Chapter XV: Book VIII: , Book IX, 560d to 588a, and Book X up to 608b), so (3)

Indeed the general principle of ameliorative suffering is so obviously true and inexhaustibly profound that only many, long-lived abuses in the practice, and a frequent obscuration in the teaching, of the doctrine, can explain and excuse the sad neglect, indeed discredit, into which the very principle and root-doctrine has fallen among well-nigh one-half of Western Christendom. As to the deplorably widespread existence, at the time of the Protestant Reformation, of both these causes, which largely occasioned or strengthened each other, we have the unimpeachable authority of the Council of Trent itself: for it orders the Bishops “not to permit that uncertain doctrines, or such as labour under the presumption of falsity, be propagated and taught,” and “to prohibit, as so many scandals and stones of stumbling for the faithful, whatever belongs to a certain curiosity or superstition or savours of filthy lucre.”[251] The cautious admissions of the strictly Catholic scholar-theologian, Dr. N. Paulus, and the precise documentary additions and corrections to Paulus furnished, directly from the contemporary documents, by the fair-minded Protestant worker at Reformation History, Prof. T. Brieger, now furnish us, conjointly, with the most vivid and detailed picture of the sad subtleties and abuses which gave occasion to that Decree.[252]

(3) _Catherine’s purgatorial conceptions avoid those causes. Her conceptions harbour two currents of thought._

It is surely not a small recommendation of Catherine’s mode of conceiving Purgatory, that it cuts, as we shall see, at the very root of those abuses. Yet we must first face certain opposite dangers and ambiguities which are closely intertwined with the group of terms and images taken over, for the purpose of describing an immanental Purgation, by her and her great Alexandrian Christian predecessors, from the Greek Heathen world. And only after the delimitation of the defect in the suggestions which still so readily operate from out of these originally Hellenic ideas, can we consider the difficulties and imperfections peculiar to the other, in modern times the predominant, element in the complete teaching as to the Middle State, an element mostly of Jewish and Roman provenance, and aiming at an extrinsically punitive conception. Both currents can be properly elucidated only if we first take them historically.

1. _Jewish prayers for the dead._

It is admitted on all hands that, in the practical form of Prayers for the Dead, the general doctrine of a Middle State can be traced back, in Judaism, up to the important passage in the Second Book of Maccabees, c. ii, vv. 43-45, where Judas Maccabaeus sends about two thousand drachms of silver to Jerusalem, in order that a Sin-Offering may be offered up for the Jews fallen in battle against Gorgias, upon whose bodies heathen amulets had been found. “He did excellently in this … it is a holy and devout thought. Hence he instituted the Sin-Offering for the dead, that they might be loosed from their sins.” That battle occurred in B.C. 166, and this book appears to have been written in B.C. 124, in Egypt, by a Jew of the school of the Pharisees.

Now it is difficult not to recognize, in the doctrinal comment upon the facts here given, rather as yet the opinions of a Judaeo-Alexandrian circle, which was small even at the time of the composition of the comment, than the general opinion of Judaism at the date of Judas’s act. For if this act had been prompted by a clear and generally accepted conviction as to the resurrection, and the efficacy of prayers for the dead, the writer would have had no occasion or inclination to make an induction of his own as to the meaning and worth of that act; and we should find some indications of such a doctrine and practice in the voluminous works of Philo and Josephus, some century and a half later on. But all such indications are wanting in these writers.

And in the New Testament there is, with regard to helping the dead, only that curious passage: “If the dead do not arise, what shall they do who are baptized for the dead?”[253] where St. Paul refers, without either acceptance or blame, to a contemporary custom among Christian Proselytes from Paganism, who offered up that bath of initiation for the benefit of the souls of deceased relatives who had died without any such purification. Perhaps not till Rabbi Akiba’s time, about 130 A.D., had prayers for the dead become part of the regular Synagogue ritual. By 200 A.D. Tertullian speaks of the practice as of an established usage among the Christian communities: “we make oblations for the Dead, on their anniversary, every year”; although “if you ask where is the law concerning this custom in Scripture, you cannot read of any such there. Tradition will appear before you as its initiator, custom as its confirmer, and faith as its observer.”[254]

It is interesting to note how considerably subsequent to the practice is, in this instance also, its clear doctrinal justification. Indeed the Jews are, to this hour, extraordinarily deficient in explicit, harmonious conceptions on the matter. Certainly throughout Prof. W. Bacher’s five volumes of Sayings of the Jewish Rabbis from 30 B.C. to 400 A.D., I can only find the following saying, by Jochanan the Amoraean, who died 279 A.D.: “There are three books before God, in which men are inscribed according to their merit and their guilt: that of the perfectly devout, that of the perfect evil-doers, and that of the middle, the uncertain souls. The devout and the evil-doers receive their sentence on New Year’s day … the first, unto life; the second, unto death. As to middle souls, their sentence remains in suspense till the day of Atonement: if by then they have done penance, they get written down alongside of the devout; if not, they are written down alongside of the evil-doers.”[255]

2. _Alexandrine Fathers on Purgatory._

Yet it is the Platonizing Alexandrian Fathers Clement and Origen, (they died, respectively, in about 215 and in 254 A.D.), who are the first, and to this hour the most important, Christian spokesmen for a state of true intrinsic purgation. We have already deliberately rejected their Universalism; but this error in no way weakens the profound truth of their teaching as to the immanental, necessary inter-connection between suffering and morally imperfect habits, and as to the ameliorative effects of suffering where, as in Purgatory, it is willed by a right moral determination. Thus Clement: “As children at the hands of their teacher or father, so also are we punished by Providence. God does not avenge Himself, for vengeance is to repay evil by evil, but His punishment aims at our good.” “Although a punishment, it is an emendation of the soul.” “The training which men call punishments.”[256] And Origen: “The fury of God’s vengeance profits unto the purification of souls; the punishment is unto purgation.” “These souls receive, in the prison, not the retribution of their folly, but a benefaction in the purification from the evils contracted in that folly,--a purification effected by means of salutary troubles.”[257]

Now Clement is fully aware of the chief source for his formulation of these deeply spiritual and Christian instincts and convictions. “Plato speaks well when he teaches that ‘men who are punished, experience in truth a benefit: for those who get justly punished, profit through their souls becoming better.’”[258] But Plato, in contradistinction from Clement, holds that this applies only to such imperfect souls as “have sinned curable sins”; he has a Hell as well as a Purgatory: yet his Purgatory, as Clement’s, truly purges: the souls are there because they are partially impure, and they cease to be there when they are completely purified.

And Plato, in his turn, makes no secret as to whence he got his suggestions and raw materials, _viz._ the Orphic priesthood and its literature, which, ever since the sixth century B.C., had been succeeding to and supplanting the previous Orgiastic Dionysianism.[259] Plato gives us vivid pictures of their doings in Athens, at the time of his writing, in about 380 B.C. “Mendicant prophets go to rich men’s doors, and persuade these men that they have a power committed to them of making an atonement for their sins, or for those of their fathers, by sacrifices and incantations … and they persuade whole cities that expiations and purifications of sin may be made by sacrifices and amusements which fill a vacant hour, and are equally at the service of the living and the dead.”[260]--Yet from these men, thus scorned as well-nigh sheer impostors, Plato takes over certain conceptions and formulations which contribute one of the profoundest, still unexhausted elements to his teaching,--although this element is, at bottom, in conflict with that beautiful but inadequate, quite anti-Orphic, conception of his--the purely negative character of Evil. For the Orphic literary remains, fragmentary and late though they be, plainly teach that moral or ritual transgressions are a defilement of the soul, an infliction of positive stains upon it; that these single offences and “spots” produce a generally sinful and “spotted” condition; and that this condition is amenable to and requires purification by suffering,--water, or more frequently fire, which wash or burn out these stains of sin. So Plutarch (who died about 120 A.D.) still declares that the souls in Hades have stains of different colours according to the different passions; and the object of the purificatory punishment is “that, these stains having been worn away, the soul may become altogether resplendent.” And Virgil, when he declares “the guilt which infects the soul is washed out or burnt out … until a long time-span has effaced the clotted stain, and leaves the heavenly conscience pure”: is utilizing an Orphic-Pythagorean Hades-book.[261]

This conception of positive stains is carefully taken over by the Alexandrian Fathers: Clement speaks of “removing, by continuous prayer, the stains (κηλίδας) contracted through former sins,” and declares that “the Gnostic,” the perfect Christian, “fears not death, having purified himself from all the spots (σπίλους) on his soul.” And Origen describes “the pure soul that is not weighed down by leaden weights of wickedness,” where the spots have turned to leaden pellets such as were fastened to fishing-nets. Hence, says Clement, “post-baptismal sins have to be purified out” of the soul; and, says Origen, “these rivers of fire are declared to be of God, who causes the evil that is mixed up with the whole soul to disappear from out of it.”[262]

In Pseudo-Dionysius the non-Orphic, purely negative, view prevails: “Evil is neither in demons nor in us as an existent evil, but as a failure and dearth in the perfection of our own proper goods.” And St. Thomas similarly declares that “different souls have correspondingly different stains, like shadows differ in accordance with the difference of the bodies which interpose themselves between the light.”[263]

But Catherine, in this inconsistent with her own general Privation-doctrine, again conceives the stain, the “macchia del peccato,” as Cardinal Manning has acutely observed, not simply as a deprivation of the light of glory, but “as the cause, not the effect, of God’s not shining into the soul”: it includes in it the idea of an imperfection, weakness with regard to virtue, bad (secondary) dispositions, and unheavenly tastes.[264]

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

Now precisely in this profoundly true conception of Positive Stain there lurk certain dangers, which all proceed from the original Orphic diagnosis concerning the source of these stains, and these dangers will have to be carefully guarded against.

(1) The conviction as to the purificatory power of fire was no doubt, originally, the direct consequence from the Orphic belief as to the intrinsically staining and imprisoning effect of the body upon the soul. “The soul, as the Orphics say, is enclosed in the body, in punishment for the punishable acts”; “liberations” from the body, and “purifications” of the living and the dead, ever, with them, proceed together. And hence to burn the dead body was considered to purify the soul that had been stained by that prison-house: the slain Clytemnestra, says Euripides, “is purified, as to her body, by fire,” for, as the Scholiast explains, “fire purifies all things, and burnt bodies are considered holy.”[265] And such an intensely anti-body attitude we find, not only fully developed later on into a deliberate anti-Incarnational doctrine, among the Gnostics, but, as we have already seen, slighter traces of this same tone may be found in the (doubtless Alexandrian) Book of Wisdom, and in one, not formally doctrinal passage, a momentary echo of it, in St. Paul himself. And Catherine’s attitude is generally, and often strongly, in this direction.

(2) A careful distinction is evidently necessary here. The doctrine that sin defiles,--affects the quality of the soul’s moral and spiritual dispositions, and that this defilement and perversion, ever occasioned by the search after facile pleasure or the flight from fruitful pain, can normally be removed and corrected only by a long discipline of fully accepted, gradually restorative pain, either here, or hereafter, or both: are profound anticipations, and have been most rightly made integral parts, of the Christian life and conception. The doctrine that the body is essentially a mere accident or superaddition or necessary defilement to the soul, is profoundly untrue, in its exaggeration and one-sidedness: for if the body is the occasion of the least spiritual of our sins, it can and should become the chief servant of the spirit; the slow and difficult training of this servant is one of the most important means of development for the soul itself; and many faults and vices are not occasioned by the body at all, whilst none are directly and necessarily caused by it. Without the body, we should not have impurity, but neither should we have specifically human purity of soul; and without it, given the persistence and activity of the soul, there could be as great, perhaps greater, pride and _solipsism_, the most anti-Christian of all the vices. Hence if, in Our Lord’s teaching, we find no trace of a Gnostic desire for purification from all things bodily as essentially soul-staining, we do find a profound insistence upon purity of heart, and upon the soul’s real, active “turning,” conversion, (an interior change from an un- or anti-moral attitude to an ethical and spiritual dependence upon God), as a _sine qua non_ condition for entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven. And the Joannine teachings re-affirm this great truth for us as a _Metabasis_, a moving from Death over to Life.

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

And this idea, as to an intrinsic purgation through suffering of impurities contracted by the soul, can be kept thoroughly Christian, if we ever insist, with Catherine in her most emphatic and deepest teachings, that Purgation can and should be effected in this life, hence in the body,--in and through all the right uses of the body, as well as in and through all the legitimate and will-strengthening abstentions from such uses; that the subject-matter of such purgation are the habits and inclinations contrary to our best spiritual lights, and which we have largely ourselves built up by our variously perverse or slothful acts, but which in no case are directly caused by the body, and in many cases are not even occasioned by it; and, finally, that holiness consists primarily, not in the absence of faults, but in the presence of spiritual force, in Love creative, Love triumphant,--the soul becoming flame rather than snow, and dwelling upon what to do, give and be, rather than upon what to shun.--Catherine’s predominant, ultimate tone possesses this profound positiveness, and corrects all but entirely whatever, if taken alone, would appear to render the soul’s substantial purity impossible in this life; to constitute the body a direct and necessary cause of impurity to the soul; and to find the ideal of perfection in the negative condition of being free from stain. In her greatest sayings, and in her actual life, Purity is found to be Love, and this Love is exercised, not only in the inward, home-coming, recollective movement,--in the purifying of the soul’s dispositions, but also in the outgoing, world-visiting, dispersive movement,--in action towards fellow-souls.

5. _Judaeo-Roman conception of Purgatory._

And this social side and movement brings us to the second element and current in the complete doctrine of a Middle State,--a constituent which possesses affinities and advantages, and produces excesses and abuses, directly contrary to those proper to the element of an intrinsic purgation.

(1) Here we get early Christian utilizations, for purposes of a doctrine concerning the Intermediate State, of sayings and images which dwell directly only upon certain extrinsic consequences of evil-doing, or which, again, describe a future historical and social event,--the Last Day. For already Origen interprets, in his beautiful _Treatise on Prayer_, XXIX, 16, Our Lord’s words as to the debtor: “Thou shalt be cast into prison, thou shalt not come forth from thence, until thou hast paid the uttermost farthing,” Matt, v, 25, 26, as applying to Purgatory. And in his _Contra Celsum_, VII, 13, he already takes, as the Biblical _locus classicus_ for a Purgatory, St. Paul’s words as to how men build, upon the one foundation Christ, either gold, silver, gems, or wood, hay, stubble; and how fire will test each man’s work; and, if the work remain, he shall receive a reward, but if it be burnt, he shall suffer loss and yet he himself shall be saved yet so as by fire, 1 Cor. iii, 10-15. It appears certain, however, that St. Paul is, in this passage, thinking directly of the Last Day, the End of the World, with its accompaniment of physical fire, and as to how far the various human beings, then on earth, will be able to endure the dread stress and testing of that crisis; and he holds that some will be fit to bear it and some will not.

Such a destruction of the world by fire appears elsewhere in Palestinian Jewish literature,--in the Book of Enoch and the Testament of Levi; and in the New Testament, in 2 Peter iii, 12: “The heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, the elements shall melt with fervent heat.” Josephus, _Antiquities_, XI, ii, 3, teaches a destruction by fire and another by water. And the Stoics, to whom also Clement and Origen appeal, had gradually modified their first doctrine of a simply cosmological Ekpyrōsis, a renovation of the physical universe by fire, into a moral purification of the earth, occasioned by, and applied to, the sinfulness of man. Thus Seneca has the double, water-and-fire, instrument: “At that time the tide” of the sea “will be borne along free from all measure, for the same reason which will cause the future conflagration. Both occur when it seems fit to God to initiate a better order of things and to have done with the old.… The judgment of mankind being concluded, the primitive order of things will be recalled, and to the earth will be re-given man innocent of crimes.”[266]

(2) It is interesting to note how--largely under the influence of the forensic temper and growth of the Canonical Penitential system, and of its successive relaxations in the form of substituted lighter good works, Indulgences,--the Latin half of Christendom, ever more social and immediately practical than the Greek portion, came, in general, more and more to dwell upon two ideas suggested to their minds by those two, Gospel and Pauline, passages. The one idea was that souls which, whilst fundamentally well-disposed, are not fit for Heaven at the body’s death, can receive instant purification by the momentary fire of the Particular Judgment; and the other held that, thus already entirely purified and interiorly fit for Heaven, they are but detained (in what we ought, properly, to term a _Satisfactorium_), to suffer the now completely non-ameliorative, simply vindictive, infliction of punishment,--a punishment still, in strict justice, due to them for past sins, of which the guilt and the deteriorating effects upon their own souls have been fully remitted and cured.

In this way it was felt that the complete unchangeableness of the condition of every kind of soul after death, or at least after the Particular Judgment (a Judgment held practically to synchronize with death), was assured. And indeed how could there be any interior growth in Purgatory, seeing that there is no meriting there? Again it was thought that thus the vision of God at the moment of Judgment was given an operative value for the spiritual amelioration of souls which, already in substantially good dispositions, could hardly be held to pass through so profound an experience without intrinsic improvement, as the other view seemed to hold.--And, above all, this form of the doctrine was found greatly to favour the multiplication among the people of prayers, Masses and good-works for the dead; since the _modus operandi_ of such acts seemed thus to become entirely clear, simple, immediate, and, as it were, measurable and mechanical. For these souls in their “Satisfactorium,” being, from its very beginning, already completely purged and fit for Heaven,--God is, as it were, free to relax at any instant, in favour of sufficiently fervent or numerous intercessions, the exigencies of his entirely extrinsic justice.

(3) The position of a purely extrinsic punishment is emphasized, with even unusual vehemence, in the theological glosses inserted, in about 1512 to 1529, in Catherine’s _Dicchiarazione_. Yet it is probably the very influential Jesuit theologian Francesco Suarez, who died in 1617, who has done most towards formulating and theologically popularizing this view. All the guilt of sin, he teaches, is remitted (in these Middle souls) at the first moment of the soul’s separation from the body, by means of a single act of contrition, whereby the will is wholly converted to God, and turned away from every venial sin. “And in this way sin may be remitted, as to its guilt, in Purgatory, because the soul’s purification dates from this moment”;--in strictness, from before the first moment of what should be here termed the “Satisfactorium.” As to bad habits and vicious inclinations, “we ought not to imagine that the soul is detained for these”: but “they are either taken away at the moment of death, or expelled by an infusion of the contrary virtues when the soul enters into glory.”[267] This highly artificial, inorganic view is adopted, amongst other of our contemporary theologians, by Atzberger, the continuator of Scheeben.[268]

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

Now it is plain that the long-enduring Penitential system of the Latin Church, and the doctrine and practice of Indulgences stand for certain important truths liable to being insufficiently emphasized by the Greek teachings concerning an intrinsically ameliorative _Purgatorium_, and that there can be no question of simply eliminating these truths. But neither are they capable of simple co-ordination with, still less of super-ordination to, those most profound and spiritually central immanental positions. As between the primarily forensic and governmental, and the directly ethical and spiritual, it will be the former that will have to be conceived and practised as, somehow, an expression and amplification of, and a practical corrective and means to, the latter.[269]

(1) The ordinary, indeed the strictly obligatory, Church teaching clearly marks the suggested relation as the right one, at three, simply cardinal points. We are bound, by the Confession of Faith of Michael Palaeologus, 1267 A.D., and by the Decree of the Council of Florence, 1429 A.D., to hold that these Middle souls “are purged after death by purgatorial or cathartic pains”; and by that of Trent “that there is a Purgatory.”[270] Yet we have here a true _lucus a non lucendo_, if this place or state does not involve purgation: for no theologian dares explicitly to transfer and restrict the name “Purgatory” to the instant of the soul’s Particular Judgment; even Suarez, as we have seen, has to extend the name somehow.

Next we are bound, by the same three great Decrees, to hold indeed that “the Masses, Prayers, Alms, and other pious offices of the Faithful Living are profitable towards the relief of these pains,” yet this by mode of “suffrage,” since, as the severely orthodox Jesuit, Father H. Hurter, explains in his standard _Theologiae Dogmaticae Compendium_, “the fruit of this impetration and satisfaction is not infallible, for it depends upon the merciful acceptance of God.”[271] Hence in no case can we, short of superstition, conceive such good works as operating automatically: so that the _a priori_ simplest view concerning the mode of operation of these prayers is declared to be mistaken. We can and ought, then, to choose among the conceptions, not in proportion to their mechanical simplicity, but according to their spiritual richness and to their analogy with our deepest this-life experiences.

And we are all bound, by the Decree of Trent and the Condemnation of Baius, 1567 A.D., to hold that Contrition springing from Perfect Love reconciles man with God, even before Confession, and this also outside of cases of necessity or of martyrdom.[272] Indeed, it is the common doctrine that one single act of Pure Love abolishes, not only Hell, but Purgatory, so that, if the soul were to die whilst that act was in operation, it would forthwith be in Heaven. If then, in case of perfect purity, the soul is at once in heaven, the soul cannot be quite pure and yet continue in Purgatory.

(2) It is thus plain that, as regards Sin in its relation to the Sinner, there are, in strictness, ever three points to consider: the guilty act, the reflex effect of the act upon the disposition the agent, and the punishment; for all theologians admit that the more or less bad disposition, contracted through the sinful act, remains in the soul, except in the case of Perfect Contrition, after the guilt of the act has been remitted. But whilst the holders of an Extrinsic, Vindictive Purgatory, work for a punishment as independent as possible of these moral effects of sin still present in the pardoned soul, the advocates of an Intrinsic, Ameliorative Purgatory find the punishment centre in the pain and difficulty attendant upon “getting slowly back to fully virtuous dispositions, through retracing the steps we have taken in departing from it.”[273] And the system of Indulgences appears, in this latter view, to find its chief justification in that it keeps up a link with the past Penitential system of the Church; that it vividly recalls and applies the profound truth of the interaction, for good even more than for evil, between all human souls, alive and dead; and that it insists upon the readily forgotten truth of even the forgiven sinner, the man with the good determination, having ordinarily still much to do and to suffer before he is quit of the effects of his sin.

(3) And the difficulties and motives special to those who supplant the Intrinsic, Ameliorating Purgatory by an Extrinsic, Vindicative _Satisfactorium_, can indeed be met by those who would preserve that beautifully dynamic, ethical, and spiritual conception. For we can hold that the fundamental condition,--the particular determination of the active will,--remains quite unchanged, from Death to Heaven, in these souls; that this determination of the active will requires more or less of time and suffering fully to permeate and assimilate to itself all the semi-voluntary wishes and habits of the soul; and that this permeation takes place among conditions in which the soul’s acts are too little resisted and too certain of success to be constituted meritorious. We can take Catherine’s beautiful Plunge-conception as indicating the kind of operation effected in and by the soul, at and through the momentary vision of God. And we can feel convinced that it is ever, in the long run, profoundly dangerous to try to clarify and simplify doctrines beyond or against the scope and direction of the analogies of Nature and of Grace, which are ever so dynamic and organic in type: for the poor and simple, as truly as the rich and learned, ever require, not to be merely taken and left as they are, but to be raised and trained to the most adequate conceptions possible to each.--It is, in any case, very certain that the marked and widespread movement of return to belief in a Middle State is distinctly towards a truly Purgative Purgatory, although few of these sincere truth-seekers are aware, as is Dr. Anrich, that they are groping after a doctrine all but quite explained away by a large body of late Scholastic and Neo-Scholastic theologians.[274]

(4) Yet it is very satisfactory to note how numerous, and especially how important are, after all is said, the theologians who have continued to walk, in this matter, in the footsteps of the great Alexandrines. St. Gregory of Nyssa teaches a healing of the soul in the beyond and a purification by fire.[275] St. Augustine says that “fire burns up the work of him who thinketh of the things of this world, since possessions, that are loved, do not perish without pain on the part of their possessor. It is not incredible that something of this sort takes place after this life.”[276]

St. Thomas declares most plainly: “Venial guilt, in a soul which dies in a state of grace, is remitted after this life by the purging fire, because that pain, which is in some manner accepted by the will, has, in virtue of grace, the power of expiating all such guilt as can co-exist with a state of grace.” “After this life … there can be merit with respect to some accidental reward, so long as a man remains in some manner in a state of probation: and hence there can be meritorious acts in Purgatory, with respect to the remission of venial sin.”[277]--Dante (_d._ 1321) also appears, as Father Faber finely notes, to hold such a voluntary, immanental Purgatory, where the poet sees an Angel impelling, across the sea at dawn, a bark filled with souls bent for Purgatory: for the boat is described as driving towards the shore so lightly as to draw no wake upon the water.[278]

Cardinal Bellarmine, perhaps the greatest of all anti-Protestant theologians (_d._ 1621) teaches that “venial sin is remitted in Purgatory _quoad culpam_,” and that “this guilt, as St. Thomas rightly insists, is remitted in Purgatory by an act of love and patient endurance.”[279] St. Francis of Sales, that high ascetical authority (_d._ 1622), declares: “By Purgatory we understand a place where souls undergo purgation, for a while, from the stains and imperfections which they have carried away with them from this mortal life.”[280]

And recently and in England we have had Father Faber, Cardinal Manning, and Cardinal Newman, although differing from each other on many other points, fully united in holding and propagating this finely life-like, purgative conception of purgatory.[281]

7. _A final difficulty._

One final point concerning a Middle State. In the Synoptic tradition there is a recurrent insistence upon the forgiveness of particular sins, at particular moments, by particular human and divine acts of contrition and pardon. In the Purgatorial teaching the stress lies upon entire states and habits, stains and perversities of soul, and upon God’s general grace working, in and through immanently necessary, freely accepted sufferings, on to a slow purification of the complete personality. As Origen says: “The soul’s single acts, good or bad, go by; but, according to their quality, they give form and figure to to the mind of the agent, and leave it either good or bad, and destined for pains or for rewards.”[282]

The antagonism here is but apparent. For the fact that a certain condition of soul precedes, and that another condition succeed, each act of the same soul, in proportion as this act is full and deliberate, does not prevent the corresponding, complimentary fact that such acts take the preceding condition as their occasion, and make the succeeding condition into a further expression of themselves. Single acts which fully express the character, whether good or bad, are doubtless rarer than is mostly thought. Yet Catherine, in union with the Gospels and the Church, is deeply convinced of the power of one single act of Pure Love to abolish, not of course the effects outward, but the reflex spiritual consequences upon the soul itself, of sinful acts or states.

Catherine’s picture again, of the deliberate Plunge into Purgatory, gives us a similar heroic act which, summing up the whole soul’s active volitions, initiates and encloses the whole subsequent purification, but which itself involves a prevenient act of Divine Love and mercy, to which this act of human love is but the return and response. Indeed, as we know, this plunge-conception was but the direct projection, on to the other-world-picture, of her own personal experience at her conversion, when a short span of clock-time held acts of love received and acts of love returned, which transformed all her previous condition, and initiated a whole series of states ever more expressive of her truest self.--Act and state and state and act, each presupposes and requires the other: and both are present in the Synoptic pictures, and both are operative in the Purgatorial teaching; although in the former the accounts are so brief as to make states and acts alike look as though one single act; and, in the latter, the descriptions are so large as to make the single acts almost disappear behind the states.

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

We have found a truly Purgational Middle state, with its sense of succession, its mixture of joy and suffering, and its growth and fruitfulness, to be profoundly consonant with all our deepest spiritual experiences and requirements. But what about Heaven, which we must, apparently, hold to consist of a sense of simultaneity, a condition of mere reproductiveness and utterly uneventful finality, and a state of unmixed, unchanging joy?--Here again, even if in a lesser degree, certain experiences of the human soul can help us to a few general positions of great spiritual fruitfulness, which can reasonably claim an analogical applicability to the Beyond, and which, thus taken as our ultimate ideals, cannot fail to stimulate the growth of our personality, and, with it, of further insight into these great realities. I shall here consider three main questions, which will roughly correspond to the three perplexities just indicated.

1. _Time and Heaven._

Our first question, then, is as to the probable character of man’s happiest ultimate consciousness,--whether it is one of succession or of simultaneity: in other words, whether, besides the disappearance of the category of space (a point already discussed), there is likely to be the lapse of the category of time also.--And let it be noted that the retention of the latter sense for Hell, and even for Purgatory, does not prejudge the question as to its presence or absence in Heaven, since those two states are admittedly non-normative, whereas the latter represents the very ideal and measure of man’s full destination and perfection.

(1) Now it is still usual, amongst those who abandon the ultimacy of the space-category, simultaneously to drop, as necessarily concomitant, the time-category also. Tennyson, among the poets, does so, in his beautiful “Crossing the Bar”: “From out our bourne of Time and Place, the flood may bear me far”; and Prof. H. J. Holtzmann, among speculative theologians, in criticising Rothe’s conception of man as a quite ultimately spacial-temporal being, treats these two questions as standing and falling together.[283]--Yet a careful study of Kant’s critique of the two categories of Space and Time suffices to convince us of the indefinitely richer content, and more ultimate reality, of the latter. Indeed, I shall attempt to show more fully in the next Chapter, with the aid of M. Henri Bergson, that mathematical, uniform clock-time is indeed an artificial compound, which is made up of our profound experience of a duration in which the constituents (sensations, imaginations, thoughts, feelings, willings) of the succession ever, in varying degrees, overlap, interpenetrate, and modify each other, and the quite automatic and necessary simplification and misrepresentation of this experience by its imaginary projection on to space,--its restatement, by our picturing faculty, as a perfectly equable succession of mutually exclusive moments. It is in that interpenetrative duration, not in this atomistic clock-time, that our deeper human experiences take place.

(2) But that sense of duration, is it indeed our deepest apprehension? Dr. Holtzmann points out finely how that we are well aware, in our profoundest experiences, of “that permanently incomprehensible fact,--the existence of, as it were, a prism, through which the unitary ray of light, which fills our consciousness with a real content, is spread out into a colour-spectrum, so that what, in itself, exists in pure unitedness” and simultaneity, “becomes intelligible to us only as a juxtaposition in space and a succession in time. Beyond the prism, there are no such two things.” And he shows how keenly conscious we are, at times, of that deepest mode of apprehension and of being which is a Simultaneity, an eternal Here and Now; and how ruinous to our spiritual life would be a full triumph of the category of time.[284]

But it is St. Augustine who has, so far, found the noblest expression for the deepest human experiences in this whole matter of Duration and Simultaneity, as against mere Clock-Time, although, here as with regard to Space, he is deeply indebted to Plotinus. “In thee, O my soul, I measure time,--I measure the impression which passing events make upon thee, who remainest when those events have passed: this present impression then, and not those events which had to pass in order to produce it, do I measure, when I measure time.” “The three times,” tenses, “past, present, and future … are certain three affections in the soul, I find them there and nowhere else. There is the present memory of past events, the present perception of present ones, and the present expectation of future ones.” God possesses “the splendour of ever-tarrying Eternity,” which is “incomparable with never-tarrying times,” since in it “nothing passes, but the content of everything abides simply present.” And in the next life “perhaps our own thoughts also will not be flowing, going from one thing to another, but we shall see all we know simultaneously, in one intuition.” St. Thomas indeed is more positive: “All things will,” in Heaven, “be seen simultaneously and not successively.”[285]

(3) If then, even here below, we can so clearly demonstrate the conventionality of mere Clock-Time, and can even conceive a perfect Simultaneity as the sole form of the consciousness of God, we cannot well avoid holding that, in the other life, the clock-time convention will completely cease, and that, though the sense of Duration is not likely completely to disappear, (since, in this life at least, this sense is certainly not merely phenomenal for man, and its entire absence would apparently make man into God), the category of Simultaneity will, as a sort of strong background-consciousness, englobe and profoundly unify the sense of Duration. And, the more God-like the soul, the more would this sense of Simultaneity predominate over the sense of Duration.

2. _The Ultimate Good, concrete, not abstract._

Our second question concerns the kind and degree of variety in unity which we should conceive to characterize the life of God, and of the soul in its God-likeness. Is this type and measure of all life to be conceived as a maximum of abstraction or as a maximum of concretion; as pure thought alone, or as also emotion and will; as solitary and self-centred, or as social and outgoing; and as simply reproductive, or also as operative?

(1) Now it is certain that nothing is easier, and nothing has been more common, than to take the limitations of our earthly conditions, and especially those attendant upon the strictly contemplative, and, still more, those connected with the technically ecstatic states, as so many advantages, or even as furnishing a complete scheme of the soul’s ultimate life.

As we have already repeatedly seen in less final matters, so here once more, at the end, we can trace the sad impoverishment to the spiritual outlook produced by the esteem in which the antique world generally held the psycho-physical peculiarities of trances, as directly valuable or even as prophetic of the soul’s ultimate condition; the contraposition and exaltation, already on the part of Plato and Aristotle, of a supposed non-actively contemplative, above a supposed non-contemplatively active life; the largely excessive, not fully Christianizable, doctrines of the Neo-Platonists as to the Negative, Abstractive way, when taken as self-sufficient, and as to Quiet, Passivity, and Emptiness of Soul, when understood literally; and the conception, rarely far away from the ancient thinkers, of the soul as a substance which, full-grown, fixed and stainless at the first, requires but to be kept free from stain up to the end.

And yet the diminution of vitality in the trance, and even the inattention to more than one thing at a time in Contemplation, are, in themselves, defects, at best the price paid for certain gains; the active and the contemplative life are, ultimately, but two mutually complementary sides of life, so that no life ever quite succeeds in eliminating either element, and life, _caeteris paribus_, is complete and perfect, in proportion as it embraces both elements, each at its fullest, and the two in a perfect interaction; the Negative, Abstractive way peremptorily requires also the other, the Affirmative, Concrete way; the Quiet, Passivity, Emptiness are really, when wholesome, an incubation for, or a rest from, Action, indeed they are themselves a profound action and peace, and the soul is primarily a Force and an Energy, and Holiness is a growth of that Energy in Love, in full Being, and in creative, spiritual Personality.

(2) Now on this whole matter the European Christian Mystics, strongly influenced by, yet also largely developing, certain doctrines of the Greeks, have, I think, made two most profound contributions to the truths of the spirit, and have seriously fallen short of reality in three respects.

The first contribution can, indeed, be credited to Aristotle, whose luminous formulations concerning Energeia, Action, (as excluding Motion, or Activity), we have already referred to. Here to _be_ is to _act_, and Energeia, a being’s perfect functioning and fullest self-expression in action, is not some kind of movement or process; but, on the contrary, all movement and process is only an imperfect kind of Energeia. Man, in his life here, only catches brief glimpses of such an Action; but God is not so hampered,--He is ever completely all that He can be, His Action is kept up inexhaustibly and ever generates supreme bliss; it is an unchanging, unmoving Energeia.[286]--And St. Thomas echoes this great doctrine, for all the Christian schoolmen: “A thing is declared to be perfect, in proportion as it is in act,”--as all its potentialities are expressed in action; and hence “the First Principle must be supremely in act,” “God’s Actuality is identical with His Potentiality,” “God is Pure Action (_Actus Purus_).”[287]--Yet it is doubtless the Christian Mystics who have most fully experienced, and emotionally vivified, this great truth, and who cease not, in all their more characteristic teachings, from insisting upon the ever-increasing acquisition of “Action,” the fully fruitful, peaceful functioning of the whole soul, at the expense of “activity,” the restless, sterile distraction and internecine conflict of its powers. And Heaven, for them, ever consists in an unbroken Action, devoid of all “activity,” rendering the soul, in its degree, like to that Purest Action, God, who, Himself “Life,” is, as our Lord declared, “not the God of the dead but of the living.”[288]

And the second contribution can, in part, be traced back to Plato, who does not weary, in the great middle period of his writings, from insisting upon the greatness of the nobler passions, and who already apprehends a Heavenly Eros which in part conflicts with, in part transcends, the Earthly one. But here especially it is Christianity, and in particular Christian Mysticism, which have fully experienced and proclaimed that “God” is “Love,” and that the greatest of all the soul’s acts and virtues is Charity, Pure Love. And hence the Pure Act of God, and the Action of the God-like soul, are conceived not, Aristotle-like, as acts of pure intelligence alone, but as tinged through and through with a noble emotion.

(3) But in three matters the Mystics, as such and as a whole, have, here especially under the predominant influence of Greek thought, remained inadequate to the great spiritual realities, as most fully revealed to us by Christianity. The three points are so closely interconnected that it will be best first to illustrate, and then to criticise them, together.

(i) Aristotle here introduces the mischief. For it is he who in his great, simply immeasurably influential, theological tractate, Chapters VI to X of the Twelfth Book of his _Metaphysic_, has presented to us God as “the one first unmoved Mover” of the Universe, but Who moves it as desired by it, not as desiring it, as outside of it, not as also inside it. God here is sheer Pure Thought, Noēsis, for “contemplation is the most joyful and the best” of actions. And “Thought” here “thinks the divinest and worthiest, without change,” hence “It thinks Itself, and the Thinking is a Thinking of Thought.”[289] We have here, as Dr. Caird strikingly puts it, a God necessarily shut up within Himself, “of purer eyes than to behold, not only iniquity but even contingency and finitude, and His whole activity is one act of pure self-contemplation.” “The ideal activity which connects God with the world, appears thus as in the world and not in God.”[290]

(ii) Now we have already allowed that the Mystics avoid Aristotle’s elimination of emotion from man’s deepest action, and of emotion’s equivalent from the life of God. But they are, for the most part, much influenced in their speculations by this intensely Greek, aristocratic, intellectualist conception, in the three points of a disdain of the Contingent and Historical; of a superiority to volitional, productive energizing; and of a presentation of God as unsocial, and as occupied directly with Himself alone. We have already studied numerous examples of the first two, deeply un-Christian, errors as they have more or less influenced Christian Mysticism; the third mistake, of a purely Transcendental, Deistic God, is indeed never consistently maintained by any Christian, and Catherine, in particular, is ever dominated by the contrary great doctrine, adumbrated by Plato and fully revealed by Our Lord, of the impulse to give Itself intrinsic to Goodness, so that God, as Supreme Goodness, becomes the Supreme Self-giver, and thus the direct example and motive for our own self-donation to Him. Yet even so deeply religious a non-Christian as Plotinus, and such speculative thinkers as Eriugena and Eckhart (who certainly intended to remain Christians) continue all three mistakes, and especially insist upon a Supreme Being, Whose true centre, His Godhead, is out of all relation to anything but Himself. And even the orthodox Scholastics, and St. Thomas himself, attempt at times to combine, with the noblest Platonic and the deepest Christian teachings, certain elements, which, in strictness, have no place in an Incarnational Religion.

(iii) For, at times, the fullest, deepest Action is still not conceived, even by St. Thomas, as a Harmony, an Organization of all Man’s essential powers, the more the better. “In the active life, which is occupied with many things, there is less of beatitude than in the contemplative life, which is busy with one thing alone,--the contemplation of Truth”; “beatitude must consist essentially in the action of the intellect; and only accidentally in the action of the will.”[291] God is still primarily intelligence: “God’s intelligence is His substance”; whereas “volition must be in God, since there is intelligence in Him,” and “Love must of necessity be declared to be in God, since there is volition in Him.”[292] God is still, in a certain sense, shut up in Himself: “As He understands things other than Himself, by understanding His own essence, so He wills things other than Himself, by willing His own goodness.” “God enjoys not anything beside Himself, but enjoys Himself alone.”[293]--And we get, in correspondence to this absorption of God in Himself, an absorption of man in God, of so direct and exclusive a kind, as, if pressed, to eliminate all serious, permanent value, for our soul, in God’s actual creation of our fellow-creatures. “He who knoweth Thee and creatures, is not, on this account, happier than if he knows them not; but he is happy because of Thee alone.” And “the perfection of Love is essential to beatitude, with respect to the Love of God, not with respect to the Love of one’s neighbour. If there were but one soul alone to enjoy God, it would be blessèd, even though it were without a single fellow-creature whom it could love.”[294]

(iv) And yet St. Thomas’s own deeply Christian sense, explicit sayings of Our Lord or of St. Paul, and even, in part, certain of the fuller apprehensions of the Greeks, can make the great Dominican again uncertain, or can bring him to entirely satisfactory declarations, on each of these points. For we get the declaration that direct knowledge of individual things, and quasi-creative operativeness are essential to all true perfection. “To understand something merely in general and not in particular, is to know it imperfectly”; Our Lord Himself has taught us that “the very hairs of your head are all numbered”; hence God must “know all other individual things with a distinct and proper knowledge.”--And “a thing is most perfect, when it can make another like unto itself. But by tending to its own perfection, each thing tends to become more and more like God. Hence everything tends to be like God, in so far as it tends to be the cause of other things.”[295]--We get a full insistence, with St. Paul, (in I Cor. xiii), upon our love of God, an act of the will, as nobler than our cognition of Him; and with Plato and St. John, upon God’s forthgoing Love for His creatures, as the very crown and measure of His perfection. “Everything in nature has, as regards its own good, a certain inclination to diffuse itself amongst others, as far as possible. And this applies, in a supreme degree, to the Divine Goodness, from which all perfection is derived.” “Love, Joy, Delight can be predicated of God”; Love which, of its very essence “causes the lover to bear himself to the beloved as to his own self”: so that we must say with Dionysius that “He, the very Cause of all things, becomes ecstatic, moves out of Himself, by the abundance of His loving goodness, in the providence exercised by Him towards all things extant.”[296]

(v) And we get in St. Thomas, when he is too much dominated by the abstractive trend, a most interesting, because logically necessitated and quite unconscious, collision with certain sayings of Our Lord. For he then explains Matt. xviii, 10, “their,” the children’s, “Angels see without ceasing the face of their Father who is in Heaven” as teaching that “the action (_operatio_), by which Angels are conjoined to the increate Good, is, in them, unique and sempiternal”; whereas his commentators are driven to admit that the text, contrariwise, implies that these Angels have two simultaneous “operations,” and that their succouring action in nowise disturbs their intellectual contemplation. Hence, even if we press Matt. xxii, 30, that we “shall be as the Angels of God,” we still have an organism of peaceful Action, composed of intellectual, affective, volitional, productive acts operating between the soul and God, and the soul and other souls, each constituent and object working and attained in and through all the others.

(vi) Indeed all Our Lord’s Synoptic teachings, as to man’s ultimate standard and destiny, belong to this God-in-man and man-in-God type of doctrine: for there the two great commandments are strictly inseparable; God’s interest in the world is direct and detailed,--it is part of His supreme greatness that He cares for every sparrow that falls to the ground; and man, in the Kingdom of God, will sit down at a banquet, the unmistakable type of social joys.--And even the Apocalypse, which has, upon the whole, helped on so much the conception of an exclusive, unproductive entrancement of each soul singly in God alone, shows the deepest emotion when picturing all the souls, from countless tribes and nations, standing before the throne,--an emotion which can, surely, not be taken as foreign to those souls themselves.[297] But, indeed, Our Lord’s whole life and message become unintelligible, and the Church loses its deepest roots, unless the Kingdom of God is, for us human souls, as truly a part of our ultimate destiny as is God Himself, that God who fully reveals to us His own deepest nature as the Good Shepherd, the lover of each single sheep and of the flock as a whole.[298]

(4) We shall, then, do well to hold that the soul’s ultimate beatitude will consist in its own greatest possible self-realization in its God-likeness,--an Action free from all Activity, but full of a knowing, feeling, willing, receiving, giving, effectuating, all which will energize between God and the soul, and the soul and other souls,--each force and element functioning in its proper place, but each stimulated to its fullest expansion, and hence to its deepest delight, by the corresponding vitalization of the other powers and ends, and of other similar centres of rich action.

3. _The pain-element of Bliss._