Chapter IX: Psycho-Physical and Temperamental Questions (2)

Thus, already in her early childhood, that picture of the Pietà seems to have suggested religious ideas and feelings with the suddenness and emotional solidity of a physical seizure--an impression still undimmed when she herself recounted it, some fifty years later, to her two intimates.--It is true that during those first, deeply unhappy ten years of marriage, we cannot readily find more than indications of a most profound and brooding melancholy, the apparent result of but two factors,--a naturally sad disposition and acutely painful domestic circumstances. Yet it is clear, from the sequel, that more and other things lay behind. It is indeed evident that she possessed a congenitally melancholy temperament; that nothing but the rarest combination of conditions could have brought out, into something like elastic play and varied exercise, her great but few and naturally excessive qualities of mind and heart; that these conditions were not only absent, but were replaced by circumstances of the most painful kind; and that she will hardly, at this time, have had even a moment’s clear consciousness of any other sources than just those conditions for her deep, keen, and ever-increasing dissatisfaction with all things, her own self included: all peace and joy, the very capacity for either seemed gone, and gone for ever. But it is only the third stage, with its sudden-seeming conversion on March 20, 1473, and the then following four years of strenuously active self-immolation and dedication to the humblest service of others, which lets us see deep into those previous years of sullen gloom and apparently hopeless drift and dreary wastage.

The two stages really belong to one another, and the depth of the former gloom and dreariness stood in direct proportion and relation to the capacities of that nature and to the height of their satisfaction in the later light and vigour brought to and assimilated by them. It was the sense, at that previous time still inarticulate, but none the less mightily operative, of the insufficiency of all things merely contingent, of all things taken as such and inevitably found to be such, that had been adding, and was now discovered to have added, a quite determining weight and poignancy to the natural pressure of her temperament and external lot. And this temperament and lot, which had not alone produced that sadness, could still less of themselves remove it, whatever might be its cause. Her sense of emptiness and impotence could indeed add to her sense of fulness and of power, once these latter had come; but of themselves the former could no more give her the latter, than hunger, which indeed makes bread to taste delicious, can give us real bread and, with it, that delight.

And it was such real bread of life and real power which now came to her. For if the tests of reality in such things are their persistence and large and rich spiritual applicability and fruitfulness, then something profoundly real and important took place in the soul of that sad and weary woman of six-and-twenty, within that Convent-chapel, at that Annunciation-tide. Her four years of heroic persistence; her unbroken Hospital service of a quarter of a century; her lofty magnanimity towards her husband, Thobia and Thobia’s mother; her profound influence upon Vernazza, in urging him on to his splendid labours throughout Italy, and to his grand death in plague-stricken Genoa; her daringly original, yet immensely persuasive, doctrine,--nearly all this dates back, completely for her consciousness and very largely in reality, to those few moments on that memorable day.

2. _Her conversion not sudden nor visionary._

But two points, concerning the manner and form of this experience, are, though of but secondary spiritual interest, far more difficult to decide. There is, for one thing, the indubitable impression, for her own mind and for ours, of complete suddenness and newness in her change. Was this suddenness and newness merely apparent, or real as well? And should this suddenness, if real, be taken as in itself and directly supernatural?

Now it is certain that Catherine, up to ten years before, had been full of definitely religious acts and dispositions. Had she not, already at thirteen, wanted to be a Nun, and, at eight or so, been deeply moved by a picture of the dead Christ in His Mother’s lap? Hence, ideas and feelings of self-dedication and of the Christ-God’s hatred of sin and love for her had, in earlier and during longer times than those of her comparative carelessness, soaked into and formed her mental and emotional bent, and will have in so far shaped her will, as to make the later determination along those earlier lines of its operation, comparatively easy, even after those years of relaxation and deviation. Yet it is clear that there was not here, as indeed there is nowhere, any mere repetition of the past. New combinations and an indefinitely deeper apprehension of the great religious ideas and facts of God’s holiness and man’s weakness, of the necessity for the soul to reach its own true depth or to suffer fruitlessly, and of God having Himself to meet and feed this movement and hunger which He has Himself implanted; new combinations and depths of emotion, and an indefinite expansion and heroic determination of the will: were all certainly here, and were new as compared with even the most religious moments in the past.

As to the suddenness, we cannot but take it as, in large part, simply apparent,--a dim apprehension of what then became clear having been previously quite oppressively with her. And, in any case, this suddenness seems to belong rather to the temperamental peculiarities and necessary forms of her particular experiences than to the essence and content of her spiritual life. For, whatever she thinks, feels, says or does throughout her life, she does and experiences with actual suddenness, or at least with a sense of suddenness; and there is clearly no more necessary connection between such suddenness and grace and true self-renouncement, than there is between gradualness and mere nature; both suddenness and gradualness being but simple modes, more or less fixed for each individual, yet differing from each to each, modes in which God’s grace and man’s will interact and manifest themselves in different souls.[35]

And then there is the question as to whether or not this conversion-experience took the form of a vision. We have seen, in the Appendix, how considerable are the difficulties which beset the account of the Bleeding Christ Vision in the Palace; and how the story of the previous visionless experience in the Chapel is free from all such objections. But, even supposing the two accounts to be equally reliable, it is the first, the visionless experience, which was demonstrably the more important and the more abidingly operative of the two. More important, for it is during those visionless moments that her conversion is first effected; and more abiding, for, according to all the ancient accounts, the impression of the Bleeding Christ Vision disappeared utterly at the end of at longest four years, whereas the memory of the visionless conversion moments remained with her, as an operative force, up to the very last. Witness the free self-casting of the soul into painful-joyous Purgation, into Love, into God (without any picturing of the historic Christ), which forms one of the two constituents of her great latter-day teaching; and how entirely free from directly historic elements all her recorded visions of the middle period turn out to be.[36]

3. _Peculiarities of her Active Penitence._

As to the four years of Active Penitence, we must beware of losing the sense of the dependence, the simple, spontaneous instrumentality, in which the negative and restrictive side of of her action stood towards the positive and expansive one. An immense affirmation, an anticipating, creative buoyancy and resourcefulness, had come full flood into her life; and had shifted her centre of deliberate interest and willing away from the disordered, pleasure-seeking, sore and sulky lesser self in which her true personality had for so long been enmeshed. Thus all this strenuous work of transforming and raising her lower levels of inclinations and of habit to the likeness and heights of her now deliberate loftiest standard was not taking place for the sake of something which actually was, or which even seemed to be, less than what she had possessed or had, even dimly, sought before, nor with a view to her true self’s contraction. But, on the contrary, the work was for the end of that indefinite More, of that great pushing upwards of her soul’s centre and widening out of its circumference, which she could herself confirm and increase only by such ever-renewed warfare against what she now recognized as her false and crippling self.

And it is noticeable how soon and how largely, even still within this stage, her attitude became “passive.” She pretty early came to do these numerous definite acts of penance without any deliberate selection or full attention to them. As in her third period her absorption in large spiritual ideas spontaneously suggests certain corresponding psycho-physical phenomena, which then, in return, stimulate anew the apprehensions of the mind; so here, towards the end of the first period, penitential love ends by quite spontaneously suggesting divers external acts of penitence, which readily become so much fresh stimulation for love.

I take this time to have been as yet free from visions or ecstasies--at least of the later lengthy and specific type. For the Bleeding Christ experience, even if fully historical, occurred within the first conversion-days, and only its vivid memory prolonged itself throughout those penitential years; whilst all such other visions, as have been handed down to us, do not treat of conversion and penance, at least in any active and personal sense. And only towards the end of these years do the psycho-physical phenomena as to the abstention from food begin to show themselves. The consideration of both the Visions and the Fasts had, then, better be reserved for the great central period.

V. THE SECOND, GREAT MIDDLE PERIOD OF CATHERINE’S LIFE, 1477 TO 1499.

It is most natural yet very regrettable that we should know so little as to Catherine’s spiritual life, or even as to her psycho-physical condition, during these central twenty-two years of her life. It is natural, for she had, at this time, neither Physician nor Confessor busy with her, and the very richness and balanced fulness of this epoch of her life may well have helped to produce but little that could have been specially seized and registered by either. Yet it is regrettable, since here we have what, at least for us human observers, constitutes the culmination and the true measure of her life, the first period looking but like the preparation, and the third period, like the price paid for such a rich expansion.--Yet we know something about three matters of considerable psycho-physical and temperamental interest, which are specially characteristic of this time: her attitude towards food; her ecstasies and visions; and certain peculiarities in her conception and practice of the spiritual warfare.

1. _Her extraordinary fasts._

As to food, it is clear that, however much we may be able or bound to deduct from the accounts, there remains a solid nucleus of remarkable fact. During some twenty years she evidently went, for a fairly equal number of days,--some thirty in Advent and some forty in Lent, seventy in all annually,--with all but no food; and was, during these fasts, at least as vigorous and active as when her nutrition was normal. For it is not fairly possible to make these great fasts end much before 1496, when she ceased to be Matron of the Hospital; and they cannot have begun much after 1475 or 1476: so that practically the whole of her devoted service and administration in and of that great institution fell within these years, of which well-nigh one-fifth was covered by these all but total abstentions from food. Yet here again we are compelled to take these things, not separately, and as directly supernatural, but in connection with everything else; and to consider the resultant whole as the effect and evidence of a strong mind and will operating upon and through an immensely responsive psycho-physical organism.

For here again we easily find a significant system and delicate selectiveness both in the constant approximate synchronisms--these incapacities occurring about Advent and Lent; and in the foods exempted--since there is no difficulty in connection with the daily Holy Eucharist, with the unconsecrated wine given to her, as to all Communicants in that age at Genoa, immediately after Communion, or with water when seasoned penitentially with salt or vinegar. And if the actual heightening of nervous energy and balance, recorded as having generally accompanied these two fasts, is indeed a striking testimony to the extraordinary powers of her mind and will, we must not forget that these fruitful fasts were accompanied, and no doubt rendered possible, by the second great psychical peculiarity of these middle years, her ecstasies.

2. _Her ecstasies and visions._

It is indeed remarkable how these two conditions and functions, her fasts and her ecstasies of a definite, lengthy and strength-bringing kind, arise, persist and then fade out of her life together. And since, in ecstasy, the respiration, the circulation, and the other physical functions are all slackened and simplified; the mind is occupied with fewer, simpler, larger ideas, harmonious amongst themselves; and the emotions and the will are, for the time, saved the conflict and confusion, the stress and strain, of the fully waking moments; and considering that Catherine was peculiarly sensitive to all this flux and friction, and that she was now often in a more or less ecstatic trance from two up to eight hours: it follows that the amount of food required to heal the breach made by life’s wear and tear would, by these ecstasies, be considerably reduced. And indeed it will have been these contemplative absorptions which directly mediated for her those accessions of vigour: and that they did so, in such a soul and for the uses to which she put this strength, is their fullest justification as thoroughly wholesome, at least in their ultimate outcome, in and for this particular life.

And the visions recorded have these two characteristics, that they all deal with metaphysical realities and relations--God as source and end of all things, as Light and food of the soul, and similar conceptions, and never directly with historical persons, scenes, or institutions; and that, whereas the non-ecstatic picturings of her last period are grandly original, and demonstrably based upon her own spiritual experience, these second-period ecstatic visions are readily traceable to New Testament, Neo-Platonist, and Franciscan precursors, and have little more originality than this special selection from amongst other possible literary sources.

3. _Special character of her spiritual warfare._

Catherine’s ecstasies lead us easily on to the special method of her spiritual warfare, which can, I think, be summed up in three maxims: “One thing, and only one at a time”; “Ever fight self, and you need not trouble about any other foe”; and “Fight self by an heroic indirectness and by love, for love,--through a continuous self-donation to Pure Love alone.”

Studying here these great convictions simply in their temperamental occasions, colouring, and limitations, we can readily discover how the “one thing at a time” maxim springs from the same disposition as that which found such refreshment in ecstasy. For here too, partly from a congenital incapacity to take things lightly, partly from an equally characteristic sensitiveness to the conflict and confusion incident to the introduction of any fresh multiplicity into the consciousness, she requires, even in her non-ecstatic moments, to have her attention specially concentrated upon one all-important idea, one point in the field of consciousness. And, by a faithful wholeness of attention to the successive spiritually significant circumstances and obligations, interior impressions and lights, which her praying, thinking, suffering, actively bring round to her notice, she manages, by such single steps, gradually to go a very long way, and, by such severe successiveness, to build up a rich simultaneity. For each of these faithfully accepted and fully willed and utilized acts and states, received into her one ever-growing and deepening personality, leave memories and stimulations behind them, and mingle, as subconscious elements, with the conscious acts which follow later on.

4. _Two remarkable consequences of this kind of warfare._

There were two specially remarkable consequences of this constant watchful fixation of the one spiritually significant point in each congeries of circumstances, and of the manner in which (partly perhaps as the occasion, but probably in great part as the effect of this attention) one interior condition of apparent fixity would suddenly shift to another condition of a different kind but of a similar apparent stability. There was the manner in which, during these years, she appears to have escaped the committing of any at all definite offences against the better and best lights of that particular moment; and there was the way in which she would realize the faultiness and subtle self-seeking of any one state, only at the moment of its disappearing to make room for another.

I take the accounts of both these remarkable peculiarities to be substantially accurate, since, if the first condition had not obtained, we should have found her practising more or less frequent Confession, as we find her doing in the first and third, but not in this period; and if the second condition had not existed, we should have had, for this period also, some such vivid account of painful scruples arising from the impression of actually present unfaithfulnesses, such as has been preserved for her last years. And indeed, as soon as we have vividly conceived a state in which a soul (by a wise utilization of the quite exceptional successiveness and simplification to which it has been, in great part, driven by its temperamental requirements, and by a constant heroic watchfulness) has managed to exclude from its life, during a long series of years, all fully deliberate resistances to, or lapses from, its contemporaneous better insight: one sees at once that a consciousness of faultiness could come to her only at those moments when, one state and level giving place to another, she could, for the moment, see the former habits and their implicit defects in the clear light of their contrast to her new, deeper insights and dispositions.

Now it is evident that here again we have in part (in the curious quasi-fixity of each state, and then the sudden replacement of it by another) something which, taken alone, is simply psychically peculiar and spiritually indifferent. The persistent sense of gradual or of rapid change in the midst of a certain continuity and indeed abidingness, characteristic of the average moments of the average soul, is, taken in itself, more true to life and to the normal reaction of the human mind, and not less capable of spiritual utilization, than is Catherine’s peculiarity. Her heroic utilization of her special psychic life for purposes of self-fighting, and the degree in which, as we shall find in a later chapter, she succeeded in moulding this life into a shape representative of certain great spiritual truths: these things it is which constitute here the spiritually significant element.

And her second peculiarity of religious practice was her great simplification and intensification of the spiritual combat. Simplification: for she does not fight directly either the Devil or the World; she directly fights the “Flesh” alone, and recognizes but one immediate opponent, her own lower self. Hence the references to the world are always simply as to an extension or indefinite repetition of that same self, or of similar lower selves; and those to the devil are, except where she declares her own lower self “a very devil,” extraordinarily rare, and, in their authentic forms, never directly and formally connected with her own spiritual interests and struggles. And Intensification: for she conceives this lower self, against which all her fighting is turned, as capable of any enormity, as actually cloaking itself successively in every kind of disguise, and as more or less vitiating even the most spiritual-seeming of her states and acts.

And here again we can, I think, clearly trace the influence of her special temperament and psycho-physical functioning, yet in a direction opposite to that in which we would naturally expect it. For it is not so much that this temperament led her to exaggerate the badness of her false self, or to elaborate a myth concerning its (all but completely separate) existence, as that, owing in large part to that temperament and functioning, her false self _was_ both unusually distinct from her true self and particularly clamorous and claimful. It would indeed be well for hagiography if, in all cases, at least an attempt were made to discover and present the precise and particular good and bad selves, worked for and fought by the particular saint: for it is just this double particularization of the common warfare in every individual soul that gives the poignant interest and instructiveness, and a bracing sense of reality to these lonely yet typical, unique yet universal struggles, defeats, and victories.

And in Catherine’s case her special temperament; her particular attitude during the ten years’ laxity, and again during the last years’ times of obscurity and scruple; even some of her sayings probably still belonging to this middle period; but above all the precise point and edge of her counter-ideal and _attrait_: all indicate clearly enough what was her congenital defect. A great self-engrossment of a downrightly selfish kind; a grouping of all things round such a self-adoring _Ego_; a noiseless but determined elimination from her life and memory of all that would not or could not, then and there, be drawn and woven into the organism and functioning of this immensely self-seeking, infinitely woundable and wounded, endlessly self-doctoring “I” and “Me”: a self intensely, although not sexually, jealous, envious and exacting, incapable of easy accommodation, of pleasure in half successes, of humour and brightness, of joyous “once-born” creatureliness: all this was certainly to be found, in strong tendency at least, in the untrained parts and periods of her character and life.

And then the same peculiarity and sensitiveness of her psycho-physical organism which, in her last period, ended by mirroring her mental spiritual apprehensions and picturings in her very body, and which, even at this time, has been traced by us in the curious long fixities and rapid changes of her fields of consciousness, clearly operates also and already here, in separating off this false self from the good one and in heightening the apprehension of that false self to almost a perception in space, or to an all but physical sensation.

We thus get something of which the interesting cases of “doubleness of personality,” so much studied of late years, are, as it were, purely psychical, definitely _maladif_ caricatures; the great difference consisting in Catherine herself possessing, at all times, the consciousness and memory of both sides, of both “selves,” and of each as both actual and potential, within the range of her one great personality. Indeed it is this very multiplicity thus englobed and utilized by that higher unity, which gives depth to her sanity and sanctity.[37]

5. _Precise object and end of her striving._

And all this is confirmed and completed, as already hinted, by the precise object of her ideal, the particular means and special end of the struggle. Here, at the very culmination of her inner life and aim, we find the deepest traces of her temperamental requirements; and here, in what she seeks, there is again an immense concentration and a significant choice. The distinctions between obligation and supererogation, between merit and grace, are not utilized but transcended; the conception of God having anger as well as love arouses as keen a sense of intolerableness as that of God’s envy aroused in Plato, and God appears to her as, in Himself, continuously loving.

This love of God, again, is seen to be present everywhere, and, of Itself, everywhere to effect happiness. The dispositions of souls are indeed held to vary within each soul and between soul and soul, and to determine the differences in their reception, and consequently in the effect upon them, of God’s one universal love: but the soul’s reward and punishment are not something distinct from its state, they are but that very state prolonged and articulated, since man can indeed go against his deepest requirements but can never finally suppress them. Heaven, Purgatory, Hell are thus not places as well as states, nor do they begin only in the beyond: they are states alone, and begin already here. And Grace and Love, and Love and Christ, and Christ and Spirit, and hence Grace and Love and Christ and Spirit are, at bottom, one, and this One is God. Hence God, loving Himself in and through us, is alone our full true self. Here, in this constant stretching out and forward of her whole being into and towards the ocean of light and love, of God the All in All, it is not hard to recognize a soul which finds happiness only when looking out and away from self, and turning, in more or less ecstatic contemplation and action, towards that Infinite Country, that great Over-Againstness, God.

And, in her sensitive shrinking from the idea of an angry God, we find the instinctive reaction of a nature too naturally prone itself to angry claimfulness, and which had been too much driven out of its self-occupation by the painful sense of interior self-division consequent upon that jealousy, not to find it intolerable to get out of that little Scylla of her own hungry self only to fall into a great Charybdis, an apparent mere enlargement and canonization of that same self, in the angry God Himself.

And if her second peculiarity, the concentration of the fight upon an unusually isolated and intense false self, had introduced an element of at least relative Rigorism and contraction into her spirituality, this third peculiarity brings a compensating movement of quasi-Pantheism, of immense expansion. Here the crushed plant expands in boundless air, light and warmth; the parched seaweed floats and unfolds itself in an immense ocean of pure waters--the soul, as it were, breathes and bathes in God’s peace and love. And it is evident that the great super-sensible realities and relations adumbrated by such figures, did not, with her, lead to mere dry or vague apprehensions. Even in this period, although here with a peaceful, bracing orderliness and harmony, the reality thus long and closely dwelt on and lived with was, as it were, physically seen and felt in these its images by a ready response of her immensely docile psycho-physical organism.

6. _Catherine possessed two out of the three conditions apparently necessary for stigmatization._

And in this connection we should note how largely reasonable was the expectation of some of her disciples of finding some permanent physical effects upon her body; and yet why she not only had not the stigmata of the Passion, but why she could not have them. For, of the three apparently necessary conditions for such stigmatization, she had indeed two--a long and intense absorption in religious ideas, and a specially sensitive psycho-physical temperament and organization of the ecstatic type; but the third condition, the concentration of that absorption upon Our Lord’s Passion and wounds, was wholly wanting--at least after those four actively penitential and during those twenty-two ecstatic years. We can, however, say most truly that although, since at all events 1477, her visions and contemplations were all concerning purely metaphysical, eternal realities, or certain ceaselessly repeated experiences of the human soul, or laws and types derived from the greatest of Christian institutions, her daily solace, the Holy Eucharist: yet that these verities ended by producing definite images in her senses, and certain observable though passing impressions upon her body, so that we can here talk of sensible shadows or “stigmata” of things purely spiritual and eternal.

And if, in the cases of some ecstatic saints, mental pathologists of a more or less materialistic type have, at times, shown excessive suspicion as to some of the causes and effects of these saints’ devotion to Our Lord’s Humanity under the imagery and categories of the Canticle of Canticles--all such suspicions, fair or unfair, have absolutely no foothold in Catherine’s life, since not only is there here no devotion to God or to Our Lord as Bridegroom of the Bridal soul: there is no direct contemplative occupation with the historic Christ and no figuring of Him or of God under human attributes or relations at all. I think that her temperament and health had something to do with her habitual dwelling upon Thing-symbols of God: Ocean--Air--Fire--picturings which, conceived with her psycho-physical vividness, must, in their expanse, have rested and purified her in a way that historical contingencies and details would not have done. The doctrinal and metaphysical side of the matter will be considered later on.

VI. THREE RULES WHICH SEEM TO GOVERN THE RELATIONS BETWEEN PSYCHO-PHYSICAL PECULIARITIES AND SANCTITY IN GENERAL.

If we next inquire how matters stand historically with regard to the relations between ecstatic states and psycho-physical peculiarities on the one hand, and sanctity in general on the other hand, we shall find, I think, that the following three rules or laws really cover, in a necessarily general, somewhat schematic way, all the chief points, at all certain or practically important, in this complex and delicate matter.

1. _Intense spiritual energising is accompanied by auto-suggestion and mono-ideism._

It is clear, for one thing, that as simply all and every mental, emotional, and volitional energizing is necessarily and always accompanied by corresponding nerve-states, and that if we had not some neural sensitiveness and neural adaptability, we could not--whilst living our earthly life--think, or feel, or will in regard to anything whatsoever: a certain special degree of at least potential psycho-physical sensitiveness and adaptability must be taken to be, not the productive cause, but a necessary condition for the exercise, of any considerable range and depth of mind and will, and hence of sanctity in general; and that the actual aiming at, and gradual achievement of, sanctity in these, thus merely possible cases, spiritualizes and further defines this sensitiveness, as the instrument, material, and expression of the soul’s work.[38] And this work of the heroic soul will necessarily consist, in great part, in attending to, calling up, and, as far as may be, both fixing and ever renovating certain few great dominant ideas, and in attempting by every means to saturate the imagination with images and figures, historical and symbolic, as so many incarnations of these great verities.

We get thus what, taken simply phenomenally and without as yet any inquiry as to an ultimate reality pressing in upon the soul,--a divine stimulation underlying all its sincere and fruitful action,--is a spiritual mono-ideism and auto-suggestion, of a more or less general kind. But, at this stage, these activities and their psycho-physical concomitants and results will, though different in kind, be no more abnormal than is the mono-ideism and auto-suggestion of the mathematician, the tactician, and the constructive statesman. Newton, Napoleon, and Richelieu: they were all dominated by some great central idea, and they all for long years dwelt upon it and worked for it within themselves, till it became alive and aflame in their imaginations and their outward-moving wills, before, yet as the means of, its taking external and visible shape. And, in all the cases that we can test in detail, the psycho-physical accompaniments of all this profound mental-volitional energy were most marked. In the cases of Newton and Napoleon, for instance, a classification of their energizings solely according to their neural accompaniments would force us to class these great discoverers and organizers amongst psycho-physical eccentrics. Yet the truth and value of their work and character has, of course, to be measured, not by this its neural fringe and cost, but by its central spiritual truth and fruitfulness.

2. _Such mechanisms specially marked in Philosophers, Musicians, Poets, and Mystical Religionists._

The mystical and contemplative element in the religious life, and the group of saints amongst whom this element is predominant, no doubt give us a still larger amount of what, again taking the matter phenomenally and not ultimately, is once more mono-ideism and auto-suggestion, and entails a correspondingly larger amount of psycho-physical impressionableness and reaction utilized by the mind. But here also, from the simplest forms of the “prayer of quiet” to absorptions of an approximately ecstatic type, we have something which, though different in kind and value, is yet no more abnormal than are the highest flights and absorptions of the Philosopher, the Musician, and the Poet. And yet, in such cases as Kant and Beethoven, a classifier of humanity according to its psycho-physical phenomena alone would put these great discoverers and creators, without hesitation, amongst hopeless and useless hypochondriacs. Yet here again the truth of their ideas and the work of their lives have to be measured by quite other things than by this their neural concomitance and cost.

3. _Ecstatics possess a peculiar psycho-physical organization._

The downright ecstatics and hearers of voices and seers of visions have all, wherever we are able to trace their temperamental and neural constitution and history, possessed and developed a definitely peculiar psycho-physical organization. We have traced it in Catherine and indicated it in St. Teresa. We find it again in St. Maria Magdalena dei Pazzi and in St. Marguerite Marie Alacocque, in modern times, and in St. Catherine of Siena and St. Francis of Assisi in mediaeval times. For early Christian times we are too ignorant as regards the psycho-physical organization of St. Ignatius of Antioch, Hermas, and St. Cyprian, to be able to establish a connection between their temperamental endowments and their hearing of voices and seeing of visions--in the last two cases we get much that looks like more or less of a mere conventional literary device.[39]

We are, however, in a fair position for judging, in the typical and thoroughly original case of St. Paul. In 2 Cor. xiii, 7, 8, after speaking of the abundant revelations accorded to him, he adds that “lest I be lifted up, a thorn” (literally, a stake) “in the flesh was given to me, an Angel of Satan to buffet me.” And though “I thrice besought the Lord that it might depart from me, the Lord answered me, ‘My grace is sufficient for thee; for grace is perfected in infirmity.’” And he was consequently determined “rather” to “glory in his infirmities, so that the power of Christ may dwell within” him. And in Gal. iv, 14, 15, written about the same time, he reminds his readers how he had “preached to them through the infirmity of the flesh,” commending them because they “did not despise nor loathe their temptation in his flesh” (this is no doubt the correct reading), “but had received him as an Angel of God, as Christ Jesus.”

Now the most ancient interpretation of this “thorn” or “stake” is some kind of bodily complaint,--violent headache or earache is mentioned by Tertullian de Pudicitia, 13, and by St. Jerome, Comm. in Gal. _loc. cit._ Indeed St. Paul’s own description of his “bodily presence” as “weak,” and his “spoken word” as “contemptible” (2 Cor. x, 10), points this way. It seems plain that it cannot have been carnal temptations (only in the sixth century did this interpretation become firmly established), for he could not have gloried in these, nor could they, hidden as they would be within his heart, have exposed him to the contempt of others. Indeed he expressly excludes such troubles from his life, where, in advising those who were thus oppressed to marry, he gives the preference to the single life, and declares, “I would that all men were even as myself” (1 Cor. vii, 7).

The attacks of this trouble were evidently acutely painful: note the metaphor of a stake driven into the live flesh and the Angel of Satan who buffeted him. (And compare St. Teresa’s account: “An Angel of God appeared to me to be thrusting at times a long spear into my heart and to pierce my very entrails”; “the pain was so great that it made me moan”; “it really seems to the soul as if an arrow were thrust through the heart or through itself; the suffering is not one of sense, neither is the wound physical”; and how, on another occasion, she heard Our Lord answer her: “Serve thou Me, and meddle not with this.”)[40]

These attacks would come suddenly, even in the course of his public ministry, rendering him, in so far, an object of derision and of loathing. (Compare here St. Teresa’s declaration: “During the rapture, the body is very often perfectly powerless; it continues in the position it was in when the rapture came upon it: if sitting, sitting; if the hands were open, or if they were shut, they will remain open or shut”; “if the body” was “standing or kneeling, it remains so.”)[41]

Yet these attacks were evidently somehow connected, both in fact and in his consciousness, with his Visions; and they were recurrent. The vision of the Third Heaven and his apparently first attack seem to have been practically coincident,--about A.D. 44. We find a second attack hanging about him for some time, on his first preaching in Galatia, about A.D. 51 or 52 (see 1 Thess. ii, 18; 1 Cor. ii, 3). And a third attack appears to have come in A.D. 57 or 58, when the Second Epistle to the Corinthians and that to the Galatians were written; note the words (2 Cor. i, 9), “But” (in addition to his share in the public persecution) “we ourselves had the sentence of death within ourselves, in order that we might not trust in ourselves but in God who raiseth the dead to life.” (And compare here St. Teresa: in July 1547 “for about four days I remained insensible. They must have regarded me as dead more than once. For a day and a half the grave was open in my monastery, waiting for my body. But it pleased Our Lord I should come to myself.”)[42] Dr. Lightfoot gives as a parallel the epileptiform seizures of King Alfred, which, sudden, acutely painful, at times death-like, and protracted, tended to render the royal power despicable in the eyes of the world.[43] Yet, except for the difference of sex and of relative privacy, St. Teresa’s states, which I have given here, are more closely similar, in so much as they are intimately connected with religious visions and voices.

And, amongst Old Testament figures, we can find a similar connection, on a still larger scale, in the case of Ezekiel, the most definitely ecstatic, though (upon the whole) the least original, of the literary Prophets. For, as to the visionary element, we have his own records of three visions of the glory of Jahve; of five other ecstasies, three of which are accompanied by remarkable telepathic, second-sight activities; and of twelve symbolic (better: representative) prophetic actions, which are now all rightly coming to be considered as having been externally carried out by him.[44] And we get psycho-physical states, as marked as in any other ecstatic saint. For we hear how Jahve on one occasion says to him: “But thou, son of man, lay thyself on thy left side” (_i.e._ according to Jewish orientation, towards the North) “and I shall lay the guilt of the house of Israel” (the Northern Kingdom) “upon thee; the number of days that thou shalt lie upon it, shalt thou bear their guilt. But I appoint unto thee the years of their guilt, as a (corresponding) number of days, (namely) one hundred and fifty days.… And, when thou hast done with them, thou shalt lay thyself on thy right side” (_i.e._ towards the South), “and thou shalt bear the guilt of the house of Judah” (the Southern Kingdom); “one day for each year shall I appoint unto thee. And behold I shall lay cords upon thee, that thou shalt be unable to turn from one side to the other, till thou hast ended the days of thy boundness” (iv, 4-8). Krätzschmar, no doubt rightly, finds here a case of hemiplegia and anaesthesia, functional cataleptic paralysis lasting during five months on the left side, and then shifting for about six weeks to the right side. And the _alalia_ (speechlessness), which no doubt accompanied this state, is referred to on three other occasions: xxiv, 27; xxix, 31; xxxiii, 22. And note how Jahve’s address to Ezekiel, “son of man,” which occurs in this book over ninety times, and but once in the whole of the rest of the Old Testament (Dan. viii, 17), evidently stands here for the sense of his creaturely nothingness, so characteristic of the true ecstatic.[45]

Now, at this last stage, the analogy of the other non-religious activities of the healthy mind and of their psycho-physical conditions and effects forsakes us; but not the principle which has guided us all along. For here, as from the very first, some such conditions and effects are inevitable; and the simple fact of this occurrence, apart from the question of their particular character, is something thoroughly normal. And here again, and more than ever, the emphasis and decision have to lie with, and to depend upon, the mental and volitional work and the spiritual truth and reality achieved in and for the recipient, and, through him, in and for others.

Even at the earlier stages, to cling to the form, as distinct from the content and end, of these things was to be thoroughly unfair to this their content and end, within the spacious economy of the spirit’s life; at this stage such clinging becomes destructive of all true religion. For if the mere psycho-physical forms and phenomena of ecstasy, of vision, of hearing of voices is, in proportion to their psycho-physical intensity and seeming automatism and quasi-physical objectivity, to be taken as necessarily a means and mark of sanctity or of insight, or, at least, as something presumably sent direct by God or else as diabolical, something necessarily super- or preter-natural: then the lunatic asylums contain more miracles, saints, and sages, or their direct, strangely similar antipodes, than all the most fervent or perverted churches, monasteries, and families upon God’s earth. For in asylums we find ecstasies, visions, voices, all more, not less marked, all more, not less irresistibly objective-seeming to the recipient, than anything to be found outside.

Yet apply impartially to both sets the test, not of form, but of content, of spiritual fruitfulness and of many-sided applicability--and this surface-similarity yields at once to a fundamental difference. Indeed all the great mystics, and this in precise proportion to their greatness, have ever taught that, the mystical capacities and habits being but means and not ends, only such ecstasies are valuable as leave the soul, and the very body as its instrument, strengthened and improved; and that visions and voices are to be accepted by the mind only in proportion as they convey some spiritual truth of importance to it or to others, and as they actually help it to become more humble, true, and loving.

And there can be no doubt that these things worked thus with such great ecstatic mystics as Ezekiel, the man of the great prophetic schemes and the permanently fruitful picturing of the Good Shepherd; as St. Paul, the greatest missionary and organizer ever given to the Christian Church; as St. Francis of Assisi, the salt and leaven and light of the Church and of society, in his day and more or less ever since; as St. Catherine of Siena, the free-spoken, docile reinspirer of the Papacy; as Jeanne d’Arc, the maiden deliverer of a Nation; as St. Teresa, reformer of a great Order. All these, and countless others, would, quite evidently, have achieved less, not more, of interior light and of far-reaching helpfulness of a kind readily recognized by all specifically religious souls, had they been without the rest, the bracing, the experience furnished to them by their ecstasies and allied states and apprehensions.

VII. PERENNIAL FRESHNESS OF THE GREAT MYSTICS’ MAIN SPIRITUAL TEST, IN CONTRADISTINCTION TO THEIR SECONDARY, PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTENTION. TWO SPECIAL DIFFICULTIES.

1. _A false and a true test of mystical experience._

Now it is deeply interesting to note how entirely unweakened, indeed how impressively strengthened, by the intervening severe test of whole centuries of further experience and of thought, has remained the main and direct, the spiritual test of the great Mystics, in contradistinction to their secondary psychological contention with respect to such experiences. The secondary, psychological contention is well reproduced by St. Teresa where she says: “When I speak, I go on with my understanding arranging what I am saying; but, if I am spoken to by others, I do nothing else but listen without any labour.” In the former case, “the soul,” if it be in good faith, “cannot possibly fail to see clearly that itself arranges the words and utters them to itself. How then can the understanding have time enough to arrange these locutions? They require time.”[46] Now this particular argument for their supernaturalness derived from the psychological form--from the suddenness, clearness, and apparent automatism of these locutions--has ceased to carry weight, owing to our present, curiously recent, knowledge concerning the subconscious region of the mind, and the occasionally sudden irruption of that region’s contents into the field of that same mind’s ordinary, full consciousness. In the Ven. Battista Vernazza’s case we have a particularly clear instance of such a long accumulation,--by means of much, in great part full, attention to certain spiritual ideas, words, and images,--in the subconscious regions of a particularly strong and deeply sincere and saintly mind; and the sudden irruption from those regions of certain clear and apparently quite spontaneous words and images into the field of her mind’s full consciousness.[47]

But the reference to the great Mystics’ chief and direct test, upon which they dwell with an assurance and self-consistency far surpassing that which accompanies their psychological argument,--the spiritual content and effects of such experiences,--this, retains all its cogency. St. Teresa tells us: “When Our Lord speaks, it is both word and work: His words are deeds.” “I found myself, through these words alone, tranquil and strong, courageous and confident, at rest and enlightened: I felt I could maintain against all the world that my prayer was the work of God.” “I could not believe that Satan, if he wished to deceive me, could have recourse to means so adverse to his purpose as this, of rooting out my faults, and implanting virtues and spiritual strength: for I saw clearly that I had become another person, by means of these visions.” “So efficacious was the vision, and such was the nature of the words spoken to me, that I could not possibly doubt that they came from Him.” “I was in a trance; and the effects of it were such, that I could have no doubt it came from God.” On another occasion she writes less positively even of the great test: “She never undertook anything merely because it came to her in prayer. For all that her Confessors told her that these things came from God, she never so thoroughly believed them that she could swear to it herself, though it did seem to her that they were spiritually safe, because of the effects thereof.”[48] This doctrine is still the last word of wisdom in these matters.

2. _First special difficulty in testing ecstasies._

Yet it is only at this last stage that two special difficulties occur, the one philosophical, the other moral. The philosophical difficulty is as follows. As long as the earlier stages are in progress, it is not difficult to understand that the soul may be gradually building up for herself a world of spiritual apprehensions, and a corresponding spiritual and moral character, by a process which, looked at merely phenomenally and separately, appears as a simple case of mono-ideism and auto-suggestion, but which can and should be conceived, when studied in its ultimate cause and end, as due to the pressure and influence of God’s spirit working in and through the spirit of man,--the Creator causing His own little human creature freely to create for itself some copy of and approach to its own eternally subsisting, substantial Cause and Crown. There the operation of such an underlying Supreme Cause, and a consequent relation between the world thus conceived and built up by the human soul and the real world of the Divine Spirit, appears possible, because the things which the soul is thus made to suggest to itself are ideas, and because even these ideas are clearly recognized by the soul as only instruments and approaches to the realities for which they stand. But here, in this last stage, we get the suggestion, not of ideas, but of psycho-physical impressions, and these impressions are, apparently, not taken as but distantly illustrative, but as somehow one with the spiritual realities for which they stand. Is not, _e.g._, Catherine’s joy at this stage centred precisely in the downright feeling, smelling, seeing, of ocean waters, penetrating odours, all-enveloping light; and in the identification of those waters, odours, lights, with God Himself, so that God becomes at last an object of direct, passive, sensible perception? Have we not then here at last reached pure delusion?

Not so, in proportion as the mystic is great and spiritual, and as he here still clings to the principles common to all true religion. For, in proportion as he is and does this, will he find and regard the mind as deeper and more operative than sense, and God’s Spirit as penetrating and transcending both the one and the other. And hence he will (at least implicitly) regard those psycho-physical impressions as but sense-like and really mental; and he will consider this mental impression and projection as indeed produced by the presence and action of the Spirit within his mind or of the pressure of spiritual realities upon it, but will hold that this whole mental process, with these its spacial- and temporal-seeming embodiments, these sights and sounds, has only a relation and analogical likeness to, and is not and cannot be identical with, those realities of an intrinsically super-spacial, super-temporal order.--And thus here as everywhere, although here necessarily more than ever, we find again the conception of the Transcendent yet also Immanent Spirit, effecting in the human spirit the ever-increasing apprehension of Himself, accompanied in this spirit by an ever keener sense of His incomprehensibility for all but Himself. And here again the truth, and more especially the divine origin of these apprehensions, is tested and guaranteed on and on by the consequent deepening of that spiritual and ethical fruitfulness and death to self, which are the common aspirations of every deepest moment and every sincerest movement within the universal heart of man.

Thus, as regards the mentality of these experiences, Catherine constantly speaks of seeing “as though with the eyes of the body.” And St. Teresa tells us of her visions with “the eyes of the soul”; of how at first she “did not know that it was possible to see anything otherwise than with the eyes of the body”; of how, in reality “she never,” in her true visions and locutions, “saw anything with her bodily eyes, nor heard anything with her bodily ears”; and of how indeed she later on, on one occasion, “saw nothing with the eyes of the body, nothing with the eyes of the soul,”--she “simply felt Christ close by her,”--evidently again with the soul. Thus, too, Catherine tells us, that “as the intellect exceeds language, so does love exceed intellection”; and how vividly she feels that “all that can be said of God,” compared to the great Reality, “is but tiny crumbs from the great Master’s table.”[49]

And, as to the inadequacy of these impressions, the classical authority on such things, St. John of the Cross, declares: “He that will rely on the letter of the divine locutions or on the intelligible form of the vision, will of necessity fall into delusion; for he does not yield to the Spirit in detachment from sense.” “He who shall give attention to these motes of the Spirit alone will, in the end, have no spirituality at all.” “All visions, revelations, and heavenly feelings, and whatever is greater than these, are not worth the least act of humility, bearing the fruits of that charity which neither values nor seeks itself, which thinketh well not of self but of all others.” Indeed “virtue does not consist in these apprehensions. Let men then cease to regard, and labour to forget them, that they may be free.” For “spiritual supernatural knowledge is of two kinds, one distinct and special,” which comprises “visions, revelations, locutions, and spiritual impressions”; “the other confused, obscure, and general,” which “has but one form, that of contemplation which is the work of faith. The soul is to be led into this, by directing it thereto through all the rest, beginning with the first, and detaching it from them.”