Chapter XI: Catherine’s Less Ultimate This-World Doctrines (1)

INTRODUCTORY: CATHERINE’S LESS ULTIMATE POSITIONS, CONCERNING OUR LIFE HERE, ARE FOUR.

We have now attempted, (by means of a doubtless more or less artificial distinction between things that, in real life, constitute parts of one whole in a state of hardly separable inter-penetration,) a presentation of Catherine’s special, mental and psycho-physical, character and temperament, and of the principal literary stimulations and materials which acted upon, and in return were refashioned by, that character; and we have also given, in sufficient detail, the resultant doctrines and world-view acquired and developed by that deep soul and noble mind. The most important and difficult part of our task remains, however, still to be accomplished,--the attempt to get an (at least approximate) estimate of the abiding meaning, place, and worth of this whole, highly synthesized position, for and within the religious life generally and our present-day requirements in particular. For the general outline of the Introduction, (intended there more as an instrument of research and classification for the literature and history then about to be examined, than as this history’s final religious appraisement,) cannot dispense us from now attempting something more precise and ultimate.--I propose, then, to give the next four chapters to an examination of Catherine’s principal positions and practices, the first two, respectively, to “the less ultimate This-World Doctrines”; and “the Other-World Doctrines,” or “the Eschatology”; and the last two to “the Ultimate Implications and Problems” underlying both. The last chapter shall then sum up the whole book, and consider the abiding place and function of Mysticism, in its contrast to, and supplementation of, Asceticism, Institutionalism, and the Scientific Habit and Activity of the Mind.

Now I think the less ultimate spiritual positions, as far as they concern our life here below, which are specially represented, or at least forcibly suggested by, Catherine, can reasonably be accounted as four: Interpretative Religion; a strongly Dualistic attitude towards the body; Quietude and Passivity; and Pure Love. I shall devote a section to each position.

I. INTERPRETATIVE RELIGION.

1. _Difficulties of the Subjective element of Religion._

Now, by Interpretative Religion, I do not mean to imply that there is anywhere, in _rerum natura_, such a thing as a religion which is not interpretative, which does not consist as truly of a reaction on the part of the believing soul to certain stimulations of and within it, as of these latter stimulations and actions. As every (even but semi-conscious) act and state of the human mind, ever embraces both such action of the object and such reaction of the subject,--a relatively crude fact of sensation or of feeling born in upon it, and an interpretation, an incorporation of this fact by, and into, the living tissue and organism of this mind: so is it also, necessarily and above all, with the deepest and most richly complex of all human acts and states,--the specifically religious ones. But if this interpretative activity of the mind was present from the very dawn of human reason, and exists in each individual in the precise proportion as mind can be predicated as operative within him at all: this mental activity is yet the last element in the compound process and result which is, or can be, perceived as such by the mind itself. The process is too near to the observer, even when he is once awake to its existence; he is too much occupied with the materials brought before his mind and with moulding and sorting them out; and this moulding and sorting activity is itself too rapid and too deeply independent of those materials as to its form, and too closely dependent upon them as to its content, for the observation by the mind of this same mind’s contributions towards its own affirmations of reality and of the nature of this reality, not ever to appear late in the history of the human race or in the life of any human individual, or not to be, even when it appears difficult, a fitful and an imperfect mental exercise.

And when the discovery of this constant contribution of the mind to its own affirmations of reality is first made, it can hardly fail, for the time being, to occasion misgivings and anxieties of a more or less sceptical kind. Is not the whole of what I have hitherto taken to be a solid world of sense outside me, and the whole of the world of necessary truth and of obligatory goodness within me,--is it not, perhaps, all a merely individual creation of my single mind--a mind cut off from all effective intercourse with reality,--my neighbour’s mind included? For all having, so far, been held to be objective, the mind readily flies to the other extreme, and suspects all to be subjective. Or if all my apprehensions and certainties are the resultants from the interaction between impressions received by my senses and mind and reactions and elaborations on the part of this mind with regard to those impressions, how can I be sure of apprehending rightly, unless I can divide each constituent off from the other? And yet, how can I effect such a continuous discounting of my mind’s action by means of my own mind itself?

And this objection is felt most keenly in religion, when the religious soul first wakes up to the fact that itself, of necessity and continuously, contributes, by its own action, to the constitution of those affirmations and certainties, which, until then, seemed, without a doubt, to be directly borne in upon a purely receptive, automatically registering mind, from that extra-, super-human world which it thus affirmed. Here also, all having for so long been assumed to be purely objective, the temptation now arises to consider it all as purely subjective. Or again, if we insist upon holding that, here too, there are both objective and subjective elements, we readily experience keen distress at our inability clearly to divide off the objective, which is surely the reality, from the subjective, which can hardly fail to be its travesty.

And finally, this doubt and trouble would seem to find specially ready material in the mystical element and form of religion. For here, as we have already seen, psycho-physical and auto-suggestive phenomena and mechanisms abound; here especially does the mind cling to an immediate access to Reality; and here the ordinary checks and complements afforded by the Historical and Institutional, the Analytically Rational, and the Volitional, Practical elements of Religion are at a minimum. Little but the Emotional and the Speculatively Rational elements seems to remain; and these, more than any others, appear incapable of admitting that they are anything other than the pure and direct effects and expressions of spiritual Reality.

What, then, shall we think of all this?

2. _Answers to the above difficulties._

We evidently must, in the first instance, guard against any attempt at doing a doctrinaire violence to the undeniable facts of our consciousness or of its docile analysis, by explaining all our knowledge, or only even all our knowledge of any single thing, as either of purely subjective or of purely objective provenance; for everywhere and always these two elements co-exist in all human apprehension, reason, feeling, will, and faith. We find, throughout, an organization, an indissoluble organism, of subjective and objective, hence a unity in diversity, which is indeed so great that (for our own experience and with respect to our own minds at all events), the Subjective does not and cannot exist without the Objective, nor the Objective without the Subjective.

In the next place, we must beware against exalting the Objective against the Subjective, or the Subjective against the Objective, as if Life, Reality, and Truth consisted in the one rather than the other. Because the subjective element is, on the first showing, a work of our own minds, it does not follow (as we shall see more clearly when studying the ultimate problems) that its operations are bereft of correspondence with reality, or, at least, that they are further from reality than are our sense-perceptions. For just as the degree of worth represented by these sense-perceptions can range from the crudest delusion to a stimulation of primary importance and exquisite precision, so also our mental and emotional reaction and penetration represent almost any and every degree of accuracy and value.

And, above all, as already implied, the true priority and superiority lies, not with one of these constituents against the other, but with the total subjective-objective interaction and resultant, which is superior, and indeed gives their place and worth to, those ever interdependent parts.

Now, in the general human experience, the Objective element is constituted, in the first instance and for clear and ready analysis, by the sense-stimulations; and, after some mental response to and elaboration of these, by the larger psychic moods; and later still, by the examples of great spiritual attitudes and of great personalities offered by other souls to the soul that keeps itself open to such impressions. And though the sense of Reality (as contrasted with Appearance), of the Abiding and Infinite (as different from the Passing and the Finite), are doubtless awakened, however faintly and inarticulately, in the human soul from the first, as the background and presupposition of the foreground and the middle-distances of its total world of perceptions and aspirations: yet all these middle-distances, as well as that great background and groundwork, would remain unawakened but for those humble little sense-perceptions on the one hand, and intercourse with human fellow-creatures on the other. And in such intercourse with the minds and souls, or with the literary remains and other monuments of souls, either still living here or gone hence some two thousand years or more, a mass of mental and moral impressions and stimulations, which, in those souls, were largely their own elaborations, offer themselves to any one human mind, or to the minds of a whole generation or country, with the apparent homogeneity of a purely objective, as it were a sense-impression.

Especially in Religion the Historical and Institutional (as Religion’s manifestation in space and time), come down to us thus from the past and surround us in the present, and either press in upon us with a painful weight, or support us with a comforting solidity, thus giving them many of the qualities of things physically seen and touched, say, a mystery play or a vast cathedral. And, on the other hand, the Rational, (whether Analytic or Synthetic,) and the Emotional and Volitional Elements, whenever they are at all preponderant or relatively independent of the other, more objective ones, are liable, in Religion, to look quite exceptionally subjective,--and this in the unfavourable sense of the word, as though either superfluous and fantastic, or as dangerous and destructive.--And yet both that look of the objective elements being, in Religion, more self-sufficing than they appear to be in the ordinary psychic, or the artistic, or social, or scientific life; and that impression conveyed by the subjective elements in Religion, as being there less necessary or more dangerous than elsewhere, are doubtless deceptive. These impressions are simply caused by two very certain facts. Religion is the deepest and most inclusive of all the soul’s energizings and experiences, and hence all its constituents reveal a difference, at least in amount and degree, when compared with the corresponding constituents of the more superficial and more partial activities of the soul; and Religion, just because of this, requires the fullest action and co-operation, the most perfect unity, in and through diversity, of all the soul’s powers, and all mere non-use of any of these forces, even any restriction to the use of but one or two, is here, more readily and extensively than elsewhere, detrimental both to the non-exercised and to the exercised forces, and, above all, is impoverishing to the soul itself and to its religion.

Hence, here as elsewhere, but more than anywhere, our ideal standard will be the greatest possible development of, and inter-stimulation between, each and all of the religious elements, with the greatest possible unity in the resulting organism. And yet,--in view of the very greatness of the result aimed at, and of the fact that its even approximate attainment can, even for any one age of the world, be reasonably expected only from the co-operation of the differently endowed and attracted races and nations, social and moral grades, sexes, ages and individuals that make up mankind,--we shall not only be very tolerant of, we shall positively encourage, largely one-sided developments, provided that each keeps some touch with the elements which itself knows not how to develop in abundance, and that it considers its own self, and works out its own special gift and _attrait_, as but one out of many variously gifted and apportioned fellow-servants in the Kingdom,--as only one of the countless, mutually complementary, individually ever imperfect, part-expressions of the manifold greatness, of the rich unity of spiritual humanity as willed by God, and of God Himself.

3. _Partial developments of the full Gospel Ideal._

Now in the New Testament we have a most instructive, at first sight puzzling phenomenon, illustrative of the positions just taken up. For here it is clear that, with regard to the distinction between richly many-sided but as yet unarticulated religion, and comparatively one-sided and limited but profoundly developed religion, we have two considerably contrasted types of spiritual tone and teaching. We get the predominantly “Objective” strand of life and doctrine, in the pre-Pauline parts and in their non-Pauline echoes, _i.e._ in the substance of the Synoptic tradition, and in the Epistles of St. James and of St. Peter; and we find the predominantly “Subjective” strain in the “Pauline” parts, St. Paul’s Epistles and the Joannine Gospel and Letters.--And it has become more and more clear that it is the pre-Pauline parts which give us the most immediately and literally faithful, and especially the most complete and many-sided, picture of Our Lord’s precise words and actions; whereas the Pauline parts give us rather what some of these great creative forces were and became for the first generations of Christians and for the most penetrating of Christ’s early disciples and lovers. And yet it is the latter documents which, at first sight, appear to be the deeper, the wider, and the more profoundly spiritual; whereas the former look more superficial, more temporal and local, and more simply popular and material.

And yet,--though this first impression has been held to be finally true by large masses of Christians; although the Greek Fathers predominantly, and, in the West, the great soul of an Augustine, and the powerful but one-sided personalities of a Luther and a Calvin have, in various degrees and ways, helped to articulate and all but finally fix it for the general Christian consciousness: this view is yielding, somewhat slowly but none the less surely, to the sense that it is the Synoptic, the pre-Pauline tradition which contains the fuller arsenal of the spiritual forces which have transfigured and which still inspire the world of souls. This, of course, does not mean that the Pauline-Joannine developments were not necessary, or are not abiding elements towards the understanding of the Christian spirit.

And, to come to the true answer to our objection, such a judgment does not mean that the reflective penetration and reapplication of the original more spontaneous message was, from the very nature of the case, inferior to the first less articulated announcement of the Good Tidings. But it merely signifies that this necessary process of reflection could only be applied to parts of the original, immensely rich and varied, because utterly living, divinely spiritual, whole; and that, thus, the special balance and tension which characterized the original, complete spirit and temper, could, however profoundly, be reproduced only in part. For the time being this later penetration and resetting of some elements from among the whole of Our Lord’s divinely rich and simple life and teaching, necessarily and rightly, yet none the less most really, ignored, or put for the time into some other context, certain other sides and aspects of that primitive treasure of inexhaustible experience. Only the full, equable, and simultaneous unfolding of all the petals could have realized the promise and content of the bud; whereas the bud, holding enfolded within itself such various elements and combinations of truth, could not expand its petals otherwise than successively, hence, at any one moment only somewhat one-sidedly and partially. Each and all of these unfoldings bring some further insight into, and articulation of, the original spiritual organism; and that they are not more, but less, than the totality of that primitive experience and revelation, does not prove that such reflective work is wrong or even simply dispensable,--for, on the contrary, in some degree or form it was and ever is necessary to the soul’s apprehension of that life and truth,--but simply implies the immensity of the spiritual light and impulsion given by Our Lord, and the relative smallness of even the greatest of His followers.

Thus only if it could be shown that those parts of the New Testament which doubtless give us the nearest approach to the actual words and deeds of Our Lord require us to conceive them as having been without the reflective and emotional element; or again that, in the case of the more derivative parts of the New Testament, it is their reflectiveness, and not their relative incompleteness and one-sidedness, that cause them to be more readily englobed in the former world, than that former world in the latter: could the facts here found be used as an argument against the importance and strict necessity for religion of the reflective and emotional, the “Subjective” elements, alongside of the “Objective,” the Historical and Institutional ones.

It is a most legitimate ground for consolation to a Catholic when he finds the necessities of life and those of learned research both driving us more and more to this conclusion; for it is not deniable that Catholicism has ever refused to do more than include the Pauline and Joannine theologies amongst its earliest and most normative stimulations and expressions; and that it has ever retained, far more than Protestantism, the sense, which (upon the whole) is most unbrokenly preserved by the Synoptists, of, if I may so phrase it, the Christianity of certain true elements in the pre- and extra-Christian religions. For it is in the Synoptists that we get the clear presentation of Our Lord’s attitude towards the Jewish Church of His time, as one, even at its keenest, analogous to that of Savonarola, and not to that of a Luther, still less of a Calvin, towards the Christian Church of their day.--Indeed in these documents all idea of limiting Christianity to what He brought of new, appears as foreign to His mind as it ever has been to that of the Catholic Church. Here we get the most spontaneous and many-sided expression of that divinely human, widely traditional and social, all-welcoming and all-transforming spirit, which embraces both grace _and_ nature, eternity _and_ time, soul _and_ body, attachment _and_ detachment. The Pauline strain stands for the stress necessary to the full spiritualization of all those occasions and materials, as against all, mere unregenerate or static, retention of the simple rudiments or empty names of those things; and predominantly insists upon grace, _not_ nature; eternity, _not_ time; soul, _not_ body; the cross and death here, the Crown and Life hereafter. No wonder it is this latter strain that gets repeated, with varying truth and success, in times of acute transition, and by characters more antithetic than synthetic, more great at developing a part of the truth than the whole.

Thinkers, of such wide historical outlook and unimpeachable detachment from immediate controversial interest as Prof. Wilhelm Dilthey and Dr. Edward Caird, have brought out, with admirable force, this greater fulness of content offered by the Synoptists, and how the Pauline-Joannine writings give us the first and most important of those concentrations upon, and in part philosophic and mystical reinterpretations of, certain constituents of the original happenings, actions and message, as apprehended and transmitted by the first eye-witnesses and believers.[112]--Here I would but try and drive home the apparently vague, but in reality ever pressing and concrete, lesson afforded by the clear and dominant fact of these two groups within the New Testament itself:--of how no mere accumulation of external happenings, or of external testimony as to their having happened,--no amount of history or of institutionalism, taken as sheer, purely positive givennesses,--can anywhere be found, or can anywhere suffice for the human mind and conscience, in the apprehension and embodiment of the truth. For although, in Our Lord’s most literally transmitted sayings and doings, this continuous and inalienable element of the apprehending, organizing, vitalizing mind and heart,--on His part above all, but also on the part of His several hearers and chroniclers,--can mostly still be traced and must everywhere be assumed: yet it is in the Pauline-Joannine literature that the ever important, the rightly and fruitfully “subjective,” the speculative and emotional, the mystical and the volitional strain can best be studied, both as to its necessity and as to its special character and dangers, because here it is developed to the relative exclusion of the other factors of complete religion.

4. _The exclusive emotionalism of Dionysius and Jacopone._

Now if even in St. Paul and St. John there is a strong predominance of these reflective-emotional elements, in Dionysius and Jacopone they threaten to become exclusive of everything else. Especially is this the case with the Pseudo-Areopagite, steeped as he is in reflection upon reflections and in emotion upon emotions, often of the most subtle kind: a Christian echo, with curiously slight modifications, of Neo-Platonism in its last stage,--hence, unfortunately, of the over-systematic and largely artificial Proclus, instead of the predominantly experimental and often truly sublime Plotinus. And even Jacopone, although he has distinctly more of the historic element, is still predominantly reflective-emotional, and presents us with many a hardly modified Platonic or Stoic doctrine, derived no doubt from late Graeco-Roman writers and their mediaeval Christian echoes.

5. _Catherine’s interpretation of the Gospel Ideal._

Catherine herself, although delightfully free from the long scale of mediations between the soul and God which forms one of the predominant doctrines of the Areopagite, continues and emphasizes most of what is common, and much of what is special to, all and each of these four writers; she is a reflective saint, if ever there was one. And of her too we shall have to say that she is great by what she possesses, and not by what she is without: great because of her noble embodiment of the reflective and emotional, the mystical and volitional elements of Christianity and Religion generally. Religion is here, at first sight at least, all but entirely a thought and an emotion; yet all this thought and emotion is directed to, and occasioned by, an abiding Reality which originates, sustains, regulates, and fulfils it. And although this Reality is in large part conceived, in Greek and specially in Neo-Platonist fashion, rather under its timeless and spaceless, or at least under its cosmic aspect, rather as Law and Substance, than as Personality and Spirit: yet, already because of the strong influence upon her of the noblest Platonic doctrine, it is loved as overflowing Love and Goodness, as cause and end of all lesser love and goodness; and the real, though but rarely articulated, acceptance and influence of History and Institutions, above all the enthusiastic devotion to the Holy Eucharist with all its great implications, gives to the whole a profoundly Christian tone and temper.

True, the Church at large, indeed the single soul (if we would take such a soul as our standard of completeness) requires a larger proportion of those crisp, definite outlines, of those factual, historical, and institutional elements; a very little less than what remains in Catherine of these elements, and her religion would be a simple, even though deep religiosity, a general aspiration, not a definite finding, an explicit religion. Yet it remains certain, although ever readily forgotten by religious souls, especially by theological apologists, that without some degree and kind of those outgoing, apprehending, interpreting activities, no religion is possible. Only the question as to what these activities should be, and what is their true place and function within the whole religious life, remains an open one. And this question we can study with profit in connection with such a life and teaching as Catherine’s, which brings out, with a spontaneous, childlike profundity and daring, the elemental religious passion, the spiritual hunger and thirst of man when he is once fully awake; the depths within him anticipating the heights above him; the affinity to and contact with the Infinite implied and required by that nobly incurable restlessness of his heart, which finds its rest in Him alone Who made it.

II. DUALISTIC ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE BODY.

And if Catherine is profoundly reflective, that reflection is, in its general drift, deeply dualistic,--at least in the matter of body and spirit. Their difference and incompatibility; the spirit’s fleeing of the body; the spirit’s getting outside of it,--by ecstasy, for a little while, even in this earthly life, and by this earthly body’s death, for good and all; the body a prison-house, a true purgatory to the soul: all this hangs well together, and is largely, in its very form, of ultimately Neo-Platonist or Platonic origin.

1. _New Testament valuations of the body._

Now here is one of the promised instances of a double type--if not of doctrine, yet at least of emotional valuation in the New Testament.

(1) In the Synoptist documents, (with the but apparent, or at least solitary, exceptions, of Jesus’ Fasting in the Desert and of His commendation of those who have made themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven),[113] we find no direct or acute antagonism to the body, even to the average earthly human body, in the teaching and practice of Our Lord. The Second Coming and its proximity do indeed, here also, dwarf all earthly concerns, in so far as earthly.[114] This background to the teaching and its tradition was, in course of time, in part abstracted from, in part restated.--The entrance into life is through the narrow gate and the steep way; only if a man turn, can he enter into the Kingdom of God; only if he lose his soul, can he find it:[115] this great teaching and example, as to life and joy being ever reached through death to self and by the whole-hearted turning of the soul from its false self to its true source, God: remains, in the very form of its promulgation as given by the Synoptists, the fundamental test and standard of all truly spiritual life and progress. But as to the body in particular, Jesus here knows indeed that “the flesh is weak,” and that we must pray for strength against its weakness:[116] but He nowhere declares it evil--an inevitable prison-house or a natural antagonist to the spirit. The beautiful balance of an unbroken, unstrained nature, and a corresponding doctrine as full of sober earnestness as it is free from all concentrated or systematic dualism, are here everywhere apparent.

(2) It is St. Paul, the man of the strongest bodily passions and temptations, he who became suddenly free from them by the all-transforming lightning-flash of his conversion, who, on and on, remained vividly conscious of what he had been and, but for that grace, still would be, and of what, through that grace, he had become. The deepest shadows are thus ever kept in closest contrast to the highest lights; and the line of demarcation between them runs here along the division between body and soul. “Unhappy man that I am, who can liberate me from this body of sin?” “In my flesh dwelleth no good thing”:[117] are sayings which are both keener in their tone and more limited in their range than are Our Lord’s. And we have seen how, in one of his most depressed moods, he transiently adopts and carries on a specifically Platonist attitude towards the body’s relation to the soul, as he finds it in that beautiful, profoundly Hellenistic treatise, the Book of Wisdom.[118] This attitude evidently represents, in his strenuous and deeply Christian character, only a passing feeling; for, if we pressed it home, we could hardly reconcile it with his doctrine as to the reality and nature of the body’s resurrection. It is indeed clear how the Platonist, and especially the Neo-Platonist, mode of conceiving that relation excludes any and every kind of body from the soul’s final stage of purification and happiness; and how the Synoptic, and indeed the generally Christian conception of it, necessarily eliminates that keen and abiding dualism characteristic of the late Greek attitude.

2. _Platonic, Synoptic, and Pauline elements in Catherine’s view._

Now in Catherine we generally find an interesting combination of the Platonic form with the Synoptic substance and spirit: and this can, of course, be achieved only because that abiding form itself is made to signify a changed set and connection of ideas.

(1) We have seen how she dwells much, Plotinus-like, upon the soul’s stripping itself of all its numerous garments, and exposing itself naked to the rays of God’s healing light. Yet in the original Platonic scheme these garments are put on by the soul in its descent from spirit into matter, and are stripped off again in its ascent back out of matter into spirit; in both cases, they stand for the body and its effects. In Catherine, even more than in Plotinus, the garments stand for various evil self-attachments and self-delusions of the soul; and against these evils and dangers the Synoptists furnish endless warnings. And yet she insists upon purity, clear separation, complete abstraction of the soul, in such terms as still to show plainly enough the originally Neo-Platonist provenance of much of her form; for in the Neo-Platonists we get, even more markedly than here, a like insistence upon the natural dissimilarity of the body and the soul, and a cognate longing to get away from it in ecstasy and death. But whilst in the Neo-Platonists there is, at the bottom of all this, a predominant belief that the senses are the primary source and occasion of all sin, so that sin is essentially the contamination of spirit by matter: in Catherine, (although she shares to the full Plotinus’s thirst for ecstasy, as the escape from division and trouble into unity and peace), impurity stands primarily for self-complacency,--belief in, and love of, our imaginary independence of even God Himself; and purity means, in the first instance, the loving Him and His whole system of souls and of life, and one’s own self only in and as part of that system.

It is very instructive to note, in this connection, how, after her four years of directly penitential and ascetical practice, (an activity which, even then, extended quite as much to matters of decentralization of the self as of bodily mortification), her warfare is, in the first instance, all but exclusively directed against the successive refuges and ambushes of self-complacency and self-centredness. Thus there is significance in the secondary place occupied, (even in the _Vita_, and doubtless still more in her own mind), by the question of continence; indeed her great declaration to the Friar indicates plainly her profound concentration upon the continuous practice of, and growth in, Love Divine, and her comparative indifference to the question of the systematic renunciation of anything but sin and selfish attachments and self-centrednesses of any kind. Her conception of sinners as “cold,” even more than as dark or stained; of God as Fire, even more than as Light; and of purity as indefinitely increasable, since Love can grow on and on: all similarly point to this finely positive, flame-, not snow-conception, in which purity has ceased to be primarily, as with the Greeks, a simple absence of soiledness, even if it be moral soiledness, and has become, as with the Synoptic teaching, something primarily positive, love itself.

In her occasionally intense insistence upon herself as being all evil, a very Devil, and in some of her picturings of her interior combat, we get, on the other hand, echoes, not of Plato, nor again of the Synoptist teaching, but of St. Paul’s “in my flesh there dwelleth no good thing,” and of his combat between flesh and spirit.--Yet the evil which she is thus conscious of, is not sensual nor even sensible evil and temptation, but consists in her unbounded natural claimfulness and intense inclination to sensitive self-absorption.--And this gives, indeed, to these feminine echoes of St. Paul a certain thin shrillness which the original tones have not got, standing there for the massive experiences of a man violently solicitated by both sense and spirit. But it leaves her free to note, as regards the flesh, the whole bodily organism, (and this in beautiful sympathy with Our Lord’s own genially fervent, homely heroic spirit), not its wickedness, but its weakness, its short-livedness, and its appeal for merciful allowance to God, “Who knows that we are dust.” Instead of a direct and pointed dualism of two distinct substances informed by all but incurably antagonistic principles, we thus get a direct conflict between two dispositions of the soul, and a but imperfect correspondence between the body and that soul.

(2) There is, indeed, no doubt that the very ancient association of the ideas of Fire and of spiritual Purification goes back, in the first instance, to the conception of the soul being necessarily stained by the very fact of its connection with the body, and of those stains being finally removed by the body’s death and cremation. We find this severely self-consistent view scattered up and down Hellenic religion and literature.[119] And even in Catherine the fire, a sense of fever-heat, still seizes the body, and this body wastes away, and leaves the soul more and more pure, during those last years of illness.--Yet the striking identity, between that old cluster of ideas and her own forms of thought, brings out, all the more clearly, the immense road traversed by spirituality between the substance of those ideas and the essence of this thought. For in her teaching, which is but symbolized or at most occasioned by those physico-psychical fever-heats, the Fire is, at bottom, so spiritual and so directly busy with the soul alone, that it is ever identical with itself in Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and on earth, and stands for God Himself; and that its effects are not the destruction of a foreign substance, but the bringing back, wherever and as far as possible, of the fire-like soul’s disposition and quality to full harmony with its Fire-source and Parent, God Himself.

(3) Only the Prison-house simile for the body, as essentially an earthly purgatory for the soul, must be admitted, I think, to remain a primarily Platonic, not fully Christianizable conception; just as the absence of all reference by her to the resurrection of the body will have been, in part, occasioned by the strong element of Platonism in her general selection and combination of ideas. Yet it would obviously be unfair to press these two points too much, since, as to the resurrection, her long illness and evidently constant physical discomfort must, even of themselves, have disinclined her to all picturing of an abiding, even though highly spiritualized, bodily organization; and as to the likeness of her body to a prison and purgatory of the soul, we are expressly told that it began only with the specially suffering last part of her life.

3. _Dualism pragmatic, not final. Its limits._

Now, for this whole matter of the right conception as to the relations of body and soul, it is clear that any more than partial and increasingly superable antagonism between body and spirit cannot be accepted.

(1) A final Dualism is unsound in Psychology, since all the first materials, stimulations, and instruments for even our most abstract thinking are supplied to us by our sense-perceptions, hence also through the body. It is narrow in Cosmology, for we do not want to isolate man in this great universe of visible things; and his link with animal- and plant-life, and even with the mineral creation, is, increasingly as we descend in the scale of beings, his body. It is ruinous for Ethics, because purity, in such a physical-spiritual being as is man, consists precisely in spiritual standards and laws extending to and transforming his merely physical inclinations. It is directly contradictory of the central truth and temper of Christianity, since these require a full acceptance of the substantial goodness and the thorough sanctifiableness of man’s body; of God’s condescension to man’s whole physico-spiritual organism; and of the persistence or reanimation of all that is essential to man’s true personality across and after death. And it is, at bottom, profoundly un-Catholic; the whole Sacramental system, the entire deep and noble conception of the normal relations between the Invisible and the Visible being throughout of the Incarnational type,--an action of the one in the other, which develops the agent and subject at the same time that it spiritualizes the patient, the object, is in direct conflict with it. Neo-Platonism came more and more to treat the body and the entire visible creation as an intrinsic obstacle to spirit, to be eliminated by the latter as completely as possible; at least this very prominent strain within it was undoubtedly pushed on to this extreme by the Gnostic sects. But Christianity has ever to come back to its central presupposition--the substantial goodness and spiritual utility and transfigurableness of body and matter; and to its final end,--the actual transformation of them by the spirit into ever more adequate instruments, materials, and expressions of abiding ethical and religious values and realities.

(2) The fact is that here, as practically at every chief turning-point in ethical and religious philosophy, the movement of the specifically Christian life and conviction is not a circle round a single centre,--detachment; but an ellipse round two centres,--detachment and attachment. And precisely in this difficult, but immensely fruitful, oscillation and rhythm between, as it were, the two poles of the spiritual life; in this fleeing and seeking, in the recollection back and away from the visible (so as to allay the dust and fever of growing distraction, and to reharmonize the soul and its new gains according to the intrinsic requirements and ideals of the spirit), and in the subsequent, renewed immersion in the visible, (in view both of gaining fresh concrete stimulation and content for the spiritual life, and of gradually shaping and permeating the visible according to and with spiritual ends and forces): in this combination, and not in either of these two movements taken alone, consists the completeness and culmination of Christianity.[120]

(3) It no doubt looks, at first sight, as though the Church, by her canonization of the Monastic Ideal, gave us, for the ultimate pattern and measure of all Christian perfection, as pure and simple a flight of the soul from the body and the world, as (short of insanity or suicide) can be made in this life. But here we have to remember three things.

In the first place, the Church not only forbids all attacks upon the legitimacy, indeed sanctity of marriage, or upon its necessity, indeed duty, for mankind at large; but St. Augustine and St. Thomas only articulate her ordinary, strenuously anti-Manichean teaching, in declaring that man was originally created by God, in body and in soul, not for celibacy but for marriage; and that only owing to the accidental event of the Fall and of its effects,--the introduction of disorder and excess into human nature, but not any corruption of its substance and foundations,--does any inferiority,--the dispositions, motives, and circumstances being equal,--attach to marriage as compared with virginity.[121] Hence, still, the absolute ideal would be that man could and did use marriage as all other legitimate functions and things of sense, as a necessary, and ever more and more perfected, means and expression of truly human spirituality, a spirituality which ever requires some non-spiritual material in which to work, and by working in which the soul itself, not only spiritualizes it, but increasingly develops its own self.

And secondly, detachment, unification, spiritual recollection is the more difficult, and the less obviously necessary, of the two movements, and yet is precisely the one which (by coming upon the extant or inchoate attachments, and by suppressing or purifying them according as they are bad or good) first stamps any and every life as definitely religious at all. No wonder, then, that it is this sacred detachment and love of the Cross that we notice, first of all, in the life and doctrine of Our Lord and of all His followers, indeed in all truly religious souls throughout the world; and that the Church should, by her teaching and selection of striking examples, ever preach and uphold this most necessary test and ingredient, this very salt of all virile and fruitful spirituality.

But, in the third place, a man need only directly attack the family, society, the state; or art, literature, science,--as intrinsically evil or even as, in practice, true hindrances to moral and religious perfection,--and the Church,--both the learning and experimenting, and the official and formulating Church,--will at once disavow him: so strong is, at bottom, the instinct that attachment and variety of interests,--variety both in kind and in degree--that materials, occasions, and objects for spirituality to leaven and to raise, and to work on in order to be itself deepened and developed,--are as truly essential to the spiritual life as are detachment, and unity, and transcendence of ultimate motive and aim; these latter furnishing to the soul the power gradually to penetrate all that material, and, in and through this labour, more and more to articulate its own spiritual character.

(4) No man can become, or is proclaimed to have become, a Christian saint, who has not thus achieved a profound spiritualization and unification of a more or less recalcitrant material and multiplicity. In some cases, it is the unity and detachment that greatly predominate over the multiplicity and attachment,--as, say, in the Fathers of the Desert. In other cases, it is the variety and attachment that strikes us first of all,--as, for instance, in Sir Thomas More and Edmund Campion. And, in a third set of cases, it is the depth of the unity and detachment, in the breath of the variety and attachment, which is the dominant characteristic, so with St. Paul and St. Augustine. Catherine herself belongs, for her great middle period, rather to the third group than to either of the other two; only during her penitential period and her last long illness does she clearly belong to the group of intensely detached and unified saints.--It is evidently impossible in such a matter to do more than insist upon the necessity of both movements; upon the immensely fruitful friction and tension which their well-ordered alternation introduces into the soul’s inner life; and upon the full ideal and ultimate measure for the complete and perfected man, humanity at large, being a maximum of multiplicity and attachment permeated and purified by a maximum of unity and detachment. The life which can englobe and organize both these movements, with their manifold interaction, will have a multitude of warm attachments, without fever or distraction, and a great unity of pure detachment, without coldness or emptiness: it will have the, winning because rich, simplicity and wondrous combination of apparent inevitableness and of seeming paradox furnished by all true life, hence exhibited in its greatest fulness by the religious life which, at its deepest, is deeper any other kind of life.

III. QUIETUDE AND PASSIVITY. POINTS IN THIS TENDENCY TO BE CONSIDERED HERE.

We have inevitably somewhat anticipated another matter, in which Catherine shows all the true Mystic’s affinities: the craving for simplification and permanence of the soul’s states,--her practice and teaching as to Quietude and Passivity. Pushed fully home, this tendency involves four closely related, increasingly profound, convictions and experiences. Utter unification of the soul’s functions, indeed utter unity of its substance: _i.e._ the soul does one single thing, and seems to do it by one single act; itself is simply one, and expresses itself by one sole act. Passivity of the soul: _i.e._ the soul does not apparently act at all, it simply _is_ and receives--it is now nothing but one pure immense recipiency. Immediacy of contact between the soul and God: _i.e._ there seems to be nothing separating, or indeed in any way between, the soul and God. And, finally, an apparent coalescence of the soul and God: _i.e._ the soul _is_ God, and God _is_ the soul.--Only the first two points, and then the closely related question of Pure Love, shall occupy us here; the last two points must stand over for our penultimate chapter.

1. _Distinction between experiences, their expression, and their analysis._

We have already studied the psycho-physical occasions, concomitants, and embodiments of Catherine’s keen desire for, and profound experience of, spiritual unification and passivity; and we can have no kind of doubt as to the factual reality and the practical fruitfulness of the state so vividly described by her. Here we have only to inquire into the accuracy of the analysis and terminology effected and employed by her, in so far as they seem to claim more than simply to describe the soul’s own feeling and impression as to these states thus experienced by itself. We have then to consider the nature and truth of what can roughly be styled Quietism and Passivity.

Now here especially will it be necessary for us carefully to distinguish between the direct experiences, impressions, and instinctive requirements of the soul,--here all souls, in precise proportion to their depth and delicacy of holiness and of self-knowledge are our masters, and furnish us with our only materials and tests; and, on the other hand, the implications and analysis of these states, as, in the first instance, psychological, and then as requiring elucidation with regard to their ontological cause and reality by means of a religious philosophy,--here, psychology, and religious philosophy, especially also the discriminations and decisions of theologians and Church authorities as expressive of these ultimate questions, will be our guides.[122]

(1) If we start from the history of the nomenclature which, (though present only partially in Catherine’s sayings, for she nowhere uses the term “passivity”), runs, with however varying a completeness, right through the Christian Mystics more or less from the first, we shall find that it consists, roughly, of three stages, and, throughout, of two currents. There is the Pre-Pauline and Pre-Philonian stage; the stage of Paul, Philo, and John, through Clement and Origen, on to Gregory of Nyssa and St. Augustine; and the stage from the Pseudo-Dionysius onward, down to Nicolas of Coes inclusive, and which, to this hour, still largely influences us all.--And there are the two currents. The one tends so to emphasize the sense and reality of the soul’s simple receptivity, and of what the soul receives at such, apparently, purely receptive times, as to ignore, or even practically deny, the undeniable fact that this very receptivity is, inevitably, an act of its own. Its decisive terms are Passivity, Fixedness, Oneness. The other current realizes that Grace does not destroy, violate, or supplant Nature, either entirely or in part, but that it awakens, purifies, and completes it, so that every divine influx is also ever a stimulation of all the good and true energy already, even though latently, present in the soul. And its characteristic terms are “Action” (as distinguished from “Activity”), Growth, Harmony.

(2) And we should note with care that these two currents are not simply Heathen and Christian respectively. For if that great, indeed all but central, term and conception of “Action” has been wisely generalized by most Christian Mystics, as the truly Christian substitute for the strongly Neo-Platonist term “Passivity”: that term and conception of “Action” was first fixed and elucidated by Aristotle, who, as Mr. Schiller well puts it, “has packed into his technical term ‘Energeia,’ and especially into the combination ‘Unmoving Energy,’ all that was most distinctive, most original, most fundamental, and most profound in his philosophy”;[123] whilst the second term, “Passivity,” goes on figuring in Christian Mystics and Mystical Theologies--(in spite of its demonstrably dangerous suggestions and frequently scandalous history)--because the religious, especially the Christian, consciousness requires a term for the expression of one element of all its deepest experiences, that character of “giveness” and of grace, of merciful anticipation by God, which marks all such states, in exact proportion to their depth and to the soul’s awakeness.

(3) Now Aristotle’s conception of God’s Unmoving Energy, is taken over by St. Thomas in the form of God being One Actus Purus,--sheer Energy, His very peace and stillness coming from the brimming fulness of His infinite life. And even finite spirit, whilst fully retaining, indeed deepening, its own character, can and does penetrate finite spirit through and through,--the law of Physics, which does not admit more than one body in any one place, having here no kind of application,--so that the Infinite Spirit is at once conceived unspiritually, if He is conceived as supplanting, and not as penetrating, stimulating, and transforming the finite spirits whom He made into an increasing likeness to Him, their Maker. And hence according to the unanimous teaching of the most experienced and explicit of the specifically Theistic and Christian Mystics, the appearance, the soul’s own impression, of a cessation of life and energy of the soul in periods of special union with God or of great advance in spirituality, is an appearance only. Indeed this, at such times strong, impression of rest springs most certainly from an unusually large amount of actualized energy, an energy which is now penetrating, and finding expression by, every pore and fibre of the soul. The whole moral and spiritual creature expands and rests, yes; but this very rest is produced by Action “unperceived because so fleet,” so near, so all fulfilling; or rather by a tissue of single acts, mental, emotional, volitional, so finely interwoven, so exceptionally stimulative and expressive of the soul’s deepest aspirations, that these acts are not perceived as so many single acts, indeed that their very collective presence is apt to remain unnoticed by the soul itself.

(4) Close parallels to such a state are abundant in all phases and directions of the soul’s life. The happiest and most fruitful moments for our aesthetic sense, those in which our mind expands most and grows most, hence is most active in aesthetic “action” (though not “activity”) are those in which we are unforcedly and massively absorbed in drinking in, with a quiet intentness, the contrasts and harmonies, the grand unity in variety, the very presence and spirit of an alpine upland, or of a river’s flowing, or of the ocean’s outspread, or of the Parthenon sculptures or of Rafael’s madonnas. At such moments we altogether cease to be directly conscious of ourselves, of time or of the body’s whereabouts; and when we return to our ordinary psychical and mental condition, we do so with an undeniable sense of added strength and youthfulness,--somewhat as though our face, old and haggard, were, after gazing in utter self-oblivion upon some resplendent youthfulness, to feel, beyond all doubt, all its many wrinkles to have gone. And so too with the mind’s absorption in some great poem or philosophy or character.--In all these cases, the mind or soul energizes and develops, in precise proportion as it is so absorbed in the contemplation of these various over-againstnesses, these “countries” of the spirit, as to cease to notice its own overflowing action. It is only when the mind but partially attends that a part of it remains at leisure to note the attention of the other part; when the mind is fully engrossed, and hence most keenly active, there is no part of it sufficiently disengaged to note the fact of the engrossment and action of, now, the whole mind. And, with the direct consciousness of our mind’s action, we lose, for the time being, all clear consciousness of the mind’s very existence. And let it be carefully noted, this absence of the direct consciousness of the self is as truly characteristic of the deepest, most creative, moments of full external action: the degree of mind and will-force operating in Nelson at Trafalgar and in Napoleon at Waterloo, or again in St. Ignatius of Antioch in the Amphitheatre, and in Savonarola at the stake, was evidently in the precisely contrary ratio to their direct consciousness of it or of themselves at all.