TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE: In the Index, only the references within this volume are hyperlinked. Volume I is available as Project Gutenberg ebook number 50205.

THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT
OF RELIGION

All rights reserved.

The Venerable Battista Vernazza
(Tommasina Vernazza)
1497-1587.

THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT
OF RELIGION AS STUDIED
IN SAINT CATHERINE OF
GENOA AND HER FRIENDS

By BARON FRIEDRICH von HÜGEL
MEMBER OF THE CAMBRIDGE PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY

VOLUME SECOND
CRITICAL STUDIES

LONDON: J. M. DENT & CO.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
MCMVIII

Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,
BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND
BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.

CONTENTS OF THE SECOND VOLUME

The frontispiece consists of a reduced facsimile, in photogravure, of a lithograph by F. Scotto, entitled “Ven. Batt^a. Vernazza,” which was printed and owned by the firm of Gervasoni, and which appeared in the large 4to volume, Ritratti, ed Elogi di Liguri Illustri, with the text printed by Ponthenier, all in Genoa. This book was published there, in monthly parts, from 1823 to 1830. Scotto’s highly characteristic lithograph no doubt reproduces an authentic likeness; and probably the original portrait was, in the first instance, owned by the Canonesses of S. Maria delle Grazie, Battista’s own convent in Genoa. The picture now in the possession of the Nuns of S. Maria in Passione, the successors of those Canonesses, is of a quite conventional, secondary type.

THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION

PART III
CRITICAL

CHAPTER IX
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL QUESTIONS

Introductory.

1. Plan of Part Three.

The picture of Catherine’s life and teaching which was attempted in the previous volume will, I hope, have been sufficiently vivid to stimulate in the reader a desire to try and go deeper, and to get as near as may be to the driving forces, the metaphysical depths of her life. And yet it is obvious that, if we would understand something of these, we must proceed slowly and thoroughly, and must begin with comparatively superficial questions. Or rather, we must begin by studying her temperamental and psycho-physical endowment and condition, and then the literary influences that stimulated and helped to mould these things, as though all this were not secondary and but the material and occasion of the forces and self-determinations to be considered later on.

2. Defects of ancient psycho-physical theory.

Now as to those temperamental and neural matters, to which this chapter shall be devoted, the reader will, no doubt long ago, have discovered that it is precisely here that not a little of the Vita e Dottrina is faded and withered beyond recall, or has even become positively repulsive to us. The constant assumption, and frequent explicit insistence, on the part of more or less all the contributors, upon the immediate and separate significance, indeed the directly miraculous character, of certain psycho-physical states—states which, taken thus separately, would now be inevitably classed as most explicable neural abnormalities,—all this atmosphere of nervous high-pitch and tremulousness has now become a matter demanding a difficult historical imagination and magnanimity, if we would be just to those who held such views, and would thus benefit to the full from these past positions and misconceptions.

Thus when we read the views of perhaps all her educated attendants: “this condition, in which her body remained alive without food or medicine, was a supernatural thing”; “her state was clearly understood to be supernatural when, in so short a time, so great a change was seen”; and “she became yellow all over,—a manifest sign that her humanity was being entirely consumed in the fire of divine love”:[1] we feel indeed that we can no more follow. And when we read, as part of one of the late additions, the worthless legends gathered from, or occasioned by, the uneducated Argentina: “in proof that she bore the stigmata within her,—on putting her hands in a cup of cold water, the latter became so boiling hot that it greatly heated the very saucer beneath it”:[2] we are necessarily disgusted. And when, worst of all, she is made, by a demonstrable, probably double misinterpretation of an externally similar action, to burn her bare arm with a live charcoal or lighted candle, with intent to see which fire, this external one or that interior one of the divine love, were the greater:[3] we can, even if we have the good fortune of being able, by means of the critical analysis of the sources, to put this absurd story to the discredit of her eulogists, but feel the pathos of such well-meant perversity, which took so sure a way for rendering ridiculous one who, take her all in all, is so truly great.[4]

3. Slow growth of Neurology.

We should, of course, be very patient in such matters: for psycho-physical knowledge was, as yet, in its very infancy, witness the all-important fact that the nerves were, in our modern sense of the term, still as unknown as they were to the whole of Graeco-Roman antiquity, with which “neuron” and “nervus” ever meant “muscle” or “ligament” and, derivatively, “energy,” but never consciously what they now mean in the strict medical sense. Thus the Vita (1551) writes: “There remained no member or muscle (nervo) of her body that was not tormented by fire within it”; “one rib was separated from the others, with great pains in the ligaments (nervi) and bones”; and “all her body was excruciated and her muscles (nervi) were tormented”:[5] where, in the first and last case, visible muscular convulsive movements are clearly meant. St. Teresa, in her own Life (1561 or 1562), writes: “Nervous pains, according to the physicians, are intolerable; and all my nerves were shrunk”; and “if the rapture lasts, all the nerves are made to feel it.”[6] Even Fénelon (died 1715) can still write of the human body: “The bones sustain the flesh which envelops them; the nerves” (ligaments, minor muscles) “which are stretched along them, constitute all their strength; and the muscles, by inflation and elongation at the points where the nerves are intertwined with them, produce the most precise and regular movements.”[7] Here the soul acts directly upon the muscles, and, through these and their dependent ligaments, upon the bones and the flesh.

4. Permanent values of the ancient theory.

And yet that old position with regard to the rarer psycho-physical states has a right to our respectful and sympathetic study.

For one thing, we are now coming again to recognize, more and more, how real and remarkable are certain psycho-physical states and facts, whether simply morbid or fruitfully utilized states, so long derided, by the bulk of Scientists, as mere childish legend or deliberate imposture; and to see how natural, indeed inevitable it was, that these, at that time quite inexplicable, things should have been attributed to a direct and discontinuous kind of Divine intervention. We, on our part, have then to guard against the Philistinism both of the Rationalists and of the older Supernaturalists, and will neither measure our assent to facts by our ability to explain them, nor postulate the unmediated action of God wherever our powers of explanation fail us. On this point we have admirable models of sympathetic docility towards facts, in the works of Prof. Pierre Janet, in his medico-psychological investigations of present-day morbid cases; of Hermann Gunkel and Heinrich Weinel, in their examination of mostly healthy psycho-physical phenomena in early Christian times and writings; and of William James, in his study of instances of various kinds, both past and present.[8]

And next, these (at first sight physical) phenomena are turning out, more and more, to be the direct or indirect consequence of the action of mind: no doubt, in the first instance, of the human mind, but still of mind, both free-willing and automatically operative. And at the same time this action is, more and more, seen to be limited and variously occasioned by the physical organism, and to be accompanied or followed, in a determinist fashion, by certain changes in that organism. Yet if we have now immeasurably more knowledge than men had, even fifty years ago, of this latter ceaselessly active, limiting, occasioning influence of the body upon the mind, we have also immeasurably more precise and numerous facts and knowledge in testimony of the all but boundless effect of mind over body. Here, again, Prof. Janet’s writings, those of Alfred Binet, and the Dominican Père Coconnier’s very sensible book register a mass of material, although of the morbid type.[9]

And further, such remarkable peripheral states and phenomena are getting again to be rightly looked for in at least some types of unusual spiritual insight and power (although such states are found to be indicative, in exact proportion to the spiritual greatness of their subject, of a substantially different mental and moral condition of soul). Witness again the Unitarian Prof. James’s Varieties, and the Church-Historical works of the Broad Lutheran German scholars Weinel, Bernoulli, and Duhm.[10]

And lastly, the very closeness with which modern experimental and analytical psychology is exploring the phenomena of our consciousness is once more bringing into ever-clearer relief the irrepressible metaphysical apprehensions and affirmations involved and implied by the experience of every human mind, from its first dim apprehension in infancy of a “something,” as yet undifferentiated by it into subjective and objective, up to its mature and reflective affirmation of the trans-subjective validity of its “positions,” or at least of its negations—pure scepticism turning out to be practically impossible. Here we have, with respect to that apprehension, such admirable workers as Henri Bergson in France, and Professors Henry Jones and James Ward in England; and, for this affirmation, such striking thinkers as the French Maurice Blondel, and the Germans Johannes Volkelt and Hugo Münsterberg. And Mgr. Mercier of Louvain, now Cardinal Mercier, has contributed some valuable criticism of certain points in these positions.[11]

5. Difficulties of this inquiry.

Now here I am met at once by two special difficulties, the one personal to myself and to Catherine, and the other one of method. For, with regard to those three first sets of recent explorations of a psycho-physical kind, I am no physician at all, and not primarily a psychologist. And again, in Catherine’s instance, the evidence as to her psycho-physical states is not, as with St. Teresa and some few other cases, furnished by writings from the pen of the very person who experienced them, and it is at all copious and precise only for the period when she was admittedly ill and physically incapacitated.—And yet these last thirteen years of her life occupy a most prominent place in her biography; it is during, and on occasion of, those psycho-physical states, and largely with the materials furnished by them, that, precisely in those years, she built up her noblest legacy, her great Purgatorial teaching; the illness was (quite evidently) of a predominantly psychical type, and concerns more the psychologist than the physician, being closely connected with her particular temperament and type of spirituality, a temperament and type to be found again and again among the Saints. All this and more makes it simply impossible for me to shrink from some study of the matter, and permits me to hope for some success in attempting, slowly and cautiously, to arrive at certain general conclusions of a spiritually important kind.

But then there is also the difficulty of method. For if we begin the study of these psycho-physical peculiarities and states by judging them from the temperamental and psychological standpoint, we can hardly escape from treating them, at least for the moment, as self-explanatory, and hence from using these our preliminary conclusions about such neural phenomena as the measure, type, and explanation of and for all such other facts and apprehensions as our further study of the religious mind and experience may bring before us. In this wise, these our psychological conclusions would furnish not only a negative test and positive material, but also the exclusive standard for all further study. And such a procedure, until and unless it were justified in its method, would evidently be nothing but a surreptitious begging of the question.—Yet to begin with the fullest analysis of the elementary and normal phenomena of consciousness and of its implications and inviolable prerequisites, would too readily land us in metaphysics which have themselves to operate in and with those immediate and continuous experiences; and hence these latter experiences, whether normal and healthy, or, as here, unusual and in part maladif, must be carefully studied first. We have, however, to guard most cautiously against our allowing this, our preliminary, analysis and description of psycho-physical states from imperceptibly blocking the way to, or occupying the ground of, our ultimate analysis and metaphysical synthesis and explanation. Only this latter will be able, by a final movement from within-outwards, to show the true place and worth of the more or less phenomenal series, passed by us in review on our previous movement from outside-inwards.

6. Threefold division.

I propose, then, in this chapter, to take, as separately as is compatible with such a method, the temperamental, psycho-physical side of Catherine’s life. I shall first take those last thirteen years of admitted illness, as those which are alone at all fully known to us by contemporary evidence.—I shall then make a jump back to her first period,—to the first sixteen years up to her marriage, with the next ten years of relaxation, and the following four years of her conversion and active penitence. I take these next, because, of these thirty years, we have her own late memories, as registered for us by her disciples, at the time of her narration of the facts concerned.—And only then, with these materials and instruments thus gathered from after and before, shall I try to master the (for us very obscure) middle period, and to arrive at some estimate of her temperamental peripheral condition during these twenty years of her fullest expansion.—I shall conclude the chapter by taking Catherine in her general, lifelong temperament, and by comparing and contrasting this type and modality of spiritual character and apprehension with the other rival forms of, and approaches to, religious truth and goodness as these are furnished for us by history.

The ultimate metaphysical questions and valuation are reserved for the penultimate chapter of my book.

I. Catherine’s Third Period, 1497 to 1510.

1. Increasing illness of Catherine’s last years.

Beginning with her third and last period (1497-1510), there can be no doubt that throughout it she was ill and increasingly so. Her closest friends and observers attest it. It is presumably Ettore Vernazza who tells us, for 1497, “when she was about fifty years of age, she ceased to be able to attend either to the Hospital or to her own house, owing to her great bodily weakness. Even on Fast-days she was obliged, after Holy Communion, to take some food to sustain her strength.” Probably Marabotto it is who tells us that, in 1499, “after twenty-five years she could no further bear her spiritual loneliness, either because of old age or because of her great bodily weakness.” We hear from a later Redactor that, “about nine years before her death (i.e. about 1501), there came to her an infirmity.” And then, especially from November 1509, May 1510, and August 1510 onwards, she is declared and described as more and more ill.[12] Indeed she herself, both by her acts and by her words, emphatically admits her incapacitation. For it is clearly ill-health which drives her to abandon the Matronship and even all minor continuous work for the Hospital. In her Wills we find indeed that, as late as May 21, 1506, she was able to get to the neighbouring Hospital for Incurables; and that even on November 27, 1508 she was “healthy in mind and body.” But her Codicil of January 5, 1503, was drawn up in the presence of nine witnesses at midnight,—a sure sign of some acute ill-health. Indeed already on July 23, 1484, she is lying “infirm in bed, in her room in the Women’s quarter of the Hospital, oppressed with bodily infirmity.”[13]

2. Abnormal sensations, impressions and moods.

Her attendants are all puzzled by the multitude and intensity, the mobility and the self-contradictory character of the psycho-physical manifestations. Perhaps already before 1497 “she would press thorny rose-twigs in both her hands, and this without any pain”; and so late as about three weeks before her death “she remained paralyzed (manca),” and no doubt anaesthetic “in one (the right) hand and in one finger of the other hand.”—Probably again before 1497 “her body could not,” at times, “be moved from the sitting posture without the application of force.” In February or March 1510 “she could not move out of her bed”; in August, “on some occasions she could not move the lips or the tongue, or the arms or legs, unless helped to do so,—especially on the left side,—and this would, at times, last three or four hours.”—In December 1509 “she suffered from great cold,” as part of her peculiar condition; on September 4, 1510, “she suffered from great cold in the right arm.”[14]

On other occasions she is, on the contrary, intensely hyper-aesthetic. Some time in February or March 1510, “for a day and a night, her flesh could not be touched, because of the great pain that such touching caused her.” At the end of August “she was so sensitive, that it was impossible to touch her very bedclothes or the bedstead, or a single hair on her head, because in such case she would cry out as though she had been grievously wounded.”—These states seem to have been usually accompanied by sensations of great heat: for on the former occasion “she seemed like a creature placed in a great flame of fire”; whilst on the latter “she had her tongue and lips so inflamed, that they seemed as though actual fire.”

And movement appears to have been more often increased than diminished. In the last case indeed “she did not move nor speak nor see; but, when thus immovable, she suffered more than when she could cry out and turn about in her bed.” But in the former instance “she could not be kept in bed”; and in April 1510 “she cried aloud, and could not keep herself from moving about, on her bed, on hands and feet.”—There are curious localizations of apparently automatic movements. During an attack somewhere in March 1510 “her flesh was all in a tremble, particularly the right shoulder”; on later occasions “an arm, a leg, a hand would tremble, and she would seem to have a spasm within her, with all-but-unbroken acute pains in the flanks, the shoulders, the abdomen, the feet and the brain.” On an earlier occasion “her body writhed in great distress.” On another day “she seemed all on fire and lost her power of speech, and made signs with her head and hands.” On one day in February or March 1510 “she lost both speech and sight, though not her intelligence”; and on September 12 “her sight was so weak, that she could hardly any further distinguish or recognize her attendants.”—The heat is liable to be curiously localized. Early in September 1510 “she had a great heat situated in and on her left ear, which lasted for three hours; the ear was red and felt very hot to the touch of others.”

Various kinds of haemorrhage are not uncommon. On the last-mentioned occasion bloody urine is passed; bleeding of the nose, with loss of bile, occurs in December 1509; very black blood is lost by the mouth, whilst black spots appear all over her person, on September 12, 1510; and more blood is evacuated on the following day. In February or March 1510 “there were in her flesh certain places which had become concave, like as paste looks where a finger has been put into it.” At the end of August 1510 “her skin became saffron-yellow all over.”

Troubles of breathing and of heart-action are frequently acute. Somewhere about March 1510 “she had such a spasm in her throat and mouth as to be unable, for about an hour, to speak or to open her eyes, and that she could hardly regain her breath.” “Cupping-glasses were applied to her side, to ease her heart, and lung-action, but with little effect.” On one occasion “she made signs indicative of feeling as though burning pincers were seizing her heart”; and on a day soon after “she felt like a hard nail at her heart.”[15]

Disturbances of the power of swallowing and of nutrition are often grave and sudden, and in curious contradiction to her abnormally acute and shifting longing for and revulsion from certain specific kinds of food. On August 22, 1510, “she was so thirsty that she felt as though she could drink up the very ocean”; “yet she could not,” in fact, “manage to swallow even one little drop of water.” On September 10 “her attendants continuously gave her drinking water; but she would straightway return it from her mouth.” And on September 12, “whilst her mouth was being bathed, she exclaimed, ‘I am suffocating,’—and this because a drop of water had trickled down her throat—a drop which she was unable to gulp down.” And on a day in August “she saw a melon and had a great desire to eat it; but hardly did she have some of it in her mouth, when she rejected it with intense disgust.” So too with odours. A little later, “on one day the smell of wine would please her, and she would bathe her hands and face in it with great relish; and next day she would so much dislike it, that she could not bear to see or smell it in her room.”—And so too with colours. On September 2 “a physician-friend came to visit her in his scarlet robes; and she bore the sight a little, so as not to pain him.” But she then declared that she could no longer bear it; and he went, and returned to her in his ordinary black habit. And yet we have seen, from the Inventory of her effects, that she loved to have vermilion colour upon her bed and person.[16]

And her emotional moods are analogously intense and rapidly shifting. In the spring of 1510 “she cried aloud because of the great pain: this attack lasted a day and a night”; in the night of August 10 “she tossed about with many exclamations”; and at the beginning of September “she cried out with a loud voice.” At other times, she laughs for joy. So at the end of April “she would laugh without speaking”; on August 11 “she fixed her eyes steadily on the ceiling; and for about an hour she abode all but immovable, and spoke not, but kept laughing in a very joyous fashion”; on August 17 great interior jubilation “expressed itself in merry laughter”; and on the evening of September 7 “her joy appeared exteriorly in laughter which lasted, with but small interruptions, for some two hours.”—And her entire apparent condition would shift from one such extreme to the other with extraordinary swiftness. In the autumn of 1509 “she many times remained as though dead; and at other times she would appear as healthy,—as though she had never had anything the matter with her.” Already in December 1509 she herself, after much vomiting and loss of blood, had sent for her Confessor and had declared that “she felt as though she must die in consequence of these many accidents.” Yet even on September 10, 1510, “when she was not being oppressed and tormented by her accidents (attacks), she seemed to be in good health; but when she was being suffocated by them, she seemed as one dead.”[17]

II. Conclusions Concerning Catherine’s Psycho-physical Condition During This Last Period.

1. Her illness not primarily physical. Her self-diagnosis.

Now we saw, at the beginning of this chapter, how readily her attendants concluded, from all these extreme, multiple, swift-changing and self-contradictory states, to their directly and separately supernatural origin.—And indeed the diagnosis and treatment of her case showed clearly that it was not primarily physical. So in the case, probably in November 1509, of the cupping-glasses, when “she got medically treated for a bodily infirmity, whilst her real trouble was fire of the spirit”; so with a medicine given to her by the resident Hospital physician, some time in April 1510, “from taking which she nearly died”; so with Giovanni Boerio’s three-weeks’ treatment of her, in May 1510, a treatment which led to no other results than momentary additional distress; and so with the declaration of the ten Physicians who, even on September 10, four days before her death, “could find no trace of disease in her pulse, secretions, or any other symptom,” and who consequently abstained from prescribing anything. And hence, more or less throughout her last nine years, “there was confusion in the management of her, not on her own part, but on that of those who served her.”[18]

For—and these two further points are of primary importance—the tending of her, as distinct from physic, was throughout held by herself to be of great importance; and yet this care was declared by her to be often useless or harmful, owing to the powers of discrimination possessed by her attendants being as much below their good-will, as her own knowledge as to the differences between her healthy and maladif states exceeded her power of herself acting upon this knowledge against these sickly conditions. “She would often appear to be asleep; and would awake from such a state, at one time, quite refreshed, and, at another time, so limp and broken down as to be unable to move. Those that served her knew not how to distinguish one state from the other; and on recovering from an attack of the latter sort, she would say to them: ‘Why did you let me continue in that state of quiet, from which I have all but died?’” So, on September 5, “she cried aloud on waking from a state of quiet, which had appeared to be (healthy) quietude, but had not been so.” And indeed, already on January 10 previous, she had shut herself off from her Confessor, “because it seemed to her that he bore with her too much in her sayings and doings.”

Yet, at least after this time, Marabotto does oppose her sometimes. Thus on two, somewhat later, occasions she respectively makes signs, and asks, that Extreme Unction be given her; but only some four months later did she actually receive it. In these cases, then, she either had not, even at bottom, a correct physical self-knowledge; or her requests had been prompted, at the time, by her secondary, maladif consciousness alone.—When first visited by Boerio, she takes pleasure in the thought of getting possibly cured by him; but “in the following night, when great pain came upon her, she reproved herself, saying, ‘You are suffering this, because you allowed yourself to rejoice without cause.’” But this declaration distinctly falls short of any necessary implication of a directly supernatural origin of her malady, as the Vita here will have it, and but refers, either to the continuance of earthly existence not deserving such joy, or to her persistent fundamental consciousness that the phenomena were partly the fruitful, profitable occasions, and partly the price paid, for the mind’s close intercourse with things divine.

Indeed her (otherwise unbroken) attitude is one, both of quiet conviction that physic cannot help her, and of gentle readiness to let the physicians try whatever they may think worth the trying: so with the cupping-glasses, and the various examinations and physickings. Especially is this disposition clear in her short dialogue with Boerio, where, in answer to his assertion that she ought to beware of giving scandal to all the world by saying that her infirmity had no need of remedies, and that she ought to look upon such an attitude as “a kind of hypocrisy,” she declares: “I am sorry if any one is scandalized because of me; and I am ready to use any remedy for infirmity, supposing that it can be found.”[19]

2. Her preoccupation with the spiritual suggestions afforded by the phenomena.

It would, indeed, be a grave misreading of her whole character and habits of mind to think of her as at all engrossed in her psycho-physical states as such, and as having ever formally considered and decided that they must either come directly from God or be amenable to medicine. On the contrary, she is too habitually absorbed in the consideration and contemplation of certain great spiritual doctrines and realities, to have the leisure or inclination for any such questions.—Indeed it is this very absorption in those spiritual realities which has ended by suggesting, with an extraordinary readiness, frequency and vividness, through her mind to her senses, and by these back to her mind, certain psycho-physical images and illustrations for those very doctrines, until her whole psycho-physical organism has been, all but entirely, modified and moulded into an apt instrument and manifestation for and of that world unseen.

Thus, after her greatest psycho-physical and spiritual experience in November 1509, she declares to Vernazza, when he urges her to let him write down the graces she has received from God, that “it would, strictly speaking, be impossible to narrate those interior things; whilst, of exterior ones, few or none have happened to me.” And she never entirely loses her mental consciousness in any state not recognized by herself as maladif. So, on a day of great psycho-physical trouble in February or March 1510, “they thought she must expire; but, though she lost both sight and speech, she never lost her intelligence.” And even on September 11 and 12, amidst foodlessness and suffocations, her intelligence still persists.—In the March previous “her mind appeared to grow daily in contentment.” Some days later, her attendants “saw how, after an hour of spasm and breathlessness, and then a great restriction of all her being, she returned to her normal condition, and addressed many beautiful words to them.” And later on, “her attendants were amazed at seeing a body, which seemed to be healthy, in such a tormented condition.” But “soon after she laughed and spoke as one in health, and told them not to distress themselves about her, since she was very contented; but that they should see to it that they did much good, since the way of God is very narrow.”[20]

3. Interaction and mutual suggestion of her spiritual and physical states.

As to the extraordinary closeness and readiness for mutual response between her sensible impressions and her thoughts and emotions—her sensations turning, all but automatically, into religious emotions, and her thoughts and feelings translating themselves into appropriate psycho-physical states—we have a mass of interesting evidence.

Thus when, about the end of November 1509, in response to her seeing, on some wall of the Hospital, a picture of Our Lord at the Well of Samaria, and to her asking Him for one drop of that Divine water, “instantly a drop was given to her which refreshed her within and without.” The spiritual idea and emotion is here accompanied and further stimulated by the keenest psycho-physical impression of drinking. And such an impression can even become painful through its excessive suggestiveness. Thus she herself explains to Maestro Boerio, on September 2, 1510, that she cannot long bear the sight of his scarlet robe “because of what it suggests (represents) to my memory,”—no doubt the fire of divine love. Three days later, on the contrary, “she mentally saw herself lying upon a bier, surrounded by many Religious robed in black,” and greatly rejoiced at the sight. Here the very impression of black, the colour of death, will have conveyed, during this special mood of hers, a downright psycho-physical pleasure, somewhat as Boerio’s reappearance, on the former occasion, in a black gown, had been a sensible relief to her.

So also with scents. When, certainly after 1499, “she perceived, on the (right) hand of her Confessor, an odour which penetrated her very heart,” and “which abode with her and restored both mind and body for many days,” we have again a primarily mental act and state which she herself knows well to be untransferable, even to Don Marabotto himself. Here the association of ideas was, no doubt, the right hand of the Priest and her daily reception, by means of it, of the Holy Eucharist. For the latter, “the Bread from heaven, having within it all manner of delight,” is already connected in her mind with an impression of sweet odour. “One day, on receiving Communion, so much odour and sweetness came to her, that she seemed to herself to be in Paradise.” Probably the love for, and then the disgust at, the smell of wine, was also connected with her Eucharistic experiences. Certainly “one day, having received Holy Communion, she was granted so great a consolation as to fall into an ecstasy, so that when the Priest wanted to give her to drink from the Chalice (with unconsecrated wine) she had to be brought back by force to her ordinary consciousness.” Vivid memories of both sets of psycho-physical impressions are, I think, at work when she says: “If a consecrated Host were to be given to me amongst unconsecrated ones, I should be able to distinguish it by the very taste, as I do wine from water.” And as the sight of red rapidly became painful from the very excess of its mental suggestiveness, so will the smell of wine have been both specially dear and specially painful to her.[21]

Indeed her psycho-physical troubles possess, for the most part, a still traceable, most delicate selectiveness as to date, range, form, combination, and other peculiarities. Thus some of the most acute attacks coincide, in their date of occurrence and general character, as the biographers point out, with special saint’s and holy days: so in the night leading into St. Lawrence’s day, August 9 and 10, 1510; so on the Vigil of St. Bartholomew’s day, August 24; and so in the night previous to and on the Feast (August 28) of St. Augustine, special Patron of her only sister’s Order and of the Convent in which her own Conversion had taken place thirty-seven years before. Yet we have also seen how that these synchronisms did not rise to the heights which were soon desired by her biographers, for we know that she died, not (as they would have it) on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, September 14, but early on the day following.

Thus too as to her incapacity to swallow and retain food, we find that, up to the end, with the rarest exceptions of a directly physical kind, she retained the most complete facility in receiving Holy Communion: so on September 2, 1510, when “all ordinary food was returned, but the Holy Eucharist she retained without any difficulty”; and so too on September 4, when, after “lying for close upon twelve hours with closed eyes, speechless and all but immovable,” Marabotto himself feared to communicate her, but “she made a sign to him, with a joyous countenance, to have no fear, and she communicated with ease, and soon after began to speak, owing to the vigour given to her by the Sacrament.” Yet here too the abnormality is not complete: some ordinary food is retained, now and then; so, minced chicken, specially mentioned for December 1509, and on September 3, 1510.

As to her heat-attacks and the corresponding extreme—the sense of intense cold,—it is clear how close is their connection with her profound concentration upon the conception of God as Love, and upon the image of Love as fire. It is these sudden and intense psycho-physical, spiritually suggestive because spiritually suggested, heat-attacks which are, I think, always meant by the terms “assault” (assalto), “stroke” (ferita), and “arrow” (saetta): terms which already indicate the mental quality of these attacks. And these heats are mostly localized in a doctrinally suggestive manner: they centre in and around the heart, or on the tongue and lips, or they envelop the whole person “as though it were placed in a great flame of fire,” or “in a glowing furnace.” Indeed these heats are often so described, by her attendants or herself, as to imply their predominantly psycho-physical nature: “it was necessary, with a view to prolonging her life, to use many means for lightening the strain of that interior fire upon her mind”; and “I feel,” she says herself, on occasion of such an attack, “so great a contentment on the part of the spirit, as to be unutterable; whilst, on the part of my humanity, all the pains are, so to say, no pains.”

As to her boundless thirst, her inability to drink, and her sense of strangulation, their doctrinal suggestions are largely clear. Thus when “she was so thirsty as to feel able to drink up all the waters of the sea,” and when she calls out “I am suffocating” (drowning, io affogo), we are at once reminded of her great saying: “If the sea were all so much love, there would not live man or woman who would not go to drown himself in it (si affogasse).” And when, at the end of August 1510, unable to drink, she herself declares “all the water that is on earth could not give me the least refreshment,” there is, perhaps, an implied contrast to that “little drop of divine water” which had so much refreshed her a year before.

And finally, the various paralyses and death-like swoons seem, at least in part, to follow from, and to represent, the death of the spirit to the life of the senses, and to mirror the intensity with which perfection has been conceived and practised as “Love going forth out of self, and abiding all in God and separated from man.” Thus when, on August 22, 1510, “she had a day of great heat, and abode paralyzed in one hand and in one finger of the other hand for about sixteen hours, and she was so greatly occupied (absorbed), that she neither spoke, nor opened her eyes, nor could take any food.”[22]

4. Only two cases of spiritually unsuggestive impressions.

It is indeed profoundly instructive to note how that, in exact proportion as a human-mental mediation and suggestion of a religious kind is directly traceable or at least probable in any or all of these things, is that thing also worthy of being considered as having ultimately the Divine Spirit Itself for its first cause as well as last end; and that, in exact proportion as this kind of human mediation and suggestion is impossible or unlikely, the thing turns out to be unworthy of being attributed, in any special sense, to the spirit of God Himself.

Of such spiritually opaque, religiously unused and apparently unuseable, hysteriform impressions, I can, even during the last days of these nine years of admitted infirmity, find but two clear instances,—instances which, by their very unlikeness to the mass of her spiritually transparent, readily used impressions, strongly confirm our high estimate of the all but totality of her psycho-physical states, as experienced and understood and used by herself. On September 7, 1510, after having seen and wisely utilized the spiritually suggestive image of “a great ladder of fire,” she ends by having so vivid an hallucination of the whole world being on fire “that she asked whether it were not so, and caused her windows to be opened that the facts might be ascertained;” and “she abode the whole night, possessed by that imagination,” as the Vita itself calls this impression. At night, on September 11, she complained of a very great heat, and cast forth from her mouth very black blood; and black spots came out all over her body. And on the 13th, “she was seen with her eyes fixed upon the ceiling, and with much movement of the lips and hands; and she answered her attendants’ queries as to what she was seeing with ‘Drive away that beast.…’ the remaining words being inaudible.”[23]

Here we have, I think, the only two merely factual, unsuggestive, and hence simply delusive, impressions really experienced by herself and recorded in the Vita, a book whose very eagerness to discover things of this kind and readiness to take them as directly supernatural is a guarantee that no other marked instances of the kind have been omitted or suppressed. And these two impressions both take place within a week of her death, and respectively four days before, and two days after, the first clear case of organic disease or lesion to be found anywhere in the life.

III. Catherine’s Psycho-physical Condition, its Likeness and Unlikeness To Hysteria.

Only by a quite unfair magnifying or multiplying of the two incidents just described could we come to hold, with Mr. Baring-Gould, that Catherine was simply a sufferer from hysteria, and that the Roman Church did well to canonize her on the ground of her having, in spite of this malady, managed to achieve much useful work amongst the sick and poor.[24] Here we shall do well to consider three groups of facts.

1. Misapprehensions as to hysteria.

The first group gives the reasons why we should try and get rid of the terror and horror still so often felt in connection with the very name of this malady. This now quite demonstrably excessive, indeed largely mythical, connotation of the term springs from four causes.

First, the very name still tends to suggest, as the causes or conditions of the malady, things fit only for discussion in medical reviews. But then, ever since 1855, all limitation to, or special connection with, anything peculiarly female, or indeed generally sexual, has been increasingly shown to be false, until now no serious authority on the matter can be found to espouse the old view. The malady is now well known to attack men as well as women, and to have no special relation to things of sex at all.[25]

Next, probably as a consequence from the initial error, this disorder was supposed to predominantly come from, or to lead to, moral impurity, or at least to be ordinarily accompanied by strong erotic propensions. But here the now carefully observed facts are imperatively hostile: of the 120 living cases most carefully studied by Prof. Janet, only four showed the predominance of any such tendencies, a proportion undoubtedly not above the percentage to be found amongst non-hysterical persons.[26]

And again, the term was long synonymous with untruthfulness and deceit. But here again Prof. Janet shows how unfounded is this prejudice, since it but springs from the misplaced promptitude with which the earlier observers refused to believe what they had not as yet sufficiently examined and could not at all explain, and from the malady being itself equivalent to a more or less extensive breaking-up of the normal inter-connection between the several, successive or simultaneous states, and, as it were, layers of the one personality. He is convinced that real untruthfulness is no commoner among such patients than it is among healthy persons.[27]

And, finally, it is no doubt felt that, apart from all such specifically moral suspicions, the malady involves all kinds of fancies and inaccuracies of feeling and of perception, and that it frequently passes into downright insanity. And this is no doubt the one objection which does retain some of its old cogency. Still, it is well to note that, as has now been fully established, the elements of the human mind are and remain the same throughout the whole range of its conditions, from the sanest to the maddest, whilst only their proportion and admixture, and the presence or absence and the kind of synthesis necessary to hold them together differentiate these various states of mind. In true insanity there is no such synthesis; in hysteria the synthesis, however slight and peculiar, is always still traceable throughout the widespread disgregation of the elements and states.[28] And it is this very persistence of the fundamental unity, together with the strikingly different combination and considerable disaggregation of its elements, that makes the study of hysteria so fruitful for the knowledge of the fully healthy mind and of its unity; whilst the continuance of all the elements of the normal intelligence, even in insanity, readily explains why it is apparently so easy to see insanity everywhere, and to treat genius and sanctity as but so much degeneracy.

2. Hysteriform phenomena observable in Catherine’s case.

The second group of facts consists in the phenomena which, in Catherine’s case, are like or identical to what is observable in cases of hysteria.

There is, perhaps above all else, the anaesthetic condition, which was presumably co-extensive with her paralytic states. “Anaesthesia,” says Prof. Janet, “can be considered as the type of the other symptoms of hysteria; it exists in the great majority of cases, it is thoroughly characteristic of the malady. In its most frequent localization (semi-anaesthesia) it affects one of the lateral halves of the body, and this half is usually the left side.” Or, “a finger or hand will be affected.” Such “insensibility can be very frequent and very profound”; but “it disappears suddenly” and even “varies from one moment to another.”[29]

Then there is the corresponding counter-phenomenon of hyper-aesthesia. “The slightest contact provokes great pains, exclamations, and spasms. The painful zones have their seat mostly on the abdomen or on the hips.” And “sensation in these states is not painful in itself, by its own intensity, but by its quality, its characteristics; it has become the signal, by association of ideas, for the production of a set of extremely painful phenomena.” So, with the colour-sense: “one patient adores the colour red, and sees in its dullest shade ‘sparkling rays which penetrate to her very heart and warm her through and through.’” But “another one finds this ‘a repulsive colour and one capable of producing nausea.’” And similarly with the senses of taste and odour.[30]

Then, too, the inability to stand or walk, with the conservation, at times, of the power to crawl; the acceptance, followed by the rejection, of food, because of certain spasms in the throat or stomach, and the curious, mentally explicable, exceptions to this incapacity; the sense, even at other times, of strangulation; heart palpitations, fever heats, strange haemorrhages from the stomach or even from the lung; red patches on the skin and emotional jaundice all over it, and one or two other peculiarities.[31]

Then, as to a particular kind of quietude, from which Catherine warns her attendants to rouse her, we find a patient who “ceases her reading, without showing any sign of doing so. She gets taken to be profoundly attentive; it is, however, but one of her attacks of ‘fixity.’ And she has promptly to be shaken out of this state, or, in a few minutes, there will be no getting her out of it.”

As to Catherine’s consciousness of possessing an extraordinary fineness of discrimination between sensibly identical objects, we see that “if one points out, to some of these patients, an imaginary portrait upon a plain white card, and mixes this card with other similar ones, they will almost always find again the portrait on the same card.” And similarly as to her attaching a particular quasi-sensible perception to Marabotto’s hand alone, we find that, if M. Janet touches Léonie’s hand, he having suggested a nosegay to her, she will henceforth, when he touches the hand, see that nosegay; whereas, if another person touches that same hand, Léonie will see nothing special.

As to Catherine’s feelings of criminality and of being already dead, M. Janet quotes M., who says, “I am like a criminal about to be punished”; and R., who declares, “It seems to me that I am dead.” As to the hallucination of a Beast, Marcelle suffers from the same impression.[32]

And,—perhaps the most important of all these surface-resemblances,—there is Catherine’s apparent freedom from all emotion at the deaths of her brothers and sister, and her extraordinary dependence upon, and claimfulness towards, her Confessor alone. “These patients rapidly lose the social feelings: Berthe, who for some time preserved some affection for her brother, ends by losing all interest in him; Marcelle, at the very beginning of her illness, separates herself from every one.” “It is always their own personality which dominates their thoughts.” Yet these patients have “an extraordinary attachment to their physician. For him they are resolved to do all things. In return, they are extremely exacting,—he is to occupy himself entirely with each one alone. Only a very superficial observer would ascribe this feeling to a vulgar source.”[33]

3. Catherine’s personality not disintegrated.

But a third group of facts clearly differentiates Catherine’s case, even in these years of avowed ill-health, from such patients; and these facts become clearer and more numerous in precise proportion as we move away from peripheral, psycho-physical phenomena and mechanisms, and dwell upon her practically unbroken mental and moral characteristics, and upon the use and meaning, the place and context of these things within her ample life.

For as to her relations with her attendants, even now it is still she who leads, who suggests, who influences; a strong and self-consistent will shows itself still, under all this shifting psycho-physical surface. Thus Don Marabotto now administers, it is true, all her money and charitable affairs for her. But it is she who insists, alone and unaided, upon the true spiritual function of that impression of odour on his hand.—Vernazza, no doubt, has now to help her in the fight against subtle scruples, on occasion of her deepest depressions. But her far more frequent times of light and joy are in nowise occasions of a simply subjective self-engrossment or of a purely psycho-physical interest, for her mind is absorbed if in but a few, yet in inexhaustibly fruitful and universally applicable ideas and experiences of a spiritual kind, such as helped to urge this friend on to his world-renewing impulses and determinations.—Her closest relations and friends, one must admit, succeed by their action, taken eighteen months and then again two days before her death, in getting her to desist from ordering her burial by the side of her husband. But we have seen, in the one case, how indirectly, and, in the other case, how suddenly and even then quite informally, they had to gain their point.—Her attendants in general, and Marabotto in particular, certainly paid her an engrossed attention, and the all but endlessness of her superficial fancies and requirements have been chronicled by them with a naïve and wearisome fulness. But then she herself is well aware that, had they but the requisite knowledge as to how and when to apply them, some sturdy opposition and a greater roughness of handling would, on their part, be of the greatest use to her, in this her psychical infirmity; indeed her shutting herself away from Marabotto, as late as January 1510, is directly caused by her sense and fear of being spoilt by him.

It is true again that, already in 1502, we hear, in a probably exaggerated but still possibly semi-authentic account, of her indifference of feeling with regard to the deaths of two brothers and of her only sister; and that, from January 1510 onwards, she gradually excludes all her attendants from her sick-room, with, eventually, the sole exceptions of Marabotto or Carenzio and Argentina. But her Wills show conclusively how persistent were her detailed interest in, and dispositions for, the requirements of her surviving brother, nephews, and nieces; of poor Thobia and the girl’s hidden mother; of her priest-attendants, and of each and all of her humblest domestics; of the natives in the far-away Greek Island of Scios; and, above all, of the Hospital and its great work which she had ever loved so well.

We have indeed found two cases, both from within the last week of her life, of mentally opaque and spiritually unsuggestive and unutilized impressions which are truly analogous to those characteristic of hysteria. But we have also seen how forcibly these two solitary cases bring out, by contrast, the spiritual transparency and fruitfulness of her usual, finely reflective picturings of these last years. For here it is her own deliberate and spiritual mind which joyously greets, and straightway utilizes and transcends, the psycho-physical occurrences; and it does so, not because these occurrences are, or are taken to be, the causes or requisites or objects of her faith and spiritual insight, but because, on the contrary, they meet and clothe an already exuberant faith and insight—spiritual certainties derived from quite another source.

And finally, if the monotony and superficial pettiness of the sick-room can easily pall upon us, especially when presented with the credulities and hectic exaggerations which disfigure so much of the Vita’s description of it; we must, in justice, as I have attempted to do in my seventh and eighth chapters, count in, as part of her biography, her deep affection for and persistent influence with Ettore and Battista Vernazza, and the exemplification of her doctrine by these virile souls, makers of history in the wide, varied world of men.[34]

In a word, it is plain at once that, given the necessarily limited number of ways in which the psycho-physical organism reacts under mental stimulations, certain neural phenomena may, in any two cases, be, in themselves, perfectly similar, although their respective mental causes or occasions may be as different, each from the other, as the Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven, or the working out of the Law of Gravitation by Newton, or the elaboration of the implications of the Categorical Imperative by Kant, are different from the sudden jumping of a live mouse in the face of an hysterically-disposed young woman, or as the various causes of tears and laughter throughout the whole world.

IV. First Period of Catherine’s Life, 1447 to 1477, in its Three Stages.

If we next go back to the first period of her life, in its three stages of the sixteen years of her girlhood, 1447-1463, the first ten years of her married life, 1463-1473, and the four years of her Conversion and active Penitence, 1473-1477, we shall find, I think, in the matter of temperament and psycho-physical conditions, little or nothing but a rare degree of spiritual sensitiveness, and an extraordinary close-knittedness of body and mind.

1. From her childhood to her conversion.

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

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

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

2. Her conversion not sudden nor visionary.

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

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

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

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

3. Peculiarities of her Active Penitence.

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

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

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

V. The Second, Great Middle Period of Catherine’s Life, 1477 to 1499.

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

1. Her extraordinary fasts.

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

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

2. Her ecstasies and visions.

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

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

3. Special character of her spiritual warfare.

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

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

4. Two remarkable consequences of this kind of warfare.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Precise object and end of her striving.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI. Three Rules which seem to govern the Relations between Psycho-physical Peculiarities and Sanctity in general.

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Ecstatics possess a peculiar psycho-physical organization.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII. Perennial Freshness of the Great Mystics’ Main Spiritual Test, in Contradistinction To Their Secondary, Psychological Contention. Two Special Difficulties.

1. A false and a true test of mystical experience.

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

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

2. First special difficulty in testing ecstasies.

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

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

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

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

Hence “many souls, to whom visions have never come, are incomparably more advanced in the way of perfection than others to whom many have been given”; and “they who are already perfect, receive these visitations of the Spirit of God in peace; ecstasies cease, for they were only graces to prepare them for this greater grace.” Hence, too, “one desire only doth God allow and suffer in His Presence: that of perfectly observing His law and of carrying the Cross of Christ. In the Ark of the Covenant there was but the Book of the Law, the Rod of Aaron, and the Pot of Manna. Even so that soul, which has no other aim than the perfect observance of the Law of God and the carrying of the Cross of Christ, will be a true Ark containing the true Manna, which is God.” And this perfected soul’s intellectual apprehensions will, in their very mixture of light and conscious obscurity, more and more approach and forestall the eternal condition of the beatified soul. “One of the greatest favours, bestowed transiently on the soul in this life, is to enable it to see so distinctly and to feel so profoundly, that it cannot comprehend Him at all. These souls are herein, in some degree, like the Saints in Heaven, where they who know Him most perfectly perceive most clearly that He is infinitely incomprehensible; for those who have the less clear vision do not perceive so distinctly as the others how greatly He transcends their vision.”[50]

3. Second special difficulty in testing ecstasies.

The second special difficulty is this. Have not at least some of the saints of this definitely ecstatic type shown more psycho-physical abnormality than spiritually fruitful origination or utilization of such things, so that their whole life seems penetrated by a fantastic spirit? And have not many others, who, at their best, may not have been amenable to this charge, ended with shattered nerve- and will-power, with an organism apparently incapable of any further growth or use, even if we restrict our survey exclusively to strength-bringing ecstasy and to a contemplative prayer of some traceable significance?

(1) As a good instance of the apparent predominance of psycho-physical and even spiritual strangeness, we can take the Venerable Sister Lukardis, Cistercian Nun of Ober-Weimar, born probably in 1276. Her life is published from a unique Latin MS. by the Bollandists (Analecta, Vol. XVIII, pp. 305-367, Bruxelles, 1899), and presents us with a mediaevally naïve and strangely unanalytic, yet extraordinarily vivid picture of things actually seen by the writer. “Although,” say the most competent editors, “we know not the name nor profession of the Author, whether he belonged to the Friars or to the Monks,[51] it is certain that he was a contemporary of Lukardis, that he knew her intimately, and that he learnt many details from her fellow-nuns. And though we shall be slow to agree with him when he ascribes all the strange things which she experienced in her soul and body to divine influence, yet we should beware of considering him to be in bad faith. For, though he erred perchance in ascribing to a divine operation things which are simply the work of nature, such a vice is common amongst those who transmit such things.”[52] I take the chief points in the order of their narration by the Vita.

“Soon after Lukardis had, at twelve years of age, taken the Cistercian habit, her mother died,” over twelve English miles away, at Erfurt, yet Lukardis “saw the scene” in such detail “in the spirit,” that, when her sister came to tell her, she, Lukardis, “anticipated her with an account of the day, the place and hour of the death, of the clothes then being worn by their mother, of the precise position of the bed and of the hospital, and of the persons present at the time.”

She soon suffered from “stone” in the bladder; “quartan, tertian, and continuous fevers,” and from fainting fits; also from contraction of the muscles (nervi) of the hands, so that the latter were all but useless and could not even hold the staff on which she had to lean in walking, till they had been “tightly wrapped round in certain clothes.” Yet “she would, at times, strike her hands so vehemently against each other, that they resounded as though they had been wooden boards.” “When lying in bed she would sometimes, as it were, plant her feet beneath her, hang her head down” backwards, “and raise her abdomen and chest, making thus, as it were, a highly curved arch of her person.” Indeed sometimes “she would for a long while stand upon her head and shoulders, with her feet up in air, but with her garments adhering to her limbs, as though they had been sewn on to them.” “Often, too, by day or night, she was wont to run with a most impetuous course;—she understood that, by this her course, she was compensating Christ for His earthly course of thirty-three years.”[53]

“On one occasion she had a vision of Christ, in which He said to her: ‘Join thy hands to My hands, and thy feet to My feet, and thy breast to My breast, and thus shall I be aided by thee to suffer less.’ And instantly she felt a most keen pain of wounds,” in all three regions, “although wounds did not as yet appear to sight.” But “as she bore the memory of the hammering of the nails into Christ upon the Cross within her heart, so did she exercise herself in outward deed. For she was frequently wont, with the middle finger of one hand, impetuously to wound the other in the place appropriate to the stigmata; then to withdraw her finger to the distance of a cubit, and straightway again impetuously to wound herself. Those middle fingers felt hard like metal. And about the sixth and ninth hour she would impetuously wound herself with her finger in the breast, at the appropriate place for the wound.”—After about two years “Christ appeared to her in the night of Blessed Gregory, Pope” (St. Gregory VII, May 26?), “pressed her right hand firmly in His, and declared, ‘I desire thee to suffer with Me.’ On her consenting, a wound instantly appeared in her right hand; about ten days later a wound in the left hand; and thus successively the five wounds were found in her body.” “The wounds of the scourging were also found upon her, of a finger’s length, and having a certain hard skin around them.”[54]

“At whiles she would lie like one dead throughout the day; yet her countenance was very attractive, owing to a wondrous flushed look. And even if a needle was pressed into her flesh, she felt no pain.”—“On one occasion she was carried upon her couch by two sisters into the Lady Chapel, to the very spot where her body now reposes. After having been left there alone for about an hour, the Blessed Virgin appeared to her, with her beloved Infant, Jesus, in her arms, and suckling Him. And Lukardis, contrary to the law of her strength”—she had, by now, been long confined to a reclining posture—“arose from her couch and began to stand upright. And at this juncture one of the Sisters opened the Chapel door a little, and, on looking in, marvelled at Lukardis being able to stand, but withdrew and forbade the other Sisters from approaching thither, since she feared that, if they saw her standing thus, they might declare her to be quite able, if she but chose, to arise and stand at any time. Upon the Blessed Virgin twice insisting upon being asked for some special favour, and Lukardis declaring, ‘I desire that thou slake my thirst with that same milk with which I now see thee suckling thy beloved Son,’ the Blessed Virgin came up to her, and gave her to drink of her milk.” And when later on Lukardis was fetched by the Sisters, she was “found reclining on her couch. And for three days and nights she took neither food nor drink, and could not see the light of day. And as a precaution, since her death was feared, Extreme Unction was administered to her. And, later on, the Sister who had seen her standing in the Chapel, gradually drew the whole story from her.”[55]

“After she had lain, very weak, and, as it were, in a state of contracture, for eleven years, it happened that, about the ninth hour of one Good Friday, the natural bodily heat and colour forsook her; she seemed nowise to breathe; her wounds bled more than usual; she appeared to be dead. And her fellow-Sisters wept greatly. Yet about Vesper-time she opened her eyes and began to move; and her companions were wondrously consoled. And then in the Easter night, about the hour of Christ’s Resurrection, as, with the other sick Sisters, she lay in her bed placed so as to be able to hear the Divine Office, she felt all her limbs to be as it were suffused with a most refreshing dew. And straightway she saw stretched down to her from Heaven a hand, as it were of the Blessed Virgin, which stroked her wounds and all the painful places, the ligaments and joints of her members, gently and compassionately. After which she straightway felt how that all her members, which before had for so long been severely contracted, and how the knots, formed by the ligaments (nervi), were being efficaciously resolved and equally distended, so that she considered herself freed from her hard bondage. She arose unaided from her couch, proceeded to the near-by entrance to the Choir, and prostrated herself there, in fervent orison, with her arms outstretched in cross-form, for a very long hour. And then, commanded by the Abbess to rise, she readily arose without help, stood with pleasure, and walked whithersoever she would.” “At all times she ever suffered more from the cold than any of her companions.”[56]

“As, during those eleven years that she lay like one paralyzed, she was wont, on every Friday, to lie with her arms expanded as though on the Cross, and her feet one on the top of the other; so, after the Lord had so wonderfully raised her on that Paschal day, she, on every Friday and every Lenten day, would stand erect with her arms outstretched, crosswise, and, without any support, on one foot only, with the other foot planted upon its fellow, from the hour of noon to that of Vespers.”—“Whilst she was still uncured, and required some delicate refection which the Convent could not afford, there came to her,” one day, “the most loving Infant, bearing in His Hand the leg of a chicken, newly roasted, and begging her to eat it for His sake.” She did so, and was wonderfully strengthened. Apparently late on in her life “they procured, with much labour and diligence, all kinds of drinkables from different and even from distant places for her. But she, having tasted any one of them, would straightway shake her head, close her lips, and then declare that she could not drink it up.” “However delicious in itself, it seemed to be so much gall and wormwood when applied to her mouth.”[57]

And if we look, not at seemingly childish fantasticalness in certain mystical lives, but at the later state of shattered health and apparently weakened nerve- and will-power which appears so frequently to be the price paid for the definitely ecstatic type of religion, even where it has been spiritually fruitful, our anxiety is readily renewed. Look at the nine, possibly thirteen, last years of Catherine’s, or at the last period of St. Margaret Mary’s life; note the similar cases of SS. Maria Magdalena de Pazzi and Juliana Falconieri. And we have a figure of all but pure suffering and passivity in St. Lidwina of Schiedam (1380-1433), over which M. Huysmans has managed to be so thoroughly morbid.

(2) And if such lives strike us as too exceptional to be taken, with whatever deductions, as a case in point, we can find a thoroughly fair instance in the life of Father Isaac Hecker. Here we have a man of extraordinary breadth, solidity, and activity of mind and character, and whose mysticism is of the most sober and harmonious kind. Yet his close companion and most faithful chronicler, Father Walter Elliott, tells us: “From severe colds, acute headaches, and weakness of the digestive organs, Father Hecker was at all times a frequent sufferer. But, towards the end of the year 1871, his headaches became much more painful, his appetite forsook him, and sleeplessness and excitability of the nervous system were added to his other ailments. Remedies of every kind were tried, but without permanent relief. By the summer of 1872 he was wholly incapacitated.” “The physical sufferings of those last sixteen” (out of the sixty-nine) “years of his life were never such as to impair his mental soundness … though his organs of speech were sometimes too slow for his thoughts.” His digestion and nervous system had been impaired by excessive abstinence in early manhood, and by excessive work in later life, “till at last the body struck work altogether. During the sixteen years of his illness every symptom of bodily illness was aggravated by the least attention to community affairs or business matters, and also by interior trials,” although he still managed, by heroic efforts, at times directly to serve his congregation and to write some remarkable papers. Yet this state continued, practically unbroken, up to the end, on December 22, 1888.[58] And although the various proximate causes, indicated by Father Elliott, had no doubt been operative here, there can, in view of the numerous similar cases, be no question that the most fundamental of the reasons of this general condition of health was his strongly mystical type and habit of mind and his corresponding psycho-physical organization.

(3) In view of those fantasticalnesses and of these exhaustions, we cannot but ask whether these things are not a terrible price to pay for such states? whether such states should not be disallowed by all solid morality, and should not prompt men of sense to try and stamp them out? And, above all, we seem placed once more, with added anxiety, before the question whether what is liable to end in such sad general incapacitation was not, from the first, directly productive of, and indeed simply produced by, some merely subjective, simply psycho-physical abnormality and morbidness?

(4) Three points here call for consideration. Let us, for one thing, never forget that physical health is not the true end of human life, but only one of its most important means and conditions. The ideal man is not, primarily and directly, a physical machine, perfect as such in its development and function, to which would be tacked on, as a sort of concomitant or means, the mental, moral, and spiritual life and character. But the ideal man is precisely this latter life and character, with the psycho-physical organism sustained and developed in such, and only such, a degree, direction, and combination, as may make it the best possible substratum, stimulus, instrument, material, and expression for and of that spiritual personality.[59] Hence, the true question here is not whether such a type of life as we are considering exacts a serious physical tribute or not, but whether the specifically human effects and fruits of that life are worth that cost.

No one denies that mining, or warfare, or hospital work, both spiritual and medical, involve grave risks to life, nor that the preparation of many chemicals is directly and inevitably injurious to health. Yet no one thinks of abolishing such occupations or of blaming those who follow them, and rightly so; for instant death may and should be risked, the slow but certain undermining of the physical health may be laudably embarked on, if only the mind and character are not damaged, and if the end to be attained is found to be necessary or seriously helpful, and unattainable by other means.

The simple fact, then, of frequent and subsequent, or even of universal and concomitant ill-health in such mystical cases, or even the proof of this ill-health being a direct consequence or necessary condition of that mystical life, can but push back the debate, and simply raises the question as to the serious value of that habit and activity. Only a decision adverse to that serious value would constitute those facts into a condemnation of that activity itself.

And, next, it must be plain to any one endowed with an appreciable dose of the mystical sense, and with a sufficiently large knowledge of human nature and of religious apprehension in the past and present,—that, if it is doubtless possible quite erroneously to treat all men as having a considerable element of mysticism in them, and hence to strain and spoil souls belonging to one of the other types: it is equally possible to starve those that possess this element in an operative degree. Atrophy is as truly a malady as plethora.

And here the question is an individual one: would that particular temperament and psycho-physical organism congenial to Sister Lukardis, to Catherine Fiesca Adorna, to Marguerite Marie Alacocque, and to Isaac Hecker, have—taking the whole existence and output together—produced more useful work, and have apprehended and presented more of abiding truth, had their ecstatic states or tendencies been, if possible, absent or suppressed? Does not this type of apprehension, this, as it were, incubation, harmonization, and vivifying of their otherwise painfully fragmentary and heavy impressions, stand out,—in their central, creative periods,—as the one thoroughly appropriate means and form of their true self-development and self-expression, and of such an apprehension and showing forth of spiritual truth as to them,—to them and not to you and me,—was possible? And if we are bound to admit that, even in such cases, ecstasy appears, psycho-physically, as a kind of second state, and that these personalities find or regain their fullest joy and deepest strength only in and from such a state; yet we know too that such ecstasy is not, as in the trances of hysteria and of other functional disorders, simply discontinuous from the ordinary, primary state of such souls; and that,—again contrary to those maladif trances,—whenever the ecstasy answers to the tests insisted upon by the great mystics, viz. a true and valuable ethico-spiritual content and effect, it also, in the long run, leaves the very body strengthened and improved.

And if, after this, their productive period, some of these persons end by losing their psycho-physical health, it is far from unreasonable to suppose that the actual alternative to those ecstasies and this break-up, would, for them, have been a lifelong dreary languor and melancholy self-absorption, somewhat after the pattern of Catherine’s last ten pre-conversion years. Thus for her, and doubtless for most of the spiritually considerable ecstatics, life was, taken all in all, indefinitely happier, richer, and more fruitful in religious truth and holiness, with the help of those ecstatic states, than it would have been if these states had been absent or could have been suppressed.

And thirdly, here again, even from the point of view of psycho-physical health and its protection, it is precisely the actual practice and, as interpreted by it, the deepest sayings of the standard Christian mystics which are being most powerfully confirmed,—although necessarily by largely new reasons and with important modifications in the analysis and application of their doctrine,—by all that we have gained, during the last forty years, in definite knowledge of the psycho-physical regions and functions of human nature, and, during two centuries and more, in enlargement and precision of our religious-historical outlook.

If we consider the specific health-dangers of this way, we shall find, I think, that their roots are ever two. These dangers, and with them the probability of delusion or at least of spiritual barrenness, always become actual, and often acute, the minute that we allow ourselves to attach a primary and independent importance to the psycho-physical form and means of these things, as against their spiritual-ethical content, suggestions, and end; or that we take the whole man, or at least the whole of the religious man, to consist of the specifically mystical habits and life alone. Now the first of these dangers has been ceaselessly exposed and fought by all the great ethical and Christian mystics of the past, e.g. St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa; and the latter has been ever enforced by the actual practice, as social religionists, of these same mystics, even if and when some of their sayings, or the logical drift of their speculative system, left insufficient room or no intrinsic necessity and function for such things.

(5) And everything that has happened and is happening in the world of psychological and philosophical research, in the world of historico-critical investigation into the past history and modalities of religion, and in the world of our own present religious experience and requirements, has but brought to light fresh facts, forces, and connections, in proof both of the right and irreplaceableness of the Mystical element in life and religion, and of the reality and constant presence of these its two dangers. For, as to these dangers, we now know, with extraordinary clearness and certainty, how necessary, constant and far-reaching is, on its phenomenal surface, the auto-suggestive, mono-ideistic power and mechanism of the mind; yet how easily, in some states, too much can be made of such vivid apprehensions and quasi-sensible imagings of invisible reality,—things admirable as means, ruinous as ends. And we also know, with an astonishing universality of application, how great a multiplicity in unity is necessarily presented by every concrete object and by every mental act and emotional state of every sane human being throughout every moment of his waking life; and how this unity is actually constituted and measured by the multiplicity of the materials and by the degree of their harmonization.—Hence, not the absence of the Mystical element, but the presence both of it and of the other constituents of religion, will turn out to be the safeguard of our deepest life and of its sanity, a sanity which demands a balanced fulness of the soul’s three fundamental pairs of activities: sensible perception and picturing memory; reflection, speculative and analytic; and emotion and volition, all issuing in interior and exterior acts, and these latter, again, providing so much fresh material and occasions for renewed action and for a growing unification in an increasing variety, on and on.

The metaphysical and faith questions, necessarily raised by the phenomenal facts and mechanisms here considered, but which cannot be answered at this level, will be discussed in a later chapter. Here we can but once more point out, in conclusion, that no amount of admitted or demonstrated auto-suggestion or mono-ideism in the phenomenal reaches and mechanism of the mind decides, of itself, anything whatsoever about, and still less against, the objective truth and spiritual value of the ultimate causes, dominant ideas, and final results of the process; nor as to whether and how far the whole great movement is, at bottom, occasioned and directed by the Supreme Spirit, God, working, in and through man, towards man’s apprehension and manifestation of Himself.[60]

CHAPTER X
THE MAIN LITERARY SOURCES OF CATHERINE’S CONCEPTIONS

INTRODUCTORY.

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

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

2. Plan of the following study of these sources.

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

I. The Pauline Writings: the Two Sources of their Pre-Conversion Assumptions; Catherine’s Preponderant Attitude towards each Position.

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

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

1. St. Paul’s Anthropology in general.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. St. Paul’s conception of “Spirit.”

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

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

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

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

3. The Angry and the Loving God.

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

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

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

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

4. The Risen Christ and the Heavenly Adam.

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

5. Reconciliation, Justification, Sanctification.

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. Pauline Social Ethics.

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

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

7. Sacramental Teachings.

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

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

8. Eschatological matters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

II. The Joannine Writings.

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

1. Joannine teaching contrasted with other systems.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.