Chapter XIV: Book VIII: , Book IX, 560d to 588a, and Book X up to 608b), so (2)

(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.

(3) The doctrine of Conditional Immortality has, I think, many undeniable advantages over every kind of Origenism. This view does not, as is often imputed to it, believe in the annihilation by Omnipotence of the naturally immortal souls of impenitent grave sinners; but simply holds that human souls begin with the capacity of acquiring, with the help of God’s Spirit, a spiritual personality, built up out of the mere possibilities and partial tendencies of their highly mixed natures, which, if left uncultivated and untranscended, become definitely fixed at the first, phenomenal, merely individual level,--so that spiritual personality alone deserves to live on and does so, whilst this animal individuality does not deserve and does not do so. The soul is thus not simply born as, but can become more and more, that “inner man” who alone persists, indeed who “is renewed day by day, even though our outward man perish.”[246]

This conception thus fully retains, indeed increases, the profound ultimate difference between the results of spiritual and personal, and of animal and simply individual life respectively,--standing, as it does, at the antipodes to Origenism; it eliminates all unmoralized, unspiritualized elements from the ultimate world, without keeping souls in an apparently fruitless suffering; and it gives full emphasis to a supremely important, though continually forgotten fact,--the profoundly expensive, creative, positive process and nature of spiritual character. No wonder, then, that great thinkers and scholars, such as Goethe, Richard Rothe, Heinrich Holtzmann, and some Frenchmen and Englishmen have held this view.[247]

Yet the objections against this view, taken in its strictness, are surely conclusive. For how can an originally simply mortal substance, force, or entity become immortal, and a phenomenal nature be leavened by a spiritual principle which, _ex hypothesi_, is not present within it? And how misleadingly hyperbolical, according to this, would be the greatest spiritual exhortations, beginning with those of Our Lord Himself!

(4) And yet the conception of Conditional Immortality cannot be far from the truth, since everything, surely, points to a lowered consciousness in the souls in question, or at least to one lower than that in the ultimate state of the saved. This conception of the shrunken condition of these souls was certainly held by Catherine, even if the other, the view of a heightened, consciousness, appears in hortatory passages which just _may_ be authentic; and indeed only that conception is conformable with her fundamental position that love alone is fully positive and alone gives vital strength, and that all fully deliberate love is absent from the lost souls. And if we consider how predominantly hortatory in tone and object the ordinary teaching on this point cannot fail to be; and, on the other hand, how close to Manichaeism, any serious equating of the force and intensity of life and consciousness between the Saved and the Lost would be, we can hardly fail to find ourselves free, indeed compelled, to hold a lesser consciousness for the Lost than for the Saved. Whilst the joyful life of the Saved would range, in harmonious intensity, beyond all that we can experience here, the painful consciousness of the Lost would be, in various degrees, indefinitely less. The Saved would thus not be only _other_ than the Lost, they would actually be _more_: for God is Life supreme, and, where there is more affinity with God, there is more life, and more consciousness.

(5) But, if the view just stated is the more likely one, then we cannot soften the sufferings of those souls, by giving them a sense of Eternity, of one unending momentary Now, instead of our earthly sense of Succession, as Cardinal Newman and Father Tyrrell have attempted to do, in a very instructive and obviously orthodox manner.[248] I shall presently argue strongly in favour of some consciousness of Eternity being traceable in our best moments here, and of this consciousness being doubtless more extended in the future blessed life. But here I have only to consider whether for one who, like Catherine, follows the analogy of earthly experience, the Lost should be considered nearer to, or farther from, such a _Totum-Simul_ consciousness than we possess now, here below, at our best? And to this the answer must, surely, be that they are further away from it. Yet God in His mercy may allow this greater successiveness, if unaccompanied by any keen memory or prevision, to help in effecting that mitigation of the suffering which we have already allowed.

IV. CATHERINE AND PURGATORY.

1. _Introductory._

(1) _Changed feeling concerning Purgatory._

In the matter of a Purgatory, a very striking return of religious feeling towards its normal equilibrium has been occurring in the most unexpected, entirely unprejudiced quarters, within the last century and a half. In Germany we have Lessing, who, in the wake of Leibniz, encourages the acceptance of “that middle state which the greater part of our fellow-Christians have adopted”: Schleiermacher, who calls the overpassing of a middle state by a violent leap at death “a magical proceeding”; David F. Strauss, who entirely agrees; Carl von Hase, who, in his very Manual of Anti-Roman Polemics admits that “most men when they die are probably too good for Hell, but they are certainly too bad for Heaven”; the delicately thoughtful philosopher Fechner who, in the most sober-minded of his religious works, insists upon our “conceiving the life beyond according to the analogy of this-life conditions,” and refers wistfully to “the belief which is found amongst all peoples and is quite shrunken only among Protestants--that the living can still do something to aid the dead”; and Prof. Anrich, probably the greatest contemporary authority on the Hellenic elements incorporated in Christian doctrine, declares, all definite Protestant though he is, that “legitimate religious postulates underlie the doctrine of Purgatory.”[249] And in England that sensitively religious Unitarian, W. R. Greg, tells us “Purgatory, ranging from a single day to a century of ages, offers that borderland of discriminating retribution for which justice and humanity cry out”; and the Positivist, John Stuart Mill, declares at the end of his life: “All the probabilities in case of a future life are that such as we have been made or have made ourselves before the change, such we shall enter into the life hereafter.… To imagine that a miracle will be wrought at death … making perfect every one whom it is His will to include among His elect … is utterly opposed to every presumption that can be adduced from the light of nature.”[250]

(2) _Causes of the previous prejudice._