Chapter 10: The Main Literary Sources of Catherine's Conceptions

The Main Literary Sources Of Catherine’s Conceptions

Introductory

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

The main literary sources of Catherine’s conceptions can be grouped under four heads: the New Testament, Pauline and Joannine writings; the Christian Neo-Platonist, Areopagite books; and the Franciscan, Jacopone da Todi’s teachings. And here, as in all cases of such partial dependence, we have to distinguish between the apparently accidental occasions (her seemingly fortuitous acquaintance with these particular writings), and the certainly necessary causes (the intrinsic requirements of her own mind and soul, and its special reactions under, and transformations of, these materials and stimulations). And during this latter process this mind’s original trend itself undergoes, in its turn, not only much development, but even some modification. She would no doubt owe her close knowledge of the first two sets of writings to the Augustinian Canonesses, (her sister Limbania amongst them,) and to their Augustinian-Pauline tradition; her acquaintance with the third set, to her Dominican cousin; and her intimacy with the fourth, to the Franciscans of the Hospital. Yet only her own spiritual affinity for similar religious states and ideals, and her already at least partial experience of them, could ever have made these writings to her what they actually became: direct stimulations, indeed considerable elements and often curiously vivid expressions, of her own immediate interior life.

2. Plan of the following study of these sources.

I shall, in this chapter, first try to draw out those characteristics of each group, which were either specially accepted or transformed, neglected or supplanted by her, and carefully to note the particular nature of these her reactions and refashionings. And I shall end up by a short account of what she and all four sets have got in common, and of what she has brought, as a gift of her own, to that common stock which had given her so much. And since her distinct and direct use of the Pauline and Joannine writings is quite certain, whereas all her knowledge of Neo-Platonism seems to have been mediated by pseudo-Dionysius alone, and all her Franciscanism appears, as far as literary sources go, to take its rise from Jacopone, I shall give four divisions to her chief literary sources, and a fifth section to the stream common to them all.[61]

I. The Pauline Writings: The Two Sources Of Their Pre-Conversion Assumptions; Catherine’s Preponderant Attitude Towards Each Position.

It is well that the chronological order requires us to begin with St. Paul, for he is probably, if not the most extensive, yet the most intense of all these influences upon Catherine’s mind. I here take the points of his experience and teaching which thus concern us in the probable order of their development in the Apostle’s own consciousness,--his pre-conversion assumptions and positions, first and the convictions gained at and after his conversion or clarified last;[62] and under each heading I shall group together, once for all, the chief reactions of Catherine’s religious consciousness.

Now those Pauline pre-conversion assumptions and positions come from two chief sources--Palestinian, Rabbinical Judaism, (for he was the disciple of the Pharisee, Gamaliel, at Jerusalem), and a Hellenistic religiousness closely akin to, though not derived from, Philo, (for he had been born in the intensely Hellenistic Cilician city Tarsus, at that time a most important seat of Greek learning in general and of the Stoic philosophy in particular). And we shall find that Catherine appropriates especially this, his Hellenistic element; indeed, that at times she sympathizes rather with the still more intensely Hellenistic attitude exemplified by Philo, than with the limitations introduced by St. Paul.

1. St. Paul’s Anthropology in general.

If we take the Pauline Anthropology first, we at once come upon a profoundly dualistic attitude.

(1) There is, in general, “the outer” and “the inner” man, 2 Cor. iv, 16; and the latter is not the exclusive privilege of the redeemed,--the contrast is that between the merely natural individual and the moral personality. And this contrast, foreign to the ancient Hebrews, is first worked out, with clear consciousness, by Plato, who, e.g., in his Banquet, causes one of the characters to say: “Socrates has thrown this Silenus-like form around himself externally, as in the case of those Silenus-statues which enclose a statuette of Apollo; but, when he is opened, how full is he found to be of temperance within”; and who treats this contrast as typical of the dualism inherent to all human life here on earth.[63]--This contrast exists throughout Catherine’s teaching as regards the thing itself, although her terms are different. She has, for reasons which will appear presently, no one constant term for “the inner man,” but “the outer man” is continuously styled “la umanità.”

(2) The “outer man” consists for St. Paul of the body’s earthly material, “the flesh”; and of the animating principle of the flesh, “the psyche,” which is inseparably connected with that flesh, and which dies for good and all at the death of the latter; whereas the form of “the body” is capable of resuscitation, and is then filled out by a finer material, “glory.”[64]--Here Catherine has no precise or constant word for the “psyche”; her “umanità” generally stands for the “psyche” plus body and flesh, all in one; and her “anima” practically always means part or the whole of “the inner man,” and mostly stands for “mind.” And there is no occasion for her to reflect upon any distinction between the form and the matter of the body, since she nowhere directly busies herself with the resurrection.

The “inner man” consists for St. Paul in the Mind, the Heart, and the Conscience. The Mind (noûs), corresponding roughly to our theoretical and practical Reason, has a certain tendency towards God: “The invisible things of God are seen by the mind in the works of creation,” Rom. i, 20; and there is “a law of the mind” which is fought by “the law of sin,” Rom. vii, 23; and this, although there is also a “mind of the flesh,” Col. ii, 18; “a reprobate mind,” Rom. i, 28; and a “renovation of the mind,” Rom. xii, 2.--Catherine clings throughout most closely to the Pauline use of the term, as far as that use is favourable: note how she perceives invisible things “colla mente mia.”

The Heart is even more accessible to the divine influence,--at least, it is to it that God gives “the first fruits of the Spirit” and “the Spirit of His Son, crying Abba, Father,” Gal. iv, 6; 2 Cor. i, 22. As an organ of immediate perception it is so parallel to the Mind, that we can hear of “eyes of the heart”; yet it is also the seat of feeling, of will, and of moral consciousness, Eph. i, 18; 2 Cor. ii, 4; 1 Cor. iv, 5; Rom. ii, 15. It can stand for the inner life generally; or, like the Mind, it can become darkened and impenitent; whilst again, over the heart God’s love is poured out, God’s peace keeps guard, and we believe with the heart, 1 Cor. xiv, 25; Rom. i, 21; ii, 5; v, 5; Phil. iv, 7; Rom. x, 9.--All this again, as far as it is favourable, is closely followed by Catherine; indeed the persistence with which she comes back to certain effects wrought upon her heart by the Spirit, Christ,--effects which some of her followers readily interpreted as so many physical miracles,--was no doubt occasioned or stimulated by 2 Cor. iii, 3, “Be ye an epistle of Christ, written by the Spirit of the living God … upon the fleshly tables of the heart.”

And Conscience, “Syneidēsis”--that late Greek word introduced by St. Paul as a technical term into the Christian vocabulary--includes our “conscience,” but is as comprehensive as our “consciousness.”--Catherine practically never uses the term: no doubt because, in the narrower of the two senses which had become the ordinary one, it was too predominantly ethical to satisfy her overwhelmingly religious preoccupations.

(3) Now, with regard to this whole dualism of the “outer” and the “inner man,” its application to the resurrection of the body in St. Paul and in St. Catherine shall occupy us in connection with her Eschatology; here I would but indicate the two Pauline moods or attitudes towards the earthly body, and Catherine’s continuous reproduction of but one of these. For his magnificent conception of the Christian society, in which each person, by a different specific gift and duty, co-operates towards the production of an organic whole, a whole which in return develops and dignifies those its constituents, is worked out by means of the image of the human earthly body, in which each member is a necessary part and constituent of the complete organism, which is greater than, and which gives full dignity to, each and all these its factors (1 Cor. xii). And he thus, in his most deliberate and systematic mood, shows very clearly how deeply he has realized the dignity of the human body, as the instrument both for the development of the soul itself and for the work of that soul in and upon the visible world.

But in his other mood, which remains secondary and sporadic throughout his writings, his attitude is acutely dualistic. His one direct expression of it occurs in 2 Cor. v, 1-4: “For we know that, if our earthly house of this tent be dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this also we groan, desiring to be clothed upon with our habitation that is from heaven. We who are in this tabernacle do groan, being burthened.” Now this passage is undoubtedly modelled by St. Paul upon the Book of Wisdom, ix, 15: “For the corruptible body is a load upon the soul, and the earthly habitation presseth down the mind that museth upon many things.” And this latter saying again is as certainly formed upon Plato (Phaedo, 81 c): “It behoves us to think of the body as oppressive and heavy and earthlike and visible. And hence the soul, being of such a nature as we have seen, when possessing such a body, is both burthened and dragged down again into the visible world.”[65] And it is this conception of the Hellenic Athenian Plato (about 380 B.C.) which, passing through the Hellenistic Alexandrian Jewish Wisdom-writer (80 B.C.?) and then through the Hellenistically tinctured ex-Rabbi, Paul of Tarsus (52 A.D.), still powerfully, indeed all but continuously, influences the mind of the Genoese Christian Catherine, especially during the years from A.D. 1496 to 1510.

Catherine’s still more pessimistic figure of the body as a prison-house and furnace of purification for the soul, is no doubt the resultant of suggestions received, probably in part through intermediary literature, from the following three passages:--(1) Plato, in his Cratylus (400 B.C.), makes Socrates say: “Some declare that the body (sōma) is the grave (sēma) of the soul, as she finds herself at present. The Orphite poets seem to have invented the appellation: they held that the soul is thus paying the penalty of sin, and that the body is an enclosure which may be likened to a prison, in which the soul is enclosed until the penalty is paid.” (2) St. Matt. v, 25, 26, gives Our Lord’s words: “Be thou reconciled with thine adversary whilst he is still with thee on the way … lest the Judge hand thee over to the prison-warder, and thou be cast into prison.… Thou shalt not go forth thence, until thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.” And (3) St. Paul declares, 1 Cor. iii, 15: “Every man’s work shall be tested by fire. If a man’s work be burnt, he shall suffer loss; yet he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire.” These three passages combined will readily suggest, to a soul thirsting for purification and possessed of an extremely sensitive psycho-physical organization with its attendant liability to fever heats, the picture of the body as a flame-full prison-house,--a purgatory of the soul.

2. St. Paul’s conception of “Spirit.”

A very difficult complication and varying element is introduced into St. Paul’s Anthropology by the term into which he has poured all that is most original, deepest, most deliberate and abiding in his teaching,--the Spirit, “Pneuma.” For somewhat as he uses the term “Sarx,” the flesh, both in its loose popular signification of “mankind in general”; and in a precise, technical sense of “the matter which composes the earthly body”; so also he has, occasionally, a loose popular use of the term “spirit,” when it figures as but a fourth parallel to “mind,” “heart,” and “conscience”; and, usually, a very strict and technical use of it, when it designates the Spirit, God Himself.

(1) Now it is precisely in the latter case that his doctrine attains its fullest depth and its greatest difficulty. For here the Spirit, the Pneuma, is, strictly speaking, only one--the Spirit of God, God Himself, in His action either outside or inside the human mind, Noûs. And in such passages of St. Paul, where man seems to possess a distinct pneuma of his own, by far the greater number only apparently contradict this doctrine. For in some, so in 1 Cor. ii, the context is dominated by a comparison between the divine and the human consciousness, so that, in v. 11, man’s Noûs is designated Pneuma, and in v. 16, and Rom. xi, 34, the Lord’s Pneuma is called His Noûs. And the “spirit of the world” contrasted here, in v. 11, with the “Spirit of God,” is a still further deliberate laxity of expression, similar to that of Satan as “the God of this world,” 2 Cor. iv, 4. In other passages,--so Rom. viii, 16; i, 9; viii, 10, and even in 1 Cor. v, 5 (the “spirit” of the incestuous Corinthian which is to be saved),--we seem to have “spirit” either as the mind in so far as the object of the Spirit’s communications, or as the mind transformed by the Spirit’s influence. And if we can hear of a “defilement of the spirit,” 2 Cor. vii, 1, we are also told that we can forget the fact of the body being the temple of the holy Spirit, 1 Cor. vi, 19; and that this temple’s profanation “grieves the holy Spirit,” Eph. iv, 30. Very few, sporadic, and short passages remain in which “the spirit of man” cannot clearly be shown to have a deliberately derivative sense.

Catherine, in this great matter, completely follows St. Paul. For she too has loosely-knit moods and passages, in which “spirito” appears as a natural endowment of her own, parallel to, or identical with, the “mente.” But when speaking strictly, and in her intense moods, she means by “spirito,” the Spirit, Christ, Love, God, a Power which, though in its nature profoundly distinct and different from her entire self-seeking self, can and does come to dwell within, and to supplant, this self. Indeed her highly characteristic saying, “my Me is God,” with her own explanations of it, expresses, if pressed, even more than this. In these moods, the term “mente” is usually absent, just as in St. Paul.

Now in his formally doctrinal Loci, St. Paul defines the Divine Pneuma and the human sarx, not merely as ontologically contrary substances, but as keenly conflicting, ethically contradictory principles. An anti-spiritual power, lust, possesses the flesh and the whole outer man, whilst, in an indefinitely higher degree and manner, the Spirit, which finds an echo in the mind, the inner man, is a spontaneous, counter-working force; and these two energies fight out the battle in man, and for his complete domination, Rom. vi, 12-14; vii, 22, 23; viii, 4-13. And this dualistic conception is in close affinity to all that was noblest in the Hellenistic world of St. Paul’s own day; but is in marked contrast to the pre-exilic, specifically Jewish Old Testament view, where we have but the contrast between the visible and transitory, and the Invisible and Eternal; and the consciousness of the weakness and fallibility of “flesh and blood.” And this latter is the temper of mind that dominates the Synoptic Gospels: “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak”; and “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” are here the divinely serene and infinitely fruitful leading notes.--And Catherine, on this point, is habitually on the Synoptist side: man is, for her, far more weak and ignorant than forcibly and deliberately wicked. Yet her detailed intensity towards the successive cloaks of self-love is still, as it were, a shadow and echo of the fierce, and far more massive, flesh-and-spirit struggle in St. Paul.

3. The Angry and the Loving God.

And, as against the intense wickedness of man, we find in St. Paul an emphatic insistence--although this is directly derived from the Old Testament and Rabbinical tradition--upon the anger and indignation of God, Rom. ii, 8, and frequently.--Here Catherine is in explicit contrast with him, in so far as the anger would be held to stand for an emotion not proceeding from love and not ameliorative in its aim and operation. This attitude sprang no doubt, in part, from the strong influence upon her of the Dionysian teaching concerning the negative character of evil; possibly still more from her continuous pondering of the text, “As a father hath compassion upon his children, so hath the Lord compassion on them that fear Him; for He knoweth our frame, He remembereth that we are dust,” Ps. ciii, 13, 14,--where she dwells upon the fact that we are all His children rather than upon the fact that we do not all fear Him; but certainly, most of all, from her habitual dwelling upon the other side of St. Paul’s teaching, that concerning the Love of God.

Now the depth and glow of Paul’s faith and love goes clearly back to his conversion, an event which colours and influences all his feeling and teaching for some thirty-four years, up to the end. And similarly Catherine’s conversion-experience has been found by us to determine the sequence and all the chief points of her Purgatorial teaching, some thirty-seven years after that supreme event.

Already Philo had, under Platonic influence, believed in an Ideal Man, a Heavenly Man; had identified him with the Logos, the Word or Wisdom of God; and had held him to be in some way ethereal and luminous,--never arriving at either a definitely personal or a simply impersonal conception of this at one time intermediate Being, at another time this supreme attribute of God. St. Paul, under the profound impression of the Historic Christ and the great experience on the road to Damascus, perceives the Risen, Heavenly Jesus as possessed of a luminous, ethereal body, a body of “glory,” Acts xxii, 11. And this Christ is, for St. Paul, identical with “the Spirit”: “the Lord is the Spirit,” 2 Cor. iii, 17; and “to be in Christ” and “Christ is in us” are parallel terms to those of “to be in the Spirit” and “the Spirit is within us” respectively. In all four cases we get Christ or the Spirit conceived as an element, as it were an ocean of ethereal light, in which souls are plunged and which penetrates them. In Catherine we have, at her conversion, this same perception and conception of Spirit as an ethereal light, and of Christ as Spirit; and up to the end she more and more appears to herself to bathe, to be submerged in, an ocean of light, which, at the same time, fills her within and penetrates her through and through.

But again, and specially since his conversion, St. Paul thinks of God as loving, as Love, and this conception henceforth largely supplants the Old Testament conception of the angry God. This loving God is chiefly manifested through the loving Christ: indeed the love of Christ and the love of God are the same thing. And this Christ-Love dwells within us.[66] And Catherine, since her mind has perceived Love to be the central character of God, and has adopted fire as love’s fullest image, cannot but hold,--God and Love and Christ and Spirit being all one and the same thing,--that Christ-Spirit-Fire is in her and she in It. The yellow light-image, which all but alone typifies God’s friendliness in the Bible, is thus turned into a red fire-image. And yet this latter in so far retains with Catherine something of its older connotation of anger, that the Fire and Heat appear in her teaching more as symbols of the suffering caused by the opposition of man’s at least partial impurity to the Spirit, Christ, Love, God, and of the pain attendant upon that Spirit’s action, even where it can still purify; whereas the Light and Illumination mostly express the peaceful penetration of man’s spirit by God’s Spirit, and the blissful gain accruing from such penetration.

4. The Risen Christ and the Heavenly Adam.

St. Paul dwells continuously upon the post-earthly, the Risen Christ, and upon Him in His identity with the pre-earthly, the Heavenly Man: so that the historical Jesus tends to become, all but for the final acts in the Supper-room and upon the Cross, a transitory episode;--a super-earthly biography all but supplants the earthly one, since His death and resurrection and their immediate contexts are all but the only two events dwelt upon, and form but the two constituents of one inseparable whole.--Here Catherine is deeply Pauline in her striking non-occupation with the details of the earthly life (the scene with the Woman at the Well being the single exception), and in her continuous insistence upon Christ as the life-giving Spirit. Indeed, even the death is strangely absent. There is but the one doubtful contrary instance, in any case a quite early and sporadic one, of the Vision of the Bleeding Christ. The fact is that, in her teaching, the self-donation of God in general, in His mysterious love for each individual soul, and of Christ in particular, in His Eucharistic presence as our daily food, take all their special depth of tenderness from her vivid realization of the whole teaching, temper, life, and death of Jesus Christ; and that teaching derives its profundity of feeling only from all this latter complexus of facts and convictions.

5. Reconciliation, Justification, Sanctification.

(1) St. Paul has two lines of thought concerning Reconciliation. In the objective, juridical, more Judaic conception, the attention is concentrated on the one moment of Christ’s death, and the consequences appear as though instantaneous and automatic; in the other, the subjective, ethical, more Hellenistic conception, the attention is spread over the whole action of the Christ’s incarnational self-humiliation, and the consequences are realized only if and when we strive to imitate Him,--they are a voluntary and continuous process. Catherine’s fundamental conversion-experience and all her later teachings attach her Reconciliation to the entire act of ceaseless Divine “ecstasy,” self-humiliation, and redemptive immanence in Man, of which the whole earthly life and death of Christ are the centre and culmination; but though the human soul’s corresponding action is conceived as continuous, once it has begun, she loves to dwell upon this whole action as itself the gift of God and the consequence of His prevenient act.

(2) As to Justification, we have again, in St. Paul, a preponderatingly Jewish juridical conception of adoption, in which a purely vicarious justice and imputed righteousness seem to be taught; and an ethical conception of immanent justice, based on his own experience and expressed by means of Hellenistic forms, according to which “the love of God is poured out in our hearts,” Rom. v, 5. And he often insists strenuously upon excluding every human merit from the moment and act of justification, insisting upon its being a “free gift” of God.--Catherine absorbs herself in the second, ethical conception, and certainly understands this love of God as primarily God’s, the Spirit’s, Christ’s love, as Love Itself poured out in our hearts; and she often breaks out into angry protests against the very suggestion of any act, or part of an act, dear to God, proceeding from her natural or separate self, indeed, if we press her expressions, from herself at all.

(3) As to Sanctification, St. Paul has three couples of contrasted conceptions. The first couple conceives the Spirit, either Old Testament-wise, as manifesting and accrediting Itself in extraordinary, sudden, sporadic, miraculous gifts and doings--e.g. in ecstatic speaking with tongues; or,--and this is the more frequent and the decisive conception,--as an abiding, equable penetration and spiritual reformation of its recipient. Here the faithful “live and walk in the spirit,” are “driven by the spirit,” “serve God in the spirit,” are “temples of the Spirit,” Gal. v, 25; Rom. viii, 14; vii, 6; 1 Cor. vi, 19: the Spirit has become the creative source of a supernatural character-building.[67]--Here Catherine, in contrast to most of her friends, who are wedded to the first view, is strongly attached to the second view, perhaps the deepest of St. Paul’s conceptions.

The second couple conceives Sanctification either juridically, and moves dramatically from act to act,--the Sacrifice on the Cross and the Resurrection of the Son of God, the sentence of Justification and the Adoption as sons of God; or ethically, and presupposes everywhere continuous processes,--beginning with the reception of the Spirit, and ending with “the Lord of the Spirit.”--Here Catherine has curiously little of the dramatic and prominently personal conception: only in the imperfect soul’s acutely painful moment, of standing before and seeing God immediately after death, do we get one link in this chain, in a somewhat modified form. For the rest, the ethical and continuous conception is present practically throughout her teaching, but in a curious, apparently paradoxical form, to be noticed in a minute.

And the third couple either treats Sanctification as, at each moment of its actual presence, practically infallible and complete: “We who have died to sin, how shall we further live in it?” “Freed from sin, ye have become the servants of Justice”; “now we are loosed from the law of death, so as to serve in newness of spirit”; “those who are according to the flesh, mind the things of the flesh; but they that are according to the Spirit, mind the things of the Spirit,” Rom. vi, 2, 18; vii, 6; viii, 5. Or it considers Sanctification as only approximately complete, so long as man has to live here below, not only in the Spirit, Rom. viii, 9, but also in the flesh, Gal. ii, 20. The faithful have indeed crucified the flesh once for all, Gal. v, 24: yet they have continually to mortify their members anew, Col. iii, 5, and by the Spirit to destroy the works of the flesh, Rom. viii, 13. The “fear of the Lord,” “of God,” does not cease to be a motive for the sanctified, 2 Cor. v, 11; vii, 1. To “walk in the Spirit,” “in the light,” has to be insisted on (1 Thess. v, 4-8; Rom. xiii, 11-14; 2 Cor. vi, 14), as long as the eternal day has not yet arisen for us. And even in Romans, chapter vi, we find admonitions, vv. 12, 13, 19, which, if we press the other conception, are quite superfluous.[68]

And here Catherine, in her intense sympathy with each of these contrasted conceptions, offers us a combination of both in a state of unstable equilibrium and delicate tension. I take it that it is not her immensely impulsive and impatient temperament, nor survivals of the Old Testament idea as to instantaneousness being the special characteristic of divine action, but her deep and noble sense of the givenness and pure grace of religion, and of God’s omnipotence being, if possible, exceeded only by His overflowing, self-communicative love, which chiefly determine her curious presentation and emotional experience of spiritual growth and life as a movement composed of sudden shiftings upwards, with long, apparently complete pauses in between. For here this form (of so many instants, of which each is complete in itself) stands for her as the least inadequate symbol, as a kind of shattered mirror, not of time at all, but of eternity; whilst the succession and difference between these instants indicates a growth in the apprehending soul, which has, in reality, been proceeding also in between these instants and not only during them. And this remarkable scheme presents her conviction that, in principle, the work of the all-powerful, all-loving Spirit cannot, of itself, be other than final and complete, and yet that, as a matter of fact, it never is so, in weak, self-deceptive, and variously resisting man, but ever turns out to require a fresh and deeper application. And this succession of sudden jerks onwards and upwards, after long, apparently complete pauses between them, gives to her fundamentally ethical and continuous conception something of the look of the forensic, dramatic series, with its separate acts,--a series which would otherwise be all but unrepresented in her picture of the soul’s life on this side of death and of its life (immediately after its vivid sight of God and itself, and its act of free-election) in the Beyond.

6. Pauline Social Ethics.

As to Social Ethics, St. Paul’s worldward movement is strongly represented in Catherine’s teaching. Her great sayings as to God being servable not only in the married state, but in a camp of (mercenary) soldiers; and as to her determination violently to appropriate the monk’s cowl, should this his state be necessary to the attainment of the highest love of God, are full of the tone of Rom. xiv, 14, 20, “nothing is common in itself, but to him who considereth anything to be common, to him it is common,”--“all things are clean”; and of 1 Cor. x, 26, 28, “the earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof.” And her sense of her soul’s positive relation to nature, e.g. trees, was no doubt in part awakened by that striking passage, Rom. viii, 19, “the expectation of the creature awaiteth the revelation of the sons of God; for the creature was made subject to vanity not willingly.”

On the other hand, it would be impossible confidently to identify her own attitude concerning marriage with that of St. Paul, since, as we know, her peculiar health and her unhappiness with Giuliano make it impossible to speak here with any certainty of the mature woman’s deliberate judgment concerning continence and marriage. Yet her impulsive protestation, in the scene with the monk, against any idea of being debarred by her state from as perfect a love of God as his,--whilst, of course, not in contradiction with the Pauline and generally Catholic positions in the matter, seems to imply an emotional attitude somewhat different from that of some of the Apostle’s sayings. Indeed, in her whole general and unconscious position as to how a woman should hold herself in religious things it is interesting to note the absence of all influence from those Pauline sayings which, herein like Philo (and indeed the whole ancient world) treat man alone as “the (direct) image and glory (reflex) of God,” and the woman as but “the glory (reflex) of the man,” 1 Cor. xi, 7. Everywhere she appears full, on the contrary, of St. Paul’s other (more characteristic and deliberate) strain, according to which, as there is “neither Jew nor Gentile, bond nor free” before God, so “neither is the man without the woman, nor the woman without the man, in the Lord,” 1 Cor. xi, 11.--And in social matters generally, Catherine’s convert life and practice shows, in the active mortifications of its first penitential part, in her persistent great aloofness from all things of sense as regards her own gratification, and in the ecstasies and love of solitude which marked the zenith of her power, a close sympathy with, and no doubt in part a direct imitation of, St. Paul’s Arabian retirement, chastisement of his body, and lonely concentration upon rapt communion with God. Yet she as strongly exemplifies St. Paul’s other, the outward movement, the love-impelled, whole-hearted service of the poorest, world-forgotten, sick and sorrowing brethren. And the whole resultant rhythmic life has got such fine spontaneity, emotional and efficacious fulness, and expansive joy about it, as to suggest at once those unfading teachings of St. Paul which had so largely occasioned it,--those hymns in praise of that love “which minds not high things but consenteth to the humble,” Rom. xii, 16; “becomes all things to all men,” 1 Cor. ix, 22; “weeps with those that weep and rejoices with those that rejoice,” ibid. xii, 26; and which, as the twin love of God and man, is not only the chief member of the central ethical triad, but, already here below, itself becomes the subject which exercises the other two virtues, for it is “love” that “believeth all things, hopeth all things,” even before that eternity in which love alone will never vanish away, ibid. xiii, 7, 8. Here Catherine with Paul triumphs completely over time: their actions and teaching are as completely fresh now, after well-nigh nineteen and four centuries, as when they first experienced, willed, and uttered them.

7. Sacramental Teachings.

In Sacramental matters it is interesting to note St. Paul’s close correlation of Baptism and the Holy Eucharist: “All (our fathers) were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea; and all ate the same spiritual food and all drank the same spiritual drink,” 1 Cor. x, 3; “in one Spirit we have all been baptized into one body, and we have all been made to drink one Spirit,” Christ, His blood, ibid. xii, 13. And Catherine is influenced by these passages, when she represents the soul as hungering for, and drowning itself in, the ocean of spiritual sustenance which is Love, Christ, God: but she attaches the similes, which are distributed by St. Paul among the two Rites, to the Holy Eucharist alone. Baptism had been a grown man’s deliberate act in Paul’s case,--an act immediately subsequent to, and directly expressive of, his conversion, the culminating experience of his life; and, as a great Church organizer, he could not but dwell with an equal insistence upon the two chief Sacraments.

Catherine had received baptism as an unconscious infant, and the event lay far back in that pre-conversion time, which was all but completely ousted from her memory by the great experience of some twenty-five years later. And in the latter experience it was (more or less from the first and soon all but exclusively) the sense of a divine encirclement and sustenance, of an addition of love, rather than a consciousness of the subtraction of sins or of a divine purification, that possessed her. In her late, though profoundly characteristic Purgatorial teaching, the soul again plunges into an ocean; but now, since the soul is rather defiled than hungry, and wills rather to be purified than to be fed, this plunge is indeed a kind of Baptism by Immersion. Yet we have no more the symbol of water, for the long state and effects to which that swift act leads, but we have, instead, fire and light, and, in one place, once again bread and the hunger for bread. And this is no doubt because, in these Purgatorial picturings, it is her conversion-experience of love under the symbols of light and of fire, and her forty years of daily hungering for the Holy Eucharist and Love Incarnate, which furnish the emotional colours and the intellectual outlines.

8. Eschatological matters.

In Eschatological matters the main points of contact and of contrast appear to be four; and three of the differences are occasioned by St. Paul’s preoccupation with Christ’s Second Coming, with the Resurrection of the body, and with the General Judgment, mostly as three events in close temporal correlation, and likely to occur soon; whilst Catherine abstracts entirely from all three.

(1) Thus St. Paul is naturally busy with the question as to the Time when he shall be with Christ. In 1 Thess. iv, 15, he speaks of “we who are now living, who have been left for the coming of the Lord,” i.e. he expects this event during his own lifetime; whilst in Phil. i, 23, he “desires to be dissolved and to be with Christ,” i.e. he has ceased confidently to expect this coming before his own death. But Catherine dwells exclusively, with this latter conception, upon the moment of death, as that when the soul shall see, and be finally confirmed in its union with, Love, Christ, God; for into her earthly lifetime Love, Christ, God, can and do come, but invisibly, and she may still lose full union with them for ever.

(2) As to the Place, it is notoriously obscure whether St. Paul thinks of it, as do the Old Testament and the Apocalypse, as the renovated earth, or as the sky, or as the intervening space. The risen faithful who “shall be caught in the clouds to meet Christ,” 1 Thess. iv, 16, seem clearly to be meeting Him, in mid-air, as He descends upon earth; and “Jerusalem above,” Gal. iv, 26, may well, as in Apoc. iii, 12; xxi, 2, be conceived as destined to come down upon earth. But Catherine, though she constantly talks of Heaven, Purgatory, Hell as “places,” makes it plain that such “places” are for her but vivid symbols for states of soul. God Himself repeatedly appears in her sayings as “the soul’s place”; and it is this “place,” the soul’s true spiritual birthplace and home, which, ever identical and bliss-conferring in itself, is variously experienced by the soul, in exact accordance with its dispositions,--as that profoundly painful, or that joyfully distressing, or that supremely blissful “place” which respectively we call Hell, and Purgatory, and Heaven.

(3) As to the Body, we have already noted St. Paul’s doctrine, intermediate between the Palestinian and Alexandrian Jewish teaching, that it will rise indeed, but composed henceforth of “glory” and no more of “flesh.” It is this his requirement of a body, however spiritual, which underlies his anxiety to be “found clothed, not naked,” at and after death, 2 Cor. v, 3. Indeed, in this whole passage, v, 1-4, “our earthly house of this habitation,” and “a building of God not made with hands,” no doubt mean, respectively, the present body of flesh and the future body of glory; just as the various, highly complex, conceptions of “clothed,” “unclothed,” “clothed upon,” refer to the different conditions of the soul with a body of flesh, without a body at all, and with a body of glory.--Now this passage, owing to its extreme complication and abstruseness of doctrine, has come down to us in texts and versions of every conceivable form; and this uncertainty has helped Catherine towards her very free utilization of it. For she not only, as ever, simply ignores all questions of a risen body, and transfers the concept of a luminous ethereal substance from the body to the soul itself, and refers the “nakedness,” “unclothing,” “clothing,” and “clothing upon” to conditions obtaining, not between the soul and the body, but between the soul and God; but she also, in most cases, takes the nakedness as the desirable state, since typical of the soul’s faithful self-exposure to the all-purifying rays of God’s light and fire, and interprets the “unclothing” as the penitential stripping from off itself of those pretences and corrupt incrustations which prevent God’s blissful action upon it.

(4) And, finally, as to the Judgment, we have in St. Paul a double current,--the inherited Judaistic conception of a forensic retribution; Christ, the divine Judge, externally applying such and such statutory rewards and punishments to such and such good and evil deeds,--so in Rom. ii, 6-10; and the experimental conception, helped on to articulation by Hellenistic influences, of the bodily resurrection and man’s whole final destiny as the necessary resultant and manifestation of an internal process, the presence of the Spirit and of the power of God,--so in the later parts of Romans, in Gal. vi, 8, and in 1 Cor. vi, 14; 2 Cor. xiii, 4.--Among Catherine’s sayings also we find some passages--but these the less characteristic and mostly of doubtful authenticity,--where reward and punishment, indeed the three “places” themselves, appear as so many separate institutions of God, which get externally applied to certain good and evil deeds. But these are completely overshadowed in number, sure authenticity, emotional intensity, and organic connection with her other teachings, by sayings of the second type, where the soul’s fate is but the necessary consequence of its own deliberate choice and gradually formed dispositions, the result, inseparable since the first from its self-identification with this or that of the various possible will-attitudes towards God.

(5) We can then sum up the main points of contact and of difference between Paul and Catherine, by saying that, in both cases, everything leads up to, or looks back upon, a great culminating, directly personal experience of shortest clock-time duration, whence all their doctrine, wherever emphatic, is but an attempt to articulate and universalize this original experience; and that if in Paul there remains more of explicit occupation with the last great events of the earthly life of Jesus, yet in both there is the same insistence upon the life-giving Spirit, the eternal Christ, manifesting His inexhaustible power in the transformation of souls, on and on, here and now, into the likeness of Himself.

Ii. The Joannine Writings

On moving now from the Pauline to the Joannine writings, we shall find that Catherine’s obligations to these latter are but rarely as deep, yet that they cover a wider reach of ideas and images. I take this fresh source of influence under the double heading of the general relations of the Joannine teaching to other, previous or contemporary, conceptions; and of this same teaching considered in itself.[69]

1. Joannine teaching contrasted with other systems.

(1) As to the general relations towards other positions, we get here, towards Judaism and Paganism, an emphatic insistence upon the novelty and independence of Christianity as regards not only Paganism, but even the previous Judaism, “The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ,” i, 17; and upon the Logos, Christ, as “the Light that enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world,” “unto his own,” i.e. men in general; for this Light “was in the world, and the world was made by Him,” i, 9-11. There is thus a divinely-implanted, innate tendency towards this light, extant in man prior to the explicit act of faith, and operative outside of the Christian body: “Every man who is from the truth, heareth my voice,” xviii, 37: “he who doeth the truth, cometh to the light,” in, 21: “begotten,” as he is, not of man but “of God,” i, 13; 1 John iii, 9. And thus Samaritans, Greeks, and Heathens act and speak in the best dispositions, iv, 42; xii, 20-24; x, 16; whilst such terms and sayings as “the Saviour of the World,” “God so loved the world,” iv, 42, iii, 16, are the most universalistic declarations to be found in the New Testament.--And this current dominates the whole of Catherine’s temper and teaching: this certainty as to the innate affinity of every human soul to the Light, Love, Christ, God, gives a tone of exultation to the musings of this otherwise melancholy woman. Whereas the Joannine passages of a contrasting exclusiveness and even fierceness of tone, such as “all they that came before Me, were thieves and robbers,” x, 8; “ye are from your father, the devil,” viii, 44; “ye shall die in your sins,” viii, 21; “your sin remains,” ix, 41, are without any parallel among Catherine’s sayings. Indeed it is plain that Catherine, whilst as sure as the Evangelist that all man’s goodness comes from God, nowhere, except in her own case, finds man’s evil to be diabolic in character.

(2) With regard to Paulinism, the Joannine writings give us a continuation and extension of the representation of the soul’s mystical union with Christ, as a local abiding in the element Christ. Indeed it is in these writings that we find the terms “to abide in” the light, 1 John ii, 10, in God, 1 John iv, 13, in Christ, 1 John ii, 6, 24, 27, iii, 6, 24, and in His love, John xv, 9, 1 John iv, 16; the corresponding expressions, “God abideth in us,” 1 John iv, 12, 16, “Christ abideth in us,” 1 John iii, 24, and “love abideth in us,” 1 John iv, 16; the two immanences coupled together, where the communicant “abideth in Me and I in him,” vi, 56, and where the members of His mystical body are bidden to “abide in Me and I in you,” xv, 4; and the supreme pattern of all these interpenetrations, “I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me,” xiv, 10.--And it is from here that Catherine primarily gets the literary suggestions for her images of the soul plunged into, and filled by, an ocean of Light, Love, Christ, God; and again from here, more than from St. Paul, she gets her favourite term μένειν (It. restare), around which are grouped, in her mind, most of the quietistic-sounding elements of her teaching.

(3) As to the points of contact between the Joannine teaching and Alexandrianism, we find that three are vividly renewed by Catherine.

Philo had taught: “God ceases not from acting: as to burn is the property of fire, so to act is the property of God,” Legg. Alleg. I, 3. And in John we find: “God is a Spirit,” and “My Father worketh ever and I work ever,” iv, 24; v, 17. And God as pure Spiritual Energy, as the Actus Purus, is a truth and experience that penetrates the whole life of Catherine.

The work of Christ is not dwelt on in its earthly beginnings; but it is traced up and back, in the form of a spiritual “Genesis,” to His life and work as the Logos in Heaven, where He abides “in the bosom of the Father,” and whence He learns what He “hath declared” to us, i, 18; just as, in his turn, the disciple whom Jesus loved “was reclining” at the Last Supper “on the bosom of Jesus,” and later on “beareth witness concerning the things” which he had learnt there, xiii, 23; xxi, 24. So also Catherine transcends the early earthly life of Christ altogether, and habitually dwells upon Him as the Light and as Love, as God in His own Self-Manifestation; and upon the ever-abiding sustenance afforded by this Light and Life and Love to the faithful soul reclining and resting upon it.

And the contrast between the Spiritual and the Material, the Abiding and the Transitory, is symbolized throughout John, in exact accord with Philo, under the spacial categories of upper and lower, and of extension: “Ye are from below, I am from above,” viii, 23; “He that cometh from above, is above all,” iv, 31; and “in my Father’s house,” that upper world, “there are many mansions,” abiding-places, xiv, 2. Hence all things divine here below have descended from above: regeneration, iii, 3; the Spirit, i, 32; Angels, i, 51; the Son of God Himself, iii, 13: and they mount once more up above, so especially Christ Himself, iii, 13; vi, 62. And the things of that upper world are the true things: “the true light,” “ the true adorers,” “the true vine,” “the true bread from Heaven,” i, ix; iv, 23; xv, 1; vi, 32: all this in contrast to the shadowy semi-realities of the lower world.--Catherine is here in fullest accord with the spacial imagery generally; she even talks of God Himself, not only as in a place, but as Himself a place, as the soul’s “loco.” But she has, for reasons explained elsewhere, generally to abandon the upper-and-lower category when picturing the soul’s self-dedication to purification, since, for this act, she mostly figures a downward plunge into suffering; and she gives us a number of striking sayings, in which she explicitly re-translates all this quantitative spacial imagery into its underlying meaning of qualitative spiritual states.

(4) As to the Joannine approximations and antagonisms to Gnosticism, Catherine’s position is as follows. In the Synoptic accounts, Our Lord makes the acquisition of eternal life depend upon the keeping of the two great commandments of the love of God and of one’s neighbour, Luke x, 26-28, and parallels. In John Our Lord says: “this is eternal life, that they may know Thee, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent,” xvii, 3. To “know,” γινώσκειν, occurs twenty-five times in 1 John alone. Here the final object of every soul is to believe and to know: “they received and knew truly and believed,” xvii, 8; “we have believed and have known,” vi, 69; or “we have known and have believed,” 1 John iv, 16. And Catherine also lays much stress upon faith ending, even here below, in a certain vivid knowledge; but this knowledge is, with her, less doctrinally articulated, no doubt in part because there was no Gnosticism fronting her, to force on such articulation.

And the Joannine writings compare this higher mental knowledge to the lower, sensible perception: “He who cometh from heaven, witnesseth to what he hath seen and heard,” iii, 31; “when He shall become manifest, we shall see Him as He is,” 1 John iii, 2. And they have three special terms, in common with Gnosticism, for the object of such knowledge: Life, Light, and Fulness (Plerōma),--the latter, as a technical term, appearing in the New Testament only in John i, 16, and in the Epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians. Catherine, also, is ever experiencing and conceiving the mental apprehensions of faith, as so many quasi-sensible, ocular, perceptions; and Life and Light are constantly mentioned, and Fulness is, at least, implied in the psycho-physical concomitants or consequences of her thinkings.

On the other hand, she does not follow John in the intensely dualistic elements of his teaching,--the sort of determinist, all but innate, distinction between “the darkness,” “the men who loved the darkness rather than the light,” and the Light itself and those who loved it, i, 4, 5; iii, 19,--children of God and children of the devil--the latter all but incapable of being saved, viii, 38-47; x, 26; xi, 52; xiv, 17. Rather is she like him in his all but complete silence as to “the anger of God,”--a term which he uses once only, iii, 36, as against the twenty-two instances of it in St. Paul.

And she is full to overflowing of the great central, profoundly un- and anti-Gnostic, sensitively Christian teachings of St. John: as to the Light, the only-begotten Son, having been given by God, because God so loved the world; as to Jesus having loved his own even to the end; as to the object of Christ’s manifestation of His Father’s name to men, being that God’s love for Christ, and indeed Christ Himself, might be within them; and as to how, if they love Him, they will keep His commandments,--His commandment to love each other as He has loved them, iii, 21; iii, 16; xiii, 1; xvii, 26; xiv, 15; xv, 17. In this last great declaration especially do we find the very epitome of Catherine’s life and spirit, of her who can never think of Him as Light and Knowledge only, but ever insists on His being Fire and Love as well; and who has but one commandment, that of Love-impelled, Love-seeking loving.

(5) And lastly, in relation to organized, Ecclesiastical Christianity, the Joannine writings dwell, as regards the more general principles, on points which, where positive, are simply presupposed by Catherine; and, where negative, find no echo within her.

The Joannine writings insist continually upon the unity and inter-communion of the faithful: “There shall be one fold, one shepherd”; Christ’s death was in order “that He might gather the scattered children of God into one”; He prays to the Father that believers “may be one, as we are one”; and He leaves as His legacy His seamless robe, x, 16; xi, 52; xvii, 21; xix, 24. And these same writings have a painfully absolute condemnation for all outside of this visible fold: “The whole world lies in evil”; its “Prince is the Devil”; “the blood of Jesus cleanseth us from all sin,” within the community alone; false prophets, those who have gone forth from the community, are not to be prayed for, are not even to be saluted, 1 John, v, 19; John xii, 31; John i, 7; v, 16; 2 John, 10. For the great and necessary fight with Gnosticism has already begun in these writings.

But Catherine dies before the unity of Christendom is again in jeopardy through the Protestant Reformation, and she never dwells--this is doubtless a limit--upon the Christian community, as such. And her enthusiastic sympathy with the spiritual teachings of Jacopone da Todi, who, some two centuries before, had, as one of the prophetic opposition, vehemently attacked the intensely theocratic policy of Pope Boniface VIII, and had suffered a long imprisonment at his hands; her tender care for the schismatic population of the far-away Greek island of Chios; and her intimacy with Dre. Tommaso Moro, who, later on, became for a while a Calvinist; all indicate how free from all suspiciousness towards individual Catholics, or of fierceness against other religious bodies and persons, was her deeply filial attachment to the Church.

In the Synoptists Our Lord declares, as to the exorcist who worked cures in His name, although not a follower of His, that “he that is not against us, is for us,” and refuses to accede to His disciples’ proposal to interfere with his activity, Mark ix, 38-41; and He points, as to the means of inheriting eternal life, to the keeping of the two great commandments, as these are already formulated in the Old Testament, and insists that this neighbour, whom here we are bidden to love, is any and every man, Luke x, 25-37. The Joannine writings insist strongly upon the strict necessity of full, explicit adhesion: the commandment of love which Our Lord gives is here “My commandment,” “a new commandment,” one held “from the beginning”--in the Christian community; and the command to “love one another” is here addressed to the brethren in their relations to their fellow-believers only, xiii, 34; xiii, 35; xv, 12, 17. Catherine’s feeling, in this matter, is clearly with the Synoptists.

2. Joannine teaching considered in itself.

If we next take the Joannine teachings in themselves, we shall find the following interesting points of contact or contrast to exist between John and Catherine.

(1) In matters of Theology proper, she is completely penetrated by the great doctrine, more explicit in St. John even than in St. Paul, that “God is Love,” 1 John iv, 8; and by the conceptions of God and of Christ “working always” as Life, Light, and Love.--But whereas, in the first Epistle of John, God Himself is “eternal life” and “light,” v, 20; i, 5; and, in the Gospel, it is Christ Who, in the first instance, appears as Life and as Light, xi, 25; viii, 12: Catherine nowhere distinguishes at all between Christ and God. And similarly, whereas in St. John “God doth not give” unto Christ “the Spirit by measure”; and Christ promises to the disciples “another Paraclete,” i.e. the Holy Spirit, iii, 34; xiv, 16; and indeed the Son and the Spirit appear, throughout, as distinct from one another as do the Son and the Father: in Catherine we get, practically everywhere, an exclusive concentration upon the fact, so often implied or declared by St. Paul, of Love, Christ, being Himself Spirit.

(2) The Joannine Soteriology has, I think, influenced Catherine as follows. Christ’s redemptive work appears, in the more original current of that teaching, under the symbols of the Word, Light, Bread, as the self-revelation of God. For in proportion that this Logos-Light and Bread enlightens and nourishes, does He drive away darkness and weakness, and, with them, sin, and this previously to any historic acts of His earthly life. And, in this connection, there is but little stress laid upon penance and the forgiveness of sins as compared with the Synoptic accounts, and the term of turning back, στρέφειν, is absent here.--But that same redemptive work appears, in the more Pauline of the two Joannine currents, as the direct result of so many vicarious, atoning deeds, the historic Passion and Death of Our Lord. Here there is indeed sin, a “sin of the world,” and specially for this sin is Christ the propitiation: “God so loved the world, as to give His only-begotten Son”--Him “the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world,” i, 29; 1 John ii, 2; John ii, 16; i, 29, 36.

Catherine, with the probably incomplete exception of her Conversion and Penance-period, concentrates her attention, with a striking degree of exclusiveness, upon the former group of conceptions. With her too the God-Christ is--all but solely--conceived as Light which, in so far as it is not hindered, operates the healing and the growth of souls. And in her great picture of all souls inevitably hungering for the sight of the One Bread, God, she has operated a fusion between two of the Joannine images, the Light which is seen and the Bread which is eaten: here the bare sight (in reality, a satiating sight) of the Bread suffices. If, for the self-manifesting God-Christ, she has, besides the Joannine Light-image, a Fire-symbol, which has its literary antecedents rather in the Old Testament than in the New, this comes from the fact that she is largely occupied with the pain of the impressions and processes undergone by already God-loving yet still imperfectly pure souls, and that fierce fire is as appropriate a symbol for such pain as is peaceful light for joy.

Now this painfulness is, in Catherine’s teaching, the direct result of whatever may be incomplete and piecemeal in the soul’s state and process of purification. And this her conception, of Perfect Love being mostly attained only through a series of apparently sudden shifts, each seemingly final, is no doubt in part moulded upon the practically identical Joannine teaching as to Faith.

True, we have already seen that her conception of the nature of God’s action upon the soul, and of the soul’s reaction under this His touch, is more akin to the rich Synoptic idea of a disposition and determination of the soul’s whole being, (a cordial trust at least as much as an intellectual apprehension and clear assent), than to the Joannine view, which lays a predominant stress upon mental apprehension and assent. And again, she nowhere presents anything analogous to the Joannine, already scholastic, formulations of the object of this Faith and Trust,--all of them explicitly concerned with the nature of Christ.

But, everywhere in the Joannine writings, the living Person and Spirit aimed at by these definitions is considered as experienced by the soul in a succession of ever-deepening intuitions and acts of Faith. Already at the Jordan, Andrew and Nathaniel have declared Jesus to be the Christ, the Son of God, i, 41, 49; yet they, His disciples, are said to have believed in Him at Cana, in consequence of His miracle there, ii, 11. Already at Capernaum Peter asserts for the twelve, “We have believed and known that Thou art the Holy One of God,” vi, 69; yet still, at the Last Supper, Christ exhorts them to believe in Him, xiv, 10, 11, and predicts future events to them, in order that, when these predictions come true, their faith may still further increase, xiii, 19; xiv, 29. And, as far on as after the Resurrection we hear that the Beloved Disciple “saw” (the empty tomb) “and believed,” xx, 8, 29. We thus get in John precisely the same logically paradoxical, but psychologically and spiritually most accurate and profound, combination of an apparent completeness of Faith at each point of special illumination, with a sudden re-beginning and impulsive upward shifting of the soul’s Light and Believing, which is so characteristic of Catherine’s experience and teaching as to the successive levels of the soul’s Fire, Light and Love. And the opposite movement--of the fading away of the Light and the Faith--can be traced in John, as the corresponding doctrine of the going out of the Fire, Light and Love within the Soul can be found in Catherine.

Again, both John and Catherine are penetrated with the sense that this Faith and Love is somehow waked up in souls by a true touch of God, a touch to which they spontaneously respond, because they already possess a substantial affinity to Him. “His,” the Good Shepherd’s, “sheep hear His voice,” x, 16; they hear it, because they are already His: the Light solicits and is accepted by the soul, because the soul itself is light-like and light-requiring, and because it proceeds originally from this very Light which would now reinforce the soul’s own deepest requirements. This great truth appears also in those profound Joannine passages: “No man can come to Me, unless the Father Who sent Me draw him”; and “I have manifested Thy name, to those men whom Thou didst give Me from out of the world,” vi, 44; xvii, 6.

And this attractive force is also a faculty of Christ: “I shall draw all men unto Myself,” xii, 32. And note how Catherine, ever completely identifying God, Christ, Light, Love, and, where these work in imperfectly pure souls, Fire, is stimulated by the last-quoted text to extend God’s, Christ’s, Love’s drawing, attraction, to all men; to limit only, in various degrees, these various men’s response to it; and to realize so intensely that a generous yielding to this our ineradicable deepest attrait is our fullest joy, and the resisting it is our one final misery, as to picture the soul, penitent for this its mad resistance, plunging itself, now eagerly responsive to that intense attraction, into God and a growing conformity with Him.

(3) As to points concerning the Sacraments where Catherine is influenced by John, we find that here again Baptismal conceptions are passed over by her. She does not allude to the water in the discourse to Nicodemus, iii, 5, although she is full of other ideas suggested there; but she dwells upon the water in the address to the Woman at the Well, iv, 10-15, that “living water,” which is, for her, the spirit’s spiritual sustenance, Love, Christ, God, and insensibly glides over into the images and experiences attaching, for her, to the Holy Eucharist.

But, as to this the greatest of the Sacraments and the all-absorbing devotion of her life, her symbols and concepts are all suggested by the Fourth Gospel, in contrast to the Synoptists and St. Paul. For the Holy Eucharist is, with her, ever detached from any direct memory of the Last Supper, Passion, and Death, the original, historical, unique occasions which still form its setting in the pre-Joannine writings, although those greatest proofs of a divinely boundless self-immolation undoubtedly give to her devotion to the Blessed Sacrament its beautiful enthusiasm and tenderness. The Holy Eucharist ever appears with her, as with St. John, attached to the scene of the multiplication of the breads,--a feast of joy and of life, with Christ at the zenith of His earthly hope and power. For not “a shewing of the death” in “the eating of this bread,” 1 Cor. xi, 26, is dwelt on by John; but we have: “I am the Bread of Life; he that eateth this bread, shall live for ever,” John vi, 51, 52.

And Catherine follows John in thinking predominantly of the single soul, when dwelling upon the Holy Eucharist. For if John presents a great open-air Love-Feast in lieu of Paul’s Upper Chamber and Supper with the twelve, he, as over against Paul’s profoundly social standpoint, has, throughout this his Eucharistic chapter, but three indications of the plural as against some fourteen singulars.

And, finally, John’s change from the future tense, with its reference to a coming historic institution, “the food which … the Son of Man will give you,” vi, 27, to the present tense, with its declaration of an eternal fact and relation, “I am” (now and always) “the living bread which hath come down from heaven,” vi, 51, will have helped Catherine towards the conception of the eternal Christ-God offering Himself as their ceaseless spiritual food to His creatures, possessed as they are by an indestructible spiritual hunger for Himself. For if the Eucharistic food, Bread, Body, has already been declared by St. Paul to be “spiritual,” 2 Cor. iii, 17, in St. John also it has to be spiritual, for it is here “the true bread from heaven” and “the bread of life”; and Christ declares here “it is the Spirit that giveth life, the flesh (alone) profiteth nothing,” vi, 61, 69. Hence Catherine is, again through the Holy Eucharist and St. John, brought back to her favourite Pauline conception of the Lord as Himself “Spirit,” “the Life-giving Spirit,” 2 Cor. iii, 17; 1 Cor. xv, 45.

(4) And if we conclude with the Joannine Eschatology, we shall find that Catherine has penetrated deep into the following conceptions, which undoubtedly, even in their union, present us with a less rich outlook than that furnished by the Synoptists, but which may be said to constitute the central spirit of Our Lord’s teaching.

Like John, who has but two mentions of “the Kingdom of God,” iii, 3, 5, and who elsewhere ever speaks of “Life,” Catherine has nowhere “the Kingdom,” but everywhere “Life.” Like him she conceives the process of Conversion as a “making alive” of the moribund, darkened, cold soul, by the Light, Love, Christ, God, v, 21-29, when He, Who is Himself “the Life,” xi, 25, and “the Spirit,” iv, 24, speaks to the soul “words” that are “spirit and life,” vi, 63; for then the soul that gives ear to His words “hath eternal life,” v, 24.

Again Catherine, for the most part, appropriates and develops that one out of the two Joannine currents of doctrine concerning the Judgment, which treats the latter as already determined and forestalled by Man’s present personal attitude towards the Light. The judgment is thus simply a discrimination, according to the original meaning of the noun κρίσις--like when God in the beginning “discriminated the light from the darkness,” Gen. i, 5; a discrimination substantially effected already here and now, “he that believeth in Him, is not judged; he that believeth not, is already judged,” iii, 18. But the other current of doctrine, so prominent in the Synoptists, is not absent from St. John,--the teaching as to a later, external and visible, forensic judgment. And Catherine has a similar intermixture of two currents, yet with a strong predominance of the immanental, present conception of the matter.

And even for that one volitional act in the beyond, which, according to her doctrine, has a certain constitutive importance for the whole eternity of all still partially impure souls--for that voluntary plunge--we can find an analogue in the Joannine writings, although here there is no reference to the after life. For throughout the greater part of his teaching--from iii, 15, 16, apparently up to the end of the Gospel,--the possession of spiritual Life is consequent upon the soul’s own acts of Faith, and not, as one would expect from his other, more characteristic teaching, upon its Regeneration from above, iii, 3. And the result of such acts of Faith is a “Metabasis,” a “passing over from death to life,” v, 24; 1 John iii, 14. Catherine will have conceived such an act of Faith as predominantly an act of Love, and the act as itself already that Metabasis; and will, most characteristically, have quickened the movement, and have altered its direction from the horizontal to the vertical, so that the “passing, going over,” becomes a “plunge down into” Life. For indeed the Fire she plunges into is, in her doctrine, Life Itself; since it is Light, Love, Christ, and God.

Catherine, once more, is John’s most faithful disciple, where he declares that Life to stream out immediately from the life-giving object of Faith into the life-seeking subject of that Faith, from the believed God into the believing soul: “I am the Bread of Life; he who cometh to Me, shall not hunger”; “he who abideth in Me, and I in him, beareth much fruit”; vi, 35; xv, 5.

And finally, she follows John closely where he insists upon Simultaneity and Eternity as contrasted with Succession and Immortality, so as even to abstract from the bodily resurrection. He who “hath passed over from death to life” (already) “possesses eternal life”; “every one who liveth and believeth in Me, shall not die for ever (at any time)”; “this,” already and of itself, “is eternal life, to know Thee, the one true God and Jesus Christ Whom Thou hast sent”; and the soul’s abiding in such an experience is Christ’s own joy, transplanted into it, and a joy which is full, v, 24; xi, 26; xvii, 3; xv, 11. And there is here such an insistence upon an unbroken spiritual life, in spite of and right through physical death, that, to Martha’s declaration that her brother will arise at the last day, xi, 24, Jesus answers, “I am the Resurrection and the Life: he who believeth in Me, even if he die” the bodily death, “shall live” on in his soul; indeed “every man who liveth” the life of the body, “and who believeth in Me, shall not die for ever (at any time)” in his soul, xi, 25, 26. John’s other line of thought, in which the bodily resurrection is prominent, remains without any definite or systematic response in Catherine’s teaching.

(5) We can then summarize the influence exercised by John upon Catherine by saying that he encouraged her to conceive religion as an experience of eternity; as a true, living knowledge of things spiritual; indeed as a direct touch of man’s soul by God Himself, culminating in man’s certainty that God is Love.

Iii. The Areopagite Writings

Catherine’s close relations to the Areopagite, the Pseudo-Dionysius, are of peculiar interest, in their manifold agreement, difference, or non-responsiveness; and this although the ideas thus assimilated are mostly of lesser depth and importance than those derived from the New Testament writings just considered. They can be grouped conveniently under the subject-matters of God’s creative, providential, and restorative, outgoing, His action upon souls and all things extant, and of the reasons for the different results of this action; of certain symbols used to characterize that essential action of God upon His creatures; of the states and energizings of the soul, in so far as it is responsive to that action; of certain terms concerning these reactions of the soul; and of the final result of the whole process. I shall try and get back, in most cases, to the Areopagite’s Neo-Platonist sources, the dry, intensely scholastic Proclus, and that great soul, the prince of the non-Christian Mystics, Plotinus.[70]

1. God’s general action.

As to God’s action, we have in Dionysius the Circle with the three stages of its movement,--a conception so dear to Catherine. “Theologians call Him the Esteemed and the Loved, and again Love and Loving-kindness, as being a Power at once propulsive and leading up” and back “to Himself; a loving movement self-moved, which pre-exists in the Good, and bubbles forth from the Good to things existing, and which again returns to the Good--as it were a sort of everlasting circle whirling round, because of the Good, from the Good, in the Good, and to the Good,--ever advancing and remaining and returning in the same and throughout the same.” This is “the power of the divine similitude” present throughout creation, “which turns all created things to their cause.”[71] The doctrine is derived from Proclus: “Everything caused both abides in its cause and proceeds from it and returns to it”; and “everything that proceeds from something returns, by a natural instinct, to that from which it proceeds.”[72] And Plotinus had led the way: “there” in the super-sensible world, experienced in moments of ecstasy, “in touch and union with the One, the soul begets Beauty, Justice, and Virtue: and that place and life is, for it, its principle and end: principle, since it springs from thence; end, because the Good is there, and because, once arrived there, the soul becomes what it was at first.”[73]

And Dionysius has the doctrine, so dear to Catherine, that “the Source of Good is indeed present to all, but all are not,” by their intention, “present to It; yet, by our aptitude for Divine union, we all,” in a sense, “are present to It.” “It shines, on Its own part, equally upon all things capable of participation in It.”[74] Already Plotinus had finely said: “The One is not far away from any one, and yet is liable to be far away from one and all, since, present though It be, It is” efficaciously “present only to such as are capable of receiving It, and are so disposed as to adapt themselves to It and, as it were, to seize and touch It by their likeness to It, … when, in a word, the soul is in the state in which it was when it came from It.”[75]

We have again in Dionysius the combination, so characteristic of Catherine, of a tender respect for the substance of human nature, as good and ever respected by God, and of a keen sense of the pathetic weakness of man’s sense-clogged spirit here below. “Providence, as befits its goodness, provides for each being suitably: for to destroy nature is not a function of Providence.” “All those who cavil at the Divine Justice, unconsciously commit a manifest injustice. For they say that immortality ought to be in mortals, and perfection in the imperfect … and perfect power in the weak, and that the temporal should be eternal … in a word, they assign the properties of one thing to another.”[76]

2. Symbols of God’s action.

(1) As to the symbols of God’s action, we have first the Chain or Rope, Catherine’s “fune,” that “rope of His pure Love,” of which “an end was thrown to her from heaven.”[77] This symbol was no doubt suggested by Dionysius: “Let us then elevate our very selves by our prayers to the higher ascent of the Divine … rays; as though a luminous chain (rope, σειρά) were suspended from the celestial heights and reached down hither, and we, by ever stretching out to it up and up … were thus carried upwards.”[78] And this passage again goes back to Proclus, who describes the “chain (rope) of love” as “having its entirely simple and hidden highest point fixed amongst the very first ranks of the Gods”; its middle effluence “amongst the Gods higher than the (sensible) world”; and its third, lowest, part, as “divided multiformly throughout the (sensible) world.” “The divine Love implants one common bond (chain) and one indissoluble friendship in and between each soul (that participates in its power), and between all and the Beautiful Itself.”[79] And this simile of a chain from heaven, which in Dionysius is luminous, and in Catherine and Proclus is loving, goes back, across Plato (Theaetetus 153c and Republic, X, 61b, 99c) to Homer, where it again is luminous (golden). For, in the Iliad, viii, 17-20, Zeus says to the Gods in Olympus, “So as to see all things, do you, O Gods and Goddesses all, hang a golden chain from heaven, and do you all seize hold of it”--so as thus to descend to earth.

(2) We have next the symbol of the Sun and its purifying, healing Light, under which God and His action are rapturously proclaimed by Dionysius. “Even as our sun, by its very being, enlightens all things able to partake of its light in their various degrees, so also the Good, by its very existence, sends unto all things that be, the rays of its entire goodness, according to their capacity for them. By means of these rays they are purified from all corruption and death … and are separated from instability.” “The Divine Goodness, this our great sun, enlightens … nourishes, perfects, renews.” Even the pure can thus be made purer still. “He, the Good, is called spiritual light … he cleanses the mental vision of the very angels: they taste, as it were, the light.”[80] All this imagery goes back, in the first instance, to Proclus. For Proclus puts in parallel “sun” and “God,” and “to be enlightened” and “to be deified”; makes all purifying forces to coalesce in the activity of the Sun-God, Apollo Katharsios, the Purifier, who “everywhere unifies multiplicity … purifying the entire heaven and all living things throughout the world”; and describes how “from above, from his super-heavenly post, Apollo scatters the arrows of Zeus,--his rays upon all the world.”[81] The Sun’s rays, here as powerful as the bolts of Zeus, thus begin to play the part still assigned to them in Catherine’s imagery of the “Saëtte” and “Radii” of the divine Light and Love. And the substance of the whole symbol goes back, through fine sayings of Plotinus and through Philo, to Plato, who calls the Sun “the offspring of the Good and analogous to it,” and who (doubtless rightly) takes Homer’s “golden chain” to be nothing but the Sun-rays,--thus identifying the two symbols.[82]

(3) Fire, as a symbol for God and His action, is thus praised by Dionysius: “The sacred theologians often describe the super-essential Essence in terms of Fire.… For sensible fire is, so to say, present in all things, and pervades them all without mingling with them, and is received by all things; … it is intolerable yet invisible; it masters all things by its own might, and yet it but brings the things in which it resides to (the development of) their own energy; it has a transforming power; it communicates itself to all who approach it in any degree; … it has the power of dividing (what it seizes); it bears upwards; it is penetrating; … it increases its own self in a hidden manner; it suddenly shines forth.”[83]--All these qualities, and the delicate transitions from fire to light and from light back to fire, and from heat immanent to heat applied from without, we can find again, vividly assimilated and experienced, in Catherine’s teaching and emotional life. But the Sun-light predominates in Dionysius, the Fire-heat in Catherine; and whereas the former explicitly attaches purification only to the Sun-light, the latter connects the cleansing chiefly with Fire-heat, no doubt because the Greek man is busy chiefly with the intellectually cognitive, and the Italian woman with the morally ameliorative, activities and interests of the mind and soul.

3. The soul’s reaction.

(1) As to the soul’s reaction under God’s action, and its return to Him, we first get, in Dionysius, the insistence upon Mystical Quietude and Silence, which, according to him, are strictly necessary, since only like can know and become one with like, and God is “Peace and Repose” and, “as compared with every known progression, Immobility,” and “the one all-perfect source and cause of the Peace of all”; and He is Silence, “the Angels are, as it were, the heralds of the Divine Silence,”--teaching not unlike that of St. Ignatius of Antioch, “Jesus Christ … the Word which proceeds from Silence.”[84] Hence “in proportion as we ascend to the higher designations of God, do our expressions become more and more circumscribed”; and at last “we shall find, not a little speaking, but a complete absence of speech and of conception.”[85] As Proclus has it: “Let this Fountain of Godhead be honoured on our part by silence and by the union which is above silence.”[86] And Plotinus says: “This,” the Divine, “Light comes not from anywhere nor disappears any whither, but simply shines or shines not: hence we must not pursue after it, but must abide in quietness till it appears.” And when it does appear, “the contemplative, as one rapt and divinely inspired, abides here with quietude in a motionless condition, … being entirely stable, and becoming, as it were, stability itself.”[87]--All this still finds its echo in Catherine.--But the treble (cognitive) movement of the Angelic and human mind,--the circular, the straight-line, and the spiral,--which Dionysius, in direct imitation of Proclus, carefully develops throughout three sections, is quite absent from Catherine’s mind.[88]

(2) We next get, in Dionysius, the following teachings as to Mystical Vision and Union. “The Unity-above-Mind is placed above the minds; and the Good-above-word is unutterable by word.” “There is, further, the most divine knowledge of Almighty God, which is known through not knowing … when the mind, having stood apart from all existing things, and having then also dismissed itself, has been made one with the super-luminous rays.” “We must contemplate things divine by our whole selves standing out of our whole selves, and becoming wholly of God.” “By the resistless and absolute ecstasy, in all purity, from out of thyself and all things, thou wilt be carried on high, to the super-essential ray of the divine darkness.” “It is during the cessation of every mental energizing, that such a union of the deified minds and of the super-divine light takes place.”[89] And the original cause and final effect of such a going forth from self, are indicated in words which were worked out in a vivid fulness by Catherine’s whole convert life: “Divine Love is ecstatic, not permitting any lovers to belong to themselves, but only to those beloved by them. And this love, the superior beings show by being full of forethought for their inferiors; those equal in rank, by their mutual coherence; and the inferior by a looking back and up to the superior ones.”[90]

Dionysius here everywhere follows Proclus. Yet the noblest Neo-Platonist sayings are again furnished by Plotinus: “We are not cut off or severed from the Light, but we breathe and consist in It, since It ever enlightens and bears us, as long as It is what It is.” In the moments of Union, “we are able to see both Him and ourself,--ourself in dazzling splendour, full of spiritual light, or rather one with the pure Light Itself … our life’s flame is then enkindled.” “There the soul rests, after it has fled up, away from evil, to the place which is free from evils … and the true life is there.” “Arrived there, the soul becomes that which she was at first.”[91] And if Plotinus has thus already got the symbolism of place, he is as fully aware as Catherine herself that, for purposes of vivid presentation, he is spacializing spiritual, that is, unextended, qualitative states and realities. “Things incorporeal do not get excluded by bodies; they are severed only by otherness and difference: hence, when such otherness is absent, they, not differing, are near each other.” And already, as with Catherine, there is the apparent finality, and yet also the renewed search for more. “The seer and the seen have become one, as though it were a case not of vision but of union.” “When he shall have crossed over as the image to its Archetype, then he will have reached his journey’s end.” And yet this “ecstasy, simplification, and donation of one’s self,” this “quiet,” is still also “a striving after contact,” “a musing to achieve union.”[92]

4. Terminology of the soul’s reaction.

(1) Certain terms and conceptions in connection with the soul’s return to God, which are specially dear to Catherine, already appear, fully developed, in Dionysius, Proclus, and Plotinus; in part, even in Plato. Her “suddenly “ (subito) appears but rarely in Dionysius, e.g. in Heavenly Hierarchy xv, 2; but it is carefully explained by him in his Third Epistle, specially devoted to the subject.[93] It is common in Plotinus: “Suddenly the soul saw, without seeing how it saw”; “suddenly thou shalt receive light,” “suddenly shining.”[94] And in Plato we find: “He who has learnt to see the Beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes towards the end, will suddenly perceive a Nature of wondrous beauty--Beauty alone, absolute, separate, simple and everlasting”: a passage which derives its imagery from the Epopteia of the Eleusynian Mysteries,--the sudden appearance, the curtain being withdrawn, upon the stage whereon the Heathen Mystery-play was being performed, under a peculiar fairy-illumination, of the figures of Demeter, Kore, and Iacchus, as the culmination of a long succession of purifications and initiations.[95]

Catherine’s “wound,” or “wounding stroke,” (ferita), is, in part, the necessary consequence of the “arrow” conception already considered; in part, the echo of that group of terms which, in Dionysius and Proclus even more than in Plotinus, express the painfully sudden and overwhelming, free-grace character of God’s action upon the soul,--especially of ἐπιβολή, “immissio,” a “coming-upon,” a “hitting,” a very common word in the Areopagite; μετοχή, “communication,” and παραδοχή, “reception,” being the corresponding terms for God’s and the soul’s share in this encounter respectively. Thus: “Unions, whether we call them immissions or receptions from God.”[96]

“Presence,” “presenza,” παρουσιά, is another favourite term, as with Catherine so also with Dionysius and Proclus. Thus the Areopagite: “The presence of the spiritual light causes recollection and unity in those that are being enlightened with it,” “His wholly inconceivable presence.”[97] And Proclus: “Every perfect spiritual contact and communion is owing to the presence of God.”[98] And the conception of a sudden presence goes back, among the Neo-Platonists, to Plato and the Greek Mysteries, in which the God was held suddenly to arrive and to take part in the sacred dance. Such rings of sacred dancers, “choirs,” are still characteristic of Dionysius--e.g. Heavenly Hierarchy, vii, 4--but they are quite wanting in Catherine.--But “contact,” “touch,” ἐπαφή,--said of God’s direct action upon the soul,--a conception so intensely active in Catherine’s mind and life, is again a favourite term with Dionysius and Proclus. The former declares this “touch” to be neither “sensible” nor “intelligible” and that “we are brought into contact with things unutterable”; the latter talks of “perfect spiritual contact.”[99]

The symbols of “Nakedness” and “Garments,” as indicative respectively of the soul’s purity and impurity or self-delusion, are, though most prominent in Catherine, rare in Dionysius. But his declaration: “The nakedness of the (Angels’) feet indicates purification from the addition of all things external and assimilation to the divine simplicity” exactly expresses her idea.[100] And Proclus has it more fully: The soul, on descending into the body, forsakes unity, “and around her, from all sides, there grow multiform kinds of existence and manifold garments”; “love of honour is the last garment of souls”; and “when,” in mounting up, “we lay aside our passions and garments which, in coming down, we had put on, we must also strip off that last garment, in order that, having become (entirely) naked, we may establish ourselves before God, having made ourselves like to the divine life.”[101]

(2) Again, as to Triads, it is interesting to note that Catherine has nothing about the three stages or ways of the inner life,--purgative, illuminative, unitive,--of which Dionysius is full, and which are already indicated in Proclus; for we can find but two in her life, the purgative and unitive, and in her teaching these two alone appear, mostly in close combination, sometimes in strong contrast. Nor has she anything about the three degrees or kinds of prayer,--Meditation, Contemplation, Union,--as indicated in Dionysius: “It behoves us, by our prayers, to be lifted into proximity with the Divine Trinity; and then, by still further approaching it, to be initiated…; and (lastly) to make ourselves one with it”; and as taught by Proclus: “Knowledge leads, then follows proximity, and then union.”[102] With her we only get Contemplation and Union.--Nor do we get in her anything about thrice three choirs of Angels, or three orders of Christian Ministrants, or three classes of Christian people, or thrice three groups of Sacraments and Sacramental acts. For she is too intensely bent upon immediate intercourse with God, and too much absorbed in the sense of profound unity and again of innumerable multiplicity, to be attracted by Dionysius’s Neo-Platonist ladder of carefully graduated intermediaries, or by his continuous interest in triads of every kind. Catherine thus follows the current in Dionysius which insists upon direct contact between the soul and the transcendent God, and ignores the other, which bridges over the abyss between the two by carefully graduated intermediaries: these intermediaries having become, with her, successive stages of purification and of ever more penetrating union of the one soul with the one God.

5. Deification, especially through the Eucharist.

As to the end of the whole process, we find that Deification, so frequently implied or suggested by Catherine, is formally taught by Dionysius: “A union of the deified minds” (ἐκθεουμένων); the heavenly and the earthly Hierarchy have the power and task “to communicate to their subjects, according to the dignity of each, the sacred deification” (ἐκθέωσις); “we are led up, by means of the multiform of sensible symbols, to the uniform Deification.”[103] “The One is the very God,” says Proclus, “but the Mind (the Noûs) is the divinest of beings, and the soul is divine, and the body is godlike.… And every body that is God-like is so through the soul having become divine; and every soul that is divine, is so through the Mind being very divine; and every Mind that is thus very divine, is so through participation in the Divine One.”[104] There are preformations of this doctrine in Plotinus and echoes of it throughout Catherine’s sayings.

And the Areopagite’s teaching that the chief means and the culmination of this deification are found and reached in the reception of the Holy Eucharist will no doubt also have stimulated Catherine’s mind: “The Communicant is led to the summit of deiformation, as far as this is possible for him.”[105] And her soul responds completely to the beautiful Dionysian-Proclian teaching concerning God’s presence in all things, as the cause of the profound sympathy which binds them all together. “They say,” declares Dionysius, “that He is in minds … and in bodies, and in heaven and in earth; (indeed that He is) sun, fire, water, spirit … all things existing, and yet again not one of all things existing.” “The distribution of boundless power passes from Almighty God all things, and no single being but has intellectual, or rational, or sensible, or vital, or essential power.” “The gifts of the unfailing Power pass on to men and (lesser) living creatures, to plants, and to the entire nature of the Universe.”[106] This latter passage was suggested by Proclus: “One would say that, through participation in the One, all things are deified, each according to its rank, inclusive of the very lowest of beings.” “The image of the One and the inter-communion existing through it,--this it is that produces the extant sympathy” which permeates all things.[107]--But Catherine has nowhere the term “echo,” which is so dear to Dionysius: “His all-surpassing power holds together and preserves even the remotest of its echoes”; “the sun and plants are or hold most distant echoes of the Good and of Life”; indeed even the licentious man still possesses, in his very passion, “as it were a faint echo of Union and of Friendship.”[108]

6. Dionysius and Catherine; three agreements and differences.

I conclude with three important points of difference and similarity between Catherine and Dionysius.

(1) Catherine abstains from the use of those repulsive, impossibly hyperbolic epithets such as “the Super-Good,” “the Above-Mind,” which Dionysius is never weary of applying to God, and is content with ever feeling and declaring how high above the very best conception which she can form of mind and of goodness He undoubtedly is; thus wisely moderated, I take it, by her constant experience and faith as to God’s immediate presence within the human soul, which soul cannot, consequently, be presented as entirely remote from the nature of God.

(2) Catherine transforms over-intense and impoverishing insistence upon the pure Oneness of God, such as we find it even in Dionysius and still more in Proclus, into a, sometimes equally over-intense, conception as to the oneness of our union with Him, leaving Him to be still conceived as an overflowing richness of all kinds.

(3) And Catherine keeps, in an interesting manner, Hellenic, and specifically Platonic, formulation for the deepest of her experiences and teachings, since her standing designation of God and of Our Lord is never personal, “My Lover” or “My Friend”; but, as it were, elemental, “Love” or “My Love.” Her keen self-purifying instinct and reverence for God will have spontaneously inclined her thus to consider Him first as an Ocean of Being in which to quench and drown her small, clamorous individuality, and this as a necessary step towards reconstituting that true personality, which, itself spirit, would be penetrated and sustained by the Spirit, Christ, God. And then the Pauline-Joannine picturings of God as a quasi-place and extended substance (“from Him and in Him and to Him,” “in the Spirit,” “in Christ,” “God is Charity and he that abideth in Charity, abideth in Him”) will have strongly confirmed this trend. Yet Dionysius too must have greatly helped on this movement of her mind. For in Dionysius the standing appellations for God are, in true Neo-Platonist fashion, derived from extended or diffusive material substances or conditions, Light, Fire, Fountain, Ocean; and from that pervasive emotion, Love, strictly speaking Desire, Eros.

Now this, for our modern and Christian feeling, curiously impersonal, general and abstract method goes back, through Proclus and Plotinus, to Plato, who, above all in his Symposium, is dominated by the two tendencies and requirements, of identifying the First and Perfect with the most General and the most Abstract; and of making the very prerequisites and instruments of the search for It,--even the earthly Eros, still so far from the Heavenly Eros and from the Christian Agapē,--into occasions, effects or instalments of and for the great Reality sought by them. And since it is thus the love, the desire, the eros, of things beautiful, and true, and good,--a love first sensible, then intellectual, and at last spiritual, which makes us seek and find It, the Beauty, Truth, and Goodness which is First Cause and Final End of the whole series, this Cause and End will be considered not as a Lover but as Love Itself. It is plain, I think, that it is specially this second motive, this requirement of a pervading organization and circle of and within the life of spirits and of the Spirit, which has also determined Catherine to retain Plato’s terminology.

IV. Jacopone Da Todi’s “lode.”

In the case of Jacopone, the suddenly wife-bereft and converted lawyer, an ardent poet doubled by a soaring, daring mystic, with an astonishing richness of simultaneous symbols and conceptions and rapidity of successive complements and contrasts, it will really be simplest if I take the chief touches which have characteristically stimulated Catherine or have left her unaffected, in the order and grouping in which they appear in his chief “Lode,” as these latter are given in the first printed edition, probably the very one used by Catherine.[109]

1. Lode XIII, XXIII, XXXV, XLV.

In Loda XIII “the vicious soul is likened unto Hell,” vv. 1-7; and “the soul that yesterday was Hell, to-day has turned into Heaven,” v. 8. We thus get here, precisely as in Catherine, the spaceless conditions of the soul and their modifications treated under the symbols of places and of the spacial change from one place to the other.

In Loda XXIII we first have five successive purifications and purities of Love, “carnal, counterfeit, self-seeking, natural, spiritual, transformed,” vv. 1-6; and then the symbols of spacial location and movement reappear, “if height does not abase itself, it cannot participate with, nor communicate itself to, the lowest grade”; all which is frequent with Catherine. But she nowhere echoes the teaching reproduced here, v. 10, as to the Divine Trinity being figured in man’s three faculties of soul.

Loda XXXV gives us a sort of Christian Stoicism very dear dear to Catherine: “Thou, my soul, hast been created in great elevation; thy nature is grounded in great nobility (gentilezza),” v. 7; “thou hast not thy life in created things; it is necessary for thee to breathe in other countries, to mount up to God thine inheritance, Who (alone) can satisfy thy poverty,” v. 10; “great is the honour which thou doest to God, when thou abidest (stare) in Him, in thy (true) nobility,” v. 11.

Loda XLV gives “the Five Modes in which God appears in the Soul”--“the state of fear”; mercenary, “beggar-love”; “the way of love”; “the paternal mode”; “the mode of espousals.” Catherine leaves the last two, anthropomorphic and familial, conceptions quite unused, and passes in her life, at one bound, from the first to the third mode.

2. Lode LVIIIa, LVIIIb.

The fine Loda LVIIIa, “Of Holy Poverty, Mistress of all Things,” has evidently suggested much to Catherine. “Waters, rivers, lakes, and ocean, fish within them and their swimming; airs, winds, birds, and all their flying: all these turn to jewels for me,” v. 10. How readily the sense of water, and of rapid movement within it, passes here into that of air, and of swift locomotion within it! And both these movements, are felt to represent, in vivid fashion, certain very different experiences of the soul.--“Moon, Sun, Sky, and Stars,--even these are not amongst my treasures; above the very sky those things abide, which are the object of my song,” v. 11. The positive, “analogic” method has here turned suddenly into the negative, “apophatic” one; and yet, even here, we still have the spacial symbolism, for the best is the highest up,--indeed it is this very symbolism which is made to add point to the negative declaration, a declaration which nevertheless clearly implies the mere symbolism of that spacialization. All this is fully absorbed by Catherine.--“Since God has my will, … my wings have such feathers that from earth to heaven there is no distance for me,” v. 12. Here we see how Plato filters through, complete, to Jacopone; but only in his central idea to Catherine. For the Phaedrus, 246b, c, teaches: “The perfect soul then, having become winged, soars upwards, and is the ruler of the universe; whilst the imperfect soul sheds her feathers and is borne downwards, till it settles on the solid ground.” Catherine never mentions wings nor feathers, but often dwells upon flying.

The great Loda LVIIIb, “Of Holy Poverty and its Treble Heaven,” (one passage of which is formally quoted and carefully expounded by Catherine), is a combination of Platonism, Paulinism, and Franciscanism, and has specially influenced her through its Platonist element. Verses 1-9 contain a fine apostrophe to Poverty. “O Love of Poverty, Reign of tranquillity! Poverty, high Wisdom! to be subject to nothing; through despising to possess all things created!” v. 1: all this is echoed by Catherine. But the ex-lawyer’s declaration that such a soul “has neither judge nor notary,” v. 3, did certainly not determine her literally, for we have had before us some fifteen cases in which she had recourse to lawyers. “God makes not His abode in a narrow heart; thou art, oh man, precisely as great as thine affection may be. The spirit of poverty possesses so ample a bosom, that Deity Itself takes up its dwelling there,” v. 8. Catherine’s deepest self seems to breathe from out of this profound saying.

Verses 10 to 30 describe the three heavens of successive self-despoilments. The firmamental heaven, which typifies the four-fold renouncement,--of honour, riches, science, reputation of sanctity, has left no echo in Catherine. The stellar heaven is “composed of solidified clear waters (aque solidate)”; here “the four winds” cease “that move the sea,--that perturb the mind: fear and hope, grief and joy,” 11-14. Here Plato again touches Catherine through Jacopone. For the Symposium, 197a, declares: “Love it is that produces peace among men and calm on the sea, a cessation of the winds, and repose and sleep even in trouble”; and Jacopone identifies the middle “crystalline” heaven, (“the waters above” of Genesis, chap, i,) with Plato’s “sea”; takes Plato’s (four) winds as the soul’s chief passions; and considers Plato’s “peace” and “windlessness” as equivalent to the “much silence,” which, says the Apocalypse, “arose in heaven,” viii, 1, interpreted here as “in mid-heaven.” “Not to fear Hell, nor to hope for Heaven, to rejoice in no good, to grieve over no adversity,” v. 16, is a formulation unlike Catherine, although single sayings of hers stand for sentiments analogous to the first and last.--“If the virtues are naked, and the vices are not garmented,--mortal wounds get given to the soul,” v. 19, has a symbolism exactly opposite to Catherine’s, who, we know, loves to glorify “nakedness” as the soul’s purity.--“The highest heaven” is “beyond even the imagings of the mortified fancy”; “of every good it has despoiled thee, and has expropriated thee from all virtue: lay up as a treasure this thy gain,--the sense of thine own vileness.” “O purified Love! it alone lives in the truth!” These verses, 20-22, have left a deep impress upon Catherine, although she wisely does not press that “expropriation from virtue,” which goes back at least to Plotinus, for whom the true Ecstatic is “beyond the choir of the virtues.”[110]

“That which appears to thee (as extant), is not truly, existent: so high (above) is that which truly is. True elevation of soul (la superbia) dwells in heaven above, and baseness of mind (humilitade) leads to damnation,” v. 24, is a saying to which we still have Catherine’s detailed commentary. In its markedly Platonic distinction between an upper true and a lower seeming world, and in its characteristically mystical love of paradox and a play upon words, it is more curious than abidingly important; but in its deeply Christian consciousness of “pride” and “humility,” in their ordinary ethical sense, being respectively the subtlest vice and the noblest virtue, it rises sheer above all Platonist and Neo-Platonist apprehension.

“Love abides in prison, in that darksome light! All light there is darkness, and all darkness there is as the day,” vv. 26, 27. Here Catherine no doubt found aids towards her prison-conception,--of the loving soul imprisoned in the earthly body, and of the imperfect, yet loving, disembodied souls imprisoned in Purgatory; and towards articulating her strong sense of the change in the meaning and value of the same symbols, as the soul grows in depth and experience. But her symbolization of God, and of our apprehension of Him as Light and Fire, is too solidly established in her mind, to allow her to emphasize the darkness-symbol with any reference to Him.

“There where Christ is enclosed (in the soul), all the old is changed by Him,--the one is transformed into the Other, in a marvellous union. To live as I and yet not I; and my very being to be not mine: this is so great a cross-purpose (traversio), that I know not how to define it,” vv. 28-30. This vivid description, based of course upon St. Paul, of the apparent shifting of the very centre of the soul’s personality, has left clear echoes in Catherine’s sayings; but the explicit reference to Christ is here as characteristically Franciscan as it is unlike Catherine’s special habits.--And the great poem ends with a refrain of its opening apostrophe.

3. Lode LXXIV, LXXIX, LXXXI, LXXXIII.

In the dramatically vivid Dialogue between the Old and the Young Friar “Concerning the divers manners of contemplating the Cross,” Loda LXXIV, the elder says to the younger man: “And I find the Cross full of arrows, which issue from its side: they get fixed in my heart. The Archer has aimed them at me; He causes me to be pierced,” v. 6. The Cross is here a bow; and yet the arrows evidently issue not from it, but, as so many rays, from the Sun, the Light-Christ, Who is laid upon it,--from the heart of the Crucified. Catherine maintains the rays and arrows, and the Sun and Fire from which they issue; but the Cross and the Crucified, presupposed here throughout, appear not, even to this extent, in her post-conversion picturings.--“You abide by the warmth, but I abide within the fire; to you it is delight, but I am burning through and through, I cannot find a place of refuge in this furnace,” v. 13. All this has been echoed throughout by Catherine.

Loda LXXIX, “Of the Divine Love and its Praises,” has evidently much influenced her. “O joyous wound, delightful wound, gladsome wound, for him who is wounded by Thee, O Love!” “O Love, divine Fire! Love full of laughter and playfulness!” “O Love, sweet and suave; O Love, Thou art the key of heaven! Ship that Thou art, bring me to port and calm the tempest,” vv. 3, 6, 16. All this we have found reproduced in her similes and experiences. “Love, bounteous in spending Thyself; Love with widespread tables!” “Love, Thou art the One that loves, and the Means wherewith the heart loves Thee!” vv. 24, 26. These verses give us the wide, wide world outlook, the connection between Love and the Holy Eucharist, and the identity of the Subject, Means, and Object of Love, which are all so much dwelt upon by Catherine.

Loda LXXXI is interesting by the way in which, although treating of “the love of Christ upon the Cross,” it everywhere apostrophizes Love and not the Lover, and treats the former, again like Catherine, as a kind of boundless living substance; indeed v. 17 must have helped to suggest one of her favourite conceptions: “O great Love, greater than the great sea! Oh! the man who is drowned within it, under it, and with it all around him, whilst he knows not where he is!”

Loda LXXXIII has two touches dear to Catherine. “O Love, whose name is ‘I love’--the plural is never found,” v. 5,--a saying which evidently is directed, not against a social conception of religion, but against a denial of the Divine Love being Source as well as Object of our love; and “I did not love Thee with any gain to myself, until I loved Thee for Thine own sake,” v. 15,--a declaration of wondrous depth and simplicity.

4. Lode LXXXVIII, LXXXIX, LXXXX, LXXXXVIII, LXXXXIX.

The great Loda LXXXVIII, “How the soul complains to God concerning the excessive ardours of the love infused into it,” contains numerous touches which have been interestingly responded to or ignored by Catherine. “All my will is on fire with Love, is united, transformed (into It); who can bear such Love? Nor fire nor sword can part the loving soul and her Love; a thing so united cannot be divided; neither suffering nor death can henceforth mount up to that height where the soul abides in ecstasy,” vv. 5, 6: a combination of St. Paul and Plotinus, quite after Catherine’s heart. But “the light of the sun appears to me obscure, now that I see that resplendent Countenance,” v. 7, has an anthropomorphic touch to which she does not respond; and “I have given all my heart, that it may possess that Lover who renews me so,--O Beauty ancient and ever new!” v. 10, has the personal designation “Lover,” which, again, is alien to her vocabulary.

“Seeing such Beauty, I have been drawn out of myself … and the heart now gets undone, melted as though it were wax, and finds itself again, with the likeness of Christ upon it,” v. 11, must have stimulated, by its first part, some of her own experiences, and will, by its second part, taken literally, have helped on the fantastic expectations of her attendants. “Love rises to such ardour, that the heart seems to be transfixed as with a knife,” v. 14, no doubt both expressed an experience of Jacopone and helped to constitute the form of a similar experience on the part of Catherine. “As iron, which is all on fire, as dawn, made resplendent by the sun, lose their own form (nature) and exist in another, so is it with the pure mind, when clothed by Thee, O Love,” v. 21, contains ideas, (all but the symbol of clothing,) very dear to Catherine. But the astonishingly daring words: “Since my soul has been transformed into Truth, into Thee, O Christ alone, into Thee Who art tender Loving,--not to myself but to Thee can be imputed what I do. Hence, if I please Thee not, Thou dost not please Thine Own Self, O Love!” v. 22, remain unechoed by her, no doubt because her states shift from one to another, and she wisely abstains from pushing the articulation of any one of them to its own separate logical limit.

“Thou wast born into the world by love and not by flesh, O Love become Man (humanato Amore),” v. 27, is like her in its interesting persistence in the “Love” (not “Lover”) designation, but is unlike her in its definite reference to the historic Incarnation. “Love, O Love, Jesus, I have reached the haven,” v. 32, is closely like her, all but the explicit mention of the historic name; and “Love, O Love, Thou art the full-orbed circle,” “Thou art both warp and woof,” beginning and end, material and transforming agency, v. 33, is Catherine’s central idea, expressed in a form much calculated to impress it upon her.

The daring and profound Loda LXXXIX, “How the soul, by holy self-annihilation and love, reaches an unknowable and indescribable state,” contains again numerous touches which have been assimilated by Catherine. So with: “Drawn forth, out of her natural state, into that unmeasurable condition whither love goes to drown itself, the soul, having plunged into the abyss of this ocean, henceforth cannot find, on any side, any means of issuing forth from it,” vv. 12, 13. So also with: “Since thou dost no longer love thyself, but alone that Goodness … it has become necessary for thee again to love thyself, but with His Love,--into so great an unity hast thou been drawn by Him,” vv. 52-54. So too with: “All Faith ceases for the soul to whom it has been given to see; and all Hope, since it now actually holds what it used to seek,” v. 70, although this is more absolute than are her similar utterances.--But especially are the startling words interesting: “In this transformation, thou drinkest Another, and that Other drinketh thee (tu bevi e sei bevuto, in transformazione),” v. 98, which, in their second part, are identical with R. Browning’s “My end, to slake Thy thirst”:[111] for they will have helped to support or to encourage Catherine’s corresponding inversion--the teaching of an eating, an assimilation, not of God by man, but of man by God. Both sets of images go back, of course, to the Eucharistic reception by the soul of the God-man Christ, under the forms of Bread eaten and of Wine drunk.

The striking Loda LXXXX, “How the soul arrives at a treble state of annihilation,” has doubtless suggested much to Catherine. “He who has become the very Cause of all things” (chi è cosa d’ogni cosa) “can never more desire anything,” v. 4, is, it is true, more daring, because more quietly explicit, than any saying of hers. But v. 13 has been echoed by her throughout: “The heavens have grown stagnant; their silence constrains me to cry aloud: ‘O profound Ocean, the very depth of Thine Abyss has constrained me to attempt and drown myself within it,’”--where note the interestingly antique presupposition of the music of the spheres, which has now stopped, and of the watery constitution of the crystalline heaven, which allows of stagnation; and the rapidity of the change in the impressions,--from immobility to silence, and from air to water. Indeed that Ocean is one as much of air as of water, and as little the one as the other; and its attractive force is still that innate affinity between the river-soul and its living Source and Home, the Ocean God, which we have so constantly found in Plotinus, Proclus, and Dionysius. “The land of promise is, for such a soul, no longer one of promise only: for the perfect soul already reigns within that land. Men can thus transform themselves, in any and every place,” v. 18, has, in its touching and lofty Stoic-Christian teaching, found the noblest response and re-utterance in and by Catherine’s words and life.

Loda LXXXXVIII, “Of the Incarnation of the Divine Word,” full though it is of beautiful Franciscanism, has left her uninfluenced. But the fine Loda LXXXXIX, “How true Love is not idle,” contains touches which have sunk deep into her mind. “Splendour that givest to all the world its light, O Love Jesus … heaven and earth are by Thee; Thine action resplends in all things and all things turn to Thee. Only the sinner despises Thy Love and severs himself from Thee, his Creator,” v. 6, is, in its substance, taken over by her. “O ye cold sinners!” v. 12, is her favourite epithet. And vv. 13, 14, with their rapid ringing of the changes on the different sense-perceptions, will, by their shifting vividness, have helped on a similar iridescence in her own imagery: “O Odour, that transcendest every sweetness! O living river of Delight … that causest the very dead to return to their vigour! In heaven Thy lovers possess Thine immense Sweetness, tasting there those savoury morsels.”

And finally Loda LXXXVII, “Of true and false discretion,” which, in vv. 12-20, consists of a dialogue between “the Flesh” and “the Reason,” will have helped to suggest the slight beginnings of this form of apprehension to Catherine which we have found amongst her authentic sayings and experiences, and which were, later on, developed on so large a scale, by Battista Vernazza, throughout her long Dialogo della Beata Caterina.

5. Jacopone it is, then, who furnished Catherine with much help towards that rare combination of deep feeling with severely abstract thinking which, if at times it somewhat strains and wearies us moderns who would ever end with the concrete, gives a nobly virile, bracing note to even the most effective of her sayings.

V. Points Common To All Five Minds; And Catherine’s Main Difference From Her Four Predecessors.

If we now consider for a moment the general points common to the four writers just considered and to Catherine, we readily note that all five are profoundly reflective and interpretative in their attitude towards the given contingencies of traditional religion; that they all tend to find the Then and There of History still at work, in various degrees, Here and Now, throughout Time and Space, and in the last resort, above and behind both these categories, in a spaceless, timeless Present. And if only three, Paul, Jacopone, and Catherine, bear marks, throughout all they think and feel and do and are, of the cataclysmic conversion-crisis through which they had passed,--the temporally intermediate two, John and Dionysius, have also got, but in a more indirect form, much of a similar Dualism. All five are, in these and other respects, indefinitely closer to each other than any one of them is to the still richer, more complete, and more entirely balanced though less articulated, Synoptic teaching, which enfolds all that is abiding in those other five, whilst they, even if united, do not approximately exhaust the substance of that teaching.

And if we would briefly define the main point on which Catherine holds views additional to, or other than, those other four, we must point to her Purgatorial teaching, which has received but little or no direct suggestion from any one of them, and which, whatever may have been its literary precursors and occasions, gives, perhaps more than anything else, a peculiarly human and personal, original and yet still modern, touch to what would otherwise be, to our feeling, too abstract and antique a spiritual physiognomy.