Chapter X: The Main Literary Sources of Catherine’s Conceptions (1)

INTRODUCTORY.

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

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

2. _Plan of the following study of these sources._

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

I. THE PAULINE WRITINGS: THE TWO SOURCES OF THEIR PRE-CONVERSION ASSUMPTIONS; CATHERINE’S PREPONDERANT ATTITUDE TOWARDS EACH POSITION.

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

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

1. _St. Paul’s Anthropology in general._

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. _St. Paul’s conception of “Spirit.”_

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

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

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

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

3. _The Angry and the Loving God._

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

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

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

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

4. _The Risen Christ and the Heavenly Adam._

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

5. _Reconciliation, Justification, Sanctification._

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. _Pauline Social Ethics._

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

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

7. _Sacramental Teachings._

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

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

8. _Eschatological matters._

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

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

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

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

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

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

II. THE JOANNINE WRITINGS.

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

1. _Joannine teaching contrasted with other systems._

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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