Chapter X: The Main Literary Sources of Catherine’s Conceptions (2)

In the Synoptists Our Lord declares, as to the exorcist who worked cures in His name, although not a follower of His, that “he that is not against us, is for us,” and refuses to accede to His disciples’ proposal to interfere with his activity, Mark ix, 38-41; and He points, as to the means of inheriting eternal life, to the keeping of the two great commandments, as these are already formulated in the Old Testament, and insists that this neighbour, whom here we are bidden to love, is any and every man, Luke x, 25-37. The Joannine writings insist strongly upon the strict necessity of full, explicit adhesion: the commandment of love which Our Lord gives is here “My commandment,” “a new commandment,” one held “from the beginning”--in the Christian community; and the command to “love one another” is here addressed to the brethren in their relations to their fellow-believers only, xiii, 34; xiii, 35; xv, 12, 17. Catherine’s feeling, in this matter, is clearly with the Synoptists.

2. _Joannine teaching considered in itself._

If we next take the Joannine teachings in themselves, we shall find the following interesting points of contact or contrast to exist between John and Catherine.

(1) In matters of Theology proper, she is completely penetrated by the great doctrine, more explicit in St. John even than in St. Paul, that “God is Love,” 1 John iv, 8; and by the conceptions of God and of Christ “working always” as Life, Light, and Love.--But whereas, in the first Epistle of John, God Himself is “eternal life” and “light,” v, 20; i, 5; and, in the Gospel, it is Christ Who, in the first instance, appears as Life and as Light, xi, 25; viii, 12: Catherine nowhere distinguishes at all between Christ and God. And similarly, whereas in St. John “God doth not give” unto Christ “the Spirit by measure”; and Christ promises to the disciples “another Paraclete,” _i.e._ the Holy Spirit, iii, 34; xiv, 16; and indeed the Son and the Spirit appear, throughout, as distinct from one another as do the Son and the Father: in Catherine we get, practically everywhere, an exclusive concentration upon the fact, so often implied or declared by St. Paul, of Love, Christ, being Himself Spirit.

(2) The Joannine Soteriology has, I think, influenced Catherine as follows. Christ’s redemptive work appears, in the more original current of that teaching, under the symbols of the Word, Light, Bread, as the self-revelation of God. For in proportion that this Logos-Light and Bread enlightens and nourishes, does He drive away darkness and weakness, and, with them, sin, and this previously to any historic acts of His earthly life. And, in this connection, there is but little stress laid upon penance and the forgiveness of sins as compared with the Synoptic accounts, and the term of turning back, στρέφειν, is absent here.--But that same redemptive work appears, in the more Pauline of the two Joannine currents, as the direct result of so many vicarious, atoning deeds, the historic Passion and Death of Our Lord. Here there is indeed sin, a “sin of the world,” and specially for this sin is Christ the propitiation: “God so loved the world, as to give His only-begotten Son”--Him “the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world,” i, 29; 1 John ii, 2; John ii, 16; i, 29, 36.

Catherine, with the probably incomplete exception of her Conversion and Penance-period, concentrates her attention, with a striking degree of exclusiveness, upon the former group of conceptions. With her too the God-Christ is--all but solely--conceived as Light which, in so far as it is not hindered, operates the healing and the growth of souls. And in her great picture of all souls inevitably hungering for the sight of the One Bread, God, she has operated a fusion between two of the Joannine images, the Light which is seen and the Bread which is eaten: here the bare sight (in reality, a satiating sight) of the Bread suffices. If, for the self-manifesting God-Christ, she has, besides the Joannine Light-image, a Fire-symbol, which has its literary antecedents rather in the Old Testament than in the New, this comes from the fact that she is largely occupied with the pain of the impressions and processes undergone by already God-loving yet still imperfectly pure souls, and that fierce fire is as appropriate a symbol for such pain as is peaceful light for joy.

Now this painfulness is, in Catherine’s teaching, the direct result of whatever may be incomplete and piecemeal in the soul’s state and process of purification. And this her conception, of Perfect Love being mostly attained only through a series of apparently sudden shifts, each seemingly final, is no doubt in part moulded upon the practically identical Joannine teaching as to Faith.

True, we have already seen that her conception of the nature of God’s action upon the soul, and of the soul’s reaction under this His touch, is more akin to the rich Synoptic idea of a disposition and determination of the soul’s whole being, (a cordial trust at least as much as an intellectual apprehension and clear assent), than to the Joannine view, which lays a predominant stress upon mental apprehension and assent. And again, she nowhere presents anything analogous to the Joannine, already scholastic, formulations of the object of this Faith and Trust,--all of them explicitly concerned with the nature of Christ.

But, everywhere in the Joannine writings, the living Person and Spirit aimed at by these definitions is considered as experienced by the soul in a succession of ever-deepening intuitions and acts of Faith. Already at the Jordan, Andrew and Nathaniel have declared Jesus to be the Christ, the Son of God, i, 41, 49; yet they, His disciples, are said to have believed in Him at Cana, in consequence of His miracle there, ii, 11. Already at Capernaum Peter asserts for the twelve, “We have believed and known that Thou art the Holy One of God,” vi, 69; yet still, at the Last Supper, Christ exhorts them to believe in Him, xiv, 10, 11, and predicts future events to them, in order that, when these predictions come true, their faith may still further increase, xiii, 19; xiv, 29. And, as far on as after the Resurrection we hear that the Beloved Disciple “saw” (the empty tomb) “and believed,” xx, 8, 29. We thus get in John precisely the same logically paradoxical, but psychologically and spiritually most accurate and profound, combination of an apparent completeness of Faith at each point of special illumination, with a sudden re-beginning and impulsive upward shifting of the soul’s Light and Believing, which is so characteristic of Catherine’s experience and teaching as to the successive levels of the soul’s Fire, Light and Love. And the opposite movement--of the fading away of the Light and the Faith--can be traced in John, as the corresponding doctrine of the going out of the Fire, Light and Love within the Soul can be found in Catherine.

Again, both John and Catherine are penetrated with the sense that this Faith and Love is somehow waked up in souls by a true touch of God, a touch to which they spontaneously respond, because they already possess a substantial affinity to Him. “His,” the Good Shepherd’s, “sheep hear His voice,” x, 16; they hear it, because they are already His: the Light solicits and is accepted by the soul, because the soul itself is light-like and light-requiring, and because it proceeds originally from this very Light which would now reinforce the soul’s own deepest requirements. This great truth appears also in those profound Joannine passages: “No man can come to Me, unless the Father Who sent Me draw him”; and “I have manifested Thy name, to those men whom Thou didst give Me from out of the world,” vi, 44; xvii, 6.

And this attractive force is also a faculty of Christ: “I shall draw all men unto Myself,” xii, 32. And note how Catherine, ever completely identifying God, Christ, Light, Love, and, where these work in imperfectly pure souls, Fire, is stimulated by the last-quoted text to extend God’s, Christ’s, Love’s drawing, attraction, to all men; to limit only, in various degrees, these various men’s response to it; and to realize so intensely that a generous yielding to this our ineradicable deepest _attrait_ is our fullest joy, and the resisting it is our one final misery, as to picture the soul, penitent for this its mad resistance, plunging itself, now eagerly responsive to that intense attraction, into God and a growing conformity with Him.

(3) As to points concerning the Sacraments where Catherine is influenced by John, we find that here again Baptismal conceptions are passed over by her. She does not allude to the water in the discourse to Nicodemus, iii, 5, although she is full of other ideas suggested there; but she dwells upon the water in the address to the Woman at the Well, iv, 10-15, that “living water,” which is, for her, the spirit’s spiritual sustenance, Love, Christ, God, and insensibly glides over into the images and experiences attaching, for her, to the Holy Eucharist.

But, as to this the greatest of the Sacraments and the all-absorbing devotion of her life, her symbols and concepts are all suggested by the Fourth Gospel, in contrast to the Synoptists and St. Paul. For the Holy Eucharist is, with her, ever detached from any direct memory of the Last Supper, Passion, and Death, the original, historical, unique occasions which still form its setting in the pre-Joannine writings, although those greatest proofs of a divinely boundless self-immolation undoubtedly give to her devotion to the Blessed Sacrament its beautiful enthusiasm and tenderness. The Holy Eucharist ever appears with her, as with St. John, attached to the scene of the multiplication of the breads,--a feast of joy and of life, with Christ at the zenith of His earthly hope and power. For not “a shewing of the death” in “the eating of this bread,” 1 Cor. xi, 26, is dwelt on by John; but we have: “I am the Bread of Life; he that eateth this bread, shall live for ever,” John vi, 51, 52.

And Catherine follows John in thinking predominantly of the single soul, when dwelling upon the Holy Eucharist. For if John presents a great open-air Love-Feast in lieu of Paul’s Upper Chamber and Supper with the twelve, he, as over against Paul’s profoundly social standpoint, has, throughout this his Eucharistic chapter, but three indications of the plural as against some fourteen singulars.

And, finally, John’s change from the future tense, with its reference to a coming historic institution, “the food which … the Son of Man will give you,” vi, 27, to the present tense, with its declaration of an eternal fact and relation, “I am” (now and always) “the living bread which hath come down from heaven,” vi, 51, will have helped Catherine towards the conception of the eternal Christ-God offering Himself as their ceaseless spiritual food to His creatures, possessed as they are by an indestructible spiritual hunger for Himself. For if the Eucharistic food, Bread, Body, has already been declared by St. Paul to be “spiritual,” 2 Cor. iii, 17, in St. John also it has to be spiritual, for it is here “the true bread from heaven” and “the bread of life”; and Christ declares here “it is the Spirit that giveth life, the flesh (alone) profiteth nothing,” vi, 61, 69. Hence Catherine is, again through the Holy Eucharist and St. John, brought back to her favourite Pauline conception of the Lord as Himself “Spirit,” “the Life-giving Spirit,” 2 Cor. iii, 17; 1 Cor. xv, 45.

(4) And if we conclude with the Joannine Eschatology, we shall find that Catherine has penetrated deep into the following conceptions, which undoubtedly, even in their union, present us with a less rich outlook than that furnished by the Synoptists, but which may be said to constitute the central spirit of Our Lord’s teaching.

Like John, who has but two mentions of “the Kingdom of God,” iii, 3, 5, and who elsewhere ever speaks of “Life,” Catherine has nowhere “the Kingdom,” but everywhere “Life.” Like him she conceives the process of Conversion as a “making alive” of the moribund, darkened, cold soul, by the Light, Love, Christ, God, v, 21-29, when He, Who is Himself “the Life,” xi, 25, and “the Spirit,” iv, 24, speaks to the soul “words” that are “spirit and life,” vi, 63; for then the soul that gives ear to His words “hath eternal life,” v, 24.

Again Catherine, for the most part, appropriates and develops that one out of the two Joannine currents of doctrine concerning the Judgment, which treats the latter as already determined and forestalled by Man’s present personal attitude towards the Light. The judgment is thus simply a discrimination, according to the original meaning of the noun κρίσις--like when God in the beginning “discriminated the light from the darkness,” Gen. i, 5; a discrimination substantially effected already here and now, “he that believeth in Him, is not judged; he that believeth not, is already judged,” iii, 18. But the other current of doctrine, so prominent in the Synoptists, is not absent from St. John,--the teaching as to a later, external and visible, forensic judgment. And Catherine has a similar intermixture of two currents, yet with a strong predominance of the immanental, present conception of the matter.

And even for that one volitional act in the beyond, which, according to her doctrine, has a certain constitutive importance for the whole eternity of all still partially impure souls--for that voluntary plunge--we can find an analogue in the Joannine writings, although here there is no reference to the after life. For throughout the greater part of his teaching--from iii, 15, 16, apparently up to the end of the Gospel,--the possession of spiritual Life is consequent upon the soul’s own acts of Faith, and not, as one would expect from his other, more characteristic teaching, upon its Regeneration from above, iii, 3. And the result of such acts of Faith is a “Metabasis,” a “passing over from death to life,” v, 24; 1 John iii, 14. Catherine will have conceived such an act of Faith as predominantly an act of Love, and the act as itself already that Metabasis; and will, most characteristically, have quickened the movement, and have altered its direction from the horizontal to the vertical, so that the “passing, going over,” becomes a “plunge down into” Life. For indeed the Fire she plunges into is, in her doctrine, Life Itself; since it is Light, Love, Christ, and God.

Catherine, once more, is John’s most faithful disciple, where he declares that Life to stream out immediately from the life-giving object of Faith into the life-seeking subject of that Faith, from the believed God into the believing soul: “I am the Bread of Life; he who cometh to Me, shall not hunger”; “he who abideth in Me, and I in him, beareth much fruit”; vi, 35; xv, 5.

And finally, she follows John closely where he insists upon Simultaneity and Eternity as contrasted with Succession and Immortality, so as even to abstract from the bodily resurrection. He who “hath passed over from death to life” (already) “possesses eternal life”; “every one who liveth and believeth in Me, shall not die for ever (at any time)”; “this,” already and of itself, “is eternal life, to know Thee, the one true God and Jesus Christ Whom Thou hast sent”; and the soul’s abiding in such an experience is Christ’s own joy, transplanted into it, and a joy which is full, v, 24; xi, 26; xvii, 3; xv, 11. And there is here such an insistence upon an unbroken spiritual life, in spite of and right through physical death, that, to Martha’s declaration that her brother will arise at the last day, xi, 24, Jesus answers, “I am the Resurrection and the Life: he who believeth in Me, even if he die” the bodily death, “shall live” on in his soul; indeed “every man who liveth” the life of the body, “and who believeth in Me, shall not die for ever (at any time)” in his soul, xi, 25, 26. John’s other line of thought, in which the bodily resurrection is prominent, remains without any definite or systematic response in Catherine’s teaching.

(5) We can then summarize the influence exercised by John upon Catherine by saying that he encouraged her to conceive religion as an experience of eternity; as a true, living knowledge of things spiritual; indeed as a direct touch of man’s soul by God Himself, culminating in man’s certainty that God is Love.

III. THE AREOPAGITE WRITINGS.

Catherine’s close relations to the Areopagite, the Pseudo-Dionysius, are of peculiar interest, in their manifold agreement, difference, or non-responsiveness; and this although the ideas thus assimilated are mostly of lesser depth and importance than those derived from the New Testament writings just considered. They can be grouped conveniently under the subject-matters of God’s creative, providential, and restorative, outgoing, His action upon souls and all things extant, and of the reasons for the different results of this action; of certain symbols used to characterize that essential action of God upon His creatures; of the states and energizings of the soul, in so far as it is responsive to that action; of certain terms concerning these reactions of the soul; and of the final result of the whole process. I shall try and get back, in most cases, to the Areopagite’s Neo-Platonist sources, the dry, intensely scholastic Proclus, and that great soul, the prince of the non-Christian Mystics, Plotinus.[70]

1. _God’s general action._

As to God’s action, we have in Dionysius the Circle with the three stages of its movement,--a conception so dear to Catherine. “Theologians call Him the Esteemed and the Loved, and again Love and Loving-kindness, as being a Power at once propulsive and leading up” and back “to Himself; a loving movement self-moved, which pre-exists in the Good, and bubbles forth from the Good to things existing, and which again returns to the Good--as it were a sort of everlasting circle whirling round, because of the Good, from the Good, in the Good, and to the Good,--ever advancing and remaining and returning in the same and throughout the same.” This is “the power of the divine similitude” present throughout creation, “which turns all created things to their cause.”[71] The doctrine is derived from Proclus: “Everything caused both abides in its cause and proceeds from it and returns to it”; and “everything that proceeds from something returns, by a natural instinct, to that from which it proceeds.”[72] And Plotinus had led the way: “there” in the super-sensible world, experienced in moments of ecstasy, “in touch and union with the One, the soul begets Beauty, Justice, and Virtue: and that place and life is, for it, its principle and end: principle, since it springs from thence; end, because the Good is there, and because, once arrived there, the soul becomes what it was at first.”[73]

And Dionysius has the doctrine, so dear to Catherine, that “the Source of Good is indeed present to all, but all are not,” by their intention, “present to It; yet, by our aptitude for Divine union, we all,” in a sense, “are present to It.” “It shines, on Its own part, equally upon all things capable of participation in It.”[74] Already Plotinus had finely said: “The One is not far away from any one, and yet is liable to be far away from one and all, since, present though It be, It is” efficaciously “present only to such as are capable of receiving It, and are so disposed as to adapt themselves to It and, as it were, to seize and touch It by their likeness to It, … when, in a word, the soul is in the state in which it was when it came from It.”[75]

We have again in Dionysius the combination, so characteristic of Catherine, of a tender respect for the substance of human nature, as good and ever respected by God, and of a keen sense of the pathetic weakness of man’s sense-clogged spirit here below. “Providence, as befits its goodness, provides for each being suitably: for to destroy nature is not a function of Providence.” “All those who cavil at the Divine Justice, unconsciously commit a manifest injustice. For they say that immortality ought to be in mortals, and perfection in the imperfect … and perfect power in the weak, and that the temporal should be eternal … in a word, they assign the properties of one thing to another.”[76]

2. _Symbols of God’s action._

(1) As to the symbols of God’s action, we have first the Chain or Rope, Catherine’s “fune,” that “rope of His pure Love,” of which “an end was thrown to her from heaven.”[77] This symbol was no doubt suggested by Dionysius: “Let us then elevate our very selves by our prayers to the higher ascent of the Divine … rays; as though a luminous chain (rope, σειρά) were suspended from the celestial heights and reached down hither, and we, by ever stretching out to it up and up … were thus carried upwards.”[78] And this passage again goes back to Proclus, who describes the “chain (rope) of love” as “having its entirely simple and hidden highest point fixed amongst the very first ranks of the Gods”; its middle effluence “amongst the Gods higher than the (sensible) world”; and its third, lowest, part, as “divided multiformly throughout the (sensible) world.” “The divine Love implants one common bond (chain) and one indissoluble friendship in and between each soul (that participates in its power), and between all and the Beautiful Itself.”[79] And this simile of a chain from heaven, which in Dionysius is luminous, and in Catherine and Proclus is loving, goes back, across Plato (_Theaetetus_ 153_c_ and _Republic_, X, 61_b_, 99_c_) to Homer, where it again is luminous (golden). For, in the _Iliad_, viii, 17-20, Zeus says to the Gods in Olympus, “So as to see all things, do you, O Gods and Goddesses all, hang a golden chain from heaven, and do you all seize hold of it”--so as thus to descend to earth.

(2) We have next the symbol of the Sun and its purifying, healing Light, under which God and His action are rapturously proclaimed by Dionysius. “Even as our sun, by its very being, enlightens all things able to partake of its light in their various degrees, so also the Good, by its very existence, sends unto all things that be, the rays of its entire goodness, according to their capacity for them. By means of these rays they are purified from all corruption and death … and are separated from instability.” “The Divine Goodness, this our great sun, enlightens … nourishes, perfects, renews.” Even the pure can thus be made purer still. “He, the Good, is called spiritual light … he cleanses the mental vision of the very angels: they taste, as it were, the light.”[80] All this imagery goes back, in the first instance, to Proclus. For Proclus puts in parallel “sun” and “God,” and “to be enlightened” and “to be deified”; makes all purifying forces to coalesce in the activity of the Sun-God, Apollo Katharsios, the Purifier, who “everywhere unifies multiplicity … purifying the entire heaven and all living things throughout the world”; and describes how “from above, from his super-heavenly post, Apollo scatters the arrows of Zeus,--his rays upon all the world.”[81] The Sun’s rays, here as powerful as the bolts of Zeus, thus begin to play the part still assigned to them in Catherine’s imagery of the “Saëtte” and “Radii” of the divine Light and Love. And the substance of the whole symbol goes back, through fine sayings of Plotinus and through Philo, to Plato, who calls the Sun “the offspring of the Good and analogous to it,” and who (doubtless rightly) takes Homer’s “golden chain” to be nothing but the Sun-rays,--thus identifying the two symbols.[82]

(3) Fire, as a symbol for God and His action, is thus praised by Dionysius: “The sacred theologians often describe the super-essential Essence in terms of Fire.… For sensible fire is, so to say, present in all things, and pervades them all without mingling with them, and is received by all things; … it is intolerable yet invisible; it masters all things by its own might, and yet it but brings the things in which it resides to (the development of) their own energy; it has a transforming power; it communicates itself to all who approach it in any degree; … it has the power of dividing (what it seizes); it bears upwards; it is penetrating; … it increases its own self in a hidden manner; it suddenly shines forth.”[83]--All these qualities, and the delicate transitions from fire to light and from light back to fire, and from heat immanent to heat applied from without, we can find again, vividly assimilated and experienced, in Catherine’s teaching and emotional life. But the Sun-light predominates in Dionysius, the Fire-heat in Catherine; and whereas the former explicitly attaches purification only to the Sun-light, the latter connects the cleansing chiefly with Fire-heat, no doubt because the Greek man is busy chiefly with the intellectually cognitive, and the Italian woman with the morally ameliorative, activities and interests of the mind and soul.

3. _The soul’s reaction._

(1) As to the soul’s reaction under God’s action, and its return to Him, we first get, in Dionysius, the insistence upon Mystical Quietude and Silence, which, according to him, are strictly necessary, since only like can know and become one with like, and God is “Peace and Repose” and, “as compared with every known progression, Immobility,” and “the one all-perfect source and cause of the Peace of all”; and He is Silence, “the Angels are, as it were, the heralds of the Divine Silence,”--teaching not unlike that of St. Ignatius of Antioch, “Jesus Christ … the Word which proceeds from Silence.”[84] Hence “in proportion as we ascend to the higher designations of God, do our expressions become more and more circumscribed”; and at last “we shall find, not a little speaking, but a complete absence of speech and of conception.”[85] As Proclus has it: “Let this Fountain of Godhead be honoured on our part by silence and by the union which is above silence.”[86] And Plotinus says: “This,” the Divine, “Light comes not from anywhere nor disappears any whither, but simply shines or shines not: hence we must not pursue after it, but must abide in quietness till it appears.” And when it does appear, “the contemplative, as one rapt and divinely inspired, abides here with quietude in a motionless condition, … being entirely stable, and becoming, as it were, stability itself.”[87]--All this still finds its echo in Catherine.--But the treble (cognitive) movement of the Angelic and human mind,--the circular, the straight-line, and the spiral,--which Dionysius, in direct imitation of Proclus, carefully develops throughout three sections, is quite absent from Catherine’s mind.[88]

(2) We next get, in Dionysius, the following teachings as to Mystical Vision and Union. “The Unity-above-Mind is placed above the minds; and the Good-above-word is unutterable by word.” “There is, further, the most divine knowledge of Almighty God, which is known through not knowing … when the mind, having stood apart from all existing things, and having then also dismissed itself, has been made one with the super-luminous rays.” “We must contemplate things divine by our whole selves standing out of our whole selves, and becoming wholly of God.” “By the resistless and absolute ecstasy, in all purity, from out of thyself and all things, thou wilt be carried on high, to the super-essential ray of the divine darkness.” “It is during the cessation of every mental energizing, that such a union of the deified minds and of the super-divine light takes place.”[89] And the original cause and final effect of such a going forth from self, are indicated in words which were worked out in a vivid fulness by Catherine’s whole convert life: “Divine Love is ecstatic, not permitting any lovers to belong to themselves, but only to those beloved by them. And this love, the superior beings show by being full of forethought for their inferiors; those equal in rank, by their mutual coherence; and the inferior by a looking back and up to the superior ones.”[90]

Dionysius here everywhere follows Proclus. Yet the noblest Neo-Platonist sayings are again furnished by Plotinus: “We are not cut off or severed from the Light, but we breathe and consist in It, since It ever enlightens and bears us, as long as It is what It is.” In the moments of Union, “we are able to see both Him and ourself,--ourself in dazzling splendour, full of spiritual light, or rather one with the pure Light Itself … our life’s flame is then enkindled.” “There the soul rests, after it has fled up, away from evil, to the place which is free from evils … and the true life is there.” “Arrived there, the soul becomes that which she was at first.”[91] And if Plotinus has thus already got the symbolism of place, he is as fully aware as Catherine herself that, for purposes of vivid presentation, he is spacializing spiritual, that is, unextended, qualitative states and realities. “Things incorporeal do not get excluded by bodies; they are severed only by otherness and difference: hence, when such otherness is absent, they, not differing, are near each other.” And already, as with Catherine, there is the apparent finality, and yet also the renewed search for more. “The seer and the seen have become one, as though it were a case not of vision but of union.” “When he shall have crossed over as the image to its Archetype, then he will have reached his journey’s end.” And yet this “ecstasy, simplification, and donation of one’s self,” this “quiet,” is still also “a striving after contact,” “a musing to achieve union.”[92]

4. _Terminology of the soul’s reaction._

(1) Certain terms and conceptions in connection with the soul’s return to God, which are specially dear to Catherine, already appear, fully developed, in Dionysius, Proclus, and Plotinus; in part, even in Plato. Her “suddenly “ (_subito_) appears but rarely in Dionysius, _e.g._ in _Heavenly Hierarchy_ xv, 2; but it is carefully explained by him in his Third Epistle, specially devoted to the subject.[93] It is common in Plotinus: “Suddenly the soul saw, without seeing how it saw”; “suddenly thou shalt receive light,” “suddenly shining.”[94] And in Plato we find: “He who has learnt to see the Beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes towards the end, will suddenly perceive a Nature of wondrous beauty--Beauty alone, absolute, separate, simple and everlasting”: a passage which derives its imagery from the Epopteia of the Eleusynian Mysteries,--the sudden appearance, the curtain being withdrawn, upon the stage whereon the Heathen Mystery-play was being performed, under a peculiar fairy-illumination, of the figures of Demeter, Kore, and Iacchus, as the culmination of a long succession of purifications and initiations.[95]

Catherine’s “wound,” or “wounding stroke,” (_ferita_), is, in part, the necessary consequence of the “arrow” conception already considered; in part, the echo of that group of terms which, in Dionysius and Proclus even more than in Plotinus, express the painfully sudden and overwhelming, free-grace character of God’s action upon the soul,--especially of ἐπιβολή, “immissio,” a “coming-upon,” a “hitting,” a very common word in the Areopagite; μετοχή, “communication,” and παραδοχή, “reception,” being the corresponding terms for God’s and the soul’s share in this encounter respectively. Thus: “Unions, whether we call them immissions or receptions from God.”[96]

“Presence,” “presenza,” παρουσιά, is another favourite term, as with Catherine so also with Dionysius and Proclus. Thus the Areopagite: “The presence of the spiritual light causes recollection and unity in those that are being enlightened with it,” “His wholly inconceivable presence.”[97] And Proclus: “Every perfect spiritual contact and communion is owing to the presence of God.”[98] And the conception of a sudden presence goes back, among the Neo-Platonists, to Plato and the Greek Mysteries, in which the God was held suddenly to arrive and to take part in the sacred dance. Such rings of sacred dancers, “choirs,” are still characteristic of Dionysius--_e.g._ _Heavenly Hierarchy_, vii, 4--but they are quite wanting in Catherine.--But “contact,” “touch,” ἐπαφή,--said of God’s direct action upon the soul,--a conception so intensely active in Catherine’s mind and life, is again a favourite term with Dionysius and Proclus. The former declares this “touch” to be neither “sensible” nor “intelligible” and that “we are brought into contact with things unutterable”; the latter talks of “perfect spiritual contact.”[99]

The symbols of “Nakedness” and “Garments,” as indicative respectively of the soul’s purity and impurity or self-delusion, are, though most prominent in Catherine, rare in Dionysius. But his declaration: “The nakedness of the (Angels’) feet indicates purification from the addition of all things external and assimilation to the divine simplicity” exactly expresses her idea.[100] And Proclus has it more fully: The soul, on descending into the body, forsakes unity, “and around her, from all sides, there grow multiform kinds of existence and manifold garments”; “love of honour is the last garment of souls”; and “when,” in mounting up, “we lay aside our passions and garments which, in coming down, we had put on, we must also strip off that last garment, in order that, having become (entirely) naked, we may establish ourselves before God, having made ourselves like to the divine life.”[101]

(2) Again, as to Triads, it is interesting to note that Catherine has nothing about the three stages or ways of the inner life,--purgative, illuminative, unitive,--of which Dionysius is full, and which are already indicated in Proclus; for we can find but two in her life, the purgative and unitive, and in her teaching these two alone appear, mostly in close combination, sometimes in strong contrast. Nor has she anything about the three degrees or kinds of prayer,--Meditation, Contemplation, Union,--as indicated in Dionysius: “It behoves us, by our prayers, to be lifted into proximity with the Divine Trinity; and then, by still further approaching it, to be initiated…; and (lastly) to make ourselves one with it”; and as taught by Proclus: “Knowledge leads, then follows proximity, and then union.”[102] With her we only get Contemplation and Union.--Nor do we get in her anything about thrice three choirs of Angels, or three orders of Christian Ministrants, or three classes of Christian people, or thrice three groups of Sacraments and Sacramental acts. For she is too intensely bent upon immediate intercourse with God, and too much absorbed in the sense of profound unity and again of innumerable multiplicity, to be attracted by Dionysius’s Neo-Platonist ladder of carefully graduated intermediaries, or by his continuous interest in triads of every kind. Catherine thus follows the current in Dionysius which insists upon direct contact between the soul and the transcendent God, and ignores the other, which bridges over the abyss between the two by carefully graduated intermediaries: these intermediaries having become, with her, successive stages of purification and of ever more penetrating union of the one soul with the one God.

5. _Deification, especially through the Eucharist._

As to the end of the whole process, we find that Deification, so frequently implied or suggested by Catherine, is formally taught by Dionysius: “A union of the deified minds” (ἐκθεουμένων); the heavenly and the earthly Hierarchy have the power and task “to communicate to their subjects, according to the dignity of each, the sacred deification” (ἐκθέωσις); “we are led up, by means of the multiform of sensible symbols, to the uniform Deification.”[103] “The One is the very God,” says Proclus, “but the Mind (the Noûs) is the divinest of beings, and the soul is divine, and the body is godlike.… And every body that is God-like is so through the soul having become divine; and every soul that is divine, is so through the Mind being very divine; and every Mind that is thus very divine, is so through participation in the Divine One.”[104] There are preformations of this doctrine in Plotinus and echoes of it throughout Catherine’s sayings.

And the Areopagite’s teaching that the chief means and the culmination of this deification are found and reached in the reception of the Holy Eucharist will no doubt also have stimulated Catherine’s mind: “The Communicant is led to the summit of deiformation, as far as this is possible for him.”[105] And her soul responds completely to the beautiful Dionysian-Proclian teaching concerning God’s presence in all things, as the cause of the profound sympathy which binds them all together. “They say,” declares Dionysius, “that He is in minds … and in bodies, and in heaven and in earth; (indeed that He is) sun, fire, water, spirit … all things existing, and yet again not one of all things existing.” “The distribution of boundless power passes from Almighty God all things, and no single being but has intellectual, or rational, or sensible, or vital, or essential power.” “The gifts of the unfailing Power pass on to men and (lesser) living creatures, to plants, and to the entire nature of the Universe.”[106] This latter passage was suggested by Proclus: “One would say that, through participation in the One, all things are deified, each according to its rank, inclusive of the very lowest of beings.” “The image of the One and the inter-communion existing through it,--this it is that produces the extant sympathy” which permeates all things.[107]--But Catherine has nowhere the term “echo,” which is so dear to Dionysius: “His all-surpassing power holds together and preserves even the remotest of its echoes”; “the sun and plants are or hold most distant echoes of the Good and of Life”; indeed even the licentious man still possesses, in his very passion, “as it were a faint echo of Union and of Friendship.”[108]

6. _Dionysius and Catherine; three agreements and differences._

I conclude with three important points of difference and similarity between Catherine and Dionysius.

(1) Catherine abstains from the use of those repulsive, impossibly hyperbolic epithets such as “the Super-Good,” “the Above-Mind,” which Dionysius is never weary of applying to God, and is content with ever feeling and declaring how high above the very best conception which she can form of mind and of goodness He undoubtedly is; thus wisely moderated, I take it, by her constant experience and faith as to God’s immediate presence within the human soul, which soul cannot, consequently, be presented as entirely remote from the nature of God.

(2) Catherine transforms over-intense and impoverishing insistence upon the pure Oneness of God, such as we find it even in Dionysius and still more in Proclus, into a, sometimes equally over-intense, conception as to the oneness of our union with Him, leaving Him to be still conceived as an overflowing richness of all kinds.

(3) And Catherine keeps, in an interesting manner, Hellenic, and specifically Platonic, formulation for the deepest of her experiences and teachings, since her standing designation of God and of Our Lord is never personal, “My Lover” or “My Friend”; but, as it were, elemental, “Love” or “My Love.” Her keen self-purifying instinct and reverence for God will have spontaneously inclined her thus to consider Him first as an Ocean of Being in which to quench and drown her small, clamorous individuality, and this as a necessary step towards reconstituting that true personality, which, itself spirit, would be penetrated and sustained by the Spirit, Christ, God. And then the Pauline-Joannine picturings of God as a quasi-place and extended substance (“from Him and in Him and to Him,” “in the Spirit,” “in Christ,” “God is Charity and he that abideth in Charity, abideth in Him”) will have strongly confirmed this trend. Yet Dionysius too must have greatly helped on this movement of her mind. For in Dionysius the standing appellations for God are, in true Neo-Platonist fashion, derived from extended or diffusive material substances or conditions, Light, Fire, Fountain, Ocean; and from that pervasive emotion, Love, strictly speaking Desire, Eros.

Now this, for our modern and Christian feeling, curiously impersonal, general and abstract method goes back, through Proclus and Plotinus, to Plato, who, above all in his _Symposium_, is dominated by the two tendencies and requirements, of identifying the First and Perfect with the most General and the most Abstract; and of making the very prerequisites and instruments of the search for It,--even the earthly Eros, still so far from the Heavenly Eros and from the Christian Agapē,--into occasions, effects or instalments of and for the great Reality sought by them. And since it is thus the love, the desire, the eros, of things beautiful, and true, and good,--a love first sensible, then intellectual, and at last spiritual, which makes us seek and find It, the Beauty, Truth, and Goodness which is First Cause and Final End of the whole series, this Cause and End will be considered not as a Lover but as Love Itself. It is plain, I think, that it is specially this second motive, this requirement of a pervading organization and circle of and within the life of spirits and of the Spirit, which has also determined Catherine to retain Plato’s terminology.

IV. JACOPONE DA TODI’S “LODE.”

In the case of Jacopone, the suddenly wife-bereft and converted lawyer, an ardent poet doubled by a soaring, daring mystic, with an astonishing richness of simultaneous symbols and conceptions and rapidity of successive complements and contrasts, it will really be simplest if I take the chief touches which have characteristically stimulated Catherine or have left her unaffected, in the order and grouping in which they appear in his chief “Lode,” as these latter are given in the first printed edition, probably the very one used by Catherine.[109]

1. _Lode XIII, XXIII, XXXV, XLV._

In Loda XIII “the vicious soul is likened unto Hell,” vv. 1-7; and “the soul that yesterday was Hell, to-day has turned into Heaven,” v. 8. We thus get here, precisely as in Catherine, the spaceless conditions of the soul and their modifications treated under the symbols of places and of the spacial change from one place to the other.

In Loda XXIII we first have five successive purifications and purities of Love, “carnal, counterfeit, self-seeking, natural, spiritual, transformed,” vv. 1-6; and then the symbols of spacial location and movement reappear, “if height does not abase itself, it cannot participate with, nor communicate itself to, the lowest grade”; all which is frequent with Catherine. But she nowhere echoes the teaching reproduced here, v. 10, as to the Divine Trinity being figured in man’s three faculties of soul.

Loda XXXV gives us a sort of Christian Stoicism very dear dear to Catherine: “Thou, my soul, hast been created in great elevation; thy nature is grounded in great nobility (_gentilezza_),” v. 7; “thou hast not thy life in created things; it is necessary for thee to breathe in other countries, to mount up to God thine inheritance, Who (alone) can satisfy thy poverty,” v. 10; “great is the honour which thou doest to God, when thou abidest (stare) in Him, in thy (true) nobility,” v. 11.

Loda XLV gives “the Five Modes in which God appears in the Soul”--“the state of fear”; mercenary, “beggar-love”; “the way of love”; “the paternal mode”; “the mode of espousals.” Catherine leaves the last two, anthropomorphic and familial, conceptions quite unused, and passes in her life, at one bound, from the first to the third mode.

2. _Lode LVIIIa, LVIIIb._

The fine Loda LVIII_a_, “Of Holy Poverty, Mistress of all Things,” has evidently suggested much to Catherine. “Waters, rivers, lakes, and ocean, fish within them and their swimming; airs, winds, birds, and all their flying: all these turn to jewels for me,” v. 10. How readily the sense of water, and of rapid movement within it, passes here into that of air, and of swift locomotion within _it_! And both these movements, are felt to represent, in vivid fashion, certain very different experiences of the soul.--“Moon, Sun, Sky, and Stars,--even these are _not_ amongst my treasures; above the very sky those things abide, which are the object of my song,” v. 11. The positive, “analogic” method has here turned suddenly into the negative, “apophatic” one; and yet, even here, we still have the spacial symbolism, for the best is the highest up,--indeed it is this very symbolism which is made to add point to the negative declaration, a declaration which nevertheless clearly implies the mere symbolism of that spacialization. All this is fully absorbed by Catherine.--“Since God has my will, … my wings have such feathers that from earth to heaven there is no distance for me,” v. 12. Here we see how Plato filters through, complete, to Jacopone; but only in his central idea to Catherine. For the _Phaedrus_, 246_b_, _c_, teaches: “The perfect soul then, having become winged, soars upwards, and is the ruler of the universe; whilst the imperfect soul sheds her feathers and is borne downwards, till it settles on the solid ground.” Catherine never mentions wings nor feathers, but often dwells upon flying.

The great Loda LVIII_b_, “Of Holy Poverty and its Treble Heaven,” (one passage of which is formally quoted and carefully expounded by Catherine), is a combination of Platonism, Paulinism, and Franciscanism, and has specially influenced her through its Platonist element. Verses 1-9 contain a fine apostrophe to Poverty. “O Love of Poverty, Reign of tranquillity! Poverty, high Wisdom! to be subject to nothing; through despising to possess all things created!” v. 1: all this is echoed by Catherine. But the ex-lawyer’s declaration that such a soul “has neither judge nor notary,” v. 3, did certainly not determine her literally, for we have had before us some fifteen cases in which she had recourse to lawyers. “God makes not His abode in a narrow heart; thou art, oh man, precisely as great as thine affection may be. The spirit of poverty possesses so ample a bosom, that Deity Itself takes up its dwelling there,” v. 8. Catherine’s deepest self seems to breathe from out of this profound saying.

Verses 10 to 30 describe the three heavens of successive self-despoilments. The firmamental heaven, which typifies the four-fold renouncement,--of honour, riches, science, reputation of sanctity, has left no echo in Catherine. The stellar heaven is “composed of solidified clear waters (_aque solidate_)”; here “the four winds” cease “that move the sea,--that perturb the mind: fear and hope, grief and joy,” 11-14. Here Plato again touches Catherine through Jacopone. For the _Symposium_, 197_a_, declares: “Love it is that produces peace among men and calm on the sea, a cessation of the winds, and repose and sleep even in trouble”; and Jacopone identifies the middle “crystalline” heaven, (“the waters above” of Genesis, chap, i,) with Plato’s “sea”; takes Plato’s (four) winds as the soul’s chief passions; and considers Plato’s “peace” and “windlessness” as equivalent to the “much silence,” which, says the Apocalypse, “arose in heaven,” viii, 1, interpreted here as “in mid-heaven.” “Not to fear Hell, nor to hope for Heaven, to rejoice in no good, to grieve over no adversity,” v. 16, is a formulation unlike Catherine, although single sayings of hers stand for sentiments analogous to the first and last.--“If the virtues are naked, and the vices are not garmented,--mortal wounds get given to the soul,” v. 19, has a symbolism exactly opposite to Catherine’s, who, we know, loves to glorify “nakedness” as the soul’s purity.--“The highest heaven” is “beyond even the imagings of the mortified fancy”; “of every good it has despoiled thee, and has expropriated thee from all virtue: lay up as a treasure this thy gain,--the sense of thine own vileness.” “O purified Love! it alone lives in the truth!” These verses, 20-22, have left a deep impress upon Catherine, although she wisely does not press that “expropriation from virtue,” which goes back at least to Plotinus, for whom the true Ecstatic is “beyond the choir of the virtues.”[110]

“That which appears to thee (as extant), is not truly, existent: so high (above) is that which truly is. True elevation of soul (_la superbia_) dwells in heaven above, and baseness of mind (_humilitade_) leads to damnation,” v. 24, is a saying to which we still have Catherine’s detailed commentary. In its markedly Platonic distinction between an upper true and a lower seeming world, and in its characteristically mystical love of paradox and a play upon words, it is more curious than abidingly important; but in its deeply Christian consciousness of “pride” and “humility,” in their ordinary ethical sense, being respectively the subtlest vice and the noblest virtue, it rises sheer above all Platonist and Neo-Platonist apprehension.

“Love abides in prison, in that darksome light! All light there is darkness, and all darkness there is as the day,” vv. 26, 27. Here Catherine no doubt found aids towards her prison-conception,--of the loving soul imprisoned in the earthly body, and of the imperfect, yet loving, disembodied souls imprisoned in Purgatory; and towards articulating her strong sense of the change in the meaning and value of the same symbols, as the soul grows in depth and experience. But her symbolization of God, and of our apprehension of Him as Light and Fire, is too solidly established in her mind, to allow her to emphasize the darkness-symbol with any reference to Him.

“There where Christ is enclosed (in the soul), all the old is changed by Him,--the one is transformed into the Other, in a marvellous union. To live as I and yet not I; and my very being to be not mine: this is so great a cross-purpose (_traversio_), that I know not how to define it,” vv. 28-30. This vivid description, based of course upon St. Paul, of the apparent shifting of the very centre of the soul’s personality, has left clear echoes in Catherine’s sayings; but the explicit reference to Christ is here as characteristically Franciscan as it is unlike Catherine’s special habits.--And the great poem ends with a _refrain_ of its opening apostrophe.

3. _Lode LXXIV, LXXIX, LXXXI, LXXXIII._

In the dramatically vivid Dialogue between the Old and the Young Friar “Concerning the divers manners of contemplating the Cross,” Loda LXXIV, the elder says to the younger man: “And I find the Cross full of arrows, which issue from its side: they get fixed in my heart. The Archer has aimed them at me; He causes me to be pierced,” v. 6. The Cross is here a bow; and yet the arrows evidently issue not from it, but, as so many rays, from the Sun, the Light-Christ, Who is laid upon it,--from the heart of the Crucified. Catherine maintains the rays and arrows, and the Sun and Fire from which they issue; but the Cross and the Crucified, presupposed here throughout, appear not, even to this extent, in her post-conversion picturings.--“You abide by the warmth, but I abide within the fire; to you it is delight, but I am burning through and through, I cannot find a place of refuge in this furnace,” v. 13. All this has been echoed throughout by Catherine.

Loda LXXIX, “Of the Divine Love and its Praises,” has evidently much influenced her. “O joyous wound, delightful wound, gladsome wound, for him who is wounded by Thee, O Love!” “O Love, divine Fire! Love full of laughter and playfulness!” “O Love, sweet and suave; O Love, Thou art the key of heaven! Ship that Thou art, bring me to port and calm the tempest,” vv. 3, 6, 16. All this we have found reproduced in her similes and experiences. “Love, bounteous in spending Thyself; Love with widespread tables!” “Love, Thou art the One that loves, and the Means wherewith the heart loves Thee!” vv. 24, 26. These verses give us the wide, wide world outlook, the connection between Love and the Holy Eucharist, and the identity of the Subject, Means, and Object of Love, which are all so much dwelt upon by Catherine.

Loda LXXXI is interesting by the way in which, although treating of “the love of Christ upon the Cross,” it everywhere apostrophizes Love and not the Lover, and treats the former, again like Catherine, as a kind of boundless living substance; indeed v. 17 must have helped to suggest one of her favourite conceptions: “O great Love, greater than the great sea! Oh! the man who is drowned within it, under it, and with it all around him, whilst he knows not where he is!”

Loda LXXXIII has two touches dear to Catherine. “O Love, whose name is ‘I love’--the plural is never found,” v. 5,--a saying which evidently is directed, not against a social conception of religion, but against a denial of the Divine Love being Source as well as Object of our love; and “I did not love Thee with any gain to myself, until I loved Thee for Thine own sake,” v. 15,--a declaration of wondrous depth and simplicity.

4. _Lode LXXXVIII, LXXXIX, LXXXX, LXXXXVIII, LXXXXIX._