgatory.”[270] Yet we have here a true _lucus a non lucendo_, if

this place or state does not involve purgation: for no theologian dares

explicitly to transfer and restrict the name “Purgatory” to the instant

of the soul’s Particular Judgment; even Suarez, as we have seen, has to

extend the name somehow.

Next we are bound, by the same three great Decrees, to hold indeed that

“the Masses, Prayers, Alms, and other pious offices of the Faithful

Living are profitable towards the relief of these pains,” yet this by

mode of “suffrage,” since, as the severely orthodox Jesuit, Father H.

Hurter, explains in his standard _Theologiae Dogmaticae Compendium_,

“the fruit of this impetration and satisfaction is not infallible, for

it depends upon the merciful acceptance of God.”[271] Hence in no case

can we, short of superstition, conceive such good works as operating

automatically: so that the _a priori_ simplest view concerning the

mode of operation of these prayers is declared to be mistaken. We can

and ought, then, to choose among the conceptions, not in proportion to

their mechanical simplicity, but according to their spiritual richness

and to their analogy with our deepest this-life experiences.

And we are all bound, by the Decree of Trent and the Condemnation of

Baius, 1567 A.D., to hold that Contrition springing from Perfect Love

reconciles man with God, even before Confession, and this also outside

of cases of necessity or of martyrdom.[272] Indeed, it is the common

doctrine that one single act of Pure Love abolishes, not only Hell,

but Purgatory, so that, if the soul were to die whilst that act was

in operation, it would forthwith be in Heaven. If then, in case of

perfect purity, the soul is at once in heaven, the soul cannot be quite

pure and yet continue in Purgatory.

(2) It is thus plain that, as regards Sin in its relation to the

Sinner, there are, in strictness, ever three points to consider: the

guilty act, the reflex effect of the act upon the disposition the

agent, and the punishment; for all theologians admit that the more or

less bad disposition, contracted through the sinful act, remains in

the soul, except in the case of Perfect Contrition, after the guilt

of the act has been remitted. But whilst the holders of an Extrinsic,

Vindictive Purgatory, work for a punishment as independent as possible

of these moral effects of sin still present in the pardoned soul, the

advocates of an Intrinsic, Ameliorative Purgatory find the punishment

centre in the pain and difficulty attendant upon “getting slowly

back to fully virtuous dispositions, through retracing the steps we

have taken in departing from it.”[273] And the system of Indulgences

appears, in this latter view, to find its chief justification in that

it keeps up a link with the past Penitential system of the Church; that

it vividly recalls and applies the profound truth of the interaction,

for good even more than for evil, between all human souls, alive and

dead; and that it insists upon the readily forgotten truth of even the

forgiven sinner, the man with the good determination, having ordinarily

still much to do and to suffer before he is quit of the effects of his

sin.

(3) And the difficulties and motives special to those who supplant

the Intrinsic, Ameliorating Purgatory by an Extrinsic, Vindicative

_Satisfactorium_, can indeed be met by those who would preserve that

beautifully dynamic, ethical, and spiritual conception. For we can

hold that the fundamental condition,--the particular determination

of the active will,--remains quite unchanged, from Death to Heaven,

in these souls; that this determination of the active will requires

more or less of time and suffering fully to permeate and assimilate to

itself all the semi-voluntary wishes and habits of the soul; and that

this permeation takes place among conditions in which the soul’s acts

are too little resisted and too certain of success to be constituted

meritorious. We can take Catherine’s beautiful Plunge-conception as

indicating the kind of operation effected in and by the soul, at and

through the momentary vision of God. And we can feel convinced that

it is ever, in the long run, profoundly dangerous to try to clarify

and simplify doctrines beyond or against the scope and direction of

the analogies of Nature and of Grace, which are ever so dynamic and

organic in type: for the poor and simple, as truly as the rich and

learned, ever require, not to be merely taken and left as they are, but

to be raised and trained to the most adequate conceptions possible to

each.--It is, in any case, very certain that the marked and widespread

movement of return to belief in a Middle State is distinctly towards a

truly Purgative Purgatory, although few of these sincere truth-seekers

are aware, as is Dr. Anrich, that they are groping after a doctrine

all but quite explained away by a large body of late Scholastic and

Neo-Scholastic theologians.[274]

(4) Yet it is very satisfactory to note how numerous, and especially

how important are, after all is said, the theologians who have

continued to walk, in this matter, in the footsteps of the great

Alexandrines. St. Gregory of Nyssa teaches a healing of the soul in the

beyond and a purification by fire.[275] St. Augustine says that “fire

burns up the work of him who thinketh of the things of this world,

since possessions, that are loved, do not perish without pain on the

part of their possessor. It is not incredible that something of this

sort takes place after this life.”[276]

St. Thomas declares most plainly: “Venial guilt, in a soul which

dies in a state of grace, is remitted after this life by the purging

fire, because that pain, which is in some manner accepted by the

will, has, in virtue of grace, the power of expiating all such guilt

as can co-exist with a state of grace.” “After this life … there can

be merit with respect to some accidental reward, so long as a man

remains in some manner in a state of probation: and hence there can be

meritorious acts in Purgatory, with respect to the remission of venial

sin.”[277]--Dante (_d._ 1321) also appears, as Father Faber finely

notes, to hold such a voluntary, immanental Purgatory, where the poet

sees an Angel impelling, across the sea at dawn, a bark filled with

souls bent for Purgatory: for the boat is described as driving towards

the shore so lightly as to draw no wake upon the water.[278]

Cardinal Bellarmine, perhaps the greatest of all anti-Protestant

theologians (_d._ 1621) teaches that “venial sin is remitted in

Purgatory _quoad culpam_,” and that “this guilt, as St. Thomas rightly

insists, is remitted in Purgatory by an act of love and patient

endurance.”[279] St. Francis of Sales, that high ascetical authority

(_d._ 1622), declares: “By Purgatory we understand a place where souls

undergo purgation, for a while, from the stains and imperfections which

they have carried away with them from this mortal life.”[280]

And recently and in England we have had Father Faber, Cardinal Manning,

and Cardinal Newman, although differing from each other on many other

points, fully united in holding and propagating this finely life-like,

purgative conception of purgatory.[281]

7. _A final difficulty._

One final point concerning a Middle State. In the Synoptic tradition

there is a recurrent insistence upon the forgiveness of particular

sins, at particular moments, by particular human and divine acts of

contrition and pardon. In the Purgatorial teaching the stress lies

upon entire states and habits, stains and perversities of soul, and

upon God’s general grace working, in and through immanently necessary,

freely accepted sufferings, on to a slow purification of the complete

personality. As Origen says: “The soul’s single acts, good or bad, go

by; but, according to their quality, they give form and figure to to

the mind of the agent, and leave it either good or bad, and destined

for pains or for rewards.”[282]

The antagonism here is but apparent. For the fact that a certain

condition of soul precedes, and that another condition succeed, each

act of the same soul, in proportion as this act is full and deliberate,

does not prevent the corresponding, complimentary fact that such acts

take the preceding condition as their occasion, and make the succeeding

condition into a further expression of themselves. Single acts which

fully express the character, whether good or bad, are doubtless rarer

than is mostly thought. Yet Catherine, in union with the Gospels and

the Church, is deeply convinced of the power of one single act of Pure

Love to abolish, not of course the effects outward, but the reflex

spiritual consequences upon the soul itself, of sinful acts or states.

Catherine’s picture again, of the deliberate Plunge into Purgatory,

gives us a similar heroic act which, summing up the whole soul’s active

volitions, initiates and encloses the whole subsequent purification,

but which itself involves a prevenient act of Divine Love and mercy, to

which this act of human love is but the return and response. Indeed,

as we know, this plunge-conception was but the direct projection,

on to the other-world-picture, of her own personal experience at

her conversion, when a short span of clock-time held acts of love

received and acts of love returned, which transformed all her previous

condition, and initiated a whole series of states ever more expressive

of her truest self.--Act and state and state and act, each presupposes

and requires the other: and both are present in the Synoptic pictures,

and both are operative in the Purgatorial teaching; although in the

former the accounts are so brief as to make states and acts alike look

as though one single act; and, in the latter, the descriptions are so

large as to make the single acts almost disappear behind the states.

V. CATHERINE AND HEAVEN--THREE PERPLEXITIES TO BE CONSIDERED.

We have found a truly Purgational Middle state, with its sense of

succession, its mixture of joy and suffering, and its growth and

fruitfulness, to be profoundly consonant with all our deepest spiritual

experiences and requirements. But what about Heaven, which we must,

apparently, hold to consist of a sense of simultaneity, a condition

of mere reproductiveness and utterly uneventful finality, and a state

of unmixed, unchanging joy?--Here again, even if in a lesser degree,

certain experiences of the human soul can help us to a few general

positions of great spiritual fruitfulness, which can reasonably

claim an analogical applicability to the Beyond, and which, thus

taken as our ultimate ideals, cannot fail to stimulate the growth of

our personality, and, with it, of further insight into these great

realities. I shall here consider three main questions, which will

roughly correspond to the three perplexities just indicated.

1. _Time and Heaven._

Our first question, then, is as to the probable character of man’s

happiest ultimate consciousness,--whether it is one of succession or

of simultaneity: in other words, whether, besides the disappearance of

the category of space (a point already discussed), there is likely to

be the lapse of the category of time also.--And let it be noted that

the retention of the latter sense for Hell, and even for Purgatory,

does not prejudge the question as to its presence or absence in Heaven,

since those two states are admittedly non-normative, whereas the latter

represents the very ideal and measure of man’s full destination and

perfection.

(1) Now it is still usual, amongst those who abandon the ultimacy

of the space-category, simultaneously to drop, as necessarily

concomitant, the time-category also. Tennyson, among the poets, does

so, in his beautiful “Crossing the Bar”: “From out our bourne of Time

and Place, the flood may bear me far”; and Prof. H. J. Holtzmann,

among speculative theologians, in criticising Rothe’s conception of

man as a quite ultimately spacial-temporal being, treats these two

questions as standing and falling together.[283]--Yet a careful study

of Kant’s critique of the two categories of Space and Time suffices

to convince us of the indefinitely richer content, and more ultimate

reality, of the latter. Indeed, I shall attempt to show more fully in

the next Chapter, with the aid of M. Henri Bergson, that mathematical,

uniform clock-time is indeed an artificial compound, which is made up

of our profound experience of a duration in which the constituents

(sensations, imaginations, thoughts, feelings, willings) of the

succession ever, in varying degrees, overlap, interpenetrate, and

modify each other, and the quite automatic and necessary simplification

and misrepresentation of this experience by its imaginary projection on

to space,--its restatement, by our picturing faculty, as a perfectly

equable succession of mutually exclusive moments. It is in that

interpenetrative duration, not in this atomistic clock-time, that our

deeper human experiences take place.

(2) But that sense of duration, is it indeed our deepest apprehension?

Dr. Holtzmann points out finely how that we are well aware, in our

profoundest experiences, of “that permanently incomprehensible

fact,--the existence of, as it were, a prism, through which the

unitary ray of light, which fills our consciousness with a real

content, is spread out into a colour-spectrum, so that what, in itself,

exists in pure unitedness” and simultaneity, “becomes intelligible to

us only as a juxtaposition in space and a succession in time. Beyond

the prism, there are no such two things.” And he shows how keenly

conscious we are, at times, of that deepest mode of apprehension and

of being which is a Simultaneity, an eternal Here and Now; and how

ruinous to our spiritual life would be a full triumph of the category

of time.[284]

But it is St. Augustine who has, so far, found the noblest expression

for the deepest human experiences in this whole matter of Duration and

Simultaneity, as against mere Clock-Time, although, here as with regard

to Space, he is deeply indebted to Plotinus. “In thee, O my soul, I

measure time,--I measure the impression which passing events make

upon thee, who remainest when those events have passed: this present

impression then, and not those events which had to pass in order to

produce it, do I measure, when I measure time.” “The three times,”

tenses, “past, present, and future … are certain three affections in

the soul, I find them there and nowhere else. There is the present

memory of past events, the present perception of present ones, and the

present expectation of future ones.” God possesses “the splendour of

ever-tarrying Eternity,” which is “incomparable with never-tarrying

times,” since in it “nothing passes, but the content of everything

abides simply present.” And in the next life “perhaps our own thoughts

also will not be flowing, going from one thing to another, but we shall

see all we know simultaneously, in one intuition.” St. Thomas indeed is

more positive: “All things will,” in Heaven, “be seen simultaneously

and not successively.”[285]

(3) If then, even here below, we can so clearly demonstrate the

conventionality of mere Clock-Time, and can even conceive a perfect

Simultaneity as the sole form of the consciousness of God, we cannot

well avoid holding that, in the other life, the clock-time convention

will completely cease, and that, though the sense of Duration is

not likely completely to disappear, (since, in this life at least,

this sense is certainly not merely phenomenal for man, and its

entire absence would apparently make man into God), the category of

Simultaneity will, as a sort of strong background-consciousness,

englobe and profoundly unify the sense of Duration. And, the more

God-like the soul, the more would this sense of Simultaneity

predominate over the sense of Duration.

2. _The Ultimate Good, concrete, not abstract._

Our second question concerns the kind and degree of variety in unity

which we should conceive to characterize the life of God, and of the

soul in its God-likeness. Is this type and measure of all life to be

conceived as a maximum of abstraction or as a maximum of concretion;

as pure thought alone, or as also emotion and will; as solitary and

self-centred, or as social and outgoing; and as simply reproductive, or

also as operative?

(1) Now it is certain that nothing is easier, and nothing has been

more common, than to take the limitations of our earthly conditions,

and especially those attendant upon the strictly contemplative, and,

still more, those connected with the technically ecstatic states, as so

many advantages, or even as furnishing a complete scheme of the soul’s

ultimate life.

As we have already repeatedly seen in less final matters, so here once

more, at the end, we can trace the sad impoverishment to the spiritual

outlook produced by the esteem in which the antique world generally

held the psycho-physical peculiarities of trances, as directly

valuable or even as prophetic of the soul’s ultimate condition; the

contraposition and exaltation, already on the part of Plato and

Aristotle, of a supposed non-actively contemplative, above a supposed

non-contemplatively active life; the largely excessive, not fully

Christianizable, doctrines of the Neo-Platonists as to the Negative,

Abstractive way, when taken as self-sufficient, and as to Quiet,

Passivity, and Emptiness of Soul, when understood literally; and the

conception, rarely far away from the ancient thinkers, of the soul as a

substance which, full-grown, fixed and stainless at the first, requires

but to be kept free from stain up to the end.

And yet the diminution of vitality in the trance, and even the

inattention to more than one thing at a time in Contemplation, are,

in themselves, defects, at best the price paid for certain gains; the

active and the contemplative life are, ultimately, but two mutually

complementary sides of life, so that no life ever quite succeeds in

eliminating either element, and life, _caeteris paribus_, is complete

and perfect, in proportion as it embraces both elements, each at

its fullest, and the two in a perfect interaction; the Negative,

Abstractive way peremptorily requires also the other, the Affirmative,

Concrete way; the Quiet, Passivity, Emptiness are really, when

wholesome, an incubation for, or a rest from, Action, indeed they are

themselves a profound action and peace, and the soul is primarily a

Force and an Energy, and Holiness is a growth of that Energy in Love,

in full Being, and in creative, spiritual Personality.

(2) Now on this whole matter the European Christian Mystics, strongly

influenced by, yet also largely developing, certain doctrines of the

Greeks, have, I think, made two most profound contributions to the

truths of the spirit, and have seriously fallen short of reality in

three respects.

The first contribution can, indeed, be credited to Aristotle, whose

luminous formulations concerning Energeia, Action, (as excluding

Motion, or Activity), we have already referred to. Here to _be_ is

to _act_, and Energeia, a being’s perfect functioning and fullest

self-expression in action, is not some kind of movement or process;

but, on the contrary, all movement and process is only an imperfect

kind of Energeia. Man, in his life here, only catches brief glimpses of

such an Action; but God is not so hampered,--He is ever completely all

that He can be, His Action is kept up inexhaustibly and ever generates

supreme bliss; it is an unchanging, unmoving Energeia.[286]--And St.

Thomas echoes this great doctrine, for all the Christian schoolmen: “A

thing is declared to be perfect, in proportion as it is in act,”--as

all its potentialities are expressed in action; and hence “the First

Principle must be supremely in act,” “God’s Actuality is identical with

His Potentiality,” “God is Pure Action (_Actus Purus_).”[287]--Yet it

is doubtless the Christian Mystics who have most fully experienced, and

emotionally vivified, this great truth, and who cease not, in all their

more characteristic teachings, from insisting upon the ever-increasing

acquisition of “Action,” the fully fruitful, peaceful functioning of

the whole soul, at the expense of “activity,” the restless, sterile

distraction and internecine conflict of its powers. And Heaven, for

them, ever consists in an unbroken Action, devoid of all “activity,”

rendering the soul, in its degree, like to that Purest Action, God,

who, Himself “Life,” is, as our Lord declared, “not the God of the dead

but of the living.”[288]

And the second contribution can, in part, be traced back to Plato,

who does not weary, in the great middle period of his writings, from

insisting upon the greatness of the nobler passions, and who already

apprehends a Heavenly Eros which in part conflicts with, in part

transcends, the Earthly one. But here especially it is Christianity,

and in particular Christian Mysticism, which have fully experienced

and proclaimed that “God” is “Love,” and that the greatest of all the

soul’s acts and virtues is Charity, Pure Love. And hence the Pure

Act of God, and the Action of the God-like soul, are conceived not,

Aristotle-like, as acts of pure intelligence alone, but as tinged

through and through with a noble emotion.

(3) But in three matters the Mystics, as such and as a whole, have,

here especially under the predominant influence of Greek thought,

remained inadequate to the great spiritual realities, as most fully

revealed to us by Christianity. The three points are so closely

interconnected that it will be best first to illustrate, and then to

criticise them, together.

(i) Aristotle here introduces the mischief. For it is he who in his

great, simply immeasurably influential, theological tractate, Chapters

VI to X of the Twelfth Book of his _Metaphysic_, has presented to us

God as “the one first unmoved Mover” of the Universe, but Who moves it

as desired by it, not as desiring it, as outside of it, not as also

inside it. God here is sheer Pure Thought, Noēsis, for “contemplation

is the most joyful and the best” of actions. And “Thought” here

“thinks the divinest and worthiest, without change,” hence “It thinks

Itself, and the Thinking is a Thinking of Thought.”[289] We have here,

as Dr. Caird strikingly puts it, a God necessarily shut up within

Himself, “of purer eyes than to behold, not only iniquity but even

contingency and finitude, and His whole activity is one act of pure

self-contemplation.” “The ideal activity which connects God with the

world, appears thus as in the world and not in God.”[290]

(ii) Now we have already allowed that the Mystics avoid Aristotle’s

elimination of emotion from man’s deepest action, and of emotion’s

equivalent from the life of God. But they are, for the most part, much

influenced in their speculations by this intensely Greek, aristocratic,

intellectualist conception, in the three points of a disdain of the

Contingent and Historical; of a superiority to volitional, productive

energizing; and of a presentation of God as unsocial, and as occupied

directly with Himself alone. We have already studied numerous examples

of the first two, deeply un-Christian, errors as they have more or

less influenced Christian Mysticism; the third mistake, of a purely

Transcendental, Deistic God, is indeed never consistently maintained

by any Christian, and Catherine, in particular, is ever dominated by

the contrary great doctrine, adumbrated by Plato and fully revealed by

Our Lord, of the impulse to give Itself intrinsic to Goodness, so that

God, as Supreme Goodness, becomes the Supreme Self-giver, and thus the

direct example and motive for our own self-donation to Him. Yet even

so deeply religious a non-Christian as Plotinus, and such speculative

thinkers as Eriugena and Eckhart (who certainly intended to remain

Christians) continue all three mistakes, and especially insist upon a

Supreme Being, Whose true centre, His Godhead, is out of all relation

to anything but Himself. And even the orthodox Scholastics, and St.

Thomas himself, attempt at times to combine, with the noblest Platonic

and the deepest Christian teachings, certain elements, which, in

strictness, have no place in an Incarnational Religion.

(iii) For, at times, the fullest, deepest Action is still not

conceived, even by St. Thomas, as a Harmony, an Organization of all

Man’s essential powers, the more the better. “In the active life,

which is occupied with many things, there is less of beatitude than

in the contemplative life, which is busy with one thing alone,--the

contemplation of Truth”; “beatitude must consist essentially in the

action of the intellect; and only accidentally in the action of the

will.”[291] God is still primarily intelligence: “God’s intelligence

is His substance”; whereas “volition must be in God, since there is

intelligence in Him,” and “Love must of necessity be declared to be

in God, since there is volition in Him.”[292] God is still, in a

certain sense, shut up in Himself: “As He understands things other

than Himself, by understanding His own essence, so He wills things

other than Himself, by willing His own goodness.” “God enjoys not

anything beside Himself, but enjoys Himself alone.”[293]--And we get,

in correspondence to this absorption of God in Himself, an absorption

of man in God, of so direct and exclusive a kind, as, if pressed, to

eliminate all serious, permanent value, for our soul, in God’s actual

creation of our fellow-creatures. “He who knoweth Thee and creatures,

is not, on this account, happier than if he knows them not; but he is

happy because of Thee alone.” And “the perfection of Love is essential

to beatitude, with respect to the Love of God, not with respect to

the Love of one’s neighbour. If there were but one soul alone to

enjoy God, it would be blessèd, even though it were without a single

fellow-creature whom it could love.”[294]

(iv) And yet St. Thomas’s own deeply Christian sense, explicit sayings

of Our Lord or of St. Paul, and even, in part, certain of the fuller

apprehensions of the Greeks, can make the great Dominican again

uncertain, or can bring him to entirely satisfactory declarations,

on each of these points. For we get the declaration that direct

knowledge of individual things, and quasi-creative operativeness are

essential to all true perfection. “To understand something merely

in general and not in particular, is to know it imperfectly”; Our

Lord Himself has taught us that “the very hairs of your head are all

numbered”; hence God must “know all other individual things with

a distinct and proper knowledge.”--And “a thing is most perfect,

when it can make another like unto itself. But by tending to its

own perfection, each thing tends to become more and more like God.

Hence everything tends to be like God, in so far as it tends to be

the cause of other things.”[295]--We get a full insistence, with St.

Paul, (in I Cor. xiii), upon our love of God, an act of the will,

as nobler than our cognition of Him; and with Plato and St. John,

upon God’s forthgoing Love for His creatures, as the very crown and

measure of His perfection. “Everything in nature has, as regards its

own good, a certain inclination to diffuse itself amongst others, as

far as possible. And this applies, in a supreme degree, to the Divine

Goodness, from which all perfection is derived.” “Love, Joy, Delight

can be predicated of God”; Love which, of its very essence “causes

the lover to bear himself to the beloved as to his own self”: so that

we must say with Dionysius that “He, the very Cause of all things,

becomes ecstatic, moves out of Himself, by the abundance of His loving

goodness, in the providence exercised by Him towards all things

extant.”[296]

(v) And we get in St. Thomas, when he is too much dominated by the

abstractive trend, a most interesting, because logically necessitated

and quite unconscious, collision with certain sayings of Our Lord. For

he then explains Matt. xviii, 10, “their,” the children’s, “Angels

see without ceasing the face of their Father who is in Heaven” as

teaching that “the action (_operatio_), by which Angels are conjoined

to the increate Good, is, in them, unique and sempiternal”; whereas his

commentators are driven to admit that the text, contrariwise, implies

that these Angels have two simultaneous “operations,” and that their

succouring action in nowise disturbs their intellectual contemplation.

Hence, even if we press Matt. xxii, 30, that we “shall be as the Angels

of God,” we still have an organism of peaceful Action, composed of

intellectual, affective, volitional, productive acts operating between

the soul and God, and the soul and other souls, each constituent and

object working and attained in and through all the others.

(vi) Indeed all Our Lord’s Synoptic teachings, as to man’s ultimate

standard and destiny, belong to this God-in-man and man-in-God type

of doctrine: for there the two great commandments are strictly

inseparable; God’s interest in the world is direct and detailed,--it

is part of His supreme greatness that He cares for every sparrow that

falls to the ground; and man, in the Kingdom of God, will sit down

at a banquet, the unmistakable type of social joys.--And even the

Apocalypse, which has, upon the whole, helped on so much the conception

of an exclusive, unproductive entrancement of each soul singly in

God alone, shows the deepest emotion when picturing all the souls,

from countless tribes and nations, standing before the throne,--an

emotion which can, surely, not be taken as foreign to those souls

themselves.[297] But, indeed, Our Lord’s whole life and message become

unintelligible, and the Church loses its deepest roots, unless the

Kingdom of God is, for us human souls, as truly a part of our ultimate

destiny as is God Himself, that God who fully reveals to us His own

deepest nature as the Good Shepherd, the lover of each single sheep and

of the flock as a whole.[298]

(4) We shall, then, do well to hold that the soul’s ultimate beatitude

will consist in its own greatest possible self-realization in its

God-likeness,--an Action free from all Activity, but full of a knowing,

feeling, willing, receiving, giving, effectuating, all which will

energize between God and the soul, and the soul and other souls,--each

force and element functioning in its proper place, but each stimulated

to its fullest expansion, and hence to its deepest delight, by the

corresponding vitalization of the other powers and ends, and of other

similar centres of rich action.

3. _The pain-element of Bliss._

And our third, last question is whether our deepest this-life

apprehensions and experiences give us any reason for holding that a

certain equivalent for what is noblest in devoted suffering, heroic

self-oblivion, patient persistence in lonely willing, will be present

in the life of the Blessed. It would certainly be a gain could we

discover such an equivalent, for a pure glut of happiness, an unbroken

state of sheer enjoyment, can as little be made attractive to our most

spiritual requirements, as the ideal of an action containing an element

of, or equivalent for, devoted and fruitful effort and renunciation can

lose its perennial fascination for what is most Christian within us.

(1) It is not difficult, I take it, to find such an element, which we

cannot think away from any future condition of the soul without making

that soul into God Himself. The ultimate cause of this element shall

be considered, as Personality, in our next Chapter: here I can but

indicate this element at work in our relations to our fellow-men and

to God.--Already St. Thomas, throughout one current of his teaching,

is full of the dignity of right individuality. “The Multitude and

Diversity of natures in the Universe proceed directly from the

intention of God, who brought them into being, in order to communicate

His goodness to them, and to have It represented by them. And since

It could not be sufficiently represented by one creature alone, He

produced many and diverse ones, so that what is wanting to the one

towards this office, should be supplied by the other.”[299] Hence the

multiplication of the Angels, who differ specifically each from all

the rest, adds more of nobility and perfection to the Universe, than

does the multiplication of men, who differ only individually.[300] And

Cardinal Nicolas of Coes writes, in 1457 A.D., “Every man is, as it

were, a separate species, because of his perfectibility.”[301] As Prof.

Josiah Royce tells us in 1901, “What is real, is not only a content of

experience and the embodiment of a type; but an individual content of

experience, and the unique embodiment of a type.”[302]

(2) Now in the future beatitude, where the full development of this

uniqueness in personality cannot, as so often here, be stunted or

misapplied, all this will evidently reach its zenith. But, if so,

then it follows that, although one of the two greatest of the joys of

those souls will be their love and understanding of each other,--this

love and trust, given as it will be to the other souls, in their full,

unique personality, will, of necessity, exceed the comprehension of

the giving personalities. Hence there will still be an equivalent for

that trust and venture, that creative faith in the love and devotion

given by us to our fellows, and found by us in them, which are, here

below, the noblest concomitants and conditions of the pain and the

cost and the joy in every virile love and self-dedication.--There

is then an element of truth in Lessing’s words of 1773: “The human

soul is incapable of even one unmixed emotion,--one that, down to its

minutest constituent, would be nothing but pleasurable or nothing but

painful: let alone of a condition in which it would experience nothing

but such unmixed emotions.”--For, as Prof. Troeltsch says finely in

1903, “Everything historical retains, in spite of all its relation to

absolute values, something of irrationality,”--of impenetrableness to

finite minds, “and of individuality. Indeed just this mixture is the

special characteristic of the lot and dignity of man; nor is a Beyond

for him conceivable in which it would altogether cease. Doubt and

unrest can indeed give way to clear sight and certitude: yet this very

clarity and assurance will, in each human soul, still bear a certain

individual character,” fully comprehensible to the other souls by love

land trust alone.[303]

(3) And this same element we find, of course, in a still greater

degree,--although, as I shall argue later on, our experimental

knowledge of God is greater than is our knowledge of our

fellow-creatures,--in the relations between our love of God and our

knowledge of Him. St. Thomas tells us most solidly: “Individual

Being applies to God, in so far as it implies Incommunicableness.”

Indeed, “_Person_ signifies the most perfect thing in nature,”--“the

subsistence of an individual in a rational nature.” “And since the

dignity of the divine nature exceeds every other dignity, this name

of Person is applicable, in a supreme degree, to God.” And again:

“God, as infinite, cannot be held infinitely by anything finite “;

and hence “only in the sense in which comprehension is opposed to

a seeking after Him, is God comprehended, _i.e._ possessed, by the

Blessed.” And hence the texts: “I follow, if that I may apprehend,

seeing that I also am apprehended” (Phil. iii, 12); “then shall I

know even as I am known” (1 Cor. xiii, 12); and “we shall see Him as

He is” (1 John iii, 2): all refer to such a possession of God. In the

last text “the adverb ‘as’ only signifies ‘we shall see His essence’

and not ‘we shall have as perfect a mode of vision as God has a mode

of being.’”[304]--Here again, then, we find that souls loving God in

His Infinite Individuality, will necessarily love Him beyond their

intellectual comprehension of Him; the element of devoted trust, of

free self-donation to One fully known only through and in such an act,

will thus remain to man for ever. St. John of the Cross proclaimed this

great truth: “One of the greatest favours of God, bestowed transiently

upon the soul in this life, is its ability to see so distinctly, and

to feel so profoundly, that … it cannot comprehend Him at all. These

souls are herein, in some degree, like to the souls in heaven, where

they who know Him most perfectly perceive most clearly that He is

infinitely incomprehensible; for those that have the less clear vision,

do not perceive so distinctly as the others how greatly He transcends

their vision.”[305] With this teaching, so consonant with Catherine’s

experimental method, and her continuous trust in the persistence of the

deepest relations of the soul to God, of the self-identical soul to the

unchanging God, we can conclude this study of her Eschatology.