The Mystical Element of Religion_ as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her friends_ Volume 2 (of 2) Freiherr von Friedrich Hügel 1404 downloads.pdf

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Mystical Element of
Religion, as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her
friends, Volume 2 (of 2)
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will
have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using
this eBook.

Title: The Mystical Element of Religion, as studied in Saint Catherine of
Genoa and her friends, Volume 2 (of 2)

Author: Freiherr von Friedrich Hügel

Release date: October 14, 2015 [eBook #50206]
Most recently updated: October 22, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/50206

Credits: Produced by Julie Barkley and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MYSTICAL
ELEMENT OF RELIGION, AS STUDIED IN SAINT CATHERINE OF
GENOA AND HER FRIENDS, VOLUME 2 (OF 2) ***

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE: In the Index, only the references within this volume are hyperlinked.

Volume I is available as Project Gutenberg ebook number 50205.

THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT
OF RELIGION

All rights reserved.

The Venerable Battista Vernazza
(Tommasina Vernazza)
1497-1587.

THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT
OF RELIGION AS STUDIED
IN SAINT CATHERINE OF
GENOA AND HER FRIENDS

By BARON FRIEDRICH von HÜGEL
MEMBER OF THE CAMBRIDGE PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY

VOLUME SECOND
CRITICAL STUDIES

LONDON: J. M. DENT & CO.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
MCMVIII

Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,
BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND
BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.

CONTENTS OF THE SECOND VOLUME
The frontispiece consists of a reduced facsimile, in photogravure, of a
lithograph by F. Scotto, entitled “Ven. Batta. Vernazza,” which was printed
and owned by the firm of Gervasoni, and which appeared in the large 4to
volume, Ritratti, ed Elogi di Liguri Illustri, with the text printed by
Ponthenier, all in Genoa. This book was published there, in monthly parts,
from 1823 to 1830. Scotto’s highly characteristic lithograph no doubt
reproduces an authentic likeness; and probably the original portrait was, in
the first instance, owned by the Canonesses of S. Maria delle Grazie,
Battista’s own convent in Genoa. The picture now in the possession of the
Nuns of S. Maria in Passione, the successors of those Canonesses, is of a
quite conventional, secondary type.
PAGE

Part III.—CRITICAL
Chapter IX.—Psycho-physical and
3-61
Temperamental Questions
Introductory 3-9
I. Catherine’s Third Period, 1497-1510 9-13
II. Conclusions concerning Catherine’s Psycho- 14-21
physical Condition during this Last Period
III. Catherine’s Psycho-physical Condition, its 22-27
Likeness and Unlikeness to Hysteria
IV. First Period of Catherine’s Life, 1447-1477, in 28-32
its Three Stages
V. The Second, Great Middle Period of Catherine’s 32-40
Life, 1477-1499
VI. Three Rules which seem to govern the Relations 40-47
between Psycho-physical Peculiarities and
Sanctity in general

VII. Perennial Freshness of the Great Mystics’ Main 47-61
Spiritual Test, in Contradistinction to their
Secondary, Psychological Contention. Two
Special Difficulties
Chapter X.—The Main Literary Sources of 62-110
Catherine’s Conceptions
Introductory 62, 63
I. The Pauline Writings: the Two Sources of their 63-79
Pre-Conversion Assumptions; Catherine’s
Preponderant Attitude towards each
Position
II. The Joannine Writings 79-90
III. The Areopagite Writings 90-101
IV. Jacopone da Todi’s “Lode” 102-110
V. Points common to all Five Minds; and 110
Catherine’s Main Difference from her Four
Predecessors
Chapter XI.—Catherine’s Less Ultimate This- 111-181
World Doctrines
Introductory 111, 112
I. Interpretative Religion 112-121
II. Dualistic Attitude towards the Body 121-129
III. Quietude and Passivity. Points in this Tendency 129-152
to be considered here
IV. Pure Love, or Disinterested Religion: its 152-181
Distinction from Quietism
Chapter XII.—The After-Life Problems and 182-258
Doctrines
I. The Chief Present-day Problems, Perplexities, 182-199
and Requirements with Regard to the
After-Life in General
II. Catherine’s General After-Life Conceptions 199-218

III. Catherine and Eternal Punishment 218-230
IV. Catherine and Purgatory 230-246
V. Catherine and Heaven—Three Perplexities to be 246-258
considered
Chapter XIII.—The First Three Ultimate 259-308
Questions
I. The Relations between Morality and Mysticism, 259-275
Philosophy and Religion
II. Mysticism and the Limits of Human Knowledge 275-290
and Experience
III. Mysticism and the Question of Evil 290-308
Chapter XIV.—The Two Final Problems: 309-340
Mysticism And Pantheism, the Immanence
of God, And Spiritual Personality,
Human and Divine
Introductory 309, 310
I. Relations between the General and the 310-319
Particular, God and Individual Things,
according to Aristotle, the Neo-Platonists,
and the Medieval Strict Realists
II. Relations between God and the Human Soul 319-325
III. Mysticism and Pantheism: their Differences and 325-335
Points of Likeness
IV. The Divine Immanence; Spiritual Personality 336-340
Chapter XV.—Summing-up of the Whole 341-396
Book. Back Through Asceticism, Social
Religion, and the Scientific Habit of
Mind, to the Mystical Element of
Religion
I. Asceticism and Mysticism 341-351
II. Social Religion and Mysticism 351-366
III. The Scientific Habit and Mysticism 367-386

IV. Final Summary and Return to the Starting-point 387-396
of the Whole Inquiry: the Necessity, and
yet the Almost Inevitable Mutual Hostility,
of the Three Great Forces of the Soul and
of the Three Corresponding Elements of
Religion
Index 397

THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF
RELIGION

PART III
CRITICAL

CHAPTER IX
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL QUESTIONS

Introductory.

1. Plan of Part Three.
The picture of Catherine’s life and teaching which was attempted in the
previous volume will, I hope, have been sufficiently vivid to stimulate in
the reader a desire to try and go deeper, and to get as near as may be to the
driving forces, the metaphysical depths of her life. And yet it is obvious
that, if we would understand something of these, we must proceed slowly
and thoroughly, and must begin with comparatively superficial questions.
Or rather, we must begin by studying her temperamental and psycho-
physical endowment and condition, and then the literary influences that
stimulated and helped to mould these things, as though all this were not
secondary and but the material and occasion of the forces and self-
determinations to be considered later on.
2. Defects of ancient psycho-physical theory.
Now as to those temperamental and neural matters, to which this chapter
shall be devoted, the reader will, no doubt long ago, have discovered that it
is precisely here that not a little of the Vita e Dottrina is faded and withered
beyond recall, or has even become positively repulsive to us. The constant
assumption, and frequent explicit insistence, on the part of more or less all
the contributors, upon the immediate and separate significance, indeed the
directly miraculous character, of certain psycho-physical states—states
which, taken thus separately, would now be inevitably classed as most
explicable neural abnormalities,—all this atmosphere of nervous high-pitch
and tremulousness has now become a matter demanding a difficult
historical imagination and magnanimity, if we would be just to those who

held such views, and would thus benefit to the full from these past positions
and misconceptions.
Thus when we read the views of perhaps all her educated attendants:
“this condition, in which her body remained alive without food or medicine,
was a supernatural thing”; “her state was clearly understood to be
supernatural when, in so short a time, so great a change was seen”; and “she
became yellow all over,—a manifest sign that her humanity was being
entirely consumed in the fire of divine love”:[1] we feel indeed that we can
no more follow. And when we read, as part of one of the late additions, the
worthless legends gathered from, or occasioned by, the uneducated
Argentina: “in proof that she bore the stigmata within her,—on putting her
hands in a cup of cold water, the latter became so boiling hot that it greatly
heated the very saucer beneath it”:[2] we are necessarily disgusted. And
when, worst of all, she is made, by a demonstrable, probably double
misinterpretation of an externally similar action, to burn her bare arm with a
live charcoal or lighted candle, with intent to see which fire, this external
one or that interior one of the divine love, were the greater:[3] we can, even
if we have the good fortune of being able, by means of the critical analysis
of the sources, to put this absurd story to the discredit of her eulogists, but
feel the pathos of such well-meant perversity, which took so sure a way for
rendering ridiculous one who, take her all in all, is so truly great.[4]
3. Slow growth of Neurology.
We should, of course, be very patient in such matters: for psycho-
physical knowledge was, as yet, in its very infancy, witness the all-
important fact that the nerves were, in our modern sense of the term, still as
unknown as they were to the whole of Graeco-Roman antiquity, with which
“neuron” and “nervus” ever meant “muscle” or “ligament” and,
derivatively, “energy,” but never consciously what they now mean in the
strict medical sense. Thus the Vita (1551) writes: “There remained no
member or muscle (nervo) of her body that was not tormented by fire
within it”; “one rib was separated from the others, with great pains in the
ligaments (nervi) and bones”; and “all her body was excruciated and her
muscles (nervi) were tormented”:[5] where, in the first and last case, visible
muscular convulsive movements are clearly meant. St. Teresa, in her own
Life (1561 or 1562), writes: “Nervous pains, according to the physicians,

are intolerable; and all my nerves were shrunk”; and “if the rapture lasts, all
the nerves are made to feel it.”[6] Even Fénelon (died 1715) can still write
of the human body: “The bones sustain the flesh which envelops them; the
nerves” (ligaments, minor muscles) “which are stretched along them,
constitute all their strength; and the muscles, by inflation and elongation at
the points where the nerves are intertwined with them, produce the most
precise and regular movements.”[7] Here the soul acts directly upon the
muscles, and, through these and their dependent ligaments, upon the bones
and the flesh.
4. Permanent values of the ancient theory.
And yet that old position with regard to the rarer psycho-physical states
has a right to our respectful and sympathetic study.
For one thing, we are now coming again to recognize, more and more,
how real and remarkable are certain psycho-physical states and facts,
whether simply morbid or fruitfully utilized states, so long derided, by the
bulk of Scientists, as mere childish legend or deliberate imposture; and to
see how natural, indeed inevitable it was, that these, at that time quite
inexplicable, things should have been attributed to a direct and
discontinuous kind of Divine intervention. We, on our part, have then to
guard against the Philistinism both of the Rationalists and of the older
Supernaturalists, and will neither measure our assent to facts by our ability
to explain them, nor postulate the unmediated action of God wherever our
powers of explanation fail us. On this point we have admirable models of
sympathetic docility towards facts, in the works of Prof. Pierre Janet, in his
medico-psychological investigations of present-day morbid cases; of
Hermann Gunkel and Heinrich Weinel, in their examination of mostly
healthy psycho-physical phenomena in early Christian times and writings;
and of William James, in his study of instances of various kinds, both past
and present.[8]
And next, these (at first sight physical) phenomena are turning out, more
and more, to be the direct or indirect consequence of the action of mind: no
doubt, in the first instance, of the human mind, but still of mind, both free-
willing and automatically operative. And at the same time this action is,
more and more, seen to be limited and variously occasioned by the physical
organism, and to be accompanied or followed, in a determinist fashion, by

certain changes in that organism. Yet if we have now immeasurably more
knowledge than men had, even fifty years ago, of this latter ceaselessly
active, limiting, occasioning influence of the body upon the mind, we have
also immeasurably more precise and numerous facts and knowledge in
testimony of the all but boundless effect of mind over body. Here, again,
Prof. Janet’s writings, those of Alfred Binet, and the Dominican Père
Coconnier’s very sensible book register a mass of material, although of the
morbid type.[9]
And further, such remarkable peripheral states and phenomena are
getting again to be rightly looked for in at least some types of unusual
spiritual insight and power (although such states are found to be indicative,
in exact proportion to the spiritual greatness of their subject, of a
substantially different mental and moral condition of soul). Witness again
the Unitarian Prof. James’s Varieties, and the Church-Historical works of
the Broad Lutheran German scholars Weinel, Bernoulli, and Duhm.[10]
And lastly, the very closeness with which modern experimental and
analytical psychology is exploring the phenomena of our consciousness is
once more bringing into ever-clearer relief the irrepressible metaphysical
apprehensions and affirmations involved and implied by the experience of
every human mind, from its first dim apprehension in infancy of a
“something,” as yet undifferentiated by it into subjective and objective, up
to its mature and reflective affirmation of the trans-subjective validity of its
“positions,” or at least of its negations—pure scepticism turning out to be
practically impossible. Here we have, with respect to that apprehension,
such admirable workers as Henri Bergson in France, and Professors Henry
Jones and James Ward in England; and, for this affirmation, such striking
thinkers as the French Maurice Blondel, and the Germans Johannes Volkelt
and Hugo Münsterberg. And Mgr. Mercier of Louvain, now Cardinal
Mercier, has contributed some valuable criticism of certain points in these
positions.[11]
5. Difficulties of this inquiry.
Now here I am met at once by two special difficulties, the one personal to
myself and to Catherine, and the other one of method. For, with regard to
those three first sets of recent explorations of a psycho-physical kind, I am
no physician at all, and not primarily a psychologist. And again, in

Catherine’s instance, the evidence as to her psycho-physical states is not, as
with St. Teresa and some few other cases, furnished by writings from the
pen of the very person who experienced them, and it is at all copious and
precise only for the period when she was admittedly ill and physically
incapacitated.—And yet these last thirteen years of her life occupy a most
prominent place in her biography; it is during, and on occasion of, those
psycho-physical states, and largely with the materials furnished by them,
that, precisely in those years, she built up her noblest legacy, her great
Purgatorial teaching; the illness was (quite evidently) of a predominantly
psychical type, and concerns more the psychologist than the physician,
being closely connected with her particular temperament and type of
spirituality, a temperament and type to be found again and again among the
Saints. All this and more makes it simply impossible for me to shrink from
some study of the matter, and permits me to hope for some success in
attempting, slowly and cautiously, to arrive at certain general conclusions of
a spiritually important kind.
But then there is also the difficulty of method. For if we begin the study
of these psycho-physical peculiarities and states by judging them from the
temperamental and psychological standpoint, we can hardly escape from
treating them, at least for the moment, as self-explanatory, and hence from
using these our preliminary conclusions about such neural phenomena as
the measure, type, and explanation of and for all such other facts and
apprehensions as our further study of the religious mind and experience
may bring before us. In this wise, these our psychological conclusions
would furnish not only a negative test and positive material, but also the
exclusive standard for all further study. And such a procedure, until and
unless it were justified in its method, would evidently be nothing but a
surreptitious begging of the question.—Yet to begin with the fullest analysis
of the elementary and normal phenomena of consciousness and of its
implications and inviolable prerequisites, would too readily land us in
metaphysics which have themselves to operate in and with those immediate
and continuous experiences; and hence these latter experiences, whether
normal and healthy, or, as here, unusual and in part maladif, must be
carefully studied first. We have, however, to guard most cautiously against
our allowing this, our preliminary, analysis and description of psycho-
physical states from imperceptibly blocking the way to, or occupying the
ground of, our ultimate analysis and metaphysical synthesis and

explanation. Only this latter will be able, by a final movement from within-
outwards, to show the true place and worth of the more or less phenomenal
series, passed by us in review on our previous movement from outside-
inwards.
6. Threefold division.
I propose, then, in this chapter, to take, as separately as is compatible
with such a method, the temperamental, psycho-physical side of Catherine’s
life. I shall first take those last thirteen years of admitted illness, as those
which are alone at all fully known to us by contemporary evidence.—I shall
then make a jump back to her first period,—to the first sixteen years up to
her marriage, with the next ten years of relaxation, and the following four
years of her conversion and active penitence. I take these next, because, of
these thirty years, we have her own late memories, as registered for us by
her disciples, at the time of her narration of the facts concerned.—And only
then, with these materials and instruments thus gathered from after and
before, shall I try to master the (for us very obscure) middle period, and to
arrive at some estimate of her temperamental peripheral condition during
these twenty years of her fullest expansion.—I shall conclude the chapter
by taking Catherine in her general, lifelong temperament, and by comparing
and contrasting this type and modality of spiritual character and
apprehension with the other rival forms of, and approaches to, religious
truth and goodness as these are furnished for us by history.
The ultimate metaphysical questions and valuation are reserved for the
penultimate chapter of my book.

I. Catherine’s Third Period, 1497 to 1510.

1. Increasing illness of Catherine’s last years.
Beginning with her third and last period (1497-1510), there can be no
doubt that throughout it she was ill and increasingly so. Her closest friends
and observers attest it. It is presumably Ettore Vernazza who tells us, for
1497, “when she was about fifty years of age, she ceased to be able to
attend either to the Hospital or to her own house, owing to her great bodily
weakness. Even on Fast-days she was obliged, after Holy Communion, to
take some food to sustain her strength.” Probably Marabotto it is who tells

us that, in 1499, “after twenty-five years she could no further bear her
spiritual loneliness, either because of old age or because of her great bodily
weakness.” We hear from a later Redactor that, “about nine years before her
death (i.e. about 1501), there came to her an infirmity.” And then, especially
from November 1509, May 1510, and August 1510 onwards, she is
declared and described as more and more ill.[12] Indeed she herself, both by
her acts and by her words, emphatically admits her incapacitation. For it is
clearly ill-health which drives her to abandon the Matronship and even all
minor continuous work for the Hospital. In her Wills we find indeed that, as
late as May 21, 1506, she was able to get to the neighbouring Hospital for
Incurables; and that even on November 27, 1508 she was “healthy in mind
and body.” But her Codicil of January 5, 1503, was drawn up in the
presence of nine witnesses at midnight,—a sure sign of some acute ill-
health. Indeed already on July 23, 1484, she is lying “infirm in bed, in her
room in the Women’s quarter of the Hospital, oppressed with bodily
infirmity.”[13]
2. Abnormal sensations, impressions and moods.
Her attendants are all puzzled by the multitude and intensity, the mobility
and the self-contradictory character of the psycho-physical manifestations.
Perhaps already before 1497 “she would press thorny rose-twigs in both her
hands, and this without any pain”; and so late as about three weeks before
her death “she remained paralyzed (manca),” and no doubt anaesthetic “in
one (the right) hand and in one finger of the other hand.”—Probably again
before 1497 “her body could not,” at times, “be moved from the sitting
posture without the application of force.” In February or March 1510 “she
could not move out of her bed”; in August, “on some occasions she could
not move the lips or the tongue, or the arms or legs, unless helped to do so,
—especially on the left side,—and this would, at times, last three or four
hours.”—In December 1509 “she suffered from great cold,” as part of her
peculiar condition; on September 4, 1510, “she suffered from great cold in
the right arm.”[14]
On other occasions she is, on the contrary, intensely hyper-aesthetic.
Some time in February or March 1510, “for a day and a night, her flesh
could not be touched, because of the great pain that such touching caused
her.” At the end of August “she was so sensitive, that it was impossible to

touch her very bedclothes or the bedstead, or a single hair on her head,
because in such case she would cry out as though she had been grievously
wounded.”—These states seem to have been usually accompanied by
sensations of great heat: for on the former occasion “she seemed like a
creature placed in a great flame of fire”; whilst on the latter “she had her
tongue and lips so inflamed, that they seemed as though actual fire.”
And movement appears to have been more often increased than
diminished. In the last case indeed “she did not move nor speak nor see;
but, when thus immovable, she suffered more than when she could cry out
and turn about in her bed.” But in the former instance “she could not be
kept in bed”; and in April 1510 “she cried aloud, and could not keep herself
from moving about, on her bed, on hands and feet.”—There are curious
localizations of apparently automatic movements. During an attack
somewhere in March 1510 “her flesh was all in a tremble, particularly the
right shoulder”; on later occasions “an arm, a leg, a hand would tremble,
and she would seem to have a spasm within her, with all-but-unbroken
acute pains in the flanks, the shoulders, the abdomen, the feet and the
brain.” On an earlier occasion “her body writhed in great distress.” On
another day “she seemed all on fire and lost her power of speech, and made
signs with her head and hands.” On one day in February or March 1510
“she lost both speech and sight, though not her intelligence”; and on
September 12 “her sight was so weak, that she could hardly any further
distinguish or recognize her attendants.”—The heat is liable to be curiously
localized. Early in September 1510 “she had a great heat situated in and on
her left ear, which lasted for three hours; the ear was red and felt very hot to
the touch of others.”
Various kinds of haemorrhage are not uncommon. On the last-mentioned
occasion bloody urine is passed; bleeding of the nose, with loss of bile,
occurs in December 1509; very black blood is lost by the mouth, whilst
black spots appear all over her person, on September 12, 1510; and more
blood is evacuated on the following day. In February or March 1510 “there
were in her flesh certain places which had become concave, like as paste
looks where a finger has been put into it.” At the end of August 1510 “her
skin became saffron-yellow all over.”
Troubles of breathing and of heart-action are frequently acute.
Somewhere about March 1510 “she had such a spasm in her throat and

mouth as to be unable, for about an hour, to speak or to open her eyes, and
that she could hardly regain her breath.” “Cupping-glasses were applied to
her side, to ease her heart, and lung-action, but with little effect.” On one
occasion “she made signs indicative of feeling as though burning pincers
were seizing her heart”; and on a day soon after “she felt like a hard nail at
her heart.”[15]
Disturbances of the power of swallowing and of nutrition are often grave
and sudden, and in curious contradiction to her abnormally acute and
shifting longing for and revulsion from certain specific kinds of food. On
August 22, 1510, “she was so thirsty that she felt as though she could drink
up the very ocean”; “yet she could not,” in fact, “manage to swallow even
one little drop of water.” On September 10 “her attendants continuously
gave her drinking water; but she would straightway return it from her
mouth.” And on September 12, “whilst her mouth was being bathed, she
exclaimed, ‘I am suffocating,’—and this because a drop of water had
trickled down her throat—a drop which she was unable to gulp down.” And
on a day in August “she saw a melon and had a great desire to eat it; but
hardly did she have some of it in her mouth, when she rejected it with
intense disgust.” So too with odours. A little later, “on one day the smell of
wine would please her, and she would bathe her hands and face in it with
great relish; and next day she would so much dislike it, that she could not
bear to see or smell it in her room.”—And so too with colours. On
September 2 “a physician-friend came to visit her in his scarlet robes; and
she bore the sight a little, so as not to pain him.” But she then declared that
she could no longer bear it; and he went, and returned to her in his ordinary
black habit. And yet we have seen, from the Inventory of her effects, that
she loved to have vermilion colour upon her bed and person.[16]
And her emotional moods are analogously intense and rapidly shifting. In
the spring of 1510 “she cried aloud because of the great pain: this attack
lasted a day and a night”; in the night of August 10 “she tossed about with
many exclamations”; and at the beginning of September “she cried out with
a loud voice.” At other times, she laughs for joy. So at the end of April “she
would laugh without speaking”; on August 11 “she fixed her eyes steadily
on the ceiling; and for about an hour she abode all but immovable, and
spoke not, but kept laughing in a very joyous fashion”; on August 17 great
interior jubilation “expressed itself in merry laughter”; and on the evening

of September 7 “her joy appeared exteriorly in laughter which lasted, with
but small interruptions, for some two hours.”—And her entire apparent
condition would shift from one such extreme to the other with extraordinary
swiftness. In the autumn of 1509 “she many times remained as though dead;
and at other times she would appear as healthy,—as though she had never
had anything the matter with her.” Already in December 1509 she herself,
after much vomiting and loss of blood, had sent for her Confessor and had
declared that “she felt as though she must die in consequence of these many
accidents.” Yet even on September 10, 1510, “when she was not being
oppressed and tormented by her accidents (attacks), she seemed to be in
good health; but when she was being suffocated by them, she seemed as one
dead.”[17]

II. Conclusions Concerning Catherine’s Psycho-physical Condition
During This Last Period.

1. Her illness not primarily physical. Her self-diagnosis.
Now we saw, at the beginning of this chapter, how readily her attendants
concluded, from all these extreme, multiple, swift-changing and self-
contradictory states, to their directly and separately supernatural origin.—
And indeed the diagnosis and treatment of her case showed clearly that it
was not primarily physical. So in the case, probably in November 1509, of
the cupping-glasses, when “she got medically treated for a bodily infirmity,
whilst her real trouble was fire of the spirit”; so with a medicine given to
her by the resident Hospital physician, some time in April 1510, “from
taking which she nearly died”; so with Giovanni Boerio’s three-weeks’
treatment of her, in May 1510, a treatment which led to no other results than
momentary additional distress; and so with the declaration of the ten
Physicians who, even on September 10, four days before her death, “could
find no trace of disease in her pulse, secretions, or any other symptom,” and
who consequently abstained from prescribing anything. And hence, more or
less throughout her last nine years, “there was confusion in the management
of her, not on her own part, but on that of those who served her.”[18]
For—and these two further points are of primary importance—the
tending of her, as distinct from physic, was throughout held by herself to be
of great importance; and yet this care was declared by her to be often

useless or harmful, owing to the powers of discrimination possessed by her
attendants being as much below their good-will, as her own knowledge as
to the differences between her healthy and maladif states exceeded her
power of herself acting upon this knowledge against these sickly conditions.
“She would often appear to be asleep; and would awake from such a state,
at one time, quite refreshed, and, at another time, so limp and broken down
as to be unable to move. Those that served her knew not how to distinguish
one state from the other; and on recovering from an attack of the latter sort,
she would say to them: ‘Why did you let me continue in that state of quiet,
from which I have all but died?’” So, on September 5, “she cried aloud on
waking from a state of quiet, which had appeared to be (healthy) quietude,
but had not been so.” And indeed, already on January 10 previous, she had
shut herself off from her Confessor, “because it seemed to her that he bore
with her too much in her sayings and doings.”
Yet, at least after this time, Marabotto does oppose her sometimes. Thus
on two, somewhat later, occasions she respectively makes signs, and asks,
that Extreme Unction be given her; but only some four months later did she
actually receive it. In these cases, then, she either had not, even at bottom, a
correct physical self-knowledge; or her requests had been prompted, at the
time, by her secondary, maladif consciousness alone.—When first visited
by Boerio, she takes pleasure in the thought of getting possibly cured by
him; but “in the following night, when great pain came upon her, she
reproved herself, saying, ‘You are suffering this, because you allowed
yourself to rejoice without cause.’” But this declaration distinctly falls short
of any necessary implication of a directly supernatural origin of her malady,
as the Vita here will have it, and but refers, either to the continuance of
earthly existence not deserving such joy, or to her persistent fundamental
consciousness that the phenomena were partly the fruitful, profitable
occasions, and partly the price paid, for the mind’s close intercourse with
things divine.
Indeed her (otherwise unbroken) attitude is one, both of quiet conviction
that physic cannot help her, and of gentle readiness to let the physicians try
whatever they may think worth the trying: so with the cupping-glasses, and
the various examinations and physickings. Especially is this disposition
clear in her short dialogue with Boerio, where, in answer to his assertion
that she ought to beware of giving scandal to all the world by saying that

her infirmity had no need of remedies, and that she ought to look upon such
an attitude as “a kind of hypocrisy,” she declares: “I am sorry if any one is
scandalized because of me; and I am ready to use any remedy for infirmity,
supposing that it can be found.”[19]
2. Her preoccupation with the spiritual suggestions afforded by the
phenomena.
It would, indeed, be a grave misreading of her whole character and habits
of mind to think of her as at all engrossed in her psycho-physical states as
such, and as having ever formally considered and decided that they must
either come directly from God or be amenable to medicine. On the contrary,
she is too habitually absorbed in the consideration and contemplation of
certain great spiritual doctrines and realities, to have the leisure or
inclination for any such questions.—Indeed it is this very absorption in
those spiritual realities which has ended by suggesting, with an
extraordinary readiness, frequency and vividness, through her mind to her
senses, and by these back to her mind, certain psycho-physical images and
illustrations for those very doctrines, until her whole psycho-physical
organism has been, all but entirely, modified and moulded into an apt
instrument and manifestation for and of that world unseen.
Thus, after her greatest psycho-physical and spiritual experience in
November 1509, she declares to Vernazza, when he urges her to let him
write down the graces she has received from God, that “it would, strictly
speaking, be impossible to narrate those interior things; whilst, of exterior
ones, few or none have happened to me.” And she never entirely loses her
mental consciousness in any state not recognized by herself as maladif. So,
on a day of great psycho-physical trouble in February or March 1510, “they
thought she must expire; but, though she lost both sight and speech, she
never lost her intelligence.” And even on September 11 and 12, amidst
foodlessness and suffocations, her intelligence still persists.—In the March
previous “her mind appeared to grow daily in contentment.” Some days
later, her attendants “saw how, after an hour of spasm and breathlessness,
and then a great restriction of all her being, she returned to her normal
condition, and addressed many beautiful words to them.” And later on, “her
attendants were amazed at seeing a body, which seemed to be healthy, in
such a tormented condition.” But “soon after she laughed and spoke as one
in health, and told them not to distress themselves about her, since she was

very contented; but that they should see to it that they did much good, since
the way of God is very narrow.”[20]
3. Interaction and mutual suggestion of her spiritual and physical states.
As to the extraordinary closeness and readiness for mutual response
between her sensible impressions and her thoughts and emotions—her
sensations turning, all but automatically, into religious emotions, and her
thoughts and feelings translating themselves into appropriate psycho-
physical states—we have a mass of interesting evidence.
Thus when, about the end of November 1509, in response to her seeing,
on some wall of the Hospital, a picture of Our Lord at the Well of Samaria,
and to her asking Him for one drop of that Divine water, “instantly a drop
was given to her which refreshed her within and without.” The spiritual idea
and emotion is here accompanied and further stimulated by the keenest
psycho-physical impression of drinking. And such an impression can even
become painful through its excessive suggestiveness. Thus she herself
explains to Maestro Boerio, on September 2, 1510, that she cannot long
bear the sight of his scarlet robe “because of what it suggests (represents) to
my memory,”—no doubt the fire of divine love. Three days later, on the
contrary, “she mentally saw herself lying upon a bier, surrounded by many
Religious robed in black,” and greatly rejoiced at the sight. Here the very
impression of black, the colour of death, will have conveyed, during this
special mood of hers, a downright psycho-physical pleasure, somewhat as
Boerio’s reappearance, on the former occasion, in a black gown, had been a
sensible relief to her.
So also with scents. When, certainly after 1499, “she perceived, on the
(right) hand of her Confessor, an odour which penetrated her very heart,”
and “which abode with her and restored both mind and body for many
days,” we have again a primarily mental act and state which she herself
knows well to be untransferable, even to Don Marabotto himself. Here the
association of ideas was, no doubt, the right hand of the Priest and her daily
reception, by means of it, of the Holy Eucharist. For the latter, “the Bread
from heaven, having within it all manner of delight,” is already connected
in her mind with an impression of sweet odour. “One day, on receiving
Communion, so much odour and sweetness came to her, that she seemed to
herself to be in Paradise.” Probably the love for, and then the disgust at, the

smell of wine, was also connected with her Eucharistic experiences.
Certainly “one day, having received Holy Communion, she was granted so
great a consolation as to fall into an ecstasy, so that when the Priest wanted
to give her to drink from the Chalice (with unconsecrated wine) she had to
be brought back by force to her ordinary consciousness.” Vivid memories of
both sets of psycho-physical impressions are, I think, at work when she
says: “If a consecrated Host were to be given to me amongst unconsecrated
ones, I should be able to distinguish it by the very taste, as I do wine from
water.” And as the sight of red rapidly became painful from the very excess
of its mental suggestiveness, so will the smell of wine have been both
specially dear and specially painful to her.[21]
Indeed her psycho-physical troubles possess, for the most part, a still
traceable, most delicate selectiveness as to date, range, form, combination,
and other peculiarities. Thus some of the most acute attacks coincide, in
their date of occurrence and general character, as the biographers point out,
with special saint’s and holy days: so in the night leading into St.
Lawrence’s day, August 9 and 10, 1510; so on the Vigil of St.
Bartholomew’s day, August 24; and so in the night previous to and on the
Feast (August 28) of St. Augustine, special Patron of her only sister’s Order
and of the Convent in which her own Conversion had taken place thirty-
seven years before. Yet we have also seen how that these synchronisms did
not rise to the heights which were soon desired by her biographers, for we
know that she died, not (as they would have it) on the Feast of the
Exaltation of the Cross, September 14, but early on the day following.
Thus too as to her incapacity to swallow and retain food, we find that, up
to the end, with the rarest exceptions of a directly physical kind, she
retained the most complete facility in receiving Holy Communion: so on
September 2, 1510, when “all ordinary food was returned, but the Holy
Eucharist she retained without any difficulty”; and so too on September 4,
when, after “lying for close upon twelve hours with closed eyes, speechless
and all but immovable,” Marabotto himself feared to communicate her, but
“she made a sign to him, with a joyous countenance, to have no fear, and
she communicated with ease, and soon after began to speak, owing to the
vigour given to her by the Sacrament.” Yet here too the abnormality is not
complete: some ordinary food is retained, now and then; so, minced

chicken, specially mentioned for December 1509, and on September 3,
1510.
As to her heat-attacks and the corresponding extreme—the sense of
intense cold,—it is clear how close is their connection with her profound
concentration upon the conception of God as Love, and upon the image of
Love as fire. It is these sudden and intense psycho-physical, spiritually
suggestive because spiritually suggested, heat-attacks which are, I think,
always meant by the terms “assault” (assalto), “stroke” (ferita), and
“arrow” (saetta): terms which already indicate the mental quality of these
attacks. And these heats are mostly localized in a doctrinally suggestive
manner: they centre in and around the heart, or on the tongue and lips, or
they envelop the whole person “as though it were placed in a great flame of
fire,” or “in a glowing furnace.” Indeed these heats are often so described,
by her attendants or herself, as to imply their predominantly psycho-
physical nature: “it was necessary, with a view to prolonging her life, to use
many means for lightening the strain of that interior fire upon her mind”;
and “I feel,” she says herself, on occasion of such an attack, “so great a
contentment on the part of the spirit, as to be unutterable; whilst, on the part
of my humanity, all the pains are, so to say, no pains.”
As to her boundless thirst, her inability to drink, and her sense of
strangulation, their doctrinal suggestions are largely clear. Thus when “she
was so thirsty as to feel able to drink up all the waters of the sea,” and when
she calls out “I am suffocating” (drowning, io affogo), we are at once
reminded of her great saying: “If the sea were all so much love, there would
not live man or woman who would not go to drown himself in it (si
affogasse).” And when, at the end of August 1510, unable to drink, she
herself declares “all the water that is on earth could not give me the least
refreshment,” there is, perhaps, an implied contrast to that “little drop of
divine water” which had so much refreshed her a year before.
And finally, the various paralyses and death-like swoons seem, at least in
part, to follow from, and to represent, the death of the spirit to the life of the
senses, and to mirror the intensity with which perfection has been
conceived and practised as “Love going forth out of self, and abiding all in
God and separated from man.” Thus when, on August 22, 1510, “she had a
day of great heat, and abode paralyzed in one hand and in one finger of the
other hand for about sixteen hours, and she was so greatly occupied

(absorbed), that she neither spoke, nor opened her eyes, nor could take any
food.”[22]
4. Only two cases of spiritually unsuggestive impressions.
It is indeed profoundly instructive to note how that, in exact proportion as
a human-mental mediation and suggestion of a religious kind is directly
traceable or at least probable in any or all of these things, is that thing also
worthy of being considered as having ultimately the Divine Spirit Itself for
its first cause as well as last end; and that, in exact proportion as this kind of
human mediation and suggestion is impossible or unlikely, the thing turns
out to be unworthy of being attributed, in any special sense, to the spirit of
God Himself.
Of such spiritually opaque, religiously unused and apparently unuseable,
hysteriform impressions, I can, even during the last days of these nine years
of admitted infirmity, find but two clear instances,—instances which, by
their very unlikeness to the mass of her spiritually transparent, readily used
impressions, strongly confirm our high estimate of the all but totality of her
psycho-physical states, as experienced and understood and used by herself.
On September 7, 1510, after having seen and wisely utilized the spiritually
suggestive image of “a great ladder of fire,” she ends by having so vivid an
hallucination of the whole world being on fire “that she asked whether it
were not so, and caused her windows to be opened that the facts might be
ascertained;” and “she abode the whole night, possessed by that
imagination,” as the Vita itself calls this impression. At night, on September
11, she complained of a very great heat, and cast forth from her mouth very
black blood; and black spots came out all over her body. And on the 13th,
“she was seen with her eyes fixed upon the ceiling, and with much
movement of the lips and hands; and she answered her attendants’ queries
as to what she was seeing with ‘Drive away that beast.…’ the remaining
words being inaudible.”[23]
Here we have, I think, the only two merely factual, unsuggestive, and
hence simply delusive, impressions really experienced by herself and
recorded in the Vita, a book whose very eagerness to discover things of this
kind and readiness to take them as directly supernatural is a guarantee that
no other marked instances of the kind have been omitted or suppressed. And
these two impressions both take place within a week of her death, and

respectively four days before, and two days after, the first clear case of
organic disease or lesion to be found anywhere in the life.

III. Catherine’s Psycho-physical Condition, its Likeness and
Unlikeness To Hysteria.

Only by a quite unfair magnifying or multiplying of the two incidents
just described could we come to hold, with Mr. Baring-Gould, that
Catherine was simply a sufferer from hysteria, and that the Roman Church
did well to canonize her on the ground of her having, in spite of this
malady, managed to achieve much useful work amongst the sick and poor.
[24]
Here we shall do well to consider three groups of facts.
1. Misapprehensions as to hysteria.
The first group gives the reasons why we should try and get rid of the
terror and horror still so often felt in connection with the very name of this
malady. This now quite demonstrably excessive, indeed largely mythical,
connotation of the term springs from four causes.
First, the very name still tends to suggest, as the causes or conditions of
the malady, things fit only for discussion in medical reviews. But then, ever
since 1855, all limitation to, or special connection with, anything peculiarly
female, or indeed generally sexual, has been increasingly shown to be false,
until now no serious authority on the matter can be found to espouse the old
view. The malady is now well known to attack men as well as women, and
to have no special relation to things of sex at all.[25]
Next, probably as a consequence from the initial error, this disorder was
supposed to predominantly come from, or to lead to, moral impurity, or at
least to be ordinarily accompanied by strong erotic propensions. But here
the now carefully observed facts are imperatively hostile: of the 120 living
cases most carefully studied by Prof. Janet, only four showed the
predominance of any such tendencies, a proportion undoubtedly not above
the percentage to be found amongst non-hysterical persons.[26]
And again, the term was long synonymous with untruthfulness and
deceit. But here again Prof. Janet shows how unfounded is this prejudice,
since it but springs from the misplaced promptitude with which the earlier

observers refused to believe what they had not as yet sufficiently examined
and could not at all explain, and from the malady being itself equivalent to a
more or less extensive breaking-up of the normal inter-connection between
the several, successive or simultaneous states, and, as it were, layers of the
one personality. He is convinced that real untruthfulness is no commoner
among such patients than it is among healthy persons.[27]
And, finally, it is no doubt felt that, apart from all such specifically moral
suspicions, the malady involves all kinds of fancies and inaccuracies of
feeling and of perception, and that it frequently passes into downright
insanity. And this is no doubt the one objection which does retain some of
its old cogency. Still, it is well to note that, as has now been fully
established, the elements of the human mind are and remain the same
throughout the whole range of its conditions, from the sanest to the
maddest, whilst only their proportion and admixture, and the presence or
absence and the kind of synthesis necessary to hold them together
differentiate these various states of mind. In true insanity there is no such
synthesis; in hysteria the synthesis, however slight and peculiar, is always
still traceable throughout the widespread disgregation of the elements and
states.[28] And it is this very persistence of the fundamental unity, together
with the strikingly different combination and considerable disaggregation of
its elements, that makes the study of hysteria so fruitful for the knowledge
of the fully healthy mind and of its unity; whilst the continuance of all the
elements of the normal intelligence, even in insanity, readily explains why it
is apparently so easy to see insanity everywhere, and to treat genius and
sanctity as but so much degeneracy.
2. Hysteriform phenomena observable in Catherine’s case.
The second group of facts consists in the phenomena which, in
Catherine’s case, are like or identical to what is observable in cases of
hysteria.
There is, perhaps above all else, the anaesthetic condition, which was
presumably co-extensive with her paralytic states. “Anaesthesia,” says Prof.
Janet, “can be considered as the type of the other symptoms of hysteria; it
exists in the great majority of cases, it is thoroughly characteristic of the
malady. In its most frequent localization (semi-anaesthesia) it affects one of
the lateral halves of the body, and this half is usually the left side.” Or, “a

finger or hand will be affected.” Such “insensibility can be very frequent
and very profound”; but “it disappears suddenly” and even “varies from one
moment to another.”[29]
Then there is the corresponding counter-phenomenon of hyper-aesthesia.
“The slightest contact provokes great pains, exclamations, and spasms. The
painful zones have their seat mostly on the abdomen or on the hips.” And
“sensation in these states is not painful in itself, by its own intensity, but by
its quality, its characteristics; it has become the signal, by association of
ideas, for the production of a set of extremely painful phenomena.” So, with
the colour-sense: “one patient adores the colour red, and sees in its dullest
shade ‘sparkling rays which penetrate to her very heart and warm her
through and through.’” But “another one finds this ‘a repulsive colour and
one capable of producing nausea.’” And similarly with the senses of taste
and odour.[30]
Then, too, the inability to stand or walk, with the conservation, at times,
of the power to crawl; the acceptance, followed by the rejection, of food,
because of certain spasms in the throat or stomach, and the curious,
mentally explicable, exceptions to this incapacity; the sense, even at other
times, of strangulation; heart palpitations, fever heats, strange haemorrhages
from the stomach or even from the lung; red patches on the skin and
emotional jaundice all over it, and one or two other peculiarities.[31]
Then, as to a particular kind of quietude, from which Catherine warns her
attendants to rouse her, we find a patient who “ceases her reading, without
showing any sign of doing so. She gets taken to be profoundly attentive; it
is, however, but one of her attacks of ‘fixity.’ And she has promptly to be
shaken out of this state, or, in a few minutes, there will be no getting her out
of it.”
As to Catherine’s consciousness of possessing an extraordinary fineness
of discrimination between sensibly identical objects, we see that “if one
points out, to some of these patients, an imaginary portrait upon a plain
white card, and mixes this card with other similar ones, they will almost
always find again the portrait on the same card.” And similarly as to her
attaching a particular quasi-sensible perception to Marabotto’s hand alone,
we find that, if M. Janet touches Léonie’s hand, he having suggested a
nosegay to her, she will henceforth, when he touches the hand, see that

nosegay; whereas, if another person touches that same hand, Léonie will see
nothing special.
As to Catherine’s feelings of criminality and of being already dead, M.
Janet quotes M., who says, “I am like a criminal about to be punished”; and
R., who declares, “It seems to me that I am dead.” As to the hallucination of
a Beast, Marcelle suffers from the same impression.[32]
And,—perhaps the most important of all these surface-resemblances,—
there is Catherine’s apparent freedom from all emotion at the deaths of her
brothers and sister, and her extraordinary dependence upon, and
claimfulness towards, her Confessor alone. “These patients rapidly lose the
social feelings: Berthe, who for some time preserved some affection for her
brother, ends by losing all interest in him; Marcelle, at the very beginning
of her illness, separates herself from every one.” “It is always their own
personality which dominates their thoughts.” Yet these patients have “an
extraordinary attachment to their physician. For him they are resolved to do
all things. In return, they are extremely exacting,—he is to occupy himself
entirely with each one alone. Only a very superficial observer would ascribe
this feeling to a vulgar source.”[33]
3. Catherine’s personality not disintegrated.
But a third group of facts clearly differentiates Catherine’s case, even in
these years of avowed ill-health, from such patients; and these facts become
clearer and more numerous in precise proportion as we move away from
peripheral, psycho-physical phenomena and mechanisms, and dwell upon
her practically unbroken mental and moral characteristics, and upon the use
and meaning, the place and context of these things within her ample life.
For as to her relations with her attendants, even now it is still she who
leads, who suggests, who influences; a strong and self-consistent will shows
itself still, under all this shifting psycho-physical surface. Thus Don
Marabotto now administers, it is true, all her money and charitable affairs
for her. But it is she who insists, alone and unaided, upon the true spiritual
function of that impression of odour on his hand.—Vernazza, no doubt, has
now to help her in the fight against subtle scruples, on occasion of her
deepest depressions. But her far more frequent times of light and joy are in
nowise occasions of a simply subjective self-engrossment or of a purely
psycho-physical interest, for her mind is absorbed if in but a few, yet in

inexhaustibly fruitful and universally applicable ideas and experiences of a
spiritual kind, such as helped to urge this friend on to his world-renewing
impulses and determinations.—Her closest relations and friends, one must
admit, succeed by their action, taken eighteen months and then again two
days before her death, in getting her to desist from ordering her burial by
the side of her husband. But we have seen, in the one case, how indirectly,
and, in the other case, how suddenly and even then quite informally, they
had to gain their point.—Her attendants in general, and Marabotto in
particular, certainly paid her an engrossed attention, and the all but
endlessness of her superficial fancies and requirements have been
chronicled by them with a naïve and wearisome fulness. But then she
herself is well aware that, had they but the requisite knowledge as to how
and when to apply them, some sturdy opposition and a greater roughness of
handling would, on their part, be of the greatest use to her, in this her
psychical infirmity; indeed her shutting herself away from Marabotto, as
late as January 1510, is directly caused by her sense and fear of being spoilt
by him.
It is true again that, already in 1502, we hear, in a probably exaggerated
but still possibly semi-authentic account, of her indifference of feeling with
regard to the deaths of two brothers and of her only sister; and that, from
January 1510 onwards, she gradually excludes all her attendants from her
sick-room, with, eventually, the sole exceptions of Marabotto or Carenzio
and Argentina. But her Wills show conclusively how persistent were her
detailed interest in, and dispositions for, the requirements of her surviving
brother, nephews, and nieces; of poor Thobia and the girl’s hidden mother;
of her priest-attendants, and of each and all of her humblest domestics; of
the natives in the far-away Greek Island of Scios; and, above all, of the
Hospital and its great work which she had ever loved so well.
We have indeed found two cases, both from within the last week of her
life, of mentally opaque and spiritually unsuggestive and unutilized
impressions which are truly analogous to those characteristic of hysteria.
But we have also seen how forcibly these two solitary cases bring out, by
contrast, the spiritual transparency and fruitfulness of her usual, finely
reflective picturings of these last years. For here it is her own deliberate and
spiritual mind which joyously greets, and straightway utilizes and
transcends, the psycho-physical occurrences; and it does so, not because

these occurrences are, or are taken to be, the causes or requisites or objects
of her faith and spiritual insight, but because, on the contrary, they meet and
clothe an already exuberant faith and insight—spiritual certainties derived
from quite another source.
And finally, if the monotony and superficial pettiness of the sick-room
can easily pall upon us, especially when presented with the credulities and
hectic exaggerations which disfigure so much of the Vita’s description of it;
we must, in justice, as I have attempted to do in my seventh and eighth
chapters, count in, as part of her biography, her deep affection for and
persistent influence with Ettore and Battista Vernazza, and the
exemplification of her doctrine by these virile souls, makers of history in
the wide, varied world of men.[34]
In a word, it is plain at once that, given the necessarily limited number of
ways in which the psycho-physical organism reacts under mental
stimulations, certain neural phenomena may, in any two cases, be, in
themselves, perfectly similar, although their respective mental causes or
occasions may be as different, each from the other, as the Moonlight Sonata
of Beethoven, or the working out of the Law of Gravitation by Newton, or
the elaboration of the implications of the Categorical Imperative by Kant,
are different from the sudden jumping of a live mouse in the face of an
hysterically-disposed young woman, or as the various causes of tears and
laughter throughout the whole world.

IV. First Period of Catherine’s Life, 1447 to 1477, in its Three Stages.

If we next go back to the first period of her life, in its three stages of the
sixteen years of her girlhood, 1447-1463, the first ten years of her married
life, 1463-1473, and the four years of her Conversion and active Penitence,
1473-1477, we shall find, I think, in the matter of temperament and psycho-
physical conditions, little or nothing but a rare degree of spiritual
sensitiveness, and an extraordinary close-knittedness of body and mind.
1. From her childhood to her conversion.
Thus, already in her early childhood, that picture of the Pietà seems to
have suggested religious ideas and feelings with the suddenness and
emotional solidity of a physical seizure—an impression still undimmed

when she herself recounted it, some fifty years later, to her two intimates.—
It is true that during those first, deeply unhappy ten years of marriage, we
cannot readily find more than indications of a most profound and brooding
melancholy, the apparent result of but two factors,—a naturally sad
disposition and acutely painful domestic circumstances. Yet it is clear, from
the sequel, that more and other things lay behind. It is indeed evident that
she possessed a congenitally melancholy temperament; that nothing but the
rarest combination of conditions could have brought out, into something
like elastic play and varied exercise, her great but few and naturally
excessive qualities of mind and heart; that these conditions were not only
absent, but were replaced by circumstances of the most painful kind; and
that she will hardly, at this time, have had even a moment’s clear
consciousness of any other sources than just those conditions for her deep,
keen, and ever-increasing dissatisfaction with all things, her own self
included: all peace and joy, the very capacity for either seemed gone, and
gone for ever. But it is only the third stage, with its sudden-seeming
conversion on March 20, 1473, and the then following four years of
strenuously active self-immolation and dedication to the humblest service
of others, which lets us see deep into those previous years of sullen gloom
and apparently hopeless drift and dreary wastage.
The two stages really belong to one another, and the depth of the former
gloom and dreariness stood in direct proportion and relation to the
capacities of that nature and to the height of their satisfaction in the later
light and vigour brought to and assimilated by them. It was the sense, at that
previous time still inarticulate, but none the less mightily operative, of the
insufficiency of all things merely contingent, of all things taken as such and
inevitably found to be such, that had been adding, and was now discovered
to have added, a quite determining weight and poignancy to the natural
pressure of her temperament and external lot. And this temperament and lot,
which had not alone produced that sadness, could still less of themselves
remove it, whatever might be its cause. Her sense of emptiness and
impotence could indeed add to her sense of fulness and of power, once
these latter had come; but of themselves the former could no more give her
the latter, than hunger, which indeed makes bread to taste delicious, can
give us real bread and, with it, that delight.

And it was such real bread of life and real power which now came to her.
For if the tests of reality in such things are their persistence and large and
rich spiritual applicability and fruitfulness, then something profoundly real
and important took place in the soul of that sad and weary woman of six-
and-twenty, within that Convent-chapel, at that Annunciation-tide. Her four
years of heroic persistence; her unbroken Hospital service of a quarter of a
century; her lofty magnanimity towards her husband, Thobia and Thobia’s
mother; her profound influence upon Vernazza, in urging him on to his
splendid labours throughout Italy, and to his grand death in plague-stricken
Genoa; her daringly original, yet immensely persuasive, doctrine,—nearly
all this dates back, completely for her consciousness and very largely in
reality, to those few moments on that memorable day.
2. Her conversion not sudden nor visionary.
But two points, concerning the manner and form of this experience, are,
though of but secondary spiritual interest, far more difficult to decide. There
is, for one thing, the indubitable impression, for her own mind and for ours,
of complete suddenness and newness in her change. Was this suddenness
and newness merely apparent, or real as well? And should this suddenness,
if real, be taken as in itself and directly supernatural?
Now it is certain that Catherine, up to ten years before, had been full of
definitely religious acts and dispositions. Had she not, already at thirteen,
wanted to be a Nun, and, at eight or so, been deeply moved by a picture of
the dead Christ in His Mother’s lap? Hence, ideas and feelings of self-
dedication and of the Christ-God’s hatred of sin and love for her had, in
earlier and during longer times than those of her comparative carelessness,
soaked into and formed her mental and emotional bent, and will have in so
far shaped her will, as to make the later determination along those earlier
lines of its operation, comparatively easy, even after those years of
relaxation and deviation. Yet it is clear that there was not here, as indeed
there is nowhere, any mere repetition of the past. New combinations and an
indefinitely deeper apprehension of the great religious ideas and facts of
God’s holiness and man’s weakness, of the necessity for the soul to reach its
own true depth or to suffer fruitlessly, and of God having Himself to meet
and feed this movement and hunger which He has Himself implanted; new
combinations and depths of emotion, and an indefinite expansion and heroic

determination of the will: were all certainly here, and were new as
compared with even the most religious moments in the past.
As to the suddenness, we cannot but take it as, in large part, simply
apparent,—a dim apprehension of what then became clear having been
previously quite oppressively with her. And, in any case, this suddenness
seems to belong rather to the temperamental peculiarities and necessary
forms of her particular experiences than to the essence and content of her
spiritual life. For, whatever she thinks, feels, says or does throughout her
life, she does and experiences with actual suddenness, or at least with a
sense of suddenness; and there is clearly no more necessary connection
between such suddenness and grace and true self-renouncement, than there
is between gradualness and mere nature; both suddenness and gradualness
being but simple modes, more or less fixed for each individual, yet differing
from each to each, modes in which God’s grace and man’s will interact and
manifest themselves in different souls.[35]
And then there is the question as to whether or not this conversion-
experience took the form of a vision. We have seen, in the Appendix, how
considerable are the difficulties which beset the account of the Bleeding
Christ Vision in the Palace; and how the story of the previous visionless
experience in the Chapel is free from all such objections. But, even
supposing the two accounts to be equally reliable, it is the first, the
visionless experience, which was demonstrably the more important and the
more abidingly operative of the two. More important, for it is during those
visionless moments that her conversion is first effected; and more abiding,
for, according to all the ancient accounts, the impression of the Bleeding
Christ Vision disappeared utterly at the end of at longest four years,
whereas the memory of the visionless conversion moments remained with
her, as an operative force, up to the very last. Witness the free self-casting
of the soul into painful-joyous Purgation, into Love, into God (without any
picturing of the historic Christ), which forms one of the two constituents of
her great latter-day teaching; and how entirely free from directly historic
elements all her recorded visions of the middle period turn out to be.[36]
3. Peculiarities of her Active Penitence.
As to the four years of Active Penitence, we must beware of losing the
sense of the dependence, the simple, spontaneous instrumentality, in which

the negative and restrictive side of of her action stood towards the positive
and expansive one. An immense affirmation, an anticipating, creative
buoyancy and resourcefulness, had come full flood into her life; and had
shifted her centre of deliberate interest and willing away from the
disordered, pleasure-seeking, sore and sulky lesser self in which her true
personality had for so long been enmeshed. Thus all this strenuous work of
transforming and raising her lower levels of inclinations and of habit to the
likeness and heights of her now deliberate loftiest standard was not taking
place for the sake of something which actually was, or which even seemed
to be, less than what she had possessed or had, even dimly, sought before,
nor with a view to her true self’s contraction. But, on the contrary, the work
was for the end of that indefinite More, of that great pushing upwards of her
soul’s centre and widening out of its circumference, which she could herself
confirm and increase only by such ever-renewed warfare against what she
now recognized as her false and crippling self.
And it is noticeable how soon and how largely, even still within this
stage, her attitude became “passive.” She pretty early came to do these
numerous definite acts of penance without any deliberate selection or full
attention to them. As in her third period her absorption in large spiritual
ideas spontaneously suggests certain corresponding psycho-physical
phenomena, which then, in return, stimulate anew the apprehensions of the
mind; so here, towards the end of the first period, penitential love ends by
quite spontaneously suggesting divers external acts of penitence, which
readily become so much fresh stimulation for love.
I take this time to have been as yet free from visions or ecstasies—at
least of the later lengthy and specific type. For the Bleeding Christ
experience, even if fully historical, occurred within the first conversion-
days, and only its vivid memory prolonged itself throughout those
penitential years; whilst all such other visions, as have been handed down to
us, do not treat of conversion and penance, at least in any active and
personal sense. And only towards the end of these years do the psycho-
physical phenomena as to the abstention from food begin to show
themselves. The consideration of both the Visions and the Fasts had, then,
better be reserved for the great central period.

V. The Second, Great Middle Period of Catherine’s Life, 1477 to
1499.

It is most natural yet very regrettable that we should know so little as to
Catherine’s spiritual life, or even as to her psycho-physical condition,
during these central twenty-two years of her life. It is natural, for she had, at
this time, neither Physician nor Confessor busy with her, and the very
richness and balanced fulness of this epoch of her life may well have helped
to produce but little that could have been specially seized and registered by
either. Yet it is regrettable, since here we have what, at least for us human
observers, constitutes the culmination and the true measure of her life, the
first period looking but like the preparation, and the third period, like the
price paid for such a rich expansion.—Yet we know something about three
matters of considerable psycho-physical and temperamental interest, which
are specially characteristic of this time: her attitude towards food; her
ecstasies and visions; and certain peculiarities in her conception and
practice of the spiritual warfare.
1. Her extraordinary fasts.
As to food, it is clear that, however much we may be able or bound to
deduct from the accounts, there remains a solid nucleus of remarkable fact.
During some twenty years she evidently went, for a fairly equal number of
days,—some thirty in Advent and some forty in Lent, seventy in all
annually,—with all but no food; and was, during these fasts, at least as
vigorous and active as when her nutrition was normal. For it is not fairly
possible to make these great fasts end much before 1496, when she ceased
to be Matron of the Hospital; and they cannot have begun much after 1475
or 1476: so that practically the whole of her devoted service and
administration in and of that great institution fell within these years, of
which well-nigh one-fifth was covered by these all but total abstentions
from food. Yet here again we are compelled to take these things, not
separately, and as directly supernatural, but in connection with everything
else; and to consider the resultant whole as the effect and evidence of a
strong mind and will operating upon and through an immensely responsive
psycho-physical organism.
For here again we easily find a significant system and delicate
selectiveness both in the constant approximate synchronisms—these

incapacities occurring about Advent and Lent; and in the foods exempted—
since there is no difficulty in connection with the daily Holy Eucharist, with
the unconsecrated wine given to her, as to all Communicants in that age at
Genoa, immediately after Communion, or with water when seasoned
penitentially with salt or vinegar. And if the actual heightening of nervous
energy and balance, recorded as having generally accompanied these two
fasts, is indeed a striking testimony to the extraordinary powers of her mind
and will, we must not forget that these fruitful fasts were accompanied, and
no doubt rendered possible, by the second great psychical peculiarity of
these middle years, her ecstasies.
2. Her ecstasies and visions.
It is indeed remarkable how these two conditions and functions, her fasts
and her ecstasies of a definite, lengthy and strength-bringing kind, arise,
persist and then fade out of her life together. And since, in ecstasy, the
respiration, the circulation, and the other physical functions are all
slackened and simplified; the mind is occupied with fewer, simpler, larger
ideas, harmonious amongst themselves; and the emotions and the will are,
for the time, saved the conflict and confusion, the stress and strain, of the
fully waking moments; and considering that Catherine was peculiarly
sensitive to all this flux and friction, and that she was now often in a more
or less ecstatic trance from two up to eight hours: it follows that the amount
of food required to heal the breach made by life’s wear and tear would, by
these ecstasies, be considerably reduced. And indeed it will have been these
contemplative absorptions which directly mediated for her those accessions
of vigour: and that they did so, in such a soul and for the uses to which she
put this strength, is their fullest justification as thoroughly wholesome, at
least in their ultimate outcome, in and for this particular life.
And the visions recorded have these two characteristics, that they all deal
with metaphysical realities and relations—God as source and end of all
things, as Light and food of the soul, and similar conceptions, and never
directly with historical persons, scenes, or institutions; and that, whereas the
non-ecstatic picturings of her last period are grandly original, and
demonstrably based upon her own spiritual experience, these second-period
ecstatic visions are readily traceable to New Testament, Neo-Platonist, and
Franciscan precursors, and have little more originality than this special
selection from amongst other possible literary sources.

3. Special character of her spiritual warfare.
Catherine’s ecstasies lead us easily on to the special method of her
spiritual warfare, which can, I think, be summed up in three maxims: “One
thing, and only one at a time”; “Ever fight self, and you need not trouble
about any other foe”; and “Fight self by an heroic indirectness and by love,
for love,—through a continuous self-donation to Pure Love alone.”
Studying here these great convictions simply in their temperamental
occasions, colouring, and limitations, we can readily discover how the “one
thing at a time” maxim springs from the same disposition as that which
found such refreshment in ecstasy. For here too, partly from a congenital
incapacity to take things lightly, partly from an equally characteristic
sensitiveness to the conflict and confusion incident to the introduction of
any fresh multiplicity into the consciousness, she requires, even in her non-
ecstatic moments, to have her attention specially concentrated upon one all-
important idea, one point in the field of consciousness. And, by a faithful
wholeness of attention to the successive spiritually significant
circumstances and obligations, interior impressions and lights, which her
praying, thinking, suffering, actively bring round to her notice, she
manages, by such single steps, gradually to go a very long way, and, by
such severe successiveness, to build up a rich simultaneity. For each of
these faithfully accepted and fully willed and utilized acts and states,
received into her one ever-growing and deepening personality, leave
memories and stimulations behind them, and mingle, as subconscious
elements, with the conscious acts which follow later on.
4. Two remarkable consequences of this kind of warfare.
There were two specially remarkable consequences of this constant
watchful fixation of the one spiritually significant point in each congeries of
circumstances, and of the manner in which (partly perhaps as the occasion,
but probably in great part as the effect of this attention) one interior
condition of apparent fixity would suddenly shift to another condition of a
different kind but of a similar apparent stability. There was the manner in
which, during these years, she appears to have escaped the committing of
any at all definite offences against the better and best lights of that
particular moment; and there was the way in which she would realize the

faultiness and subtle self-seeking of any one state, only at the moment of its
disappearing to make room for another.
I take the accounts of both these remarkable peculiarities to be
substantially accurate, since, if the first condition had not obtained, we
should have found her practising more or less frequent Confession, as we
find her doing in the first and third, but not in this period; and if the second
condition had not existed, we should have had, for this period also, some
such vivid account of painful scruples arising from the impression of
actually present unfaithfulnesses, such as has been preserved for her last
years. And indeed, as soon as we have vividly conceived a state in which a
soul (by a wise utilization of the quite exceptional successiveness and
simplification to which it has been, in great part, driven by its
temperamental requirements, and by a constant heroic watchfulness) has
managed to exclude from its life, during a long series of years, all fully
deliberate resistances to, or lapses from, its contemporaneous better insight:
one sees at once that a consciousness of faultiness could come to her only at
those moments when, one state and level giving place to another, she could,
for the moment, see the former habits and their implicit defects in the clear
light of their contrast to her new, deeper insights and dispositions.
Now it is evident that here again we have in part (in the curious quasi-
fixity of each state, and then the sudden replacement of it by another)
something which, taken alone, is simply psychically peculiar and spiritually
indifferent. The persistent sense of gradual or of rapid change in the midst
of a certain continuity and indeed abidingness, characteristic of the average
moments of the average soul, is, taken in itself, more true to life and to the
normal reaction of the human mind, and not less capable of spiritual
utilization, than is Catherine’s peculiarity. Her heroic utilization of her
special psychic life for purposes of self-fighting, and the degree in which,
as we shall find in a later chapter, she succeeded in moulding this life into a
shape representative of certain great spiritual truths: these things it is which
constitute here the spiritually significant element.
And her second peculiarity of religious practice was her great
simplification and intensification of the spiritual combat. Simplification: for
she does not fight directly either the Devil or the World; she directly fights
the “Flesh” alone, and recognizes but one immediate opponent, her own
lower self. Hence the references to the world are always simply as to an

extension or indefinite repetition of that same self, or of similar lower
selves; and those to the devil are, except where she declares her own lower
self “a very devil,” extraordinarily rare, and, in their authentic forms, never
directly and formally connected with her own spiritual interests and
struggles. And Intensification: for she conceives this lower self, against
which all her fighting is turned, as capable of any enormity, as actually
cloaking itself successively in every kind of disguise, and as more or less
vitiating even the most spiritual-seeming of her states and acts.
And here again we can, I think, clearly trace the influence of her special
temperament and psycho-physical functioning, yet in a direction opposite to
that in which we would naturally expect it. For it is not so much that this
temperament led her to exaggerate the badness of her false self, or to
elaborate a myth concerning its (all but completely separate) existence, as
that, owing in large part to that temperament and functioning, her false self
was both unusually distinct from her true self and particularly clamorous
and claimful. It would indeed be well for hagiography if, in all cases, at
least an attempt were made to discover and present the precise and
particular good and bad selves, worked for and fought by the particular
saint: for it is just this double particularization of the common warfare in
every individual soul that gives the poignant interest and instructiveness,
and a bracing sense of reality to these lonely yet typical, unique yet
universal struggles, defeats, and victories.
And in Catherine’s case her special temperament; her particular attitude
during the ten years’ laxity, and again during the last years’ times of
obscurity and scruple; even some of her sayings probably still belonging to
this middle period; but above all the precise point and edge of her counter-
ideal and attrait: all indicate clearly enough what was her congenital defect.
A great self-engrossment of a downrightly selfish kind; a grouping of all
things round such a self-adoring Ego; a noiseless but determined
elimination from her life and memory of all that would not or could not,
then and there, be drawn and woven into the organism and functioning of
this immensely self-seeking, infinitely woundable and wounded, endlessly
self-doctoring “I” and “Me”: a self intensely, although not sexually, jealous,
envious and exacting, incapable of easy accommodation, of pleasure in half
successes, of humour and brightness, of joyous “once-born” creatureliness:

all this was certainly to be found, in strong tendency at least, in the
untrained parts and periods of her character and life.
And then the same peculiarity and sensitiveness of her psycho-physical
organism which, in her last period, ended by mirroring her mental spiritual
apprehensions and picturings in her very body, and which, even at this time,
has been traced by us in the curious long fixities and rapid changes of her
fields of consciousness, clearly operates also and already here, in separating
off this false self from the good one and in heightening the apprehension of
that false self to almost a perception in space, or to an all but physical
sensation.
We thus get something of which the interesting cases of “doubleness of
personality,” so much studied of late years, are, as it were, purely psychical,
definitely maladif caricatures; the great difference consisting in Catherine
herself possessing, at all times, the consciousness and memory of both
sides, of both “selves,” and of each as both actual and potential, within the
range of her one great personality. Indeed it is this very multiplicity thus
englobed and utilized by that higher unity, which gives depth to her sanity
and sanctity.[37]
5. Precise object and end of her striving.
And all this is confirmed and completed, as already hinted, by the precise
object of her ideal, the particular means and special end of the struggle.
Here, at the very culmination of her inner life and aim, we find the deepest
traces of her temperamental requirements; and here, in what she seeks, there
is again an immense concentration and a significant choice. The distinctions
between obligation and supererogation, between merit and grace, are not
utilized but transcended; the conception of God having anger as well as
love arouses as keen a sense of intolerableness as that of God’s envy
aroused in Plato, and God appears to her as, in Himself, continuously
loving.
This love of God, again, is seen to be present everywhere, and, of Itself,
everywhere to effect happiness. The dispositions of souls are indeed held to
vary within each soul and between soul and soul, and to determine the
differences in their reception, and consequently in the effect upon them, of
God’s one universal love: but the soul’s reward and punishment are not
something distinct from its state, they are but that very state prolonged and

articulated, since man can indeed go against his deepest requirements but
can never finally suppress them. Heaven, Purgatory, Hell are thus not places
as well as states, nor do they begin only in the beyond: they are states alone,
and begin already here. And Grace and Love, and Love and Christ, and
Christ and Spirit, and hence Grace and Love and Christ and Spirit are, at
bottom, one, and this One is God. Hence God, loving Himself in and
through us, is alone our full true self. Here, in this constant stretching out
and forward of her whole being into and towards the ocean of light and
love, of God the All in All, it is not hard to recognize a soul which finds
happiness only when looking out and away from self, and turning, in more
or less ecstatic contemplation and action, towards that Infinite Country, that
great Over-Againstness, God.
And, in her sensitive shrinking from the idea of an angry God, we find
the instinctive reaction of a nature too naturally prone itself to angry
claimfulness, and which had been too much driven out of its self-
occupation by the painful sense of interior self-division consequent upon
that jealousy, not to find it intolerable to get out of that little Scylla of her
own hungry self only to fall into a great Charybdis, an apparent mere
enlargement and canonization of that same self, in the angry God Himself.
And if her second peculiarity, the concentration of the fight upon an
unusually isolated and intense false self, had introduced an element of at
least relative Rigorism and contraction into her spirituality, this third
peculiarity brings a compensating movement of quasi-Pantheism, of
immense expansion. Here the crushed plant expands in boundless air, light
and warmth; the parched seaweed floats and unfolds itself in an immense
ocean of pure waters—the soul, as it were, breathes and bathes in God’s
peace and love. And it is evident that the great super-sensible realities and
relations adumbrated by such figures, did not, with her, lead to mere dry or
vague apprehensions. Even in this period, although here with a peaceful,
bracing orderliness and harmony, the reality thus long and closely dwelt on
and lived with was, as it were, physically seen and felt in these its images
by a ready response of her immensely docile psycho-physical organism.
6. Catherine possessed two out of the three conditions apparently
necessary for stigmatization.

And in this connection we should note how largely reasonable was the
expectation of some of her disciples of finding some permanent physical
effects upon her body; and yet why she not only had not the stigmata of the
Passion, but why she could not have them. For, of the three apparently
necessary conditions for such stigmatization, she had indeed two—a long
and intense absorption in religious ideas, and a specially sensitive psycho-
physical temperament and organization of the ecstatic type; but the third
condition, the concentration of that absorption upon Our Lord’s Passion and
wounds, was wholly wanting—at least after those four actively penitential
and during those twenty-two ecstatic years. We can, however, say most
truly that although, since at all events 1477, her visions and contemplations
were all concerning purely metaphysical, eternal realities, or certain
ceaselessly repeated experiences of the human soul, or laws and types
derived from the greatest of Christian institutions, her daily solace, the Holy
Eucharist: yet that these verities ended by producing definite images in her
senses, and certain observable though passing impressions upon her body,
so that we can here talk of sensible shadows or “stigmata” of things purely
spiritual and eternal.
And if, in the cases of some ecstatic saints, mental pathologists of a more
or less materialistic type have, at times, shown excessive suspicion as to
some of the causes and effects of these saints’ devotion to Our Lord’s
Humanity under the imagery and categories of the Canticle of Canticles—
all such suspicions, fair or unfair, have absolutely no foothold in
Catherine’s life, since not only is there here no devotion to God or to Our
Lord as Bridegroom of the Bridal soul: there is no direct contemplative
occupation with the historic Christ and no figuring of Him or of God under
human attributes or relations at all. I think that her temperament and health
had something to do with her habitual dwelling upon Thing-symbols of
God: Ocean—Air—Fire—picturings which, conceived with her psycho-
physical vividness, must, in their expanse, have rested and purified her in a
way that historical contingencies and details would not have done. The
doctrinal and metaphysical side of the matter will be considered later on.

VI. Three Rules which seem to govern the Relations between Psycho-
physical Peculiarities and Sanctity in general.

If we next inquire how matters stand historically with regard to the
relations between ecstatic states and psycho-physical peculiarities on the
one hand, and sanctity in general on the other hand, we shall find, I think,
that the following three rules or laws really cover, in a necessarily general,
somewhat schematic way, all the chief points, at all certain or practically
important, in this complex and delicate matter.
1. Intense spiritual energising is accompanied by auto-suggestion and
mono-ideism.
It is clear, for one thing, that as simply all and every mental, emotional,
and volitional energizing is necessarily and always accompanied by
corresponding nerve-states, and that if we had not some neural sensitiveness
and neural adaptability, we could not—whilst living our earthly life—think,
or feel, or will in regard to anything whatsoever: a certain special degree of
at least potential psycho-physical sensitiveness and adaptability must be
taken to be, not the productive cause, but a necessary condition for the
exercise, of any considerable range and depth of mind and will, and hence
of sanctity in general; and that the actual aiming at, and gradual
achievement of, sanctity in these, thus merely possible cases, spiritualizes
and further defines this sensitiveness, as the instrument, material, and
expression of the soul’s work.[38] And this work of the heroic soul will
necessarily consist, in great part, in attending to, calling up, and, as far as
may be, both fixing and ever renovating certain few great dominant ideas,
and in attempting by every means to saturate the imagination with images
and figures, historical and symbolic, as so many incarnations of these great
verities.
We get thus what, taken simply phenomenally and without as yet any
inquiry as to an ultimate reality pressing in upon the soul,—a divine
stimulation underlying all its sincere and fruitful action,—is a spiritual
mono-ideism and auto-suggestion, of a more or less general kind. But, at
this stage, these activities and their psycho-physical concomitants and
results will, though different in kind, be no more abnormal than is the
mono-ideism and auto-suggestion of the mathematician, the tactician, and
the constructive statesman. Newton, Napoleon, and Richelieu: they were all
dominated by some great central idea, and they all for long years dwelt
upon it and worked for it within themselves, till it became alive and aflame
in their imaginations and their outward-moving wills, before, yet as the

means of, its taking external and visible shape. And, in all the cases that we
can test in detail, the psycho-physical accompaniments of all this profound
mental-volitional energy were most marked. In the cases of Newton and
Napoleon, for instance, a classification of their energizings solely according
to their neural accompaniments would force us to class these great
discoverers and organizers amongst psycho-physical eccentrics. Yet the
truth and value of their work and character has, of course, to be measured,
not by this its neural fringe and cost, but by its central spiritual truth and
fruitfulness.
2. Such mechanisms specially marked in Philosophers, Musicians, Poets,
and Mystical Religionists.
The mystical and contemplative element in the religious life, and the
group of saints amongst whom this element is predominant, no doubt give
us a still larger amount of what, again taking the matter phenomenally and
not ultimately, is once more mono-ideism and auto-suggestion, and entails a
correspondingly larger amount of psycho-physical impressionableness and
reaction utilized by the mind. But here also, from the simplest forms of the
“prayer of quiet” to absorptions of an approximately ecstatic type, we have
something which, though different in kind and value, is yet no more
abnormal than are the highest flights and absorptions of the Philosopher, the
Musician, and the Poet. And yet, in such cases as Kant and Beethoven, a
classifier of humanity according to its psycho-physical phenomena alone
would put these great discoverers and creators, without hesitation, amongst
hopeless and useless hypochondriacs. Yet here again the truth of their ideas
and the work of their lives have to be measured by quite other things than
by this their neural concomitance and cost.
3. Ecstatics possess a peculiar psycho-physical organization.
The downright ecstatics and hearers of voices and seers of visions have
all, wherever we are able to trace their temperamental and neural
constitution and history, possessed and developed a definitely peculiar
psycho-physical organization. We have traced it in Catherine and indicated
it in St. Teresa. We find it again in St. Maria Magdalena dei Pazzi and in St.
Marguerite Marie Alacocque, in modern times, and in St. Catherine of Siena
and St. Francis of Assisi in mediaeval times. For early Christian times we
are too ignorant as regards the psycho-physical organization of St. Ignatius

of Antioch, Hermas, and St. Cyprian, to be able to establish a connection
between their temperamental endowments and their hearing of voices and
seeing of visions—in the last two cases we get much that looks like more or
less of a mere conventional literary device.[39]
We are, however, in a fair position for judging, in the typical and
thoroughly original case of St. Paul. In 2 Cor. xiii, 7, 8, after speaking of the
abundant revelations accorded to him, he adds that “lest I be lifted up, a
thorn” (literally, a stake) “in the flesh was given to me, an Angel of Satan to
buffet me.” And though “I thrice besought the Lord that it might depart
from me, the Lord answered me, ‘My grace is sufficient for thee; for grace
is perfected in infirmity.’” And he was consequently determined “rather” to
“glory in his infirmities, so that the power of Christ may dwell within” him.
And in Gal. iv, 14, 15, written about the same time, he reminds his readers
how he had “preached to them through the infirmity of the flesh,”
commending them because they “did not despise nor loathe their temptation
in his flesh” (this is no doubt the correct reading), “but had received him as
an Angel of God, as Christ Jesus.”
Now the most ancient interpretation of this “thorn” or “stake” is some
kind of bodily complaint,—violent headache or earache is mentioned by
Tertullian de Pudicitia, 13, and by St. Jerome, Comm. in Gal. loc. cit.
Indeed St. Paul’s own description of his “bodily presence” as “weak,” and
his “spoken word” as “contemptible” (2 Cor. x, 10), points this way. It
seems plain that it cannot have been carnal temptations (only in the sixth
century did this interpretation become firmly established), for he could not
have gloried in these, nor could they, hidden as they would be within his
heart, have exposed him to the contempt of others. Indeed he expressly
excludes such troubles from his life, where, in advising those who were
thus oppressed to marry, he gives the preference to the single life, and
declares, “I would that all men were even as myself” (1 Cor. vii, 7).
The attacks of this trouble were evidently acutely painful: note the
metaphor of a stake driven into the live flesh and the Angel of Satan who
buffeted him. (And compare St. Teresa’s account: “An Angel of God
appeared to me to be thrusting at times a long spear into my heart and to
pierce my very entrails”; “the pain was so great that it made me moan”; “it
really seems to the soul as if an arrow were thrust through the heart or
through itself; the suffering is not one of sense, neither is the wound

physical”; and how, on another occasion, she heard Our Lord answer her:
“Serve thou Me, and meddle not with this.”)[40]
These attacks would come suddenly, even in the course of his public
ministry, rendering him, in so far, an object of derision and of loathing.
(Compare here St. Teresa’s declaration: “During the rapture, the body is
very often perfectly powerless; it continues in the position it was in when
the rapture came upon it: if sitting, sitting; if the hands were open, or if they
were shut, they will remain open or shut”; “if the body” was “standing or
kneeling, it remains so.”)[41]
Yet these attacks were evidently somehow connected, both in fact and in
his consciousness, with his Visions; and they were recurrent. The vision of
the Third Heaven and his apparently first attack seem to have been
practically coincident,—about a.d. 44. We find a second attack hanging
about him for some time, on his first preaching in Galatia, about a.d. 51 or
52 (see 1 Thess. ii, 18; 1 Cor. ii, 3). And a third attack appears to have come
in a.d. 57 or 58, when the Second Epistle to the Corinthians and that to the
Galatians were written; note the words (2 Cor. i, 9), “But” (in addition to his
share in the public persecution) “we ourselves had the sentence of death
within ourselves, in order that we might not trust in ourselves but in God
who raiseth the dead to life.” (And compare here St. Teresa: in July 1547
“for about four days I remained insensible. They must have regarded me as
dead more than once. For a day and a half the grave was open in my
monastery, waiting for my body. But it pleased Our Lord I should come to
myself.”)[42] Dr. Lightfoot gives as a parallel the epileptiform seizures of
King Alfred, which, sudden, acutely painful, at times death-like, and
protracted, tended to render the royal power despicable in the eyes of the
world.[43] Yet, except for the difference of sex and of relative privacy, St.
Teresa’s states, which I have given here, are more closely similar, in so
much as they are intimately connected with religious visions and voices.
And, amongst Old Testament figures, we can find a similar connection,
on a still larger scale, in the case of Ezekiel, the most definitely ecstatic,
though (upon the whole) the least original, of the literary Prophets. For, as
to the visionary element, we have his own records of three visions of the
glory of Jahve; of five other ecstasies, three of which are accompanied by
remarkable telepathic, second-sight activities; and of twelve symbolic

(better: representative) prophetic actions, which are now all rightly coming
to be considered as having been externally carried out by him.[44] And we
get psycho-physical states, as marked as in any other ecstatic saint. For we
hear how Jahve on one occasion says to him: “But thou, son of man, lay
thyself on thy left side” (i.e. according to Jewish orientation, towards the
North) “and I shall lay the guilt of the house of Israel” (the Northern
Kingdom) “upon thee; the number of days that thou shalt lie upon it, shalt
thou bear their guilt. But I appoint unto thee the years of their guilt, as a
(corresponding) number of days, (namely) one hundred and fifty days.…
And, when thou hast done with them, thou shalt lay thyself on thy right
side” (i.e. towards the South), “and thou shalt bear the guilt of the house of
Judah” (the Southern Kingdom); “one day for each year shall I appoint unto
thee. And behold I shall lay cords upon thee, that thou shalt be unable to
turn from one side to the other, till thou hast ended the days of thy
boundness” (iv, 4-8). Krätzschmar, no doubt rightly, finds here a case of
hemiplegia and anaesthesia, functional cataleptic paralysis lasting during
five months on the left side, and then shifting for about six weeks to the
right side. And the alalia (speechlessness), which no doubt accompanied
this state, is referred to on three other occasions: xxiv, 27; xxix, 31; xxxiii,
22. And note how Jahve’s address to Ezekiel, “son of man,” which occurs in
this book over ninety times, and but once in the whole of the rest of the Old
Testament (Dan. viii, 17), evidently stands here for the sense of his
creaturely nothingness, so characteristic of the true ecstatic.[45]
Now, at this last stage, the analogy of the other non-religious activities of
the healthy mind and of their psycho-physical conditions and effects
forsakes us; but not the principle which has guided us all along. For here, as
from the very first, some such conditions and effects are inevitable; and the
simple fact of this occurrence, apart from the question of their particular
character, is something thoroughly normal. And here again, and more than
ever, the emphasis and decision have to lie with, and to depend upon, the
mental and volitional work and the spiritual truth and reality achieved in
and for the recipient, and, through him, in and for others.
Even at the earlier stages, to cling to the form, as distinct from the
content and end, of these things was to be thoroughly unfair to this their
content and end, within the spacious economy of the spirit’s life; at this
stage such clinging becomes destructive of all true religion. For if the mere

psycho-physical forms and phenomena of ecstasy, of vision, of hearing of
voices is, in proportion to their psycho-physical intensity and seeming
automatism and quasi-physical objectivity, to be taken as necessarily a
means and mark of sanctity or of insight, or, at least, as something
presumably sent direct by God or else as diabolical, something necessarily
super- or preter-natural: then the lunatic asylums contain more miracles,
saints, and sages, or their direct, strangely similar antipodes, than all the
most fervent or perverted churches, monasteries, and families upon God’s
earth. For in asylums we find ecstasies, visions, voices, all more, not less
marked, all more, not less irresistibly objective-seeming to the recipient,
than anything to be found outside.
Yet apply impartially to both sets the test, not of form, but of content, of
spiritual fruitfulness and of many-sided applicability—and this surface-
similarity yields at once to a fundamental difference. Indeed all the great
mystics, and this in precise proportion to their greatness, have ever taught
that, the mystical capacities and habits being but means and not ends, only
such ecstasies are valuable as leave the soul, and the very body as its
instrument, strengthened and improved; and that visions and voices are to
be accepted by the mind only in proportion as they convey some spiritual
truth of importance to it or to others, and as they actually help it to become
more humble, true, and loving.
And there can be no doubt that these things worked thus with such great
ecstatic mystics as Ezekiel, the man of the great prophetic schemes and the
permanently fruitful picturing of the Good Shepherd; as St. Paul, the
greatest missionary and organizer ever given to the Christian Church; as St.
Francis of Assisi, the salt and leaven and light of the Church and of society,
in his day and more or less ever since; as St. Catherine of Siena, the free-
spoken, docile reinspirer of the Papacy; as Jeanne d’Arc, the maiden
deliverer of a Nation; as St. Teresa, reformer of a great Order. All these, and
countless others, would, quite evidently, have achieved less, not more, of
interior light and of far-reaching helpfulness of a kind readily recognized by
all specifically religious souls, had they been without the rest, the bracing,
the experience furnished to them by their ecstasies and allied states and
apprehensions.

VII. Perennial Freshness of the Great Mystics’ Main Spiritual Test,
in Contradistinction To Their Secondary, Psychological Contention.
Two Special Difficulties.

1. A false and a true test of mystical experience.
Now it is deeply interesting to note how entirely unweakened, indeed
how impressively strengthened, by the intervening severe test of whole
centuries of further experience and of thought, has remained the main and
direct, the spiritual test of the great Mystics, in contradistinction to their
secondary psychological contention with respect to such experiences. The
secondary, psychological contention is well reproduced by St. Teresa where
she says: “When I speak, I go on with my understanding arranging what I
am saying; but, if I am spoken to by others, I do nothing else but listen
without any labour.” In the former case, “the soul,” if it be in good faith,
“cannot possibly fail to see clearly that itself arranges the words and utters
them to itself. How then can the understanding have time enough to arrange
these locutions? They require time.”[46] Now this particular argument for
their supernaturalness derived from the psychological form—from the
suddenness, clearness, and apparent automatism of these locutions—has
ceased to carry weight, owing to our present, curiously recent, knowledge
concerning the subconscious region of the mind, and the occasionally
sudden irruption of that region’s contents into the field of that same mind’s
ordinary, full consciousness. In the Ven. Battista Vernazza’s case we have a
particularly clear instance of such a long accumulation,—by means of
much, in great part full, attention to certain spiritual ideas, words, and
images,—in the subconscious regions of a particularly strong and deeply
sincere and saintly mind; and the sudden irruption from those regions of
certain clear and apparently quite spontaneous words and images into the
field of her mind’s full consciousness.[47]
But the reference to the great Mystics’ chief and direct test, upon which
they dwell with an assurance and self-consistency far surpassing that which
accompanies their psychological argument,—the spiritual content and
effects of such experiences,—this, retains all its cogency. St. Teresa tells us:
“When Our Lord speaks, it is both word and work: His words are deeds.” “I
found myself, through these words alone, tranquil and strong, courageous
and confident, at rest and enlightened: I felt I could maintain against all the

world that my prayer was the work of God.” “I could not believe that Satan,
if he wished to deceive me, could have recourse to means so adverse to his
purpose as this, of rooting out my faults, and implanting virtues and
spiritual strength: for I saw clearly that I had become another person, by
means of these visions.” “So efficacious was the vision, and such was the
nature of the words spoken to me, that I could not possibly doubt that they
came from Him.” “I was in a trance; and the effects of it were such, that I
could have no doubt it came from God.” On another occasion she writes
less positively even of the great test: “She never undertook anything merely
because it came to her in prayer. For all that her Confessors told her that
these things came from God, she never so thoroughly believed them that
she could swear to it herself, though it did seem to her that they were
spiritually safe, because of the effects thereof.”[48] This doctrine is still the
last word of wisdom in these matters.
2. First special difficulty in testing ecstasies.
Yet it is only at this last stage that two special difficulties occur, the one
philosophical, the other moral. The philosophical difficulty is as follows. As
long as the earlier stages are in progress, it is not difficult to understand that
the soul may be gradually building up for herself a world of spiritual
apprehensions, and a corresponding spiritual and moral character, by a
process which, looked at merely phenomenally and separately, appears as a
simple case of mono-ideism and auto-suggestion, but which can and should
be conceived, when studied in its ultimate cause and end, as due to the
pressure and influence of God’s spirit working in and through the spirit of
man,—the Creator causing His own little human creature freely to create
for itself some copy of and approach to its own eternally subsisting,
substantial Cause and Crown. There the operation of such an underlying
Supreme Cause, and a consequent relation between the world thus
conceived and built up by the human soul and the real world of the Divine
Spirit, appears possible, because the things which the soul is thus made to
suggest to itself are ideas, and because even these ideas are clearly
recognized by the soul as only instruments and approaches to the realities
for which they stand. But here, in this last stage, we get the suggestion, not
of ideas, but of psycho-physical impressions, and these impressions are,
apparently, not taken as but distantly illustrative, but as somehow one with
the spiritual realities for which they stand. Is not, e.g., Catherine’s joy at

this stage centred precisely in the downright feeling, smelling, seeing, of
ocean waters, penetrating odours, all-enveloping light; and in the
identification of those waters, odours, lights, with God Himself, so that God
becomes at last an object of direct, passive, sensible perception? Have we
not then here at last reached pure delusion?
Not so, in proportion as the mystic is great and spiritual, and as he here
still clings to the principles common to all true religion. For, in proportion
as he is and does this, will he find and regard the mind as deeper and more
operative than sense, and God’s Spirit as penetrating and transcending both
the one and the other. And hence he will (at least implicitly) regard those
psycho-physical impressions as but sense-like and really mental; and he
will consider this mental impression and projection as indeed produced by
the presence and action of the Spirit within his mind or of the pressure of
spiritual realities upon it, but will hold that this whole mental process, with
these its spacial- and temporal-seeming embodiments, these sights and
sounds, has only a relation and analogical likeness to, and is not and cannot
be identical with, those realities of an intrinsically super-spacial, super-
temporal order.—And thus here as everywhere, although here necessarily
more than ever, we find again the conception of the Transcendent yet also
Immanent Spirit, effecting in the human spirit the ever-increasing
apprehension of Himself, accompanied in this spirit by an ever keener sense
of His incomprehensibility for all but Himself. And here again the truth, and
more especially the divine origin of these apprehensions, is tested and
guaranteed on and on by the consequent deepening of that spiritual and
ethical fruitfulness and death to self, which are the common aspirations of
every deepest moment and every sincerest movement within the universal
heart of man.
Thus, as regards the mentality of these experiences, Catherine constantly
speaks of seeing “as though with the eyes of the body.” And St. Teresa tells
us of her visions with “the eyes of the soul”; of how at first she “did not
know that it was possible to see anything otherwise than with the eyes of
the body”; of how, in reality “she never,” in her true visions and locutions,
“saw anything with her bodily eyes, nor heard anything with her bodily
ears”; and of how indeed she later on, on one occasion, “saw nothing with
the eyes of the body, nothing with the eyes of the soul,”—she “simply felt
Christ close by her,”—evidently again with the soul. Thus, too, Catherine

tells us, that “as the intellect exceeds language, so does love exceed
intellection”; and how vividly she feels that “all that can be said of God,”
compared to the great Reality, “is but tiny crumbs from the great Master’s
table.”[49]
And, as to the inadequacy of these impressions, the classical authority on
such things, St. John of the Cross, declares: “He that will rely on the letter
of the divine locutions or on the intelligible form of the vision, will of
necessity fall into delusion; for he does not yield to the Spirit in detachment
from sense.” “He who shall give attention to these motes of the Spirit alone
will, in the end, have no spirituality at all.” “All visions, revelations, and
heavenly feelings, and whatever is greater than these, are not worth the least
act of humility, bearing the fruits of that charity which neither values nor
seeks itself, which thinketh well not of self but of all others.” Indeed “virtue
does not consist in these apprehensions. Let men then cease to regard, and
labour to forget them, that they may be free.” For “spiritual supernatural
knowledge is of two kinds, one distinct and special,” which comprises
“visions, revelations, locutions, and spiritual impressions”; “the other
confused, obscure, and general,” which “has but one form, that of
contemplation which is the work of faith. The soul is to be led into this, by
directing it thereto through all the rest, beginning with the first, and
detaching it from them.”
Hence “many souls, to whom visions have never come, are incomparably
more advanced in the way of perfection than others to whom many have
been given”; and “they who are already perfect, receive these visitations of
the Spirit of God in peace; ecstasies cease, for they were only graces to
prepare them for this greater grace.” Hence, too, “one desire only doth God
allow and suffer in His Presence: that of perfectly observing His law and of
carrying the Cross of Christ. In the Ark of the Covenant there was but the
Book of the Law, the Rod of Aaron, and the Pot of Manna. Even so that
soul, which has no other aim than the perfect observance of the Law of God
and the carrying of the Cross of Christ, will be a true Ark containing the
true Manna, which is God.” And this perfected soul’s intellectual
apprehensions will, in their very mixture of light and conscious obscurity,
more and more approach and forestall the eternal condition of the beatified
soul. “One of the greatest favours, bestowed transiently on the soul in this
life, is to enable it to see so distinctly and to feel so profoundly, that it

cannot comprehend Him at all. These souls are herein, in some degree, like
the Saints in Heaven, where they who know Him most perfectly perceive
most clearly that He is infinitely incomprehensible; for those who have the
less clear vision do not perceive so distinctly as the others how greatly He
transcends their vision.”[50]
3. Second special difficulty in testing ecstasies.
The second special difficulty is this. Have not at least some of the saints
of this definitely ecstatic type shown more psycho-physical abnormality
than spiritually fruitful origination or utilization of such things, so that their
whole life seems penetrated by a fantastic spirit? And have not many others,
who, at their best, may not have been amenable to this charge, ended with
shattered nerve- and will-power, with an organism apparently incapable of
any further growth or use, even if we restrict our survey exclusively to
strength-bringing ecstasy and to a contemplative prayer of some traceable
significance?
(1) As a good instance of the apparent predominance of psycho-physical
and even spiritual strangeness, we can take the Venerable Sister Lukardis,
Cistercian Nun of Ober-Weimar, born probably in 1276. Her life is
published from a unique Latin MS. by the Bollandists (Analecta, Vol.
XVIII, pp. 305-367, Bruxelles, 1899), and presents us with a mediaevally
naïve and strangely unanalytic, yet extraordinarily vivid picture of things
actually seen by the writer. “Although,” say the most competent editors,
“we know not the name nor profession of the Author, whether he belonged
to the Friars or to the Monks,[51] it is certain that he was a contemporary of
Lukardis, that he knew her intimately, and that he learnt many details from
her fellow-nuns. And though we shall be slow to agree with him when he
ascribes all the strange things which she experienced in her soul and body
to divine influence, yet we should beware of considering him to be in bad
faith. For, though he erred perchance in ascribing to a divine operation
things which are simply the work of nature, such a vice is common amongst
those who transmit such things.”[52] I take the chief points in the order of
their narration by the Vita.
“Soon after Lukardis had, at twelve years of age, taken the Cistercian
habit, her mother died,” over twelve English miles away, at Erfurt, yet
Lukardis “saw the scene” in such detail “in the spirit,” that, when her sister

came to tell her, she, Lukardis, “anticipated her with an account of the day,
the place and hour of the death, of the clothes then being worn by their
mother, of the precise position of the bed and of the hospital, and of the
persons present at the time.”
She soon suffered from “stone” in the bladder; “quartan, tertian, and
continuous fevers,” and from fainting fits; also from contraction of the
muscles (nervi) of the hands, so that the latter were all but useless and could
not even hold the staff on which she had to lean in walking, till they had
been “tightly wrapped round in certain clothes.” Yet “she would, at times,
strike her hands so vehemently against each other, that they resounded as
though they had been wooden boards.” “When lying in bed she would
sometimes, as it were, plant her feet beneath her, hang her head down”
backwards, “and raise her abdomen and chest, making thus, as it were, a
highly curved arch of her person.” Indeed sometimes “she would for a long
while stand upon her head and shoulders, with her feet up in air, but with
her garments adhering to her limbs, as though they had been sewn on to
them.” “Often, too, by day or night, she was wont to run with a most
impetuous course;—she understood that, by this her course, she was
compensating Christ for His earthly course of thirty-three years.”[53]
“On one occasion she had a vision of Christ, in which He said to her:
‘Join thy hands to My hands, and thy feet to My feet, and thy breast to My
breast, and thus shall I be aided by thee to suffer less.’ And instantly she felt
a most keen pain of wounds,” in all three regions, “although wounds did not
as yet appear to sight.” But “as she bore the memory of the hammering of
the nails into Christ upon the Cross within her heart, so did she exercise
herself in outward deed. For she was frequently wont, with the middle
finger of one hand, impetuously to wound the other in the place appropriate
to the stigmata; then to withdraw her finger to the distance of a cubit, and
straightway again impetuously to wound herself. Those middle fingers felt
hard like metal. And about the sixth and ninth hour she would impetuously
wound herself with her finger in the breast, at the appropriate place for the
wound.”—After about two years “Christ appeared to her in the night of
Blessed Gregory, Pope” (St. Gregory VII, May 26?), “pressed her right
hand firmly in His, and declared, ‘I desire thee to suffer with Me.’ On her
consenting, a wound instantly appeared in her right hand; about ten days
later a wound in the left hand; and thus successively the five wounds were

found in her body.” “The wounds of the scourging were also found upon
her, of a finger’s length, and having a certain hard skin around them.”[54]
“At whiles she would lie like one dead throughout the day; yet her
countenance was very attractive, owing to a wondrous flushed look. And
even if a needle was pressed into her flesh, she felt no pain.”—“On one
occasion she was carried upon her couch by two sisters into the Lady
Chapel, to the very spot where her body now reposes. After having been left
there alone for about an hour, the Blessed Virgin appeared to her, with her
beloved Infant, Jesus, in her arms, and suckling Him. And Lukardis,
contrary to the law of her strength”—she had, by now, been long confined
to a reclining posture—“arose from her couch and began to stand upright.
And at this juncture one of the Sisters opened the Chapel door a little, and,
on looking in, marvelled at Lukardis being able to stand, but withdrew and
forbade the other Sisters from approaching thither, since she feared that, if
they saw her standing thus, they might declare her to be quite able, if she
but chose, to arise and stand at any time. Upon the Blessed Virgin twice
insisting upon being asked for some special favour, and Lukardis declaring,
‘I desire that thou slake my thirst with that same milk with which I now see
thee suckling thy beloved Son,’ the Blessed Virgin came up to her, and gave
her to drink of her milk.” And when later on Lukardis was fetched by the
Sisters, she was “found reclining on her couch. And for three days and
nights she took neither food nor drink, and could not see the light of day.
And as a precaution, since her death was feared, Extreme Unction was
administered to her. And, later on, the Sister who had seen her standing in
the Chapel, gradually drew the whole story from her.”[55]
“After she had lain, very weak, and, as it were, in a state of contracture,
for eleven years, it happened that, about the ninth hour of one Good Friday,
the natural bodily heat and colour forsook her; she seemed nowise to
breathe; her wounds bled more than usual; she appeared to be dead. And her
fellow-Sisters wept greatly. Yet about Vesper-time she opened her eyes and
began to move; and her companions were wondrously consoled. And then
in the Easter night, about the hour of Christ’s Resurrection, as, with the
other sick Sisters, she lay in her bed placed so as to be able to hear the
Divine Office, she felt all her limbs to be as it were suffused with a most
refreshing dew. And straightway she saw stretched down to her from
Heaven a hand, as it were of the Blessed Virgin, which stroked her wounds

and all the painful places, the ligaments and joints of her members, gently
and compassionately. After which she straightway felt how that all her
members, which before had for so long been severely contracted, and how
the knots, formed by the ligaments (nervi), were being efficaciously
resolved and equally distended, so that she considered herself freed from
her hard bondage. She arose unaided from her couch, proceeded to the near-
by entrance to the Choir, and prostrated herself there, in fervent orison, with
her arms outstretched in cross-form, for a very long hour. And then,
commanded by the Abbess to rise, she readily arose without help, stood
with pleasure, and walked whithersoever she would.” “At all times she ever
suffered more from the cold than any of her companions.”[56]
“As, during those eleven years that she lay like one paralyzed, she was
wont, on every Friday, to lie with her arms expanded as though on the
Cross, and her feet one on the top of the other; so, after the Lord had so
wonderfully raised her on that Paschal day, she, on every Friday and every
Lenten day, would stand erect with her arms outstretched, crosswise, and,
without any support, on one foot only, with the other foot planted upon its
fellow, from the hour of noon to that of Vespers.”—“Whilst she was still
uncured, and required some delicate refection which the Convent could not
afford, there came to her,” one day, “the most loving Infant, bearing in His
Hand the leg of a chicken, newly roasted, and begging her to eat it for His
sake.” She did so, and was wonderfully strengthened. Apparently late on in
her life “they procured, with much labour and diligence, all kinds of
drinkables from different and even from distant places for her. But she,
having tasted any one of them, would straightway shake her head, close her
lips, and then declare that she could not drink it up.” “However delicious in
itself, it seemed to be so much gall and wormwood when applied to her
mouth.”[57]
And if we look, not at seemingly childish fantasticalness in certain
mystical lives, but at the later state of shattered health and apparently
weakened nerve- and will-power which appears so frequently to be the
price paid for the definitely ecstatic type of religion, even where it has been
spiritually fruitful, our anxiety is readily renewed. Look at the nine,
possibly thirteen, last years of Catherine’s, or at the last period of St.
Margaret Mary’s life; note the similar cases of SS. Maria Magdalena de
Pazzi and Juliana Falconieri. And we have a figure of all but pure suffering

and passivity in St. Lidwina of Schiedam (1380-1433), over which M.
Huysmans has managed to be so thoroughly morbid.
(2) And if such lives strike us as too exceptional to be taken, with
whatever deductions, as a case in point, we can find a thoroughly fair
instance in the life of Father Isaac Hecker. Here we have a man of
extraordinary breadth, solidity, and activity of mind and character, and
whose mysticism is of the most sober and harmonious kind. Yet his close
companion and most faithful chronicler, Father Walter Elliott, tells us:
“From severe colds, acute headaches, and weakness of the digestive organs,
Father Hecker was at all times a frequent sufferer. But, towards the end of
the year 1871, his headaches became much more painful, his appetite
forsook him, and sleeplessness and excitability of the nervous system were
added to his other ailments. Remedies of every kind were tried, but without
permanent relief. By the summer of 1872 he was wholly incapacitated.”
“The physical sufferings of those last sixteen” (out of the sixty-nine) “years
of his life were never such as to impair his mental soundness … though his
organs of speech were sometimes too slow for his thoughts.” His digestion
and nervous system had been impaired by excessive abstinence in early
manhood, and by excessive work in later life, “till at last the body struck
work altogether. During the sixteen years of his illness every symptom of
bodily illness was aggravated by the least attention to community affairs or
business matters, and also by interior trials,” although he still managed, by
heroic efforts, at times directly to serve his congregation and to write some
remarkable papers. Yet this state continued, practically unbroken, up to the
end, on December 22, 1888.[58] And although the various proximate causes,
indicated by Father Elliott, had no doubt been operative here, there can, in
view of the numerous similar cases, be no question that the most
fundamental of the reasons of this general condition of health was his
strongly mystical type and habit of mind and his corresponding psycho-
physical organization.
(3) In view of those fantasticalnesses and of these exhaustions, we cannot
but ask whether these things are not a terrible price to pay for such states?
whether such states should not be disallowed by all solid morality, and
should not prompt men of sense to try and stamp them out? And, above all,
we seem placed once more, with added anxiety, before the question whether
what is liable to end in such sad general incapacitation was not, from the

first, directly productive of, and indeed simply produced by, some merely
subjective, simply psycho-physical abnormality and morbidness?
(4) Three points here call for consideration. Let us, for one thing, never
forget that physical health is not the true end of human life, but only one of
its most important means and conditions. The ideal man is not, primarily
and directly, a physical machine, perfect as such in its development and
function, to which would be tacked on, as a sort of concomitant or means,
the mental, moral, and spiritual life and character. But the ideal man is
precisely this latter life and character, with the psycho-physical organism
sustained and developed in such, and only such, a degree, direction, and
combination, as may make it the best possible substratum, stimulus,
instrument, material, and expression for and of that spiritual personality.[59]
Hence, the true question here is not whether such a type of life as we are
considering exacts a serious physical tribute or not, but whether the
specifically human effects and fruits of that life are worth that cost.
No one denies that mining, or warfare, or hospital work, both spiritual
and medical, involve grave risks to life, nor that the preparation of many
chemicals is directly and inevitably injurious to health. Yet no one thinks of
abolishing such occupations or of blaming those who follow them, and
rightly so; for instant death may and should be risked, the slow but certain
undermining of the physical health may be laudably embarked on, if only
the mind and character are not damaged, and if the end to be attained is
found to be necessary or seriously helpful, and unattainable by other means.
The simple fact, then, of frequent and subsequent, or even of universal
and concomitant ill-health in such mystical cases, or even the proof of this
ill-health being a direct consequence or necessary condition of that mystical
life, can but push back the debate, and simply raises the question as to the
serious value of that habit and activity. Only a decision adverse to that
serious value would constitute those facts into a condemnation of that
activity itself.
And, next, it must be plain to any one endowed with an appreciable dose
of the mystical sense, and with a sufficiently large knowledge of human
nature and of religious apprehension in the past and present,—that, if it is
doubtless possible quite erroneously to treat all men as having a
considerable element of mysticism in them, and hence to strain and spoil

souls belonging to one of the other types: it is equally possible to starve
those that possess this element in an operative degree. Atrophy is as truly a
malady as plethora.
And here the question is an individual one: would that particular
temperament and psycho-physical organism congenial to Sister Lukardis, to
Catherine Fiesca Adorna, to Marguerite Marie Alacocque, and to Isaac
Hecker, have—taking the whole existence and output together—produced
more useful work, and have apprehended and presented more of abiding
truth, had their ecstatic states or tendencies been, if possible, absent or
suppressed? Does not this type of apprehension, this, as it were, incubation,
harmonization, and vivifying of their otherwise painfully fragmentary and
heavy impressions, stand out,—in their central, creative periods,—as the
one thoroughly appropriate means and form of their true self-development
and self-expression, and of such an apprehension and showing forth of
spiritual truth as to them,—to them and not to you and me,—was possible?
And if we are bound to admit that, even in such cases, ecstasy appears,
psycho-physically, as a kind of second state, and that these personalities
find or regain their fullest joy and deepest strength only in and from such a
state; yet we know too that such ecstasy is not, as in the trances of hysteria
and of other functional disorders, simply discontinuous from the ordinary,
primary state of such souls; and that,—again contrary to those maladif
trances,—whenever the ecstasy answers to the tests insisted upon by the
great mystics, viz. a true and valuable ethico-spiritual content and effect, it
also, in the long run, leaves the very body strengthened and improved.
And if, after this, their productive period, some of these persons end by
losing their psycho-physical health, it is far from unreasonable to suppose
that the actual alternative to those ecstasies and this break-up, would, for
them, have been a lifelong dreary languor and melancholy self-absorption,
somewhat after the pattern of Catherine’s last ten pre-conversion years.
Thus for her, and doubtless for most of the spiritually considerable
ecstatics, life was, taken all in all, indefinitely happier, richer, and more
fruitful in religious truth and holiness, with the help of those ecstatic states,
than it would have been if these states had been absent or could have been
suppressed.
And thirdly, here again, even from the point of view of psycho-physical
health and its protection, it is precisely the actual practice and, as

interpreted by it, the deepest sayings of the standard Christian mystics
which are being most powerfully confirmed,—although necessarily by
largely new reasons and with important modifications in the analysis and
application of their doctrine,—by all that we have gained, during the last
forty years, in definite knowledge of the psycho-physical regions and
functions of human nature, and, during two centuries and more, in
enlargement and precision of our religious-historical outlook.
If we consider the specific health-dangers of this way, we shall find, I
think, that their roots are ever two. These dangers, and with them the
probability of delusion or at least of spiritual barrenness, always become
actual, and often acute, the minute that we allow ourselves to attach a
primary and independent importance to the psycho-physical form and
means of these things, as against their spiritual-ethical content, suggestions,
and end; or that we take the whole man, or at least the whole of the
religious man, to consist of the specifically mystical habits and life alone.
Now the first of these dangers has been ceaselessly exposed and fought by
all the great ethical and Christian mystics of the past, e.g. St. John of the
Cross and St. Teresa; and the latter has been ever enforced by the actual
practice, as social religionists, of these same mystics, even if and when
some of their sayings, or the logical drift of their speculative system, left
insufficient room or no intrinsic necessity and function for such things.
(5) And everything that has happened and is happening in the world of
psychological and philosophical research, in the world of historico-critical
investigation into the past history and modalities of religion, and in the
world of our own present religious experience and requirements, has but
brought to light fresh facts, forces, and connections, in proof both of the
right and irreplaceableness of the Mystical element in life and religion, and
of the reality and constant presence of these its two dangers. For, as to these
dangers, we now know, with extraordinary clearness and certainty, how
necessary, constant and far-reaching is, on its phenomenal surface, the auto-
suggestive, mono-ideistic power and mechanism of the mind; yet how
easily, in some states, too much can be made of such vivid apprehensions
and quasi-sensible imagings of invisible reality,—things admirable as
means, ruinous as ends. And we also know, with an astonishing universality
of application, how great a multiplicity in unity is necessarily presented by
every concrete object and by every mental act and emotional state of every

sane human being throughout every moment of his waking life; and how
this unity is actually constituted and measured by the multiplicity of the
materials and by the degree of their harmonization.—Hence, not the
absence of the Mystical element, but the presence both of it and of the other
constituents of religion, will turn out to be the safeguard of our deepest life
and of its sanity, a sanity which demands a balanced fulness of the soul’s
three fundamental pairs of activities: sensible perception and picturing
memory; reflection, speculative and analytic; and emotion and volition, all
issuing in interior and exterior acts, and these latter, again, providing so
much fresh material and occasions for renewed action and for a growing
unification in an increasing variety, on and on.
The metaphysical and faith questions, necessarily raised by the
phenomenal facts and mechanisms here considered, but which cannot be
answered at this level, will be discussed in a later chapter. Here we can but
once more point out, in conclusion, that no amount of admitted or
demonstrated auto-suggestion or mono-ideism in the phenomenal reaches
and mechanism of the mind decides, of itself, anything whatsoever about,
and still less against, the objective truth and spiritual value of the ultimate
causes, dominant ideas, and final results of the process; nor as to whether
and how far the whole great movement is, at bottom, occasioned and
directed by the Supreme Spirit, God, working, in and through man, towards
man’s apprehension and manifestation of Himself.[60]

CHAPTER X
THE MAIN LITERARY SOURCES OF CATHERINE’S
CONCEPTIONS

INTRODUCTORY.

1. The main literary sources of Catherine’s teaching are four.
The main literary sources of Catherine’s conceptions can be grouped
under four heads: the New Testament, Pauline and Joannine writings; the
Christian Neo-Platonist, Areopagite books; and the Franciscan, Jacopone da

Todi’s teachings. And here, as in all cases of such partial dependence, we
have to distinguish between the apparently accidental occasions (her
seemingly fortuitous acquaintance with these particular writings), and the
certainly necessary causes (the intrinsic requirements of her own mind and
soul, and its special reactions under, and transformations of, these materials
and stimulations). And during this latter process this mind’s original trend
itself undergoes, in its turn, not only much development, but even some
modification. She would no doubt owe her close knowledge of the first two
sets of writings to the Augustinian Canonesses, (her sister Limbania
amongst them,) and to their Augustinian-Pauline tradition; her acquaintance
with the third set, to her Dominican cousin; and her intimacy with the
fourth, to the Franciscans of the Hospital. Yet only her own spiritual affinity
for similar religious states and ideals, and her already at least partial
experience of them, could ever have made these writings to her what they
actually became: direct stimulations, indeed considerable elements and
often curiously vivid expressions, of her own immediate interior life.
2. Plan of the following study of these sources.
I shall, in this chapter, first try to draw out those characteristics of each
group, which were either specially accepted or transformed, neglected or
supplanted by her, and carefully to note the particular nature of these her
reactions and refashionings. And I shall end up by a short account of what
she and all four sets have got in common, and of what she has brought, as a
gift of her own, to that common stock which had given her so much. And
since her distinct and direct use of the Pauline and Joannine writings is
quite certain, whereas all her knowledge of Neo-Platonism seems to have
been mediated by pseudo-Dionysius alone, and all her Franciscanism
appears, as far as literary sources go, to take its rise from Jacopone, I shall
give four divisions to her chief literary sources, and a fifth section to the
stream common to them all.[61]

I. The Pauline Writings: the Two Sources of their Pre-Conversion
Assumptions; Catherine’s Preponderant Attitude towards each
Position.

It is well that the chronological order requires us to begin with St. Paul,
for he is probably, if not the most extensive, yet the most intense of all these

influences upon Catherine’s mind. I here take the points of his experience
and teaching which thus concern us in the probable order of their
development in the Apostle’s own consciousness,—his pre-conversion
assumptions and positions, first and the convictions gained at and after his
conversion or clarified last;[62] and under each heading I shall group
together, once for all, the chief reactions of Catherine’s religious
consciousness.
Now those Pauline pre-conversion assumptions and positions come from
two chief sources—Palestinian, Rabbinical Judaism, (for he was the
disciple of the Pharisee, Gamaliel, at Jerusalem), and a Hellenistic
religiousness closely akin to, though not derived from, Philo, (for he had
been born in the intensely Hellenistic Cilician city Tarsus, at that time a
most important seat of Greek learning in general and of the Stoic
philosophy in particular). And we shall find that Catherine appropriates
especially this, his Hellenistic element; indeed, that at times she
sympathizes rather with the still more intensely Hellenistic attitude
exemplified by Philo, than with the limitations introduced by St. Paul.
1. St. Paul’s Anthropology in general.
If we take the Pauline Anthropology first, we at once come upon a
profoundly dualistic attitude.
(1) There is, in general, “the outer” and “the inner” man, 2 Cor. iv, 16;
and the latter is not the exclusive privilege of the redeemed,—the contrast is
that between the merely natural individual and the moral personality. And
this contrast, foreign to the ancient Hebrews, is first worked out, with clear
consciousness, by Plato, who, e.g., in his Banquet, causes one of the
characters to say: “Socrates has thrown this Silenus-like form around
himself externally, as in the case of those Silenus-statues which enclose a
statuette of Apollo; but, when he is opened, how full is he found to be of
temperance within”; and who treats this contrast as typical of the dualism
inherent to all human life here on earth.[63]—This contrast exists throughout
Catherine’s teaching as regards the thing itself, although her terms are
different. She has, for reasons which will appear presently, no one constant
term for “the inner man,” but “the outer man” is continuously styled “la
umanità.”

(2) The “outer man” consists for St. Paul of the body’s earthly material,
“the flesh”; and of the animating principle of the flesh, “the psyche,” which
is inseparably connected with that flesh, and which dies for good and all at
the death of the latter; whereas the form of “the body” is capable of
resuscitation, and is then filled out by a finer material, “glory.”[64]—Here
Catherine has no precise or constant word for the “psyche”; her “umanità”
generally stands for the “psyche” plus body and flesh, all in one; and her
“anima” practically always means part or the whole of “the inner man,” and
mostly stands for “mind.” And there is no occasion for her to reflect upon
any distinction between the form and the matter of the body, since she
nowhere directly busies herself with the resurrection.
The “inner man” consists for St. Paul in the Mind, the Heart, and the
Conscience. The Mind (noûs), corresponding roughly to our theoretical and
practical Reason, has a certain tendency towards God: “The invisible things
of God are seen by the mind in the works of creation,” Rom. i, 20; and there
is “a law of the mind” which is fought by “the law of sin,” Rom. vii, 23;
and this, although there is also a “mind of the flesh,” Col. ii, 18; “a
reprobate mind,” Rom. i, 28; and a “renovation of the mind,” Rom. xii, 2.—
Catherine clings throughout most closely to the Pauline use of the term, as
far as that use is favourable: note how she perceives invisible things “colla
mente mia.”
The Heart is even more accessible to the divine influence,—at least, it is
to it that God gives “the first fruits of the Spirit” and “the Spirit of His Son,
crying Abba, Father,” Gal. iv, 6; 2 Cor. i, 22. As an organ of immediate
perception it is so parallel to the Mind, that we can hear of “eyes of the
heart”; yet it is also the seat of feeling, of will, and of moral consciousness,
Eph. i, 18; 2 Cor. ii, 4; 1 Cor. iv, 5; Rom. ii, 15. It can stand for the inner life
generally; or, like the Mind, it can become darkened and impenitent; whilst
again, over the heart God’s love is poured out, God’s peace keeps guard,
and we believe with the heart, 1 Cor. xiv, 25; Rom. i, 21; ii, 5; v, 5; Phil. iv,
7; Rom. x, 9.—All this again, as far as it is favourable, is closely followed
by Catherine; indeed the persistence with which she comes back to certain
effects wrought upon her heart by the Spirit, Christ,—effects which some of
her followers readily interpreted as so many physical miracles,—was no
doubt occasioned or stimulated by 2 Cor. iii, 3, “Be ye an epistle of Christ,

written by the Spirit of the living God … upon the fleshly tables of the
heart.”
And Conscience, “Syneidēsis”—that late Greek word introduced by St.
Paul as a technical term into the Christian vocabulary—includes our
“conscience,” but is as comprehensive as our “consciousness.”—Catherine
practically never uses the term: no doubt because, in the narrower of the
two senses which had become the ordinary one, it was too predominantly
ethical to satisfy her overwhelmingly religious preoccupations.
(3) Now, with regard to this whole dualism of the “outer” and the “inner
man,” its application to the resurrection of the body in St. Paul and in St.
Catherine shall occupy us in connection with her Eschatology; here I would
but indicate the two Pauline moods or attitudes towards the earthly body,
and Catherine’s continuous reproduction of but one of these. For his
magnificent conception of the Christian society, in which each person, by a
different specific gift and duty, co-operates towards the production of an
organic whole, a whole which in return develops and dignifies those its
constituents, is worked out by means of the image of the human earthly
body, in which each member is a necessary part and constituent of the
complete organism, which is greater than, and which gives full dignity to,
each and all these its factors (1 Cor. xii). And he thus, in his most deliberate
and systematic mood, shows very clearly how deeply he has realized the
dignity of the human body, as the instrument both for the development of
the soul itself and for the work of that soul in and upon the visible world.
But in his other mood, which remains secondary and sporadic throughout
his writings, his attitude is acutely dualistic. His one direct expression of it
occurs in 2 Cor. v, 1-4: “For we know that, if our earthly house of this tent
be dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands,
eternal in the heavens. For in this also we groan, desiring to be clothed upon
with our habitation that is from heaven. We who are in this tabernacle do
groan, being burthened.” Now this passage is undoubtedly modelled by St.
Paul upon the Book of Wisdom, ix, 15: “For the corruptible body is a load
upon the soul, and the earthly habitation presseth down the mind that
museth upon many things.” And this latter saying again is as certainly
formed upon Plato (Phaedo, 81 c): “It behoves us to think of the body as
oppressive and heavy and earthlike and visible. And hence the soul, being
of such a nature as we have seen, when possessing such a body, is both

burthened and dragged down again into the visible world.”[65] And it is this
conception of the Hellenic Athenian Plato (about 380 b.c.) which, passing
through the Hellenistic Alexandrian Jewish Wisdom-writer (80 b.c.?) and
then through the Hellenistically tinctured ex-Rabbi, Paul of Tarsus (52 a.d.),
still powerfully, indeed all but continuously, influences the mind of the
Genoese Christian Catherine, especially during the years from a.d. 1496 to
1510.
Catherine’s still more pessimistic figure of the body as a prison-house
and furnace of purification for the soul, is no doubt the resultant of
suggestions received, probably in part through intermediary literature, from
the following three passages:—(1) Plato, in his Cratylus (400 b.c.), makes
Socrates say: “Some declare that the body (sōma) is the grave (sēma) of the
soul, as she finds herself at present. The Orphite poets seem to have
invented the appellation: they held that the soul is thus paying the penalty of
sin, and that the body is an enclosure which may be likened to a prison, in
which the soul is enclosed until the penalty is paid.” (2) St. Matt. v, 25, 26,
gives Our Lord’s words: “Be thou reconciled with thine adversary whilst he
is still with thee on the way … lest the Judge hand thee over to the prison-
warder, and thou be cast into prison.… Thou shalt not go forth thence, until
thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.” And (3) St. Paul declares, 1 Cor. iii,
15: “Every man’s work shall be tested by fire. If a man’s work be burnt, he
shall suffer loss; yet he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire.” These
three passages combined will readily suggest, to a soul thirsting for
purification and possessed of an extremely sensitive psycho-physical
organization with its attendant liability to fever heats, the picture of the
body as a flame-full prison-house,—a purgatory of the soul.
2. St. Paul’s conception of “Spirit.”
A very difficult complication and varying element is introduced into St.
Paul’s Anthropology by the term into which he has poured all that is most
original, deepest, most deliberate and abiding in his teaching,—the Spirit,
“Pneuma.” For somewhat as he uses the term “Sarx,” the flesh, both in its
loose popular signification of “mankind in general”; and in a precise,
technical sense of “the matter which composes the earthly body”; so also he
has, occasionally, a loose popular use of the term “spirit,” when it figures as
but a fourth parallel to “mind,” “heart,” and “conscience”; and, usually, a

very strict and technical use of it, when it designates the Spirit, God
Himself.
(1) Now it is precisely in the latter case that his doctrine attains its fullest
depth and its greatest difficulty. For here the Spirit, the Pneuma, is, strictly
speaking, only one—the Spirit of God, God Himself, in His action either
outside or inside the human mind, Noûs. And in such passages of St. Paul,
where man seems to possess a distinct pneuma of his own, by far the greater
number only apparently contradict this doctrine. For in some, so in 1 Cor. ii,
the context is dominated by a comparison between the divine and the
human consciousness, so that, in v. 11, man’s Noûs is designated Pneuma,
and in v. 16, and Rom. xi, 34, the Lord’s Pneuma is called His Noûs. And
the “spirit of the world” contrasted here, in v. 11, with the “Spirit of God,”
is a still further deliberate laxity of expression, similar to that of Satan as
“the God of this world,” 2 Cor. iv, 4. In other passages,—so Rom. viii, 16; i,
9; viii, 10, and even in 1 Cor. v, 5 (the “spirit” of the incestuous Corinthian
which is to be saved),—we seem to have “spirit” either as the mind in so far
as the object of the Spirit’s communications, or as the mind transformed by
the Spirit’s influence. And if we can hear of a “defilement of the spirit,” 2
Cor. vii, 1, we are also told that we can forget the fact of the body being the
temple of the holy Spirit, 1 Cor. vi, 19; and that this temple’s profanation
“grieves the holy Spirit,” Eph. iv, 30. Very few, sporadic, and short passages
remain in which “the spirit of man” cannot clearly be shown to have a
deliberately derivative sense.
Catherine, in this great matter, completely follows St. Paul. For she too
has loosely-knit moods and passages, in which “spirito” appears as a natural
endowment of her own, parallel to, or identical with, the “mente.” But when
speaking strictly, and in her intense moods, she means by “spirito,” the
Spirit, Christ, Love, God, a Power which, though in its nature profoundly
distinct and different from her entire self-seeking self, can and does come to
dwell within, and to supplant, this self. Indeed her highly characteristic
saying, “my Me is God,” with her own explanations of it, expresses, if
pressed, even more than this. In these moods, the term “mente” is usually
absent, just as in St. Paul.
Now in his formally doctrinal Loci, St. Paul defines the Divine Pneuma
and the human sarx, not merely as ontologically contrary substances, but as
keenly conflicting, ethically contradictory principles. An anti-spiritual

power, lust, possesses the flesh and the whole outer man, whilst, in an
indefinitely higher degree and manner, the Spirit, which finds an echo in the
mind, the inner man, is a spontaneous, counter-working force; and these
two energies fight out the battle in man, and for his complete domination,
Rom. vi, 12-14; vii, 22, 23; viii, 4-13. And this dualistic conception is in
close affinity to all that was noblest in the Hellenistic world of St. Paul’s
own day; but is in marked contrast to the pre-exilic, specifically Jewish Old
Testament view, where we have but the contrast between the visible and
transitory, and the Invisible and Eternal; and the consciousness of the
weakness and fallibility of “flesh and blood.” And this latter is the temper
of mind that dominates the Synoptic Gospels: “The spirit indeed is willing,
but the flesh is weak”; and “Father, forgive them, for they know not what
they do,” are here the divinely serene and infinitely fruitful leading notes.—
And Catherine, on this point, is habitually on the Synoptist side: man is, for
her, far more weak and ignorant than forcibly and deliberately wicked. Yet
her detailed intensity towards the successive cloaks of self-love is still, as it
were, a shadow and echo of the fierce, and far more massive, flesh-and-
spirit struggle in St. Paul.
3. The Angry and the Loving God.
And, as against the intense wickedness of man, we find in St. Paul an
emphatic insistence—although this is directly derived from the Old
Testament and Rabbinical tradition—upon the anger and indignation of
God, Rom. ii, 8, and frequently.—Here Catherine is in explicit contrast with
him, in so far as the anger would be held to stand for an emotion not
proceeding from love and not ameliorative in its aim and operation. This
attitude sprang no doubt, in part, from the strong influence upon her of the
Dionysian teaching concerning the negative character of evil; possibly still
more from her continuous pondering of the text, “As a father hath
compassion upon his children, so hath the Lord compassion on them that
fear Him; for He knoweth our frame, He remembereth that we are dust,” Ps.
ciii, 13, 14,—where she dwells upon the fact that we are all His children
rather than upon the fact that we do not all fear Him; but certainly, most of
all, from her habitual dwelling upon the other side of St. Paul’s teaching,
that concerning the Love of God.
Now the depth and glow of Paul’s faith and love goes clearly back to his
conversion, an event which colours and influences all his feeling and

teaching for some thirty-four years, up to the end. And similarly Catherine’s
conversion-experience has been found by us to determine the sequence and
all the chief points of her Purgatorial teaching, some thirty-seven years after
that supreme event.
Already Philo had, under Platonic influence, believed in an Ideal Man, a
Heavenly Man; had identified him with the Logos, the Word or Wisdom of
God; and had held him to be in some way ethereal and luminous,—never
arriving at either a definitely personal or a simply impersonal conception of
this at one time intermediate Being, at another time this supreme attribute of
God. St. Paul, under the profound impression of the Historic Christ and the
great experience on the road to Damascus, perceives the Risen, Heavenly
Jesus as possessed of a luminous, ethereal body, a body of “glory,” Acts
xxii, 11. And this Christ is, for St. Paul, identical with “the Spirit”: “the
Lord is the Spirit,” 2 Cor. iii, 17; and “to be in Christ” and “Christ is in us”
are parallel terms to those of “to be in the Spirit” and “the Spirit is within
us” respectively. In all four cases we get Christ or the Spirit conceived as an
element, as it were an ocean of ethereal light, in which souls are plunged
and which penetrates them. In Catherine we have, at her conversion, this
same perception and conception of Spirit as an ethereal light, and of Christ
as Spirit; and up to the end she more and more appears to herself to bathe,
to be submerged in, an ocean of light, which, at the same time, fills her
within and penetrates her through and through.
But again, and specially since his conversion, St. Paul thinks of God as
loving, as Love, and this conception henceforth largely supplants the Old
Testament conception of the angry God. This loving God is chiefly
manifested through the loving Christ: indeed the love of Christ and the love
of God are the same thing. And this Christ-Love dwells within us.[66] And
Catherine, since her mind has perceived Love to be the central character of
God, and has adopted fire as love’s fullest image, cannot but hold,—God
and Love and Christ and Spirit being all one and the same thing,—that
Christ-Spirit-Fire is in her and she in It. The yellow light-image, which all
but alone typifies God’s friendliness in the Bible, is thus turned into a red
fire-image. And yet this latter in so far retains with Catherine something of
its older connotation of anger, that the Fire and Heat appear in her teaching
more as symbols of the suffering caused by the opposition of man’s at least
partial impurity to the Spirit, Christ, Love, God, and of the pain attendant

upon that Spirit’s action, even where it can still purify; whereas the Light
and Illumination mostly express the peaceful penetration of man’s spirit by
God’s Spirit, and the blissful gain accruing from such penetration.
4. The Risen Christ and the Heavenly Adam.
St. Paul dwells continuously upon the post-earthly, the Risen Christ, and
upon Him in His identity with the pre-earthly, the Heavenly Man: so that
the historical Jesus tends to become, all but for the final acts in the Supper-
room and upon the Cross, a transitory episode;—a super-earthly biography
all but supplants the earthly one, since His death and resurrection and their
immediate contexts are all but the only two events dwelt upon, and form but
the two constituents of one inseparable whole.—Here Catherine is deeply
Pauline in her striking non-occupation with the details of the earthly life
(the scene with the Woman at the Well being the single exception), and in
her continuous insistence upon Christ as the life-giving Spirit. Indeed, even
the death is strangely absent. There is but the one doubtful contrary
instance, in any case a quite early and sporadic one, of the Vision of the
Bleeding Christ. The fact is that, in her teaching, the self-donation of God in
general, in His mysterious love for each individual soul, and of Christ in
particular, in His Eucharistic presence as our daily food, take all their
special depth of tenderness from her vivid realization of the whole teaching,
temper, life, and death of Jesus Christ; and that teaching derives its
profundity of feeling only from all this latter complexus of facts and
convictions.
5. Reconciliation, Justification, Sanctification.
(1) St. Paul has two lines of thought concerning Reconciliation. In the
objective, juridical, more Judaic conception, the attention is concentrated on
the one moment of Christ’s death, and the consequences appear as though
instantaneous and automatic; in the other, the subjective, ethical, more
Hellenistic conception, the attention is spread over the whole action of the
Christ’s incarnational self-humiliation, and the consequences are realized
only if and when we strive to imitate Him,—they are a voluntary and
continuous process. Catherine’s fundamental conversion-experience and all
her later teachings attach her Reconciliation to the entire act of ceaseless
Divine “ecstasy,” self-humiliation, and redemptive immanence in Man, of
which the whole earthly life and death of Christ are the centre and

culmination; but though the human soul’s corresponding action is conceived
as continuous, once it has begun, she loves to dwell upon this whole action
as itself the gift of God and the consequence of His prevenient act.
(2) As to Justification, we have again, in St. Paul, a preponderatingly
Jewish juridical conception of adoption, in which a purely vicarious justice
and imputed righteousness seem to be taught; and an ethical conception of
immanent justice, based on his own experience and expressed by means of
Hellenistic forms, according to which “the love of God is poured out in our
hearts,” Rom. v, 5. And he often insists strenuously upon excluding every
human merit from the moment and act of justification, insisting upon its
being a “free gift” of God.—Catherine absorbs herself in the second, ethical
conception, and certainly understands this love of God as primarily God’s,
the Spirit’s, Christ’s love, as Love Itself poured out in our hearts; and she
often breaks out into angry protests against the very suggestion of any act,
or part of an act, dear to God, proceeding from her natural or separate self,
indeed, if we press her expressions, from herself at all.
(3) As to Sanctification, St. Paul has three couples of contrasted
conceptions. The first couple conceives the Spirit, either Old Testament-
wise, as manifesting and accrediting Itself in extraordinary, sudden,
sporadic, miraculous gifts and doings—e.g. in ecstatic speaking with
tongues; or,—and this is the more frequent and the decisive conception,—as
an abiding, equable penetration and spiritual reformation of its recipient.
Here the faithful “live and walk in the spirit,” are “driven by the spirit,”
“serve God in the spirit,” are “temples of the Spirit,” Gal. v, 25; Rom. viii,
14; vii, 6; 1 Cor. vi, 19: the Spirit has become the creative source of a
supernatural character-building.[67]—Here Catherine, in contrast to most of
her friends, who are wedded to the first view, is strongly attached to the
second view, perhaps the deepest of St. Paul’s conceptions.
The second couple conceives Sanctification either juridically, and moves
dramatically from act to act,—the Sacrifice on the Cross and the
Resurrection of the Son of God, the sentence of Justification and the
Adoption as sons of God; or ethically, and presupposes everywhere
continuous processes,—beginning with the reception of the Spirit, and
ending with “the Lord of the Spirit.”—Here Catherine has curiously little of
the dramatic and prominently personal conception: only in the imperfect
soul’s acutely painful moment, of standing before and seeing God

immediately after death, do we get one link in this chain, in a somewhat
modified form. For the rest, the ethical and continuous conception is present
practically throughout her teaching, but in a curious, apparently paradoxical
form, to be noticed in a minute.
And the third couple either treats Sanctification as, at each moment of its
actual presence, practically infallible and complete: “We who have died to
sin, how shall we further live in it?” “Freed from sin, ye have become the
servants of Justice”; “now we are loosed from the law of death, so as to
serve in newness of spirit”; “those who are according to the flesh, mind the
things of the flesh; but they that are according to the Spirit, mind the things
of the Spirit,” Rom. vi, 2, 18; vii, 6; viii, 5. Or it considers Sanctification as
only approximately complete, so long as man has to live here below, not
only in the Spirit, Rom. viii, 9, but also in the flesh, Gal. ii, 20. The faithful
have indeed crucified the flesh once for all, Gal. v, 24: yet they have
continually to mortify their members anew, Col. iii, 5, and by the Spirit to
destroy the works of the flesh, Rom. viii, 13. The “fear of the Lord,” “of
God,” does not cease to be a motive for the sanctified, 2 Cor. v, 11; vii, 1.
To “walk in the Spirit,” “in the light,” has to be insisted on (1 Thess. v, 4-8;
Rom. xiii, 11-14; 2 Cor. vi, 14), as long as the eternal day has not yet arisen
for us. And even in Romans, chapter vi, we find admonitions, vv. 12, 13,
19, which, if we press the other conception, are quite superfluous.[68]
And here Catherine, in her intense sympathy with each of these
contrasted conceptions, offers us a combination of both in a state of
unstable equilibrium and delicate tension. I take it that it is not her
immensely impulsive and impatient temperament, nor survivals of the Old
Testament idea as to instantaneousness being the special characteristic of
divine action, but her deep and noble sense of the givenness and pure grace
of religion, and of God’s omnipotence being, if possible, exceeded only by
His overflowing, self-communicative love, which chiefly determine her
curious presentation and emotional experience of spiritual growth and life
as a movement composed of sudden shiftings upwards, with long,
apparently complete pauses in between. For here this form (of so many
instants, of which each is complete in itself) stands for her as the least
inadequate symbol, as a kind of shattered mirror, not of time at all, but of
eternity; whilst the succession and difference between these instants
indicates a growth in the apprehending soul, which has, in reality, been

proceeding also in between these instants and not only during them. And
this remarkable scheme presents her conviction that, in principle, the work
of the all-powerful, all-loving Spirit cannot, of itself, be other than final and
complete, and yet that, as a matter of fact, it never is so, in weak, self-
deceptive, and variously resisting man, but ever turns out to require a fresh
and deeper application. And this succession of sudden jerks onwards and
upwards, after long, apparently complete pauses between them, gives to her
fundamentally ethical and continuous conception something of the look of
the forensic, dramatic series, with its separate acts,—a series which would
otherwise be all but unrepresented in her picture of the soul’s life on this
side of death and of its life (immediately after its vivid sight of God and
itself, and its act of free-election) in the Beyond.
6. Pauline Social Ethics.
As to Social Ethics, St. Paul’s worldward movement is strongly
represented in Catherine’s teaching. Her great sayings as to God being
servable not only in the married state, but in a camp of (mercenary)
soldiers; and as to her determination violently to appropriate the monk’s
cowl, should this his state be necessary to the attainment of the highest love
of God, are full of the tone of Rom. xiv, 14, 20, “nothing is common in
itself, but to him who considereth anything to be common, to him it is
common,”—“all things are clean”; and of 1 Cor. x, 26, 28, “the earth is the
Lord’s, and the fulness thereof.” And her sense of her soul’s positive
relation to nature, e.g. trees, was no doubt in part awakened by that striking
passage, Rom. viii, 19, “the expectation of the creature awaiteth the
revelation of the sons of God; for the creature was made subject to vanity
not willingly.”
On the other hand, it would be impossible confidently to identify her own
attitude concerning marriage with that of St. Paul, since, as we know, her
peculiar health and her unhappiness with Giuliano make it impossible to
speak here with any certainty of the mature woman’s deliberate judgment
concerning continence and marriage. Yet her impulsive protestation, in the
scene with the monk, against any idea of being debarred by her state from
as perfect a love of God as his,—whilst, of course, not in contradiction with
the Pauline and generally Catholic positions in the matter, seems to imply
an emotional attitude somewhat different from that of some of the Apostle’s
sayings. Indeed, in her whole general and unconscious position as to how a

woman should hold herself in religious things it is interesting to note the
absence of all influence from those Pauline sayings which, herein like Philo
(and indeed the whole ancient world) treat man alone as “the (direct) image
and glory (reflex) of God,” and the woman as but “the glory (reflex) of the
man,” 1 Cor. xi, 7. Everywhere she appears full, on the contrary, of St.
Paul’s other (more characteristic and deliberate) strain, according to which,
as there is “neither Jew nor Gentile, bond nor free” before God, so “neither
is the man without the woman, nor the woman without the man, in the
Lord,” 1 Cor. xi, 11.—And in social matters generally, Catherine’s convert
life and practice shows, in the active mortifications of its first penitential
part, in her persistent great aloofness from all things of sense as regards her
own gratification, and in the ecstasies and love of solitude which marked
the zenith of her power, a close sympathy with, and no doubt in part a direct
imitation of, St. Paul’s Arabian retirement, chastisement of his body, and
lonely concentration upon rapt communion with God. Yet she as strongly
exemplifies St. Paul’s other, the outward movement, the love-impelled,
whole-hearted service of the poorest, world-forgotten, sick and sorrowing
brethren. And the whole resultant rhythmic life has got such fine
spontaneity, emotional and efficacious fulness, and expansive joy about it,
as to suggest at once those unfading teachings of St. Paul which had so
largely occasioned it,—those hymns in praise of that love “which minds not
high things but consenteth to the humble,” Rom. xii, 16; “becomes all
things to all men,” 1 Cor. ix, 22; “weeps with those that weep and rejoices
with those that rejoice,” ibid. xii, 26; and which, as the twin love of God
and man, is not only the chief member of the central ethical triad, but,
already here below, itself becomes the subject which exercises the other two
virtues, for it is “love” that “believeth all things, hopeth all things,” even
before that eternity in which love alone will never vanish away, ibid. xiii, 7,
8. Here Catherine with Paul triumphs completely over time: their actions
and teaching are as completely fresh now, after well-nigh nineteen and four
centuries, as when they first experienced, willed, and uttered them.
7. Sacramental Teachings.
In Sacramental matters it is interesting to note St. Paul’s close correlation
of Baptism and the Holy Eucharist: “All (our fathers) were baptized into
Moses in the cloud and in the sea; and all ate the same spiritual food and all
drank the same spiritual drink,” 1 Cor. x, 3; “in one Spirit we have all been

baptized into one body, and we have all been made to drink one Spirit,”
Christ, His blood, ibid. xii, 13. And Catherine is influenced by these
passages, when she represents the soul as hungering for, and drowning itself
in, the ocean of spiritual sustenance which is Love, Christ, God: but she
attaches the similes, which are distributed by St. Paul among the two Rites,
to the Holy Eucharist alone. Baptism had been a grown man’s deliberate act
in Paul’s case,—an act immediately subsequent to, and directly expressive
of, his conversion, the culminating experience of his life; and, as a great
Church organizer, he could not but dwell with an equal insistence upon the
two chief Sacraments.
Catherine had received baptism as an unconscious infant, and the event
lay far back in that pre-conversion time, which was all but completely
ousted from her memory by the great experience of some twenty-five years
later. And in the latter experience it was (more or less from the first and
soon all but exclusively) the sense of a divine encirclement and sustenance,
of an addition of love, rather than a consciousness of the subtraction of sins
or of a divine purification, that possessed her. In her late, though profoundly
characteristic Purgatorial teaching, the soul again plunges into an ocean; but
now, since the soul is rather defiled than hungry, and wills rather to be
purified than to be fed, this plunge is indeed a kind of Baptism by
Immersion. Yet we have no more the symbol of water, for the long state and
effects to which that swift act leads, but we have, instead, fire and light,
and, in one place, once again bread and the hunger for bread. And this is no
doubt because, in these Purgatorial picturings, it is her conversion-
experience of love under the symbols of light and of fire, and her forty
years of daily hungering for the Holy Eucharist and Love Incarnate, which
furnish the emotional colours and the intellectual outlines.
8. Eschatological matters.
In Eschatological matters the main points of contact and of contrast
appear to be four; and three of the differences are occasioned by St. Paul’s
preoccupation with Christ’s Second Coming, with the Resurrection of the
body, and with the General Judgment, mostly as three events in close
temporal correlation, and likely to occur soon; whilst Catherine abstracts
entirely from all three.

(1) Thus St. Paul is naturally busy with the question as to the Time when
he shall be with Christ. In 1 Thess. iv, 15, he speaks of “we who are now
living, who have been left for the coming of the Lord,” i.e. he expects this
event during his own lifetime; whilst in Phil. i, 23, he “desires to be
dissolved and to be with Christ,” i.e. he has ceased confidently to expect
this coming before his own death. But Catherine dwells exclusively, with
this latter conception, upon the moment of death, as that when the soul shall
see, and be finally confirmed in its union with, Love, Christ, God; for into
her earthly lifetime Love, Christ, God, can and do come, but invisibly, and
she may still lose full union with them for ever.
(2) As to the Place, it is notoriously obscure whether St. Paul thinks of it,
as do the Old Testament and the Apocalypse, as the renovated earth, or as
the sky, or as the intervening space. The risen faithful who “shall be caught
in the clouds to meet Christ,” 1 Thess. iv, 16, seem clearly to be meeting
Him, in mid-air, as He descends upon earth; and “Jerusalem above,” Gal. iv,
26, may well, as in Apoc. iii, 12; xxi, 2, be conceived as destined to come
down upon earth. But Catherine, though she constantly talks of Heaven,
Purgatory, Hell as “places,” makes it plain that such “places” are for her but
vivid symbols for states of soul. God Himself repeatedly appears in her
sayings as “the soul’s place”; and it is this “place,” the soul’s true spiritual
birthplace and home, which, ever identical and bliss-conferring in itself, is
variously experienced by the soul, in exact accordance with its dispositions,
—as that profoundly painful, or that joyfully distressing, or that supremely
blissful “place” which respectively we call Hell, and Purgatory, and
Heaven.
(3) As to the Body, we have already noted St. Paul’s doctrine,
intermediate between the Palestinian and Alexandrian Jewish teaching, that
it will rise indeed, but composed henceforth of “glory” and no more of
“flesh.” It is this his requirement of a body, however spiritual, which
underlies his anxiety to be “found clothed, not naked,” at and after death, 2
Cor. v, 3. Indeed, in this whole passage, v, 1-4, “our earthly house of this
habitation,” and “a building of God not made with hands,” no doubt mean,
respectively, the present body of flesh and the future body of glory; just as
the various, highly complex, conceptions of “clothed,” “unclothed,”
“clothed upon,” refer to the different conditions of the soul with a body of
flesh, without a body at all, and with a body of glory.—Now this passage,

owing to its extreme complication and abstruseness of doctrine, has come
down to us in texts and versions of every conceivable form; and this
uncertainty has helped Catherine towards her very free utilization of it. For
she not only, as ever, simply ignores all questions of a risen body, and
transfers the concept of a luminous ethereal substance from the body to the
soul itself, and refers the “nakedness,” “unclothing,” “clothing,” and
“clothing upon” to conditions obtaining, not between the soul and the body,
but between the soul and God; but she also, in most cases, takes the
nakedness as the desirable state, since typical of the soul’s faithful self-
exposure to the all-purifying rays of God’s light and fire, and interprets the
“unclothing” as the penitential stripping from off itself of those pretences
and corrupt incrustations which prevent God’s blissful action upon it.
(4) And, finally, as to the Judgment, we have in St. Paul a double current,
—the inherited Judaistic conception of a forensic retribution; Christ, the
divine Judge, externally applying such and such statutory rewards and
punishments to such and such good and evil deeds,—so in Rom. ii, 6-10;
and the experimental conception, helped on to articulation by Hellenistic
influences, of the bodily resurrection and man’s whole final destiny as the
necessary resultant and manifestation of an internal process, the presence of
the Spirit and of the power of God,—so in the later parts of Romans, in Gal.
vi, 8, and in 1 Cor. vi, 14; 2 Cor. xiii, 4.—Among Catherine’s sayings also
we find some passages—but these the less characteristic and mostly of
doubtful authenticity,—where reward and punishment, indeed the three
“places” themselves, appear as so many separate institutions of God, which
get externally applied to certain good and evil deeds. But these are
completely overshadowed in number, sure authenticity, emotional intensity,
and organic connection with her other teachings, by sayings of the second
type, where the soul’s fate is but the necessary consequence of its own
deliberate choice and gradually formed dispositions, the result, inseparable
since the first from its self-identification with this or that of the various
possible will-attitudes towards God.
(5) We can then sum up the main points of contact and of difference
between Paul and Catherine, by saying that, in both cases, everything leads
up to, or looks back upon, a great culminating, directly personal experience
of shortest clock-time duration, whence all their doctrine, wherever
emphatic, is but an attempt to articulate and universalize this original

experience; and that if in Paul there remains more of explicit occupation
with the last great events of the earthly life of Jesus, yet in both there is the
same insistence upon the life-giving Spirit, the eternal Christ, manifesting
His inexhaustible power in the transformation of souls, on and on, here and
now, into the likeness of Himself.

II. The Joannine Writings.

On moving now from the Pauline to the Joannine writings, we shall find
that Catherine’s obligations to these latter are but rarely as deep, yet that
they cover a wider reach of ideas and images. I take this fresh source of
influence under the double heading of the general relations of the Joannine
teaching to other, previous or contemporary, conceptions; and of this same
teaching considered in itself.[69]
1. Joannine teaching contrasted with other systems.
(1) As to the general relations towards other positions, we get here,
towards Judaism and Paganism, an emphatic insistence upon the novelty
and independence of Christianity as regards not only Paganism, but even
the previous Judaism, “The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth
came by Jesus Christ,” i, 17; and upon the Logos, Christ, as “the Light that
enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world,” “unto his own,” i.e.
men in general; for this Light “was in the world, and the world was made
by Him,” i, 9-11. There is thus a divinely-implanted, innate tendency
towards this light, extant in man prior to the explicit act of faith, and
operative outside of the Christian body: “Every man who is from the truth,
heareth my voice,” xviii, 37: “he who doeth the truth, cometh to the light,”
in, 21: “begotten,” as he is, not of man but “of God,” i, 13; 1 John iii, 9.
And thus Samaritans, Greeks, and Heathens act and speak in the best
dispositions, iv, 42; xii, 20-24; x, 16; whilst such terms and sayings as “the
Saviour of the World,” “God so loved the world,” iv, 42, iii, 16, are the most
universalistic declarations to be found in the New Testament.—And this
current dominates the whole of Catherine’s temper and teaching: this
certainty as to the innate affinity of every human soul to the Light, Love,
Christ, God, gives a tone of exultation to the musings of this otherwise
melancholy woman. Whereas the Joannine passages of a contrasting
exclusiveness and even fierceness of tone, such as “all they that came

before Me, were thieves and robbers,” x, 8; “ye are from your father, the
devil,” viii, 44; “ye shall die in your sins,” viii, 21; “your sin remains,” ix,
41, are without any parallel among Catherine’s sayings. Indeed it is plain
that Catherine, whilst as sure as the Evangelist that all man’s goodness
comes from God, nowhere, except in her own case, finds man’s evil to be
diabolic in character.
(2) With regard to Paulinism, the Joannine writings give us a
continuation and extension of the representation of the soul’s mystical
union with Christ, as a local abiding in the element Christ. Indeed it is in
these writings that we find the terms “to abide in” the light, 1 John ii, 10, in
God, 1 John iv, 13, in Christ, 1 John ii, 6, 24, 27, iii, 6, 24, and in His love,
John xv, 9, 1 John iv, 16; the corresponding expressions, “God abideth in
us,” 1 John iv, 12, 16, “Christ abideth in us,” 1 John iii, 24, and “love
abideth in us,” 1 John iv, 16; the two immanences coupled together, where
the communicant “abideth in Me and I in him,” vi, 56, and where the
members of His mystical body are bidden to “abide in Me and I in you,” xv,
4; and the supreme pattern of all these interpenetrations, “I am in the Father,
and the Father is in Me,” xiv, 10.—And it is from here that Catherine
primarily gets the literary suggestions for her images of the soul plunged
into, and filled by, an ocean of Light, Love, Christ, God; and again from
here, more than from St. Paul, she gets her favourite term μένειν (It.
restare), around which are grouped, in her mind, most of the quietistic-
sounding elements of her teaching.
(3) As to the points of contact between the Joannine teaching and
Alexandrianism, we find that three are vividly renewed by Catherine.
Philo had taught: “God ceases not from acting: as to burn is the property
of fire, so to act is the property of God,” Legg. Alleg. I, 3. And in John we
find: “God is a Spirit,” and “My Father worketh ever and I work ever,” iv,
24; v, 17. And God as pure Spiritual Energy, as the Actus Purus, is a truth
and experience that penetrates the whole life of Catherine.
The work of Christ is not dwelt on in its earthly beginnings; but it is
traced up and back, in the form of a spiritual “Genesis,” to His life and
work as the Logos in Heaven, where He abides “in the bosom of the
Father,” and whence He learns what He “hath declared” to us, i, 18; just as,
in his turn, the disciple whom Jesus loved “was reclining” at the Last

Supper “on the bosom of Jesus,” and later on “beareth witness concerning
the things” which he had learnt there, xiii, 23; xxi, 24. So also Catherine
transcends the early earthly life of Christ altogether, and habitually dwells
upon Him as the Light and as Love, as God in His own Self-Manifestation;
and upon the ever-abiding sustenance afforded by this Light and Life and
Love to the faithful soul reclining and resting upon it.
And the contrast between the Spiritual and the Material, the Abiding and
the Transitory, is symbolized throughout John, in exact accord with Philo,
under the spacial categories of upper and lower, and of extension: “Ye are
from below, I am from above,” viii, 23; “He that cometh from above, is
above all,” iv, 31; and “in my Father’s house,” that upper world, “there are
many mansions,” abiding-places, xiv, 2. Hence all things divine here below
have descended from above: regeneration, iii, 3; the Spirit, i, 32; Angels, i,
51; the Son of God Himself, iii, 13: and they mount once more up above, so
especially Christ Himself, iii, 13; vi, 62. And the things of that upper world
are the true things: “the true light,” “ the true adorers,” “the true vine,” “the
true bread from Heaven,” i, ix; iv, 23; xv, 1; vi, 32: all this in contrast to the
shadowy semi-realities of the lower world.—Catherine is here in fullest
accord with the spacial imagery generally; she even talks of God Himself,
not only as in a place, but as Himself a place, as the soul’s “loco.” But she
has, for reasons explained elsewhere, generally to abandon the upper-and-
lower category when picturing the soul’s self-dedication to purification,
since, for this act, she mostly figures a downward plunge into suffering; and
she gives us a number of striking sayings, in which she explicitly re-
translates all this quantitative spacial imagery into its underlying meaning
of qualitative spiritual states.
(4) As to the Joannine approximations and antagonisms to Gnosticism,
Catherine’s position is as follows. In the Synoptic accounts, Our Lord
makes the acquisition of eternal life depend upon the keeping of the two
great commandments of the love of God and of one’s neighbour, Luke x,
26-28, and parallels. In John Our Lord says: “this is eternal life, that they
may know Thee, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent,”
xvii, 3. To “know,” γινώσκειν, occurs twenty-five times in 1 John alone.
Here the final object of every soul is to believe and to know: “they received
and knew truly and believed,” xvii, 8; “we have believed and have known,”
vi, 69; or “we have known and have believed,” 1 John iv, 16. And Catherine

also lays much stress upon faith ending, even here below, in a certain vivid
knowledge; but this knowledge is, with her, less doctrinally articulated, no
doubt in part because there was no Gnosticism fronting her, to force on such
articulation.
And the Joannine writings compare this higher mental knowledge to the
lower, sensible perception: “He who cometh from heaven, witnesseth to
what he hath seen and heard,” iii, 31; “when He shall become manifest, we
shall see Him as He is,” 1 John iii, 2. And they have three special terms, in
common with Gnosticism, for the object of such knowledge: Life, Light,
and Fulness (Plerōma),—the latter, as a technical term, appearing in the
New Testament only in John i, 16, and in the Epistles to the Colossians and
Ephesians. Catherine, also, is ever experiencing and conceiving the mental
apprehensions of faith, as so many quasi-sensible, ocular, perceptions; and
Life and Light are constantly mentioned, and Fulness is, at least, implied in
the psycho-physical concomitants or consequences of her thinkings.
On the other hand, she does not follow John in the intensely dualistic
elements of his teaching,—the sort of determinist, all but innate, distinction
between “the darkness,” “the men who loved the darkness rather than the
light,” and the Light itself and those who loved it, i, 4, 5; iii, 19,—children
of God and children of the devil—the latter all but incapable of being
saved, viii, 38-47; x, 26; xi, 52; xiv, 17. Rather is she like him in his all but
complete silence as to “the anger of God,”—a term which he uses once
only, iii, 36, as against the twenty-two instances of it in St. Paul.
And she is full to overflowing of the great central, profoundly un- and
anti-Gnostic, sensitively Christian teachings of St. John: as to the Light, the
only-begotten Son, having been given by God, because God so loved the
world; as to Jesus having loved his own even to the end; as to the object of
Christ’s manifestation of His Father’s name to men, being that God’s love
for Christ, and indeed Christ Himself, might be within them; and as to how,
if they love Him, they will keep His commandments,—His commandment
to love each other as He has loved them, iii, 21; iii, 16; xiii, 1; xvii, 26; xiv,
15; xv, 17. In this last great declaration especially do we find the very
epitome of Catherine’s life and spirit, of her who can never think of Him as
Light and Knowledge only, but ever insists on His being Fire and Love as
well; and who has but one commandment, that of Love-impelled, Love-
seeking loving.

(5) And lastly, in relation to organized, Ecclesiastical Christianity, the
Joannine writings dwell, as regards the more general principles, on points
which, where positive, are simply presupposed by Catherine; and, where
negative, find no echo within her.
The Joannine writings insist continually upon the unity and inter-
communion of the faithful: “There shall be one fold, one shepherd”;
Christ’s death was in order “that He might gather the scattered children of
God into one”; He prays to the Father that believers “may be one, as we are
one”; and He leaves as His legacy His seamless robe, x, 16; xi, 52; xvii, 21;
xix, 24. And these same writings have a painfully absolute condemnation
for all outside of this visible fold: “The whole world lies in evil”; its “Prince
is the Devil”; “the blood of Jesus cleanseth us from all sin,” within the
community alone; false prophets, those who have gone forth from the
community, are not to be prayed for, are not even to be saluted, 1 John, v,
19; John xii, 31; John i, 7; v, 16; 2 John, 10. For the great and necessary
fight with Gnosticism has already begun in these writings.
But Catherine dies before the unity of Christendom is again in jeopardy
through the Protestant Reformation, and she never dwells—this is doubtless
a limit—upon the Christian community, as such. And her enthusiastic
sympathy with the spiritual teachings of Jacopone da Todi, who, some two
centuries before, had, as one of the prophetic opposition, vehemently
attacked the intensely theocratic policy of Pope Boniface VIII, and had
suffered a long imprisonment at his hands; her tender care for the
schismatic population of the far-away Greek island of Chios; and her
intimacy with Dre. Tommaso Moro, who, later on, became for a while a
Calvinist; all indicate how free from all suspiciousness towards individual
Catholics, or of fierceness against other religious bodies and persons, was
her deeply filial attachment to the Church.
In the Synoptists Our Lord declares, as to the exorcist who worked cures
in His name, although not a follower of His, that “he that is not against us,
is for us,” and refuses to accede to His disciples’ proposal to interfere with
his activity, Mark ix, 38-41; and He points, as to the means of inheriting
eternal life, to the keeping of the two great commandments, as these are
already formulated in the Old Testament, and insists that this neighbour,
whom here we are bidden to love, is any and every man, Luke x, 25-37. The

Joannine writings insist strongly upon the strict necessity of full, explicit
adhesion: the commandment of love which Our Lord gives is here “My
commandment,” “a new commandment,” one held “from the beginning”—
in the Christian community; and the command to “love one another” is here
addressed to the brethren in their relations to their fellow-believers only,
xiii, 34; xiii, 35; xv, 12, 17. Catherine’s feeling, in this matter, is clearly
with the Synoptists.
2. Joannine teaching considered in itself.
If we next take the Joannine teachings in themselves, we shall find the
following interesting points of contact or contrast to exist between John and
Catherine.
(1) In matters of Theology proper, she is completely penetrated by the
great doctrine, more explicit in St. John even than in St. Paul, that “God is
Love,” 1 John iv, 8; and by the conceptions of God and of Christ “working
always” as Life, Light, and Love.—But whereas, in the first Epistle of John,
God Himself is “eternal life” and “light,” v, 20; i, 5; and, in the Gospel, it is
Christ Who, in the first instance, appears as Life and as Light, xi, 25; viii,
12: Catherine nowhere distinguishes at all between Christ and God. And
similarly, whereas in St. John “God doth not give” unto Christ “the Spirit by
measure”; and Christ promises to the disciples “another Paraclete,” i.e. the
Holy Spirit, iii, 34; xiv, 16; and indeed the Son and the Spirit appear,
throughout, as distinct from one another as do the Son and the Father: in
Catherine we get, practically everywhere, an exclusive concentration upon
the fact, so often implied or declared by St. Paul, of Love, Christ, being
Himself Spirit.
(2) The Joannine Soteriology has, I think, influenced Catherine as
follows. Christ’s redemptive work appears, in the more original current of
that teaching, under the symbols of the Word, Light, Bread, as the self-
revelation of God. For in proportion that this Logos-Light and Bread
enlightens and nourishes, does He drive away darkness and weakness, and,
with them, sin, and this previously to any historic acts of His earthly life.
And, in this connection, there is but little stress laid upon penance and the
forgiveness of sins as compared with the Synoptic accounts, and the term of
turning back, στρέφειν, is absent here.—But that same redemptive work
appears, in the more Pauline of the two Joannine currents, as the direct

result of so many vicarious, atoning deeds, the historic Passion and Death
of Our Lord. Here there is indeed sin, a “sin of the world,” and specially for
this sin is Christ the propitiation: “God so loved the world, as to give His
only-begotten Son”—Him “the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of
the world,” i, 29; 1 John ii, 2; John ii, 16; i, 29, 36.
Catherine, with the probably incomplete exception of her Conversion and
Penance-period, concentrates her attention, with a striking degree of
exclusiveness, upon the former group of conceptions. With her too the God-
Christ is—all but solely—conceived as Light which, in so far as it is not
hindered, operates the healing and the growth of souls. And in her great
picture of all souls inevitably hungering for the sight of the One Bread,
God, she has operated a fusion between two of the Joannine images, the
Light which is seen and the Bread which is eaten: here the bare sight (in
reality, a satiating sight) of the Bread suffices. If, for the self-manifesting
God-Christ, she has, besides the Joannine Light-image, a Fire-symbol,
which has its literary antecedents rather in the Old Testament than in the
New, this comes from the fact that she is largely occupied with the pain of
the impressions and processes undergone by already God-loving yet still
imperfectly pure souls, and that fierce fire is as appropriate a symbol for
such pain as is peaceful light for joy.
Now this painfulness is, in Catherine’s teaching, the direct result of
whatever may be incomplete and piecemeal in the soul’s state and process
of purification. And this her conception, of Perfect Love being mostly
attained only through a series of apparently sudden shifts, each seemingly
final, is no doubt in part moulded upon the practically identical Joannine
teaching as to Faith.
True, we have already seen that her conception of the nature of God’s
action upon the soul, and of the soul’s reaction under this His touch, is more
akin to the rich Synoptic idea of a disposition and determination of the
soul’s whole being, (a cordial trust at least as much as an intellectual
apprehension and clear assent), than to the Joannine view, which lays a
predominant stress upon mental apprehension and assent. And again, she
nowhere presents anything analogous to the Joannine, already scholastic,
formulations of the object of this Faith and Trust,—all of them explicitly
concerned with the nature of Christ.

But, everywhere in the Joannine writings, the living Person and Spirit
aimed at by these definitions is considered as experienced by the soul in a
succession of ever-deepening intuitions and acts of Faith. Already at the
Jordan, Andrew and Nathaniel have declared Jesus to be the Christ, the Son
of God, i, 41, 49; yet they, His disciples, are said to have believed in Him at
Cana, in consequence of His miracle there, ii, 11. Already at Capernaum
Peter asserts for the twelve, “We have believed and known that Thou art the
Holy One of God,” vi, 69; yet still, at the Last Supper, Christ exhorts them
to believe in Him, xiv, 10, 11, and predicts future events to them, in order
that, when these predictions come true, their faith may still further increase,
xiii, 19; xiv, 29. And, as far on as after the Resurrection we hear that the
Beloved Disciple “saw” (the empty tomb) “and believed,” xx, 8, 29. We
thus get in John precisely the same logically paradoxical, but
psychologically and spiritually most accurate and profound, combination of
an apparent completeness of Faith at each point of special illumination,
with a sudden re-beginning and impulsive upward shifting of the soul’s
Light and Believing, which is so characteristic of Catherine’s experience
and teaching as to the successive levels of the soul’s Fire, Light and Love.
And the opposite movement—of the fading away of the Light and the Faith
—can be traced in John, as the corresponding doctrine of the going out of
the Fire, Light and Love within the Soul can be found in Catherine.
Again, both John and Catherine are penetrated with the sense that this
Faith and Love is somehow waked up in souls by a true touch of God, a
touch to which they spontaneously respond, because they already possess a
substantial affinity to Him. “His,” the Good Shepherd’s, “sheep hear His
voice,” x, 16; they hear it, because they are already His: the Light solicits
and is accepted by the soul, because the soul itself is light-like and light-
requiring, and because it proceeds originally from this very Light which
would now reinforce the soul’s own deepest requirements. This great truth
appears also in those profound Joannine passages: “No man can come to
Me, unless the Father Who sent Me draw him”; and “I have manifested Thy
name, to those men whom Thou didst give Me from out of the world,” vi,
44; xvii, 6.
And this attractive force is also a faculty of Christ: “I shall draw all men
unto Myself,” xii, 32. And note how Catherine, ever completely identifying
God, Christ, Light, Love, and, where these work in imperfectly pure souls,

Fire, is stimulated by the last-quoted text to extend God’s, Christ’s, Love’s
drawing, attraction, to all men; to limit only, in various degrees, these
various men’s response to it; and to realize so intensely that a generous
yielding to this our ineradicable deepest attrait is our fullest joy, and the
resisting it is our one final misery, as to picture the soul, penitent for this its
mad resistance, plunging itself, now eagerly responsive to that intense
attraction, into God and a growing conformity with Him.
(3) As to points concerning the Sacraments where Catherine is influenced
by John, we find that here again Baptismal conceptions are passed over by
her. She does not allude to the water in the discourse to Nicodemus, iii, 5,
although she is full of other ideas suggested there; but she dwells upon the
water in the address to the Woman at the Well, iv, 10-15, that “living water,”
which is, for her, the spirit’s spiritual sustenance, Love, Christ, God, and
insensibly glides over into the images and experiences attaching, for her, to
the Holy Eucharist.
But, as to this the greatest of the Sacraments and the all-absorbing
devotion of her life, her symbols and concepts are all suggested by the
Fourth Gospel, in contrast to the Synoptists and St. Paul. For the Holy
Eucharist is, with her, ever detached from any direct memory of the Last
Supper, Passion, and Death, the original, historical, unique occasions which
still form its setting in the pre-Joannine writings, although those greatest
proofs of a divinely boundless self-immolation undoubtedly give to her
devotion to the Blessed Sacrament its beautiful enthusiasm and tenderness.
The Holy Eucharist ever appears with her, as with St. John, attached to the
scene of the multiplication of the breads,—a feast of joy and of life, with
Christ at the zenith of His earthly hope and power. For not “a shewing of
the death” in “the eating of this bread,” 1 Cor. xi, 26, is dwelt on by John;
but we have: “I am the Bread of Life; he that eateth this bread, shall live for
ever,” John vi, 51, 52.
And Catherine follows John in thinking predominantly of the single soul,
when dwelling upon the Holy Eucharist. For if John presents a great open-
air Love-Feast in lieu of Paul’s Upper Chamber and Supper with the twelve,
he, as over against Paul’s profoundly social standpoint, has, throughout this
his Eucharistic chapter, but three indications of the plural as against some
fourteen singulars.

And, finally, John’s change from the future tense, with its reference to a
coming historic institution, “the food which … the Son of Man will give
you,” vi, 27, to the present tense, with its declaration of an eternal fact and
relation, “I am” (now and always) “the living bread which hath come down
from heaven,” vi, 51, will have helped Catherine towards the conception of
the eternal Christ-God offering Himself as their ceaseless spiritual food to
His creatures, possessed as they are by an indestructible spiritual hunger for
Himself. For if the Eucharistic food, Bread, Body, has already been
declared by St. Paul to be “spiritual,” 2 Cor. iii, 17, in St. John also it has to
be spiritual, for it is here “the true bread from heaven” and “the bread of
life”; and Christ declares here “it is the Spirit that giveth life, the flesh
(alone) profiteth nothing,” vi, 61, 69. Hence Catherine is, again through the
Holy Eucharist and St. John, brought back to her favourite Pauline
conception of the Lord as Himself “Spirit,” “the Life-giving Spirit,” 2 Cor.
iii, 17; 1 Cor. xv, 45.
(4) And if we conclude with the Joannine Eschatology, we shall find that
Catherine has penetrated deep into the following conceptions, which
undoubtedly, even in their union, present us with a less rich outlook than
that furnished by the Synoptists, but which may be said to constitute the
central spirit of Our Lord’s teaching.
Like John, who has but two mentions of “the Kingdom of God,” iii, 3, 5,
and who elsewhere ever speaks of “Life,” Catherine has nowhere “the
Kingdom,” but everywhere “Life.” Like him she conceives the process of
Conversion as a “making alive” of the moribund, darkened, cold soul, by
the Light, Love, Christ, God, v, 21-29, when He, Who is Himself “the
Life,” xi, 25, and “the Spirit,” iv, 24, speaks to the soul “words” that are
“spirit and life,” vi, 63; for then the soul that gives ear to His words “hath
eternal life,” v, 24.
Again Catherine, for the most part, appropriates and develops that one
out of the two Joannine currents of doctrine concerning the Judgment,
which treats the latter as already determined and forestalled by Man’s
present personal attitude towards the Light. The judgment is thus simply a
discrimination, according to the original meaning of the noun κρίσις—like
when God in the beginning “discriminated the light from the darkness,”
Gen. i, 5; a discrimination substantially effected already here and now, “he
that believeth in Him, is not judged; he that believeth not, is already

judged,” iii, 18. But the other current of doctrine, so prominent in the
Synoptists, is not absent from St. John,—the teaching as to a later, external
and visible, forensic judgment. And Catherine has a similar intermixture of
two currents, yet with a strong predominance of the immanental, present
conception of the matter.
And even for that one volitional act in the beyond, which, according to
her doctrine, has a certain constitutive importance for the whole eternity of
all still partially impure souls—for that voluntary plunge—we can find an
analogue in the Joannine writings, although here there is no reference to the
after life. For throughout the greater part of his teaching—from iii, 15, 16,
apparently up to the end of the Gospel,—the possession of spiritual Life is
consequent upon the soul’s own acts of Faith, and not, as one would expect
from his other, more characteristic teaching, upon its Regeneration from
above, iii, 3. And the result of such acts of Faith is a “Metabasis,” a
“passing over from death to life,” v, 24; 1 John iii, 14. Catherine will have
conceived such an act of Faith as predominantly an act of Love, and the act
as itself already that Metabasis; and will, most characteristically, have
quickened the movement, and have altered its direction from the horizontal
to the vertical, so that the “passing, going over,” becomes a “plunge down
into” Life. For indeed the Fire she plunges into is, in her doctrine, Life
Itself; since it is Light, Love, Christ, and God.
Catherine, once more, is John’s most faithful disciple, where he declares
that Life to stream out immediately from the life-giving object of Faith into
the life-seeking subject of that Faith, from the believed God into the
believing soul: “I am the Bread of Life; he who cometh to Me, shall not
hunger”; “he who abideth in Me, and I in him, beareth much fruit”; vi, 35;
xv, 5.
And finally, she follows John closely where he insists upon Simultaneity
and Eternity as contrasted with Succession and Immortality, so as even to
abstract from the bodily resurrection. He who “hath passed over from death
to life” (already) “possesses eternal life”; “every one who liveth and
believeth in Me, shall not die for ever (at any time)”; “this,” already and of
itself, “is eternal life, to know Thee, the one true God and Jesus Christ
Whom Thou hast sent”; and the soul’s abiding in such an experience is
Christ’s own joy, transplanted into it, and a joy which is full, v, 24; xi, 26;
xvii, 3; xv, 11. And there is here such an insistence upon an unbroken

spiritual life, in spite of and right through physical death, that, to Martha’s
declaration that her brother will arise at the last day, xi, 24, Jesus answers,
“I am the Resurrection and the Life: he who believeth in Me, even if he die”
the bodily death, “shall live” on in his soul; indeed “every man who liveth”
the life of the body, “and who believeth in Me, shall not die for ever (at any
time)” in his soul, xi, 25, 26. John’s other line of thought, in which the
bodily resurrection is prominent, remains without any definite or systematic
response in Catherine’s teaching.
(5) We can then summarize the influence exercised by John upon
Catherine by saying that he encouraged her to conceive religion as an
experience of eternity; as a true, living knowledge of things spiritual;
indeed as a direct touch of man’s soul by God Himself, culminating in
man’s certainty that God is Love.

III. The Areopagite Writings.

Catherine’s close relations to the Areopagite, the Pseudo-Dionysius, are
of peculiar interest, in their manifold agreement, difference, or non-
responsiveness; and this although the ideas thus assimilated are mostly of
lesser depth and importance than those derived from the New Testament
writings just considered. They can be grouped conveniently under the
subject-matters of God’s creative, providential, and restorative, outgoing,
His action upon souls and all things extant, and of the reasons for the
different results of this action; of certain symbols used to characterize that
essential action of God upon His creatures; of the states and energizings of
the soul, in so far as it is responsive to that action; of certain terms
concerning these reactions of the soul; and of the final result of the whole
process. I shall try and get back, in most cases, to the Areopagite’s Neo-
Platonist sources, the dry, intensely scholastic Proclus, and that great soul,
the prince of the non-Christian Mystics, Plotinus.[70]
1. God’s general action.
As to God’s action, we have in Dionysius the Circle with the three stages
of its movement,—a conception so dear to Catherine. “Theologians call
Him the Esteemed and the Loved, and again Love and Loving-kindness, as
being a Power at once propulsive and leading up” and back “to Himself; a

loving movement self-moved, which pre-exists in the Good, and bubbles
forth from the Good to things existing, and which again returns to the Good
—as it were a sort of everlasting circle whirling round, because of the
Good, from the Good, in the Good, and to the Good,—ever advancing and
remaining and returning in the same and throughout the same.” This is “the
power of the divine similitude” present throughout creation, “which turns
all created things to their cause.”[71] The doctrine is derived from Proclus:
“Everything caused both abides in its cause and proceeds from it and
returns to it”; and “everything that proceeds from something returns, by a
natural instinct, to that from which it proceeds.”[72] And Plotinus had led the
way: “there” in the super-sensible world, experienced in moments of
ecstasy, “in touch and union with the One, the soul begets Beauty, Justice,
and Virtue: and that place and life is, for it, its principle and end: principle,
since it springs from thence; end, because the Good is there, and because,
once arrived there, the soul becomes what it was at first.”[73]
And Dionysius has the doctrine, so dear to Catherine, that “the Source of
Good is indeed present to all, but all are not,” by their intention, “present to
It; yet, by our aptitude for Divine union, we all,” in a sense, “are present to
It.” “It shines, on Its own part, equally upon all things capable of
participation in It.”[74] Already Plotinus had finely said: “The One is not far
away from any one, and yet is liable to be far away from one and all, since,
present though It be, It is” efficaciously “present only to such as are capable
of receiving It, and are so disposed as to adapt themselves to It and, as it
were, to seize and touch It by their likeness to It, … when, in a word, the
soul is in the state in which it was when it came from It.”[75]
We have again in Dionysius the combination, so characteristic of
Catherine, of a tender respect for the substance of human nature, as good
and ever respected by God, and of a keen sense of the pathetic weakness of
man’s sense-clogged spirit here below. “Providence, as befits its goodness,
provides for each being suitably: for to destroy nature is not a function of
Providence.” “All those who cavil at the Divine Justice, unconsciously
commit a manifest injustice. For they say that immortality ought to be in
mortals, and perfection in the imperfect … and perfect power in the weak,
and that the temporal should be eternal … in a word, they assign the
properties of one thing to another.”[76]

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

CHAPTER XI
CATHERINE’S LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES

Introductory: Catherine’s less ultimate Positions, concerning our
Life here, are Four.

We have now attempted, (by means of a doubtless more or less artificial
distinction between things that, in real life, constitute parts of one whole in
a state of hardly separable inter-penetration,) a presentation of Catherine’s
special, mental and psycho-physical, character and temperament, and of the
principal literary stimulations and materials which acted upon, and in return
were refashioned by, that character; and we have also given, in sufficient
detail, the resultant doctrines and world-view acquired and developed by
that deep soul and noble mind. The most important and difficult part of our
task remains, however, still to be accomplished,—the attempt to get an (at
least approximate) estimate of the abiding meaning, place, and worth of this
whole, highly synthesized position, for and within the religious life
generally and our present-day requirements in particular. For the general
outline of the Introduction, (intended there more as an instrument of
research and classification for the literature and history then about to be
examined, than as this history’s final religious appraisement,) cannot
dispense us from now attempting something more precise and ultimate.—I
propose, then, to give the next four chapters to an examination of
Catherine’s principal positions and practices, the first two, respectively, to
“the less ultimate This-World Doctrines”; and “the Other-World Doctrines,”
or “the Eschatology”; and the last two to “the Ultimate Implications and
Problems” underlying both. The last chapter shall then sum up the whole
book, and consider the abiding place and function of Mysticism, in its
contrast to, and supplementation of, Asceticism, Institutionalism, and the
Scientific Habit and Activity of the Mind.

Now I think the less ultimate spiritual positions, as far as they concern
our life here below, which are specially represented, or at least forcibly
suggested by, Catherine, can reasonably be accounted as four: Interpretative
Religion; a strongly Dualistic attitude towards the body; Quietude and
Passivity; and Pure Love. I shall devote a section to each position.

I. Interpretative Religion.

1. Difficulties of the Subjective element of Religion.
Now, by Interpretative Religion, I do not mean to imply that there is
anywhere, in rerum natura, such a thing as a religion which is not
interpretative, which does not consist as truly of a reaction on the part of the
believing soul to certain stimulations of and within it, as of these latter
stimulations and actions. As every (even but semi-conscious) act and state
of the human mind, ever embraces both such action of the object and such
reaction of the subject,—a relatively crude fact of sensation or of feeling
born in upon it, and an interpretation, an incorporation of this fact by, and
into, the living tissue and organism of this mind: so is it also, necessarily
and above all, with the deepest and most richly complex of all human acts
and states,—the specifically religious ones. But if this interpretative activity
of the mind was present from the very dawn of human reason, and exists in
each individual in the precise proportion as mind can be predicated as
operative within him at all: this mental activity is yet the last element in the
compound process and result which is, or can be, perceived as such by the
mind itself. The process is too near to the observer, even when he is once
awake to its existence; he is too much occupied with the materials brought
before his mind and with moulding and sorting them out; and this moulding
and sorting activity is itself too rapid and too deeply independent of those
materials as to its form, and too closely dependent upon them as to its
content, for the observation by the mind of this same mind’s contributions
towards its own affirmations of reality and of the nature of this reality, not
ever to appear late in the history of the human race or in the life of any
human individual, or not to be, even when it appears difficult, a fitful and
an imperfect mental exercise.
And when the discovery of this constant contribution of the mind to its
own affirmations of reality is first made, it can hardly fail, for the time

being, to occasion misgivings and anxieties of a more or less sceptical kind.
Is not the whole of what I have hitherto taken to be a solid world of sense
outside me, and the whole of the world of necessary truth and of obligatory
goodness within me,—is it not, perhaps, all a merely individual creation of
my single mind—a mind cut off from all effective intercourse with reality,
—my neighbour’s mind included? For all having, so far, been held to be
objective, the mind readily flies to the other extreme, and suspects all to be
subjective. Or if all my apprehensions and certainties are the resultants from
the interaction between impressions received by my senses and mind and
reactions and elaborations on the part of this mind with regard to those
impressions, how can I be sure of apprehending rightly, unless I can divide
each constituent off from the other? And yet, how can I effect such a
continuous discounting of my mind’s action by means of my own mind
itself?
And this objection is felt most keenly in religion, when the religious soul
first wakes up to the fact that itself, of necessity and continuously,
contributes, by its own action, to the constitution of those affirmations and
certainties, which, until then, seemed, without a doubt, to be directly borne
in upon a purely receptive, automatically registering mind, from that extra-,
super-human world which it thus affirmed. Here also, all having for so long
been assumed to be purely objective, the temptation now arises to consider
it all as purely subjective. Or again, if we insist upon holding that, here too,
there are both objective and subjective elements, we readily experience
keen distress at our inability clearly to divide off the objective, which is
surely the reality, from the subjective, which can hardly fail to be its
travesty.
And finally, this doubt and trouble would seem to find specially ready
material in the mystical element and form of religion. For here, as we have
already seen, psycho-physical and auto-suggestive phenomena and
mechanisms abound; here especially does the mind cling to an immediate
access to Reality; and here the ordinary checks and complements afforded
by the Historical and Institutional, the Analytically Rational, and the
Volitional, Practical elements of Religion are at a minimum. Little but the
Emotional and the Speculatively Rational elements seems to remain; and
these, more than any others, appear incapable of admitting that they are

anything other than the pure and direct effects and expressions of spiritual
Reality.
What, then, shall we think of all this?
2. Answers to the above difficulties.
We evidently must, in the first instance, guard against any attempt at
doing a doctrinaire violence to the undeniable facts of our consciousness or
of its docile analysis, by explaining all our knowledge, or only even all our
knowledge of any single thing, as either of purely subjective or of purely
objective provenance; for everywhere and always these two elements co-
exist in all human apprehension, reason, feeling, will, and faith. We find,
throughout, an organization, an indissoluble organism, of subjective and
objective, hence a unity in diversity, which is indeed so great that (for our
own experience and with respect to our own minds at all events), the
Subjective does not and cannot exist without the Objective, nor the
Objective without the Subjective.
In the next place, we must beware against exalting the Objective against
the Subjective, or the Subjective against the Objective, as if Life, Reality,
and Truth consisted in the one rather than the other. Because the subjective
element is, on the first showing, a work of our own minds, it does not
follow (as we shall see more clearly when studying the ultimate problems)
that its operations are bereft of correspondence with reality, or, at least, that
they are further from reality than are our sense-perceptions. For just as the
degree of worth represented by these sense-perceptions can range from the
crudest delusion to a stimulation of primary importance and exquisite
precision, so also our mental and emotional reaction and penetration
represent almost any and every degree of accuracy and value.
And, above all, as already implied, the true priority and superiority lies,
not with one of these constituents against the other, but with the total
subjective-objective interaction and resultant, which is superior, and indeed
gives their place and worth to, those ever interdependent parts.
Now, in the general human experience, the Objective element is
constituted, in the first instance and for clear and ready analysis, by the
sense-stimulations; and, after some mental response to and elaboration of
these, by the larger psychic moods; and later still, by the examples of great

spiritual attitudes and of great personalities offered by other souls to the
soul that keeps itself open to such impressions. And though the sense of
Reality (as contrasted with Appearance), of the Abiding and Infinite (as
different from the Passing and the Finite), are doubtless awakened, however
faintly and inarticulately, in the human soul from the first, as the
background and presupposition of the foreground and the middle-distances
of its total world of perceptions and aspirations: yet all these middle-
distances, as well as that great background and groundwork, would remain
unawakened but for those humble little sense-perceptions on the one hand,
and intercourse with human fellow-creatures on the other. And in such
intercourse with the minds and souls, or with the literary remains and other
monuments of souls, either still living here or gone hence some two
thousand years or more, a mass of mental and moral impressions and
stimulations, which, in those souls, were largely their own elaborations,
offer themselves to any one human mind, or to the minds of a whole
generation or country, with the apparent homogeneity of a purely objective,
as it were a sense-impression.
Especially in Religion the Historical and Institutional (as Religion’s
manifestation in space and time), come down to us thus from the past and
surround us in the present, and either press in upon us with a painful
weight, or support us with a comforting solidity, thus giving them many of
the qualities of things physically seen and touched, say, a mystery play or a
vast cathedral. And, on the other hand, the Rational, (whether Analytic or
Synthetic,) and the Emotional and Volitional Elements, whenever they are
at all preponderant or relatively independent of the other, more objective
ones, are liable, in Religion, to look quite exceptionally subjective,—and
this in the unfavourable sense of the word, as though either superfluous and
fantastic, or as dangerous and destructive.—And yet both that look of the
objective elements being, in Religion, more self-sufficing than they appear
to be in the ordinary psychic, or the artistic, or social, or scientific life; and
that impression conveyed by the subjective elements in Religion, as being
there less necessary or more dangerous than elsewhere, are doubtless
deceptive. These impressions are simply caused by two very certain facts.
Religion is the deepest and most inclusive of all the soul’s energizings and
experiences, and hence all its constituents reveal a difference, at least in
amount and degree, when compared with the corresponding constituents of
the more superficial and more partial activities of the soul; and Religion,

just because of this, requires the fullest action and co-operation, the most
perfect unity, in and through diversity, of all the soul’s powers, and all mere
non-use of any of these forces, even any restriction to the use of but one or
two, is here, more readily and extensively than elsewhere, detrimental both
to the non-exercised and to the exercised forces, and, above all, is
impoverishing to the soul itself and to its religion.
Hence, here as elsewhere, but more than anywhere, our ideal standard
will be the greatest possible development of, and inter-stimulation between,
each and all of the religious elements, with the greatest possible unity in the
resulting organism. And yet,—in view of the very greatness of the result
aimed at, and of the fact that its even approximate attainment can, even for
any one age of the world, be reasonably expected only from the co-
operation of the differently endowed and attracted races and nations, social
and moral grades, sexes, ages and individuals that make up mankind,—we
shall not only be very tolerant of, we shall positively encourage, largely
one-sided developments, provided that each keeps some touch with the
elements which itself knows not how to develop in abundance, and that it
considers its own self, and works out its own special gift and attrait, as but
one out of many variously gifted and apportioned fellow-servants in the
Kingdom,—as only one of the countless, mutually complementary,
individually ever imperfect, part-expressions of the manifold greatness, of
the rich unity of spiritual humanity as willed by God, and of God Himself.
3. Partial developments of the full Gospel Ideal.
Now in the New Testament we have a most instructive, at first sight
puzzling phenomenon, illustrative of the positions just taken up. For here it
is clear that, with regard to the distinction between richly many-sided but as
yet unarticulated religion, and comparatively one-sided and limited but
profoundly developed religion, we have two considerably contrasted types
of spiritual tone and teaching. We get the predominantly “Objective” strand
of life and doctrine, in the pre-Pauline parts and in their non-Pauline
echoes, i.e. in the substance of the Synoptic tradition, and in the Epistles of
St. James and of St. Peter; and we find the predominantly “Subjective”
strain in the “Pauline” parts, St. Paul’s Epistles and the Joannine Gospel and
Letters.—And it has become more and more clear that it is the pre-Pauline
parts which give us the most immediately and literally faithful, and
especially the most complete and many-sided, picture of Our Lord’s precise

words and actions; whereas the Pauline parts give us rather what some of
these great creative forces were and became for the first generations of
Christians and for the most penetrating of Christ’s early disciples and
lovers. And yet it is the latter documents which, at first sight, appear to be
the deeper, the wider, and the more profoundly spiritual; whereas the former
look more superficial, more temporal and local, and more simply popular
and material.
And yet,—though this first impression has been held to be finally true by
large masses of Christians; although the Greek Fathers predominantly, and,
in the West, the great soul of an Augustine, and the powerful but one-sided
personalities of a Luther and a Calvin have, in various degrees and ways,
helped to articulate and all but finally fix it for the general Christian
consciousness: this view is yielding, somewhat slowly but none the less
surely, to the sense that it is the Synoptic, the pre-Pauline tradition which
contains the fuller arsenal of the spiritual forces which have transfigured
and which still inspire the world of souls. This, of course, does not mean
that the Pauline-Joannine developments were not necessary, or are not
abiding elements towards the understanding of the Christian spirit.
And, to come to the true answer to our objection, such a judgment does
not mean that the reflective penetration and reapplication of the original
more spontaneous message was, from the very nature of the case, inferior to
the first less articulated announcement of the Good Tidings. But it merely
signifies that this necessary process of reflection could only be applied to
parts of the original, immensely rich and varied, because utterly living,
divinely spiritual, whole; and that, thus, the special balance and tension
which characterized the original, complete spirit and temper, could,
however profoundly, be reproduced only in part. For the time being this
later penetration and resetting of some elements from among the whole of
Our Lord’s divinely rich and simple life and teaching, necessarily and
rightly, yet none the less most really, ignored, or put for the time into some
other context, certain other sides and aspects of that primitive treasure of
inexhaustible experience. Only the full, equable, and simultaneous
unfolding of all the petals could have realized the promise and content of
the bud; whereas the bud, holding enfolded within itself such various
elements and combinations of truth, could not expand its petals otherwise
than successively, hence, at any one moment only somewhat one-sidedly

and partially. Each and all of these unfoldings bring some further insight
into, and articulation of, the original spiritual organism; and that they are
not more, but less, than the totality of that primitive experience and
revelation, does not prove that such reflective work is wrong or even simply
dispensable,—for, on the contrary, in some degree or form it was and ever
is necessary to the soul’s apprehension of that life and truth,—but simply
implies the immensity of the spiritual light and impulsion given by Our
Lord, and the relative smallness of even the greatest of His followers.
Thus only if it could be shown that those parts of the New Testament
which doubtless give us the nearest approach to the actual words and deeds
of Our Lord require us to conceive them as having been without the
reflective and emotional element; or again that, in the case of the more
derivative parts of the New Testament, it is their reflectiveness, and not
their relative incompleteness and one-sidedness, that cause them to be more
readily englobed in the former world, than that former world in the latter:
could the facts here found be used as an argument against the importance
and strict necessity for religion of the reflective and emotional, the
“Subjective” elements, alongside of the “Objective,” the Historical and
Institutional ones.
It is a most legitimate ground for consolation to a Catholic when he finds
the necessities of life and those of learned research both driving us more
and more to this conclusion; for it is not deniable that Catholicism has ever
refused to do more than include the Pauline and Joannine theologies
amongst its earliest and most normative stimulations and expressions; and
that it has ever retained, far more than Protestantism, the sense, which
(upon the whole) is most unbrokenly preserved by the Synoptists, of, if I
may so phrase it, the Christianity of certain true elements in the pre- and
extra-Christian religions. For it is in the Synoptists that we get the clear
presentation of Our Lord’s attitude towards the Jewish Church of His time,
as one, even at its keenest, analogous to that of Savonarola, and not to that
of a Luther, still less of a Calvin, towards the Christian Church of their day.
—Indeed in these documents all idea of limiting Christianity to what He
brought of new, appears as foreign to His mind as it ever has been to that of
the Catholic Church. Here we get the most spontaneous and many-sided
expression of that divinely human, widely traditional and social, all-
welcoming and all-transforming spirit, which embraces both grace and

nature, eternity and time, soul and body, attachment and detachment. The
Pauline strain stands for the stress necessary to the full spiritualization of all
those occasions and materials, as against all, mere unregenerate or static,
retention of the simple rudiments or empty names of those things; and
predominantly insists upon grace, not nature; eternity, not time; soul, not
body; the cross and death here, the Crown and Life hereafter. No wonder it
is this latter strain that gets repeated, with varying truth and success, in
times of acute transition, and by characters more antithetic than synthetic,
more great at developing a part of the truth than the whole.
Thinkers, of such wide historical outlook and unimpeachable detachment
from immediate controversial interest as Prof. Wilhelm Dilthey and Dr.
Edward Caird, have brought out, with admirable force, this greater fulness
of content offered by the Synoptists, and how the Pauline-Joannine writings
give us the first and most important of those concentrations upon, and in
part philosophic and mystical reinterpretations of, certain constituents of the
original happenings, actions and message, as apprehended and transmitted
by the first eye-witnesses and believers.[112]—Here I would but try and
drive home the apparently vague, but in reality ever pressing and concrete,
lesson afforded by the clear and dominant fact of these two groups within
the New Testament itself:—of how no mere accumulation of external
happenings, or of external testimony as to their having happened,—no
amount of history or of institutionalism, taken as sheer, purely positive
givennesses,—can anywhere be found, or can anywhere suffice for the
human mind and conscience, in the apprehension and embodiment of the
truth. For although, in Our Lord’s most literally transmitted sayings and
doings, this continuous and inalienable element of the apprehending,
organizing, vitalizing mind and heart,—on His part above all, but also on
the part of His several hearers and chroniclers,—can mostly still be traced
and must everywhere be assumed: yet it is in the Pauline-Joannine literature
that the ever important, the rightly and fruitfully “subjective,” the
speculative and emotional, the mystical and the volitional strain can best be
studied, both as to its necessity and as to its special character and dangers,
because here it is developed to the relative exclusion of the other factors of
complete religion.
4. The exclusive emotionalism of Dionysius and Jacopone.

Now if even in St. Paul and St. John there is a strong predominance of
these reflective-emotional elements, in Dionysius and Jacopone they
threaten to become exclusive of everything else. Especially is this the case
with the Pseudo-Areopagite, steeped as he is in reflection upon reflections
and in emotion upon emotions, often of the most subtle kind: a Christian
echo, with curiously slight modifications, of Neo-Platonism in its last stage,
—hence, unfortunately, of the over-systematic and largely artificial Proclus,
instead of the predominantly experimental and often truly sublime Plotinus.
And even Jacopone, although he has distinctly more of the historic element,
is still predominantly reflective-emotional, and presents us with many a
hardly modified Platonic or Stoic doctrine, derived no doubt from late
Graeco-Roman writers and their mediaeval Christian echoes.
5. Catherine’s interpretation of the Gospel Ideal.
Catherine herself, although delightfully free from the long scale of
mediations between the soul and God which forms one of the predominant
doctrines of the Areopagite, continues and emphasizes most of what is
common, and much of what is special to, all and each of these four writers;
she is a reflective saint, if ever there was one. And of her too we shall have
to say that she is great by what she possesses, and not by what she is
without: great because of her noble embodiment of the reflective and
emotional, the mystical and volitional elements of Christianity and Religion
generally. Religion is here, at first sight at least, all but entirely a thought
and an emotion; yet all this thought and emotion is directed to, and
occasioned by, an abiding Reality which originates, sustains, regulates, and
fulfils it. And although this Reality is in large part conceived, in Greek and
specially in Neo-Platonist fashion, rather under its timeless and spaceless,
or at least under its cosmic aspect, rather as Law and Substance, than as
Personality and Spirit: yet, already because of the strong influence upon her
of the noblest Platonic doctrine, it is loved as overflowing Love and
Goodness, as cause and end of all lesser love and goodness; and the real,
though but rarely articulated, acceptance and influence of History and
Institutions, above all the enthusiastic devotion to the Holy Eucharist with
all its great implications, gives to the whole a profoundly Christian tone and
temper.
True, the Church at large, indeed the single soul (if we would take such a
soul as our standard of completeness) requires a larger proportion of those

crisp, definite outlines, of those factual, historical, and institutional
elements; a very little less than what remains in Catherine of these
elements, and her religion would be a simple, even though deep religiosity,
a general aspiration, not a definite finding, an explicit religion. Yet it
remains certain, although ever readily forgotten by religious souls,
especially by theological apologists, that without some degree and kind of
those outgoing, apprehending, interpreting activities, no religion is possible.
Only the question as to what these activities should be, and what is their
true place and function within the whole religious life, remains an open one.
And this question we can study with profit in connection with such a life
and teaching as Catherine’s, which brings out, with a spontaneous, childlike
profundity and daring, the elemental religious passion, the spiritual hunger
and thirst of man when he is once fully awake; the depths within him
anticipating the heights above him; the affinity to and contact with the
Infinite implied and required by that nobly incurable restlessness of his
heart, which finds its rest in Him alone Who made it.

II. Dualistic Attitude towards the Body.

And if Catherine is profoundly reflective, that reflection is, in its general
drift, deeply dualistic,—at least in the matter of body and spirit. Their
difference and incompatibility; the spirit’s fleeing of the body; the spirit’s
getting outside of it,—by ecstasy, for a little while, even in this earthly life,
and by this earthly body’s death, for good and all; the body a prison-house,
a true purgatory to the soul: all this hangs well together, and is largely, in its
very form, of ultimately Neo-Platonist or Platonic origin.
1. New Testament valuations of the body.
Now here is one of the promised instances of a double type—if not of
doctrine, yet at least of emotional valuation in the New Testament.
(1) In the Synoptist documents, (with the but apparent, or at least solitary,
exceptions, of Jesus’ Fasting in the Desert and of His commendation of
those who have made themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven),[113]
we find no direct or acute antagonism to the body, even to the average
earthly human body, in the teaching and practice of Our Lord. The Second
Coming and its proximity do indeed, here also, dwarf all earthly concerns,

in so far as earthly.[114] This background to the teaching and its tradition
was, in course of time, in part abstracted from, in part restated.—The
entrance into life is through the narrow gate and the steep way; only if a
man turn, can he enter into the Kingdom of God; only if he lose his soul,
can he find it:[115] this great teaching and example, as to life and joy being
ever reached through death to self and by the whole-hearted turning of the
soul from its false self to its true source, God: remains, in the very form of
its promulgation as given by the Synoptists, the fundamental test and
standard of all truly spiritual life and progress. But as to the body in
particular, Jesus here knows indeed that “the flesh is weak,” and that we
must pray for strength against its weakness:[116] but He nowhere declares it
evil—an inevitable prison-house or a natural antagonist to the spirit. The
beautiful balance of an unbroken, unstrained nature, and a corresponding
doctrine as full of sober earnestness as it is free from all concentrated or
systematic dualism, are here everywhere apparent.
(2) It is St. Paul, the man of the strongest bodily passions and
temptations, he who became suddenly free from them by the all-
transforming lightning-flash of his conversion, who, on and on, remained
vividly conscious of what he had been and, but for that grace, still would
be, and of what, through that grace, he had become. The deepest shadows
are thus ever kept in closest contrast to the highest lights; and the line of
demarcation between them runs here along the division between body and
soul. “Unhappy man that I am, who can liberate me from this body of sin?”
“In my flesh dwelleth no good thing”:[117] are sayings which are both
keener in their tone and more limited in their range than are Our Lord’s.
And we have seen how, in one of his most depressed moods, he transiently
adopts and carries on a specifically Platonist attitude towards the body’s
relation to the soul, as he finds it in that beautiful, profoundly Hellenistic
treatise, the Book of Wisdom.[118] This attitude evidently represents, in his
strenuous and deeply Christian character, only a passing feeling; for, if we
pressed it home, we could hardly reconcile it with his doctrine as to the
reality and nature of the body’s resurrection. It is indeed clear how the
Platonist, and especially the Neo-Platonist, mode of conceiving that relation
excludes any and every kind of body from the soul’s final stage of
purification and happiness; and how the Synoptic, and indeed the generally

Christian conception of it, necessarily eliminates that keen and abiding
dualism characteristic of the late Greek attitude.
2. Platonic, Synoptic, and Pauline elements in Catherine’s view.
Now in Catherine we generally find an interesting combination of the
Platonic form with the Synoptic substance and spirit: and this can, of
course, be achieved only because that abiding form itself is made to signify
a changed set and connection of ideas.
(1) We have seen how she dwells much, Plotinus-like, upon the soul’s
stripping itself of all its numerous garments, and exposing itself naked to
the rays of God’s healing light. Yet in the original Platonic scheme these
garments are put on by the soul in its descent from spirit into matter, and are
stripped off again in its ascent back out of matter into spirit; in both cases,
they stand for the body and its effects. In Catherine, even more than in
Plotinus, the garments stand for various evil self-attachments and self-
delusions of the soul; and against these evils and dangers the Synoptists
furnish endless warnings. And yet she insists upon purity, clear separation,
complete abstraction of the soul, in such terms as still to show plainly
enough the originally Neo-Platonist provenance of much of her form; for in
the Neo-Platonists we get, even more markedly than here, a like insistence
upon the natural dissimilarity of the body and the soul, and a cognate
longing to get away from it in ecstasy and death. But whilst in the Neo-
Platonists there is, at the bottom of all this, a predominant belief that the
senses are the primary source and occasion of all sin, so that sin is
essentially the contamination of spirit by matter: in Catherine, (although she
shares to the full Plotinus’s thirst for ecstasy, as the escape from division
and trouble into unity and peace), impurity stands primarily for self-
complacency,—belief in, and love of, our imaginary independence of even
God Himself; and purity means, in the first instance, the loving Him and
His whole system of souls and of life, and one’s own self only in and as part
of that system.
It is very instructive to note, in this connection, how, after her four years
of directly penitential and ascetical practice, (an activity which, even then,
extended quite as much to matters of decentralization of the self as of
bodily mortification), her warfare is, in the first instance, all but exclusively
directed against the successive refuges and ambushes of self-complacency

and self-centredness. Thus there is significance in the secondary place
occupied, (even in the Vita, and doubtless still more in her own mind), by
the question of continence; indeed her great declaration to the Friar
indicates plainly her profound concentration upon the continuous practice
of, and growth in, Love Divine, and her comparative indifference to the
question of the systematic renunciation of anything but sin and selfish
attachments and self-centrednesses of any kind. Her conception of sinners
as “cold,” even more than as dark or stained; of God as Fire, even more
than as Light; and of purity as indefinitely increasable, since Love can grow
on and on: all similarly point to this finely positive, flame-, not snow-
conception, in which purity has ceased to be primarily, as with the Greeks, a
simple absence of soiledness, even if it be moral soiledness, and has
become, as with the Synoptic teaching, something primarily positive, love
itself.
In her occasionally intense insistence upon herself as being all evil, a
very Devil, and in some of her picturings of her interior combat, we get, on
the other hand, echoes, not of Plato, nor again of the Synoptist teaching, but
of St. Paul’s “in my flesh there dwelleth no good thing,” and of his combat
between flesh and spirit.—Yet the evil which she is thus conscious of, is not
sensual nor even sensible evil and temptation, but consists in her
unbounded natural claimfulness and intense inclination to sensitive self-
absorption.—And this gives, indeed, to these feminine echoes of St. Paul a
certain thin shrillness which the original tones have not got, standing there
for the massive experiences of a man violently solicitated by both sense and
spirit. But it leaves her free to note, as regards the flesh, the whole bodily
organism, (and this in beautiful sympathy with Our Lord’s own genially
fervent, homely heroic spirit), not its wickedness, but its weakness, its
short-livedness, and its appeal for merciful allowance to God, “Who knows
that we are dust.” Instead of a direct and pointed dualism of two distinct
substances informed by all but incurably antagonistic principles, we thus
get a direct conflict between two dispositions of the soul, and a but
imperfect correspondence between the body and that soul.
(2) There is, indeed, no doubt that the very ancient association of the
ideas of Fire and of spiritual Purification goes back, in the first instance, to
the conception of the soul being necessarily stained by the very fact of its
connection with the body, and of those stains being finally removed by the

body’s death and cremation. We find this severely self-consistent view
scattered up and down Hellenic religion and literature.[119] And even in
Catherine the fire, a sense of fever-heat, still seizes the body, and this body
wastes away, and leaves the soul more and more pure, during those last
years of illness.—Yet the striking identity, between that old cluster of ideas
and her own forms of thought, brings out, all the more clearly, the immense
road traversed by spirituality between the substance of those ideas and the
essence of this thought. For in her teaching, which is but symbolized or at
most occasioned by those physico-psychical fever-heats, the Fire is, at
bottom, so spiritual and so directly busy with the soul alone, that it is ever
identical with itself in Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and on earth, and stands for
God Himself; and that its effects are not the destruction of a foreign
substance, but the bringing back, wherever and as far as possible, of the
fire-like soul’s disposition and quality to full harmony with its Fire-source
and Parent, God Himself.
(3) Only the Prison-house simile for the body, as essentially an earthly
purgatory for the soul, must be admitted, I think, to remain a primarily
Platonic, not fully Christianizable conception; just as the absence of all
reference by her to the resurrection of the body will have been, in part,
occasioned by the strong element of Platonism in her general selection and
combination of ideas. Yet it would obviously be unfair to press these two
points too much, since, as to the resurrection, her long illness and evidently
constant physical discomfort must, even of themselves, have disinclined her
to all picturing of an abiding, even though highly spiritualized, bodily
organization; and as to the likeness of her body to a prison and purgatory of
the soul, we are expressly told that it began only with the specially suffering
last part of her life.
3. Dualism pragmatic, not final. Its limits.
Now, for this whole matter of the right conception as to the relations of
body and soul, it is clear that any more than partial and increasingly
superable antagonism between body and spirit cannot be accepted.
(1) A final Dualism is unsound in Psychology, since all the first materials,
stimulations, and instruments for even our most abstract thinking are
supplied to us by our sense-perceptions, hence also through the body. It is
narrow in Cosmology, for we do not want to isolate man in this great

universe of visible things; and his link with animal- and plant-life, and even
with the mineral creation, is, increasingly as we descend in the scale of
beings, his body. It is ruinous for Ethics, because purity, in such a physical-
spiritual being as is man, consists precisely in spiritual standards and laws
extending to and transforming his merely physical inclinations. It is directly
contradictory of the central truth and temper of Christianity, since these
require a full acceptance of the substantial goodness and the thorough
sanctifiableness of man’s body; of God’s condescension to man’s whole
physico-spiritual organism; and of the persistence or reanimation of all that
is essential to man’s true personality across and after death. And it is, at
bottom, profoundly un-Catholic; the whole Sacramental system, the entire
deep and noble conception of the normal relations between the Invisible and
the Visible being throughout of the Incarnational type,—an action of the
one in the other, which develops the agent and subject at the same time that
it spiritualizes the patient, the object, is in direct conflict with it. Neo-
Platonism came more and more to treat the body and the entire visible
creation as an intrinsic obstacle to spirit, to be eliminated by the latter as
completely as possible; at least this very prominent strain within it was
undoubtedly pushed on to this extreme by the Gnostic sects. But
Christianity has ever to come back to its central presupposition—the
substantial goodness and spiritual utility and transfigurableness of body and
matter; and to its final end,—the actual transformation of them by the spirit
into ever more adequate instruments, materials, and expressions of abiding
ethical and religious values and realities.
(2) The fact is that here, as practically at every chief turning-point in
ethical and religious philosophy, the movement of the specifically Christian
life and conviction is not a circle round a single centre,—detachment; but
an ellipse round two centres,—detachment and attachment. And precisely in
this difficult, but immensely fruitful, oscillation and rhythm between, as it
were, the two poles of the spiritual life; in this fleeing and seeking, in the
recollection back and away from the visible (so as to allay the dust and
fever of growing distraction, and to reharmonize the soul and its new gains
according to the intrinsic requirements and ideals of the spirit), and in the
subsequent, renewed immersion in the visible, (in view both of gaining
fresh concrete stimulation and content for the spiritual life, and of gradually
shaping and permeating the visible according to and with spiritual ends and

forces): in this combination, and not in either of these two movements taken
alone, consists the completeness and culmination of Christianity.[120]
(3) It no doubt looks, at first sight, as though the Church, by her
canonization of the Monastic Ideal, gave us, for the ultimate pattern and
measure of all Christian perfection, as pure and simple a flight of the soul
from the body and the world, as (short of insanity or suicide) can be made
in this life. But here we have to remember three things.
In the first place, the Church not only forbids all attacks upon the
legitimacy, indeed sanctity of marriage, or upon its necessity, indeed duty,
for mankind at large; but St. Augustine and St. Thomas only articulate her
ordinary, strenuously anti-Manichean teaching, in declaring that man was
originally created by God, in body and in soul, not for celibacy but for
marriage; and that only owing to the accidental event of the Fall and of its
effects,—the introduction of disorder and excess into human nature, but not
any corruption of its substance and foundations,—does any inferiority,—the
dispositions, motives, and circumstances being equal,—attach to marriage
as compared with virginity.[121] Hence, still, the absolute ideal would be that
man could and did use marriage as all other legitimate functions and things
of sense, as a necessary, and ever more and more perfected, means and
expression of truly human spirituality, a spirituality which ever requires
some non-spiritual material in which to work, and by working in which the
soul itself, not only spiritualizes it, but increasingly develops its own self.
And secondly, detachment, unification, spiritual recollection is the more
difficult, and the less obviously necessary, of the two movements, and yet is
precisely the one which (by coming upon the extant or inchoate
attachments, and by suppressing or purifying them according as they are
bad or good) first stamps any and every life as definitely religious at all. No
wonder, then, that it is this sacred detachment and love of the Cross that we
notice, first of all, in the life and doctrine of Our Lord and of all His
followers, indeed in all truly religious souls throughout the world; and that
the Church should, by her teaching and selection of striking examples, ever
preach and uphold this most necessary test and ingredient, this very salt of
all virile and fruitful spirituality.
But, in the third place, a man need only directly attack the family, society,
the state; or art, literature, science,—as intrinsically evil or even as, in

practice, true hindrances to moral and religious perfection,—and the
Church,—both the learning and experimenting, and the official and
formulating Church,—will at once disavow him: so strong is, at bottom, the
instinct that attachment and variety of interests,—variety both in kind and
in degree—that materials, occasions, and objects for spirituality to leaven
and to raise, and to work on in order to be itself deepened and developed,—
are as truly essential to the spiritual life as are detachment, and unity, and
transcendence of ultimate motive and aim; these latter furnishing to the soul
the power gradually to penetrate all that material, and, in and through this
labour, more and more to articulate its own spiritual character.
(4) No man can become, or is proclaimed to have become, a Christian
saint, who has not thus achieved a profound spiritualization and unification
of a more or less recalcitrant material and multiplicity. In some cases, it is
the unity and detachment that greatly predominate over the multiplicity and
attachment,—as, say, in the Fathers of the Desert. In other cases, it is the
variety and attachment that strikes us first of all,—as, for instance, in Sir
Thomas More and Edmund Campion. And, in a third set of cases, it is the
depth of the unity and detachment, in the breath of the variety and
attachment, which is the dominant characteristic, so with St. Paul and St.
Augustine. Catherine herself belongs, for her great middle period, rather to
the third group than to either of the other two; only during her penitential
period and her last long illness does she clearly belong to the group of
intensely detached and unified saints.—It is evidently impossible in such a
matter to do more than insist upon the necessity of both movements; upon
the immensely fruitful friction and tension which their well-ordered
alternation introduces into the soul’s inner life; and upon the full ideal and
ultimate measure for the complete and perfected man, humanity at large,
being a maximum of multiplicity and attachment permeated and purified by
a maximum of unity and detachment. The life which can englobe and
organize both these movements, with their manifold interaction, will have a
multitude of warm attachments, without fever or distraction, and a great
unity of pure detachment, without coldness or emptiness: it will have the,
winning because rich, simplicity and wondrous combination of apparent
inevitableness and of seeming paradox furnished by all true life, hence
exhibited in its greatest fulness by the religious life which, at its deepest, is
deeper any other kind of life.

III. Quietude and Passivity. Points in this tendency to be considered
here.

We have inevitably somewhat anticipated another matter, in which
Catherine shows all the true Mystic’s affinities: the craving for
simplification and permanence of the soul’s states,—her practice and
teaching as to Quietude and Passivity. Pushed fully home, this tendency
involves four closely related, increasingly profound, convictions and
experiences. Utter unification of the soul’s functions, indeed utter unity of
its substance: i.e. the soul does one single thing, and seems to do it by one
single act; itself is simply one, and expresses itself by one sole act. Passivity
of the soul: i.e. the soul does not apparently act at all, it simply is and
receives—it is now nothing but one pure immense recipiency. Immediacy
of contact between the soul and God: i.e. there seems to be nothing
separating, or indeed in any way between, the soul and God. And, finally,
an apparent coalescence of the soul and God: i.e. the soul is God, and God
is the soul.—Only the first two points, and then the closely related question
of Pure Love, shall occupy us here; the last two points must stand over for
our penultimate chapter.
1. Distinction between experiences, their expression, and their analysis.
We have already studied the psycho-physical occasions, concomitants,
and embodiments of Catherine’s keen desire for, and profound experience
of, spiritual unification and passivity; and we can have no kind of doubt as
to the factual reality and the practical fruitfulness of the state so vividly
described by her. Here we have only to inquire into the accuracy of the
analysis and terminology effected and employed by her, in so far as they
seem to claim more than simply to describe the soul’s own feeling and
impression as to these states thus experienced by itself. We have then to
consider the nature and truth of what can roughly be styled Quietism and
Passivity.
Now here especially will it be necessary for us carefully to distinguish
between the direct experiences, impressions, and instinctive requirements of
the soul,—here all souls, in precise proportion to their depth and delicacy of
holiness and of self-knowledge are our masters, and furnish us with our
only materials and tests; and, on the other hand, the implications and
analysis of these states, as, in the first instance, psychological, and then as

requiring elucidation with regard to their ontological cause and reality by
means of a religious philosophy,—here, psychology, and religious
philosophy, especially also the discriminations and decisions of theologians
and Church authorities as expressive of these ultimate questions, will be our
guides.[122]
(1) If we start from the history of the nomenclature which, (though
present only partially in Catherine’s sayings, for she nowhere uses the term
“passivity”), runs, with however varying a completeness, right through the
Christian Mystics more or less from the first, we shall find that it consists,
roughly, of three stages, and, throughout, of two currents. There is the Pre-
Pauline and Pre-Philonian stage; the stage of Paul, Philo, and John, through
Clement and Origen, on to Gregory of Nyssa and St. Augustine; and the
stage from the Pseudo-Dionysius onward, down to Nicolas of Coes
inclusive, and which, to this hour, still largely influences us all.—And there
are the two currents. The one tends so to emphasize the sense and reality of
the soul’s simple receptivity, and of what the soul receives at such,
apparently, purely receptive times, as to ignore, or even practically deny, the
undeniable fact that this very receptivity is, inevitably, an act of its own. Its
decisive terms are Passivity, Fixedness, Oneness. The other current realizes
that Grace does not destroy, violate, or supplant Nature, either entirely or in
part, but that it awakens, purifies, and completes it, so that every divine
influx is also ever a stimulation of all the good and true energy already,
even though latently, present in the soul. And its characteristic terms are
“Action” (as distinguished from “Activity”), Growth, Harmony.
(2) And we should note with care that these two currents are not simply
Heathen and Christian respectively. For if that great, indeed all but central,
term and conception of “Action” has been wisely generalized by most
Christian Mystics, as the truly Christian substitute for the strongly Neo-
Platonist term “Passivity”: that term and conception of “Action” was first
fixed and elucidated by Aristotle, who, as Mr. Schiller well puts it, “has
packed into his technical term ‘Energeia,’ and especially into the
combination ‘Unmoving Energy,’ all that was most distinctive, most
original, most fundamental, and most profound in his philosophy”;[123]
whilst the second term, “Passivity,” goes on figuring in Christian Mystics
and Mystical Theologies—(in spite of its demonstrably dangerous
suggestions and frequently scandalous history)—because the religious,

especially the Christian, consciousness requires a term for the expression of
one element of all its deepest experiences, that character of “giveness” and
of grace, of merciful anticipation by God, which marks all such states, in
exact proportion to their depth and to the soul’s awakeness.
(3) Now Aristotle’s conception of God’s Unmoving Energy, is taken over
by St. Thomas in the form of God being One Actus Purus,—sheer Energy,
His very peace and stillness coming from the brimming fulness of His
infinite life. And even finite spirit, whilst fully retaining, indeed deepening,
its own character, can and does penetrate finite spirit through and through,
—the law of Physics, which does not admit more than one body in any one
place, having here no kind of application,—so that the Infinite Spirit is at
once conceived unspiritually, if He is conceived as supplanting, and not as
penetrating, stimulating, and transforming the finite spirits whom He made
into an increasing likeness to Him, their Maker. And hence according to the
unanimous teaching of the most experienced and explicit of the specifically
Theistic and Christian Mystics, the appearance, the soul’s own impression,
of a cessation of life and energy of the soul in periods of special union with
God or of great advance in spirituality, is an appearance only. Indeed this, at
such times strong, impression of rest springs most certainly from an
unusually large amount of actualized energy, an energy which is now
penetrating, and finding expression by, every pore and fibre of the soul. The
whole moral and spiritual creature expands and rests, yes; but this very rest
is produced by Action “unperceived because so fleet,” so near, so all
fulfilling; or rather by a tissue of single acts, mental, emotional, volitional,
so finely interwoven, so exceptionally stimulative and expressive of the
soul’s deepest aspirations, that these acts are not perceived as so many
single acts, indeed that their very collective presence is apt to remain
unnoticed by the soul itself.
(4) Close parallels to such a state are abundant in all phases and
directions of the soul’s life. The happiest and most fruitful moments for our
aesthetic sense, those in which our mind expands most and grows most,
hence is most active in aesthetic “action” (though not “activity”) are those
in which we are unforcedly and massively absorbed in drinking in, with a
quiet intentness, the contrasts and harmonies, the grand unity in variety, the
very presence and spirit of an alpine upland, or of a river’s flowing, or of
the ocean’s outspread, or of the Parthenon sculptures or of Rafael’s

madonnas. At such moments we altogether cease to be directly conscious of
ourselves, of time or of the body’s whereabouts; and when we return to our
ordinary psychical and mental condition, we do so with an undeniable sense
of added strength and youthfulness,—somewhat as though our face, old and
haggard, were, after gazing in utter self-oblivion upon some resplendent
youthfulness, to feel, beyond all doubt, all its many wrinkles to have gone.
And so too with the mind’s absorption in some great poem or philosophy or
character.—In all these cases, the mind or soul energizes and develops, in
precise proportion as it is so absorbed in the contemplation of these various
over-againstnesses, these “countries” of the spirit, as to cease to notice its
own overflowing action. It is only when the mind but partially attends that a
part of it remains at leisure to note the attention of the other part; when the
mind is fully engrossed, and hence most keenly active, there is no part of it
sufficiently disengaged to note the fact of the engrossment and action of,
now, the whole mind. And, with the direct consciousness of our mind’s
action, we lose, for the time being, all clear consciousness of the mind’s
very existence. And let it be carefully noted, this absence of the direct
consciousness of the self is as truly characteristic of the deepest, most
creative, moments of full external action: the degree of mind and will-force
operating in Nelson at Trafalgar and in Napoleon at Waterloo, or again in
St. Ignatius of Antioch in the Amphitheatre, and in Savonarola at the stake,
was evidently in the precisely contrary ratio to their direct consciousness of
it or of themselves at all.
(5) Now if such “Passivity,” or Action, is in reality the condition in which
the soul attains to its fullest energizing, we can argue back, from this
universal principle, to the nature of the various stages and kinds of the
Prayer and States of Quiet. In each case, that is, we shall combat the still
very common conception that,—though orthodoxy, it is admitted, requires
some human action to remain throughout,—such Prayer and States consist
(not only as to the immediate feeling of their subjects, but in reality and in
their ultimate analysis) in an ever-increasing preponderance of divine action
within the soul, and an ever-decreasing remnant of acts of the soul itself.
For such a view assumes that God supplants man, and that, so to speak, His
Hand appears unclothed alongside of the tissue woven by man’s own mind;
whereas God everywhere but stimulates and supports man whom He has
made, and His Hand moves ever underneath and behind the tissue,—a
tissue which, at best, can become as it were a glove, and suggest the latent

hand. The Divine Action will thus stimulate and inform the human action
somewhat like the force that drives the blood within the stag’s young
antlers, or like the energy that pushes the tender sap-full fern-buds up
through the hard, heavy ground.
Thus a special intensity of divine help and presence, and an unusual
degree of holiness and of union, have nothing to do with the fewness of the
soul’s own acts at such times, but with their quality,—with the
preponderance amongst them of divinely informed acts as against merely
natural, or wrongly self-seeking, or downrightly sinful acts. And since it is
certain that living simplicity is but the harmony and unification, the
synthesis, of an organism, and hence is great in precise proportion to the
greater perfection of that synthesis, it follows that the living, utterly one-
seeming Action or State will, at such times, contain a maximum number of
interpenetrating acts and energies, all worked up into this harmonious
whole.
2. Four causes of inadequate analysis.
It is plain, I think, that one thoroughly normal, one accidental, and two
mischievous, causes have all conspired to arrest or to deflect the analysis of
most of the Mystics themselves concerning Simplicity.
For one thing, the soul, as has just been shown, at such moments of
harmonious concentration and of willing and thinking in union with God’s
Light and Will, necessarily ceases, more or less, to be conscious of its own
operations, and, in looking back, braced and rested as it now is, it cannot
but think that it either did not act at all, or that its action was reduced to a
minimum. For how otherwise could it now feel so rested, when, after its
ordinary activity, it feels so tired and dissatisfied? and how otherwise could
it be so unable to give any clear account of what happened in those minutes
of union? Yet it is, on the contrary, the very fulness of the action which has
rested, by expanding, the soul; and which has made the soul, returned to its
ordinary distractedness, incapable of clearly explaining that, now past,
concentration.
The accidental cause has been the fairly frequent, though not necessary,
connection of the more pronounced instances of such habits of mind with
more or less of the psycho-physical phenomena of ecstasy, in the technical
sense of the word. For, in such trances, the breathing and circulation are

retarded, and the operation of the senses is in part suspended. And it was
easy to reason, from such visible, literal simplification of the physical life,
to a similar modification of the soul’s action at such times; and, from the
assumed desirableness of that psycho-physical condition, to the advantage
of the supposed corresponding state of the soul itself. Any tendency to an
extreme dualism, as to the relations between body and soul, would thus
directly help on an inclination to downright Quietism.—Here it is, on the
contrary, certain that only in so far as those psycho-physical simplifications
are the results of, or conditions for, a deepening multiplicity in unity, a
fuller synthetic action of the soul, or, at least, of a fuller penetration by the
soul of even one limited experience or idea—an operation which entails not
less, but more, energizing of the soul,—are such psycho-physical
simplifications of any spiritual advantage or significance. And in such cases
they could not be indications of the cessation or diminution of the deepest
and most docile energizing of the soul.
And the mischievous causes were a mistake in Psychology and a mistake
in Theology. For, as to Psychology, not only was simplicity assumed,
(through a mistaken acceptance of the soul’s own feeling, as furnishing the
ultimate analysis of its state), to consist, at any one moment, of an act
materially and literally one, instead of a great organism of various
simultaneous energizings; but this one act was often held to require no kind
of repetition. Since the act was one as against any simultaneous multiplicity,
so was it one as against any successive multiplicity, even if this latter were
taken as a repetition differentiated by number alone. And yet here again
energizing is energizing; and though the soul’s acts overlap and
interpenetrate each other, and though when, by their number and harmony,
they completely fill and pacify the soul, many of them are simultaneously
or successively present to the soul in their effects alone: it is nevertheless
the renewal, however peaceful and unperceived, of these acts, which keeps
the state of soul in existence. For these acts are not simply unowned acts
that happen to be present within the soul; they are the soul’s own acts,
whether, in addition, the soul is directly conscious of them or not.
And, theologically, the idea was often at work that it was more worthy of
God to operate alone and, as it were, in vacuo; and more creaturely of man
to make, or try to make, such a void for Him. Yet this is in direct conflict
with the fundamental Christian doctrine, of the Condescension, the

Incarnation of God to and in human nature, and of the persistence, and
elevation of this humanity, even in the case of Christ Himself. God’s action
does not keep outside of, nor does it replace, man’s action; but it is,—Our
Lord Himself has told us,—that of yeast working in meal, which manifests
its hidden power in proportion to the mass of meal which it penetrates and
transforms.
3. Four Quietistic aberrations.
Now it is certain that the error of Quietism has, in no doubt many cases,
not remained confined to such mistakes in psychological analysis and
theological doctrine, but that these have joined hands with, and have
furnished a defence to, sloth and love of dreamy ease, or to some
impatience of the necessary details of life, or to fanatical attachment to
some one mood and form of experience; and that they have, thus reinforced,
ravaged not a few wills and souls.
Four chief Quietistic aberrations can be studied in history.
(1) The neglect or even contempt of vocal prayer, and of the historical
and institutional elements of religion, at least in the case of more advanced
souls, is one of these abuses.—Now it is true, and Catherine has been a
striking instance, that the proportion of all these different elements towards
one another vary, and should vary, considerably between soul and soul,
according to the attrait and degree of advance of each; that the soul’s most
solid advance is in the direction of an ever-deepened spiritual devotedness,
and not in that of a multiplication of particular devotions; that the use of
even the more central of those elements and means may, for souls called to
the prayer of Quiet, become remarkably elastic and largely unmethodized;
and that, for such souls (and, in various degrees and ways, sooner or latter,
for perhaps most other souls), a prayer of peacefully humble expectation
and of all but inarticulate, practically indescribable, brooding of love, and
of dim, expansive trust and conformity is possible, sometimes alone
possible, and is proved right and useful, if it leaves them strengthened to act
and to suffer, to help and to devote themselves to their fellows, to Christ,
and to God.
But it remains equally true, even for these as for all other souls, that the
historical and institutional elements must ever remain represented, and
sufficiently represented; indeed the persistence in these elements of religion

will be one of the chief means for avoiding delusion. We have St. Teresa’s
experience and teaching here, as a truly classical instance. And if the prayer
of Quiet will give a special colour, depth, and unity to those more
contingent-seeming practices, these practices will, in return, give a
particular definiteness, content, and creaturely quality to that prayer. And
thus too the universally and profoundly important union and interchange
with souls of other, equally legitimate, kinds and degrees of spirituality will
be kept up. Only the sum-total of all these souls, only the complete invisible
Church, is the full Bride of Christ; and though the souls composing her may
and should each contribute a varying predominance of different elements,
no soul should be entirely without a certain amount of each of these
constituents.
(2) Another abuse is the neglect, contempt, or misapplied fear of not
directly religious occupations and labours which, however otherwise
appropriate or even necessary to this soul’s growth and destination, tend to
disturb its quiet and to absorb a part of its time and attention. Here it is
doubtless true that the other elements of religion are also all more or less
apprehensive and jealous with regard to actual, or even only possible, non-
religious rival interests. And it is certain that they are all right in so far as
that a certain interior leisureliness and recollection, a certain ultimate
preference for the spiritualizing religious force of the soul as against the
materials, non-religious and other, which that force is to penetrate, are
necessary to the soul that would advance.
But the fear that characterizes the Historical and Institutional elements is
rather a fear, respectively, of error and of disobedience and singularity,
whereas on the part of the Mystical element it is a fear of distraction and
absorption away from the Unum Necessarium of the soul. Perhaps even
among the Canonized Mystics there is none that has more impressively
warned us, both by word and example, against this insidious danger, than
the distinguished Platonist scholar and deep spiritual writer, Père Jean
Nicolas Grou, who, right through the long mystical period of his life,
alternated his prayer of Quiet with extensive and vigorous critical work on
the Graeco-Latin classics, and whose practice only wants further expansion
and application, (according to the largely increased or changed conditions
of such not directly religious work), in order to bear much fruit, not only for
criticism and science, but, (by the return-effect of such occupations upon

the soul’s general temper and particular devotional habits), for spirituality
itself. But we must return to this point more fully in our last chapter.
(3) The third abuse is the neglect or contempt of morality, especially on
its social, visible, and physical sides. Particular Mystics, and even whole
Mystical schools and movements, have undoubtedly in some instances, and
have, possibly, in many more cases, been maligned on this point, since even
such a spotless life as Fénelon’s, and that of such a profoundly well-
intentioned woman as Madame Guyon, did not, for a time, escape the most
unjust suspicions. It is also true that, as a man advances in spirituality, he
lays increasing stress upon the intention and general attitude of the agent,
and increasingly requires to be judged by the same interior standard, if he is
to be rightly understood at all. God may and does, to humble and purify
him, allow painful temptations and trials from within to combine,
apparently, against him, with persecutions and much isolation from without.
And the difference, rather than the similarity, between Religion and
Morality,—the sense of pure grace, of free pardon, of the strange profound
“givenness” of even our fullest willings and of our most emphatically
personal achievements,—can and should grow in him more and more.
And yet it is clear that there must have been some fire to account for all
that smoke of accusation; that the material and the effect outwards, the body
of an action, do matter, as well as does that action’s spirit; that this body
does not only act thus outwards, but also inwards, back upon the spirit of
the act and of the agent; and that temptations and trials are purifying, not by
their simple presence but in proportion as they are resisted, or, if they have
been yielded to, in proportion as such defeats are sincerely deplored and
renounced. Thus everywhere the full development of any one part of life,
and the true unity of the whole, have to be achieved through the gradual
assimilation of at first largely recalcitrant other elements, and within an
ever-abiding multiplicity—a maximum number of parts and functions
interacting within one great organism. And hence not the outrage, neglect,
or supersession of morality, but, on the contrary, its deeper development, by
more precise differentiation from, and more organic integration into,
religion proper, must, here again and here above all, be the final aim. Once
more again it is the Incarnational type which is the only fully true, the only
genuinely Christian one.

(4) And, finally, there are certain hardly classifiable fanaticisms, which
are nevertheless a strictly logical consequence from a wrongly understood
Quiet and Passivity,—from Quietism in its unfavourable, condemned sense.
I am thinking of such a case as that of Margarethe Peters, a young Quietist,
who caused herself to be crucified by her girl-companions, at Wildenspuch,
near Schaffhausen, in 1823,—in order to carry out, in full literalness and
separateness, the utmost and most painful passivity and dependence and
resistless self-donation, in direct imitation of the culminating act of Christ’s
life on earth and of His truest followers.[124] Here, in the deliberate suicide
of this undoubtedly noble Lutheran girl, we get an act which but brings out
the strength and weakness of Quietism wherever found. For the greatest
constituents of the Christian spirit are undoubtedly there: free self-sacrifice,
impelled by love of God, of Christ, and of all men, and by hatred of self.—
Yet, because they here suppress other, equally necessary, constituents, and
are out of their proper context and bereft of their proper checks, they but
render possible and actual a deed of piteous self-delusion. How terrible is
false simplification, the short cut taken by pure logic, operating without a
sufficient induction from facts, and within an ardent, self-immolating
temperament!
4. Rome’s condemnation of Quietism.
All this is abundantly sufficient to explain and justify Rome’s
condemnation of Quietism. The term “Quietists” appears, I think, for the
first time,—at least in an invidious sense,—in the Letter which Cardinal
Caraccioli, Archbishop of Naples, addressed to Pope Innocent XI
(Odescalchi) on June 30, 1682, and in which he graphically describes the
abuses which, (under pretext or through the misapplication of spiritual
Quiet and Passivity), had now appeared in his Diocese: souls apparently
incapable of using their beads or making the sign of the Cross; or which
will neither say a vocal prayer nor go to Confession; or which, when in this
prayer of Quiet, even when at Holy Communion, will strive to drive away
any image, even of Our Lord Himself, that may present itself to their
imagination; or which tear down a Crucifix, as a hindrance to union with
God; or which look upon all the thoughts that come to them in the quietude
of prayer, as so many rays and effluences from God Himself, exempting
them henceforth from every law.[125]

Yet it is important to bear well in mind, the special circumstances, the
admitted limits, and the probable signification of Rome’s condemnations.
(1) As to the circumstances of the time, it appears certain that it was the
ready circulation of the doctrines of the Spanish priest, Miguel de Molinos
in the Guida Spirituale, 1675, and the abuses of the kind we have just now
detailed, and that sprang from this circulation, which formed the primary
reason and motive for the otherwise excessively severe treatment of a man
and a book, which had both received the very highest and the most
deliberate ecclesiastical approbations. That these two circumstances were
the determining causes of at least the severity of his condemnation is well
brought out by the circumstance that, during his two years’ trial (1685-
1687), not only the short Guida but his whole obtainable correspondence
(some twenty thousand letters) were examined, and that it is at least as
much on such occasional manuscript material, and on Molinos’s own oral
admissions,—in prison and doubtless, in part at least, under torture,—that
the condemnation was based, containing, as it does, certain revoltingly
immoral propositions and confessions, admittedly absent from his published
writings.
But if at least some shadow of doubt rests upon the moral character of
Molinos, not a shadow of such suspicion or of doubt concerning his
perfectly Catholic intentions can, in justice, be allowed to rest upon his
chief follower and the most distinguished apologist for his doctrine, the
saintly Oratorian and Bishop, the much-tried Cardinal Petrucci; any more
than Fénelon’s moral and spiritual character, or deeply Catholic spirit and
intentions, can, (in spite of the painfully fierce and unjust attack upon both
by Bossuet in his formally classic invective, Relation sur le Quiétisme), for
one moment be called in question.[126] Other admittedly deeply spiritual and
entirely well-intentioned Catholics, whose writings were also condemned
during this time when devotional expressions having an at all quietistic
tinge or drift were very severely judged, are Mère Marie de l’Incarnation
(Marie Guyard), a French Ursuline Religious, who died in Canada in 1672,
and the process of whose Beatification has been introduced; the saintly
French layman, Jean de Bernières-Louvigny, much admired by Fénelon,
who died in 1659; the very interior, though at times somewhat fantastic,
Secular Priest, Henri Marie Boudon, who died in 1702; and the very austere
but highly experienced ascetical writer, the Jesuit Père Joseph Surin, whom

Bossuet had formally approved, and who died in 1668.[127] But Madame
Guyon herself, that much-tried and vehemently opposed woman, was held,
by many an undoubtedly Catholic-minded, experienced and close observer,
to be (in spite of the largely misleading and indeed incorrect character of
many of her analyses and expressions) a truly saintly, entirely filial
Catholic.[128]
(2) As to the limits of these condemnations, we must remember that only
two of them,—those of Molinos and of Fénelon,—claim to be directly
doctrinal at all; and that Fénelon was never really compromised in the
question of Quietism proper, but was condemned on questions of Pure Love
alone. Bossuet himself was far less sound as against the central Quietist
doctrine of the One Act, which, unless formally revoked, lasts on
throughout life, and hence need never be repeated; Fénelon’s early criticism
of the Molinos propositions remains one of the clearest extant refutations of
that error. Again in the matter of the Passivity of advanced souls, Bossuet
was distinctly less normal and sober than Fénelon: for whilst Fénelon taught
that in no state does the soul lose all capacity, although the facility may
greatly vary, to produce distinct acts of the virtues or vocal prayers and
other partially external exercises, Bossuet taught that, in some cases, all
capacity of this kind is abolished.[129] “I take,” says Fénelon, “the terms
‘Passive’ and ‘Passivity’ as they actually appear everywhere in the language
of the (sound) Mystics, as something opposed to the terms ‘active’ and
‘activity’: ‘Passivity,’ taken in the sense of an entire inaction of the will,
would be a heresy.” And he then opposes “Passivity,” not to “Action,” but
to that “Activity,” which is a merely natural, restless, and hurried excitation.
[130]

(3) And as to the abiding significance of the whole anti-quietist decisions
and measures, we shall do well to consider the following large facts. From
St. Paul and St. John to Clement of Alexandria and Origen; from these to
Dionysius the Areopagite; from the Areopagite to St. Bernard of Clairvaux
and then the Franciscan and Dominican Mystics; from these, again, on to
the great Renaissance and Counter-Reformation saints and writers of this
type,—the German Cardinal Nicolas of Coes and the Italian St. Catherine of
Genoa, the Spaniards St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross, and the French
Saint Francis de Sales and Saint Jane Frances de Chantal, we get a
particular type of religious experience and doctrine, which but unfolds and

concentrates, with an unusual articulation, breadth, and depth, what is to be
found, on some sides of their spiritual character and teaching, among Saints
and religious souls of the more mixed type, such as St. Augustine, St.
Anselm, St. Thomas of Aquin, and St. Ignatius Loyola. And this mixed
type, bearing within it a considerable amount of that mystical quiet and
emotional-speculative element, is again but a deepening, a purification and
a realization of one of the profoundest affinities and constituents of every
human heart and will.
Hence, even in the thickest of the quietist controversy, when that mystical
element must have seemed, to many, to be discredited once for all, those
best acquainted with the rich history of the Church, and with the manifold
requirements of the abiding religious consciousness, could not and did not
doubt that all that was good, deep, and true in that element would continue
to be upheld by, and represented in, the Church.—And it is not difficult to
point to the more or less Mystical souls furnished by the Monks, the Friars;
the Clerks-Regular, specially the Jesuits; the Secular Clergy; and the Laity,
down to the present day. Such writers and Saints as Père de Caussade (d.
about 1770) on the one hand, and Père Jean N. Grou (d. 1803) and the Curé
d’Ars (d. 1859) on the other hand, carry on the two streams of the
predominantly mystical and of the mixed type,—streams so clearly
observable before 1687 and 1699. Quietism, the doctrine of the One Act;
Passivity in a literal sense, as the absence or imperfection of the power and
use of initiative on the soul’s part in any and every state: these doctrines
were finally condemned, and most rightly and necessarily condemned; the
Prayer of Quiet, and various states and degrees of an ever-increasing
predominance of Action over Activity,—an Action which is all the more the
soul’s very own, because the more occasioned, directed, and informed by
God’s action and stimulation,—these, and the other chief lines of the
ancient experience and practice, remain as true, correct, and necessary as
ever.
5. Rome’s alleged change of front.
And yet it is undeniable that the Roman events between 1675 and 1688
do seem, at first sight, to justify the strongly Protestant Dr. Heppe’s
contention that those twelve years,—not to speak of the later troubles of
Madame Guyon and of Fénelon—witnessed a complete volte face, a formal

self-stultification, of the Roman teaching and authority, on these difficult
but immediately important matters.
(1) Let us put aside the many passages in Molinos’s Guida which were
but (more or less) literal reproductions of the teachings of such solemnly
approved authorities as Saints Teresa, Peter of Alcantara, John of the Cross,
Francis de Sales and Jane Frances de Chantal,—passages which, of course,
remained uncondemned even in Molinos’s pages, but which it would often
be difficult to distinguish from the parts of his book that were censured. Yet
there still remain such facts as the following.
Juan Falconi’s Alfabeto and Lettera were at their Fifth Italian edition,
1680, and all five editions had been approved by the Master of the
Apostolic Palace; but only in 1688 were these writings forbidden. Yet the
Lettera contains, with unsurpassed directness and clearness, the central
doctrine of Quietism: an exhortation to the production of one single lively
Act of Faith, which will then continue uninterruptedly through the whole
earthly life into eternity, and which, consequently, is not to be repeated.[131]
Molinos’s Guida and Breve Trattato appeared in Rome, respectively in
1675 and 1681, with the approbations of five theologians, four of whom
were Consultors of the Holy Office,—the Archbishop of Reggio; the
Minister-General of the Franciscans; the late General of the Carmelites;
Father Martin Esparza, the same Jesuit Theologian-Professor of the Roman
College who, some years before, had been one of those who had examined
and approved St. Catherine’s Vita ed Opere; and the actual General of the
Carmelites.[132]
Even after these two writings of Molinos had been criticised by the
Jesuits Bell Huomo and Segneri and the Clerk Regular Regio, (Segneri
enjoying a deservedly immense reputation, and showing in this affair much
moderation and a strong sense of the legitimate claims of Mysticism), the
Inquisition examined these criticisms, and forbade, not the incriminated
writings of Molinos and Petrucci, but the critique of Bell Huomo donec
corrigatur, and those of Regio and of Segneri (in his Lettera of 1681)
absolutely. Segneri’s subsequent Concordia almost cost him his life, so
strong was the popular veneration of Molinos.
Molinos indeed was the guest of Pope Innocent XI himself, and the
friend and confidant, amongst countless other spiritually-minded souls, of

various Cardinals, especially of the deeply devout Petrucci, Bishop of Jesi,
who was raised to the Cardinalate eighteen months after the beginning of
Molinos’s trial. The imprisonment of Molinos began in May 1685, but the
trial did not end till August 1687, when (after nineteen “Principal Errors of
the New Contemplation” had been censured by the Holy Office in February
1687) sixty-eight propositions, out of the two hundred and sixty-three
which had been urged against him, were solemnly condemned: of these the
clearly and directly immoral ones being admittedly not derived from any
printed book, or indeed any ever published letter of his Molinos.[133]
(2) To estimate Rome’s attitude (as far as it concerns the ultimate truth
and completeness of these doctrines, taken in their most characteristic and
explicit forms) fairly, we shall have to put aside all questions as to the
motives that impelled, and the methods that were employed, by either side
against the other. Molinos may have been even worse than the condemned
propositions represent, and yet Petrucci would remain a saintly soul; and we
certainly are driven to ask with Leibniz: “Si Molinos a caché du venin sous
ce miel, est-il juste que Petrucci et autres personnes de mérite en soient
responsables?”[134] But neither the wickedness of the one nor the sanctity of
the other would make the doctrines propounded by them, objectively, any
less solid or more spiritual than they are in themselves. The acutely anti-
Roman Anglican Bishop Burnet may not have invented or exaggerated
when he wrote from Rome, during those critical years, that one of the chief
motives which actuated the opponents of the Quietists was the fact that,
though the latter “were observed to become more strict in their lives, more
retired and serious in their mental devotions, yet … they were not so
assiduous at Mass, nor so earnest to procure Masses to be said for their
friends: nor … so frequently either at Confession or in processions”: and so
“the trade of those that live by these things was sensibly sunk.”[135] And the
cruel injustice of many details and processes of the movement against the
Quietists,—a movement which soon had much of the character of a popular
scare and panic, in reaction against a previous, in part, heedless enthusiasm,
—are beyond dispute or justification. Yet mercenary and ruthless as part of
the motives and much of the action of the anti-quietists doubtlessly were,
the question as to the worth and wisdom of Quietism, (taken objectively,
and not as an excusable counter-excess but as a true synthesis of the
spiritual life), remains precisely where it was before.

(3) Now I think that two peculiarities, most difficult to notice at the time,
seriously differentiate the Molinist movement from the great current of fully
Catholic Mysticism, even in those points and elements where the two are
materially alike or even identical; and yet that these peculiarities are but the
caricature (through further emphasis and systematization) of certain
elements present, in a more latent and sporadic manner, in the formulae and
philosophic assumptions or explanations of the older Mysticism,—elements
which had been borrowed too largely from a, at bottom, profoundly anti-
incarnational philosophy, not to be of far less value and of much greater
danger than the profoundly true experiences, nobly spiritual maxims, and
exquisite psychological descriptions which that predominantly Neo-
Platonist framework handed on.
The first peculiarity is that the older Mystics, especially those of the type
of St. Catherine of Genoa and St. John of the Cross, but even also those of
the more “mixed” type of Mysticism, such as St. Teresa, had indeed quite
freely used terms which are vividly true as descriptions of the prima facie
aspect and emotional impression of certain states and experiences of the
soul: “empty,” “fixed,” “motionless,” “the reason and the will have ceased
to act,” “doing nothing,” “incapable of doing anything,” “moved by
irresistible grace,” “but one act,” “one single desire”: these and equivalent
expressions occur again and again. But these sayings do not here lead up to
such a deliberate and exclusive rule as is that given by Falconi, and
repeated by Molinos in his Guida, Nos. 103-106.[136]
This doctrine of the One Act, in this its negative form,—for it is not to be
repeated,—and in its application to the whole waking and sleeping life, is
first an exclusive concentration upon, and then a wholesale extension of,
one out of the several trends of the older teaching, a doctrine which,
compared with that teaching in its completeness, is thin and doctrinaire, and
as untrue to the full psychological explanation and working requirements of
the soul as it is readily abusable in practice and contrary to the Incarnational
type of religion. It is impossible not to feel that the manifold great ocean-
waters of life, that the diversely blowing winds of God’s Spirit are here,
somehow, expected to flow and breathe in a little shortcut, single channel,
through a tiny pipe; one more infallible recipe or prescription is here offered
to us, hardly more adequate than the many similar “sure” roads to salvation,

declared by this or that body of devout religionists to attach to the practice
or possession of this or that particular prayer or particular religious object.
And the second difference is that the older Catholic Mystics leave less
the impression that the external side of religion, its body, is of little or no
importance, and indeed very readily an obstacle to its interior side, its soul.
And this, again, for the simple reason that their teaching is, in general, less
systematic and pointed, more incidental, and careless of much self-
consistency.
(4) Yet these two differences have largely sprung from the simple
pressing and further extension of precisely the least satisfactory, the
explanatory and systematic side,—the form as against the content,—of the
older Mystics. For once the more specifically Neo-Platonist constituent, in
those Mystics’ explanation and systematization, was isolated from the
elements of other provenance which there had kept it in check, and now
became, as it were, hypostasized and self-sufficient, this constituent could
not but reveal, more clearly than before, its inadequacy as a form for the
intensely organic and “incarnational” spiritual realities and processes which
it attempted to show forth. That Neo-Platonist constituent, always present in
those ancient Mystics, had ever tended to conceive the soul’s unity, at any
one moment, as a something outside of all multiplicity whatsoever. Hence
this character of the simultaneous unity had only to be extended to the
successive unity,—and the literally One Act, as in the present so throughout
the future, became a necessary postulate.
And that same constituent had, even in those great teachers of profound
maxims, exquisite religious psychology, and noblest living, tended,
(however efficaciously checked by all this their Christian experience and by
certain specifically Platonist and Aristotelian elements of their philosophy),
towards depreciating the necessity, importance, indeed even the
preponderant utility, of the External, Contingent, Historical and
Institutional, and of the interchange, the inter-stimulation between these
sides and expressions of religion and its internal centre and spirit.
Perhaps, amongst all the great ecclesiastically authorized Mystics of that
past, the then most recent of them all, St. John of the Cross, comes, by his
(theoretically continuous though in his practice by no means exclusive)
insistence upon the abstractive and universal, the obscure and invisible, the

self-despoiling and simplifying element and movement, nearest to an
exclusion of the other element and movement. Indeed the Quietists’
generally strong insistence upon the necessity of a Director and upon
Frequent Communion gives their teaching, when taken in its completeness,
a prima facie greater Institutionalism than is offered by the spiritual theory
of the great Spaniard. Yet if, even in him, one misses, in his theoretical
system, a sufficiently organic necessity for the outgoing movement, a
movement begun by God Himself, and which cannot but be of fundamental
importance and influence for believers in the Incarnation, there is as
complete an absence of the doctrinaire One-Act recipe for perfection as in
the most Historical and Institutional of Christian teachers. But more about
this hereafter.
6. Four needs recognised by Quietism.
Quietism, then, has undoubtedly isolated and further exaggerated certain
explanatory elements of the older Mysticism which, even there, were
largely a weakness and not a strength; has thus underrated and starved the
Particular, Visible, Historical, Institutional constituents of Religion; and
has, indeed, misunderstood the nature of true Unity everywhere. Yet the
very eagerness with which it was welcomed at the time,—in France and
Italy especially,—and this, not only as a fashion by the Quidnuncs, but as so
much spiritual food and life by many a deeply religious soul; and the
difficulty, and not infrequent ruthlessness of its suppression, indicate plainly
enough that, with all its faults and dangers, it was divining and attempting
to supply certain profound and abiding needs of the soul. I take these needs
to be the following four.
(1) Man has an ineradicable, and, when rightly assuaged, profoundly
fruitful thirst for Unity,—for Unification, Synthesis, Harmonization; for a
living System, an Organization both within and without himself, in which
each constituent gains its full expansion and significance through being, and
more and more becoming, just that part and function of a great, dynamic
whole; a sense of the essential and ultimate organic connection of all things,
in so far as, in any degree or form, they are fair and true and good. And this
sense and inevitable requirement alone explain the surprise and pain caused,
at first, to us all, by the actual condition of mutual aloofness and hostility,
characteristic of most of the constituents of the world within us, as of the
world around us, towards their fellow-constituents. A truly atomistic world,

—even an atomistic conception of the world,—of life, as a collection of
things one alongside of another, on and on, is utterly repulsive to any
deeply religious spirit whose self-knowledge is at all equal to its
aspirations.—No wonder, then, if the Quietists, haunted by the false
alternative of one such impenetrable atom-act or of an indefinite number of
them, chose the One Act, and not a multitude of them.
(2) Man has a deep-seated necessity to purify himself by detachment, not
only from things that are illicit but even from those that are essential and
towards which he is bound to practise a deep and warm attachment. There is
no shadow of theoretical or ultimate contradiction here: to love one’s
country deeply, yet not to be a Chauvinist; to love one’s wife tenderly, yet
not to be uxorious; to care profoundly for one’s children, yet to train,
rebuke, and ever brace them, when necessary, up to suffering and even
death itself: these things so little exclude each the other, that each
attachment can only rightly grow in and through the corresponding
detachment. The imperfection in all these cases, and in all the analogous,
specifically religious ones, lies not in the objects to be loved, nor in these
objects being many and of various degrees and kinds of lovableness, nor in
the right (both effective and affective, appropriately varied) love of them:
but simply in our actual manner of loving them.—No wonder then that
Quietism, face to face with the false alternative of either Attachment or
Detachment, chose Detachment, (the salt and the leaven of life) and not
attachment (life’s meat and meal).
(3) Man has a profound, though ever largely latent, capacity and need for
admiration, trust, faith; and does not by any means improve solely by direct
efforts at self-improvement, and by explicit examinations of his efforts and
failures; but, (a little from the first, and very soon as much, and later on far
more), he progresses by means of a happy absorption in anything clean and
fruitful that can and does lift him out of and above his smaller self
altogether.—And such an absorption will necessarily be unaccompanied, at
the time, by any direct consciousness on the part of the mind as to this its
absorption. And, religiously, such quiet concentrations will, in so far as they
are at all analyzable after the event, consist in a quite inarticulate, and yet
profound and spiritually renovating, sense of God; and they will have to be
tested, not by their describable content, but by their ethical and religious
effects. “Psychology and religion,” says that great psychological authority,

Prof. William James, “both admit that there are forces, seemingly outside of
the conscious individual, that bring redemption to his life.” “A man’s
conscious wit and will, so far as they strain after the ideal, are aiming at
something only dimly and inaccurately imagined, whilst the deeper forces
of organic ripening within him tend towards a rearrangement that is pretty
surely definite, and definitely different from what he consciously conceives
and determines. It may consequently be actually interfered with by efforts
of too direct and energetic a kind on our part.”[137]—No wonder then that
Quietism, finding this element of quiet incubation much ignored and
starved in the lives of most religious souls, flew to the other extreme, of
making this inarticulateness and wise indirectness of striving into the one
test and measure of the perfection of all the constituents of the religious life,
instead of insisting upon various degrees and combination of full and direct
consciousness and articulation, and of much dimness and indirect alertness,
as each requiring the other, and as both required by the complete and
normal life of the soul.
(4) And Man has a deep-seated sense of shame, in precise proportion as
he becomes spiritually awake, about appropriating to himself his virtues and
spiritual insight, even in so much as he perceives and admits his possession
of them. Not all his consciousness and conviction of the reality of his own
efforts and initiative, can or does prevent a growing sense that this very
giving of his is (in a true sense) God’s gift,—that his very seeking of God
ever implies that he had, in some degree, already found God,—that God had
already sought him out, in order that he might seek and find God.—No
wonder then that, once more shrinking from a Unity constituted in a
Multiplicity, Quietism should, (with the apparently sole choice before it, of
God Himself operating literally all, or of man subtracting something from
that exclusive action and honour of God), have chosen God alone and
entire, rather than, as it were, a fragmentary, limited, baffled influence and
efficiency of the Almighty within His Own creature. Yet here again the
greater does not supplant, but informs, the lesser; and the Incarnational
action of God is, in this supreme question also, the central truth and secret
of Christianity.
7. Multiplicity and unity, in different proportions, needful for all spiritual
life.

We find, then, that it is essential for even the most advanced souls, that
they should keep and increase the sense and the practice of a right
multiplicity, as ever a constituent and essential condition of every concrete,
living unity; of a right attachment, as ever the necessary material and
content for a fruitful and enriching detachment; of a right consciousness and
articulation of images, thoughts, feelings, volitions, and external acts, as
ever stimulations, restful alternations, and food for a wise and strengthening
prayer or states of Quiet and inarticulation; and of a right personal initiative
and responsibility, as the most precious means and element for the
operations of God.
We find, too, that it is equally important, for even the most imperfect
souls, to be helped towards some, (though but ever semi-conscious and
intermittent), sense of the unity which alone can give much worth or
meaning to their multiplicity; of the detachment which alone can purify and
spiritualize their attachments; of the self-oblivion, in rapt and peaceful
admiration, which alone can save even their right self-watchings and self-
improvements from still further centring them in themselves; and of the true
self-abandonment to pure grace and the breathing of God’s Spirit, which
alone can give a touch of winning freedom and of joyful spaciousness to all
the prudence and right fear and conscious responsibility which, left alone,
will hip, darken and weigh down the religious soul.
And thus we shall find that there is no degree of perfection for any one
set of souls which is not, in some form and amount, prefigured and required
by all other souls of good-will; and again, that there is no one constituent, to
which any one soul is specially drawn, which does not require the
supplementation and corrective of some other constituents, more fully
represented in other souls of possibly lower sanctity.
Thus each soul and grade requires all the others; and thus the measure of
a soul’s greatness is not its possessing things which cannot, in any degree or
way, be found in, or expected of, all human souls, in proportion as they are
fully and characteristically human, but, on the contrary, its being full of a
spirit and a force which, in different degrees and forms, are the very salt and
yeast, the very light and life, of all men in every place and time.
The following weighty declaration, long ascribed to St. Thomas Aquinas,
fully covers, I think, the doctrine and ideal aimed at throughout this section:

“Already in this life we ought continuously to enjoy God, as a thing most
fully our own, in all our works.… Great is the blindness and exceeding the
folly of many souls that are ever seeking God, continuously sighing after
God, and frequently desiring God: whilst, all the time, they are themselves
the tabernacles of the living God … since their soul is the seat of God, in
which He continuously reposes. Now who but a fool deliberately seeks a
tool which he possesses under lock and key? or who can use and profit by
an instrument which he is seeking? or who can draw comfort from food for
which he hungers, but which he does not relish at leisure? Like unto all this
is the life of many a just soul, which ever seeks God and never tarries to
enjoy Him; and all the works of such an one are, on this account, less
perfect.”[138]

IV. Pure Love, or Disinterested Religion: its Distinction from
Quietism.

The problem of Pure Love, of Disinterested Religion, can hardly, in
practice, be distinguished from that of Quiet and Passivity, if only because
Quietists, (those who have considered perfection to diminish more and
more the number of the soul’s acts, or at least to eliminate more and more
the need of distinctness or difference between them), have, quite inevitably,
ever given a special prominence to the question as to what should be the
character of those few acts, of that one unbroken act. For once allow this
their main question we should all have to answer in the Quietist’s way,—
viz. that this single act must, for a perfect soul, to be the most perfect of the
acts possible to man, and hence must be an act of Pure Love.—Yet it is well
to realize clearly that, if Quietism necessitates an even excessive and unreal
doctrine of Pure Love, a moderate and solid Pure-Love teaching has no kind
of necessary connection with Quietism. For even though my interior life be
necessarily one continuous stream and tissue of acts, countless in their
number, variety, and degrees of inter-penetration, it in nowise follows that
acts of Pure Love are not the best, or are impossible; nor that, in proportion
as Pure Love informs the soul’s multiform acts, such acts must lose in depth
and delicacy of variety and articulation. Indeed here, with regard to the very
culmination of the interior life, we shall again find and must again test the
two conceptions: the finally abstractive and materially simplifying one,
which must ever have any one real thing outside of another; and the

incarnational and synthetic one, which finds spiritual realities and forces
working the one inside and through the other. And the latter view will
appear the true one.
1. New Testament teaching as to Pure Love.
Now we must first try and get some clear ideas as to how this difficult
matter stands in the New Testament,—in the Synoptic tradition and in the
Pauline-Joannine teaching respectively. Here again it is the former which,
(though on its surface it appears as the more ordinary and the more locally
coloured teaching), is the richer, in its grandly elastic and manifold
simplicity; and it is the latter which has most profoundly penetrated and
articulated the ultimate meaning and genius of a part of Our Lord’s
doctrine, yet at the cost of a certain narrowing of the variety and breadth of
that outlook. In both cases I shall move, from the easier and more popular
teaching, to the deepest and most original enunciations and explanations.
[139]

(1) The Synoptic teaching starts throughout from the ordinary post-exilic
Jewish feeling and teaching, which indeed recognizes the ceremonial
obligations and the more tangible amongst the ethical demands as standing
under the categorical imperative of the Legal “Thou Shalt,” but places the
large territory of the finer moral precepts outside of the Law. So with the
“Zedakah,” the “Justice” of almsdeeds, and with the “Gemiluth Chasadim,”
the “works of mercy,” such as visiting the sick, burying the dead, and
rejoicing with the joyful and sorrowing with the sorrowful. Thus Rabbi
Simon the Just tells us: “The world rests on three things: on the Law
(Thorah), on Worship (Abodah), and on Works of Mercy (Gemiluth
Chasadim)”; and Rabbi Eleazar declared the “Gemiluth Chasadim” to be
above the “Zedakah.”[140] And it is especially in view of these works of
supererogation that rewards, and indeed a strict scale of rewards, are
conceived. Thus already in the Book of Tobit, (written somewhere between
175 and 25 b.c.), we have Tobit instructing his son Tobias that “Prayer is
good with Fasting and Alms, more than to buy up treasures of gold. For
Alms delivereth from death … they that practise Mercy and Justice shall
live long.”[141] And one of the sayings of the Jewish Fathers declares: “So
much trouble, so much reward.”[142]

Now this whole scheme and its spirit seems, at first to be taken over quite
unchanged by Our Lord. The very Beatitudes end with: “Rejoice … because
your reward is great in heaven.” And, in the following Sermon, his hearers
are bidden to beware of doing their “Zedakah,”—the “Justice” of Prayer,
Fasting, Almsdeeds in order to be seen by men; since, in that case, “ye shall
not have reward from your Father Who is in heaven.” And this is driven
home in detail: these three kinds of Justice are to be done “in secret,” and
“thy Father will repay thee.” Even Prayer itself thus appears as a
meritorious good work, one of the means to “treasure up treasures in
heaven.” Similarly, the rich man is bid “Go sell all that thou hast and give it
to the poor; and thou shalt have a treasure in heaven.” Even “he that shall
give you a cup of cold water in My name, shall not lose his reward.” Indeed
we have the general principle, “the labourer is worthy of his hire.”[143]
And yet we can follow the delicate indications of the presence, and the
transitions to the expression, of the deeper apprehension and truth. For, on
the part of God, the reward appears, in the first instance, as in intrinsic
relation to the deed. The reward is the deed’s congenital equivalent:
“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy”; “if ye forgive men
their trespasses, your Father … will likewise forgive you your trespasses”;
and “everyone who shall confess Me before men, him will I also confess
before My Father Who is in heaven.”[144] Or the reward appears as a just
inversion of the ordinary results of the action thus rewarded: “Blessed are
the meek, for they shall inherit the land”; take the highest seat at a banquet,
and you will be forced down to the lowest, take the lowest, and you will be
moved up to the highest; and, generally, “he who findeth his soul, shall lose
it; and that loseth his soul, for My sake, shall find it.”[145] Or the reward
appears as an effect organically connected with the deed, as its cause or
condition: “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.”[146] And
then the reward comes to vary, although the deed remains quantitatively
identical, solely because of that deed’s qualitative difference,—i.e.
according to the variation in its motive: “He that receiveth a prophet in the
name of a prophet, shall receive the reward of a prophet; and he who
receiveth a just man in the name of a just man, shall receive the reward of a
just man.”[147] And then the reward moves up and up and becomes a grace,
through being so far in excess of the work done: “Every one who hath
forsaken house … or father or children or fields for My name, shall receive

manifold,” indeed “an hundredfold”—“a full … and overflowing measure
shall they pour into your lap”; and “whosoever shall humble himself, shall
be exalted,”—not simply back to his original level, but into the Kingdom of
Heaven. So, too, “Thou wast faithful over a few things, I shall place thee
over many things”; indeed this faithful servant’s master “shall place him
over all his possessions;” or rather, “blessed are those servants whom the
Lord, when He cometh, shall find watching. Amen, I say unto you, that he
shall approach … and shall minister unto them.”[148]
This immense disproportion between the work and its reward, and the
consequent grace-character of the latter, is driven home with a purposely
paradoxical, provocative pointedness, in the two Parables of the Wedding
Garment and of the Equal Payment of the Unequal Labourers, both of
which are in St. Matthew alone. The former concerns the soul’s call to the
kingdom, and that soul’s response. The King here, after having formally
invited a certain select number of previously warned relatives and nobles,
who all, as such, had a claim upon him, Matt, xxii, 3, sends out invitations
with absolute indiscrimination,—to men with no claims or with less than
none; to “bad” as well as “good.” And it is the King, again, who
gratuitously supplies them each with the appropriate white wedding-feast
garment. He has thus a double right to expect all his guests to be thus
clothed, and to punish instantly, not the mere negligence, but the active
rejection implied on the part of the man clothed in his ordinary clothing (vv.
11, 12). Both call and investiture have been here throughout pure graces,
which rendered possible, and which invited but did not force, an
acceptance.[149]
The second Parable describes the “Householder” who hired labourers for
his vineyard at the first, third, sixth, ninth, and even eleventh hour,—each
and all of them for a penny a day; who actually pays out to them, at the end
of the day, this one identical pay; and who, to the labourer of the first shift
who complains, “These last have wrought but one hour, and thou hast made
them equal unto us who have borne the burden and heat of the day,”
declares, “Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst thou not agree with me for a
penny? Take thine own and go thy way: I will give to this last even as unto
thee. Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye
evil (art thou envious) because I am good” (because I choose to be
bountiful)? Matt. xx, 1-15. Here again the overflowing generosity of God’s

grace is brought home to us, as operating according to other standards than
those of ordinary daily life: nor is this operation unjust, for the Householder
paid their due to the first set of workers, whilst rewarding, far above their
worth, those poor labourers of the last hour. But, as Jülicher well points out,
“we should not pedantically insist upon finding here a doctrine of the strict
equality of souls in the Beyond—a doctrine contradicted by other
declarations of Jesus. Only the claim of single groups of souls to
preferential treatment is combated here …: a certain fundamental religious
disposition is to be awakened.” And, as Bugge rightly notes, “the great
supreme conception which lies at the bottom of the parable has,
parablewise, remained here unnamed: Paul has found the expressive term
for it,—‘Grace.’”[150]
And we get corresponding, increasingly spiritual interpretations with
regard to man’s action and man’s merit. First, all ostentation in the doing of
the deed cancels all reward in the Beyond; so, in the case of each of the
three branches of “Justice.”[151] And then the worker is to be satisfied, day
by day, with that day’s pay and sustenance: “Give us this day our daily
bread,” every soul is to pray; the divine Householder will say, “Didst thou
not agree with me for a penny a day? Take thine own and go thy way.” And
even “when ye have done all that has been commanded you, say ‘we are
unprofitable servants, we have but done what we were bound to do.’” They
are invited to look away from self, to “seek first the Kingdom and His
Justice,” and then “all these things,” their very necessaries for earthly life,
“shall be added unto you.” Indeed it is the boundlessly generous self-
communicativeness of God Himself which is to be His disciples’ deliberate
ideal, “be ye perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect”; and the
production of this likeness within themselves is to be the ultimate end and
crown of their most heroic, most costly acts: “love your enemies, and pray
for those that persecute you: that you may become the sons of your Father
who is in Heaven, who maketh His sun to rise upon the evil and the good,
and who raineth upon the just and the unjust.” And the more there is of such
self-oblivious love, the more will even the gravest sins be entirely blotted
out, and the more rapid will be the full sanctification of the soul, as Our
Lord solemnly declares concerning the sinful woman in St. Luke, “her
many sins are forgiven her, because she hath loved much.”[152]

In all this matter it is St. Luke’s Gospel which is specially interesting as
showing, so to speak, side by side, an increased Rabbinical-like preciseness
of balance between work and reward, and yet the adoption, doubtlessly
under Pauline influence, of St. Paul’s central term in lieu of the old Jewish
terminology. For, in one of its curious so-called “Ebjonite” passages, this
Gospel works up the Parable of the Talents, with its only approximate
relation between the deeds and their rewards (Matt. xxv, 14-30), into the
Parable of the Pounds (Luke xix, 12-27), with its mathematically
symmetrical interdependence between the quantities of the merit and those
of this merit’s reward: the man who makes ten pounds is placed over ten
cities, and he who makes five, over five. And, on the other hand, in a Lukan
equivalent for part of the Sermon on the Mount, St. Matthew’s “reward” is
replaced by “grace”: “If ye love them that love you, what grace (χάρις) have
you? and if ye do good to those that do you good, what grace have
you?”[153]
(2) St. Paul indeed it is who, in the specially characteristic portions of his
teaching, unfolds, by means of a partly original terminology, the deepest
motives and implications of Our Lord’s own divinely deep sayings and
doings, and never wearies of insisting upon the Grace-character of the
soul’s call and salvation,—the Free Mercy, the Pure Love which God shows
to us, and the sheer dependence and complete self-donation, the pure love
which we owe to Him, and which, at the soul’s best, it can and does give
Him.
It is true that in the contrasting, the traditional layer of his teaching, we
find the old Jewish terminology still intact: “God will render unto every
man according to his works”; “it behoves us to appear before the Judgment-
seat of Christ, that everyone … may receive according to what he hath
done, whether it be good or bad.”[154] Indeed it is precisely in St. Paul’s
pages that we find the two most difficult and, at first sight, least spiritual
sayings concerning this matter to be discovered in the whole New
Testament: “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the
most miserable.” And: “If the dead do not rise … let us eat and drink, for
to-morrow we die.”[155] But these two passages must doubtless be taken
partly as arguments adapted to the dispositions of his hearers,—the “Let us
eat and drink” conclusion is given in the words of a current Heathen Greek
proverb,—and, still more, as expressions not so much of a formal doctrine

as of a mood, of one out of the many intense, mutually supplementary and
corrective moods of that rich nature.
According to his own deepest, most deliberate, and most systematic
teaching, it is the life of Christ, the living Christ, energizing even now
within the faithful soul, that constitutes both the primary source and the
ultimate motive of Christian sanctity. “I am crucified with Christ;
nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” And through this
divine-human life within us “we faint not; but though our outward man
perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.” Indeed the Lord
Himself said to him: “My grace is sufficient for thee; for power is made
perfect in infirmity”; and hence he, Paul, could declare: “Gladly therefore
will I glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may dwell in me.”
And thus, with Christ living within him, he can exclaim: “If God be for us,
who shall be against us?… Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
shall tribulation, or peril, or the sword?… In all these things we are more
than conquerors, through him that loved us. For I am persuaded that neither
death nor life, nor things present nor things to come … shall be able to
separate us from the love of God.” “Whether we live, or whether we die, we
are the Lord’s.”[156] We thus get here a reinsistence upon, and a further
deepening of, perhaps the profoundest utterance of the whole Old
Testament: “What have I in Heaven besides Thee? and besides Thee I seek
nothing upon earth. Even though my flesh and my heart faint, Thou art my
rock and my portion for ever.”[157]
And then that deathless hymn to Pure Love, the thirteenth chapter of the
First Epistle to the Corinthians, not only culminates with the proclamation
that, of all man can hope and wish and will and do, of all his doings and his
graces, “there remain these three, Faith, Hope, Love, (Charity): but the
greatest of these is Love (Charity).” But the Love that has this primacy is
Pure Love, for “it seeketh not its own.” And though of this Love alone it is
said that “it never passeth away,” ever persists in the Beyond: yet even here
already it can and does get exercised,—and this, not only without any
suppression of parallel acts of the other virtues, but with these other virtues
and their specific motives now taken over and deepened, each in its special
characteristic, by the supreme virtue and motive of Pure Love: “Love
believeth all things, hopeth all things, beareth all things.”[158] Thus Faith,
Hope, Patience, and all the other virtues, they all remain, but it is Love that

is now the ultimate motive of all their specific motives. These, his
culminating teachings, indicate clearly enough that virtue’s rewards are
regarded by him, ultimately and substantially, as “the wages of going on
and not to die”; or rather that they are, in their essence, manifestations of
that Eternal Life which is already energizing, within souls that earnestly
seek God, even here and now. This Life, then, however great may be its
further expansion and the soul’s consciousness of possessing it, already
holds within itself sufficient, indeed abundant motives, (in the fulfilment of
its own deepest nature and of its now awakened requirements of harmony,
strength, and peace through self-donation), for giving itself ever more and
more to God.
(3) And with regard to the Joannine teaching, it will be enough for us to
refer back to the texts discussed in the preceding chapter, and to note how
large and specially characteristic is here the current which insists upon the
reward being already, at least inchoatively, enclosed in the deed itself, and
upon this deed being the result and expression of Eternal Life operating
within the faithful soul, even already, Here and Now. Only the declaration
that “perfect love casteth out fear,” that it does not tolerate fear alongside of
itself, 1 John iv, 18, appears to be contrary to the Pauline doctrine that
Perfect Love, “Love” itself “beareth all things, believeth, hopeth, endureth
all things,” 1 Cor. xiii, 7. Love then can animate other virtues: why not then
a holy fear? But this Joannine saying seems in fact modelled upon St. Paul’s
quotation and use of a passage from the Septuagint: “Cast out the
bondwoman (the slave-servant) and her son, for the son of the bondwoman
shall not be heir together with the son of the free,” Gal. iv, 30; and hence
this saying will not exclude “children of the free-woman,”—a holy fear as
well as faith, hope, patience,—but only “children of the slave-woman,”
superstition, presumption, weakmindedness, and slavish fear.
2. The “Pure Love” controversy.
In turning now to the controversy as to, Pure Love (1694-1699) and its
assured results, we shall have again to distinguish carefully between the
lives and intentions of the writers who were censured, and the doctrines,
analytic or systematic, taught or implied by them, which were condemned.
This distinction is easier in this case than in that of Quietism, for the chief
writer concerned here is Fénelon, as to whose pure and spiritual character
and deeply Catholic intentions there never has been any serious doubt.

But in this instance we have to make a further distinction—viz. between
the objective drift of at least part of his Explication des Maximes des Saints
sur la Vie Interieure, published in 1697, and especially the twenty-three
propositions extracted from it which were condemned by Pope Innocent XII
in 1699; and the teaching which he increasingly clarified and improved in
his numerous apologetic writings against Bossuet and other opponents in
this memorable controversy—especially in his Latin writings, intended for
transmission to the Pope, and written as late as 1710 and 1712.[159] It is
certain that Bishops and theologians who opposed his Maximes were found
warmly endorsing such pieces as his wonderfully clear and sober Première
Réponse aux Difficultés de M. l’Evêque de Chartres. It is these pieces,
comprising also his remarkably rich Instruction Pastorale, his admirably
penetrating Lettre sur l’Oraison Passive and Lettre sur la Charité, and his
extraordinarily compact and balanced Second Epistle to Pope Clement XI,
1712 (where all the censured ambiguities and expressions are carefully
avoided), and which alone among Fénelon’s writings shall be accepted in
what follows.[160] Indeed even the earlier of these writings fail in but one
thing—in justifying the actual text of the condemned book, as distinguished
from the intentions of its writer. Bishop Hedley sums up the real position
with the treble authority of a spiritually trained Monk, of a practised
theological writer, and of a Catholic Bishop of long experience: “The
doctrine intended by Fénelon, in his Maximes des Saints, and as explained
by him during his controversy with Bossuet, has never been censured,
although the opposite party laboured hard for its condemnation. Fifteen
years after the condemnation of his book, we find him re-stating to Pope
Clement XI (who, as Cardinal, had drawn up the Brief of his
condemnations), in careful scholastic language the doctrine intended by
himself, but which he himself had misstated in his popular treatise. As there
were errors, the other side, whatever the crudity or novelty of some of its
contentions, whatever its motives or methods—and some of them were far
from creditable—was sure in the end to succeed. And it is well that it
should have succeeded as far as it did succeed.”[161]
In any case, we shall have to beware of considering Bossuet’s
contentions as to the specific character of Charity, Love, and as to the
possibility, for man here below, of single acts of pure love, to be
representative of the ordinary Catholic teaching either before or since the

condemnation. On both these fundamental points Fénelon’s positions are
demonstrably, and indeed have been generally admitted to be, a mere
restatement of that teaching, as is shown, for instance, in the Jesuit Father
Deharbe’s solid and sober, thoroughly traditional and highly authorized
essay: Die vollkommene Liebe Gottes … dargestellt nach der Lehre des h.
Thomas von Aquin, Regensburg, 1856. It is this most useful treatise and the
admirable Analyse Raisonnée de la Controverse du Quiétisme of the Abbé
Gosselin,[162] (which has already much helped me in the preceding section),
that have been my chief aids in my careful study, back through Bossuet and
Fénelon, to St. Thomas and his chief commentators, Sylvius, who died in
1649, and Cardinal Cajetan, who died in 1534, and to the other chief
authorities beyond them.—I group the main points, which alone need
concern us here, under three heads: the specific Nature of Pure Love; single
Acts of Pure Love; a State of Pure Love.
(1) Now as to the specific Nature of Charity, or Pure, Perfect Love, St.
Thomas tells us: “One Kind of Love is perfect, the other kind is imperfect.
Perfect Love is that wherewith a man is loved for his own sake: as, for
instance, when some one wishes well to another person, for that other
person’s sake, in the manner in which a man loves his friend. Imperfect love
is the love wherewith a man loves something, not for its own sake, but in
order that this good thing may accrue to himself,—in the manner in which a
man loves a thing that he covets. Now the former kind of love pertains to
Charity, which clings to God for His own sake, whereas it is Hope that
pertains to the second kind of love, since he who hopes aims at obtaining
something for himself.”[163] And Cardinal Cajetan explains that this wishing
well to God, “this good that we can will God to have, is double. The good
that is in Him, that (strictly speaking) is God Himself,—we can, by Love,
will Him to have it, when we find our delight in God being what He is. And
the good that is but referred to God,—His honour and Kingdom and the
Obedience we owe him,—this we can will, not only by finding our pleasure
in it, but by labouring at its maintenance and increase with all our
might.”[164]
And, says St. Thomas, such Perfect Love alone is Love in its strict sense
and “the most excellent of all the virtues”: for “ever that which exists for its
own sake is greater than that which exists in view of something else. Now
Faith and Hope attain indeed to God, yet as the source from which there

accrue to us the knowledge of the Truth and the acquisition of the Good;
whilst Love attains to God Himself, with a view to abide in Him, and not
that some advantage may accrue to us from Him.” And perhaps still more
clearly: “ When a man loves something so as to covet it, he apprehends it as
something pertaining to his own well-being. The lover here stands towards
the object beloved, as towards something which is his property.”[165] And
note how, although he teaches that whereas “the beatitude of man, as
regards its cause and its object, is something increate,” i.e. God Himself,
“the essence of the beatitude itself is something created,” for “men are
rendered blessed by participation, and this participation in beatitude is
something created”: yet he is careful to explain some of his more incidental
passages, in which he speaks of this essence of beatitude as itself man’s
end, by the ex professo declaration: “God” alone “is man’s ultimate end,
and beatitude is only as it were an end before the very end, an end in
immediate proximity to the ultimate end.”[166]
(2) And next, as to the possibility, actual occurrence and desirableness of
single Acts of such Pure Love, even here below: all this is assumed as a
matter of course throughout St. Thomas’s ex professo teaching on the
matter. For throughout the passages concerning the Nature of Pure Love he
is not exclusively, indeed not even primarily, busy with man’s acts in the
future life, but with the respective characteristics of man’s various acts as
executed and as analyzable, more or less perfectly, already here below. And
nowhere does he warn us against concluding, from his reiterated insistence
upon the essential characteristics of Pure Love, that such love cannot, as a
matter of fact, be practised, at least in single acts, here below at all. Hence it
is clear that, according to him, the soul as it advances in perfection will—
alongside of acts of supernatural Faith, Hope, Fear, etc. (and the production
of such acts will never cease), produce more and more acts of Pure Love:
not necessarily more, as compared with the other kinds of contemporary
acts, but certainly more as compared with its former acts of the same
character.
But there is a further, profoundly and delicately experienced doctrine.
Not only can Pure Love be exercised in single and simple acts, alongside of
single and simple acts of other kinds of virtues, supernatural or otherwise:
but Pure Love can itself come to command or to inform acts which in
themselves bear, and will now bear in increased degree, the characteristics

of the other kinds of acts. St. Thomas tells us, with admirable clearness:
“An act can be derived from Charity in one of two ways. In the first way,
the act is elicited by Charity itself, and such a virtuous act requires no other
virtue beside Charity,—as in the case of loving the Good, rejoicing in it,
and mourning over its opposite. In the second way, an act proceeds from
Charity in the sense of being commanded by it: and in this manner,—since
Charity” has the full range of and “commands all the virtues, as ordering
them (each and all) to their (ultimate) end,—an act can proceed from
Charity whilst nevertheless belonging to any other special virtue.” And he
assures us that: “The merit of eternal life,” “the fountain-head of meriting,”
“pertains primarily to, consists in Charity, and pertains to and consists in
other kinds of supernatural acts in only a secondary manner,—that is, only
in so far as these acts are commanded or informed by Charity” or Pure
Love.[167]
Let us take some instances of such two-fold manifestations of identical
motives and virtues, according as these motives and virtues operate in
simple co-ordination, or within a compound and organic system. In the
scholar’s life, Greek and Latin and Hebrew may be acquired, each simply
for its own sake and each alongside of the other; or they can be acquired,
from the immediate motive indeed of knowing each in its own specific
nature as thoroughly as possible, yet with the ultimate, ever more and more
conscious and all-penetrating, motive of thus acquiring means and materials
for the science of language, or for the study of philosophy, or for research
into early phases of the Jewish-Christian religion. In the family life, a man,
woman, or child can live for himself or herself, and then for his or her other
immediate relatives, each taken as separate alongside of the other, or he or
she may get more and more dominated by the conception and claims of the
family as an organic whole, and may end by working largely, even with
respect to himself, as but for so many constituents of that larger organism in
which alone each part can attain its fullest significance. And especially a
young mother can live for her own health and joys, and then, alongside of
these, for those of her child, or she can get to the point of sustaining her
own physical health and her mental hopes and will to live as so many
means and conditions for feeding and fostering the claimful body and soul
of her child.

So again, in the creatively artistic life, we can have a Dante writing prose
and poetry and painting a picture, and a Rafael painting pictures and writing
sonnets; or we can have Wagner bringing all his activities of scholar, poet,
painter, musician, stage-manager,—each retaining, and indeed indefinitely
increasing, its specific character and capabilities,—to contribute, by endless
mutual stimulation and interaction, to something other and greater than any
one of them individually or even than the simple addition of them all,—to a
great Music-Drama and multiform yet intensely unified image of life itself.
And an organist can draw out, as he plays, the Vox Humana stop, and then
another and another limitedly efficacious organ-stop, whilst each new-
comer takes the place of its predecessor or a place beside it; or he can draw
out the Grand Jeu stop, which sets all the other stops to work in endless
interaction, with itself permeating and organizing the whole. We thus, in
these and countless other cases, and in every variety of degree within each
case, get two kinds of variety, what we may call the simple and the
compound diversification. And everywhere we can find that the richest
variety not only can co-exist with, but that it requires and is required by,
indeed that it is a necessary constituent and occasion of, the deepest and
most delicate unity.[168]
(3) And finally, as to a State of Pure Love. Only here do we reach the
class of questions to which the condemnations of Fénelon really apply.
We shall do well to begin by bearing in mind the very ancient, practically
unbroken, very orthodox Christian discrimination of faithful souls,—
sometimes into the two classes of Mercenaries (or Slaves) and Friends or
Children, the latter of whom the great Clement of Alexandria, who died
about a.d. 215, called “Gnostics,” “Gnosis” being his term for perfection
(this scheme is the one to which Catherine’s life and teaching conform); or
into the three classes of Servants (Slaves); Mercenaries; and Friends (or
Children), as is already worked out with full explicitness by Saints Basil,
Gregory of Nazianzum, and Gregory of Nyssa, who died in the years 379,
389, and 395 (?) respectively. Now Clement places the Mercenary on the
left of the Sanctuary, but the “Gnostic” on the right; and, whilst declaring
that the former “are those who, by means of renouncing things perishable,
hope to receive the goods of incorruption in exchange,” he demands of the
“Gnostic” that “he approach the saving word neither from the fear of
punishment, nor from the motive of reward, but simply because He is

good.”[169] And St. Basil, echoed in this by his two contemporaries, teaches
that, “We obey God and avoid vices, from the fear of punishment, and in
that case we take on the resemblance of Slaves. Or we keep the precepts,
because of the utility that we derive from the recompense, thus resembling
Mercenaries. Or finally, from love of Him who has given us the law, we
obey with joy at having been judged worthy of serving so great and good a
God, and thus we imitate the affection of Children towards their
parents.”[170] And, in the case of all these Fathers, it is clear that, not only
single acts, but whole states of soul and life are meant.
But the increased fineness in the analysis of interior experiences and
dispositions has since then required, and the Church formulations have most
wisely demanded, that these three classes be not so sharply distinguished as
to make any one soul seem exclusively and unchangeably to pertain to any
one of them; and, still more, that these three divisions be taken to represent,
even where and whilst they are most completely realized, only the
predominant character of the majority of the acts constituting the respective
state of soul. For it is clear that not only is there, and can there be, no such
thing, on earth at least, as a state composed of one unrepeated act; but there
is no such thing as a condition of soul made up solely of acts of “simple”
Pure Love, or even of supernatural acts of all sorts commanded throughout
by Charity, or indeed solely of supernatural acts, both simple and
commanded. The “One-act” state is a chimera; the state of “simple” acts of
Pure Love alone would, if possible, involve the neglect of numberless other
virtues and duties; and the last two states indeed highly desirable, but it
would be fanaticism to think we could completely attain to them here
below.

Yet there is nothing in any Church-censure to prevent, and there is much
in the teaching and life of countless saints to invite, our holding the
possibility, hence the working ideal and standard, for even here below, of a
state in which two kinds of acts, which are still good in their degree, would
be in a considerable minority: acts of merely natural, unspiritualized hope,
fear, desire, etc.; and acts of supernatural hope, fear, desire, etc., in so far as
not commanded by Charity. For even in this state not fully deliberate venial
sins would occasionally be committed, far more would a certain number of
acts of an unspiritualized, unsupernatural kind occur. And the necessary
variety among the supernatural acts would in nowise be impaired,—it
would indeed be greatly stimulated, by Pure Love being now, for the most
part, the ultimate motive of their exercise.
Sylvius, in his highly authoritative commentary on St. Thomas, puts the
matter admirably: “We may not love God in view of reward in suchwise as
to make eternal life the true and ultimate end of our love, or to love God
because of it, so that without the reward we would not love Him … We
must love God with reference to the eternal reward in suchwise that we put
forth indeed both love and good works in view of such beatitude,—in so far
as the latter is the end proposed to these works by God Himself; yet that we
subordinate this our beatitude to the love of God as the true and ultimate
end,” so that “if we had no beatitude to expect at all, we should nevertheless
still love Him and execute good works for His own sake alone. In this
manner we shall first love God above all things and for His own sake; and
we shall next keep the eternal reward before us, for the sake of God and of
His honour.”[171] A man in these dispositions would still hope, and desire,
and fear, and regret, and strive for, and aspire to conditions, things, persons
both of earth and of the beyond, both for himself and for others, both for
time and for eternity: but all this, for the most part, from the ultimate
motive, penetrating, deepening, unifying all the other motives,—of the love
of Love, Christ, Spirit, God.
Any hesitation to accept the reality or possibility of such a state cannot,
then, be based upon such acceptance involving any kind of Quietism, but
simply on the admittedly great elevation of such a condition. Yet this latter
objection seems to be sufficiently met if we continuously insist that even
such a state neither exempts souls from the commission of (more or less
deliberate) venial sin; nor is ever entirely equable; nor is incapable of being

completely lost; nor, as we have just contended, is ever without more or less
numerous acts of an unsupernaturalized kind, and still less without acts of
the supernatural virtues other than Love and unprompted by Love.
And all fear of fanaticism will be finally removed by a further most
necessary and grandly enlarging insistence upon the Mercenaries and even
the Servants having passing moments, and producing varyingly numerous
single acts of, Pure Love and of the other supernatural virtues prompted by
Pure Love. All souls in a state of Grace throughout God’s wide wide world,
—every constituent, however slight and recent, of the great soul of the
Church throughout every sex, age, race, clime, and external organization,
would thus have some touches, some at least incidental beginnings of Pure
Love, and of the other supernatural virtues prompted by Pure Love. All
souls would thus, in proportion to their degree of grace and of fidelity, have
some of those touches; and the progress of all would consist in the degree to
which that variety of acts would become informed and commanded by the
supreme motive of all motives, Pure and Perfect Love.[172]
And with such an Ideal, required by fundamental Catholic positions, ever
increasingly actuating the soul and binding it to all souls beneath, around,
above it, what there is of truth in the savage attacks of Spinoza and of Kant
and of such recent writers as A. E. Taylor,[173] upon the supposed
hypocritical self-seeking in the practice and temper of average Christians,
would lose all its force.
3. Cognate Problems.
Three much-discussed cognate matters require some elucidation here.
They answer to the questions: Does reference to the self, as for instance in
acts of gratitude and thanksgiving, prevent an act from being one of Pure
Love? Is the pleasurableness, normally ever attached and subsequent to all
virtuous acts, to be regarded as part of the reward from which Pure Love
abstracts? And finally are, I will not say any technically ecstatic or other in
part psycho-physical peculiarities and manifestations, but even active
Contemplation or the simple Prayer of Quiet, necessary conditions or
expressions of a state of Pure Love,—understood in the sense explained
above?
(1) As to reference to the self, it is highly important to distinguish
between acts of Pure Love, and attempts, by means of the maximum

possible degree of abstraction, to apprehend the absolute character and
being of God. For these two things have no necessary connection, and yet
they have been frequently confounded. St. Teresa’s noble confession of past
error, and consequent doubly valuable, amended teaching is perhaps the
most classical pronouncement extant upon this profoundly important point.
[174]
The contingent, spacial and temporal, manifestations and
communications of God, above all as we have them in the life of Our Lord
and in those who have come nearest to Him, but also, in their several
degrees and forms, in the lives of each one of us: all these, in their sacred,
awakening and healing, particularity and closeness of contact, can and
should be occasions and materials for the most perfect, for the purest Love.
Indeed it is well never to forget that nothing, and least of all God, the
deepest of all the realities, is known to us at all, except in and by means of
its relation to our own self or to our fellow-creatures. Hence if Love were
Pure only in proportion as it could be based upon our apprehension of God
as independent of all relation to ourselves, Pure Love would be simply
impossible for us.—But, in truth, such a conception would, in addition, be
false in itself: it would imply that the whole great Incarnation-fact and -
doctrine,—the whole of that great root of all religion, the certainty that it is
because God has first loved us that we can love Him, that He is a self-
revealing God, and One whom we can know and reach because “in Him we
live and move and have our being”—was taking us, not towards, but away
from, our true goal. There are, surely, few sadder and, at bottom, more
deeply uncreaturely, unchristian attitudes, than that which would seek or
measure perfection in and by the greatest possible abstraction from all those
touching contingencies which God Himself has vouchsafed to our nature,—
a nature formed by Himself to require such plentiful contact with the
historical and visible.—And if God’s pure love for us can and does manifest
itself in such contingent acts, then our love can and should become and
manifest itself purer and purer by means, not only of the prayer of formless
abstraction and expectation, but also by the contemplation of these
contingencies and by the production of analogously contingent acts. And if
so, then certainly gratitude, in so far as it truly deserves the name, can and
does belong to Pure Love, for the very characteristic of such gratitude
consists in a desire to give and not to receive.[175]

Not, then, the degree of disoccupation with the Contingent, even of the
contingent of our own life, but the degree of freedom from self-seeking, and
of the harmonization and subordination of all these contingencies in and
under the supreme motive of the Pure Love and service of God in man and
of man in God, is the standard and test of Christian perfection.
(2) As to the pleasurableness which, in normal psychic conditions, more
or less immediately accompanies or follows the virtuous acts of the soul,
the realizations of its own deeper and deepest ideals, we should note that, in
its earthly degree and form, it is not included in what theologians mean by
the “rewards” of virtuous action. And in this they are thoroughly self-
consistent, for they adhere, I think with practical unanimity, to Catherine’s
doctrine that these immediate consequences of virtuous acts are not to be
considered a matter of positive and, as it were, separate divine institution,—
as something which, given the fundamental character of man’s spiritual
nature, might have been otherwise; but as what,—given the immutable
nature of God and of the image at nature in His creature, man,—follows
from an intrinsic, quite spontaneous necessity.—Hence, at this point
especially, would it be foolish and fanatical, because contrary to the
immanental nature of things, and to the right interplay of the elemental
forces of all life, to attempt the suppression even of the several actual
irruptions of such pleasure, and still more of the source and recurrence of
this delectation. Fortunately success is here as impossible as it would be
undesirable,—as much so as, on a lower plane, would be the suppression of
the pleasure concomitant with the necessary kinds and degrees of eating.
Indeed, it is clear, upon reflection that unless a man (at least implicitly)
accepts and (indirectly) wills that spiritual or physical pleasure, he cannot
profitably eat his food or love his God.
But from this in nowise follows what Bossuet tried so hard to prove,—
that what is thus necessarily present in man, as a psychical or physical
prompting and satisfaction, must also of necessity be willed by him, directly
and as his determining reason and justification. In turning to eat, man
cannot help feeling a psychic pleasure of an all but purely physical kind;
and, if he is wise, he will make no attempt to meddle with this feeling. But
he can either deliberately will, as his action’s object, that pleasure which is
thus inevitably incident to the act, and the more he does so, the more simply
greedy and sensual he will become; or he can directly will, as his

determining end, that sustenance of life and strength for his work and
spiritual growth, which is the justification and ultimate reason of eating (the
rationale of that very pleasure so wisely attached by nature, as a stimulus,
to a process so necessary to the very highest objects), and the more he does
so, the more manly and spiritual he will grow.
And so with every one of man’s wondrously manifold and different
physical, psychical, spiritual requirements and actions, within the wide
range of his right nature and ideals. There is not one of them,—not the most
purely physical-seeming of these acts,—which he cannot ennoble and
spiritualize by, as it were, meeting it,—by willing it, more and more,
because of its rational end and justification. And there is not one of them,—
not an act which, judged simply by its direct subject-matter and by the
soul’s faculties immediately engaged, would be the most purely mental and
religious of acts,—which man cannot degrade and de-spiritualize, by, as it
were, following it, by willing it more and more because of its psychical
attraction and pleasurable concomitance alone. For, in the former case, the
act, however gross may seem its material, is made the occasion and
instrument of spiritual character-building and of the constitution of liberty;
in the latter case, the act, however ethereal its body, is but the occasion and
means of the soul’s dispersion in the mere phenomenal flux of the surface
of existence, and of its subjection to the determinism which obtains here.
[176]

Catherine’s whole convert life is one long series of the most striking
examples of an heroic delicacy in self-knowledge and self-fighting in this
matter: a delicacy which, as to the degree of its possibility and desirableness
in any particular soul, is, however, peculiarly dependent upon that soul’s
special circumstances, temperament, attrait, and degree of perfection
reached and to be reached.
(3) And, finally, as to the relations between the Contemplative forms of
Prayer, and Acts and variously complete States of Pure Love; and, again, of
such Prayer and Love, and Abnormal or Miraculous conditions: it is clear
that, if there is no true Contemplation without much Pure Love, there can be
much Pure Love without Contemplation.
Abbé Gosselin well sums up the ordinary Catholic teaching. “Meditation
consists of discursive acts which are easily distinguished from each other,

both because of the kind of strain and shock with which they are produced,
and because of the diversity of their objects. It is the ordinary foundation of
the interior life and the ordinary prayer of beginners, whose imperfect love
requires to be thus excited and sustained by distinct and reflective acts.
Contemplation consists, strictly speaking, in direct ‘non-reflex’ acts,—acts
so simple and peaceful as to have nothing salient by which the soul could
distinguish one from the other. It is called by the Mystical Saints ‘a simple
and loving look,’ as discriminating it from meditation and the latter’s many
methodic and discursive acts, and as limiting it to a simple and loving
consideration and view of God and of divine things, certified and rendered
present to the soul by faith. It is the ordinary prayer of perfect souls, or at
least of those that have already made much progress in the divine love. For
the more purely a soul loves God, the less it requires to be sustained by
distinct, reflective acts; reasoning becomes a fatigue and an embarrassment
to it in its prayer—it longs but to love and to contemplate the object of its
love.”
Or as Fénelon puts it: “‘Passivity,’ ‘Action,’ is not precisely itself Pure
Love, but is the mode in which Pure Love operates.… ‘Passivity,’ ‘Action,’
is not precisely the purity of Love, but is the effect of that purity.”[177] Yet,
as M. Gosselin adds, “It must be admitted that without Contemplation the
soul can arrive at a very high perfection; and that the most discursive
meditation, and hence still more all prayer as it becomes effective, often
includes certain direct acts which form an admixture and beginning of
contemplation.”[178]
And as to any supposed necessary relations between the very highest
contemplation and the most complete state of Pure Love on the one hand,
and anything abnormal or miraculous on the other hand, Fénelon, in this
point remarkably more sober than Bossuet, well sums up the most
authoritative and classical Church-teaching on the matter: “‘Passive’
Contemplation is but Pure Contemplation: ‘Active’ Contemplation being
one which is still mixed with hurried and discursive acts. When
Contemplation has ceased to have any remnant of this hurry, of this
‘activity,’ it is entirely ‘Passive,’ that is, peaceful, in its acts.” “This free and
loving look of the soul means acts of the understanding,—for it is a look;
and acts of the will, for the look is a loving one; and acts produced by free-
will, without any strict necessity, for the look is a free look.” “We should

not compare Passive Contemplation,” as did Bossuet, “to prophecy, or to
the gift of tongues or of miracles; nor may we say that this mystical state
consists principally in something wrought by God within us without our co-
operation, and where, consequently, there neither is nor can be any merit.
We must, on the contrary, to speak correctly, say that the substance of such
Passive Prayer, taken in its specific acts, is free, meritorious, and operated
within us by a grace that acts together with us.” “It is the attraction to the
acts which the soul now produces which, as by a secondary and counter-
effect, occasions a quasi-incapacity for those acts which it does not
produce. Now this attraction is not of a kind to deprive the soul of the use of
its free-will: we see this from the nature of the acts which this attraction
causes the soul to produce. Whence I conclude that this same attraction
does not, again, deprive it of its liberty with regard to the acts which it
prevents. The attraction but prevents the latter in the way it produces the
other,—by an efficacious influence that involves no sheer necessity.”
“‘Passivity,’ if it comes from God, ever leaves the soul fully free for the
exercise of the distinct virtues demanded by God in the Gospel; the attrait
is truly divine only in so far as it draws the soul on to the perfect fulfilment
of the evangelical counsels and promises concerning all the virtues.” “The
inspiration of the Passive state is but an habitual inspiration for the interior
acts of evangelical piety. It renders the Passive soul neither infallible nor
impeccable, nor independent of the Church even for its interior direction,
nor exempt from the obligation of meriting and growing in virtue.… The
inspiration of the passive soul differs from that of actively just souls only in
being purer; that is, more exempt from all natural self-seeking, more full,
more simple, more continuous, and more developed at each moment. We
have, throughout, ever one and the same inspiration, which but grows in
perfection and purity in proportion as the soul renounces itself more, and
becomes more sensitive to the divine impressions.”[179]
Thus we get an impressive, simple and yet varied, conception of
spirituality, in which a real continuity, and a power and obligation of mutual
understanding and aid underlies all the changes of degree and form, from
first to last. For from first to last there are different degrees, but of the same
supernatural grace acting in and upon the same human nature responsive in
different degrees and ways. From first to last there is, necessarily and at
every step, the Supernatural: at no point is there any necessary presence of,
or essential connection with, the Miraculous or the Abnormal.

4. Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant.
Theology and Philosophy have not ceased to occupy themselves, at least
indirectly, with the substance of these great questions, since they furnished
the subject-matter to Bossuet and Fénelon in their memorable controversy;
somewhat over-subtle although some of it was in its earlier phases, owing
to Fénelon’s chivalrous anxiety to defend, as far as possible, the very
expressions, often so nebulous and shifting, of his cousin, Madame Guyon.
(1) Indeed about twenty years before that controversy, Spinoza had, in his
Theologico-Political Treatise, and then, more impressively still, in his
Ethics, made a brilliant assault upon all, especially all religious, self-
seeking. Also on this point these writings showed that strange, pathetic
combination of grandly religious intuitions and instincts with a Naturalistic
system which, logically, leaves no room for those deepest requirements of
that great soul; and here they revealed, in addition, considerable injustice
towards the, doubtless very mixed and imperfect, motives of average
humanity.
True intuition speaks in his Treatise (published in 1670) in the words:
“Since the love of God is man’s supreme beatitude and the final end and
scope of all human actions: it follows that only that man conforms to the
divine law, who strives to love God, not from fear of punishment, nor from
the love of some other thing, such as delights, fame, and so forth, but from
this motive alone, that he knows God, or that he knows the knowledge and
love of God, to be his supreme end.” But a little further back we learn that
“the more we know the things of Nature, the greater and the more perfect
knowledge of God do we acquire”; a frank application of the pure
Pantheism of his reasoned system.
In his Ethics, again, a noble intuition finds voice where he says: “Even if
we did not know our Mind,” our individual soul, “to be eternal, we should
still put Piety and Religion and, in a word, all those virtues that are to be
referred to magnanimity and generosity, first in our esteem.” But he is
doubtless excessive in his picturing of the downright, systematic immorality
of attitude of ordinary men—the “slaves” and “mercenaries.” “Unless this
hope of laying aside the burdens of Piety and Religion after death and of
receiving the price of their service, and this fear of being punished by dire
punishments after death were in men, and if they, contrariwise, believed

that their minds would perish with their bodies: they would let themselves
go to their natural inclination and would decide to rule all their actions
according to their lust.” And he is doubtlessly, though nobly, excessive in
his contrary ideal: “He who loves God cannot strive that God shall love him
in return,”—an ideal which is, however, certainly in part determined by his
philosophy, which knows no ultimate abiding personality or consciousness
either in God or man.
Yet, once again, we have him at his inspiring best when, Catherine-like,
he tells us: “The supreme Good of those who pursue virtue is common to
them all, and all are equally able to rejoice in it”; and “this love towards
God is incapable of being stained by the passions of envy and bitterness,
but is increased in proportion as we figure to ourselves a larger number of
men joined to God by the same bonds of love”; when he declares: “we do
not enjoy beatitude because we master our passions; rather, contrariwise, do
we master our passions because we enjoy beatitude”; and when he insists,
with no doubt too indiscriminating, too Jacopone-like, a simplification,
upon what, in its substance, is a profound truth: “the intellectual,” the pure
“love of the soul for God is the very love of God, wherewith God loves
Himself.”[180]
(2) It was, however, the astonishingly circumspect and many-sided
Leibniz who, indefinitely smaller soul though he was, succeeded, perhaps
better than any other modern philosopher, in successfully combining the
divers constitutive elements of the act and state of Pure Love, when he
wrote in 1714: “Since true Pure Love consists in a state of soul which
makes me find pleasure in the perfections and the felicity of the object
loved by me, this love cannot but give us the greatest pleasure of which we
are capable, when God is that object. And, though this love be disinterested,
it already constitutes, even thus simply by itself, our greatest-good and
deepest interest.”
Or, as he wrote in 1698: “Our love of others cannot be separated from our
true good, nor our love of God from our felicity. But it is equally certain
that the consideration of our own particular good, as distinguished from the
pleasure which we taste in seeing the felicity of another, does not enter into
Pure Love.” And earlier still he had defined the act of loving as “the finding
one’s pleasure in the felicity of another”; and had concluded thence that
Love is for man essentially an enjoyment, although the specific motive of

love is not the pleasure or the particular good of him who loves, but the
good or the felicity of the beloved object.[181]
(3) Yet it is especially Kant who, with his predominant hostility to all
Eudaemonism in Morality and Religion, has, more than all others, renewed
the controversy as to the relations between virtue and piety on the one hand,
and self-seeking motives on the other, and who is popularly credited with
an entirely self-consistent antagonism to even such a wise and necessary
attitude as are the amended positions of Fénelon and those of Leibniz. And
yet I sincerely doubt whether (if we put aside the question as to the strictly
logical consequences of his Critical Idealism, such as that Idealism appears
in its greatest purity in the Critique of Pure Reason, 1781; and if we neglect
the numerous, often grossly unjust, Spinoza-like sallies against the
supposed undiluted mercenariness of ordinary piety, which abound in his
Religion within the Limits of Pure Reason, 1793), we could readily find any
explicit pronouncement hopelessly antagonistic to the Catholic Pure-Love
doctrine.
Certainly the position taken up towards this point in that very pregnant
and curious, largely-overlooked little treatise, The Canon of Pure Reason,
which (evidently an earlier and complete sketch), has been inserted by him
into his later, larger, but materially altered scheme of the Critique of 1781,
(where it now forms the Zweite Hauptstück of the Transcendentale
Methodenlehre, ed. Kehrbach, Reclam, pp. 603-628), appears to be
substantially acceptable.[182] “Happiness consists in the satisfaction of all
our inclinations, according to their various character, intensity, and duration.
The law of practical action, in so far as it is derived from the motive of
happiness, I call Pragmatic, a Rule of Good Sense; the same law, in so far
as it has for its motive only the becoming worthy of such happiness, I call
Moral, the Moral Law. Now Morality already by itself constitutes a system,
but Happiness does not do so, except in so far as Happiness is distributed in
exact accordance with Morality. But such a distribution is only possible in
the intelligible world,”—the world beyond phenomena which can be
reached by our reason alone—“and under a wise Originator and Ruler. Such
an One, together with life in such a world—a world which we are obliged to
consider as a future one—reason finds itself forced to assume, or else to
look upon the moral laws as empty phantoms, since the necessary result of
these laws,—a result which that same reason connects with their very idea,

—would have to fall away, if that assumption were to go. Hence every one
looks upon the moral laws as commandments, a thing which they could not
be, if they did not conjoin with their rule consequences of a priori
appropriateness, and hence if they did not carry with them promises and
threats. But this too they can do only if they lie within the compass of a
Single Necessary Being, Itself the Supreme Good, Which alone can render
possible such a unity embracing both means and end.—Happiness alone is,
for our reason, far from being the Complete Good, for reason does not
approve of Happiness unless it be united with the being worthy of
Happiness, i.e. Moral Rectitude. But Morality alone, and with it the simple
being worthy of happiness, is also far from the Complete Good. Even if
reason, free from any consideration of any interest of its own, were to put
itself in the position of a being that had to distribute all happiness to others
alone, it could not judge otherwise: for, in the complete idea of practical
action, both points are in essential conjunction, yet in suchwise that it is the
moral disposition which, as condition, first renders possible a sharing in
happiness, and not the prospect of happiness which first gives an opening to
the moral disposition. For, in this latter case, the disposition would not be
moral, and, consequently, would not deserve that complete happiness to
which reason can assign no other limitation than such as springs from our
own immoral attitude of will.”[183]
In his Foundation of the Metaphysic of Morals, 1785, the noble
apostrophe to the Good Will no doubt appears formally to proclaim as
possible and desirable a complete human disposition, in which no
considerations of Happiness play any part: “The good will is good, not
through what it effects or produces, not through its utility for the attainment
of any intention or end, but it is good through the quality of the volition
alone; that is, it is good in itself.…” “If, with its greatest efforts, nothing
were to be effected by it, and only the good will itself were to remain, this
bare will would yet shine in lonely splendour as a jewel,—as something
which has its full value in itself.” But further on he shows us how, after all,
“this good will cannot, then, be the only and the whole good, but still it is
the highest good and the condition for all the rest, even for our desire of
happiness.”[184] Certain exaggerations, which are next developed by him
here, shall be considered in a later chapter.
5. Four important points.

Here I will but put together, in conclusion, four positions which I have
rejoiced to find in two such utterly, indeed at times recklessly, independent
writers as Professor Georg Simmel of Berlin and Professor A. E. Taylor.
(1) Dr. Simmel declares, with admirable cogency: “The concept of
religion completely loses in Kant, owing to his rationalistic manner of
discovering in it a mere compound of the moral interest and the striving
after happiness, its most specific and deepest character. No doubt these two
apprehensions are also essential to religion, but precisely the direction in
which Kant conjoins them,—that duty issues in happiness, is the least
characteristic of religion, and is only determined by his Moralism, which
refuses to recognize the striving after happiness as a valuable motive. The
opposite direction appears to me as far more decisively a part of religion
and of its incomparable force: for we thus find in religion precisely that
ideal power, which makes it the duty of man to win his own salvation.
According to the Kantian Moralism, it is every man’s private affair how he
shall meet his requirement of happiness; and to turn such a private
aspiration into an objective, ideal claim, would be for Kant a contradiction
and abomination. In reality, however, religion itself requires that man
should have a care for his own welfare and beatitude, and in this consists its
incomparable force of attraction.”[185] Let the reader note how entirely this
agrees with, whilst properly safeguarding, the doctrine of Pure Love: it is
the precise position of the best critics of the unamended Fénelon.
(2) Professor Taylor insists that “it is possible to desire directly and
immediately pleasant experiences which are not my own.… Because it is I
who in every case have the pleasure of the anticipation, it is assumed that it
must be I who am to experience the realization of the anticipation.” Yet “it
is really no more paradoxical that I should anticipate with pleasure some
event which is not to form part of my own direct sensible experience, than it
is that I should find pleasure in the anticipation at twenty of myself at
eighty.” “The austerest saints will and can mortify themselves as a thing
well-pleasing to God.”[186] In this way the joy of each constituent of the
Kingdom of God in the joys of all the rest, and in the all-pervading joy of
God, is seen to be as possible as it is undoubtedly actual: the problem of the
relation between pleasure and egoism is solved.
(3) And Professor Taylor again insists upon how pleasant experiences,
which do not owe their pleasantness to their relation to a previous

anticipation, are not, properly speaking, good or worthy. It is by
“satisfactions” and not by mere “pleasures” that “even the most confirmed
Hedonist must compute the goodness of a life.… Only when the pleasant
experience includes in itself the realization of an idea is it truly good.”[187]
But, if so, then the experience will be good, not in proportion as it is
unpleasant, as Kant was so prone to imply; nor directly in proportion as it is
pleasant, although pleasantness will accompany or succeed it, of a finer
quality if not of a greater intensity, according as the idea which it embodies
is good: but directly in proportion to the goodness of that idea. Thus all
things licit, from sense to spirit, will find their place and function in such
acts, and in a life composed of such acts, spirit expressing itself in terms of
sense. And the purification, continuously necessary for the ever more
adequate expression of the one in and by the other, will be something
different from any attempt at suppressing this means of expression. Thus
here again the great Christian Incarnation-Doctrine appears as the deepest
truth, and as the solution of the problem as to the relations of pleasure and
duty.[188]
(4) And finally, as to the ever-present need and importance of a theory
concerning these matters, Professor Taylor points out, not only that some
such theory is necessary to the full human life, but that it must place an
infinite ideal before us: paradox though it may sound, nothing less is truly
practical, for “any end that is to be permanently felt as worth striving for,
must be infinite,” and therefore “in a sense infinitely remote”; and hence “if
indifference to the demand for a practicable ideal be the mark of a dreamer
or a fanatic, contentment with a finite and practicable ideal is no less
undeniably the mark of an esprit borné.”[189]
Here Fénelon has adequately interpreted the permanent and complete
requirements of the religious life and spirit. “You tell me,” he says to his
adversaries, “that ‘Christianity is not a school of Metaphysicians.’ All
Christians cannot, it is true, be Metaphysicians; but the principal
Theologians have great need to be such. It was by a sublime Metaphysic
that St. Augustine soared above the majority of the other Fathers, who were,
for the rest, as fully versed in Scripture and Tradition. It was by his lofty
Metaphysic that St. Gregory of Nazianzum has merited the distinguishing
title of Theologian. It is by Metaphysic that St. Anselm and St. Thomas
have been such great luminaries of the Church. True, the Church is not ‘a

school of Metaphysicians,’ who dispute without docility, as did the ancient
sects of philosophers. Yet she is a school in which St. Paul teaches that
Charity is more perfect than Hope, and in which the holiest Doctors declare,
in accordance with the principles of the Fathers, that Love is more perfect,
precisely because it ‘abides in God, not in view of any benefit that may
accrue to us from so doing.’” “I know well,” he writes to a friend, “that men
misuse the doctrines of Pure Love and Resignation; I know that there are
hypocrites who, under cover of such noble terms, overthrow the Gospel. Yet
it is the worst of all procedures to attempt the destruction of perfect things,
from a fear that men will make a wrong use of them.” Notwithstanding all
misuse of the doctrine—“the very perfection of Christianity is Pure
Love.”[190]

CHAPTER XII
THE AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES

Moving on now to the questions concerning the After-Life, it will be
convenient to consider them under five heads: the chief present-day
positions and perplexities with regard to belief in the After-Life in General;
the main implications and convictions inherent to an Eschatology such as
Catherine’s; and then the principal characteristics, difficulties, and helps of
her tendencies and teachings concerning Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. And
throughout the Chapter we shall busy ourselves directly only with the After-
Life in the sense of a heightened, or at least an equal, consciousness after
death, as compared to that which existed before death: the belief in a
shrunken state of survival, in non-annihilation, appearing to be as certainly
the universal minimum of belief as such a minimum is not Immortality.

I. The Chief Present-day Problems, Perplexities, and Requirements
with Regard to the After-Life in General.

Now I take our chief present-day problems, perplexities, and resultant
requirements with regard to the After-Life in general, to fall into three

groups, according as those problems are predominantly Historical, or
Philosophical, or directly Practical and Ethical.
1. Three Historical Difficulties.
The Historical group now brings very clearly and certainly before us the
striking non-universality, the startling lateness, and the generally strange
fitfulness and apparent unreasonableness characterizing the earliest stage of
belief in the soul’s heightened, or at least equivalent, consciousness after
death.
(1) Now with respect to the Non-Universality of the doctrine, it is true
that, in China, Confucianism is full of care for the dead. “Throughout the
Empire, the authorities are obliged to hold three annual sacrifices for the
refreshment and rest of the souls of the dead in general.” “It is hardly
doubtful that the cultus of Ancestors formed the chief institution in classical
Confucianism, and constituted the very centre of religion for the people.
Even now ancestor-worship is the only form of religion for which rules,
applicable to the various classes among the Emperor’s subjects, are laid
down in the Dynastic Statutes.” And Professor De Groot, from whom I am
quoting, gives an interesting conspectus of the numberless ways in which
the religious service of the dead penetrates Chinese life.[191]—Yet we hear
of Kong-Tse (Confucius) himself (551-478 b.c.), that, though he insisted
upon the most scrupulous execution of the three hundred rules of the then
extant temple-ceremonial, which were no doubt largely busy with the dead,
and though he said that one should sacrifice to the spirits as if they were
present, he designated, in several of his sayings, occupation with
theological problems as useless: “as long as we do not know men, how shall
we know spirits? As long as we do not understand life, how should we
fathom death?” And to questions relative to the spirits and the dead, he
would give evasive answers.[192] Thus the founder of the most characteristic
of the Chinese religions was without any clear and consistent conviction on
the point in question.
In India we find, for Brahmanic religion, certain unmistakable
Immortality-Doctrines (in the sense of the survival of the soul’s self-
consciousness), expressed in the hymns of the Rig-Veda.—But already, in
the philosophizings of the Upanishads, we get a world-soul, and this soul’s
exclusive permanence: “to attain to true unity, the very duality of subject

and object is to disappear. The terms Atman and Brahman here express the
true Being which vivifies all beings and appearances, and with which
cognizing man reunites himself whilst losing his individual existence.”[193]
And if we move on to Buddhism, with its hundreds of millions of
adherents in Burmah, Tibet, China, and Japan, we can learn, from the
classical work of Oldenberg, how interestingly deep down lies the reason
for the long conflict between scholars as to whether Nirvana is or is not to
be taken for the complete extinction of the individual soul. “Everything, in
the Buddhist dogmatic system, is part and parcel of a circle of Becoming
and of Dissolution: all things are but a Dhamma, a Sankhara; and all
Dhamma, all Sankhara are but temporary.… The Mutable, Conditioned is
here thinkable only as conditioned by another Mutable and Conditioned. If
we follow the dialectic consequence alone, there is no seeing how,
according to this system, there can remain over, when a succession and
mutual destruction of things conditioning and of things conditioned has run
its course, anything but a pure vacuum.” And we have also such a saying of
the Buddha as the following. “Now if, O disciples, the Ego (atta) and
anything appertaining to the Ego (attaniya) cannot be comprehended with
accuracy and certainty, is not then the faith which declares: ‘This is the
world, and this is the Ego; this shall I become at death,—firm, constant,
eternal, unchangeable,—thus shall I be there, throughout eternity,’—is not
this sheer empty folly?” “How should it not, O Lord, be sheer empty folly?”
answer the disciples. “One who spoke thus,” is Oldenberg’s weighty
comment, “cannot have been far from the conviction that Nirvana is
annihilation. Yet it is understandable how the very thinkers, who were
capable of bearing this consequence, should have hesitated to raise it to the
rank of an official dogma of the community.… Hence the official doctrine
of the Buddhist Church attained the form, that, on the question of the real
existence of the Ego, of whether or not the perfected saint lives on after
death, the exalted Buddha has taught nothing. Indeed the legally obligatory
doctrine of the old community required of its votaries an explicit
renunciation of all knowledge concerning the existence or non-existence of
completely redeemed souls.”
“Buddhism,” so Oldenberg sums up the matter, with, I think, the
substantial adhesion of all present-day competent authorities, “teaches that
there is a way out of the world of created things, out into the dark Infinite.

Does this way lead to new being? or does it lead to nothingness? Buddhist
belief maintains itself on the knife’s edge of these alternatives. The desire of
the heart, as it longs for the Eternal, is not left without something, and yet
the thinking mind is not given a something that it could grasp and retain.
The thought of the Infinite, the Eternal, could not be present at all, and yet
vanish further away than here, where, a mere breath and on the point of
sinking into sheer nothingness, it threatens to disappear altogether.”[194]
This vast Buddhist community, numbering, perhaps, a third of the human
race, should not, then, be forgotten, when we urge the contrary instances of
the religions of Assyria and Babylonia; of Egypt; of Greece and Rome; and,
above all, of the Jews and Christianity.
Yet it is well to remember that such non-universality of belief is at least
as real, to this very hour, for such a fundamental religious truth and practice
as Monotheism and Monolatry; such purely Ethical convictions as
Monogamy and the Illicitness of Slavery; such a plain dictate of the
universal humanitarian ideal as the illegitimacy of the application of
physical compulsion in matters of religious conviction; and such directly
demonstrable psychical and natural facts as subconsciousness in the human
soul, the sexual character of plants, and the earth’s rotundity and rotation
around the sun. In none of these cases can we claim more than that the
higher, truer doctrine,—that is, the one which explains and transcends the
element of truth contained in its predecessor and opposite,—is explicitly
reached by a part only of humanity, and is but implied and required by other
men, at their best. Yet this is clearly enough for leaving us free to decide,—
reasonably conclusive evidence for their truth being forthcoming,—in
favour of the views of the minority: since the assumption of an equality of
spiritual and moral insight and advance throughout mankind is as little
based upon fact, as would be the supposition of men’s equal physical
strength or height, or of any other quality or circumstance of their nature
and environment.
(2) The lateness of the doctrine’s appearance, precisely in the cases where
there can be no doubt of its standing for a conviction of an endless
persistence of a heightened consciousness after death,—that is, amongst the
Greeks (and Romans) and the Jews (and Christians),—has now been well
established by critical historical research.

With regard to the Greeks,[195] the matter is particularly plain, since we
can still trace even in Plato, (427 to 347 b.c.), who, next to Our Lord
Himself and to St. Paul, is doubtless the greatest and most influential
teacher of full individual Immortality that the world has seen, two periods
of thought in this matter, and can show that the first was without any such
certain conviction. In his Apology of Socrates, written soon after the
execution in 399 b.c., he makes his great master, close to his end, declare
that death would bring to man either a complete unconsciousness, like to a
dreamless sleep, or a transition into another life,—a life here pictured like
to the Homeric Hades. Both possibilities Socrates made to accept
resignedly, in full reliance on the justice of the Gods, and to look no further;
how should he know what is known to no man?—And this is Plato’s own
earlier teaching. For in the very Republic which, in its chronologically later
constituents, (especially in Book V, 471c, to the end of Book VIII, Book IX,
560d to 588a, and Book X up to 608b), so insists upon and develops the
truth and importance of Immortality in the strictest, indeed the sublimest
sense: we get, in its earlier portions, (especially in Book II, 10c, to Book V,
460c), no trace of any such conviction. For, in these earlier passages, the
Guardians in the Ideal State are not to consider what may come after death:
the central theme is the manner in which Justice carries with it its own
recompense; and the rewards, that are popularly wont to be placed before
the soul, are referred to ironically,—Socrates is determined to do without
such hopes. In those later portions, on the contrary, there is the greatest
insistence upon the importance of caring, not for this short life alone, but
for the soul’s “whole time” and for what awaits it after death. And in the
still later parts, (as in Books VI and VII), the sublimest form of Immortality
is presupposed as true and actual throughout. Thus in Greece it is not till
about 390-380 b.c., and in Plato himself not till his middle life, that we get a
quite definite and final doctrine of the Immortality of all souls, and of a
blessed after-existence for every just and holy life here below.
For the survival after the body’s death, indubitably attributed to the
Psyche in the Homeric Poems, is conceived there, throughout, as a
miserably shrunken consciousness, and one which is dependent for its
continuance upon the good offices bestowed by the survivors upon the
corpse and grave. And the translation of the still living Menelaus to Elysium
(Od. IV, 560-568) is probably a later insertion; belongs to a small class of
exceptional cases; implies the writer’s inability to conceive a heightened

consciousness for the soul, after the soul’s separation from the body; and is
based, not upon any virtue or reward, but upon Menelaus’s family-
relationship to Zeus. Ganymede gets similarly translated because of his
physical beauty (II. XX, 232 seq.).
Hesiod, though later than Homer as a writer, gives us, in his account of
the Five Ages of the World (Works and Days, ll. 109-201), some traces of
an Animistic conception of a heightened life of the bodiless soul beyond the
grave,—a conception which had been neglected or suppressed by Homer,
but which had evidently been preserved alive in the popular religion of, at
least, Central Greece. Yet Hesiod knows of such a life only for the Golden
and for the Silver Ages, and for some miraculous, exceptional cases of the
fourth, the Heroic Age: already in the third, the Bronze Age, and still more
emphatically in his own fifth, the Iron Age, there are no such consolations:
nothing but the shrunken consciousness of the Homeric after-death Psyche
is, quite evidently, felt by him to be the lot of all souls in the hard, iron
present.
The Cultus of the Heroes is already registered in Draco’s Athenian Laws,
in about 620 b.c., as a traditional custom. And these Heroes have certainly
lived at one time as men upon earth, and have become heroes only after
death; their souls, though severed from the body, live a heightened
imperishable life, indeed one that can mightily help men here below and
now,—so at Delphi and at Salamis against the Persians. Yet here again each
case of such an elevation was felt to be a miracle, an exception incapable of
becoming a universal law: not even the germ of a belief in the Immortality
of the soul as such seems to be here.
The Cultus of the Nether-World Deities, of the Departed generally, and,
as the culmination of all this movement, the Eleusinian Mysteries, must not
be conceived as involving or as leading to, any belief in the ecstatic
elevation of the soul, or consciousness of its God-likeness; and such
unending bliss as is secured, is gained by men, not because they are
virtuous and devout, but through their initiation into the Mysteries. Rhode
assures us, rightly I think, that “it remains unproved that, during the
classical period of Greek culture, the belief in Judges and a Judgment to be
held in Hades over the deeds done by men on earth, had struck root among
the people”; Professor Percy Gardner adds his great authority to the same

conclusion.[196] Here again it is Plato who is the first to take up a clearly
and consistently spiritual and universalistic position.
Indeed it is only in the predominantly neuropathic, indeed largely
immoral and repulsive, forms of the Dionysiac sect and movement, (at
work, perhaps, already in the eighth century b.c. and which leads on to the
formation of the more aristocratic and priestly Orphic communities) that a
demonstrable and direct belief arose in the soul’s intrinsic God-likeness, or
even divinity, and in its immortality, or even eternity; and that stimulations,
materials, and conceptions were furnished to Greek thought, which are
traceable wheresoever it henceforth inclines to belief in the soul’s intrinsic
Immortality.
Yet the leaven spread but slowly into philosophy. For the Ionian
philosophers, and among them Heraclitus, the impressive teacher of the flux
of all things, flourish from about 600 to 430 b.c.; but, naïve Materialists and
Pantheists as they are, they frankly exclude all survival of individual
consciousness after death. The Eleatic philosophers live between 550 and
450 b.c., and are all busy with a priori logical constructions of the physical
world, conceived as sole and self-explanatory; and amongst them is
Parmenides, the powerful propounder of the complete identity and
immutability of all reality. Those transcendent spiritual beliefs appear first
as part, indeed as the very foundation, although still rather of a mode of life
than of a formal philosophy, in the teaching and community of Pythagoras,
who seems to have lived about 580 to 490 b.c., and who certainly emigrated
from Asia Minor to Croton in Southern Italy. The soul appears here as
intrinsically immortal, indeed without beginning and without end. And then
Immortality forms one (the mystical) of the two thoroughly heterogeneous
elements of the, otherwise predominantly Ionic and Materialistic,
philosophy of Empedocles of Agrigentum in Sicily, about 490 to 435 b.c. In
both these cases the Dionysiac-Orphic provenance of the “Immortality”-
doctrines is clearly apparent.
And then, among the poets who bridge over the period up to Plato, we
find Pindar, who, alongside of reproductions of the ordinary, popular
conceptions, gives us at times lofty, Orphic-like teachings as to the eternity,
the migration, and the eventual persistent rest and happiness of the just
Soul, and as to the suffering of the unjust one; Aeschylus, who primarily
dwells upon the Gods’ judgment in this life, and who makes occasional

allusions to the after-life which are partly still of the Homeric type;
Sophocles, who indeed refers to the special privileges which, in the after-
life, attend upon the souls that have here been initiated into the Eleusinian
Mysteries, and who causes Oedipus to be translated, whilst still alive, to
Other-World happiness, but who knows nothing of an unceasing heightened
consciousness for all men after death; and Euripides, who, showing plainly
the influence of the Sophists, gives expression, alongside of Pantheistic
identifications of the soul and of the aether, to every kind of misgiving and
doubt as to any survival after death.
And as to the appearance of the doctrine among the Jews, we again find a
surprising lateness. I follow here, with but minor contributions and
modifications from other writers and myself, the main conclusions of Dr.
Charles’s standard Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life,
London, 1899, whose close knowledge of the subject is unsurpassed, and
who finds as many and as early attestations as are well-nigh findable by
serious workers.[197]
“The primitive beliefs of the individual Israelite regarding the future life,
being derived from Ancestor-worship, were implicitly antagonistic to
Yahwism, from its first proclamation by Moses.… This antagonism
becomes explicit and results in the final triumph of Yahwism.” And to the
early Israelite, even under Yahwism, “the religious unit was” not the
individual but “the family or tribe.” Thus, even fully six centuries after
Moses, “the message of the prophets of the eighth century,” Amos, Hosea,
Isaiah, Micah, “is still directed to the nation, and the judgments they
proclaim are collective punishment for collective guilt. It is not till late in
the seventh century b.c. that the problem of individual retribution really
emerged, and received its first solution in the teaching of Jeremiah.” And
“the further development of these ideas,” by the teaching of Ezekiel and of
some of the Psalms and Proverbs, as regards individual responsibility and
retribution in this life, and by the deep misgivings and keen questionings of
Job and Ecclesiastes, as to the adequacy of this teaching, “led inevitably to
the conception of a blessed life beyond the grave.”
Yet throughout the Hebrew Old Testament the Eschatology of the Nation
greatly predominates over that of the Individual. Indeed in pre-Exilic times
“the day of Yahwe,” with its national judgments, constitutes the all but
exclusive subject of the prophetic teaching as to the future. Only from the

Exile, (597 to 538 b.c.), onwards, does the eschatological development
begin to grow in complexity, for now the individualism first preached by
Jeremiah begins to maintain its claim also. But not till the close of the
fourth century, or the beginning of the third century b.c., do the separate
eschatologies of the individual and of the nation issue finally in their
synthesis: the righteous individual will participate in the Messianic
Kingdom, the righteous dead of Israel will arise to share therein,—thus in
Isaiah xxvi, 1-19, a passage which it is difficult to place earlier than about
334 b.c. The resurrection is here limited to the just. In Daniel xii, 2, which
is probably not earlier than 165 b.c., the resurrection is extended, not indeed
to all members of Israel, but, with respective good and evil effects, to its
martyrs and apostates.
And the slowness and incompleteness of the development throughout the
Hebrew Old Testament is strikingly illustrated by the great paucity of texts
which yield, without the application of undue pressure, any clear conviction
or hope of a heightened, or even a sheer, maintenance of the soul’s this-life
consciousness and force after death. Besides the passages just indicated, Dr.
Charles can only find Psalms xlix and lxxiii, and Job xix, 25-27, all three,
according to him, later than Ezekiel, who died in 571 b.c.[198] The textually
uncertain and obscure Job-passage (xix, 25, 26) must be discounted, since it
evidently demands interpretation according to the plain presupposition and
point of the great poem as a whole.—And the same result is reached by the
numerous, entirely unambiguous, passages which maintain the negative
persuasion. In the hymn put into the mouth of the sick king Hezekiah, for
about 713 b.c., (a composition which seems to be very late, perhaps only of
the second century b.c.), we hear: “The grave cannot praise Thee … they
that go down into the pit cannot hope for truth. The living, the living, he
shall praise Thee, as I do this day.” And the Psalter contains numerous
similar declarations. Thus vi, 5: “In death there is no remembrance of Thee:
in the grave who shall give Thee thanks?” and cxv, 17: “The dead praise not
the Lord, neither any that go down into silence; but we praise the Lord.”
See also Psalms xxx, 19; lxxxviii, 11.
Indeed the name for the Departed is Rephaim, “the limp, the powerless
ones.” Stade well says: “According to the ancient Israelitish conception the
entire human being, body and soul, outlasts death, whilst losing all that
makes life worth living. That which persists in Sheol for all eternity is the

form of man, emptied of all content. Antique thought ignores as yet that
there exists no such thing as a form without substance. The conception has
as little in common with the conviction of the Immortality of the Soul,
which found its chief support in Greek ideas, as with the expectation of the
Resurrection, which grew out of the Jewish Messianic hope, or with the
Christian anticipation of Eternal Life, which is also based upon religious
motives.”[199]
Yet, with respect to this objection from the lateness of the doctrine, we
must not forget that fully consistent Monotheism and Monogamy are also
late, but not, on that account, less true or less precious; and indeed that, as a
universal rule, the human mind has acquired at all adequate convictions as
to most certain and precious truths but slowly and haltingly. This process is
manifest even in Astronomy, Geology, Botany, Human Anatomy. It could
not fail to be, not less but more the case in a matter like this which, if it
concerns us most deeply, is yet both too close to us to be readily appreciated
in its true proportions, and too little a matter of mathematical demonstration
or of direct experience not to take much time to develop, and not to demand
an ever-renewed acquisition and purification, being, as it is, the postulate
and completion of man’s ethical and spiritual faiths, at their deepest and
fullest.
(3) And with regard to the unsatisfactory character of some of the earliest
manifestations of the belief, this point is brought home to us, with startling
vividness, in the beginnings of the doctrine in ancient Greece. For Rhode’s
very careful and competent examination of precisely this side of the whole
question shows conclusively (even though I think, with Crusius, that he has
overlooked certain rudiments of analogous but healthy experiences and
beliefs in pre-Dionysiac Greece) how new and permanently effective a
contribution to the full doctrine was made, for the Hellenic world and hence
indirectly for all Western humanity, by the self-knowledge gained in that
wildly orgiastic upheaval, those dervish-like dances and ecstatic fits during
the Dionysian night-celebrations on the Thracian mountain-sides. Indeed
Rhode traces how from these experiences, partly from the continuation of
them, partly from the reaction against them, on the part of the intensely
dualistic and ascetic teaching and training of the Orphic sect, there arose,
and filtered through to Pythagoras, to Plato, and to the whole Neo-Platonist
school, the clear conception and precise terminology concerning ecstatic,

enthusiastic states, the divinity and eternity of the human soul, its punitive
lapse into and imprisonment within the body, and its need of purification
throughout the earthly life and of liberation through death from this its
incurably accidental and impeding companion.—Thus we get here,
concerning one of the chief sources of at least the formulation of our belief
in Immortality, what looks a very nest of suspicious, repulsive
circumstances:—psycho-physical phenomena, which, quite explicable to,
and indeed explained by, us now as in nowise supernatural, could not fail to
appear portentous to those men who first experienced them; unmoral or
immoral attitudes and activities of mind and will; and demonstrable
excesses of feeling and conception as regards both the static goodness, the
downright divinity, eternity, and increateness of the soul, and the unmixed
evil of the body with its entirely disconnected alongsideness to the soul.
Does not all this spell a mass of wild hallucination, impurity, fanaticism,
and superstition?
Yet here again it behoves us, if not to accept, yet also not to reject, in
wholesale fashion and in haste. For the profoundly experienced Professor
Pierre Janet shows[200] us, what is now assumed as an axiom, and as the
ultimate justification of the present widespread interest in the study of
Hysteria, that “we must admit for the moral world the great principle
universally admitted for the physical world since Claude Bernard,—viz.
that the laws of illness are, at bottom, the same as those of health, and that,
in the former, there is but the exaggeration or the diminution of phenomena
which existed already in the latter.”
And if thus our recent studies of morbid mentalities have been able to
throw a flood of light upon the mechanism and character of the healthy
mind, a mind more difficult to analyze precisely because of the harmonious
interaction of its forces, there is nothing very surprising if man, in the past,
learnt to know his own fundamental nature better in and through periods of
abnormal excitation than in those of normal balance. And the resultant
doctrines in the case in question only required, and demand again and
again, a careful pruning and harmonizing to show forth an extraordinary
volume of abiding truth. The insuppressible difference between mind and
matter, and the distinction between the fully recollected soul (intuitive
reason), and explicit reasoning; the immeasurable superiority of mind over
matter, and the superiority of that full reason over this “thin” reasoning; the

certainty, involved in all our inevitable mental categories and assumptions
and in all our motives for action, of this mind and intuition being more like
the cause of all things than are those other inferior realities and activities;
the indestructibleness of the postulates and standards of objective and
infinite Beauty, Truth, Goodness, of our consciousness of being intrinsically
bound to them, and of our inmost humanity and its relative greatness being
measurable by just this our consciousness of this our obligation, and hence
by the keenness of our sense of failure, and by our striving after purification
and the realization of our immanental possibilities: all this remains deeply
fruitful and true.
And those crude early experiences and analyses certainly point to what,
even now, are our most solid reasons for belief in Immortality: for if man’s
mind and soul can thus keenly suffer from the sense of the contingency and
mutability of all things directly observed by it without and within, it must
itself be, at least in part or potentially, outside of this flux which it so
vividly apprehends as not Permanence, not Rest, not true Life. Let us
overlook, then, and forgive the first tumultuous, childishly rude and clumsy,
mentally and emotionally hyper-aesthetic forms of apprehension of these
great spiritual facts and laws, forms which are not, after all, more
misleading than is the ordinary anaesthetic condition of our apprehending
faculties towards these fundamental forces and testimonies of our lot and
nature. Not the wholesale rejection, then, of even those crude Dionysian
witnessings, still less of the already more clarified Orphic teaching, and
least of all of Plato’s great utilizations and spiritualizations can be required
of us, but only a reinterpretation of those first impressions and of mankind’s
analogous experiences, and a sifting and testing of the latter by the light of
all that has been deeply lived through, and seriously thought out, by
spiritually awake humanity ever since.—And we should remember that the
history of the doctrine among the Jews is, as has already been intimated,
grandly free from any such suspicious occasions and concomitances.
2. Two Philosophical Difficulties.
Yet it is precisely this latter, social, body-and-soul-survival doctrine
which brings the second group of objections, the philosophical difficulties,
to clear articulation. For thus we are unavoidably driven to one or other of
the equally difficult alternatives, of a bodiless life of the soul, and of a
survival or resurrection of the body.

(1) Christianity, by its explicit teachings, and even more by its whole
drift and interior affinities, requires the survival of all that is essential to the
whole man, and conceives this whole as constituted, not by thought alone
but also by feeling and will and the power of effectuation; so that the body,
or some unpicturable equivalent to it, seems necessary to this physico-
spiritual, ultimately organic conception of what man is and must continue to
be, if he is to remain man at all.—And Psychology, on its part, is showing
us, more and more, how astonishingly wide and deep is the dependence, at
least for their actuation, of the various functions and expressions of man’s
character and spirit upon his bodily frame. For not only is the reasoning
faculty seen, ever since Aristotle, to depend, for its material and stimulation,
upon the impressions of the senses, nor can we represent it to ourselves
otherwise than as seated in the brain or in some such physical organism, but
the interesting Lange-James observations and theory make it likely that also
the emotions,—the feelings as distinct from sensations,—ever result, as a
matter of fact, from certain foregoing, physico-neural impressions and
modifications, which latter follow upon this or that perception of the mind,
a perception which would otherwise, as is the case in certain neural lesions
and anaesthesias, remain entirely dry and unemotional.[201]—And the sense
of the Infinite, which we have had such reason to take as the very centre of
religion, arises ever, within man’s life here below, in contrast to, and as a
concomitant and supplementation of, his perception of the Finite and
Contingent, and hence not without his senses being alive and active.
Now all this fits in admirably with the whole Jewish-Christian respect
for, high claims upon, and constant training of the body, the senses, the
emotions, and with the importance attached to the Visible and Audible,—
History, Institutions, Society.—Yet our difficulties are clear. For however
spiritually we may conceive a bodily survival or resurrection; however
completely we may place the identity of the various stages of the body in
this life, and the sameness between the body before death and after the
resurrection, in the identity of its quasi-creator, the body-weaving soul, we
can in nowise picture to ourselves such a new, indefinitely more spiritual,
incorporation, and we bring upon ourselves acute difficulties, for both
before and after this unpicturable event. Before the resurrection there would
have to be unconsciousness between death and that event; but thus the
future life is broken up, and for no spiritual reason. Or there would be
consciousness; but then the substitute for the body, that occasions this

consciousness, would, apparently, render all further revivification of the
body unnecessary. And if we take the resurrection as effected, we promptly
feel how mixed and clumsy, how inadequate, how less, and not more, than
the best and noblest elements of our experience and aspirations even here
and now, is such a, still essentially temporal and spacial, mode of existence.
I take it that, against all this, we can but continue to maintain two points.
The soul’s life after bodily death is not a matter of experience or of logical
demonstration, but a postulate of faith and a consequence from our
realization of the human spirit’s worth; and hence is as little capable of
being satisfactorily pictured, as are all the other great spiritual realities
which can nevertheless be shown to be presupposed and implicitly affirmed
by every act of faith in the final truth and abiding importance of anything
whatsoever.—And again, it is not worth while to attempt to rescue,
Aristotle-wise, just that single, and doubtless not the highest, function of
man’s spirit and character, his dialectic faculty, or even his intellectual
intuitive power, for the purpose of thus escaping, or at least minimizing, the
difficulties attendant upon the belief in Immortality. If we postulate, as we
do, man’s survival, we must postulate, without being able to fill in or to
justify any details of the scheme, the survival of all that may and does
constitute man’s true and ultimate personality. How much or how little this
may precisely mean, we evidently know but very imperfectly: but we know
enough to be confident that it means more than the abstractive, increasingly
dualistic school of Plato, Philo, Plotinus, Proclus would allow.
(2) But speculative reason seems also to raise a quite general objection,
based upon man’s littleness within the immense Universe, and upon the
arbitrariness of excepting those tiny points, those centres of human
consciousness, men’s souls, from the flux, the ceaseless becoming and
undoing, of all the other parts of that mighty whole, immortal, surely, only
as a whole.
Here we can safely say that, at least in this precise form, the difficulty
springs predominantly not from reason or experience, but from an untutored
imagination. For all our knowledge of that great external world, which this
objection supposes to englobe our small internal world, as a part inferior, or
at most but equal, to the other parts of that whole, is dependent upon this
interior world of ours; and however truly inherent in that external world we
may hold that world’s laws to be, those laws can, after all, be shown to be

as truly the result of our own mind’s spontaneous work,—an architectonic
building up by this mind of the sense-impressions conveyed to it from
without. And that whole Universe, in so far as it is material, cannot be
compared, either in kind or in dignity, to Mind: only the indications there,
parallel in this to our experiences within our own mind, of a Mind and
Spirit infinitely greater and nobler than, yet with a certain affinity to, our
own,—only these constitute that outer world as great as this our inner
world. Indeed it is plain that Materialism is so far from constituting the
solution to the problem of existence, that even Psycho-Physical Parallelism,
even the attribution of any ultimate reality to Matter, are on their trial. It is
anyhow already clear that, of the two, it is easier and nearer to the truth to
maintain that Matter and its categories are simply modes in the
manifestation of Mind to minds and in the apprehension of Mind by minds,
than to declare Mind to be but a function or resultant of Matter.[202]
But if all this is so, then no simply sensible predominance of the sensible
Universe, nor even any ascertainment of the mere flux and interchange of
and between all things material and their elements, can reasonably affect the
question as to the superiority and permanence of Mind. But we shall return,
in the next chapter, to the difficulties special to the Immortality of
individual human spirits or personalities,—for this is, I think, the point at
which the problem is still acute.
3. Three Ethico-Practical Difficulties.
The last group of objections is directly practical and ethical, and raises
three points: the small space and influence occupied and exercised,
apparently, by such a belief, in the spiritual life of even serious persons; the
seemingly selfish, ungenerous type of religion and of moral tone fostered
by definite belief in, or at least occupation with, the thought of an individual
future life, as contrasted with the nobility of tone engendered by such
denials or abstractions from all such beliefs as we find in Spinoza and
Schleiermacher; and, finally, the plausibility of the teaching, on the part of
some distinguished thinkers and poets, that a positive conviction of this our
short earthly life being the sole span of our individual consciousness is
directly productive of a certain deep tenderness, an heroic concentration of
attention, and a virile truthfulness, which are unattainable, which indeed are
weakened or rendered impossible by, the necessarily vague anticipation of

an unending future life; a hope which, where operative at all, can but dwarf
and deaden all earthly aspiration and endeavour.
(1) As to the first point, which has perhaps never been more brilliantly
affirmed than by Mr. Schiller,[203] I altogether doubt whether the numerous
appearances, which admittedly seem to point that way, are rightly
interpreted by such a conclusion. For it is, for one thing, most certainly
possible to be deeply convinced of the reality and importance of the soul’s
heightened after-life, and to have no kind of belief or interest in Psychical
Research, at least in such Research as an intrinsically valuable aid to any
specifically religious convictions. No aloofness from such attempts to find
spiritual realities at the phenomenal level can, (unless it is clear that the
majority of educated Western Europeans share the naïve assumptions of this
position), indicate negation of, or indifference to, the belief in Immortality.
—And next, it is equally certain that precisely the most fruitful form of the
belief is that which conceives the After-life as already involved in this one,
and which, therefore, dwells specially, not upon the posteriority in time, but
upon the difference in kind of that spiritual life of the soul which, even hic
et nunc, can be sought after and experienced, in ever imperfect degrees no
doubt, yet really and more and more. Here we ever get an approach to
Simultaneity and Eternity, instead of sheer succession and clock-time: and
here the fundamental attitude of the believer would appear only if pressed
to deny or exclude the deathlessness of the spirit and its life,—the usual
latency and simple implication of the positive conviction, in nowise
diminishing this conviction’s reality.—And, finally, it would have to be
seen whether those who are indifferent or sceptical as to Immortal or
Eternal Life, are appreciably fewer and largely other than those who are
careless as to the other deep implications and requirements of spiritual
experience. We may well doubt whether they would turn out to be so.
(2) As to the second point, we have already found how utterly
insuppressible is the pleasure, normally concomitant upon every act of
noble self-conquest; and how, though we can and should perform such and
all other acts, as far as possible, from the ultimate, determining motive of
thereby furthering the realization of the Kingdom of God, there can be no
solid truthfulness or sane nobility in insisting upon attempts at thinking
away and denying the fact and utility of that concomitant pleasure. But if
so, then a further, other-world extension of that realization and of this

concomitant happiness, and a belief here below in such an eventual
extension, cannot of themselves be ignoble or debasing. Occasions for
every degree and kind of purely selfish and faultily natural acts, of acts
inchoatively supernatural but still predominantly slavish, reappear here, in
close parallel to the variety of disposition displayed by men towards every
kind of reality and ideal, towards the Family, Science, the State, Humanity,
where the same concomitances and the same high uses and mean abuses are
ever possible and actual. Neither here nor there should we attempt to
impoverish truth and life, in order to exclude the possibility of their abuse.
—And it would, of course, be profoundly unfair to contrast such a rarely
noble spirit as Spinoza among the deniers with the average mind from
among the affirmers. The average or the majority of the deniers would not, I
think, appear as more generous and devoted than the corresponding average
or majority on the other side.
(3) And as to the supposed directly beneficial effects of a positive denial
of Immortality, such as have been sung for us by George Eliot and Giovanni
Pascoli, we can safely affirm that the special tendernesses and quiet
heroisms, deduced by them from such a negation, are too obviously
dependent upon spiritual implications and instincts, for us to be able to put
them directly to the credit of that denial. Only in so far as Immortality were
not a postulate intrinsically connected with belief in objective and
obligatory Beauty, Truth, and Goodness,—in God as our origin and end,—
could its persistent and deliberate denial not be injurious to these
fundamental convictions and to the ultimate health of the soul’s life: and of
this intrinsic non-connection there is no sufficient evidence.—Certainly, in
such a case as Spinoza’s, the same strain of reasoning which makes him
abandon individual Immortality Ought, in logic, to prevent him, a mere
hopelessly determined link in the Natura Naturata, from ever attaining to
the free self-dedication of himself, as now a fully responsible member of
the Natura Naturans. And if not all the grand depth of his spiritual instinct
and moral nobility, and its persistence in spite of its having no logical room
in the fixedly naturalistic element of his teaching, can be urged as an
argument in favour of the ultimate truth and ethical helpfulness of that
whole element, neither can it be urged with respect to what is presumably
one part of that element, his denial of personal Immortality.

II. Catherine’s General After-Life Conceptions.

Now Catherine’s general After-Life Conceptions in part bring into
interesting prominence, in part really meet and overcome, the perplexities
and mutually destructive alternatives which we have just considered. I shall
here again leave over to the next chapter the simply ultimate questions, such
as that of the pure Eternity versus the Unendingness of the soul; but shall
allow myself, as to one set of her general ideas, a little digression as to the
probability of their ultimate literary suggestion by Plato.—These Platonic
passages probably reached her too indirectly, and by means and in forms
which I have too entirely failed to discover, for me to be able to discuss
them in my chapter devoted to her assured and demonstrably direct literary
sources. But these sayings of Plato greatly help to illustrate the meaning of
her doctrine.—I shall group these, her general, positions and implications
under four heads, and shall consider three of these as, in substance,
profoundly satisfactory, but one of them, the second, as acceptable only
with many limitations, although this second has obviously much influenced
the form given by her to several of those other conceptions.
1. Forecasts of the Hereafter, based upon present experience.
First, then, we get, as the fundamental presupposition of the whole
Eschatology, a grandly sane, simple, and profound doctrine formulated over
and over again and applied throughout, with a splendid consistency, as the
key and limit to all her anticipations and picturings. Only because of the
fact, and of our conviction of the fact, of the unbroken continuity and
identity of God with Himself, of the human soul with itself, and of the
deepest of the relations subsisting between that God and the soul, across the
chasm formed by our body’s death, and only in proportion as we can and do
experience and achieve, during this our earthly life, certain spiritual laws
and realities of a sufficiently elemental, universal, and fruitful, more or less
time- and space-less character, can we (whilst ever remembering the
analogical nature of such picturings even as to the soul’s life here) safely
and profitably forecast certain general features of the future which is thus
already so largely a present. But, given these conditions in the present, we
can and should forecast the future, to the extent implied. And as Plato’s
great imaginative projection, his life-work, the Republic, achieves its
original end, (of making more readily understandable, by objectivizing on a

large scale, the life of the inner city of our own soul), in so far as he has
rightly understood the human soul and has found appropriate
representations of its powers, laws, and ideals in his future commonwealth,
even if we cannot accept this picture for political purposes and in all its
details: so is it also with Catherine’s projection, which, if bolder in its
subject-matter, is, most rightly, indefinitely more general in its indications
than is Plato’s great diagram of the soul. Man’s spiritual personality, being
held by her to survive death,—to retain its identity and an at least
equivalent consciousness, of that identity,—the deepest experiences of that
personality before the body’s death are conceived as re-experienced by it, in
a heightened degree and form, after death itself. Hence these great pictures,
of what the soul will experience then, would remain profoundly true of
what the soul seeks and requires now, even if there were no then at all.
And note particularly how only with regard to one stage and condition of
the spirit’s future life,—that of the purification of the imperfect soul,—does
she indulge in any at all direct doctrine or detailed picturing; and this,
doubtless, not only because she has experienced much concerning this
matter in her own life here, but also because the projection of these
experiences would still give us, not the ultimate state, but more or less only
a prolongation of our mixed, joy-in-suffering life upon earth. As to the two
ultimate states, we get only quite incidental glimpses, although even these
are strongly marked by her general position and method.
2. Catherine’s forecasts and present experience correspondingly limited.
And next, coming to the projection itself, we naturally find it to present
all the strength and limitations of her own spiritual experiences which are
thus projected: her attitude towards the body and towards human
fellowship, (two subjects which are shown to be closely inter-related by the
continuous manner in which they stand and fall together throughout the
history of philosophy and religion,) thus constitute the second general
peculiarity of her Eschatology. We have already noted, in her life, her
strongly ecstatic, body-ignoring, body-escaping type of religion; and how,
even in her case, it tended to starve the corporate, institutional conceptions
and affections. Here, in the projection, we find both the cause and the effect
again, and on a larger scale. Her continuous psycho-physical discomforts
and keen thirst for a unity and simplicity as rapid and complete as possible,
the joy and strength derived from ecstatic habits and affinities, would all

make her, without even herself being aware of it, drop all further thought as
to the future fate of that oppressive “prison-house” from which her spirit
had at last got free.
Now such non-occupation with the fate of the body and of her fellow-
souls may appear quite appropriate in her Purgatorial Eschatology, yet we
cannot but find that, even here, it already possesses grave disadvantages,
and that it persists throughout all her After-life conceptions. For in all the
states and stages of the soul we get a markedly unsocial, a sola cum solo
picture. And yet there is, perhaps, no more striking difference, amongst
their many affinities, between Platonism and Christianity than the intense
Individualism which marks the great Greek’s doctrine, and the profoundly
social conception which pervades Our Lord’s own teaching,—in each case
as regards the next life as well as this one. Plotinus’s great culminating
commendation of “the flight of the alone to the Alone” continues Plato’s
tradition; whereas, if even St. Paul and the Joannine writings speak at times
as though the individual soul attained to its full personality in and by direct
intercourse with God alone, the Synoptic Gospels, and at bottom also those
two great lovers of Our Lord’s spirit, never cease to emphasize the social
constituent of the soul’s life both here and hereafter. The Kingdom of
Heaven, the Soul of the Church, as truly constitutes the different
personalities, their spirituality and their joy, as they constitute it,—that great
Organism which, as such, is both first and last in the Divine thought and
love.
Here, in the at least partial ignoring of these great social facts, we touch
the main defect of most mystical outlooks; yet this defect does not arise
from what they possess, but from what they lack. For solitude, and the
abstractive, unifying, intuitive, emotional, mystical element is also wanted,
and this element and movement Catherine exemplifies in rare perfection.
Indeed, in the great classical, central period of her life she had, as we know,
combined all this with much of the outward movement, society, detailed
observation, attachment, the morally en-static, the immanental type.
Unfortunately the same ill-health and ever-increasing predominance of the
former element, which turned her, quite naturally, to these eschatological
contemplations, and which indeed helped to give them their touching tone
of first-hand experience, also tended, of necessity, to make her drop even
such slight and lingering social elements as had formerly coloured her

thought. It is, then, only towards the understanding and deepening of the
former of these two necessary movements of religion, that these, her latter-
day enlargements of some of her deepest experiences and convictions will
be found true helps.
Yet if the usual ad extra disadvantages of such an abstractive position
towards the body are thus exemplified by her, in this her unsocial,
individualistic attitude, it is most interesting to note how entirely she avoids
the usual ad intra drawbacks of this same position. For if her whole
attention, and, increasingly, even her consciousness are, in true ecstatic
guise, absorbed away from her fellows and concentrated exclusively upon
God in herself and herself in God, yet this consciousness consists not only
of Noûs, that dry theoretic reason which, already by Plato, but still more by
Aristotle, is alone conceived as surviving the body, but contains also the
upper range of Thumos,—all those passions of the noblest kind,—love,
admiration, gratitude, utter self-donation, joy in purifying suffering and in
an ever-growing self-realization as part of the great plan of God,—all the
highest notes in that wondrous scale of deep feeling and of emotionally
coloured willing which Plato made dependent, not for its character but for
the possibility of its operation, upon the body’s union with the soul.—And
thus we see how, in her conception of the soul’s own self within itself and
of its relation to God, the Christian idea of Personality, as of a many-sided
organism in which Love and Will are the very flower of the whole, has
triumphed over the Platonic presentation of the Spirit, in so far as this is
taken to require and achieve an ultimate sublimation free from all emotive
elements. Thus in her doctrine the whole Personality survives death,
although this Personality energizes only, as it were upwards, to God alone,
and not also sideways and downwards, towards its fellows and the lesser
children of God.
3. Catherine’s forecast influenced by Plato.
Catherine’s third peculiarity consists in a rich and profound organization
of two doctrines, the one libertarian, the other determinist; and requires
considerable quotation from Plato, whose teachings, bereft of all
transmigration-fancies, seem clearly to reappear here, (however complex
may have been the mediation,) in Catherine’s great conception.

The determinist doctrine maintains that virtue and vice, in proportion as
they are allowed their full development, spontaneously and necessarily
attain to their own congenital consummation, a consummation which
consists, respectively, in the bliss inseparable from the final and complete
identity between the inevitable results upon itself of the soul’s deliberate
endeavours, and the indestructible requirements of this same soul’s
fundamental nature; and in the misery of the, now fully felt but only
gradually superable, or even, in other cases, insuperable, antagonism
between the inevitable consequences within its own self of the soul’s more
or less deliberate choosings, and those same, here also ineradicable,
demands of its own truest nature.
As Marsilio Ficino says, in his Theologia Platonica, published in
Florence in 1482: “Virtue is reward in its first budding, reward is virtue
full-grown. Vice is punishment at the moment of its birth; punishment is
vice at its consummation. For, in each of these cases, one and the same
thing is first the simple seed and then the full ear of corn; and one and the
same thing is the full ear of corn and then the food of man. Precisely the
very things then that we sow in this our (earthly) autumn, shall we reap in
that (other-world) summer-day.”[204] It is true that forensic terms and
images are also not wanting in Catherine’s sayings; but these, in part, run
simply parallel to the immanental conception without modifying it; in part,
they are in its service; and, in part, they are the work of the theologians’
arrangements and glosses discussed in my Appendix.
And the libertarian doctrine declares that it is the soul itself which, in the
beyond and immediately after death, chooses the least painful, because the
most expressive of her then actual desires, from among the states which the
natural effects upon her own self of her own earthly choosings have left her
interiorly free to choose.
Now it is in this second doctrine especially that we find so detailed an
anticipation by Plato of a whole number of highly original and
characteristic points and combinations of points, as to render a fortuitous
concurrence between Catherine and Plato practically impossible. Yet I have
sought in vain, among Catherine’s authentic sayings, actions, possessions,
or friends, for any trace of direct acquaintance with any of Plato’s writings.
But Ficino’s Latin translation of Plato, published, with immense applause,
in Florence in 1483, 1484, must have been known, in those intensely

Platonizing times, to even non-professed Humanists in Genoa, long before
Catherine’s death in 1510, so that one or other of her intimates may have
communicated the substance of these Platonic doctrines to her.[205] Plotinus,
of whom Ficino published a Latin translation in 1492, contains but a feeble
echo of Plato on this point. Proclus, directly known only very little till much
after Catherine’s time, is in even worse case. The Areopagite, who has so
continuously taken over whole passages from all three writers, although
directly almost exclusively from Proclus, contains nothing more
immediately to the purpose than his impressive sayings concerning
Providence’s continuous non-forcing of the human personality in its
fundamental constitution and its free elections with their inevitable
consequences; hence Catherine cannot have derived her ideas, in the crisp
definiteness which they retain in her sayings, from her cousin the
Dominican nun and the Areopagite. And it is certain, as we have seen, how
scattered and inchoate are the hints which she may have found in St. Paul,
the Joannine writings, and Jacopone da Todi. St. Augustine contains nothing
that would be directly available,—an otherwise likely source considering
Catherine’s close connection with the Augustinian Canonesses of S. Maria
delle Grazie.
In Plato, then, we get five conceptions and symbolic pictures that are
practically identical with those of Catherine.
(1) First we get the conception of souls having each, in exact accordance
with the respective differences of their moral and spiritual disposition and
character, as these have been constituted by them here below, a “place” or
environment, expressive of that character, ready for their occupation after
the body’s death. “The soul that is pure departs at death, herself invisible, to
the invisible world,—to the divine, immortal and rational: thither arriving,
she lives in bliss. But the soul that is impure at the time of her departure and
is … engrossed by the corporeal …, is weighed down and drawn back again
into the visible place (world).”
And this scheme, of like disposition seeking a like place, is then carried
out, by the help of the theory of transmigration, as a re-incarnation of these
various characters into environments, bodies, exactly corresponding to
them: gluttonous souls are assigned to asses’ bodies, tyrannous souls to
those of wolves, and so on: in a word, “there is no difficulty in assigning to
all ‘a whither’ (a place) answering to their general natures and

propensities.”[206] For this corresponds to a law which runs throughout all
things,—a determinism of consequences which does not prevent the liberty
of causes. “The King of the universe contrived a general plan, by which a
thing of a certain nature found a seat and place of a certain kind. But the
formation of this nature, he left to the wills of individuals.”
Or, with the further spacial imagery of movements up, level, or down, we
get: “All things that have a soul change … and, in changing, move
according to law and the order of destiny. Lesser changes of nature move on
level ground, but great crimes sink … into the so-called lower places …;
and, when the soul becomes greatly different and divine, she also greatly
changes her place, which is now altogether holy.”[207] The original, divinely
intended “places” of souls are all high and good, and similar to each other
though not identical, each soul having its own special “place”; and for this
congenital “place” each soul has a resistible yet ineradicable home-
sickness. “The first incarnation” of human souls which “distributes each
soul to a star,” is ordained to be similar for all.… “And when they have
been of necessity implanted in bodily forms, should they master their
passions … they live in righteousness; if otherwise, in unrighteousness. And
he who lived well through his allotted time shall be conveyed once more to
a habitation in his kindred star, and there shall enjoy a blissful and
congenial life; but failing this he shall pass into … such a form of (further)
incarnation as fits his disposition … until he shall overcome, by reason, all
that burthen that afterwards clung around him.”[208]
If from all this we exclude the soul’s existence before any beginning of
its body, its transmigration into other bodies, and the self-sufficiency of
reason; and if we make it all to be penetrated by God’s presence, grace, and
love, and by our corresponding or conflicting emotional and volitional as
well as intellectual attitude: we shall get Catherine’s position exactly.
(2) But again, in at least one phase of his thinking, Plato pictures the
purification of the imperfect soul as effected, of at least as begun, not in a
succession of “places” of an extensionally small but organic kind, bodies,
but in a “place” of an extensionally larger but inorganic sort,—the shore of
a lake, where the soul has to wait. “The Acherusian lake is the lake to the
shores of which the many go when they are dead; and, after waiting an
appointed time, which to some is longer and to others shorter, they are sent

back to be born as animals.” Here we evidently get a survival of the
conception, predominant in Homer, of a pain-and-joyless Hades, but limited
here to the middle, the imperfect class of souls, and followed, in their case,
by transmigration, to which alone, apparently, purification is directly
attached.
In the same Dialogue we read later on: “Those who appear to have lived
neither well nor ill … go to the river Acheron, and are carried to the lake;
and there they dwell and are purified of their evil deeds … and are absolved
and receive the rewards of their good deeds according to their deserts.”
Here we have, evidently, still the same “many” and the same place, the
shores of the Acherusian lake, but also an explicit affirmation of
purification effected there, for this purification is now followed directly, not
by re-incarnation, but by the ultimate happiness in the soul’s original and
fundamentally congenial “place.” And this scheme is far more conformable
to Plato’s fundamental position: for how can bodies, even lower than the
human, help to purify the soul which has become impure precisely on
occasion of its human body?—We can see how the Christian Purgatorial
doctrine derives some of its pictures from the second of these parallel
passages; yet that the “longer or shorter waiting” of the first passage also
enters into that teaching,—especially in its more ordinary modern form,
according to which there is, in this state, no intrinsic purification.
And lower down we find: “Those who have committed crimes which,
although great, are not unpardonable,—for these it is necessary to plunge
(ἐμπεσεῖν) into Tartarus, the pains of which they are compelled to undergo
for a year; but at the end of the year they are borne to the Acherusian lake.
But those who appear incurable by reason of the greatness of their crimes
… such their appropriate destiny hurls (ῤίπτει) into Tartarus, whence they
never come forth.” Here we get a Purgatory, pictured as a watery substance
in which the more gravely impure of the curable souls are immersed before
arriving at the easier purification, the waiting on the dry land alongside the
lake; this Purgatory is, as a “place” and, in intensity, identical with Hell; and
into this place the curable souls “plunge” and the incurable ones are
“hurled.”—Of this third passage Catherine retains the identification of the
pains of Purgatory and those of Hell; the “plunge,” or “hurling,” of two
distinct classes of souls into these pains; and the mitigation, after a time,
previous to complete cessation, of the suffering in the case of the curable

class. But the “plunge,” with her, is common to all degrees of imperfectly
pure souls; there is, for all these souls, no change of “place” during their
purgation, but only a mitigation of suffering; and this mitigation is at work
gradually and from the first. And the ordinary modern Purgatorial teaching
is like this passage, in that it keeps the curable souls in Tartarus, say, for one
year, and lets them suffer there, apparently without mitigation, throughout
that time: and that, in the case of both classes of souls, it conceives the
punishment as extrinsic, vindictive, and inoperative.
And a fourth Phaedo passage tells us: “Those who are remarkable for
having led holy lives are released from this earthly prison, and go to their
pure home, which is above, and dwell in the purer earth,” the Isles of the
Just, in Oceanus. “And those, again, amongst these who have duly purified
themselves with philosophy, live henceforth altogether without the body, in
mansions fairer far than these.” Here we get, alongside of the two
Purgatories and the one Hell, two Heavens, of which the first is but taken
over from Homer and Pindar, but of which the second is Plato’s own
conception. Catherine, in entire accord with the ordinary teaching, has got
but one “place” of each kind; and her Heaven corresponds, apart from his
formal and final exclusion of every sort of body, to the second of these
Platonic Heavens; whilst, here again, the all-encompassing presence of
God’s love for souls as of the soul’s love for God, which, in her teaching, is
the beginning, means, and end of the whole movement, effects an indefinite
difference between the two positions.[209]
(3) Yet Plato, in his most characteristic moods, explicitly anticipates
Catherine as to the intrinsic, ameliorative nature and work of Purgatory:
“The proper office of punishment is two-fold: he who is rightly punished
ought either to become better … by it, or he ought to be made an example
to his fellows, that they may see what he suffers and … become better.
Those who are punished by Gods and men and improved, are those whose
sins are curable … by pain and suffering:—for there is no other way in
which they can be delivered from evil, as in this world so also in the other.
But the others are incurable—the time has passed at which they can receive
any benefit themselves.… Rhadamanthus,” the chief of the three nether-
world judges, “looks with admiration on the soul of some just one, who has
lived in holiness and truth … and sends him” without any intervening
suffering “to the Isles of the Blessed.… I consider how I shall present my

soul whole and undefiled before the Judge, in that day.”[210] Here the last
sentence is strikingly like in form as well as in spirit to many a saying of St.
Paul and Catherine.
(4) But the following most original passages give us a sentiment and an
image which, in their special drift, are as opposed to St. Paul, and indeed to
the ordinary Christian consciousness, as they are dear to Catherine, in this
matter so strongly, although probably unconsciously, Platonist, indeed Neo-
Platonist, in her affinities. “In the time of Kronos, indeed down to that of
Zeus, the Judgment was given on the day on which men were to die,” i.e.
immediately before their death; “and the consequence was, that the
judgments were not well given,—the souls found their way to the wrong
places. Zeus said: ‘The reason is, that the judged have their clothes on, for
they are alive.… There are many, having evil souls, who are apparelled in
fair bodies or wrapt round in wealth and rank.… The Judges are awed by
them; and they themselves too have their clothes on when judging: their
eyes and ears and their whole bodies are interposed, as a veil, before their
own souls. What is to be done? … Men shall be entirely stript before they
are judged, for they shall be judged when dead; the Judge too shall be
naked, that is, dead: he, with his naked soul, shall pierce into the other
naked soul immediately after each man dies … and is bereft of all his kith
and kin, and has left behind him all his brave attire upon earth, and thus the
Judgment will be just.’”[211]—If we compare this with St. Paul’s precisely
contrary instinct and desire to be “clothed upon” at death, “lest we be found
naked,” i.e. without the protection of any kind of body; and then realize
Catherine’s intense longing for “nudità,”—to strip herself here, as far as
possible, from all imperfection and self-delusion before the final stripping
off of the body in death, and to appear, utterly naked, before the utterly
naked eye of God, so that no “clothes” should remain requiring to be burnt
away by the purifying fires,[212] the profound affinity of sentiment and
imagery between Catherine and Plato—and this on a point essentially
Platonic,—is very striking.
(5) But, above all, in his deep doctrine as to the soul’s spontaneous
choice after death of that condition, “place,” which, owing to the natural
effects within her of her earthly willings and self-formation, she cannot but
now find the most congenial to herself, Plato appears as the ultimate source
of a literary kind for Catherine’s most original view, which otherwise is, I

think, without predecessors. “The souls,” he tells us in the Republic,
“immediately on their arrival in the other world, were required to go to
Lachesis,” one of the three Fates. And “an interpreter, having taken from
her lap a number of lots and plans of life, spoke as follows: ‘Thus saith
Lachesis, the daughter of Necessity.… “Your destiny shall not be allotted to
you, but you shall choose it for yourselves. Let him who draws the first lot,
be the first to choose a life which shall be his irrevocably.… The
responsibility lies with the chooser, Heaven is guiltless.”’” “No settled
character of soul was included in the plans of life, because, with the change
of life, the soul inevitably became changed itself.” “It was a truly wonderful
sight, to watch how each soul selected its life.… When all the souls had
chosen their lives, Lachesis dispatched with each of them the Destiny he
had selected, to guard his life and satisfy his choice.”[213] And in the
Phaedrus Plato tells us that “at the end of the first thousand years” (of the
first incarnation) “the good souls and also the evil souls both come to cast
lots and to choose their second life; and they may take any that they
like.”[214]
In both the dialogues the lots are evidently taken over from popular
mythology, but are here made merely to introduce a certain orderly
succession among the spontaneous choosings of the souls themselves,
whilst the lap of the daughter of Necessity, spread out before all the
choosers previous to their choice, and the separate, specially appropriate
Destiny that accompanies each soul after its choice, indicate plainly that,
although the choice itself is the free act and pure self-expression of each
soul’s then present disposition, yet that this disposition is the necessary
result of its earthly volitions and self-development or self-deformation, and
that the choice now made becomes, in its turn, the cause of certain
inevitable consequences,—of a special environment which itself is then
productive of special effects upon, and of special occasions for, the final
working out of this soul’s character.—Plotinus retains the doctrine: “the
soul chooses there” in the Other world,—“its Daemon and its kind of
life.”[215] But neither Proclus nor Dionysius has the doctrine, whilst
Catherine, on the contrary, reproduces it with a penetrating completeness.
4. Simplifications characteristic of Catherine’s Eschatology.

And under our last, fourth head, we can group the simplifications
characteristic of Catherine’s Eschatology.
(1) One simplification has, of course, for now some fifteen hundred
years, been the ordinary Christian conception: I mean the elimination of the
time-element between the moment of death and the beginning of the three
states. Yet it is interesting to note how by far the greatest of the Latin
Fathers, St. Augustine, who died in a.d. 430, still clings predominantly to
the older Christian and Jewish conception of the soul abiding in a state of
shrunken, joy-and-painless consciousness from the moment of the body’s
death up to that of the general resurrection and judgment. “After this short
life, thou wilt not yet be where the saints will be,” i.e. in Heaven. “Thou
wilt not yet be there: who is ignorant of this? But thou canst straightway be
where the rich man descried the ulcerous beggar to be a-resting, far away,”
i.e. in Limbo. “Placed in that rest, thou canst await the day of judgment
with security, when thou shalt receive thy body also, when thou shalt be
changed so as to be equal to an Angel.”[216] Only with regard to Purgatory, a
state held by him, in writings of his last years, 410-430 a.d., to be possible,
indeed probable, does he make an exception to his general rule: for such
purification would have to take place” in the interval of time between the
death of the body and the last day of condemnation and reward.”[217]
It is doubtless the still further fading away of the expectation, so vivid
and universal in early Christian times, of the proximity of Our Lord’s
Second Advent, and the tacit prevalence of Greek affinities and conceptions
concerning the bodiless soul, that helped to eliminate, at last universally,
this interval of waiting, in the case of souls too good or too bad for
purgation, from the general consciousness of at least Western Christendom.
The gain in this was the great simplification and concentration of the
immediate outlook and interest; the loss was the diminished apprehension
of the essentially complex, concrete, synthetic character of man’s nature,
and of the necessity for our assuming that this characteristic will be
somehow preserved in this nature’s ultimate perfection.
(2) There is a second simplification in Catherine which, though here St.
Augustine leads the way, is less common among Christians: her three other-
world “places” are not, according to her ultimate thought, three distinct
spacial extensions and localities, filled, respectively, with ceaselessly
suffering, temporarily suffering, and ceaselessly blessed souls; but they are,

(notwithstanding all the terms necessitated by such spacial picturings as
“entering,” “coming out,” “plunging into”), so many distinct states and
conditions of the soul, of a painful, mixed, or joyful character. We shall
have these her ultimate ideas very fully before us presently. But here I
would only remark that this her union of a picturing faculty, as vivid as the
keenest sense-perception, and of a complete non-enslavement to, a vigorous
utilization of, these life-like spacial projections, by a religious instinct and
experience which never forgets that God and souls are spirits, to whom our
ordinary categories of space and extension, time and motion, do not and
cannot in strictness apply, is as rare as it is admirable; and that, though her
intensely anti-corporeal and non-social attitude made such a position more
immediately easy for her than it can be for those who remain keenly aware
of the great truths involved in the doctrines of the Resurrection of the Body
and the Communion of Saints, this her trend of thought brings into full
articulation precisely the deepest of our spiritual apprehensions and
requirements, whilst it is not her fault if it but further accentuates some of
our intellectual perplexities.
We get much in St. Augustine, which he himself declares to have derived,
in the first instance, from “the writings of the Platonists,” which doubtless
means above all Plotinus, (that keen spiritual thinker who can so readily be
traced throughout this part of the great Convert’s teaching), as to this
profound incommensurableness between spiritual presence, energizing, and
affectedness on the one hand, and spacial position, extension, and
movement on the other. “What place is there within me, to which my God
can come? … I would not exist at all, unless Thou already wert within me.”
“Thou wast never a place, and yet we have receded from Thee; and we have
drawn near to Thee, yet Thou art never a place.” “ Are we submerged and
do we emerge? Yet it is not places into which we are plunged and out of
which we rise. What can be more like to places and yet more unlike? For
here the affections are in case,—the impurity of our spirit, which flows
downwards, oppressed by the love of earthly cares; and the holiness of Thy
Spirit, which lifts us upwards with the love of security.”[218] For, as he
teaches “the spiritual creature can only be changed by times,”—a
succession within a duration: “by remembering what it had forgotten, or by
learning what it did not know, or by willing what it did not will. The bodily
creature can be changed by times and places,” by spacial motion, “from
earth to heaven, from heaven to earth, from east to west.” “That thing is not

moved through space which is not extended in space … the soul is not
considered to move in space, unless it be held to be a body.”[219]
In applying the doctrine just expressed to eschatological matters, St.
Augustine concludes: “If it be asked whether the soul, when it goes forth
from the body, is borne to some corporeal places, or to such as, though
incorporeal, are like to bodies, or to what is more excellent than either: I
readily answer that, unless it have some kind of body, it is not borne to
bodily places at all, or, at least, that it is not borne to them by bodily
motion.… But I myself do not think that it possesses any body, when it goes
forth from this earthly body.… It gets borne, according to its deserts, to
spiritual conditions, or to penal places having a similitude to bodies.”[220]
The reader will readily note a curiously uncertain frame of mind in this
last utterance. I take it that Plotinian influences are here being checked by
the Jewish conception of certain, definitely located, provision-chambers
(promptuaria), in which all souls are placed for safe keeping, between the
time of the body’s death and its resurrection. So in the Fourth Book of Esra
(of about 90 a.d.), “the souls of the just in their chambers said: ‘How long
are we to remain here?’”; and in the Apocalypse of Baruch (of about 150-
250 a.d.), “at the coming of the Messiah, the provision-chambers will open,
in which the” whole, precise “number of the souls of the just have been
kept, and they will come forth.”[221]
But it is St. Thomas Aquinas who, by the explicit and consistent adoption
and classification of these promptuaria receptacula, reveals to us more
clearly the perplexities and fancifulnesses involved in the strictly spacial
conception. “Although bodies are not assigned to souls (immediately) after
death, yet certain bodily places are congruously assigned to these souls in
accordance with the degree of their dignity, in which places they are, as it
were, locally, in the manner in which bodiless things can be in space: each
soul having a higher place assigned to it, according as it approaches more or
less to the first substance, God, whose seat, according to Scripture, is
Heaven.” “In the Scriptures God is called the Sun, since He is the principle
of spiritual life, as the physical sun is of bodily life; and, according to this
convention, … souls spiritually illuminated have a greater fitness for
luminous bodies, and sin-darkened souls for dark places.” “It is probable
that, as to local position, Hell and the Limbo of the Fathers constitute one

and the same place, or are more or less continuous.” “The place of
Purgatory adjoins (that of) Hell.” “There are altogether five places ready to
receive (receptanda) souls bereft of their bodies: Paradise, the Limbo of the
Fathers, Purgatory, Hell, and the Limbo of Infants.”[222]
No doubt all these positions became the common scholastic teaching. But
then, as Cardinal Bellarmine cogently points out: “no ancient, as far as I
know, has written that the Earthly Paradise was destroyed … and I have
read a large number who affirm its existence. This is the doctrine of all the
Scholastics, beginning with St. Thomas, and of the Fathers. … St.
Augustine indeed appears to rank this truth amongst the dogmas of
faith.”[223] We shall do well, then, not to press these literal localization-
schemes, especially since, according to St. Augustine’s penetrating analysis,
our spiritual experiences, already in this our earthly existence, have a
distinctly non-spacial character. Catherine’s position, if applied to the
central life of man here, and hence presumptively hereafter, remains as true
and fresh and unassailable as ever.
(3) And her last simplification consists in taking the Fire of Hell, the Fire
of Purgatory, and the Fire and Light of Heaven as profoundly appropriate
symbols or descriptions of the variously painful or joyous impressions
produced, through the differing volitional attitudes of souls towards Him,
by the one God’s intrinsically identical presence in each and all. In all three
cases, throughout their several grades, there are ever but two realities, the
Spirit-God and the spirit-soul, in various states of inter-relation.
Here again it is Catherine’s complete abstraction from the body which
renders such a view easy and, in a manner, necessary for her mind. But here
I would only emphasize the impressive simplicity and spirituality of view
which thus, as in the material world it finds the one sun-light and the one
fire-heat, which, in themselves everywhere the same, vary indefinitely in
their effects, owing to the varying condition of the different bodies which
meet the rays and flames; so, in the Spiritual World it discovers One
supreme spiritual Energy and Influence which, whilst ever self-identical, is
assimilated, deflected, or resisted by the lesser spirits, with inevitably
joyous, mixed, or painful states of soul, since they can each and all resist,
but cannot eradicate that Energy’s impression within their deepest selves.
And though, even with her, the Sun-light image remains quasi-Hellenic and
Intellectual, and the Fire-heat picture is more immediately Christian and

Moral: yet she also frequently takes the sunlight as the symbol of the
achieved Harmony and Peace, and the Fire-heat as that of more or less
persisting Conflict and Pain. She is doubtless right in keeping both symbols,
and in ever thinking of each as ultimately implying the other, for God is
Beauty and Truth, as well as Goodness and Love, and man is made with the
indestructible aspiration after Him in His living completeness.
And here again Catherine has a complicated doctrinal history behind her.
We have already considered the numerous Scriptural passages where God
and His effects upon the soul are symbolized as light and fire; and those
again where joy or, contrariwise, trial and suffering are respectively
pictured by the same physical properties. And Catherine takes the latter
passages as directly explanatory of the first, in so far as these joys and
sufferings are spiritual in their causes or effects.
Among the Greek Fathers, Clement of Alexandria tells us that “the Fire”
of Purgatory,—for he has no Eternal Damnation,—“is a rational,” spiritual,
“fire that penetrates the soul”; and Origen teaches that “each sinner himself
lights the flame of his own fire, and is not thrown into a fire that has been lit
before that moment and that exists in front of him.… His conscience is
agitated and pierced by its own pricks.” Saints Gregory of Nyssa and
Gregory of Nazianzum are more or less influenced by Origen on this point.
And St. John Damascene, who died in about 750 a.d., says explicitly that
the fire of Hell is not a material fire, that it is very different from our
ordinary fire, and that men hardly know what it is.[224]
Among the Latins, St. Ambrose declares: “neither is the gnashing, a
gnashing of bodily teeth; nor is the everlasting fire, a fire of bodily flames;
nor is the worm, a bodily one.”—St. Jerome, in one passage, counts the
theory of the non-physical fire as one of Origen’s errors; but elsewhere he
mentions it without any unfavourable note, and even enumerates several
Scripture-texts which favour it, and admits that “‘the worm which dieth not
and the fire which is not quenched,’ is understood, by the majority of
interpreters (a plerisque), of the conscience of sinners which tortures
them.”[225]—St. Augustine, in 413 a.d., declares: “In the matter of the pains
of the wicked, both the unquenchable fire and the intensely living worm are
interpreted differently by different commentators. Some interpreters refer
both to the body, others refer both to the soul; and some take the fire

literally, in application to the body, and the worm figuratively, in application
to the soul, which latter opinion appears the more credible.” Yet when,
during the last years of his life, he came, somewhat tentatively, to hold an
other-world Purgatory as well, he throughout assimilated this Purgatory’s
fire to the fire of this-world sufferings. Thus in 422 a.d.: “Souls which
renounce the wood, hay, straw, built upon that foundation (I Cor. iii, 11-15),
not without pain indeed (since they loved these things with a carnal
affection), but with faith in the foundation, a faith operative through love …
arrive at salvation, through a certain fire of pain.… Whether men suffer
these things in this life only, or such-like judgments follow even after this
life—in either case, this interpretation of that text is not discordant with the
truth.” “‘He shall be saved yet so as by fire,’ because the pain, over the loss
of the things he loved, burns him. It is not incredible that some such thing
takes place even after this life … that some of the faithful are saved by a
certain purgatorial fire, more quickly or more slowly, according as they
have less or more loved perishable things.”[226]
St. Thomas, voicing and leading Scholastic opinion, teaches that the fire
of Purgatory is the same as that of Hell; and Cardinal Bellarmine, who died
in 1621, tells us: “The common opinion of theologians is that the fire of
Purgatory is a real and true fire, of the same kind as an earthly fire. This
opinion, it is true, is not of faith, but it is very probable,”—because of the
“consent of the scholastics, who cannot be despised without temerity,” and
also because of “the eruptions of Mount Etna.”[227] Yet the Council of
Florence had, in 1439, restricted itself to the quite general proposition that
“if men die truly penitent, in the love of God, before they have satisfied …
for their sins … their souls are purified by purgatorial pains after death”;
thus very deliberately avoiding all commitment as to the nature of these
pains.[228] Cardinal Gousset, who died in 1866, tells us: “The more common
opinion amongst theologians makes the sufferings of Purgatory to consist in
the pain of fire, or at least in a pain analogous to that of fire.”[229] This latter
position is practically identical with Catherine’s.
As to the fire of Hell, although here especially the Scholastics, old and
new, are unanimous, it is certain that there is no definition or solemn
judgment of the Church declaring it to be material. On this point again we
find St. Thomas and those who follow him involved in practically endless
difficulties and in, for us now, increasingly intolerable subtleties, where

they try to show how a material fire can affect an immaterial spirit. Bossuet,
so severely orthodox in all such matters, preaching, before the Court, about
sin becoming in Hell the chastisement of the sinner, does not hesitate to
finish thus: “We bear within our hearts the instrument of our punishment. ‘I
shall produce fire from thy midst, which shall devour thee’ (Ezek. xxviii,
18). I shall not send it against thee from afar, it will ignite in thy conscience,
its flames will arise from thy midst, and it will be thy sins which will
produce it.”[230]—And the Abbé F. Dubois, in a careful article in the
Ecclesiastical Revue du Clergé Français of Paris, has recently expressed the
conviction that “the best minds of our time, which are above being
suspected of yielding to mere passing fashions, feel the necessity of
abandoning the literal interpretation, judged to be insufficient, of the ancient
symbols; and of returning to a freer exegesis, of which some of the Ancients
have given us the example.”[231] Among these helpful “Ancients” we cannot
but count Catherine, with her One God Who is the Fire of Pain and the
Light of Joy to souls, according as they resist Him or will Him, either here
or hereafter.

III. Catherine and Eternal Punishment.

Introductory: four doctrines and difficulties to be considered.
Taking now the three great after-life conditions separately, in the order of
Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, I would first of all note that some readers may
be disappointed that Catherine did not, like our own English Mystic, the
entirely orthodox optimist, Mother Juliana of Norwich—her Revelations
belong to the year 1373 a.d.—simply proclaim that, whilst the teaching and
meaning of Christ and His Church would come true, all, in ways known to
God alone, would yet be well.[232] In this manner, without any weakening
of traditional teaching, the whole dread secret as to the future of evil-doers
is left in the hands of God, and a beautifully boundless trust and hope glows
throughout those contemplations.
Yet, as I hope to show as we go along, certain assumptions and
conceptions, involved in the doctrine of Eternal Punishment, cannot be
systematically excluded, or even simply ignored, without a grave
weakening of the specifically Christian earnestness; and that, grand as is, in
certain respects, the idea of the Apocatastasis, the Final Restitution of all

Things and Souls—as taught by Clement and Origen—it is not, at bottom,
compatible with the whole drift, philosophy, and tone, (even apart from
specific sayings) of Our Lord. And this latter teaching—of the simply
abiding significance and effect of our deliberate elections during this our
one testing-time,—and not that of an indefinite series of chances and
purifications with an ultimate disappearance of all difference between the
results of the worst life and the best, answers to the deepest postulates and
aspirations of the most complete and delicate ethical and spiritual sense. For
minds that can discriminate between shifting fashions and solid growth in
abiding truth, that will patiently seek out the deepest instinct and simplest
implications underlying the popular presentations of the Doctrine of
Abiding Consequences, and that take these implications as but part of a
larger whole: this doctrine still, and now again, presents itself as a
permanent element of the full religious consciousness.
It would certainly be unfair to press Catherine’s rare and incidental
sayings on Hell into a formal system. Yet those remarks are deep and
suggestive, and help too much to interpret, supplement, and balance her
central, Purgatorial teaching, and indeed to elucidate her general religious
principles, for us to be able to pass them over. We have already sufficiently
considered the question as to the nature of the Fire; and that as to Evil
Spirits is reserved for the next Chapter. Here I shall consider four doctrines
and difficulties, together with Catherine’s attitude towards them: the soul’s
final fate, dependent upon the character of the will’s act or active
disposition at the moment of the body’s death; the total moral perversion of
the lost; the mitigation of their pains; and the eternity of their punishment.
1. Eternity dependent on the earthly life’s last moment.
Now as to the soul’s final fate being made dependent upon the character
of that soul’s particular act or disposition at the last moment previous to
death, this teaching, prominent in parts of the Trattato and Vita, goes back
ultimately to Ezekiel, who, as Prof. Charles interestingly shows, introduces
a double individualism into the older, Social and Organic, Eschatology of
the Hebrew Prophets. For Man is seen, by him, as responsible for his own
acts alone, and as himself working out separately his own salvation or his
own doom; and this individual man again is looked at, not in his organic
unity, but as repeating himself in a succession of separate religious acts. The
individual act is taken to be a true expression of the whole man at the

moment of its occurrence: and hence, if this act is wicked at the moment of
the advent of the Kingdom, the agent will rightfully be destroyed; but if it
be righteous, he will be preserved.[233]—Now the profound truth and
genuine advance thus proclaimed, who can doubt them? And yet it is clear
that the doctrine here is solidly true, only if taken as the explicitation and
supplement, and even in part as the corrective, of the previously
predominant teaching. Take the Ezekielian doctrine as complete, even for
its own time, or as final over against the later, the Gospel depth of teaching,
(with its union of the social body and of individual souls, and of the soul’s
single acts and of the general disposition produced by and reacting upon
these acts), and you get an all but solipsistic Individualism and an atomistic
Psychology, and you offend Christianity and Science equally.
It is evident that Catherine, if she can fairly be taxed with what, if
pressed, would, in her doctrine rather than in her life, be an excessive
Individualism, is, in her general teaching and practice, admirably free from
Psychological Atomism; indeed did any soul ever understand better the
profound reality of habits, general dispositions, tones of mind and feeling
and will, as distinct from the single acts that gradually build them up and
that, in return, are encircled and coloured by them all? Her whole
Purgatorial doctrine stands and falls by this distinction, and this although,
with a profound self-knowledge, she does not hesitate to make the soul
express, in one particular act after death,—that of the Plunge,—an even
deeper level of its true attitude of will and of its moral character than is
constituted by those imperfect habits of the will, habits which it will take so
much suffering and acceptance of suffering gradually to rectify.
Thus the passages in which Catherine seems to teach that God can and
does, as it were, catch souls unawares, calling them away, and finally
deciding their fate on occasion of any and every de facto volitional
condition at the instant of death, however little expressive of the radical
determination of that soul such an act or surface-state may be, will have,
(even if they be genuine, and most of them have doubtlessly grown, perhaps
have completely sprung up, under the pen of sermonizing scribes), to be
taken as hortatory, hence as partly hyperbolical. And such an admission will
in nowise deny the possibility for the soul to express its deliberate and full
disposition and determination in a single act or combination of acts; nor that
the other-world effects will follow according to such deep, deliberate

orientations of the character: it will only deny that, at any and every
moment, any and every act of the soul sufficiently expresses its deliberate
disposition. Certainly it is comparatively rarely that the soul exerts its full
liberty, in an act of true, spiritual self-realization; and an analogous rarity
cannot but be postulated by religious philosophy for contrary acts, of an
approximately equal fulness of deliberation and accuracy of representation,
with regard to the soul’s volitional state. And yet the operative influence
towards such rare, fully self-expressive acts of the right kind, and the aid
towards similar, massive, and truly representative volitions of the wrong
kind, afforded by even quite ordinary half-awake acts and habits of
respectively good or evil quality are so undeniable, and it is so impossible
to draw a general line as to where such wishes pass into full willings and
deliberate states: that the prevalence of a hortatory attitude towards the
whole subject is right and indeed inevitable.
2. The reprobate will of the lost.
As to Moral Perversion, the reprobate will of the lost, we find that
Catherine approaches the question from two different, and at bottom, on
this point, incompatible, systems; but some incidental and short sayings of
hers give us suggestive hints towards a consistent position in this difficult
matter.
Catherine has a double approach. For, consistently with the strong Neo-
Platonist, Dionysian strain in her mind, she frequently teaches and implies
that Evil is the absence of Good, of Love, and nothing positive at all. In this
case Evil would not only be less strong than good—only Manichaeans
would maintain that they were equal—but, as against the constructive force
of good, it would have no kind even of destructive strength. Varying
amounts, degrees, and kinds of good, but good and only good, everywhere,
would render all, even transitory, pollution of the soul, and all, even
passing, purification of it, so much actual impossibility and theoretical
superstition. All that survived at all, could but be good; and at most some
good might be added, but no evil could be removed, since none would exist.
—Yet all this is, of course, strongly denied and supplanted by the, at first
sight, less beautiful, but far deeper and alone fully Christian, position of her
specifically Purgatorial teaching. Here Evil is something positive, an active
disposition, orientation, and attachment of the will; it is not without
destructive force; and its cure is a positive change in that will and its habits,

and not a mere addition of good. Yet it is plain that, even exclusively within
the implications of this deeper conviction, there is no necessity to postulate
unmixed evil in the disposition of any soul. In some the evil would be
triumphing over the good; in others good would be triumphing over evil,—
each over the other, in every degree of good or of evil, up to the all but
complete extinction of all inclinations to evil or to good respectively.
And Catherine has suggestive sayings. For one or two of them go, at least
in their implications, beyond a declaration as to the presence of God’s
extrinsic mercy in Hell, a presence indicated by a mitigation of the souls’
sufferings to below what these souls deserve; and even beyond the
Areopagite’s insistence upon the presence of some real good in these souls,
since he hardly gets beyond their continuous possession of those non-moral
goods, existence, intelligence, and will-power.[234] For when she says, “The
ray of God’s mercy shines even in Hell,” she need not, indeed, mean more
than that extrinsic mercy, and its effect, that mitigation. But when she
declares: “if a creature could be found that did not participate in the divine
Goodness,—that creature would, as it were, be as malignant as God is
good,” we cannot, I think, avoid applying this to the moral dispositions of
such souls.[235]
Now I know that St. Thomas had already taught, in at first sight identical
terms: “Evil cannot exist (quite) pure without the admixture of good, as the
Supreme Good exists free from all admixture of evil.… Those who are
detained in Hell, are not bereft of all good”;[236] and yet he undoubtedly
maintained the complete depravation of the will’s dispositions in these
souls. And, again, after Catherine’s first declaration there follow, (at least in
the text handed down in the Vita), words which explain that extrinsic mercy,
not as mitigating the finite amount of suffering due to the sinner, but as
turning the infinite suffering due to the sinner’s infinite malice, into a finite,
though indefinite amount; and hence, in the second declaration, a
corresponding interior mercy may be signified—God’s grace preventing the
sinner from being infinitely wicked.
But Catherine, unlike St. Thomas, expressly speaks not only of Good and
Evil, but of Good and Malignancy; and Malignancy undoubtedly refers to
dispositions of the will. And even if the words, now found as the sequel to
the first saying, be authentic, they belong to a different occasion, and cannot

be allowed to force the meaning of words spoken at another time. In this
latter saying the words “as it were” show plainly that she is not thinking of
a possible infiniteness of human wickedness which has been changed,
through God’s mercy, to an actual finitude of evil; but is simply asking
herself whether a man could be, not infinitely but wholly, malignant. For
she answers that, were this possible, a man would “as it were” be as
malignant as God is good, and thus shows that the malignancy, which she
denies, would only in a sense form a counterpart to God’s benevolence:
since, though the man would be as entirely malignant as God is entirely
good, God would still remain infinite in His goodness as against the finitude
of Man’s wickedness.
The difficulties of such a combination of convictions are, of course,
numerous and great. Psychologically it seems hard to understand why this
remnant of good disposition should be unable to germinate further and
further good, so that, at last, good would leaven the whole soul. From the
point of view of any Theodicy, it appears difficult to justify the unending
exclusion of such a soul from growth in, and the acquirement of, a
predominantly good will and the happiness that accompanies such a will.
And the testimony of Our Lord Himself and of the general doctrine of the
Church appear definitely opposed: for does not His solemn declaration:
“Hell, where their worm dieth not” (Mark ix, 48), find its authoritative
interpretation in the common Church teaching as to the utterly reprobate
will of the lost? And indeed Catherine herself, in her great saying that if but
one little drop of Love could fall into Hell (that is, surely, if but the least
beginning of a right disposition towards God could enter those souls) Hell
would be turned into Heaven, seems clearly to endorse this position.
And yet, we have full experience in this life of genuinely good
dispositions being present, and yet not triumphing or even spreading within
the soul; of such conditions being, in various degrees, our own fault; and of
such defeat bringing necessarily with it more or less of keen suffering.—
There would be no injustice if, after a full, good chance and sufficient aid
had been given to the soul to actualize its capabilities of spiritual self-
constitution, such a soul’s deliberately sporadic, culpably non-predominant,
good did not, even eventually, lead to the full satisfaction of that soul’s
essential cravings.—The saying attributed to Our Lord, which appears in St.
Mark alone, is a pure quotation from Isaiah lxvi, 24 and Ecclesiasticus vii,

17, and does not seem to require more than an abiding distress of
conscience, an eternal keenness of remorse.
Again, the common Church-teaching is undoubtedly voiced by St.
Thomas in the words, “Since these souls are completely averse to the final
end of right reason, they must be declared to be without any good will.” Yet
St. Thomas himself (partly in explanation of the Areopagite’s words, “the
evil spirits desire the good and the best, namely, to be, to live, and to
understand”), is obliged to distinguish between such souls’ deliberate will
and their “natural will and inclination,” and to proclaim that this latter,
“which is not from themselves but from the Author of nature, who put this
inclination into nature … can indeed be good.”[237] And, if we would not
construct a scheme flatly contradictory of all earthly experience, we can
hardly restrict the soul, even in the beyond, to entirely indeliberate, good
inclinations, and to fully deliberate, bad volitions, but cannot help
interposing an indefinite variety of inchoative energizings, half-wishes, and
the like, and thinking of these as mixed with good and evil. Indeed this
conclusion seems also required by the common teaching that the suffering
there differs from soul to soul, and this because of the different degrees of
the guilt: for such degrees depend undoubtedly even more upon the degree
of deliberation and massiveness of the will than upon the degree of
objective badness in the deed, and hence can hardly fail to leave variously
small or large fragments of more or less good and imperfectly deliberate
wishings and energizings present in the soul.
And finally Catherine’s “little drop of Love” would, she says, “at once”
turn Hell into Heaven, and hence cannot mean some ordinary good moral
disposition or even such supernatural virtues as theological Faith and Hope,
but Pure Love alone, which latter queen of all the virtues she is explicitly
discussing there. Thus she in nowise requires the absence from these souls
of a certain remnant of semi-deliberate virtue of a less exalted, and not
necessarily regenerative kind.
3. Mitigation of the sufferings of the lost.
As to the Mitigation of the Suffering, it is remarkable that Catherine, who
has been so bold concerning the source of the pains, and the dispositions, of
the lost souls, does not more explicitly teach such an alleviation. I say
“remarkable,” because important Fathers and Churches, that were quite

uninfected by Origenism, have held and have acted upon such a doctrine.
St. Augustine, in his Enchiridion (a.d. 423 (?)) tells us that “in so far as” the
Offering of the Sacrifice of the Altar and Alms “profit” souls in the beyond,
“they profit them by procuring a full remission (of the punishment), or at
least that their damnation may become more tolerable.” And after warning
men against believing in an end to the sufferings of the lost, he adds: “But
let them consider, if they like, that the sufferings of the damned are
somewhat mitigated during certain intervals of time.”[238]—Saints John
Chrysostom and John Damascene, thoroughly orthodox Greek Fathers, and
the deeply devout hymn-writer Prudentius among the Latins, teach similar
doctrine; and in many ancient Latin missals, ranging from the eleventh to
the fourteenth century, prayers for the Mitigation of the Sufferings of the
Damned are to be found.[239]
Hence the great Jesuit Theologian Petau, though not himself sharing this
view, can declare: “Concerning such a breathing-time (respiratio) of lost
souls, nothing certain has as yet been decreed by the Catholic Church, so
that this opinion of most holy Fathers should not temerariously be rejected
as absurd, even though it be foreign to the common opinion of Catholics in
our time.”[240] And the Abbé Emery, that great Catholic Christian, the
second founder of St. Sulpice, who died in 1811, showed, in a treatise On
the Mitigation of the Pains of the Damned, that this view had also been held
by certain Scholastic Theologians, and had been defended, without any
opposition, by Mark of Ephesus, in the Sessions of the Council of Florence
(a.d. 1439); and concluded that this doctrine was not contrary to the
Catholic Faith and did not deserve any censure. The most learned
Theologians in Rome found nothing reprehensible in this treatise, and Pope
Pius VII caused his Theologian, the Barnabite General, Padre Fontana, to
thank M. Emery for the copy sent by him to the Holy Father.[241]
Catherine herself cannot well have been thinking of anything but some
such Mitigation when she so emphatically teaches that God’s mercy extends
even into Hell. Indeed, even the continuation of this great saying in the
present Vita-text formally teaches such Mitigation, yet practically
withdraws it, by making it consist in a rebate and change, from an infinitude
in degree and duration into a finitude in degree though not in duration.[242]
But, as we have already found, this highly schematic statement is doubtless
one of the later glosses, in which case her true meaning must have been

substantially that of the Fathers referred to, viz. that the suffering, taken as
anyhow finite in its degree, gets mercifully mitigated for these souls.—And,
if she was here also faithful to her general principles, she will have
conceived the mitigation, not as simply sporadic and arbitrary, but as more
or less progressive, and connected with the presence in these souls of those
various degrees of semi-voluntary good inclinations and wishes, required
by her other saying. Even if these wishings could slowly and slightly
increase, and the sufferings could similarly decrease, this would in nowise
imply or require a final full rectification of the deliberate will itself, and
hence not a complete extinction of the resultant suffering. Hell would still
remain essentially distinct from Purgatory; for in Purgatory the deliberate,
active will is good from the first, and only the various semi-volitions and
old habits are imperfect, but are being gradually brought into full harmony
with that will, by the now complete willing of the soul; and hence this state
has an end; whereas in Hell the deliberate, active will is bad from the first,
and only various partially deliberate wishes and tendencies are good, but
cannot be brought to fruition in a full virtuous determination of the
dominant character of the soul, and hence this state has no end.
4. The Endlessness of Hell.
And lastly, as to the Endlessness of this condition of the Lost, it is, of
course, plain that Catherine held this defined doctrine; and again, that “the
chief weight, in the Church-teaching as to Hell, rests upon Hell’s
Eternity.”[243]
Here I would suggest five groups of considerations:
(1) Precisely this Eternity appears to be the feature of all others which is
ever increasingly decried by contemporary philosophy and liberal theology
as impossible and revolting. Thus it is frequently argued as though, not the
indiscriminateness nor the materiality nor the forensic externality nor the
complete fixity of the sufferings, nor again the complete malignity of the
lost were incredible, and hence the unendingness of such conditions were
impossible of acceptance; but, on the contrary, as though,—be the degree
and nature of those sufferings conceived as ever so discriminated, spiritual,
interior, and relatively mobile, and as occasioned and accompanied by a
disposition in which semi-voluntary good is present,—the simple
assumption of anything unending or final about them, at once renders the

whole doctrine impossible to believe. It is true that Tennyson and Browning
take the doctrine simply in its popular Calvinistic form, and then reject it;
and even John Stuart Mill and Frederick Denison Maurice hardly consider
the eternity separately. But certainly that thoughtful and religious-minded
writer, Mr. W. R. Greg, brings forward the eternity-doctrine as, already in
itself, “a curiosa infelicitas which is almost stupidity on the part of the
Church.”[244]
(2) Yet it is plain how strongly, even in Mr. Greg’s case, the supposed
(local, physical, indiscriminate, etc.) nature of the state affects the writer’s
judgment as to the possibility of its unendingness,—as indeed is inevitable.
And it is even clearer, I think, that precisely this eternity-doctrine stands for
a truth which is but an ever-present mysterious corollary to every deeply
ethical or spiritual, and, above all, every specifically Christian view of life.
For every such view comes, surely, into hopeless collision with its own
inalienable requirements if it will hold that the deepest ethical and spiritual
acts and conditions are,—avowedly performed though they be in time and
space—simply temporary in their inmost nature and effects; whereas every
vigorously ethical religion, in so far as it has reached a definite personal-
immortality doctrine at all, cannot admit that the soul’s deliberate character
remains without any strictly final and permanent results. The fact is that we
get here to a profound ethical and spiritual postulate, which cannot be
adequately set aside on the ground that it is the product of barbarous ages
and vindictive minds, since this objection applies only to the physical
picturings, the indiscriminateness, non-mitigation, and utter reprobation; or
on the ground that a long, keen purification, hence a temporally finite
suffering, would do as well, since, when all this has completely passed
away, there would be an entire obliteration of all difference in the
consequences of right and wrong; or that acts and dispositions built up in
time cannot have other than finite consequences, since this is to naturalize
radically the deepest things of life; or finally that “Evil,” as the Areopagite
would have it, “is not,”[245] since thus the very existence of the conviction
as to free-will and sin becomes more inexplicable than the theoretical
difficulties against Libertarianism are insoluble.—Against this deep
requirement of the most alert and complete ethical and spiritual life the
wave of any Apocatastasis-doctrine or -emotion will, in the long run, ever
break itself in vain.